Politics, culture, and travel | San Francisco and the world
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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.
You can read the whole thing 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.
In the latest issue of San Francisco magazine, I review the new album by Kowloon Walled City, the city’s best new metal band. These guys combine the aggression of Black Flag (sans Henry Rollins’ petulant moaning) with the sludgy grandeur of the Melvins, producing the aural equivalent of a primal scream. Check it out.
A band’s name is usually a clear indicator of its sound. (Really, could Cannibal Corpse play anything but metal?) This holds true for Kowloon Walled City, though you might not realize it at first. The San Francisco metal band takes its name from a famously dangerous Hong Kong neighborhood run by killers, drug dealers, and pimps–a sort of hell, in other words–and the group sounds satisfyingly like its name. Banging out a symphony of down-tuned guitars and turned-up amps, KWC harks back to similarly heavy forebears, like the Melvins, Helmet, and Oakland legends Neurosis. The band’s brutal debut EP last year earned it a spot at the generally metal averse Noise Pop Festival, and its first long-player only improves on the formula. The opening track, “Annandale,” sets the tone, with front man Scott Evans’ sandpapery croak slicing through the barrage of low-end riffs and hammer-fall drumming. A keen sense of dynamics keeps things interesting all the way through: “Paper Houses” swings like an undertaker on his way to the boneyard, and the cathartic closer, “More Like the Shit Factory,” features a chiming guitar that could almost be called pretty. But the idyll doesn’t last long–these guys have a name to live up to, after all.
Out this week, my piece on the policies and politics of being green in San Francisco, a Sisyphean task even in this most environmentally minded of cities.
Such is the current character of San Francisco that it’s possible to construct a social schedule composed almost entirely of “eco-drinks” mixers, a latter-day cultural marker that combines earnest environmental talk, a full bar, and a certain amount of networking and/or cruising, depending on your interests. Sometimes there are DJs spinning house music; sometimes there’s a group circle in which everyone joins hands and declares what he or she is passionate about; sometimes people just get drunk…
Also, my review of Stephen Elliott’s excellent new book, The Adderall Diaries:
If you followed the 2008 trial of Hans Reiser, the Oakland software guru who murdered his Russian wife, you might have been struck by Reiser’s sense of victimhood—he really seemed to believe that he was the one who’d been wronged. San Francisco writer Stephen Elliott gets into Reiser’s head in this fearless memoir/true-crime hybrid, but it’s only partly about the homicidal programmer. Elliott is most interested in the stories we construct to govern our lives—“how we order and interpret what we believe to be true,” as he puts it—and what happens when those stories break down, as Reiser’s nerdy alpha-dog self-image did when his wife left him, with disastrous consequences. Elliott examines his own life in sharp vignettes that ping from Chicago group homes to San Fernando Valley porn shoots to dot-com-era San Francisco. He scours his troubled past—drugs, homelessness, a horrific family life—for clues to his calmer but still troubled present, which includes bouts of depression, Adderall addiction, and a toxic relationship with his abusive father, who may or may not have killed someone himself. People are mysteries, though, and Elliott (thankfully) doesn’t offer up the certainties of most true-crime lit, even to explain his own actions. “How little we know about ourselves,” he writes, but he deserves kudos for this skillful attempt at making sense of his own history.
A lot of my recent stuff isn’t online and I’m too lazy to scan it, but the city did me a favor and posted my piece (.pdf) on biking with Jared Blumenfeld, who runs the department of environment. He was serving as interim Parks and Rec chief at the time, and leading bike tours around SF. I tagged along one day for a trip to Mclaren Park, a massive chunk of greenspace straddling the freeways down on the southern edge of the city. It’s mostly known for the body dumpings that turn up within its borders on a semi-regular basis, but it’s a beautiful place, too.
South of Bernal Hill, the traffic thinned and the group began to climb up into a land of steep, winding streets with names unfamiliar to most San Franciscans, past rows of boxy, sun-baked houses and curbs lined with big-rimmed Buicks.
…
Out on the margins here, park care tended toward entropy. At a reservoir further up the hill, Blumenfeld watched a woman repeatedly toss a tennis ball into the water for a brown Labrador. “That dog is pissing in our drinking water,” he noted in a deadpan voice.
1. Fittingly, the band came on just as the sun was going down.
2. The pit on the lawn was huge, and in the golden light it looked like a Tibetan mandala. A really violent mandala.
3. Frontman Tom Araya was exceedingly polite throughout the set, repeatedly thanking us for coming out then dipping into a growl to introduce the next song.
4. Guitarist Kerry King sported an incredibly long beard that was braided into a knot stretching down to his solar plexus. With the lighting just so, the effect was that of a desert monk, maybe. Purity of the faith.
5. The other guitarist, Jeff Hanneman, played a guitar sporting a Heineken graphic. We wondered how much money that brings in. (On a related note, Slayer hockey jerseys were on sale for $90.)
6. Shoreline, with its bright, Disneyish colors and Pirates of the Caribbeanesque wooden footbridges, is a weird (though not unpleasant) place to see a metal show.
7. There was an old guy on the lawn in front of us wearing a shirt that read, “Everything louder than everything else.” There were a lot of kids wandering around carrying branded shopping bags full of the swag they had bought.
8. It was tough not to be reminded all over again exactly how influential Slayer is. Every other band in the world has stolen at least a little something from them.
9. When their set finished, it seemed like the entire amphitheatre rushed for the parking lot. Marilyn Manson might have been the de facto headliner last night, but this was a Slayer crowd.
(Update: I added one more thing after the post went up.)
Time for a little hometown chest-beating: “Blame Us,” a massive oral history of the Bay Area’s role in Obama’s rise, out in the new issue of San Francisco:
Without Bay Area technology, ingenuity, righteous indignation, and cash, Barack Obama would not be president today. A flash oral history of a nation-changing collision between A) a long-shot candidate who belived that only people connected could fix a broken democracy and B) a ramped-up region of idealists and web wizards fighting to do just that.
The story hit the web yesterday, and I’m proud to have played a part in its creation, interviewing the likes of Pete Leyden, the progressive politico and futurist big-thinker, and Sean Quinn, the professional poker player cum blogger and one of the minds behind FiveThirtyEight.com, the uncannily accurate online polling sensation. As reporters, though, we had it easy, simply doing our interviews and uploading the tapes. It was the editors who had the tough job, molding those hours (and hours and hours) of interviews into coherence. Bravo, guys. It’s a perfect postscript to the swearing-in of our new president.
Four years ago this morning, I was checking out of a motel in Carson City, Nevada, road-worn and weary, on the way to visit a friend in Mammoth Lakes, trying to escape the gloom that had descended on San Francisco after John Kerry’s loss. There was no getting away from it, though: in the motel office, George W. Bush’s second inauguration was playing on the TV, the sound turned low. Under bleak skies, his motorcade sped through the D.C. streets, besieged by booing protesters. As I signed the credit-card slip, the guy behind the counter burst out, “I can’t believe that bastard won again.”
How things change.
There were the million-plus in D.C. this morning, of course, clogging the Mall and massing out toward the horizon. The crowd was smaller here in San Francisco, but it still filled the Civic Center plaza, where a big screen had been set up in front of City Hall’s beaux-arts facade. We would have had a better view back home on the couch, but that wasn’t the point. At times like this, you just want to be around people. The mood was jubilant; people cheered the Bidens and Obamas, booed Rick Warren and Bush (number of shoes thrown at Bush’s image on the screen: 4) and generally welcomed the dawn of a new era. Gathered today under the bright blue sky were whites and blacks, Latinos and Asians, old hippies in sensible shoes and young hipsters in giant sunglasses, all of them craning their necks toward the screen, oscillating between hushed silence and delirious applause. After Obama’s speech, we all sang the Star Spangled Banner, teary-eyed, voices cracking. Afterwards, people lingered in the sun, a little stunned, maybe, over what had actually happened today.