CUL-DE-SAC

Accuse an American liberal of being a puritan and he or she will probably say, “No I’m not! I had sex before marriage.” They’re missing the point.

Puritanism was a religious movement but it’s also a cultural tendency and, among some people, a natural inclination. Every movement has its puritans and one of the most common expressions of Puritanism today is found in environmentalism.

I first heard the expression “environmental puritan” while speaking with novelist and futurist David Brin. He didn’t mean it as a compliment. He said EPs are the kind of people who say we must shiver in the dark if we’re going to save the world. President Jimmy Carter played the role when he addressed the nation during the energy crisis and confronted the shivers by wearing a cardigan sweater. Was he re-elected? I can’t remember.

The scarlet letter of the environmental puritan today is seen all over the streets of San Diego. It’s the Prius, called the Toyota Pious by Hummer Drivers. And here’s where I have to be careful to not throw stones.

Pay a visit to my house and you’ll see a Prius (44 mpg) parked outside. My second car is a Mini (33 mpg). You’ll also see that I have no front lawn; replaced this year by a patio and water-sparing garden. The xeriscaped berm dates back many more years. In my garage I have a worm bin for disposing organic kitchen waste. The worm castings are collected and scattered over the water-sparing front garden.

Did I mention I have a collapsible clothesline to dry laundry while reducing my consumption of electricity? Now all I need is the tankless water heater and solar panels on the roof. It’ll be a miniscule carbon reduction in a world still hooked on fossil fuels, but it’ll make me feel good.

The problem with puritans is we are, by definition, members of the fringe and not the majority. In fact, most of us who claim purity are not inclined to dramatically change our standards of living. And why should we? To say one person’s reduced carbon footprint is miniscule compared to the big picture is an exaggeration. Microscopic is a better word. Turning around climate change is something governments, not individuals, will need to do.

But I’ll end with a story about an individual – a Grandfather who died before I was old enough to remember him. My mother’s father was a Kansas wheat farmer who raised his family during the great depression. He owned a car, and when he washed it he never used more than one bucket of water. He told his family that using more would be wasteful.

My grandfather lived at a time when the things you needed for life were limited and hard to come by. “Waste not, want not” may have been a cliché, even then, but it was a rule you had to live by. My grandfather and his family grew and canned vegetables from their large garden because that’s how they supplemented their diet. There was nothing trendy about it.

I think a more modest lifestyle and a less global economy will be the ultimate result of our need to stop living on cheap, abundant fossil energies. But there I go again, talking like a puritan. Ronald Reagan would have kicked my ass too.

The Christmas season is when most people are held hostage by gift-giving and gatherings with families they may or may not want to see. There’s no point in fighting it, but maybe I say that because most of my family is easy to take.

At my house, we did the tree and the presents. We went to our parish church on Christmas Eve for the transubstantiation of the host wafer. And, speaking of miracles, we sat on the couch and watched our video cassette of the movie Miracle on 34th Street. I don’t know if it’s ironic or appropriate that St. Didicus Catholic School, which my kids attend, is actually on 34th Street in San Diego.

This time of year you hear a lot from the school and the church about the “reason for the season.” Just for the record, I believe Christmas is a winter solstice celebration that Christianity has hitched a ride on. I suppose it’s common for established religions to ride pagan vehicles to get the word out.

But let me get back to that pagan miracle movie. Seeing it today you’re stuck by the old-fashioned acting styles and heavy sentimentality. Even so, this movie is smart and clever and it tells a good story. Just in case you are one of the dozen people who haven’t seen it, Miracle is about an old man in New York who really believes he’s Santa Claus. He gets hired as the Santa Claus for Macy’s department store until an in-house psychologist, who doesn’t like him, claims he’s crazy and tries to get him committed to a loony bin.  

The happy ending sees Santa being released by a judge, following his commitment hearing. The daughter of a woman, who works for Macy’s, decides this Santa is the true Santa after her single mom and the mom’s fiancé are lead, by Santa, to the suburban home of the little girl’s dreams. The home is up for sale, the adults say they’ll buy it and the Christmas miracle is complete.

 It’s this final part of the movie that’s always galled me a bit. The little girl believes in the spirit of the holiday because she gets to leave her mom’s downtown apartment and live in a detached single-family home on Long Island.

Miracle was made in 1947 and it reflects the material aspirations and housing trends of the time. But I find it strange when a movie that spends half it’s time decrying the commercialism of the season ends on a note that is brazenly materialistic.

If owning your own home is the American dream then it’s a dream that’s come true for me and I may have no right to be tough on this movie. The message of Miracle on 34^th Street seems to be that our greatest dreams will come true if we can only have faith. I’d just find it more inspiring if our greatest dreams weren’t only about owning bigger and better stuff.

Inside the San Diego County courthouse

His face was glum and passive throughout the trial. The defendant never testified. He never spoke. And when the clerk read our guilty verdict his face looked like pain itself. It was the face of a convicted child molester but it was a human face. You couldn’t look at it without imagining yourself in that dark pit he had fallen into. He looked like he might as well be dead.  

This was his second conviction. Eighteen years before, he was convicted of sexually abusing his five-year-old stepdaughter by rubbing his penis against her and making her perform oral sex. The charges for this trial sounded Victorian… touching a child with lewd or lascivious intent.

He got an eighteen year sentence for the first one. I don’t know what he’ll get this time. I wonder if he’ll die in prison. I guess he made his choice. So did we.

Jury service in San Diego means sitting in the jury lounge at the courthouse while you hear the names of people in the pool called over the intercom. You half hope your name isn’t called and half hope it will be called to provide some relief from the boredom. The path from the lounge to the courtroom goes up escalators and down a long hall with tile floors and water-stained acousti-tile ceilings. The deputies wear guns and the lawyers wear suits.

The hard wooden benches that line the hallway are filled with people who face turning points in their lives. They look frightened and vulnerable. A lot of them look poor because the poor are usually the victims and the committers of crime. The criminal justice system soaks them up like a sponge.

I served on a jury with a black guy who worked for UPS and a Mexican guy who worked for the post office. There was a white guy who used to live in Philadelphia. He worked for Qualcomm and once met Joe Frazier in a restaurant. Two older gals on the jury talked a lot and chummed around. One of them had been a forewoman on an earlier trial.

The reality of trials is so different from the myth of TV dramas. I’ve never seen a real trial that presents a clear or easy answer. The way to the truth can be found in court but it’s a jagged path that’s riddled with holes which are filled by your instincts, hunches and common sense. Do they have to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt? In fact, they just have to make you believe it’s true.

As I walked past the defendant and the lawyers into the jury box, I didn’t meet their eyes. When you’re a juror you don’t want a relationship with a lawyer. I knew the defense attorney hoped I was on his side. After the trial he told me he knew my name from a radio show I used to host. He thought that because I worked in public radio I would be liberal and, therefore, a friend to the defendant.

He was right, in a sense. Though I reached guilty verdicts I held out on one of the four counts. I demanded we hear to the testimony of the victim read back again. Lawyers pick jurors based on stereotypes because that’s all they’ve got.

A couple of guys on that jury would have reached a guilty verdict no matter what the evidence was. I’m sure of that. Some others in the jury pool were saved the trouble when they said, during voir dire, that they were already convinced the guy did it. Maybe they believed that or they just wanted to get out of jury service.

I give my regards to others who’ve done their patriotic duty. We’ll meet again in the jury lounge someday.

(Broadcast on The California Report)

I was riding my bike to work more than two years ago when I found out what it was like to have a traumatic brain injury. A car, making a right turn, hit me from behind and I was flung onto the hood and the windshield. That’s the thanks I got for trying to reduce my carbon footprint. At least I got the satisfaction of totaling the car.

I have no memories from the week after my accident, a result of the brain injury and drugs that induce amnesia. I know I was in intensive care. I’m told I’d wake up and curse loudly as I tore at the tubes and braces connected to me. I had bleeding in the brain in two places. Maybe there would have been more places if I hadn’t been wearing a bike helmet.

For at least three months I had cognitive problems. I had little short term memory. I’d repeat myself and not recall what people had just told me. Once, when asked where I lived, I gave the name of a city I hadn’t lived in for a dozen years.

I wasn’t allowed to drive. This meant I occasionally asked my 82-year-old father to drive me around town. Even in my brain-damaged state I think I would have been less of a menace on the road.

My wife was patient and strong as I recovered. My two small children were… well two small children. I was short-tempered with them, especially my seven-year-old son. There was a distinct period of time when I would break out in tears very often for little or no reason.

I was working, then, as a talk show host for KPBS in San Diego. And I returned to the air as a guest on my own show, interviewed by a fill-in host. When I listen to the recording of that show today I’m stuck by how distracted and slow on the uptake I sounded.

One lesson I learned was how personal this medium of radio is. I still have a stack of cards and emails I printed up from listeners who heard about my accident and wrote to wish me well. I had become a friend of to so many people I’d never seen.

A doctor told me I’d heal up. Pretty soon, he said, I’d have a hard time remembering why I’d been in the hospital. I wish. Today, I still have burning pains in the lower part of my body. I take Vicodin for that every day.  I still can’t fall asleep at night without my sleep medication. The thing about brain injuries is you never know how they’re going to affect you. The nerve damage I got in that accident is still part of my life, and it may always be.

But I’m lucky because it could have been a lot worse. I had a family that took care of me, drove me around and fought my battles with the health care bureaucracy while I was still pretty much out of it.

I’m not glad I got hit by that car. But you learn to count your blessings. And no… I’ve never ridden a bike since.

Cul-de-sac, the name I chose for this blog, makes us think of dead ends. It’s the end of the line. It’s where things stop and can go no further. It’s the essence of the city I live in.

San Diegans ended up in the nation’s southwestern cul-de-sac for a variety of reasons. Some of us were native-born. Some came here following a job. Some came for the weather and the surfing. I supposed some people got lost on their way to LA.

I remember the first time I drove west in San Diego on I-8 and I saw the freeway sign that told the direction you were going. “Beaches,” said the sign. I had to confess that would be a nice place to be once you reached the end of the road. What will be our final reward after years of hard journey and earthly toil? Heaven will be the beach. Naturally.

You’d think that our modern multinational world would make San Diego a transit point and not a cul-de-sac. But whether you’re a businessman leaving town to strike deals in Asia or an export good to be sold, the transit point is LA. As for going south… well, the barrier between here and Mexico is just getting higher and harder.

Am I being glum? Of course not! I hate people who complain about this place.

I love the undulating landscape. I love the way the canyons stop the streets. I love the old houses in the old neighborhoods. As a community, we have our faults. But as individuals the people are friendly and tolerant. We may be a terminus, but San Diego is desirable enough to have been a destination for visitors and vagabonds from many places and cultures.

My biggest problem with this place is that I would never move here today. I arrived a dozen years ago when the cost of living was high but tolerable. Now it seems the only people who can afford to accept jobs and buy houses in San Diego are people who already live here. This threatens to make us parochial and it will stand in the way of progress.

Okay, I’m complaining. In fact, I’m complaining about something that old timers around here must think is terrific. The outrageous cost of living is the gate, surrounding this city, that they’ve always wanted to build to keep out as many people as possible.

Now that I’m here I may be stuck. Maybe I’m addicted to the good weather. Maybe Prop 13 has imprisoned me in a house with unnaturally low property taxes that I can’t bear to leave.

I was reminded of my favorite piece of sacred music today as I heard my friend Angela Carone speak, in a public radio interview, about a new production of Handel’s Messiah in San Diego.

I’m sure that when I say that this is “my favorite piece of sacred music” I sound unoriginal at best. Is Handel’s Messiah performed too much at the expense of other good stuff? Sure. But its overuse is our problem, not Handel’s. And it doesn’t diminish the greatness of the piece, which I consider to be the ultimate mix of powerful music and top-notch story telling.

I performed the Messiah many years ago in the Royal Albert Hall. I was a college kid in London who decided, on a whim, to audition for the London Philharmonic Choir, which was attached to the city’s Philharmonic Orchestra. During the Christmas season we did two performances of the Messiah that I will never forget.

My view from the choral section at the back of the stage took in the circular, multi-leveled auditorium and its sold-out audience. In front of them I saw the orchestra and the four vocal soloists who were as handsome as film actors…. or so they are in my pink-hued memory.

My strongest memory was of the tenor solo, “Thou Shalt Break Them.” The singer would wrap up the song’s signature phrase as the violin players launched their bows in unison from the instruments’ top to bottom strings as they played the thrilling orchestral part.

These fiddle players, by the way, were definitely NOT choking up on their bows. I mention this because that’s literally what the members of a San Diego orchestra do – they hold their bows as if they are ballplayers attempting to bunt – in order to mimic the quieter sound of early 18^th century violins. I learned this during Angela’s radio chat.

I’m not sure why musical directors try to recreate the sound we would have heard in a performance during Handel’s time. Everything was quieter back then. They used boys instead of women to sing the alto and soprano parts. Pianos were not as noisy. The same was true, apparently, of the period’s gut-stringed violins and cellos.

I guess ears were more sensitive in the days before amplification and heavy machinery. Not so sensitive today. I think it’s okay to shout, when you do the Messiah, just as long as you do it in tune.

Blackouts happen infrequently enough in San Diego that I see them as a novel adventure. Our city’s first notable winter storm of the year happened on Monday. Around 8 pm we saw the lights start to flicker in our house and a minute later the power was gone.

 When the power goes out you talk to your neighbors a lot to find out who’s got the latest word from the power company. You also hear their war stories of past blackouts. Chuck and Rae, who live across the street, say they lost power for a full six days a few decades past. In this case, electrons started arriving again at 3 pm the next day.

But for a while we got to rough it. The central heat shut off and I closed off half of the house to sequester the warmth, generated by body heat and candles, in the bedrooms and bathroom. We read by candlelight and located the odd things we needed with a flashlight.

We’ve gotten very accustomed to electricity always being there and this was made obvious in the way we would reach to turn on a light switch as we entered a room, even after the power had been off for hours.

A neighbor told of how she walked into her garage and threw the switch although she was going there to look for candles to replace the lights that weren’t coming on. It occurred to me to look for a space heater to warm us up until I realized you had to plug those things in too.

If the power went out in San Diego as often as it does in Bagdad I’d start to consider it irritating. Until that happens I’ll enjoy knowing what it was like to live when the world was dim at night and when you didn’t have to be plugged into the TV or the Internet at all times.

The Internet is the address where our common knowledge resides. Now, the most common of all common knowledge has a name. Wikipedia. In fact, Wikipedia is what they say.

We’ve all used that careless attribution from time to time. “They say a seatbelt won’t really protect you in a serious car crash.” Who said that? Who are they? Today, they are Wikipedia.

This electronic encyclopedia can be written and edited by anyone. They write it and we read it. We have no idea who they are. They may know what they’re talking about or they may not. Earnest college professors tell their students not to use Wikipedia as a source of information.

But we use it (and other websites like it) when we’re curious about whether some famous movie actor is alive or dead. We use it to learn the date when Charles Darwin was born and to get a broad idea of what is meant by the theory of relativity… just to choose a couple of random examples.

It is an encyclopedia, after all. And it’s faster, easier to use and more up-to-date than any other encyclopedia. But I suspect the World Book I grew up with had an editor whose name was found on the masthead. Now we’re going to them for information. They are unaccountable and the things they say have always been a collection of fact, fiction, myth and legend.

They also don’t tend to present information that challenges the common wisdom in any compelling or responsible way. Okay, maybe the World Book didn’t either! But at least you knew who to blame.

I remember hearing a lecture by an African scholar named Ali Mazrui more than 20 years ago when he spoke about oral and literate cultures. The problem with the oral tradition, he said, is it passes on information that is agreed upon and homogenized. It doesn’t pass on information that is challenging, obnoxious or brilliant. That stuff has to be written down to stand the test of time and lend itself to the progress of future generations.

Wikipedia is literate in the sense that it’s written down. But it’s like oral culture because it’s information that’s agreed upon and that no one person is responsible for. I will admit that the knowledge of the masses is a vast resource and common wisdom is usually correct, based on reality we see every day. Just don’t believe everything they say.