Villaraigosa for LA's Mayor

Villaraigosa is the only one of the 5 mayoral candidates with a vision for Los Angeles that would actually solve some of the city's problems while the other four candidates--Hahn, Hertz berg, Parks, and Alarcon--are only offering band aids that would keep LA's wounds festering.

On the city council, he helped resolve the MTA bus strike in November 2003 while Mayor Hahn was unable to do so. As a board member of the MTA, he's done necessary work to link transit and land use planning as well as adopt sustainable building pratices for all large projects.

Villaraigosa says to solve Los Angeles traffic gridlock we need to a comprehensive plan to upgrade the roads, build more rail lines including expanding the lines we have, improve the bus system until it is first class, and create more bikeways. He argues that to solve the housing crisis we need to build more middle class homes and more affordable homes for the poor as well as create tax incentives for families to help them buy their first home. Homes, schools and transporation should all be coordinated.

While in the state legislature he was important in passing a $2.1 billion initiative effort to provide parks and open space throughout the state. By helping to pass the bill for the Los Angeles river conservancy, he brought more than $87 million to Southern California to spur development of parks along the Los Angeles River and he also funded an extensive expansion of water quality enforcement by the state. He’s by far the best candidate for the environment with his vision for a green Los Angeles: planting a million trees to both conserve water and improve air; improve air quality; reduce dumping of toxics in the beaches; increasing recycling throughout the city; and a host of other ideas. He’s the best candidate for increasing much needed park space: he wants to build parks, particularly a string of pocket parks along the Los Angeles River.

For the economy, he further suggests to solve the problem of poverty in the inner city we need a community-development bank to improve the economy in low-income neighborhoods. Villaraigosa would work harder than any other candidate to extend the living-wage ordinance and build more affordable housing. With low-income workers making more money, they would immediately spend the money, spurring the economy. Building housing and also rehabilitating existing slum housing would also employ construction workers and would positively affect the economy. Villaragoisa’s economic solutions will benefit citizens of all classes. Further, with poor people getting higher wages and better housing, there would be more social peace, again benefiting all classes. His plan of adding more police without a tax increase would also help social peace.

Villaraigosa has real achievements both when he was in the state legislature and on the city council. When he was in the state legislature, he authored a state health insurance program, “Healthy Families,” currently serving 600,000 children of the working poor--this is one of the most important pieces of legislation passed in California in the last decade. Also he led the passage of a $9.1 billion initiative to rebuild and modernize California schools.

He is a politician who has done more for the environment than any other in Los Angeles and he's also extremely knowledgable about transportation issues, important for solving traffic gridlock. All in all he's already improved California's health, schools, environment, transportation, and water quality. That is quite a record. As mayor he would support ideas that would improve schools, health, transportation, the economy, and public safety. Los Angeles needs Villaragoisa’s vision and needs him as mayor.

Villaraigosa versus the other candidates

The other four candidates running for Los Angeles's mayor don't even come close to Villaraigosa.

Bob Hertzberg is a moderate business-orientated Democrat. His best is to use the rubber from heaps of used tires to make rubber sidewalks, a good idea but far from an environmental plan to solve L.A.'s many environmental problems. To improve the economy, he suggests the mayor persuade Korean banks in invest in this city, but Koreans and Japanese companies have been investing in L.A. for years with little impact. His major idea is to break-up Los Angeles Unified School District, but as mayor he has little power to do so, and can only suggest that the state legislature take action. He has a few proposals to help driving such as no roadwork during rush hour, but these plans won't solve traffic gridlock. He has a couple ideas how to reduce runaway film production by eliminating $20,000/day location, but this will so little for the economy.

Richard Alarcon is a decent liberal Democrat, but he, as many other candidates want to add 1,000 more cops. His major ideas are to roll back DWP rates 11%--nice but a quick fix, solving no long-term problems. His idea for improving transportation by creating a Green Business Program to provide tax credits for business that have good wages and give public transportation to their employees would have little or no impact on reducing traffic gridlock He had some decent ideas for improving schools--reduce administrative spending; increase per capita spending; localize decision making--but the mayor has little influence over the huge bureaucracy of the Los Angeles United School District. He wants to get rid of pay-to-play for awarding city contracts by limiting campaign contributions of developers and lobbyists to $100. That's a nice idea but laws such as these have been passed for a decade with little discernible effort.

As for Bernard Parks, he has been a good representative for his district, getting more than $7 million in funds for the redevelopment of the Vision Theater in Leimert Park, so arts and culture can be catalyst for economic development in the African-American area. He has supported the Lula May Washington Dance Studio and African Marketplace and other art projects in L.A.’s. He is serious about supporting arts through funding the Cultural Affairs Department, has helped support gay rights, and has a good transportation plan that integrates pushing for more rail lines, better buses, and improved street driving. His business orientated idea to help the economy through tax incentives would do little. Often Parks seems to be more campaigning against Mayor Hahn than giving forth ideas to solve the city problems. He has made witty remarks attacking Hahn such as "asking Mayor Hahn about reforming the pay-to-play scandal is like asking Fat Albert about dietary tips."

Finally, Mayor Hahn's boasts his two most notable accomplishments were appointing Bratton as head of the L.A.P.D. and stopping Valley succession--a very shortlist. As for the environment, he as one small accomplishment: getting the DWP not to invest in a Utah coal plant. Other than that, he's do nothing for the environment; for example, he hasn't pushed the DWP to increase its use of non-polluting energy sources.

During the long bus strike in fall 2003 he walked a picket line but was unable to negotiate an end to the long, drawn-out lockout/strike. During the February floods he was again M.I.A. He's usually not there, without a vision, without ideas. He has been decent to labor, supporting both the grocery workers and the longshorepeople during their strikes as well as allowing for raises of city hall workers. But that is not enough to be re-elected mayor. His administration has been tarnished by the pay-to-play scandal of giving city contracts to developers who had previously given him campaign contracts.

All in all Villaraigosa beats out his four competitors for mayor in terms of previous accomplishments and he has the most far-reaching and detailed vision for Los Angeles.

Hollywood Floods

When I drive to my mother's house for dinner at 5:30 Monday during the storm, the streets are wet but there is barely a drizzle, so when I start east at 7:00 pm down Melrose Avenue through Hollywood I think there would no problems. Driving through Melrose and Highland there is a an inch or two of water over the intersection but I keep on going. I'm an old hand now after a month of storms of driving through slightly flooded intersections.

Then as I approach Vine Street the cars are really backed up and I could see the westbound lanes are flooded. There are two lanes going east where I am in the left lane with the right lane flooded. I think for a second maybe I should turn around but I didn't. Instead I slowly inch forward until I got to the intersection. Yes, on Vine going north there is a couple inches of rain flooding the street with a car stranded in the middle. Big water ahead! I see there is a couple inches of rain all over the intersection--I'm driving a sedan, not a truck or a SUV. I inch forward through the water saying a prayer. Now I'm driving on water, praying my brakes hold up. I keep inching forward until finally I'm out of the intersection. Oh my god, I made it.

On the other side of Vine Streets Melrose Avenue is again clear of water as I pass by Paramount Studios on my north. Then approaching Bronson Avenue I see that the cars are slowing down ahead. I know at Melrose and Wilton Avenue there was in previous storms at least an inch or two of rain. Two weeks ago the traffic light at that intersection had gone out in a power outage that effected the whole area, so I decide to turn right to avoid the Melrose/Wilton intersection, taking backstreets. One street is blocked off--I guess it had flooded so the neighbors wisely blocked it off. I take backstreets the few blocks until home but there are strangely a lot more cars--obviously taking detours as I am.

As I turn into the parking garage undearneth my apartmenthouse, my neighbors are with buckets bailing out the inches of water on the garage floor near the entrance. I park my car at the opposite end of the parking garage, put my purse in the apartment. Twice in the previous month's storms the power had gone out--once for three hours. In late December I had a friend over for dinner during the storm when lightening and thunder happened together right over my apartment house--the lights went out including the computer. God, I thought my building had been hit. I lit candles and we continued eating--what else is there to do? Back to the quail! Later I checked my computer which luckily was protected by a surge protector so the computer was O.K.

Now, thank God, the lights are on in my apartment. Then I return to help by carrying buckets full of water to dump in the street. They fill up buckets while I haul them out of the garage. One neighbor said that Beverly and Western is flooded. I learn later that it had about 2 feet of water, the power is out in the neighborhood, and also homes are flooded. With six of us working at filling up water buckets and dumping them in the street we clear out the water in the gargage in about 15 more minutes.

On the news on channel 9 I see the Hollywood Freeway at Santa Monica is totally covered with water. Cars had gotten stranded (thank god it wasn't me), firemen had to rescue the people, and towtrucks had to tow out their cars. In an hour a storm cell had dropped 1 1/2 inches of rain over Hollywood and then moved north and dissipated. That's what is so weird. The storm can be drizzles all day like today and then pow! a storm cell in an hour can flood the streets! Because all four lanes of the Hollywood Freeway were closed, cars were backed up on the soutside for miles and on the north for miles while police were taking cars slowly off the freeways. Cars must be crisscrossing Hollywood trying to avoid flooded intersections and the freeway.

The funny thing is now it isn't even raining. Well, I hope that stops the flooding of Hollywood.

Kevin's Starr's Coast of Dreams

Kevin Starr’s Coast of Dreams: California on the Edge 1990-2003 is the sixth in a series of books on California history, and the only one written just at the end of the decade it is about. The book gets some things very right about California in the 1990s while it completely misses other.

What’s best about the book the chapter “The Boys from Texas” where he brilliantly covers the mid-1990s deregulation of California’s energy and then the resulting energy crisis shortage of early 2000-1. Starr writes as an angry California nationalist not wanting his state to become an energy colony of “the boys from Texas” but instead energy independent. Further, he gives a good argument for an very unpopular opinion: Governor Gray Davis did as much as he could to get the state through the energy shortage.

Starr in "Zen California" has an enlightening description of the state’s multitude of religious communities including Hindus; Japanense and Tibetan Buddhists; New Age; Protestants, covering the Pentecostal revival; Catholics, focusing on the impact of Mexican Catholics; and Jews. In “Diversity” he paints good portraits of the growth of immigrant communities from Mexicans to Asians to Muslims, Armenians, and Russians. In his chapter “Immigrants to the Rescue” he powerfully argues that immigrant busnisspeople have started small businesses and new industries and also immigrant professionals have important jobs in high tech industries--both were key to the state’s economic recovery.

Starr counters the prejudiced idea that California is becoming a nightmare of impoverished immigrants by showing how many immigrants are contributing to economic life as well as becoming established by buying homes and moving into the middle and upper middle classes. His idea of the “dream” does capture these dream riven people. These immigrant success stories need to be told—Starr does a good job of telling it.

But even here Starr ignores an important story. He neglects entirely another key event: Latino trade union leaders such as Gilbert Cedillo as well as immigrant activists such as Jose Guiterrez organized a huge demonstration against Proposition 187 and then started drives to naturalize Latinos and register them as voters. These registration drives helped to elect Latino politicians. Also Miguel Contreras, the new head of the Los Angeles County AFL-CIO, had unionists work hard to mobilize Latinos and trade unionists, contributing to the effort to elect first Latino candidates and then progressive non-Latinos. These efforts helped create the strong progressive bloc of legislators in the state assembly and senate, thus changing both Los Angeles's and California's politics and policies.

Starr has similar strengths and weaknesses in his discussion of the environment. He gives an excellent statewide panorama of California’s environmental problem from sprawl in the Central Valley to statewide drought to conflict over redwoods to corruption in building Los Angeles's subway. The only environmental group he does discuss is Earth First--their attempt to stop Pacific Lumber’s cutting of old growth redwoods in Humboldt County--but he describes them as quaint but uncivil remnants of the 1960s.

His “Going Green” chapter omits the many citizen’s groups that have reshaped the state. In Los Angles, these groups have had great impact: a coalition West L.A. group saved from the developers a remnant of Ballona Wetlands, the last wetlands in Los Angeles; Friends of the Los Angeles River and Latino politicians got the state to pass 1999 bill establishing the San Gabriel and Lower Los Angeles Rivers and Mountains Conservancy as well as established bike paths along the river; the Desert Chapter of Los Angeles Sierra Club persuaded the U.S. congress to pass legislation for a new national park made up of Joshua Tree, Death Valley and parts of Mohave; the Chinatown Yard Alliance, which is a coalition of Anglo, Chinatown and Latino groups, successfully fought Mayor Riordan to keep the old railroad land called the Cornfields from being industrialized and got itinstead turned into park with an elementary school.

This is just Los Angeles—the missing story is even Los Angeles has a powerful environmental movement. The second missing story is that throughout the state environmental citizens groups were a political power. The third missing story is Anglo environmentalists on the Los Angeles’s Westside are now working politically with Chinese, blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans in such groups as the Chinatown Yard Alliance. These citizens groups and coalitions are hardly 1960s remants but the new politics of the 1990s and the 2000s

What's Really Happening In L.A.

Even more problematical is Kevin Starr’s view of Los Angeles in his book Coast of Dreams. He gets the little details wrong, saying Santa Monica by the 1980s and 1990s had such irritating homeless that they “effective [were] creating a no-man-s-land between Santa Monica and the sea.” Nita Nickerson, one of my students, said that during this period as a pregnant woman she felt perfectly safe walking the area—hardly a no woman’s land. Starr's examples of catastrophe mostly occured in L.A.: horrifying murders, corrupt cops of the Rampart scandal, the 1992 riot, never ending ethnic tensions, dreadfully poor children, and out-of-control gangs. After reading Starr’s litany of catastrophes, some of my students were astounded to hear me call him a booster.

What’s quite missing is all the citizens groups who bravely battle to make Los Angeles livable. After the 1992 riot Los Angeles’s business and political establishment had established Rebuild LA to address the city’s poverty but it failed miserable. But Starr omits the real story: -Latino led AFL-CIO, immigrants rights groups and progressive Jewish, black Latino politicians and groups defeated Mayor Riordan’s attempts to privatize city services, which would have led to lower wages, producing even more poverty.

Then this coaltion fought for and won a livable wage ordinance; supported the Justice for Janitors campaign to first unionize and then got a wage increased for immigrant janitors working in high-rise luxury offices. All these efforts were the real beginning of addressing poverty after elites had failed miserably. Again, the city's establishment failed to make any dent in the gang problem, but anti-gang groups were making small progress. These many small groups-- Amer-I-Can, Hands Across Watts, Homies Unidos, Unity One, Barrios Unidos, HomeBoy Industries, and Communities in Schools--all flew under Starr's radar as they worked to have gang truces an to provide alternatives to gangs in recreation, life-skills and job-training programs.

Other groups tackled the affordable housing shortage, hunger, and rundown schools. These citizens groups tackling Los Angeles’s problems across the were giving the city much needed compassion and humanity but also were presenting viable proposals that would lessen the growing gap between the state's wealthiest and its poorest citizens. The story was not of a city out of control but of citizen's groups presenting viable proposals. A few of these proposals were adopted but mostly the city's political and econmic establishment stonewalled.

A final story that Starr omits is how Los Angeles arts have come of age in the 1990s. Starr has bits and pieces of the story strewn around his various chapters, but one needs to gather the pieces together in a coherent story. In the 1990s of Los Angeles architecture reached world fame with Frank Gehry while the Getty musuem now had the finest photography collection in a private museum in the country. In the early 1930s Mexican muralist David Sequiros painted his murals in Los Angeles, starting a 60-year old outdoor mural tradition with murals across town, more than any other U.S. city; further, the city has a roster of important visual artists and a huge number of museums and galleries showcasing all kinds of visual art. Many small theaters were daring and adventurous while its large theater pioneered with such plays as Tony Kushner’s Angels in America.

Los Angeles finally had a large scale repertory cinema in the American Cinemateque at the Egyptian The city had one important film festival after another featuring Latino film, African and African-American film, independent cinema, and even a homegrown alternative Silverlake film festival. After New York, Los Angeles was the most important visual arts as well as theater center in the country; in cinema it was, of course, the most important.

Starr even discusses Los Angeles novelists—Bukowski, Ellroy—as being too down and dirty but he has focused on pre-1990s novelists: Bukowski is really a countercultural voice of the 1960s and 1970s celebrating the little guy while Ellroy is a 1980s debunker exposing in his best novel LA Confidential the corrupt, racist 1950s LAPD. Two novelists who did capture the 1990s were Janet Fitch’s White Olander and Hector Tovar’s Tatooed Soldiers. Where Starr gives us a long litany of ills suffered by trashed children, Fitch’s heroine is one of those trashed children who manages by the end to find some happiness. Tovar’s is the best immigrant story, detailing a Guatamlan refugee fleeing the civil war to see in Los Angeles his life hit bottom and then begin to go upwards. Both novels ending with small moments of redemption.

Starr’s book, despite its flaws, is still the best book about California in the 1990s because he begins to tell a major important California story in how the great immigrant wave of the decade was transforming the state’s economy and culture, but a second story needs to be told: how immigrants are transforming its politics. How immigrants form coalitions with non-immigrants in dealing with issues of environment, hunger, jobs, anti-gang and housing may prove to be the big story of the decade starting in 2000. A new arts and literature resulting from this stew of new cultures is also bubbling. Rather than a decade strewn with catastrophe, the 1990s may prove in the future to be a decade like New York 1900-1910 when citizens started small scale groups to produce ideas--seeds of hope--to solve their many problems and to creative innovative new arts.

Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate

Two days ago at the Los Angeles County Museum I saw the director's cut of Michael Cimino's "Heaven's Gate," the 1980 film that is one of the greatest American films I've ever seen. The film was stupendous-- the best film yet made about the epic history of the American West-- but when it was first shown it did miserably.

When "Heaven's Gate" was released in 1980, director Cimino had gone way over budget and the United Artists executives cut 1 1/2 hrs out of a 3 1/2 hr film director's cut and threw out the negatives for the film. The released shortened film got savaged by the critics and ignored by the public--this financial loss helped United Artists go into bankruptcy and destroyed Cimino's career. No one ever got to see the director's cut until now.

MGM film archivist, in reconstructing the original 3 1/2 hour film without any negatives, carefully made it out of duplicates. The archivest as well as the cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond spoke about the film afterwards at LA County Msuem to a rapt film audience, detailing both the making of the film and then the careful reconstruction from duplicates.

"Heaven's Gate" as well as two other Hollywood films--"Shane" and "The Johnson County War"-- are about one of the most amazing events in U.S. history: the Johnson County War in 1892 Wyoming. The East Coast rich who owned large cattle ranches were unhappy at alleged cattle rustling of their cattle in Johnson County, Wyoming. Small farmers/ranches dominated Johnson County whose court did not punish the alleged cattle rustlers.

The cinematography by Vilmos Zisgmond is beautifully captures the conflict. In one early shot the sherrif, Kris Kristofferson, is coming into town in comfort in the railroad car while on the top of the car are seated hundreds of impoverished new immigrants from Eastern Europe--men, women with scarves around their heads, children.The film is visually stunning, contrasting the gorgeous western scenery of pine trees and snow covered mountains, with the grueling work of immigrants pulling plows by hands without oxen. In another early shot an immigrant is butchering a calf for his hungry family living in a tiny cabin in the plains when a gunmen shots him dead; then his wife drags his dead body on a cart down the road with their two children following. At the same time the cattle barons must in their luxurious club organized a vigilante group of 50 gunmen that invaded Johnson County on a railroad car with a death list of 50 people they aimed to kill.

There is a stellar cast of actors in the lead roles: Kris Kristofferson plays the sherrif; Isabelle Huppert is his love, a madame who runs a bordello; Christopher Walken, who is hired as a vigalente for the cattle barons who falls in love with Huppert; Jeff Bridges, who plays a saloonkeeper who sides with the immigrants; and Sam Waterson who is brilliant as the leader of the cattle lords.

During the discussion after the film one man in the audience said that the film, one of the last films deep affected by the Vietnam War, came out just when Reagen was elected in 1980, and those in the Reagen administration thought the film "anti-American" and didn't want to see any more such films. Scenes such as when the vigalentes arrive, they then executed three men in a shootout that Cimino's captures in all its gore--these scenes opposed the heroic cowboy myth of the new President Reagan. In Heaven's Gate the small ranchers/small farmers of Johnson County are impoverished, hardworking East European/German immigrants, organize with the sheriff a force of both men and women to defend their county. What's stunning is the film's end when the immigrants attack the invaders, defeat them in one battle, and then have a seige against the invaders. Women turn out to be warriors as well as men taking part in a seige against the vigalente invaders.

Cimino has captured some of the complex, fasinating history of America as few films ever had. To me, the crux of Cimino's brilliance in "Heaven's Gate" is he makes at look at America's history, particulary the suffering, strength and courage of immigrants who suffered racism and exploitation and had to put their lives on the line in Johnson County. His cinematory also shows the glories of the West, the visual backdrop of the war. Hopefully, MGM will put the director's cut out on DVD so more people can see this great film.

Free Speech , a Radical Church, and Community Farms Need Saving

December 11, 2004, I attended “Tour L.A.: Past Forward,” organized by the Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research, a 40-year old private library located in South Los Angeles that documents social justice movements in this city. Twenty of us tour participants met at 8:45 a.m. by the kiosk in the Plaza south of Olvera Street where people were decorating for the festival for the Virgin of Guadalupe to be held that evening at Our Lady Queen of the Angels Church next door: yellow, rose, and blue paper cut-outs were hung between the trees; vendors were setting up food and craft tables; stage hands were building a stage for music.

First we went to the brown brick Hellman/Quon building to hear historian William Estrada talk about the hidden free speech history of the Plaza. Estrada told us that from 1781 when Los Angeles was founded to 1881 the Plaza was the town’s center: Our Lady Queen of the Angeles Church, located here, was the first and leading church; adobes and then brick residences for the town’s elites stood here; the city’s main shops circled the Plaza. The Spanish officials and pobaldores (colonists) built a zanja madre, mother ditch, from the Los Angeles River down to the pueblo to water their fields. After the Anglo elite shifted the city’s center a few blocks southeast after 1880, the Plaza became the center of the immigrant working people: Mexicans and Italian immigrants lived right west and north in neighborhood called Sonoratown; Chinese immigrants lived directly east in Old Chinatown.

Estrada said that the Plaza and its nearby streets were the center of rallies, meetings, and speechmaking: Sun yat-sen, future leader of China, spoke to 700 Chinese at a nearby restaurant to gain support for the future Chinese Revolution; the Flores-Magon brothers, leaders of the anarchist Partido Liberal Mexicano, held many rallies at the Plaza for a Mexican revolution; the I.W.W., radical trade unionists who led L.A. trade union movement, had their office at 420 Los Angeles Street; anarchist Emma Goldman, Job Harriman who ran for Socialist mayor of Los Angeles, and famed Socialist author Upton Sinclair, all spoke here.

A few minutes later as we walked again through the Plaza I could hear the ghostly voices from 1912 of radical Mexican and Italian immigrants discussing the latest strikes in L.A. A few minutes later at Our Lady Queen of the Angels Church (La Placita) by the mural on the northside we listened to Father Steve Niskanen. During the 1980s Father Oliveres led La Placita into declaring itself the first Catholic Church to be a sanctuary for refugees from the civil wars in Central America; defying the I.N.S.; and making this a church for the poor and homeless.

The Claretian order, which runs the church, transferred Father Oliveres to Bolivia in 1990, ending La Placita’s radicalism, but the Claretians changed their minds by 2002. Two new priests, Father Steve Niskanen and Arnold Abelardo, who arrived in 2002, revived this radical heritage. The two priests redeclared the church as a sanctuary for immigrants; denounced the government’s raids on immigrants; started within the church Centro San Juan Diego del Immigrante (San Juan Diego Immigrant Center) to give legal and medical aid to immigrants; and again are feeding and helping the homeless. Father Niskanen, who is a tall, gangly Anglo, said he came from a conservative background but is changing while being pastor at La Placita.

Leaving Father Niskanen, we boarded the bus to get off at Spring Street, walk a block to Biddy Mason Park just south of the Bradbury Building at 304 South Broadway. If you walk through the Bradbury Building to the gallery at the back on the 1^st floor and then go right, you see a pocket park with leafy green camphor and jacaranda trees, benches, and then a wall dedicated to Biddy Mason. Mason, who was a black slave in 1851, walked to Los Angeles with her master’s wagon train.

There, she sued in 1856 for her freedom in court, and was helped by blacks in the tiny black community. She won! Inscriptions on the wall tall the story of this pioneering African-American Angelo: she was a talented midwife, helping to birth hundreds of children. She bought land and had a house right on this spot. At her house she and other blacks held meetings for Los Angeles’s first black church, the African-American Methodist Episcopal Church, which was built a few blocks down, on land she owned and donated to the church.

From Biddy Mason’s Park we walked a few blocks down Spring Street, the old Wall Street of Los Angeles with its stock exchange and leading banks before they moved to Bunker Hill; we arrived at Gallery 727 at 727 South Spring Street to see the photography show “South Central Farmers: Photographs by Don Normark and Don Rogers” (www.gallery727losangeles.com.” At 41^st Street and Alameda Avenue in South Los Angeles South Central Farmers for 12 years have created small garden plots in a community gardens. The city of Los Angeles originally condemned this land by eminent domain for the “good the community” to build a huge incinerator opposed by concerned Citizens of South Central Los Angeles, then let 360 farmers create garden plots. After promising that the land would be used for the good of the community, City Hall in a “sweetheart deal” decided gave the land back to its previous owner Ralph Horowitz to build a warehouse, so in December 31, 2003, the South Central Farmers have received their first eviction notice.

They have been fighting for a year including getting a court injunction to keep their farms (www.saveourgarden.com). We see photos of a few of the 350 families who are fighting City Hall and a millionaire real-estate dealer. The photos were stunning, showing these adults and children’s pride in their corn, chayote, cactucs they’ve grown as well as how they pass on food traditions--including building wonderful scacrecrows-- to the next generation. Looking at these photos, I thought of original small farming village of El Pueblo where farmers also laboriously built a long irrigation ditch, the madre zanja, to water their crops and then took pride in their vegetables they grew. Yes, the South Central Farmers who are carrying on this same food and farming two-hundred year old traditions deserve our support. You can fill out their petition at www. pettiononline.com/lagarden/petition html.

Michael Rochin captures old L.A.

I have read an amazing novel by Michael Jacob Rochin called Cascaron about Californios (Mexicans) in Southern California in the 1850s. Cascaron is the best fictional story I've ever read to recreate the life on the Mexican ranchos of the 1840s and and 1850s which dominated California's coastline. Don Diego Antonio Arboleda owns a huge rancho near Santa Barbara in 1857 in the last years of the ranchos before the whole way of life was destroyed. He sends his nephew Dario, the novel's hero and a foreman on the ranch, on a long journey to L.A. to arrange a deal for Arboleda's cows to help save the rancho. Dario is a wonderful horseman and an even better dancer--the one who gives the girls their first dance at their coming out party.

The whole intricate way of life on the rancho is wonderfully created: the life is full of strong families who lived together on the rancho, who had love of the land, who had a rich dance and music culture. When Dario rides with two retairners to the mission, Rochlin has created a lovely evocation of the beauty of the land of Southern California, the mission where they stop for a meal, and the dangers along the road. The novel for its first 90% creates this amazingly rich life of the ranchos including Dario's love for a daughter of a neibhoring rancho and the festivals at the ranchos which included a bear-and-bull fight. Arriving in L.A. the trio face more dangers in a wild western town of 1857 to finally make the deal to sell the beef and keep the rancho from financial troubles.

This is a tagic novel, as the Southern California ranchos' brief prosperity of 1857-8 which came from selling beef to the miners in Northern California was their last prosperity. By 1864 the Arbeleda family lost a good part of their land to the Anglos and Don Antonio, the patriach, had died. The novel describes how by 1864 with disease and a terrible drought destroying the cattle, most of the large ranchos were were lost by "legal technicalities, tax sales, and foreclosures."

Dario does survive in Santa Barbara until 1908, when Anglo children call him Don Dario but he knows he was never a don like his uncle Don Antonio. The Anglos get Dario, now an eighty-two-year old, to participate in "full folk regalia" and to dance in the festivities celebrating the "Spanish" heritage of Santa Barbara. The novel says, "So what if costumes like this had never bee worn and music like that had never been played ...Don Dari smiled and stared out but he could no longer see.... A woman demanded that Don Dari stomp like the flamencos and a man whooped a war dance like he'd seen ina motion picutre." In the end the wonderful dancer Dario becomes a tragic participant in the Anglos caricaturing the Mexican culture they neither understand nor appreciate.

Michael Rocholin is an archicture and historian of Los Angeles who has written a wonderful series of books about history and architure of this city. In his novel Cascaron he includes maps of 1850s Los Angeles with zanga madre, the mother ditch from the Los Angeles River, as well as other irrigation ditches and vineyards near oldtown. Rochlin has also written Ancient LA, is a spendid essay how the Indian villages are the sites of towns all over Southern California: he digs up a lost past and shows how the influence of this past on the present.

In Rochlin's Arcadian L.A. talks about three powerful women who owned large estates and who were devoted to the natural beauty of the land and the arts--the opposite of the macho land developers who destroyed vast areas of Southern California. Arcadia is the name of a rural paradise in ancient Greece.

The first woman, Anita Baldwin, owned her beautiful estate Anoakia at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains where she bred horses and commissioned prominent California painter Maynard Dixon to do the "Jinks room" murals which are now in the Fisher Gallery at USC. Baldwin's estae was unfortunatley destroyed by developers in 2000. May Rindge and her husband bought all of the Malibu rancho, one of the last Mexican land grants, so they owned all of Malibu; after her husband's death Rindge fought to keep out homesteaders, developers, and the state of California. In order to provide tiles for the her and her daughter's homes, May Rindge brought in the finest craftsmen and established the Malibu Tile Works, one of Southern California's best tile works. Part of the old Rindge estate survies as Malibu Lagoon State Park which includes a musuem showcase of Malibu history including the internationlly famous hand-made Mediterranean-style tiles used in buildings throughout Southern California.

Aline Barnsdall had her estate in the heart of Hollywood where she had Frank Lloyd Wright build her the splendid Hollyhock house and had a short-lived arts colony; Barnsdall donated to the city of Los Angeles this estate which became Barndall Park with a Los Angeles municipal art musuem and arts programs so Barsndall's support of art, architecture, and open space continues in the park named after her. Rochlin shows how three women were all good stewards of the land as well as promoted the arts and how their influence is still with us today. In these books Rochlin tells of the almost lost Los Angeles--of vaqueros and three-day Mexican fiestas, of females who created natural paradises along with arts and theater. Rochlin has proven to be one of the most lyrical and orginal writers in California.

Rochlin's book are published by a small press and are available from them:
Unreinforced Masonry Studio
P.O. Box 33671
Los Angeles Ca 90033

Cascaron
ISBN 0-9648304-5-0

Also try amazon.com

Native Artists/New Mexico

Last weekend I went to Albuquerque, New Mexico, for a few days.

I went to hear Pat Smith at the Zimmerman Library of the University of New Mexico (UNM) do American Indian storytelling. Pat along with her husband John Crawford, my publisher, were my hosts. Pat is part Micmac (Indians who lived in New Brunswick, Canada, and in Maine) as well as part French Canadian and Irish. She had recently published along with Michael B. RunningWolf the book Glos’gap Stories of the Micmac Indians (Persea Books), and told us stories about Glos’gap, a mythical hero of the Algonquin peoples. The stories she told were delightful, particularly the one how Glos’gap tamed a womanizer male Indian.

I also read Pat’s essay “Grandma West to Smith All Right: But She Went from Nine to Five” from Working Class Women in the Academy: Laborers in the Knowledge Factory. Pat’s Micmac grandmother was a maid at Smith College, so Pat was able to go on scholarship for daughters of former employees. After Smith, she got a Ph.D. in English from Yale where she became a scholar of Edgar Allen Poe and then got a job teaching English at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque. At the same time she was raising her two small sons.

Not long after arriving she volunteered to teach part-time on the Navajo reservation, commuting hundreds of miles to teach on small towns on the Reservation: Sanostee, Toadlena, Ramah. She said, “I learn enough Navajo to help my students begin to work with Navajo kids writing in Navajo. For three years our students in UNM’s Title VII bilingual teacher-training program graduate with Bachelor’s degrees in Elementary Ed and become luminous teachers.” She begins to include American Indian literatures into American Literature survey courses. A retired American Literature professor complains, "She’s gone native.”

But she thinks she hasn’t gone native but is only trying to teach as well as learn from Native peoples. She directed the Ph.D. dissertation of Laguna Pueblo writer Paula Gunn Allen that Allen later publishes as The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in Native American Tradition. Smith says, “Under Paula’s direction, a number of us pool essays and syllabi for the Modern Language Association’s Teaching Native American Literature: Curriculum and Course Design.” At UNM she teaches a generation of Native and Chicano writers: literary critic James Ruppert; Navajo poet and scholar Luci Tapahonso; part-Apache poet Jimmy Santiago Baca; Maidu poet-scholar Janice Gould . While taking Pat’s class Baca wrote his wonderful book of poetry Martin and Meditations on South Valley (New Directions).

Besides teaching, Pat’s published a book of poetry; criticism; and now non-fiction and fiction. Over the weekend I got to see Pat’s other recent books for young adults about Native Americans: Weetamoo, Heart of the Pocassets (Scholastic Inc) about a Indian teenage girl in 17^th century Massachuttes and As Long as the River Flow: The Stories of Nine Native Americans, short biographies of nine prominent Native Americans she wrote in collaboration with Paula Gunn Allen, a major Native American poet, essayist, and anthologist.

The next morning John Crawford and I stopped at the Indian Pueblo Center, learning the history of the Pueblo peoples from being a hunting gathering people thousands of years ago to growing corn as the Indians were the first to use irrigated farming here. For the present day an exhibit showcased the arts and crafts of each of the nineteen Pueblos including Maria Martinez’s stunning black pots. In New Mexico the Catholics put their churches near their already existing pueblos, not like California where the Indians were forcibly removed to the missions. We also saw a short film about the Pueblo woman painter Pablita Velarde who made wonderful paintings of the dances at the pueblos and was a pioneering women artist; we watched her make her own paints out of the New Mexican earth. Since I had come I had been seeing the art work and hearing about the writinng of Indian women--writer Pat Smith, Navajo poet Luci Tapahonso, Laguna poet/critic Paula Gunn Allen, potter Maria Martinez, and painter Pablita Velarde.

Next at the Rio Grande Nature Center I walked the river trail about a mile to the Rio Grande River—muddy, majestic and broad--and stared at the other side of the river with heights crowned with houses. As I continued on the Bosque (forest) trail through the cottonwoods a sunburst of yellow leaves in November. Pat picked me up and pointed out the sand hill cranes in the field a few blocks from her house, making me realize this whole area was a wetlands full of birds. At her own house a large flock of sparrows perched in her front yard. Birds and Native women artists were everywhere.

In New Mexico: poets and cranes

Visiting Albuquerque at the University of New Mexico I went to hear Joy Harjo read poetry. A Creek Indian from Oklahoma, Harjo is one of the great contemporary poets. She had graduated from this campus with a B.A. where she was now reading. She read her famous poem “She Had Some Horses,” which is the title of her breakthrough book (1983). She explained her ex-husband Acoma Pueblo poet Simon Ortiz was writing horse songs that inspired her to write her horse song. She stunningly read this poem that described how her narrator had so many kinds of horses with great surrealistic metaphor. She also read a lovely piece about her daughter Rainy Dawn as well as played one of her songs from her work with a band. She has a dazzling original voice combining her Creek background, jazz, and European modernism.

After a short solo walk the next day by the Rio Grande, I went with my hosts Pat Smith and John Crawford as John drove 90 miles south on Highway 25 parallel to the Rio Grande River. On the way we passed South Valley near the Isleta Pueblo where poet Jimmy Santiago Baca lived. In an interview Baca, who identifies as part Indian part-European, talks up going up to the Isletas holy mountain to sit and talk with them but he also tries to combine his Indian background with his experiences growing up in the city. But now we were driving away from the city to Bosque del Apache, a huge national monument of marsh and birds. We saw thousands of white snow geese close together in the water, more thousands of sand hill cranes standing on their spindly little legs, hundreds of ducks, a couple mule deer, a pheasant and a juvenile bald eagle.

At dusk while we were looking at more thousands of cranes in the water ahead of us while hundreds more flew in overhead—it was breathtaking. The cranes flapped their wings hard for a few second and then glided on the wind. For the first time since Bush’s election I was utterly caught up in enchantment of looking at over masses of cranes in front of me in the water and seeing them soar ahead. New Mexico was so much like Los Angeles a hundred years ago, when there were still wetlands covered with birds.

Over breakfast Pat, John and I discussed Willa Cather’s book Death Comes for the Archbishop with Pat arguing that Cather got her history all mixed up in the novel. The archbishop that Cather glorifies is modeled on Bishop Lamy, a French clergymen in the 19^th century who was patronizing to the Mexicans and Indians. Cather in her writing attacked Padre Antonio José Martinez, a New Mexican who fought for the poor; started the first seminary in the Southwest to train native clergy; started New Mexico’s first printing press, and was the true hero. Well, the visiting Anglo writer got it wrong.

The next day I took my third walk by the Rio Grande. New Mexico seemed a long thin strip of farms, towns and a city paralleling the river. My hosts lived in North Valley, about three blocks from the river that used to flood over its banks right up to the house, so a drainage ditch was dug behind the house to stop the flooding. As I walked to the river I saw this area had recently been a small Mexican-American farming village with irrigated fields. I walked besides the irrigation ditch, inspecting the metal gates that could either let in or hold the waters. I was only beginning to see how New Mexico's writers and artists were rooted in the land with it grand river, its marshes, irrigated fields, thousands of sand hill cranes, and colored soil used to make paints.

How the Democrats Can Win

Why do all those working people people in rural America vote for the Repbulicans? Thomas Frank has brilliantly argued in Whatever Happened to Kansas why blue collar people in rural Anmerica stopped voting for the Democrats. During the last 15 years the midde class was getting smashed in many planes in rural America: small family farms were going bankrupt; small towns dependent on these family farms were being deserted; unionized jobs in such industries as meatpacking were being destroyed in Chicago as firms moved to Kansas and Nebraska setting much lower-paid nonunionized plants there. At the same time the Democratic Party unfortunately abandoned economic justice policies to help working people in the mid-1990s.

Since 1993 the Democratic Party has been dominated by right-wing group of the Democratic Leadership Council (D.L.C.) whose leaders are Clinton, Kerry, and Joe Liberman. The D.L.C. has repositioned the Democratic Party so it has abandoned economic justice issues which are very important for my family and millions of others. Thomas Frank said about Clinton, "Whether it was NAFTA, deregulation of various industries, or welfare reform, he basically adopted the Reagan agenda on economic issues." When Clinton signed off on N.A.F.T.A. he lost the House and the Senate to the Republicans in 1993. Did the Democrat Party learn enough from this? No.

Take 2004. Bush handed the Democrats an incredible issue—the high cost of drugs as well as his hypocritical pharmaceutical plan for seniors, which actually shoves billions at insurance companies and drug companies while not lowering prices of the drugs. Kerry proposed no plans for lowering drug prices. The next presidential nominee or Democratic senate candidates for the Democrats could say if president s/ he would have Medicare negotiate for lower drug prices; s/he could have seniors enroll in a government discount plan to cut costs; and s/he could said it was legal to import lower priced drugs from Candada. Well, the Democrats if they would truly fight for lower drug prices could get millions of seniors and others’ votes.

Bush’s dismal record on being the first president since Herbert Hoover losing jobs gave Kerry a great opportunity to pick up millions of votes. Kerry supported N.A.F.T.A. and W.T.O. (rammed through by President Clinton) that cement in an international system of trade laws encouraging outsourcing of U.S. jobs. Labor unions fought incredibly against NAFTA and WTO but lost. Blue collar voters, particulary in the red states like Kansas, often feel abandoned by the Democrats for supporting N.A.F.T.A. and the W.T.O. In the 1990s corporations moved millions of factory jobs overseas but after 2000 they are outsourcing middle class jobs such as information technology. According to Peter Hart, one of the leading researchers who does polls for the Democrats, “polling in battleground states showed that a bit more than half of all voters worry very often about jobs moving overseas (and three-fourths of swing voters say this loss of high-tech and white-collar jobs is a very serious problem). Ohio particularly has lost thousands of jobs; whole communities like Youngstown have been hurt.

Kerry did have a plan to give tax credits to businesses for hiring more jobs. There is no guarantee any jobs, particular middle class jobs, would be created but businesses who would hire minimum wage workers would have benefited. Kerry really offered tax credits to Wal-Mart. Giving tax credits to business to hire is a right-wing Reublican position. Kerry again lost voters in the swing states.

One easy way to generate jobs is for Democratic candidates to propose a government jobs program similar to FDR's W.P.A. program or Carter's C.E.T.A. program both of which had government jobs for the unemployed. They were both successful programs. These programs could be targeted to rural America where unemployment is high, giving rural voters in those red states a reason to vote for the Democrats. Secondly, Democratic candidates could abandon N.A.F.T.A. and the W.T.O., showing blue collar and white collar voters that Democrats are on their side. The debacle for Democrats started when Clinton signed off on N.A.F.T.A. It will send when the Demcoratic Party commits itself to getting rid of N.A.F.T.A.

As for education, I had researched how both federal and state governments had defunded public higher education by 15% from 1980-2005, making it extremely expensive for many families. Since government is giving 15% less money to public universities, they are forced to raise tuition and to get money from private sources. Kerry’s plan was giving tax credits for families for tuition, a dreadful idea when the federal government is deeply in debt. His plan would have not stopped ever increasing costs of college tuition and public universities endlessly searching for private monies. Again, his education plans did nothing for his candidacy. Instead Democratic candidates could have had a simple plan to make higher education more afforable: increase government spending to pubic universities so they cut tuition.

Regarding health care, 70% of Americas are worried about the ever-increasing health care costs. We in the United States already pay $400 billion for a waste, privatized health care system that is the most expensive in the world--$50 billion for profits and $350 billion for bureaucratic red tape of insurance companies et al. Kerry’s health care plan by having federal subsidies for low-income people to enroll them in private insurance companies was also dreadful. According to Steffie Woolhandler and Dr. David Himmelstein, “Kerry’s massive new spending would leave at least 17 million uninsured (by his own estimate) and tens of millions more with inadequate coverage, and stimulate the malignant growth of healthcare costs.” Instead of wasting more money on insurance companies, Democratic candidates should expand Medicare as Medicare is a much more economical program than insurance companies.

The Democratic Party have endorsed programs which in no way try to help rural America whose economy is worse than urban America. Instead they’ve supported policies that caused jobs to flee the country; accepted a for-profit health care system that the most expensive in the world but gives worst care than any industrialized countries; sat idly by while many public universities become out of reach of many working people. At that point many blue collar voters in rural America stopped voting for Democrats. The Republicans with their phony right-wing populism gathers in these voters for Republicans on cultural wedge issues such as anti-gay marriage or anti-abortion.

I would add in a heartless world that right-wing Democrats as well as the Bushes have wrought, the idea of faith is comforting. The emphasis on values for many working people is as result of the bleak economic landscape so many face: if jobs are leaving, college is expensive, health insurance premiums go up and up every year, what one can rely on but faith? In the past 150 years when peoples face economic disaster with no help in sight, they’ve often turned to faith and their local churches/synagogues/mosques for help. The churches often give real help: food, furniture, fellowship etc. If the Democrats don’t fight for economic populism, they cede working people to the Republicans.

Despite all the Republican attacks on Kerry as one of the most liberal senators, he wasn't that liberal at all but on the right-wing of the Democratic Party with a billionaire wife. The Republicans have been using this right-wing populism for decades to paint any Democratic presidential candidate as an elitist, so the Democrats should pick a candidate like F.D.R. with a proven record of fighting for progressive issues when he was governor of New York. And the candidate needs a wife like Elinor Roosevelt who had a record of helping those in need. People voted for F.D.R. because he symbolized change and hope. Kerry did not symbolize any difference. The Democrats again need to find candidates who can symbolize change and hope.

If Democrats want to ever win a national election again they need to fight for cheaper drug prices and government-run health programs because they do the best job; fight for government refunding of higher education; end their support for NAFTA and WTO; and propose a government jobs program that would actually create jobs like F.D.R. and Carter did.

U.S. health care compared to other countries

According to U.S. Census Bureau, International Database, year 2004, U.S. is #20 in health care compared to other nations. In life expectancy, the U.S. is behind Japan, Swedan, Australia, Finland, Switzerland, Norway, Canada, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Israel, Austria, Greece, New Zeeland, United Kingdom and Cyprus. The U.S. in life expectancy is tied with Ireland and Denmark and actually ahead of the Czech Republic.

As for infant mortality, the U.S. is #21, behind all the above countries except Israel and Cyprus. Now when this country is behind in infant mortality 20 other countries, it really shows how really bad the health care is in this country. The U.S. is behind Portugal in both life expectancy and infant mortality--but our economy is much bigger. Under the next four years of Bush, I'm afraid these figures will all worsen, as Bush's priorities aren't health care. Under Bush's first terms another million people lost their health insurance. Remember, for this bad health care system Americans pay much more than any other country in the world.

When people say we can't have universal health care system as in any other industrialized country because it would cost too much, one most respond that we in the U.S. are pay more for our privatized health care system than people in Europe and Japan but we get worse health care.

Infant Mortality and Life Expectancy for Selected
Countries, 2004, U.S. Census Bureau, International Database.

Country Life Expectancy Infant mortality

Japan 81 3.3
Sweden 80.2 2.8

Australia 80.3 4.8

Finland 78.2 4.4

Norway 79.2 3.7

5-Canada 80 4.8

Czech Republic 75.8 4

Italy 79.5 6.1

10-Germany 78.5 4.2

France 79.4 4.3

Spain 79.4 4.5

Israel 79.2 7.2

Norway 79.2 3.7

15Denmark 77.4 4.6

Austria 78.9 4.7

Greece 78.9 5.6

New Zealand 78.5 6

Portugal 77.3 5.1

20-United Kingdom 78.3 5.2

Ireland 77.4 5.5

Cyprus 77.5 7.4
23United States 77.4 6.6

1. Infant deaths per 1,000 live births.
2. Life expectancy at birth, in years, both sexes.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, International Database.

Bush's family values hurt families

When Bush voters were polled after voting, they said again and again they supported Bush because of his strong family values. I find this awfully perplexing because I think Bush’s health policies in particular have caused great suffering to families in this country. My brother has a chronic disease—Parkinsons—and has to pay extraordinary amounts for needed drugs. In the United States we have the highest costing drugs in the world. It harms families to have to pay so much of our incomes for drugs that people need. Further, the Bush administration has made it illegal to bring in lower cost drugs from Canada.

For seniors, the Bush administration did pass a pharmaceutical benefit for seniors which did not lower drug prices for them. The national health service in Canada negotiates with the drug companies and gets lower drug prices, but in Bush’s legislation the law forbade this government from negotiating for lower drug prices. When seniors sign up for the Bush drug plan, they are forced to stay on it for a year but the drug companies can weekly change their drug prices. Most seniors I know refuse to sign up for the plan. They feel it’s not a benefit for them at all but a giveaway of billions for the drug and insurance companies. I think again families are hurt by this Bush legislation.

The Bush administration is totally against a national health plan as in every other industrialized country, and they praise the present privatized health system. We in the United States pay more than any other country for medical care for a lousy health care system. The health of our citizens—measured by life expectancy and infant mortality—is less than any other industrialized country. We’re behind Finland, Canada, Switzerland, Japan, England, Australia, Austria, Italy, Spain, Germany, France, Norway, Sweden—yes behind them all. Actually, the United States’ life expectancy is very close to Costa Rica’s but in Costa Rica the average citizen spends $250/year on health care but in the U.S. our average citizen spends $1,500. Even Costa Rica has a better health system than the United States. When even tiny Costa Rica’s health care system is better than the United States, our families are really losing.

According to Dr. David Himmelstein who teaches at Harvard Medical School and is a cofounder of Physicians for a National Health Program, Americans spend less time in hospitals than people in other industrialized countries, visit the doctors less than in Japan and European countries, and get less high technology care than in Japan and European countries.

So if our soaring health care costs aren’t going for health care, what is it going for? Dr. Himmelstein says about “$50 billion a year in profit extracted from the health care system …. In fact, we spend each year about $320 billion or $340 billion on useless bureaucratic work in order to apportion the right to health care according to ability to pay, enforce inequality in care, and enforce the collection of profit by insurance companies, for-profit hospitals, the drug industry ….”

Of course, Bush doesn’t even talk about the 45 million Americans without health insurance. What about their families? I guess their families don’t count.

Personally, I fail to say how paying $400 billion to drug companies, h.m.o.s, and insurance companies helps families. As more and more of our babies die because of inadequate care for mothers and new infants, families are hurt. As more and more seniors can’t afford drugs and die earlier than they would in other countries, families are hurt. As people with chronic diseases are forced to pay ever increasing costs, families are hurt. Bush’s health policies are harming millions of families in this country.

If a U.S. citizen wants to improve their chances of having healthy baby or having their grandparents get good health care, they can always move to Canada or, better yet, France. Frances has a much better health care system than the U.S. It’s citizens live longer. More babies survive. Grandparents live longer. Now France has real family values.

Againt Bush

100,000 Iraq dead; 1,000 American soldiers dead and 8,000 wounded.
Wrong war, wrong place, wrong time. According to 10/31 60 minutes, American soldiers sent into harm's way without armour for their humvees, without night goggles, without enough radios. The Veteran's budget was cut right before the Iraq War started.

The New Berkeley Woman in the 1960s

Jo Freeman has written a remarkable memoir At Berkeley in the ‘60s that is a wonderful ‘60s autobiography and also a fascinating history of a conflicted decade. Jo’s story is new, because the mass media exploitation of “hippie chicks” obscured what was really new about ‘60s young women. She gives us a New College Woman of the 1960s: one who has intellectual and political passions she follows. Freeman is the equal of any ‘60s young man in her devotion to being an agent of social change.

Freeman grew up in the San Fernando Valley suburb of Los Angeles, raised by her single parent schoolteacher mother, to whom she credits much of her early intellectual and political growth. Her remarkable mother Helen Freeman was an Anglo Southern woman from Alabama who emancipated herself by joining the Women’s Army Corps, settled in Los Angeles to raise her daughter alone, got a M.A. from U.S.C. on the G.I. Bill, and was a fervent Democratic Party volunteer. Helen, a pro-integrationist Southern liberal, took her daughter to Democratic political events for years including the 1960s Democratic convention held in Los Angeles.

Helen also idolized education, encouraging her daughter to do so well in high school that she graduated at fifteen. Helen chose UC Berkeley, the best college she could afford, as the school for her daughter. With Helen’s guidance, Freeman escaped the stifling conformity demanded of Valley Girls where popularity was valued over brains. In part this is a mother-daughter story where the daughter at college slowly escape the influence of her demanding mother to become her own person.

Throughout the book Freeman alternates chapters describing the historical evolution with autobiographical chapters. The historical chapters help set the scene: the 1930s student radical protests, the 1940s red scare that banned all student political activities at UC Berkeley and all campuses nationwide, and then the late 1950s- early 1960s rebirth of the student movement protesting McCarthyism as well as 1950s resurgence of liberal politics of the California Democratic Clubs. Then Freeman tells how as a sixteen-year old freshman in 1961 she explored the smorgasbord of political groups on campus from anti-nuclear to socialist to Young Republican until she chose to join the Young Democrats, still her mother’s daughter.

Freeman reminds us that personal change often happens in tiny steps when she describes how in 1963 as a junior she was influenced by Jacobus ten Broek’s class where she read the classics of free speech—Milton, Mill and Meiklejohn. She has a new identity: “radical civil liberterian.” We forget that the real impetus of the ‘60s was forged in extensive study and debate on civil liberties, civil rights and later the Vietnam War. Freeman tests out her new beliefs by joining SLATE, the main dissident campus group, and with the new campus rule inagurated by UC President Kerr lifting the ban on controversial speakers on campus, she as part of SLATE tested this new freedom by organizing a series of controversial speakers on campus: Communist Miki Lima; black power militant Malcolm X; and Captain Ralph Forbes, an American Nazi Party leader.

Jo’s real break with her mother came like it did in many Democratic families came over the issue of sit-ins. Like many Southerners, her mother had a strong sense of propriety: good people don’t get arrested. As students in the Bay Area began the civil rights sit-ins in 1963, Jo as well as hundreds of others wrestled with their consciences whether or not to sit-in; she reread her political theory and philosophy classics on the issue until she decided she could sit-in. Her mother was apalled. After Jo got arrested twice in civil rights protests, her angry mother cut all financial support, but Jo is now self-supporting at eighteen, working at a minimum wage job for the Democratic Party in Oakland. If you compare Freeman to almost any college girl in American fiction or autobiography from 1900-1960, Freeman is a New College Woman: she has at eighteen assumed the independence of a young man: self-supporting, making her own decisions, determined to finish her degree as well as to make history

The Berkeley Woman as Leader

Freeman argues in her autobiography At Berkeley in the'60s when the whole adult world including her own mother came down hard on the young civil rights protestors in the Bay Area in the early1960s, it helped her and her colleagues bond together as they went through the jails and then the lengthy trials. Jo also does something “good” girls never do: she hitchhikes alone across the country to participate as a foot soldier for the civil rights in a vigil trying to get black Mississipeans a vote at the Democratic national convention in Atlantic City in summer of 1964 and as she travels from Washington to Atlantic City to New York, her new friends in the civil rights movement put her up and feed her along with hundreds of others. How do you forge a leader: by making them go overcome obstacles.

Jo was one of many summer ’64 civil rights foot soldiers who quickly became leaders on campus in the fall of 1964 when the Berkeley administration tried to end the political tables on campus. Jo is no longer like her mother, a volunteer following Democratic Party male leaders, but is now certified leader herself. What’s invaluable about the second half of the book is her description of the crucial Free Speech Movement (F.S.M.) from the point of view of a moderate leader from the Young Democrats.

The F.S.M. was always divided between the radicals (civil rights activists) and the moderates—Young Democrats, Young Republicans, young civil libertarians. Freeman shows in student politics the play of democracy, the fights over tactics, and the short-lived “right” revolt that she led. Further, she points out that the administration by threatening to expel seven students finally pushed the moderates to side with the civil rights radicals to have a sit-in and campus-wide strike. In the photo of the sit-in itself she includes two sit-inners: Don Castelberry of the Young Republicans holds up an American flag as he stands next to Jo, a leader of the Young Democrats, addressing the crowd. What Freeman shows so brilliantly is that moderate Democratic Party youth and even Republican Party youth made the ‘60s possible when they joined the civil rights and anti-war protests.

As Freeman says, the newspapers and other mass media did a terrible job reporting on the events in Berkeley saying that student mobs participate in riots and strike at Berkeley which were Communist led—all was untrue. She points out that UC President Kerr, even though he know the allegations about Communist influence was untrue, still redbaited the students in the papers. Given the blast of negative media, polls said 74% of Californians disapproved of the students in Berkeley, so the state legislature quickly rushed to punish the students with a host of bills and also two investigations, one led by State Senator Hugh Burns.

Burns issued a report slandering the Free Speech Movement saying that it was Communist-controlled and President Kerr was a Commie dupe. The next year after her graduation Freeman went to work in the South to register voters in Alabama and Mississippi where such activist had already been killed; leaflets in Alabama and a Mississippi newspaper cited the Burns report’s slanders as evidence that she was a Communist agitator. Further, the redbaiting against Kerr cost him his job as head of the University of California after Regan was elected governor. Thus Freeman showed that redbaiting slanders continued well into the 1960s still costing a few people their jobs and endangered their lives. As an historian looking back, she says that the early 1960s in Berkeley helped limit the McCarthyism redbaiting allowing democratic space to open up.

I hope she writes a second autobiography describing how she faced segregationists in the Deep South to register blacks and voters and then how she fared during the late 1960s during the Vietnam War and the beginning women’s movement. Freeman was indeed a trailblazer, so I’m interested to find where she went next.

Yaltah Menuhin and Willa Cather: the musician-novelist friendship

Los Angeles author Lionel Rolfe has written in The Uncommon Friendship of Yaltah Menuhin & Willa Cather a moving biography of his mother Yaltah Menuhin, sister of famed violinist Yehudi Menuhin, and her relationship with novelist Willa Cather. Yaltah like Mendelssohn’s sister Fanny and Mozart’s sister Nannerl showed brilliance as a musician early but was discouraged by family members and always overshadowed by her famous brother. Rolfe looks closely at what it takes for women to overcome the obstacles that family, husbands, and the larger society put in front of them having successful careers.

Rolfe’s mother Yaltah was actively discouraged by her parents Moshe and Marutha who were Russian Jewish emigres to San Francisco where Moshe was superintendant of city’s Hebrew schools. All three of their children-- Yehudi, the oldest; Hephzibah, the middle girl; and Yaltah, the youngest—were musical prodigies. At first the mother had decided the daughters wouldn’t have musical careers, but then mother relented, seeing that Hephzibah could perform well in the secondary role as accompanist on the piano when her brother played his violin. The parents then that Yaltah was too “fragile” to be a touring musician.

If you compare the three Menuhin prodigies with Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn, the parallels are striking. The Mendelssohns of Hamburg, Germany, like the Menuhins of San Francisco, California, were an extremely intellectual Jewish family and both mothers were music teachers. Both Fanny Mendelssohn in the 1830s Yaltah Menuhin in the 1930s had family members telling them to give up before they started.

In fact, the Menuhins were on the 20th centuryCalifornia version of a Jewish tradition of producing prodigies going back the shtetls of Eastern Europe. So in many ways this is a western Jewish story. Moshe was a descendant of the Lubavitch Schneersohn dynasty, one of the great Hasidic religious dynasties of Eastern Europe. Rolfe’s descriptions of the Menuhins in Los Gatos, California, in the later 1930s having intrigues over who their three teenager children would be allowed to court and then marry almost sound like the intrigues of a Hassidic or European court, but music was at the center rather than politics or religion.

What’s critical in his mother’s life, Rolfe argues, is her relationship with this independent older woman novelist Willa Cather. Though the two were together only in the last decade of Cather’s life, Rolfe shows this short but intense relationship was important for both. Rolfe retells the fascinated story how his grandparents educated all three children at home, and in New York Cather was the Shakespeare tutor for the three Menuhin children.

Rolfe gives a fascinating argument that the short-lived Cather-Menuhin friendship was inspiring for both Willa and Yalta. He argues that Yaltah was the inspiration for the heroine of the novella Lucy Gayheart, which Willa Cather was writing at the same time she regularly saw the Menuhin. Further, Rolfe argues that Yaltah thought Aunt Willa was the mother that her own mother had never been. Yaltah got from Aunt Willa the image of an independent woman artist, not controlled by her parents or a husband. Yaltah alternated between obeying her dominating parents and rebelling against them. It does seem likely that the rebellion was in part inspired by Aunt Willa. While Yaltah was at first like Nannerl Mozart, Mozart's sister, letting her father choose her first husband in a marriage which lasted only six months, then Yaltah rebelled, chosing as her second husband a man her parents couldn't stand.

Yaltah and FannyMendelssohn were unlike in another way. Fanny Mendelssohn did get the support her husband William Hensel to publish her composition and performed in the weekly family musical salons. In contrast, Yaltah Menuhin, despite lack of support from all her three husbands, performed in public concerts. Though Yaltah Menuhin never had the stellar musical career of her older brother Yehudi, she did perform piano in concerts from aged 30 to 80 in North America, Europe, and England. In Los Angeles during the 1950s where Yaltah lived with her second husband and two sons she regularly took part in the “Evenings on the Roof” series performing the work of many new composers. Again, she was a woman who stood on her own two feet like her Aunt Willa. Rolfe’s book is a moving story of a fascinating Californian Jewish woman who in order to become a musician overcomes numerous obstacles.

FSM@40 at Bekeley: Our Democracy Movement

What was remarkable about joining the Free Speech Movement in 1964 at UC Berkeley was to leave the silenced repressed atmosphere of my high school years to join the great conversation that innundated the Berkeley campus--from silence to speaking up in a democracy movement. I rejoined the conversation by attending the 40th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley Monday October 4th-Sunday October 10th, 2004, which included a noon rally that attracted 3,000 students; over 15 workshops on different aspects of civil liberties; films, a folk song night, two poetry readings, and a rock concert.

As a seventeen year old freshman I looked up to the older (ninteen and up) civil rights activists having sit-ins in the Bay Area to end job segregation, so it was walking into a old dialogue to listen to the panel “Berkeley and the Black Freedom” October 7. The five speakers all shared their histories in the ‘60s civil rights struggles that gave rise to the FSM: Taman Moncur (Traci Sims), a leader of the Bay Area sit-ins at the Sheraton-Palace Hotel to get blacks jobs in 1963; Mike Miller, the Bay Area organizer during the 1960s for Students for a Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the group who went to Mississippi to challenge the segregationists; Hardy Frye, a SNCC organizer in Sacramento and Mississippi from 1964-1967; and Cassie Lopez, an Anfrican-American civil rights organizer of jobs, education and housing in Detroit. Frye told us the lessons he learned: how to make political coalitions; how to change Mississippi and Alabama politics as well as how to challenge the national Democratic Party; and how to bring these ideas to the rest of the county.

The last speaker, Josie Heinman, a senior now at UC Berkeley and activist with the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration and Immigrant Rights (BAMN), in a powerful speech told the 1960s generation is now sharing the torch with her generation. She related how BAMN helped organize 50,000 students to go to Washington, D.C. April 1, 2004, to demonstrate for affirmative action at the Supreme Court. Concerned that too few students of color are enrolling in UC Berkeley, BAMN is trying to restore affirmative action to UC.

In Thursday evening’s panel “Focus on the FSM: Its Genesis, Meanings and Consequences” Ken Cloke, former chairman of SLATE which was a leading dissident student group at UC Berkley, said he was afraid during the McCarthy ‘50s he would never get a job if he signed a petition, but he like all the others overcame this fear. Jo Freeman, a leader of the Young Democrats in the 1960s at Berkeley, argued that, although FSM clearly came out of the civil rights movements, it’s main accomplishment was helping to end McCarthyism and redbaiting.

Michael Rossman, mainstay of FSM for 40 years, told how “I learned the difference between a ‘mob’ and a ‘public,’’ Rossman said. “We were called a ‘mob’ but we really were the first democracy that we had ever experienced.” Rossman added the UC President Clark Kerr, who saw himself as a liberal, told the newspapers that Communists heavily influenced FSM though he knew it wasn’t true. Kerr’s redbaiting boomeranged, since he gave ammunition to such right-wingers as Ronald Regan who, when elected governor in 1966, quickly fired Kerr for being too soft on the student striving for democracy.

At the noon rally on October 8 3,000, mostly students, on Sproul Plaza sat around a police car. They were reenacting the October, 1964, student capture of the Berkeley police car which had just arrested civil rights activist Jack Weinberg for sitting at an allegedly illegal political table near Sather Gate. Three months later the UC Berkeley faculty voted 8-1 that all we had asked for around the police car should be given to us as our contitutional rights. Now in 2004 speakers spoke from a wooden stage over the police car. Now student body president Misha Leybovich said that “seeing the strength of the ‘60s gives me hope and confidence for my generation…. It’s a fallacy that we’re no longer passionate. It’s a fallacy that we’re no longer active.” He apologized that the Daily Cal, the student newspaper; the administration; and the ASUC were all against FSM in 1964 but was happy that all three groups supported FSM in 2004.

As if to underscore his point, Leybovich introduced UC Berkeley’s new Chancellor Birgeneau who said that while doing civil rights work in South Carolina in 1965 he received his political education from two FSM leaders. He now warned that we need to defend free speech from censorship coming from the left as well as the right and especially guard against attempts at “political correctness.”

It wasn't "political correctness" that the next two young women speakers, Rosha Jones and Hiraa Khan, from campus Berkeley ACLU were concerned about but about government attacks on civil liberties. They said that the students had gotten the ASUC, the student government, to pass a resolution condemning the Patriot Act. This next year students will focus on ending racial profiling, defeating the Patriot Act, and restoring affirmative action.

It felt like being eighteen again for me to sit on the steps in front of Sproul Hall listening to FSM leader Bettina Aptheker remember the love and respect in FSM that has lasted 40 years. Another FSM arrestee, poet Julia Vinograd read her splendid poem “FSM Sit-In” describing how at the sit-in “Nothing went as we planned. I hadn’t planned to be there;/ part of me hasn’t left. "

Yet another FSM arrestee, State Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg told the crowd of students that she had paid nothing for her Berkeley education in 1964 and that “if all eighteen year olds and older registered and voted, you wouldn’t pay tuition either. People are working 24/7 to make you feel powerless and apathetic.” Goldberg condemned as hogwash the 30-year war on state taxes by “the wealthiest people in the world.” As she asked the crowd if they were going to keep out of politics, they screamed back, “No.” She ended her speech with a rousing “Tax the rich” which the crowd applauded.

The next speaker, Howard Dean, like many others during the weeklong events, compared assaults on civil liberties in 2004 from Bush’s Patriot Act with McCarthyism in the 1960s, but he said that the lesson of 40 years ago is that ordinary people can make a difference. In a speech that electrified the crowd, Dean launched into a tirade against Bush and also the national Democratic Party in Washington that didn’t stand up to the radical right. He then asked the members of the crowd to run for office, reminding them that Jackie Goldberg had done that. He was met with cheers. This was a Dean crowd.

A three-person 20-foot tall puppet of the Statute of Libery walked up behind the last two speakers—Tony Serra, a 1962 Boalt Hall graduate and radical lawyer, and Northern California ACLU Executive Director Bill Kearn. As both men added to the chorus of voices condemning the Patriot Act, the tall Statue of Liberty puuppet stood with a hood covering her big puppet’s face and a gag saying “Homeland Security" tied across her mouth;” the gag was untied as Kearny read the Bill of Rights.

Twice during the 1960s I was very moved to hear speakers at rallies as these very same steps to read from the Declaration of Independence. As one 1960s Berkeley student said, we were the kids in junior high school who believed in the U.S. Constitution and thought it would be part of our lives. I was amazed that after Kerr and others redbaited us and slandered our reputation in the mass media, Berkeley in the 1960s has not been seen as the democracy movement it was but as the work of rioters, outside agitators, Communists troublemakers etc etc etc. The lies never die. These lies are tiresome repetitions repeated decade after decade.

In 1964 as I had once organized at the FSM sit-in December 3rd classes on everything from Spanish to civil rights to philosophy; now FSM had three workshops on civil liberties to be held on three different areas of Sproul Steps. For hours during the sit-in students met with T.A. studing history, Spanish, political science. Now I joined the workshop on Internet and civil liberties with Dave del Tortom, who is a cyber cryptologist (maker of secret codes for the Internet) and works with Cryptorights; he told how his group helps human rights group secure privacy in their Internet communications. In the evening I sat in Pauley Ballroom in the Student Union to hear Seymour Hirsch, the reporter who broke the My Lai massacre story in 1969 and had been recently writing a stunning series of articles on Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. He spoke to over 800 people revealing that Bush and Secretary of Defense Rumsfield knew for two months about Abu Ghraib but did nothing, revelations which propelled Hirsch onto the 11:00 Bay Area news.

The next day there was conversation continued through nine more civil liberties workshops in the Student Union from "The Media and Civil Liberties" where stalwarts from Bay Area alternative radio and media dissidents on the Internet shared ideas to "Racial Disparities" where African-American civil rights activist and professor Hardy Frye discussed how after the elections progressive could organize around health to reach a diverse number of people. Then Pakistani-American Samina Faheem of American Muslim Voice talked about how Muslim Americans, totally silenced after 9/11, were beginning to use their free speech.

Before I left I visited the FSM Café in Moffit Library. When I attended Berkeley undergraduates had no library but were second-class citizens of the main library which catered to professors and graduate students. Now Moffit Library was for undergraduates. I looked at the one whole wall on the FSM Cafe covered with photos of thousands of students seated around the police car in 1964. We were the children of Tom Paine and Thomas Jefferson. We were the children of Thoreau and Martin Luther King--all had done allegedly illegal acts but were later vindicated. FSM has indeed freed students in the nation from McCarthyism in order to be free citizens enjoying the Bill of Rights on the campus and in the world. I feel exactly as Michael Rossman does in his poem “Remembering the Police Car Siege that Jump Started the FSM”: “I remain a true fool/for the spirit of liberty/exercised in democratic union.”