Chris Smith’s blog

Last week, Thought Catalog published an essay of mine on growing up punk in suburban Detroit. It’s a personal piece about high school, the 1980s, skating, and, mostly, the shitty hardcore band I was in. We did, however, have a great name: Moral Decay. Anyway, here it is.

Like thousands of other basement bands across the country at the time, we spent our days skateboarding, building launch ramps in our driveways, and working up new ways to express our dissatisfaction with the world. Plenty of stuff pissed us off. This was 1986, after all, the high Reagan era. The U.S. was always invading some country I had never heard of, and the threat of nuclear war seemed very real. I wasn’t happy at home, either: I didn’t get along with my parents, and they didn’t get along with each other. Plus, I lived in the suburbs of Detroit, which even then had a feral, end-of-days feel. That year, there were nearly 400 arsons in a three-day period. I remember sitting in front of the TV on Halloween night, watching the city burn. [ ... ]

The new issue of San Francisco magazine is out, and with it my short piece on political correctness in SF (see p.40).

This spring, PETA, the animal-rights group that specializes in pointless PR stunts, petitioned San Francisco to rename the Tenderloin. The name is just far too beefy-sounding for PETA’s taste–”an outdated moniker that evokes the horrors of the meat trade,” according to a letter the group sent Mayor Ed Lee. PETA’s suggestion? The Tempeh District. This won’t happen, of course, but what if we did succumb to our darkest, most politically correct impulses? Herein, a rundown of what some of our neighborhoods might be called if we resolved never to offend anyone, anywhere, ever again.

My new piece in San Francisco magazine is out, on the scramble to be the next mayor if Gavin Newsom wins the race for Lt. Governor next week–and even if he doesn’t, actually. There are roughly a million ways it could all play out, and City Hall watchers (myself included) are plotting the possibilities like courtiers in a comedy of manners. So serpentine are the routes to power that we decided to go easy on the text (one page) and instead serve up a four (4!)-page flow chart. If you’re local, pick up a copy of the mag–it’s worth it, graphically speaking. If not, check out the digital version. The story begins on pg. 48.

My new piece for California magazine is part memoir, part generational polemic. It begins at the Reagan White House, at one of Nancy Reagan’s Just Say No celebrity tennis tournaments, and works its way down through the years, surveying the damage our generations–Silents, Boomers, Xers–have caused to the body politic. Our only hope? The millennial generation.

On a swampy day in June 1988, I found myself–a 16-year-old skate punk with a dim view of politicians–at the Ronald Reagan White House. Specifically, I was at the backyard tennis court for a celebrity tournament organized by Nancy Reagan (my dad worked for one of the corporate sponsors). The theme: Just Say No to drugs. I sat sweating in the stands, one row behind the Gipper himself.

While the Reagans watched, a doubles team that included Treasury Secretary James Baker–the bureaucratic warrior who would later spearhead George W. Bush’s Florida recount campaign–demolished Secretary of State George Shultz’s squad.

There were celebrities, too: Herschel Walker, the Dallas Cowboys running back, sported a high-top fade. Chuck Norris wore short shorts and looked more ordinary than action-figure. Umpire Dick Van Patten, the Eight is Enough patriarch, spiked his commentary with Borscht-Belt jokes about his wife’s shopping habits. Johnny Depp, a high-school narc on 21 Jump Street, skulked around the court in dark sunglasses, looking like he wished he were somewhere else.

Afterwards, the First Lady, a birdlike, immaculately coiffed figure, handed out $50,000 checks to nonprofits pushing the Just Say No mantra. The master of ceremonies thanked her, “for bringing to America the drug problem that is afflicting all of our young people.” An unfortunate malapropism.

There’s a generational lesson here …

Read the whole thing here.

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.