Chris Smith’s blog

In commemoration of the 10-year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, here’s a piece I wrote for Mother Jones back in March 2003. It’s about the lies that got us into a war.

My latest for San Francisco magazine: a profile of Theo Ellington, the rising Bayview political activist who led last year’s fight against “Stop and Frisk”:

But Ellington’s campaign showed that the African-American community—down to about 6 percent of the city’s population—still has some fight left. It also heralded the emergence of a new leader. “Brotha Clint” Sockwell, a community activist, a teacher, and one of Ellington’s mentors, puts it sardonically: “Theo represents the hope of the remaining three or four black people in San Francisco.”

You might have heard that Occupy’s dead. Certainly it’s changed. The large occupations of public space are gone, as are most of the marches. But the movement lives on through the work of groups like Occupy Bernal, which fights illegal home foreclosures in San Francisco’s southern neighborhoods. My piece for San Francisco magazine:

Housing justice organizations like the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment have been doing such work for years, but Occupy Bernal–like similar groups around the country, from Oakland to Minneapolis to Atlanta–has brought fresh bodies to the cause, along with a certain theatrical flair. It organized a bus tour of Peninsula mansions belonging to Wells Fargo board members, has occupied homes to stave off evictions, and is pushing for a moratorium on foreclosures in San Francisco. And when any San Francisco home goes up for auction, occupiers go to city hall to drown out the auctioneer with whistles and loud music.

Photo by Stian Rasmussen.

I’ve got the cover story in December’s San Francisco magazine: a profile of Rose Pak, Chinatown activist, community leader, and power-broker extraordinaire. This was a fun one to report and write.

PAK HAS BEEN general consultant to the Chinese Chamber of Commerce since the 1980s, but the title hardly does her justice. She is a confidante of mayors, a consumate political infighter who can get people hired or fired, and one of the leaders of a Chinatown-based political machine that has helped elect generations of local politicians. Most famously, of course, Pak and Brown engineered Lee’s ascension to the mayoralty in 2010, making him the city’s first Asian American to hold the position.

…

Pak’s political enemies—and they are legion—have their own loaded terms to describe her. They see her as a Chinatown “godmother,” ramming through policies that benefit her friends and punish her enemies. They say that she’s corrupt, dictatorial, an all-around nasty piece of work. Even the extent of her power is the subject of much debate in political circles. Sometimes she revels in her notoriety, but mostly she down-plays her influence. “Power,” she likes to say, “is an illusion.” If so, a lot of people can’t take their eyes off the shadow on the wall.

…

A COUPLE OF WEEKS after the banquet, I find myself careering down a steep fairway in a golf cart at the Olympic Club, the old-line, members-only golf course out on the city’s southwestern edge. It’s a rare bluebird day with a light breeze off the ocean—perfect for the charity tournament Pak has organized here for the last 18 years to benefit Chinese Hospital. She has already raised $25 million for the hospital’s rebuilding. Today will bring in another $720,000.

Pak is in the cart ahead with the mayor, who drives hunched over the wheel as if fleeing a bank robbery. At the wheel of my cart is David Ho, a 35-year-old community outreach manager with the CCDC and one of Pak’s closest associates. Periodically, Lee and Pak stop to chat with golfers beerily playing their way through a round. At one stop, Pak yells to a man about to tee off, “Hey, you need a mulligan? We’re selling them for 125 bucks a pop!” She laughs—ahuh-huh-huh-huh, like a muscle car backfiring—and then they’re off again.

…

Photo by the great Jim Hughes, who also shot the legendary “Aaron Peskin in a Speedo” photos that ran with my profile of the supervisor back in 2007.

My latest for California magazine is a profile of R.J. Rushdoony, the most influential Christian conservative you’ve never heard of–godfather of the homeschooling movement, frequent guest on the 700 Club, and ideological spur to generations of rightwingers. How best to describe him? In an anecdote that didn’t make the final cut of the story, John Whitehead, founder of the libertarian legal nonprofit the Rutherford Institute, described to me what it was like hanging out with the patriarch. One evening, Rushdoony drove Whitehead up to his rural compound in northern California’s Gold Rush country. After parking outside one of the buildings, Rushdoony embarked on an elaborate anti-theft ritual, inspecting each car door to make sure it was locked. “I said, ‘There’s no one here except us,’” Whitehead remembers with a laugh. “He looked right at me and said, ‘Man is a sinner.’”

And an excerpt from the piece:

Like many conservatives then and now, Rushdoony believed that America was founded as an explicitly Christian nation. In the postwar era, when many on the right felt that holy heritage was under siege, his fusion of right-wing politics and fundamentalist Christianity had particular resonance.

Indeed, Rushdoony’s worldview held something for everyone on the right, even if few people subscribed to every aspect. Free-marketeers and self-styled patriots who hated the New Deal and were alarmed by Communism flocked to his banner. (He counted Robert Welch, founder of the hard-right John Birch Society, among his friends.) But Rushdoony also attracted social conservatives who saw the Devil’s hand in feminism, reproductive rights, and civil rights. For these people, he confirmed the sinfulness of all challenges to the traditional order. “In the name of toleration,” he wrote, “the believer is asked to associate on a common level of total acceptance with the atheist, the pervert, the criminal, and the adherents of other religions as though no differences existed.”

(Illustration by John Stich.)

The current Utne Reader features a condensed version of my story about Steve DeCaprio, Oakland’s punk-rock squatter guru. I remember Utne from way back–what liberal doesn’t?–so it’s pretty cool to see my work in there. (Here’s a pdf, by the way, of the uncut version that ran in California Northern a few months ago.)

The current issue of San Francisco publishes a quick Q&A I did with Becky Bond, head of Credo’s super PAC–which has the distinction of being the only super PAC out there that disapproves of super PACs. Here’s a PDF.

In this video, Symbolia founder Erin Polgreen gives us a walk-through of the tablet magazine’s premier issue as it comes together. My profile of Keith Kabwe, singer for 1970s Zambian psych-rock pioneers Amanaz, is slated to be in there, expertly illustrated by my friend and colleague Damien Scogin and supplemented by clips of the band’s music and my interviews with Keith.

California Northern magazine runs my piece on squatting, punk rock, and the Occupy movement. I tell the story through an Oakland squatter and activist named Steve DeCaprio (he also plays in the black metal band Embers), in whom all of these threads converge. There’s just an excerpt posted online now, but I’m told the whole thing will be up there at some point.

“One night a little more than a decade ago, Steve DeCaprio pulled his bike up to an abandoned house in Ghost Town, a poor neighborhood in West Oakland dotted with vacant lots. He cut through the rusty lock on the chain-link fence with bolt cutters, then pried open a plywood sheet that stood where the front door once had. Then he replaced the locks with his own. This is how DeCaprio, a longtime East Bay squatter and veteran of the punk and metal scenes, “acquired” his home.

He already knew that the previous owner of the house had died in the early 1980s and that no one had come forward to claim it. The turn-of-the-century bungalow had sat empty for many years. The kitchen floor was burned out, and the back of the house hung off the foundation. An acacia tree in the back yard had grown into the roof, leaving the interior open to the elements. The top floor was piled with the carcasses of dead raccoons and other small animals. “They would climb the tree, jump down, and get stuck,” he says.

Later, DeCaprio and a crew of friends got to work making the place habitable. “At first, it was basically just urban camping,” he remembers. It took eight months of on-and-off work to fix the roof. He got the water flowing, bought storm doors and painted the exterior, planted cacti in the front yard, and yanked out another backyard tree that had begun to menace the house next door. He named it Noodle House, and he currently shares it with three people plus the occasional touring underground band.

DeCaprio, who turns forty in August, has tousled, graying hair and favors Carharts and black t-shirts bearing band logos. In a more mainstream context, he would be described as a “go-getter.” He plays guitar in a black-metal band named Embers, works as a member representative for the California League of Conservation Voters, and is pursuing a law degree through an independent study program (he expects to take the bar exam next year). And, of course, there’s the house. Right now, DeCaprio is working on a solar array to provide electricity. “There’s gonna be this moment when I turn on a light switch and it’ll be epic,” he says.

… “

My piece in San Francisco magazine on the relative fortunes of Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris, now that both have ascended to Sacramento. To use a racing metaphor: Newsom’s stuck in neutral, while Harris is in the fast lane. (See pg. 35.)