Chris Smith’s blog

First there was Al Gore. Then there was Tony Blair. Next it’ll be … Kim Jong Il?

My new piece for San Francisco magazine plays off the mini-trend of world leaders teaming up with Silicon Valley venture capitalists to save the world and (ahem) make some money along the way. Herein, I imagine some more potential partnerships between the titans of tech and various heads of state:

In this month’s San Francisco magazine, I review California Crackup, Joe Matthews’ and Mark Paul’s excellent new diagnosis of what ails California.

When it comes to the Golden State’s ills, the depth of our despair is matched only by the dysfunction of our system. And while a pox-on-both-houses purge of our leaders might be satisfying, it wouldn’t fix anything. Now Joe Mathews, a journalist and a fellow at the New America Foundation, and Mark Paul, a UC Berkeley visiting scholar and a former deputy state treasurer, have charted the disastrous reform efforts that left us with a polity “both unintended and unworkable.” The trouble began with our constitution, which was inadequate even in 1850 and was thereafter amended into incoherence by piecemeal changes. The ballot initiative process that brought us 1978’s Proposition 13, among other civic afflictions, only made things worse. The authors advocate major structural changes: Replace our winner-takes-all electoral system with proportional representation, end supermajority requirements, and modify the initiative process. Their lucid analysis is spiked with wit and appealing turns of phrase (”Political reform is what we do in California to break our hearts”) that lift it above mere wonkery. Mathews and Paul know that their advice will probably go unheeded. All the more reason, then, for them to think big: “When defeat is likely, why not try what works?”

If you follow the political game, you’ve probably heard of “dog-whistle politics.” That’s when politicians speak in code to their supporters–all of whom get the meaning even if outsiders don’t. Sarah Palin’s speech at CSU Stanislaus last week put me in mind of the dog whistle. Apparently, she discussed “the topic of teaching the next generation the civic lessons of protecting freedom and defending the American idea of liberty.” Sounds like conservative boilerplate, basically, and it is. But there’s a lot in that statement if you care to look. What her supporters hear is an affirmation of their worldview: of an America explicitly founded by Christians for Christians, of a low-tax, corporate-friendly, homogeneous nation that is free to do as it wishes on the world stage.

I mention all this because the subject of my new piece in California magazine had a keen ear for the dog whistle. Eugene Burdick was a Cal political scientist and a Hollywood screenwriter, a Navy man and a surfer, a public intellectual who hobnobbed with both Marlon Brando and JFK’s Whiz Kids. (His astonishingly varied resume suggested the title of the piece.) Burdick, who died in 1965, is mostly remembered today for his Cold War polemic, The Ugly American, which urged the US to adopt counterinsurgency tactics in Vietnam long before COIN was cool (COIN’s vogue over the last few years is in many ways a retread of 1960s-era thinking; so far, its lackluster results also echo that era.) Like so many liberals back then, Burdick was an ardent Cold Warrior, a “better dead than red” guy, and his writing reflects a mindset (one that’s admittedly difficult to conjure today) in which the Soviet Union posed an existential threat to our existence.

He was also, however, a preternaturally gifted political analyst, and his most interesting book wasn’t about foreign policy but about domestic politics. Published in 1956, The Ninth Wave combined surfing and California politics in what might you might call a dystopian potboiler. In some ways, the book is sort of a mess. It’s filled with clunky writing and reams of needless detail (apparently, he dictated his prose into a tape recorder, sans editing.) But the ideas–he was one of the first to see the ways in which opinion polling could be used to manipulate fearful voters–are eerily up-to-date.

Burdick’s main character, an amoral political consultant (and surfer) from L.A. named Mike Freesmith, cracks the code of the modern election campaign. Using the nascent science of computer-aided opinion polling, he slices-and-dices the electorate into easily manipulated blocs, then jacks up the fear and hate quotient to put his demagogic candidate on the road to the governor’s office. When asked what his secret is, Freesmith sounds depressingly au courant: “You scare them into voting for your man.”

You can read the whole thing here.

Lots of things:

Proposition 13, which froze property-tax rates at artificially low levels, and allows many businesses to avoid paying their fair share.

The two-thirds rules in the legislature, which prevent virtually anything from getting done.

Our infrastructure, which was the envy of the world in the 1960s and which now is falling apart due to creeping neglect.

And the citizenry, which demands everything–cops and firefighters, world-class universities and schools, good roads, parks, and libraries–but is totally unwilling to pay for them.

In this month’s San Francisco magazine, I discuss the Golden State’s ills, as well as a few possible solutions, with Jeff Lustig, a veteran activist, professor, and the editor of Remaking California, a collection of essays that makes the case that only a constitutional convention can get us back on track. Of course, a push for just such a convention died earlier this year, but Lustig thinks there will be more to come. I think so, too. It’s hard to imagine anything else working.

The May/June issue of Afar magazine is out, and it’s running my feature on South Africa’s “Born-Frees,” the first generation to come of age after apartheid’s end. [Turn to page 71.] I tell the story through the life of my friend Thami Nkosi, a 29-year-old Soweto activist and inveterate shit-stirrer, and the group of guys he grew up with.

In many ways, Born-Frees like Thami represent South Africa’s future, and their lives tell us a lot about the country today, and the ways in which both Soweto and South Africa have changed since 1994’s “democratic miracle.” So many things have improved–there’s a large and growing middle class, for instance, and Soweto is booming, bristling with new condos and malls and parks. But it is an unfinished revolution. Decades ago, the older generation marched in the streets, firebombed buildings, and at great cost won political freedom. Unlike their fathers and grandfathers, whose lives were largely defined by the anti-apartheid struggle, the Born Frees have always been able to vote for whomever they like and say what they please. Political freedom, however, hasn’t fully translated to economic freedom. In essence, the Born-Frees’ struggle boils down to a single question, repeated daily in a variety of ways: How to make it in today’s South Africa?

A sample from the piece:

At a friend’s house in Dobsonville, we hunker down for a barbecue, or braai, as South Africans call it, with beer, sausage, and big communal handfuls of pap, a grits-like staple. Thami holds forth under a tent in the driveway, energetically opining on the media, American rappers, and South Africa’s woeful political order. “I see these Jaguars with Jacob Zuma stickers, and I wonder what that means,” he says. “There’s so much crap happening in this country.”

…

That evening, we drive up to a walled compound at the top of a hill. Sifiso lives in a small apartment here with his fiancée and daughter. The security guard opens the gate, and we park beside a line of late-model cars, all buffed to a high sheen. Young, turned-out Sowetans mingle while a DJ spins local house music; a friend points out the son of Aggrey Klaaste, a famous black journalist from the struggle years. Looking around the party, it’s easy to feel good about the future. “Soweto is coming up,” Sifiso says.

The magazine’s on newsstands now, and I’ve just found a low-res web version [Turn to page 71.]. Check it out.

This month’s issue of California runs my profile of Trevor Paglen, an artist, geographer, writer, and photographer who deals in exploring “the limits of what we can know,” as he put it to me one day. This broad category takes in everything from investigations of California’s vast prison network to gorgeous photos of “dead” satellites orbiting the earth. He’s played in a noise band (as one music blogger described the sound: “Has a band ever made you want to take a shit? Like involuntarily?”); he went toe-to-toe with Colbert; and he’s founded his own branch of geography, called experimental geography. Paglen specializes, however, in working the seam line between our government’s desire for secrecy and the public’s right to know. Here’s the beginning of the piece:

The light is fading on a bitter-cold December afternoon in Berkeley, and Trevor Paglen is talking about spy satellites. Specifically, he’s explaining how hard it is to photograph them–not just because our government doesn’t want us to know they’re there but also because they’re a long way away. “You’re basically trying to shoot something the size of a car on the other side of the Earth, but actually it’s even farther,” he says, his words dissolving into a machine-gun laugh. Then, dissatisfied with the imprecision of his statement, he says, “Wait, you know what the diameter of the Earth is?” He’s silent for a minute as he pulls out his iPhone and searches the Web, and then: “Yeah, it’s 8,000 miles, so that would be … ” He trails off again, running the calculations in his head. “Yeah, shooting something a little bigger than a car but from a distance of three times further than China.” Another rapid-fire laugh. “It’s far away.”

Check out the rest of the piece.

The new issue of the travel magazine Afar has a small piece of mine on Newtown, Jozi’s cultural hub. [Turn to page 18.] I’ve spent a lot of time in this former industrial neighborhood on my visits to Jo’burg, and I’ve seen it change. Back in 2002, my fixer and I almost got jumped while shooting in a shady bar near the old taxi depot cum trash-pit that once dominated Newtown’s landscape. The red-eyed drunks in the bar allowed me to take a few shots then thought better of it. Switching from English to tsotsitaal, they asked my fixer why he was protecting me. That was when we decided it was time to go.

That bar is gone now, replaced by a mixed-use condo project. It’s all part of a huge redevelopment push by the city fathers, aided by a welter of security cameras and an unwillingness to let all of downtown Johannesburg go to hell (indeed, similar efforts are underway in other parts of the city). But Newtown, with its mix of museums, restaurants, and nightspots, is the farthest along.

My last visit coincided with a music festival, where I ran into the venerable Pops Mohamed, a South African world-music icon who nevertheless rides the bus all over town. As the sun set over the city, we talked about Indian food, and the best bars in the inner suburbs. It was a decidedly unglamorous conversation to have with a pop star, but that’s the kind of place Newtown is: buzzy, but down-to-earth.

Afar’s content isn’t online but you can find it, as they say, at better newsstands everywhere. (Update, 4.11.10: I’ve just discovered an online cache, and edited this post accordingly.)

(You can see more of my South African photography here.)

I’ve got a couple of small pieces in the current issues of California and San Francisco magazines. One is on climate change, the other on health care. Wonky? Sure. But contentiously wonky.

The first, a short profile (.pdf) of former SF environment department director Jared Blumenfeld (who decamped to the EPA last month), is about climate change policy:

While most leaders who confront the climate crisis choose to accentuate the positive aspects of global warming–the “win-win” business opportunities, all the new green jobs and game-changing technologies on the horizon–Blumenfeld spikes the cheerleading with straight talk. He called carbon offsets a “con” when many environmentalists were hyping them as an environmental cure-all, and he is equally dismissive of the magical thinking at the heart of many green-jobs programs. And despite the strides we’ve made in greening our lives, he says, there’s almost no way we’ll be able to change course before the cataclysm hits.

(I went biking with Blumenfeld last year, too. That piece is here.)

The second is a review of Thomas Goetz’ new book, The Decision Tree, which posits a brighter future for our health care–not through legislative reform but through technology. Color me unconvinced.

Given the circuslike debate on Capitol Hill, you might have abandoned all hope of seeing our dysfunctional healthcare system improved. Thomas Goetz hasn’t. The executive editor of Wired (he also has a master’s in public health from UC Berke­ley) posits a hopeful future, one that combines “the lessons of technology and the rigor of public health” to person­alize and improve our health­care: Online tracking software and social networking will help us take advantage of an ever expanding stream of health data, DNA testing will offer snapshots of our genetic pre­dis­positions, and doctors will be able to detect disease before it strikes–or at least manage it better once it does. Goetz lays out the benefits of this more engaged approach in clear, commonsensical prose. But many of his fixes depend on Herculean efforts by tech-savvy patients, and it’s hard to see how they translate to the unwired bulk of our citizenry. Moreover, he barely mentions the pernicious “fee for service” model that rewards doctors not for fostering good health but for ordering expensive tests and procedures–a widespread practice that stands in the way of many of his preventive-care prescriptions. “Change is hard,” Goetz notes. That’s an understatement. While laudable, the sol­­utions he offers here feel less like revolutions than like workarounds.

This month’s San Francisco magazine runs my small contribution to the debate over geoengineering. Despite the complicated name, geoengineering is at bottom a simple idea: it attempts to right our climate wrongs not by cutting carbon emissions but by manipulating the earth’s atmosphere via technological fixes. Long a favorite of green-hating rightwingers who didn’t want to modify their lifestyles, the field has edged into the mainstream as it’s become increasingly clear that the world isn’t likely to change its carbon-heavy ways anytime soon (witness the squabbling in Copenhagen). Researchers have proposed a welter of different approaches, ranging from the merely implausible-sounding (planting farmland with carbon-sucking minerals) to the downright Strangeloveian (launching fleets of tiny mirrors into space to block solar rays).

I write about a San Francisco startup, Climos, that wants to seed the Southern Ocean with iron, which is supposed to help pull carbon from the air. There’s plenty of promise, but the questions are legion. A few of them: Can it work? Is it safe? And even if we can cut carbon by messing with the atmosphere, should we? After all, messing with the atmosphere is how we got into this situation in the first place. As you’ll see in the piece, though, it seems worth trying to me. And as the years pass without any real global emissions cuts, geoengineering’s appeal is only likely to grow.

“You never want to be a company that succeeds because things are going terribly,” Dan Whaley says of his South Park startup’s apocalypse-ready product. “But here we are.” Whaley’s company, Climos, is peddling an idea that is elegantly simple in its outline, fiendishly complex in its details, and, at least at first blush, batshit crazy: It aims to fight global warming by seeding the ocean with iron.

I shot these photos last month while reporting a story on the ways in which Soweto–and, more generally, South Africa–has changed since the end of apartheid. The piece will come later, but for now there are photos.