Category: Current Affairs

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Warm Morning, Warm Day Ahead

It’s been an odd winter all around I guess, and maybe every winter is odd. I mean weather-wise. On the mild stretch of Pacific coast where I live, the rains came pretty much on schedule in the fall. At the end of November we had a very wet, very warm storm. The storms continued in December, though the weather cooled off. By Christmas, some locations had nearly double their average rainfall amounts for the date.

January arrived, and we moved into what’s normally our rainiest time of year. But this time around, the storms started detouring north of California. Two or three little systems have brushed past. Until this week, the weather’s been cold (by our standards) and clear. The past few days have been warm (by anyone’s winter standards–temperatures in the upper 60s and 70s) and clear.

Overnight, the wind came up from the east and northeast. That means it’s been flowing over the ranges of coast hills and mountains down to the bays and oceans. When that happens, the wind warms up (the apparent explanation: the air compresses and warms as it descends the faces of the hills Letting the dog out at 5:30 this morning, I stepped out into the backyard and felt how balmy the breeze felt, then went to check our thermometer. Sixty-one degrees.

Now the daylight is coming up. We’ve got an asteroid making a close pass later today. A meteorite came down someplace in Russia. Looks like a warm day ahead.

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Clouds in My Coffee

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Another in the kitchen series “Things You See While Making or Looking at Coffee.” We’ve got a skylight in the kitchen. I had a cup of cold coffee on the counter beneath the skylight. I was looking at the beautiful radiating pattern the half and half was making on the surface of the coffee. And then I saw clouds passing over the surface of the coffee. And then I took this picture. (Conclusion of the foregoing.)

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Where I’ve Been, What I’m Doing

So, the last two weekends I’ve found myself in the middle of a sort of intense project that’s had me sitting on my butt in front of my computer, though not writing.

Here it is: We’ve had lots of talk in the Bay Area about the number of homicides in Oakland. You may have heard about all the killings in Chicago in 2012. Just over 500 in a city of 2.7 million. Oakland, with a shade under 400,000 residents, had right around 130 homicides (I’ve got reason to believe the number was slightly under-reported in Oakland; it depends, too, on how you count homicides ruled “justified”). That puts Oakland’s homicides per 100,000 residents at 32 or so, compared to 19 for Chicago. (On a

So, I set out to finish a project I started early last year to keep tabs on the Oakland homicide data. I spent all day last Sunday and some of today (before a prominent televised sporting event) trying to come up with a list of everyone killed in the city in 2012, their names, ages, whether anyone was arrested for the killing, and stories pertinent to each victim and incident. More on this later. But for now, I’m uploading the spreadsheet below.

The most depressing thing to see here, beyond the number of lives taken, and the number of very young lives ended, is how many of these cases are unsolved (meaning no arrests have ever been made).

2012 Oakland Homicides in Excel

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The Wallet

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Last night, we stopped at a 24-hour Walgreen’s in North Oakland after a late and atypical Saturday evening out. We parked, got out, and started to walk into the store. Kate said, “A wallet.” And there, lying right out in the open in the parking lot, was a woman’s wallet. I had walked right past without seeing it. Opening it, we found a couple IDs, some random gift cards, and a pretty good wad of cash.

We talked over what to do. Give it to the cashier at Walgreen’s? No–we didn’t think so. Bring it home and try to find the person named in the IDs? Yeah, we’d try that. When we looked her up, we readily found her on Facebook and left her a direct message with our home phone number. Then we noticed that she didn’t appear to be very active on Facebook, though the page we could view did list a hometown elsewhere in California. We looked for other contact information close by–in online phone directories and at one of the universities closet by–but couldn’t find any. Checking her hometown, I did find a listing for someone with the same rather unusual last name and figure it might be her family. But since it was 2 in the morning, I decided to wait until we got up today to see if the wallet owner contacted us; if she didn’t, I’d call the out-of-town number.

So, morning dawned and some hours later we got up. No word, online or via telephone, from the owner. We took The Dog out for a walk, and when we came back in I called the number I had found. It felt a little weird doing it–here you are, a total stranger, calling with some strange tidings of a lost wallet. It also went through our minds that maybe the wallet was missing because of some kind of crime and maybe we just ought to turn it in to the police.

But the number did belong to the wallet woman’s family, and after a couple calls, we set up a time to give it back to her. I guess the takeaway is–without the ability to at least get a start tracking someone down like this, I guess we would have resorted to the old pre-Net approach of posting a “Found” sign at the Walgreen’s or maybe just have handed it over to the local constabulary.

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Apocalypse Then

I've been working a little fitfully on an audio piece with a post-apocalypse theme. As soon as I started thinking about "post-apocalypse," I realized that I'd already lived through one–the aftermath of World War II–and grew up thinking that another apocalypse, a nuclear war, was imminent.

Was the shadow of that soon-to-come war really so tangible? Well, I remember the Chicago Tribune printing a map in 1962 that purported to show how far the Soviet missiles that had been discovered in Cuba could fly and seeing that our hometown was well within range. And then there were the movies–"Fail-Safe" and "The Bedford Incident" and "On the Beach" among others–that portrayed a world in which the nukes were turned loose for no particular reason.

Anyway, doing a little research, I came across some civil defense films from the 1950s designed to condition the public for the possibility of a nuclear war and instruct the citizenry how to respond to it. Here's the script for the beginning of a film titled "Let's Face It."

"Let’s face it: The threat of hydrogen bomb warfare is the greatest threat our nation has ever known. Enemy jet bombers carrying nuclear weapons can sweep in over a variety of routes and drop bombs on any important target in the United States. The threat of this destruction has affected our way of life in every city, village, and town from coast to coast. These are the signs of the times."

At this point, a siren sounds.

"Only in practice now, a rehearsal, a training exercise. But tomorrow, this siren may mean the real thing. And if you hear it—as you drive in your auto, as you sit in your office, as you work at your bench, wherever you are—what will you do? What will happen to you? Let’s face it. Your life, the fate of your community and the fate of your nation, depends on what you do when enemy bombers head for our cities."

Hear that? When enemy bombers head for our cities! Not "if." When!

I found another film that gives basic tips on surviving an atomic attack in your home and neighborhood. Surprisingly, it omits the timeless advice "kiss your ass goodbye" and focuses on strategies like throwing yourself face down on the pavement and covering your head with a coat (if caught out on the street in a surprise attack) or climbing under Dad's basement workbench with the rest of the family (if the air-raid sirens go off while you're watching "Ozzie and Harriet").

And here it is: eight-minutes plus of instruction that could save your life.

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Richard Nixon and Me

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My mom’s older brother, Bill Hogan, getting carried off to a paddy wagon during a demonstration in mid-1960s Chicago. His is one of two January 9 birthdays I think of every year. (Photo by way of my brother Chris.)

It’s Richard Nixon’s one hundredth birthday today. I always remember the date because it’s the same, ironically, as that of my Uncle Bill, a far-left-wing Roman Catholic priest (born in Chicago 14 years after the future president) who spent much of Nixon’s one-term-plus in office marching against him.

Nixon was a dominant figure in my consciousness growing up. My mom was a Democratic precinct captain in Park Forest, one of Chicago’s far southern suburbs, during the 1960 presidential campaign. She was Irish-American, Catholic, and liberal, and crazy about John F. Kennedy. She got hold of what I remember being a huge Kennedy poster, maybe four feet by six feet, and put it up in the living-room picture window. My dad thought it might invite a rock through the window.

Late in the campaign, Nixon stopped in Park Forest, then a rather liberal pocket of the suburbs, and we went to see him. As I remember it, he spoke from a platform set up near the clock tower in the center of the Park Forest Plaza, one of Chicagoland’s first shopping malls. After my dad found a spot in the packed parking lot and we were walking toward the plaza, someone who was leaving the event handed us several Kennedy signs on sticks. Mom and Dad gave the placards to me and my brothers, John and Chris. They wanted us to go up close to the stage and wave the signs while Nixon spoke. I was six. I was aware we were involved in some kind of prank, and I was happy to go along. We got up there, NIxon came on, and we started waving the signs. I don’t remember what he said, except for one thing. “I see a lot of you with Kennedy signs out there,” he remarked. “And I just hope you change your minds by Election Day.”

Mom really disliked Nixon. I remember her talking about his highly publicized attempt to save a home he was renting in Los Angeles in November 1961. Nixon got up on the roof and started spraying it down with a garden hose as the wind-driven wildfire fire approached; Mom saw Nixon’s act as grandstanding. She also remarked on what a bad sport he was when he declared “you won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore” after losing the 1962 governor’s election in California.

And then, of course, he came back.

I guess it’s safe to say now that I’m the one who assassinated him. That’s right. I had a very detailed dream when I was about 16 that I shot Nixon. (Another dream I remember from my adolescence involved witnessing Indira Gandhi’s hanging by mob in India; still another involved some sort of romantic get-together with Joan Baez; I woke the next morning to encounter a story in the paper in which she declared she was bisexual.)

I’m guessing the Nixon dream occurred some time in the spring of 1970 or so, because it contained a shred of an event that really happened. In May of that year, there was a huge protest in Washington in reaction to Nixon’s expansion of the Vietnam War to Cambodia and Laos and the subsequent killing of student protesters at Kent State (in Ohio) and Jackson State (in Mississippi). With the capital packed with angry students, Nixon did something that’s unimaginable today: He went out before dawn one morning, accompanied only by a driver, to visit some of the protesters at the Lincoln Memorial (I find his willingness to go out and talk as amazing to contemplate as Lincoln’s wandering around Washington unprotected during most of the Civil War).

In my dream, I was looking through a telescopic sight as Nixon arrived at the Lincoln Memorial in a military jeep, surrounded by army guys. A hot, sunny day. He was unshaven and sweaty looking–haggard–wearing a white dress shirt and black slacks, but in shirtsleeves. I understood there’d been a coup of some kind, and he was arriving at the Lincoln Memorial to give a speech announcing–what? That the military was taking over, I guess. He went up the memorial steps to speak, but before he said a word I shot him.

I escaped the area, then found myself in my grandmother’s living room–my dad’s mother’s house–on the North Side of Chicago. The TV was on–a small black-and-white model. One clip was being played over and over: The moment Nixon was shot, then falling. The image’s viewpoint was the same as mine through the telescopic sight. I turned away from the TV, glanced out the window, and saw figures moving behind cars parked at the curb. Police. I’d been tracked down, and they were sure to kill me.

And that’s all I remember of that dream.

Several years later, in waking life, I hitchhiked east to see if I could get into the Senate Watergate hearings. I was short on money and unprepared for how much a hotel cost in Washington, so I wound up doing something else you can’t imagine anymore: I slept out with my pathetic little blanket on the grounds of the Washington Monument. Sleeping outdoors did assure I’d get up early for the predawn distribution of tickets to the day’s hearing. I did get in, and what I remember was Dick Cavett sitting in a seat a few rows in front of where I stood, at the back of the Senate Caucus Room (I’m guessing he hadn’t needed to show up at 5 in the morning for the ticket giveaway).

The very next year, I thumbed out to Shenandoah National Park in Virginia and was in a campground there the night Nixon resigned. After that, there was a long hiatus in our relationship, broken by the occasional TV interview (his) or book (his) or embarrassing presidential tape (his) or opera (a Berkeley composer’s). In 1994, we went down to the Nixon Library and Museum in Yorba Linda a couple of weeks after his funeral. If you’re down there, it’s worth a stop just to see how thoroughly a man’s career can be sanitized.

For today, all that’s ancient history. Richard Milhous Nixon: Happy 100th birthday.

And in passing, below is another piece of ancient history I’ve been sitting on. It’s the first piece I ever wrote for a daily paper, 40 years ago last month. As you can see, my theme was Nixon then, too. (Also there’s the hair. And the byline. But those are stories for another day. Click for a larger, and perhaps readable, image.)

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Winter, Decay

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Our yard in Berkeley–it’s a work in its twenty-fifth year of progress. Or at least it’s been 25 years since we moved in here and the yard became our charge and responsibility. It has changed dramatically. The giant old Monterey pine that dominated the space (and often stirred anxiety during windy winter storms) is gone. The old clapboarded garage that the tree’s root was slowly lifting up and displacing: gone. In their place: a small addition, a patio, a small shed, a lawn that we put in several years ago. Plus an apple tree, a few bushes, several Norfolk pines in pots, and a lush expanse of oxalis that during the last couple of months of wet weather have taken over every last unclaimed square inch of ground (“unclaimed” meaning the large areas given over to a variety of dry-season grasses and weeds the rest of the year).

The apple tree back there is largely untended. The fruit seems to get shot through with worms before it’s ready for us to eat (or maybe I’m too picky about eating apples with a little wildlife in them). Looking this morning, when I went out in the back yard to experiment with a new macro lens (a Christmas present from the boys), I noticed there are still a couple of apples in a picturesque state of decay still hanging on the branches. Nearby, more picturesque decay: thriving in the rain and cold, mold and moss and lichen spread along the redwood fence between us and the neighbors to the south. Some years from now–maybe 25 years from now or maybe a little sooner or later–that fence will go back to earth, with the old apples and the piles of weeds and oxalis that get taken away for compost. Today, though, I can’t help but notice the buds getting ready to burst forth on the apple branches.

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Mystery of the Middle-School Ballfield

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Early last summer, fences went up around the baseball field at King Middle School, a few blocks from us in North Berkeley. Soon, work started. The entire field was scraped clean and graded. It looked like new drainage was installed, and a brand-new sprinkler system went in.

The project seemed a little odd from the outset. It’s true the old grass on the field was a little weedy. And drainage has never been great since the field was installed in the late ’80s or early ’90s. The right field corner got swampy during the winter rains. A couple years ago, water leaking from somewhere turned much of right field into an impromptu fen (though no one suggested the name Fenway). When the leak was fixed more than a year later, the accidental wetland went back to its earlier lawn-like state. The field was much as it always has been–not perfect, with a tangle of blackberry bushes along the left field foul line, but with nothing suggesting a major overhaul was needed.

But the field was closed and work commenced. After all the new drainage and irrigation was in place, the field was graded and seeded. It was evident that it would take well past the start of the school year before the grass would be well enough established to let the kids run around on it. My guess was early October, and we heard from a parent at the school that students had been told the field would be open by late October.

As it happened, one October evening before sunset I was able to get onto the field (with our dog) through a gap in the fence. I just wanted to see what the new turf felt like underfoot. I was surprised to find that large areas of the field beyond the old right-field problem area were very wet and soft. That was no doubt due to what appear to have been daily waterings–overwatering seems to be the rule in many Berkeley parks–but I guess I expected that with improved drainage that problem would have been addressed. Walking down to the field’s left-field corner, where there’s a grate over a drain, you could see the path water was taking to flow out of the field.

Long story short, the fences have remained around the field, and the field’s as soggy as ever after a very wet autumn. The outfield grass has been cut several times, but parts of the field are marshy enough that the riding mowers have left muddy tracks in their wake. a few weeks ago, a particularly windy storm apparently blew down several sections of the fence; at this point, most of the fence is down, and there’s been no visible attempt to either put it up again or remove it. It’s been long enough since anyone regularly used the field that grass is taking root on the dirt infield. Swatches of new sod have appeared around the outfield in areas where the seeded grass wasn’t flourishing.

So I guess the question is: what’s going on here? For a project that seems like it was entirely optional to begin with, it seems to have gone on for a long time without any visible benefit, and it’s removed a big piece of the campus open space from use. Yes, the kids will get their field back eventually, but I’m guessing in a year of so no one will know the difference between the old and new, improved versions.

Finally, I wonder how much the school district has spent on this. It’s easy enough to find out that it’s planning to spend about $1 million dollars to upgrade the track and field on campus–after years of back-and-forth with neighbors and runners, the district’s planning to install an all-weather track next summer to replace the existing clay and cinder oval–I haven’t dug far enough into the school board’s old agendas and minutes to find out how much money has gone into the baseball field.

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‘Always on Christmas Night …’

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The closing lines of “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.” My favorite part of one of my favorite poems. Merry Christmas, wherever you are on this Christmas night.

“… Always on Christmas night there was music.
An uncle played the fiddle, a cousin sang
‘Cherry Ripe,’ and another uncle sang ‘Drake’s Drum.’
It was very warm in the little house.
Auntie Hannah, who had got on to the parsnip
wine, sang a song about Bleeding Hearts and Death,
and then another in which she said her heart
was like a Bird’s Nest; and then everybody
laughed again; and then I went to bed.

“Looking out my bedroom window, out into
the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow,
I could see the lights in the windows
of all the other houses on our hill and hear
the music rising from them up the long, steadily
falling night. I turned the gas down, I got
into bed. I said some words to the close and
holy darkness, and then I slept.”

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After the Shooting’s Over, How to Protect the Kids

We had a short-lived debate in our public-radio newsroom this afternoon on whether it’s wise to advise parents to “turn off the TV” to shield their children from unfiltered news of today’s school slaughter–at least until mom and dad can figure out what they’re going to say and sit down with the kids to discuss the terrible event.

It wouldn’t have been a debate except for me expressing the apparently way-out view that it’s inappropriate to try to shelter the kids from the news. First, everyone the kids know is already talking about what happened today, and they’re very savvy about finding and sharing information. Of course, it is a good idea to try to talk to them and be attentive to the emotions they express (or may find it hard to express) today and in the weeks and months to come.

But I also wonder what it is we think we’re protecting them from. Is it the horrible act of violence we’ve witnessed today?

My generation grew up with unfiltered views of one nation-altering assassination after another, not to mention intimate and graphic views of the Vietnam War. Occasionally, our parents would talk to us about what we were seeing. What spoke most eloquently to me, though, was seeing how they reacted to these tragedies as they unfolded. I remember a close family friend, a newspaper editor in Chicago, weeping the evening Bobby Kennedy died. That said more to me about the nature and the import of the event than any carefully framed message ever could have.

It also meant something that my parents and some others in the neighborhood each tried in smaller or larger ways to change what they saw happening around them. That wasn’t part of a carefully crafted lesson for us kids, either. They felt something was wrong–with the war, for instance, or the fact that families in a nearby town were living in converted boxcars–and decided to march or volunteer. Again, that told us a lot more about the world we lived in (and about them) than anything they could have said. Thinking about it now, maybe I wish more of what they were doing had rubbed off on me.

And that gets to the heart of what I find most disturbing about today. Perhaps this horror will shake us out of our collective complacency and acceptance of this particular kind of crime. Maybe there will be a “One Million Parent March” and we’ll take some effective steps to limit the sale of weapons to the deranged and enraged. But how many of us really expect that?

I say let the kids see the TV news, and watch it with them.

The news we mustn’t let them hear is that the adults they depend on let today happen and don’t really have any plan to prevent the next tragedy.