CUL-DE-SAC

They say democracy is a terrible system of government until you consider the alternative. But there’s got to be something that works better than democracy in California.

A new year brings another in a seemingly endless succession of financial crises. This year, the state has to find a way to fill a $20 billion deficit. Anywhere else you would consider raising taxes to pay for it. But you can’t raise taxes in California without a two-thirds vote of the Legislature. That’s made political stasis status quo on anything that involves money.

Here’s how it goes. The Republicans are resigned to being the minority party in Sacramento. But that’s okay with them as long as they control at least a third of the Legislature and can stop any tax increase. The Democrats don’t have enough votes to raise revenue but, deep in their hearts, they’re probably okay with that too. If they could raise taxes with just a simple majority they would actually have to do it and piss people off and end up not being the majority party anymore.

And then there are the rest of us good citizens who dislike and distrust politicians so much we don’t want to let them do anything. This is why California voters continue to segregate funding, by proposition, for this or that project so there’s less money in the general fund for politicians to get their grubby hands on. Our distrust of elected officials means any effort to raise local taxes in California requires a local vote of the people.

I hope I don’t give the impression that politicians are good people who should be allowed to do whatever they want. Politicians have been known to be corrupt and incompetent. But I thought democracy was supposed to work well in spite of that. Good systems of government should transcend the imperfections of their leaders.  

Our system is messed up but it’s not the fault of politicians. It’s our fault. Let’s talk about collective guilt.

It’s a concept that’s been applied to the people of Nazi Germany. The German people, we think, bore responsibility for the evils of the Hitler regime even though the government was a dictatorship and very few Germans were directly involved with the killing of Jews. You have to prove personal responsibility to convict people for specific crimes. But the entire German nation bore collective responsibility because their coöperation was essential in order to operate the diabolical Nazi machine. Collective guilt is a weight that Germany carries even today, when the country is populated by people who had nothing to do with Nazism.   

So if the German people could be held responsible for Nazism, can Californians be blamed for our dysfunctional government? Of course we can! We not only live in a democracy we live in a direct democracy.

Since the whole thing is our fault, let me propose a possible solution. If voters are going to continue to make policy decisions, through direct democracy, let’s give them a choice and make them accountable. Don’t just propose a tax boost and put it on the ballot for a popular vote, up or down. Let voters choose either a tax increase or a package of budget cuts. They’d have to choose one or the other, and the proposal with the most votes would win and become policy. It would be just like choosing between two candidates.

The beauty of this is people will know what services they’re getting rid of, as they keep their taxes low, and they’ll be responsible for it. The system will need close regulation so the proposals are presented simply yet truthfully.

If you think this system will be even more disastrous than what we already have, you may be right. But it will force us to acknowledge that this state really does belong to us, and with freedom comes responsibility. Collective responsibility.

The latest chapter in the fight over gay marriage begins this week with the effort to get California Proposition 8 shot down in federal court. The proposition to restrict marriage to heterosexual unions in California passed in 2008 and it’s already survived a challenge in state court. The federal challenge, I assume, could go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and have repercussions for the many laws, banning same-sex marriages, that have been passed in states all around the country.

For the record, I agree with Barack Obama and the runner-up in the Miss USA pageant that marriage has been and should remain a union between a woman and a man.

My view on this subject has always made me a little uncomfortable because most of the people I associate with seem to disagree with me. We’ve become a nation in which people of different political persuasions have very little to do with each other. (Read Bill Bishop’s book “The Big Sort” to learn more about this) We work in different jobs. We live in different neighborhoods and run in different social circles. My tribe is liberal/academic. So my opinion on gay marriage has made me feel like an enemy sympathizer in the American culture war.

It may be cliché but it’s no exaggeration to say marriage is one of the pillars of our civilization. Yes, it has changed over the years but it has always been a joining of female to male and I have yet to hear a good enough reason to change that. There is a fundamental difference between same-sex couples and heterosexual couples (the ability to have children together, in case anyone was wondering) and I believe the law can take that into account.  

The debate over gay marriage has raised an issue of human rights and I’m glad it has. It has made me realize that everyone, gay or straight, must be able to choose a life partner… someone who supports you, loves you, and speaks for you in serious or dire situations. I think reasonable people agree that all committed partnerships should enjoy government support and recognition. But we disagree on whether partnerships among same-sex couples should be called a marriage or a civil union.

Courts have disagreed on this matter as well. I can’t know how the U.S. Supreme Court will rule on the question, though I could hazard a guess. What’s very clear is that the majority of American voters, from California to Maine, aren’t ready for gay marriage.

Will they ever be? It’s possible and it may even be likely. Polls show that young people are much more open to the idea. But to say gay marriage in America is inevitable is a bold statement to make in the face of more than 30 state votes on the question, every one of which concluded that marriage should remain a heterosexual union. Personally, I don’t think we can accept gay marriage until we conclude that having children is incidental, not fundamental, to marriage.

Some folks seem to think that all people who oppose gay marriage are homophobic. That’s like saying that anyone who criticizes the state of Israel is anti-Semitic. There are good people on both sides of this debate, and I hope we can keep the discussion civilized until all the people have voted and all the courts have ruled. I’m looking forward to some resolution of this issue, but we’ve got a ways to go.

As the calendar turned from ‘09 to ‘10, I spent New Year’s Eve as I usually do these days. I attended a party of families with small children. Typically, we celebrate the coming of the New Year on east-coast time. The kids blow their horns and we drink our champagne at 9 p.m., which allows us to get the kids home and in bed by ten o’clock.

That evening I had a conversation I’ve had several times before, with parents my age, in which we wonder why our parents worried about us so much less than we do about our kids. We all say the same thing. When we were young, but old enough to cross the street by ourselves, our parents would send us out the front door and say, “Go play.” We’d wander the neighborhood. We’d ride our bikes to friends’ houses that were a dozen blocks away. We’d play in fields and canyons and hang out at the park.

Today, by contrast, parents are afraid to let their kids out of their sight. Children don’t walk or ride their bikes to school. Even kids who catch the school bus are accompanied to the bus stop by a mom or dad. I had a part-time job as a school bus driver in Minneapolis twenty-five years ago. Even then, elementary school children found their own way to the bus stop.

What turned us into a nation of hovering parents? It’s tempting to look for simplistic explanations but reality is rarely simple. One contributing factor must be the sensational coverage of child abduction and child sex-abuse cases in the media.

In San Diego the trial of David Westerfield, convicted of kidnapping and murdering a seven-year-old neighbor, truly made me fear for the safety of my son. This is despite the fact that abduction of kids by strangers is so rare it’s outrageous to let it govern our parenting styles. Parents today act as if they know there’s a child molester, living on their block, who sits at his front window just waiting for the first unprotected kid to wander by so he can lure him/her into his lair.

Another factor is the modern tendency to program a kid’s day. Middle class and high-income parents seem to believe their kids just won’t turn out right unless they spend most of their time doing “constructive” activities – activities that are planned and supervised. This means lots of driving kids around town to soccer practice and music lessons. It also means a lot less time that kids spend wandering around, playing their own games and discovering their own adventures.

Was there a third factor? I’m sure there’s that and more. We have smaller families today. It was impossible to keep close track of every kid back when people had seven or eight. The point is that family life in urban/suburban America has changed dramatically, and it’s up to all of us to decide if it’s for the better or the worse.

Fearing for our kids is natural. But when does it become an obsession that robs children of the skills they need to learn independence and become adults? I wish all parents, including myself, the wisdom to figure that out.

I read a story on voiceofsandiego.com written by Scott Lewis about the future of San Diego, which Lewis has come to call The Dissolving City. Read the story yourself. But I’ll tell you that Lewis sees San Diego as a city that has become either unable or unwilling to pay the price to maintain services and infrastructure. He says philanthropic groups and small taxing authorities – business improvement districts and the like – are stepping in, more and more, to pick up the slack and give people what they need.

This may not be a bad thing. Some people think it’s inevitable and it may even represent progress as outdated city bureaucracies come crashing down. For me, the fundamental question is this: What is our community and who has the job of maintaining it.   

Hillary Clinton once wrote a book called It Takes a Village, which takes its title from the proverb, “It takes a village to raise a child.” This is the kind of expression that’s embraced by liberals who believe in big government and great societies. Conservatives are more likely to say it takes a family to raise a child and the rest of the village should mind its own damn business.

But let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that it does take a village. What’s the village? How big is the village, and how many children is it trying to raise? And as it’s raising children, how does it also provide things like roads, sewers and libraries for all the other villagers.

The thing that scares me about the devolution of service provision to non-profits, home owners associations and hyper-local taxing districts is the loss of civic identity and increasing inequality. When infrastructure and services are provided this way they become scattered and hard to find. That means a lot of people fall through the cracks.

Yes, La Jolla’s library isn’t suffering bad budget cuts because donors are making up the difference. (Something Lewis points out). But can libraries in the poor neighborhoods of southeast San Diego manage the same thing? Whether they can or not, they don’t. American society has become Balkanized as people have segregated themselves into neighborhoods based on economic class and political persuasion. I wonder what’s left to tie us together as “the city” dissolves. I wonder what happens to poor neighborhoods when they are left on their own to install streetlights and fill potholes.

It’s ironic that Prop 13 actually took control of property taxes away from local jurisdictions and turned it over to the state. It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing most political conservatives would favor. Clearly, I think local control is a good thing. But the more local you are the more people get left out.

If it takes a village to raise a child, I’d prefer that village not be the entire state of California whose bureaucracy is massive and headquartered hundreds of miles away. But if we lose our cities, there’s not much left we can even call a society.

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.