Category: Current Affairs

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The Lives and Lies of ‘Elias Vance,’ an AI Hero for Our Times

“Elias Vance,” a fictional Georgia high school history teacher created by artificial intelligence. (Why is he walking toward the wall instead of the door?)

A while ago, a friend reposted an appealing little essay she’d come across on Facebook. The piece told of a Georgia high school history teacher who’d done his best for more than three decades to show his students the complex reality of the United States’ past.

“… My classroom was a living thing,” the essay said. “History there wasn’t a series of sterile, polished dates; it was loud, complicated, and often painful—just like the country itself. I taught the brilliance of the Constitution alongside the brutality of the Middle Passage. I wanted my students to feel the gravity of our past, to recognize the ghosts that still haunt our halls.”

The piece was attributed to an Elias Vance, and I have to say, he sounds like my kind of history teacher, telling it like it was (and is). But all was not well in his world, he wrote. His teaching had come to the notice of local school officials, who deemed his insistence on teaching the truth “divisive.” Faced with a demand to “soften the edges” of his lessons, to use dumbed-down textbooks and to emphasize America’s “positive heritage,” he walked. Now, he said, he spent his days posting occasionally on “the local community pages”:

“Just brief reflections, sharing the narratives the new books want to omit. I write about the unsung figures, the hard-earned victories, and the complex, tragic, beautiful story of us. The comment sections are a sea of former students—some now parents themselves—and total strangers. They all echo the same sentiment: “Don’t stop, Mr. Vance. We need the truth.”

Of course, when I went looking for more about the heroic Elias Vance, the story immediately fell apart. Our high school history hero proved to be an AI creation (as Snopes later confirmed ). Oh, the irony: an essay extolling the virtue of truth, the necessity of honestly appraising our history, that was a total fabrication.

Is there any harm in that? As my friend said when I pointed out the Elias Vance story was made up, the tale does point to a real issue — the push by Trump and his movement to sanitize, rewrite or deny key aspects of our history. The AI-generated story happens to present the issue in a way with which lots of people will sympathize: those alarmed by our president’s totalitarian impulses; those appalled by the denial of the nation’s legacy of racism and racist violence; those disgusted by attempts to erase the memory of Trump’s campaign to overturn the 2020 election.

It’s true that our history is full of fables and too-good-to-be-true tales of virtue and heroism going back at least to Parson Weems’s invention of the George Washington cherry tree myth. Some of the stories are even based in fact. Abraham Lincoln really did have a nearly universal reputation for honesty. John F. Kennedy really was decorated for heroism for saving his PT 109 crew after it was struck by a Japanese destroyer and sank during World War II.

But it’s important to know the difference between pure invention and narratives based in fact, even when some of the facts may be disputed (some point to Lincoln’s penchant for political calculation as undercutting his “Honest Abe” image; naval experts are still debating the role Kennedy’s command decisions played in the sinking of PT 109).

So yes, in a world where it’s becoming harder and harder to retain a grip on what’s real and what’s not, the “Elias Vance, Honest History Warrior” hoax is damaging. It further erodes the boundary between reality and fiction. It also exposes a related problem: the tendency of large segments of social media audiences, even really smart people, to uncritically accept much of what they read and see.

To be honest, when I first saw the Elias Vance post, I was thinking of reposting it myself. But first I wanted to know more about Mr. Vance. Within a couple minutes of searching him online, it was apparent he didn’t exist. Within 10 minutes, it was obvious the story came from a Facebook account that has churned out multitudes of inspirational, AI-generated stories about people doing good deeds for the less fortunate. It was also clear that the account is just one of many — thousands? tens of thousands? millions? — doing the very same thing.

(The AI services people prompt to produce these stories often name the heroes “Elias Vance.” Why? ChatGPT has an answer, and so does Google’s Gemini service. )

One example relates the story of a 72-year-old high school custodian who dies alone during his overnight shift and posthumously turns out to have been a mentor and benefactor to generations of students. It’s hard to do the story justice, really — ancient, kindly Mr. Vance, who to the teaching staff was merely “the invisible old man in the grey uniform who unclogged the toilets,” was running an all-in-one tutoring, crisis counseling and nutrition support service. He taught calculus, bought clothing for kids in need and was a reassuring ear to students facing crises like how to come out or deal with teen pregnancy. He even talked a student out of downing a bottle of pills to end her life. The story is chock-full of details like this:

“Elias’s daughter, Brenda, flew in from Chicago. She stood by the casket, looking overwhelmed and expensive in her designer suit. She told the funeral director she expected maybe ten people. She told him her father was a ‘distant man,’ a workaholic who cared more about his job than his family. ‘He never called,’ she said, adjusting her glasses. ‘He was always “working late.” I never understood why he loved mopping floors so much.’ “

There are probably dozens of other AI-generated Elias Vance stories floating around out there on social media. He’s a hero in some, a villain in others. Unlike the story of Elias Vance the history teacher, most are pretty obvious fictions.

Maybe the “Elias Vance History Teacher” tale reflects something real about our times, and that’s something that needs to be said. By the same token, though, it’s more important than ever to know what’s “real” in terms of events that have actually transpired and what’s invented to make a point about events. “The Grapes of Wrath” is an amazing and truthful document of its times, but it wasn’t a documentary.

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Jimmy Kimmel and a Lesson in Sharing Grief

A friend shared the video below of Jimmy Kimmel paying tribute to Cleto Escobedo, a lifelong friend and the bandleader on his show who died earlier this week. “I feel like you’ll appreciate this,” my friend said. “It’s apropos of nothing relevant, but I found it pretty moving.”

It is moving, for sure. Kimmel takes 22 minutes to recount his friendship with Escobedo, which started when he was 9 years old, and how they came to work together on late-night television. The story is both funny and wrenching as Kimmel makes it clear how much he loved his friend and how heartbroken he is at losing him.

I wonder whether honest displays of sadness and grieving and genuine expressions of love like this can have a wider impact on our culture, much of which is dominated by phony, ginned-up histrionics designed to provoke outrage and stir our sense of grievance. Which isn’t to say there isn’t plenty to be outraged by in this world of ours. But we might live in a healthier, more humane world if we learn to talk honestly with each other about all our joys and sorrows, not just the stuff that enrages us.

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The Retirement Chronicles

The Oxford English Dictionary definition of “retirement,” sense 4.a, which is said to have been in common use since the mid-18th century:

“The state or condition of having left office, employment, or service permanently, now esp. on reaching pensionable age; the period of a person’s life after retiring from office or employment. Also: the state of having withdrawn permanently from one’s usual sphere of activity. Frequently in in (one’s) retirement.”

I’m looking that up because — here’s my buried lede — I’ve worked my last day as a staff reporter and editor at KQED in San Francisco, and, having reached my early 70s, the popular notion of what lies ahead is retirement. I don’t think the OED definition quite fits me, though. I refer to the “condition of having left employment … permanently.” As I’ve been telling people, I don’t feel like I’m done with journalism, where I’ve spent nearly all of my adult life. I feel like I’ll always have stories to tell and will find ways of telling at least a few of them. But maybe that’s insecurity speaking, prompted by all the uncertainty I feel about what really comes next.

I’ll leave The Retirement Chronicles there for now. More to come.

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The Chief Medical Examiner’s Sketchbook

San Francisco’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner is attempting to identify this man, who was found deceased in a vacant lot on 5th Street in October 2024.

It’s not important to say how I got to the website for San Francisco’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. But I will say that I was following a line of research on the number of traffic fatalities in the city going back to the 1950s or so. Just part of some history I’ve been gathering.

I forgot about that purported mission when I got to the chief medical examiner’s home page. It features sketches of deceased people the office has been unable to identify. The sketches are arresting because they take people who have been found in the worst of circumstances — dead on the street or in a park restroom, for instance — and portray them as they might well have looked in life and as their friends and loved ones might imagine them. Clearly the artist is attempting more than creating a likeness. The work here is an exercise in trying to restore dignity and humanity to those denied it at the end of their lives.

The man pictured above was found in October 2024 in a vacant downtown lot, lying in a pool of water. The medical examiner’s office released this sketch about three months later, along with a brief description of the case:

The decedent is a white male, approximately 50 years of age with brown hair and brown eyes. He is 5 feet and 6 inches tall and weighs 168 pounds. He was found in an abandoned lot that was filled with water at 348 5th Street, San Francisco. The decedent was found in the water dressed in multiple layers of clothing including an AJAX East Bay sweatshirt, a Kobe Bryant #24 jersey, and a Lakers #8 jersey.

Several news outlets around town duly published the sketch and the medical examiner’s press release, which noted that this was a rare case of it being unable to identify a decedent. Sometimes, publishing the sketches pays off with a relatively quick identification. Late last year, a woman lying unresponsive on a downtown street was identified just a few days after her drawing was posted; in late 2023, it took about three weeks before someone supplied a name for a man who’d been found dead on the roof of a parking garage.

So far, though, the man found lying in the water wearing the Kobe Bryant jersey remains unknown.

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Oakland: The Luckiest City Since …

Oakland Coliseum, June 20, 2024.

If Charles O. Finley had gotten his way, the A’s might never have come to Oakland.

 From the moment he gained complete ownership of the Kansas City Athletics in early 1961, he began trying to move the team. He explored taking the A’s to Dallas-Fort Worth, Milwaukee, Louisville, Atlanta, San Diego, New Orleans and Seattle before settling on Oakland and its brand-new Coliseum as the team’s new home. 

When the American League approved the move in October 1967, Kansas City had seen enough. The contempt local fans and officials felt for Finley when he left town is often summed up in an outraged (and outrageous) quote attributed to — but apparently never uttered by — the late Missouri Sen. Stuart Symington. 

The day after the American League approved the A’s move, later accounts insist, Symington went to the Senate floor to denounce Finley and declared, “Oakland is the luckiest city since Hiroshima.”

It’s such an over-the-top line — and all the better for being delivered by a U.S. senator in the august chamber of “the world’s greatest deliberative body” —  that writers to this day are still quoting it. Someone out there has even updated it: With the A’s and current owner John Fisher on the way to Nevada, it’s now Las Vegas that’s the luckiest city since Hiroshima. 

My first impulse when I came across the quote in a Ron Fimrite Sports Illustrated feature on Oakland’s especially dreadful 1979 season was to look up the 1967 news stories recounting Symington’s sensational statement. It must have made a splash, and I wouldn’t be above using it myself for a piece I was writing on the history of the A’s.

But it turns out there is no record of the quote being attributed to Symington until years after his actual 1967 remarks — or at least no record that someone going through online databases can find. 

With that caveat – that we’re depending on what we can mine from an imperfectly preserved record – here’s a summary of how the quote evolved and was eventually placed in Sen. Symington’s mouth:

The Congressional Record for Oct. 19, 1967, reprints Symington’s brief remarks on the floor, which he made after participating in negotiations with the American League about the A’s status. 

Symington made no mention of Hiroshima, according to the Record. But neither did he hold back from blasting Finley, calling him “one of the most disreputable characters ever to enter the American sports scene.” He added that while it hurt to lose major league baseball in Kansas City, it was a pleasure to get rid of the team’s owner.

The resulting news accounts, including a front-page story from the Kansas City Star’s  Washington bureau and an Associated Press story carried all over the country, match the Record’s account and quote Symington’s description of Finley as “disreputable.” The stories are very specific. The Star mentions that Oregon Sen. Wayne Morse yielded the floor in the middle of a speech to allow Symington to deliver his statement about Finley. The AP notes Symington’s speech took two minutes. Neither account includes the purported (and irresistibly quotable) “Hiroshima” comment.

The Kansas City Times, sister paper of the Kansas City Star, published an account of Symington’s Senate speech on Oct. 20, 1967. Neither the story nor any other source at the time suggested Symington mentioned Hiroshima.

But if Symington didn’t say anything about Finley and Hiroshima on the Senate floor, where did the phrase come from and how was it eventually credited to him? There are a couple of clues about the origin that show up in printed sources. 

In the weeks before Finley’s move to Oakland became official, many thought the A’s were headed to Seattle. A few days before the American League’s decision, Dick Young, a New York Daily News columnist, wrote in the nationally distributed Sporting News,  “It looks like Seattle is the lucky city. The last city with that kind of luck was Hiroshima.” 

Young’s column ran in The Sporting News’ Oct. 14 edition. On Oct. 16, the Kansas City Star reported the proceedings of a City Council meeting that included this nugget: 

“Turning his sarcastic talents on Charles O. Finley, Athletics owner, Councilman John Maguire remarked: ‘No other city but Hiroshima has been so blessed.'” The metropolis Maguire appears to be referring to in that account is Kansas City itself, not Oakland or Seattle. 

Yes, comparing the impact of a reviled team owner to a nuclear attack that had killed tens of thousands of people was memorable because it was ironic, insensitive and bitterly funny. The appearance of these statements so close together suggests the birth of what a later generation would call a meme. 

Then came the American League vote on Oct. 18 — Councilman Maguire was part of the city’s delegation to the league meeting. On Oct. 19, Symington made his apparently Hiroshima-free speech on the Senate floor. Then, in the days immediately following the news the A’s were California-bound, variations on the Hiroshima line began showing up in papers around the country.

The earliest example that I’ve turned up —  “by getting Finley, Oakland became the luckiest city since Hiroshima” — appeared in the Oakland Tribune on Oct. 22. The quote was attributed only to “one quipster.” 

On Oct. 25, Los Angeles Times columnist John Hall wrote, “Somebody else said it first. With Charlie Finley and the A’s on the way, Oakland is the luckiest city since Hiroshima.”

Two days later, the San Diego Union’s Jack Murphy followed with this: “Oakland doubtless regards the arrival of Finley with emotions ranging from delight to despair. To borrow a line from John Hall, Oakland is the luckiest city since Hiroshima.” 

In the following weeks, months and years, the quote was attributed to sportswriters in Chicago, Kansas City, “the Midwest,” California, Wisconsin and Texas. In some cases, it was said to be the wit of some unnamed Kansas Citian. Sometimes it was not attributed at all and was reprinted as a recently overheard wisecrack.

The quote never completely fell from circulation, but in 1973, six years after its first appearance, its author finally got a name when The New York Times Magazine credited it to Kansas City Star sports editor Joe McGuff. 

That attribution was apparently based on an interview with sportswriter Wells Twombly, who wrote a feature on Finley and the A’s for the magazine. Here’s the passage:

“If you try to figure Finley out, you’ll only succeed in confusing yourself,” says Kansas City Star sports editor Joe McGuff, who called Oakland the luckiest city since Hiroshima when Finley took the Athletics there. “His capacity for turmoil is incredible. He thrives on it. He enjoys tough times so he can work his way out of them and give himself credit.” 

Perhaps McGuff, a legendary Kansas City journalist who eventually became the Star’s editor in chief, did say something like that. But scouring his stories and columns on the A’s departure from Kansas City doesn’t turn up the Hiroshima bon mot. 

Also in 1973, Ron Bergman, an A’s beat writer for the Oakland Tribune, published “The Mustache Gang,” an account of the team’s first world championship season. Bergman had written about Oakland’s welcome for Charlie Finley for The Sporting News in 1967. That piece used the quote and attributed it to “a Midwest sportswriter.” His 1973 tome ascribes the words to Symington.

Two popular books that came out shortly afterward did the same.

 “Charlie O.,” published in 1975 by Sacramento Bee writer Herb Michelson, used the quote, attributed to Symington, for book-jacket copy. That guaranteed it would get attention and many reviews quoted the line and its attribution.

“Champagne and Baloney: The Rise and Fall of Finley’s A’s,” by Berkeley poet and jack of all literary trades Tom Clark, appeared in 1976. Clark goes out of his way to say Symington’s Hiroshima one-liner could be found in the Congressional Record. That was untrue, but Clark’s use of the quote attracted the attention of New York Times book reviewer Christopher Lehmann-Haupt: 

“Still, for all that Finley’s threat to the national moral fabric has been pumped out of proportion, one has to admit that his presence on the scene has inspired some amusing rhetoric. …

“When, in 1967, Finley moved the A’s from Kansas City to Oakland, Senator Stuart Symington sputtered, ‘Oakland is the luckiest city since Hiroshima.’ ” 

Those two books and their reviews appear to have settled the matter: Writers ever since have repeated that Symington compared the Finley effect to the A-bomb. That spurious attribution has been especially popular this year, with the quote appearing in many accounts of the A’s imminent departure from Oakland. 

At the end of the day, and at the close of the Athletics’ era in yet another bruised and sorrowful hometown, the evidence shows the “HIroshima” idea started with someone else — New York columnist Dick Young — and that the quote was passed around for years before it became the too-good-not-to-be-true declaration of an important public figure who, based on his actual words, really did detest Charlie Finley.

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Behind Door No. 1, a $12 Billion Train. Behind Door No. 2 …

Comparisons, anyone?

Brightline Holdings, a company developing high-speed train service from Las Vegas to the L.A. area, broke ground the other day on a system it says will cost $12 billion. The 218-mile route will include four stations. The company says it will begin service in 2028, in time for the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

We’ll see how credible those estimates and promises are, but in a state notorious for obscene infrastructure cost overruns and project delays, the promise of a working train system from scratch in four years seems miraculous. (Yes, hear a voice says, “If it sounds too good to be true. …”)

The Santa Clara Valley Transportation’s Authority’s project to extend BART six miles through downtown San Jose currently carries a price tag of $12.7 billion. Given the project’s shocking recent price escalation, no one will be too surprised to see the cost rise further. And as the price goes up, the VTA keeps pushing the extension’s forecast opening date further into the future. Once upon a time, the agency talked about the line opening by the end of this decade. Now it’s scheduled to start carrying paying passengers in around 2037. 

No particular point here — the facts alluded to above are well known. But no one I know has called out the similar cost estimates for the two projects, which are very different in almost every other way. Brightline will run down a highway median on the surface, for instance. The BART route through downtown San Jose involves a deep, five-mile-long tunnel, construction beneath an urban center, and working in a region where property acquisition costs are extreme, among other differences.

But even given all that, you naturally wonder whether one of the projects here is exceedingly skillful at stretching dollars and the other, not so much.

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Your American Mass Shooting Calendar

This week marks the anniversary of a couple of recent mass shootings: The massacre of innocents in Uvalde, Texas, last year, and the slaughter of transit workers in San Jose two years ago. Naturally there will be coverage of the anniversaries. We’ll revisit the trauma. We’ll hear hopes and prayers that we’ve learned something about how to prevent similar tragedies.

The anniversaries made me think about how many dates mark major mass shootings. I kind of had it in the back of my head that you could make up a calendar of all these episodes where, when you look back just a little way, you could see the hundreds of lives taken and the thousands upon thousands altered forever at the whim of well-armed strangers. What I had in mind was something like the Roman Catholic calendar of saints’ feast days. Or more darkly, one of those “page-a-day” calendars. This one would be “A Massacre a Day.”

It sounds like fun of the grimly ironic sort, if you don’t think about the people involved. But when I sat down to write down the incidents I recall off the top of my head — starting with one in 1966 and then continuing through those that occurred over the many years I’ve been in newsrooms — there’s no fun involved. The most sobering thing is that there have been so many of these mass killings in recent years that each new one seems to be making less of an impression.

Here’s the list, in calendar order — 36 separate dates (which, just. to be clear, I had to look up). I suppose the really grim thing about this is that if you searched a little and went beyond the most notorious recent and historic incidents, you’d probably have no problem filling up a 365-day calendar.

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You Never Know Where You’ll Be

Janson grave, Mount Olive Cemetery, Chicago.

You never know where you’ll be when the next mass shooting or schoolhouse slaughter takes place.

We’re out of town on a family visit. Around noon, I went out for a walk. I got an alert on my phone about some breaking news: a school shooting a few hundred miles away. The only question I have after seeing something like that is not, “How could it happen?” It’s, “How bad will it be?”

About the same time I was taking in that news, I started to hear sirens. I happened to be walking up the street toward a high school. A fire truck passed, then an ambulance. I wondered with a certain dread whether they might be responding to something at the school, and if so, whether the “something” involved firearms.

But there were no more emergency vehicles rushing toward the school, and I encountered a bunch of kids going about their day in what I took to be a happy, unconcerned way — just enjoying their friends and their day.

So at this hour, at any rate, tragedy is far away, out of earshot. But never out of mind.

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‘I Bequeath Myself to the Dirt …’

Whitman tomb, Harleigh Cemetery, Camden, New Jersey, November 2012.

“Forum,” KQED’s daily discussion show, is doing reruns this holiday week. And today one of the topics covered was titled “Would You Consider Becoming Compost?” The subject was a new California law that allows people to choose to compost their remains instead of embalming and burying or cremating them. One of the guests was from Recompose, a Seattle company that does “ecological death care,” aka human composting. One of the facts she shared is that the company’s process renders a body into about one cubic yard of soil — enough to comfortably fit in the bed of a pickup truck. That sounds like a lot of “material”; she explained that the volume is due to soil used in the composting process.

Composting sounds all right to me. And the show topic reminded me of one of my favorite pieces of poetry, a section from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” It comes from the famous “I sound my barbaric yawp” passage: 

I bequeath myself to the dirt, to grow from the grass I love;
If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am, or what I mean;
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged;
Missing me one place, search another;
I stop somewhere, waiting for you.

Ah — what an optimistic vision of how we might persist on this Earth we love and link ourselves to the future and future-kind. I am not looking for an epitaph just yet, but those last three lines certainly ring in my mind.

Whitman touched more than once on the process that would allow him to “bequeath myself to the dirt.” In “This Compost,” he mused on how the earth disposes of “those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations? Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat?” He marvels at the “chemistry” that purifies these leavings and turns them into new growth and life so that “when I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease, though probably every spear of grass rises out of what was once a catching disease.”

Given his declared enthusiasm for the soil and leaving himself to future generations, it’s kind of ironic that Whitman wound up building a tomb in a Camden, New Jersey, cemetery for his final resting place (his brother George, a Union officer in the Civil War, and other family members are also interred there).

If you want to visit, the Harleigh Cemetery in Camden is pretty easy to find. Failing to fetch him at first, check your map apps. He’s stopped right there, waiting for you.

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Journal of Holiday Greeting Studies, Boxing Day Edition

On Christmas Day, we went out to a spot on the other side of the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge to check out the bird life on a trail around a tidal marsh and channel. There was lots to see — mostly waterfowl and shore birds with the odd raptor and corvid thrown into the mix. We encountered many two-legged mammals, too. Generally speaking, when I find myself passing someone else on a trail, I make it a point to acknowledge the other person in what I hope is a friendly way. That just means saying hi as we pass. If the greeting’s returned, that makes for a small moment of grace in which my fellow walkers and I are no longer strangers. If the greeting’s not returned, I try not to take it personally. Some of the people we passed the other day responded to a “hi” by saying “Merry Christmas.” Nothing wrong with that, but I admit that to me the phrase feels a little stilted, and I didn’t lead with it myself because, you know, not everyone you run into along the way is celebrating that particular occasion. In any case, it was a good walk with lots of birds and perhaps people were feeling a little less shy about greeting each other because of the day.

Then yesterday, December 26, we went for a walk in the Berkeley hills. I turned our conversation toward the topic of two observances that fall on the day after Christmas: St. Stephen’s Day and Boxing Day. Would it be appropriate, I wondered, to wish someone “Happy St. Stephen’s Day”? When one recalls the occasion commemorated by the day — the stoning death of the man reputed to be the first Christian martyr — no. But how about saying “Happy Boxing Day”? It’s a curiosity, for sure, dating back to the 18th century English custom of giving employees and tradespeople gifts or cash the day after Xmas. But despite its obscure origins and non-American provenance, I figure lots of people have heard of it. So I decided to try it out as a greeting for hikers we met along the trail.

And I’m delighted to report that the general reaction (from about 10 parties we passedo n the trail) seemed to be, well, delight. People laughed or smiled and said “happy Boxing Day” in return. Why? I’m thinking because it was unexpected and just arcane enough to be recognized as an attempt at humor, at sharing the fun of being outdoors together on a holiday. Or something. You can try it yourself in 364 days.

In the meantime, Happy National Fruitcake Day.