By Sarah Phelan
Diamonds, so the saying goes, are a girl’s best friend, especially during the holiday season, which is when 25 percent of the sales of these gems reportedly take place.
But does it make sense to give your sweetie a diamond as a symbol of your love, when so many of these brilliant sparklers have caused death and destruction for so many African souls?
“Conflict diamonds” are sparklers that are mined in war zones and sold to finance African paramilitary groups. But while that practice is said to be lessening, unethical child labor practices and unacceptable environmental degradation continues unabated in Africa, which is where 49 percent of the world’s diamonds originate. These harsh realities became clear to San Francisco resident Beth Gerstein when she was shopping for an engagement ring. The discovery led her to found Brilliant Earth, which specializes in independently mined diamonds of what she calls “ethical origin,” most of them hailing from Canada, which has some of the toughest labor standards in the world.
“Diamonds are supposed to be a symbol of love and commitment, but the industry has fueled a lot of civil wars, and many workers continue to live in abject poverty and work in dangerous and environmentally degrading conditions,” says Gerstein, noting that the movie Blood Diamond, which premiers Dec. 8, “has created a lot of defensive reaction within the diamond industry.”
“People should be proud to wear diamonds. An ethically-mined, conflict-free diamond will carry a “slight premium, but it’s still competitively priced,” says Gerstein, noting that if the whole notion of wearing diamonds turns you off, you can donate your previously worn diamonds to the Diamonds for Africa Fund, which Brilliant Earth cofounded with the Indigenous Land Rights Fund. Proceeds benefit the San Bushmen in Botswana, improve health conditions and education in villages in the Congo, and help children in Sierra Leone, who’ve been affected by conflict diamonds.
Poverty
Get Your (Conflict) Rocks Off
Get Your (Conflict) Rocks Off
By Sarah Phelan
Diamonds, so the saying goes, are a girl’s best friend, especially during the holiday season, which is when 25 percent of the sales of these gems reportedly take place.
But does it make sense to give your sweetie a diamond as a symbol of your love, when so many of these brilliant sparklers have caused death and destruction for so many African souls?
“Conflict diamonds” are sparklers that are mined in war zones and sold to finance African paramilitary groups. But while that practice is said to be lessening, unethical child labor practices and unacceptable environmental degradation continues unabated in Africa, which is where 49 percent of the world’s diamonds originate. These harsh realities became clear to San Francisco resident Beth Gerstein when she was shopping for an engagement ring. This discovery led her to found Brilliant Earth, which specializes in independently mined diamonds of what she calls “ethical origin,” most of them from Canada, which has some of the toughest labor standards in the world.
“Diamonds are supposed to be a symbol of love and commitment, but the industry has fueled a lot of civil wars, and many workers continue to live in abject poverty and work in dangerous and environmentally degrading conditions,” says Gerstein, noting that the movie Blood Diamond, which premiers Dec. 8, “has created a lot of defensive reaction within the diamond industry.”
“People should be proud to wear diamonds. An ethically-mined, conflict-free diamond will carry a slight premium, but it’s still competitively priced,” says Gerstein, who notes that if the whole notion of wearing diamonds turns you off, you can also donate your previously worn diamonds or family heirlooms to the Diamonds for Africa Fund, which Brilliant Earth cofounded with the Indigenous Land Rights Fund. Proceeds benefit the San Bushmen in Botswana, improve health conditions and education in villages in the Congo, and help children in Sierra Leone, who’ve been affected by conflict diamonds.
Happiness science
› annalee@techsploitation.com
TECHSPLOITATION I took a five-question happiness quiz, and it turns out I’m very satisfied but not overly so. If I start feeling down, the quiz advised, I should look inside myself for answers.
No, I wasn’t reading Cosmopolitan or OKCupid.com. The quiz was part of a study by happiness researcher Ed Diener, a psychology professor at the University of Illinois.
Over the past couple of years, happiness has come into vogue as an object of study. Everybody from renowned British economist Richard Layard to philosophers and neuroscientists have been weighing in on what happiness is and how we can make more of it.
While neuroscience struggles to untangle the mystery of whether dopamine boosts our happiness and which parts of the brain are active when people report being happy, social science has an easy answer. Just ask.
Most studies of happiness are based on simple quizzes like Diener’s. Like many psychologists, Diener assumes that people will be honest when asked how happy they are and that they can gauge their own happiness levels. Because there’s no way to measure happiness objectively, most studies call self-reported happiness a form of “subjective well-being.”
It turns out that these subjective tests are quite revelatory.
Economist Layard published a book last year called Happiness in which he discusses one of the surprising results of these tests: money doesn’t make people happier. The only time people’s subjective well-being rises as a result of cash is when the money takes them out of poverty. Middle-class people who become upper-class, however, don’t report feeling any happier. In fact, happiness levels in the United States have remained steady since the 1950s, despite the fact that the nation itself has become much wealthier.
If money doesn’t make us happy, Layard argues, we should be rethinking our priorities. Most people value happiness above all else, but they live in nations where progress and social good are equated with money.
Why not value other things that might make us genuinely happy? After all, the Declaration of Independence promises that the government will safeguard its citizens’ “pursuit of happiness.” The problem is how to implement a pro-happiness policy.
You’d think there would be a lot of disagreement among scientists about what makes people happy, but in fact there are a few basic things everyone agrees lead to happiness. Strong, intimate relationships with others are integral to happiness, as is self-esteem in the face of setbacks. One of the big happiness killers turns out to be “keeping up with the Joneses,” or comparing yourself to other people who are somehow better off than you.
People with a strong sense of self are less likely to engage in this kind of comparing and are also more likely to be stable, which is another ingredient in happiness.
Philosopher Joel Kupperman points out in his recent book Six Myths about the Good Life that happiness isn’t always the nice thing it’s cracked up to be. There are clearly immoral kinds of happiness, such as enjoying murder. Then there’s the problem of mistaking pleasure for happiness. Pleasure is fleeting and based on objects outside us (like good food or a movie or winning the lottery). It doesn’t contribute to a sense of self-esteem. Taking pleasure in our hard-won accomplishments is more likely to lead to the good kind of happiness that builds self-reliance. One can even have too much happiness and never develop the emotional skills required to endure hardship or setbacks.
A healthy consciousness, Kupperman argues, isn’t entirely happy. Indeed, he says, good philosophy should make its readers unhappy because it forces them to confront their ethical and logical vulnerabilities.
I was relieved to read Kupperman’s criticism of happiness, because Layard and many of his cohorts seem to take it for granted that happiness is a good thing. And this leads them down the thorny path of inventing policies to maximize happiness, such as (in Layard’s case) preventing divorce, banning television, and handing out antidepressant drugs in even greater numbers than they are already.
It’s good to know that there’s a scientific basis to the truism that money can’t buy happiness. But trying to legislate how people make themselves happy is an ethical and scientific dead end. All we can do is grant everyone the freedom to find fulfillment and enough money to bring them the happiness created by a relief from poverty. The rest is just subjective. SFBG
Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd whose happiness is bigger than yours.
The Santa Rosa Press Democrat/New York Times: still no answers on why it once again censored and mangled Project Censored and its stories on Bush and Iraq et al
On Sept. 10, 2003, while the New York Times and the Santa Rosa Press Democrat and affiliated papers were running Judith Miller’s stories making the case for the Iraq War and then seeking to justify it, the Guardian published the annual Project Censored list of censored stories.
Our front page had a caricature of Bush, standing astride the globe holding a U.S. flag with a dollar sign, and a headline that read, “The neocon plan for global domination–and other nine other big stories the mainstream press refused to cover in 2002.”
The number one story was “The neoconservative plan for global domination.” Our introduction to the timely censored package made the critical point: “If there’s one influence that has shaped world-wide politics over the past year, it’s the extent to which the Bush administration has exploited the events of Sept. ll, 200l, to solidify its military and economic control of the world at the expense of democracy, true justice, and the environment. But President George W. Bush hasn’t simply been responding to world events. The agenda the administration has followed fits perfectly with a clearly defined plan that’s been in place for a decade.”
In many cases, we noted, the neocon story and the other censored stories laying out the dark side of the Bush administration and its drumbeat to war got little or no play–or else were presented piecemeal without any attempt to put the information in context. (The number two story was “Homeland security threatens civil liberties.” Number three: “U.S. illegally removes pages from Iraq U.N. report.” Number four: “Rumsfeld’s plan to provoke terrorists.” Number seven: “Treaty busting by the United States.” Number eight: “U.S. and British forces continue use of depleted uranium weapons despite massive evidence of negative health effects.” Number nine: “In Afghanistan poverty, women’s rights, and civil disruption worse than ever.”)
Project Director Peter Phillips told us at that time, “The stories this year reflect a clear danger to democracy and governmental transparency in the U.S.–and the corporate media’s failure to alert the public to these important issues. The magnitude of total global domination has to be the most important important story we’ve covered in a quarter century.” In our summary of the neocon plan, we wrote that “it called for the United States to diversify its military presence throughout the world, offered a policy of preemption, argued for the expansion of U.S. nuclear programs while discouraging those of other countries, and foresaw the need for the United States to act alone, if need be, to protect its interests and those of its allies.”
And we then asked the critical and timely question. “Sound familiar?”
In that critical year of 2003, only months after the ill-fated Bush invasion of Iraq, the timely and relevant Censored project and stories were not published in the New York Times and the Press Democrat and affiliated papers either censored or mangled the coverage. This year, as Iraq slid into civil war, U.S. war dead rose toward 3,000, and the U.S. public was well ahead of the media in turning against the war, the New York Times should have finally recognized its annual mistake and published the Project Censored story. It didn’t (and it never has). The Santa Rosa Press Democrat should have been all over the story, since it was a local and national story out of nearby Sonoma State University, it was reseached by local professors and students, and it was the project’s 30th anniversary highlighted with a special conference at the school. Instead, the PD did a front page hatchet job on the story and then refused to run a decent number of complaining letters, according to Phillips.
However, The PD did run an op ed piece in this morning’s paper by Phillips (see link below). Which is to the good.
But the paper never answered any of the questions and complaints submitted by Phillips, the project founder Carl Jensen (retired and living in nearby Cotati), or the Guardian (see previous blogs and links). Why? No explanation.
The key point is that the Times and the PD have once again demonstrated in 96 point Tempo Bold the point of Project Censored and the value of alternative voices.
Postscript: More impertinent advice: TheTimes papers that marched us into war, with their flawed front page reporting and backup editorials, ought at minimum to start covering the project and the stories and the voices who had it right before, during, and after Bush committed us to the worst foreign policy blunder in U.S. history. Repeating: the PD ought to invite Jensen, Phillips,and the Project in for a chat and discuss why they have so much trouble handling a local story. B3
Goldies Dance winner Sean Dorsey
One look at Sean Dorsey — a debonair dancer with slightly mussed hair and innovative modern dance choreographer — and two words instantly come to mind: dip me!
But watching him dance, you see more of a rough-and-tumble Gene Kelly than a gliding Fred Astaire. Which isn’t to say he can’t throw down a steamy tango, as he does in Red Tie, Red Lipstick, a moving pas de deux about violence against a transgender couple. Dorsey featured the piece, with narration by trans poet Marcus Van, in his first full-length show, Outsider Chronicles, staged last year at ODC Theater and soon to be remounted Nov. 16 to 18 at the Dance Mission Theater.
Since moving to San Francisco in 2001 from Vancouver, Dorsey has blazed a fierce trail for transgender performers. He immediately became enamored with the city when he met site-specific choreographer Lizz Roman while visiting here with the Kokoro Dance company. “There was very little release technique or inversion work in Vancouver,” the native Canadian recalls. “I totally fell in love with her [Roman’s] movement and what she was doing.”
The feeling was mutual, and Roman gave the young dancer a spot in her company. Dance Brigade founder Krissy Keefer also went mad for Dorsey, granting him a solo slot in the now-defunct Lesbian and Gay Dance Festival. Even our pampered SF LGBT audience wasn’t used to seeing butch-looking dancers like Dorsey onstage, and its response was ecstatic.
By the spring of 2002 he was in ODC Theater’s Pilot Program, which nurtures emerging choreographers as they develop new work eventually showcased on the theater’s floor. Three months later he founded the groundbreaking Fresh Meat Productions, which brings trans and queer performers, filmmakers, musicians, and writers together annually to tell their stories through their chosen artistic discipline. Since the first two-day show at ODC Theater that summer, Fresh Meat has moved on to cosponsoring Tranny Fest, a festival of independent trans cinema now helmed by Dorsey’s partner, filmmaker Shawna Virago, and also helped to organize national tours of trans artists. Currently, Dorsey, the nonprofit’s artistic director, is organizing a show for a trans printmaker at the Femina Potens gallery and another solo show for a trans visual artist.
Amid all the organizing, marketing, and promoting, Dorsey brought his own point of view to queer performance with last year’s Outsider Chronicles, via an individual artist grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission. Written and choreographed by Dorsey, the program combines modern dance with music and narration in five stories that reflect the life of a transgender person — as well as any human being who has ever had a crush, a secret, or a high school guidance counselor with a textbook full of bad advice. Each vignette (most performed with dance partner Meir Culbreth) expresses a language of movement that is boldly real and acutely honest.
Through Fresh Meat and his own choreography, Dorsey has been able to combine art and activism in a way that creates alliances, fosters a community of like-minded artists, and changes our notion of what defines dance and, at its most basic level, our bodies. Next on the horizon, the onetime housing and poverty activist who realized his dance career almost accidentally while on a hiatus from grad school plans to use his Gerbode Emerging Choreographer Award to continue combining his two great passions. Tentatively titled Some Went Untold, the envisioned piece will be based on interviews Dorsey conducts with trans folk across the land.
“I’m still, like, ‘Hello, hello, hello, where are all the trans dancers?’” Dorsey says. “I’m hoping very soon that there will be more trans dancers to work with.” He also hopes to find the time to learn ballroom dance. Let the dipping begin! (Deborah Giattina)
One nation under dog
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
In Suzan-Lori Parks’s The America Play, the setting is a vast dirt hole — what the piece calls “an exact replica of the Great Hole of History.” You could say it’s still the operative landscape in her 2002 Pulitzer Prize–winning play, Topdog/Underdog, which also takes as a central motif The America Play’s image of a black man dressed as an arcade Abraham Lincoln (there for patrons to shoot in a continual reenactment of the assassination in Ford’s Theatre). Parks now grounds it in a more ostensibly realistic plotline Linc-ing two African American brothers to a deep and sordid past they only partially and fleetingly understand. The hole of history here consists of the squalid apartment shared by Lincoln (Ian Walker) and Booth (David Westley Skillman), named by their father as “some idea of a joke.”
In Parks’s telling, the joke is loaded. The layering of history, it suggests, turns Booth’s inner-city digs downright archaeological. It blends — in subtle and intricate ways — the brothers’ troubled childhood, a history of racism and endemic poverty, and a ruthless culture suffused with fantasies of death and easy money.
Second Wind’s production, ably helmed by director Virginia Reed, is the first one locally since the touring Broadway version came through town. It’s great not only to have the opportunity to see this rich and dramatically powerful work performed again but to see a small company do this demanding piece such justice. (If justice is a word one can draw anywhere near the world of Linc and Booth.) The actors establish an engaging rapport onstage. Skillman is sharp and just vaguely menacing as younger brother Booth, jumpy and less certain than his big brother despite his obsessive ambition to be the three-card monte hustler his now disillusioned brother once was. Walker’s Linc, meanwhile, is a finely tuned combination of resignation, restraint, and irrepressible pride. He first appears in whiteface, wearing the president’s getup, which gives him a steady paycheck and time to think; when his startled kid brother trains a real gun on him, we have a tableau that sets the whole history ball rolling.
True, opening night saw the performances, especially Walker’s, fluctuating slightly in intensity, focus, and rhythm, but that’s only to say an excellent cast will likely prove even stronger as the run continues.
THE WAR AT HOME
Bay Area playwright Brad Erickson’s new play, The War at Home, comes stitched together with song — religious hymns sung by a cast whose effortless harmonies belie the contested provenance of the play’s allegiances and convictions. It’s an ironic and rhythmically effective counterpoint to the disunion tackled by Erickson’s smart and well-crafted story, which begins with the lovely-sounding but nonetheless physically strained concord of a group portrait around the piano.
Jason (a nicely understated Peter Matthews) is a young gay playwright from the Big Apple who returns home to Charleston, SC, where his father, Bill (Alex Ross), is a popular Baptist minister, to put on a play lambasting the Baptist Church for its bigoted opposition to gay marriage and demonization of homosexuality. As the inevitable uproar gets under way — with his good-natured, well-meaning dad (played with wonderfully convincing sincerity by Ross) caught between his son and his strident, militant church assistant, Danny (Patrick MacKellan) — Jason’s renewed contact with his old lover Reese (Jason Jeremy) raises some hell of its own for him.
Pastor Bill has grown the congregation successfully over the years into a thriving community. Early in the play, he’s overlooking the floor plans for the church’s new Christian Life Center facility (which includes an elaborate gym confoundingly absent showers, he notices). But the growth of the church and Bill’s success as a pastor have come at a price — his own passive complicity in the purging over the years of progressive church leadership in the Southern Baptist Convention (as a Christian who had protested the Vietnam War and fought for civil rights, Bill finds his passivity amounts to a significant compromise). Now his son’s play and life become the catalyst for a confrontation with the right-wing leadership that threatens to end his career as well as break up his marriage to Jason’s serenely oblivious mother (a bottomless well of denial played with perfectly pitched charm by Adrienne Krug).
Having recently married his NYC partner in a legal ceremony in Boston, Jason becomes panicked over his infidelity with Reese, made troubling here by the thought that he may be living up to the hateful stereotypes of the Christian Right and stoking the facile certainties of their intolerant, authoritarian worldview (which to his father’s chagrin Jason labels — with youthful impetuosity perhaps but hardly without cause — “fascist”).
It’s part of the strength of Erickson’s play that it eschews easy answers or stereotypes. Nevertheless, Danny and, to a lesser extent, Reese remain less developed characters than Jason and his parents, whose interactions are some of the play’s most convincing and resonant. Director John Dixon, meanwhile, who shrewdly avoids stereotypes himself, as well as cheap laughs, garners strong performances from a very solid cast. SFBG
TOPDOG/UNDERDOG
Through Nov. 18
Thurs.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.
Phoenix Theatre
414 Mason, SF
$13–$25
(415) 820-1460
www.secondwind.com
THE WAR AT HOME
Through Nov. 11
Wed.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.
New Conservatory Theatre Center
25 Van Ness, SF
$22–$40
(415) 861-8972
www.nctcsf.org
Allison inspires youth
OPINION I first saw Aimee Allison, District 2 candidate for the Oakland City Council, when she addressed a large, enthusiastic crowd of high school students, mostly students of color, from Oakland Tech, McClymonds, and Skyline. She spoke about the ruin and costs of war, the need for decent jobs, and practical ways and means for overcoming poverty in Oakland.
What impressed me about the young, vivacious candidate from the Grand Lake–Chinatown district was not just her Ron Dellums–like vision of Oakland, where “a better world begins.” It was her special ability to break through youthful feelings of despondency, the Generation X cynicism that continues to impede social progress. Allison has a special asset that her adversary, incumbent Pat Kernighan, lacks: an ability to inspire hope and activism among youth, including the struggling students in the least affluent sections of our city.
On Sept. 17, Constitution Day at Laney College, students hosted a debate between Kernighan and Allison. After the debate I talked with Reginald James, a 24-year-old Laney College student. He told me other students agreed that Kernighan was unprepared. “She was unable to relate to youth, to find common ground.”
James said Kernighan tended to blame the federal government for Oakland’s problems, deflecting responsibility from the City Council on which she serves. In contrast, Allison said incumbents should accept accountability for their failures, and she challenged the students to become active in their own cause.
During the debate Kernighan was almost fatalistic. “When there are not enough resources, we have to make hard decisions,” she argued. After the debate, Oakland teacher Jonah Zern summarized Kernighan’s presentation: “Pat continuously stated that she was powerless to change the problems of Oakland, that it was the state and federal government that need to make changes. It made me wonder. Why was she running for City Council?”
It was not her political positions as such or even her record that irked the youthful audience. One student asked Kernighan why the streets in the flatlands are not as clean as those above the freeway. She replied, “They don’t sweep the streets up there because the people do not tend to throw their trash out in the street.” The insinuation that people in the hills are superior to less-fortunate folk upset some students. Allison’s remarks, in contrast, were well received. Allison said, “In rich neighborhoods, parents can raise money for their kids’ sports teams. In others, schools don’t have teams. In rich neighborhoods, they can send their kids to music lessons, while in poor neighborhoods, music and art programs are being cut. Every child deserves an opportunity.”
Kernighan works hard. She knows the ins and outs of city government. But she has no vision, no plan to address the structural defects of Oakland’s social life. As a successful businessperson, Allison responds well to the needs and feelings of the middle class. But unlike most politicians, she maintains close relations and ties with the young and poor of Oakland. She has a valuable talent for enlisting youth in the fight against crime, for uniting our diverse cultures.
Understanding the needs and longings of young Oaklanders, tapping their potential to become agents of change, is a precondition of effective leadership on the City Council. If the Laney debate is an example, Kernighan is out of touch. SFBG
Paul Rockwell
Paul Rockwell is a writer living in Oakland.
WEDNESDAY
Sept. 13
Music
Oliver Mtukudzi
Ah, the power of the juxtaposition: a shaft of sunlight thrown against a patch of darkness; an instant of pure breathless beauty amid the grit and the grime of a humdrum day; a moment of clarity in the middle of swirling chaos. When touched by the thoughtful hands of a great artist, these juxtapositions leave us knocked out but wanting more every time. Zimbabwean singer-songwriter Oliver Mtukudzi is such an artist. With startling contrasts of raw, aching vocals against frequently breezy, lighthearted instrumentation, Mtukudzi’s songs address such heady topics as poverty, sexism, and the African AIDS crisis while lulling listeners with gently rollicking grooves, and the result is nothing short of mesmerizing. (Todd Lavoie)
8 and 10 p.m.
Yoshi’s
510 Embarcadero West, Oakland
$24
(510) 238-9200
www.yoshis.com
Discussion
Free minds
Attend a UC Berkeley panel discussion on national security, intellectual freedom, and constitutional rights in the post-Sept. 11 era moderated by Tom Leonard of the Graduate School of Journalism. Panelists include Michael Nacht, dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy; Tom Campbell, dean of the Haas School of Business and former California state senator and US representative; and Professor Tom Goldstein, director of the Mass Communications Program. (Deborah Giattina)
6:30-8 p.m.
UC Berkeley
Free Speech Movement Café
Moffitt Undergraduate Library
Near University and Hearst, Berk.
Free
(510) 642-8197
Cops out of their cars
EDITORIAL The politics of crime can be tricky for the left: progressives are against far-reaching and punitive crackdowns, against police abuse, against the pervasive financial waste in law enforcement … and sometimes can’t come up with answers when neighborhoods like Hunters Point and the Western Addition ask what local government is going to do to stop waves of violence like the homicide epidemic plaguing San Francisco today.
So it’s encouraging to see Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, a Green Party member representing District 5, taking the lead on demanding more beat cops for the highest-crime areas in town. Mirkarimi’s not pushing a traditional reactionary approach of suggesting that the city hire more police officers and lock more people in jail; he’s advocating a simple — and decidedly progressive — approach to the issue. He wants the cops out of their cars and on the streets. On foot.
The idea of beat cops and community policing isn’t new at all; in fact, it’s the modern approach of highly mobile officers in cars, dispatched by a central computer and radio system in response to emergency calls, that’s a relatively recent trend. Police brass love it — they can cover more ground with fewer troops — and a lot of patrol officers like it too. They have that big metal car to protect them from potentially hostile criminals, and they don’t have to interact every minute of every day with the people on the streets.
But cops walking the beat are a proven deterrent to crime — and that’s not merely because of their visible presence. Properly trained and motivated community police officers can forge ties with merchants, residents, and neighborhood leaders. They can figure out where problems are likely to happen. They can become an asset to the community — not an outside occupying force that residents neither trust nor respect.
It’s a crucial change: right now, one of the biggest problems the San Francisco Police Department faces in solving homicides is the unwillingness of witnesses to come forward, in part because of a general mistrust of police. When there’s a killing, homicide detectives appear as if out of nowhere, demanding answers; it’s little wonder nobody wants to talk to them.
We recognize that beat patrols won’t solve the homicide crisis by themselves. That’s a complex socioeconomic issue with roots in poverty and desperation, and a couple of folks in blue on the street corner can’t alleviate decades of political and economic neglect.
And we also realize that it can be expensive to put officers on foot — they can’t respond as fast, and it takes time to develop community ties. But Mirkarimi isn’t asking for a total overhaul of the SFPD’s operations. He’s asking for a modest pilot program, a one-year experiment that would put two foot patrols a day in the Western Addition, focusing on areas with the most violent crime. The ultimate goal, Mirkarimi says, is to create a citywide beat-patrol program.
It won’t be easy: the department seems to be pulling out all the stops to defeat Mirkarimi’s proposal, which will come before the Board of Supervisors on Sept. 19. The Police Commission needs to come out in support of Mirkarimi’s proposal and direct Chief Heather Fong and her senior staff to work to make it effective.
The supervisors, some of whom worry that beat patrols in high-crime districts will mean less police presence in other areas, should give this very limited program a chance. Nothing else is working. SFBG
The soul stirrers
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
The set is modestly spare, a disheveled if not quite ramshackle affair, being the basement studio of an imaginary low-watt radio station run by a solitary disc jockey (Peter Newton) with a thing for Japanese culture, an anguished relation to the American scene, and an insomniac disposition. But just as the deepest truths can rise immaculately from the muffled vibrations of a scratchy old blues record, so does Bay Area playwright Gary Aylesworth’s new play See That My Grave Is Kept Clean slyly and unassumingly sound nothing less than the soul-stirring chords and discords of an embattled American imagination.
The play’s DJ-everyman, sitting at his desk and console in a kimono, his samurai sword on one side, his classic blues discs on the other, coos into the microphone to whomever might be listening to the evening’s program. Caught between suicidal despair and a desire for revitalization, he’s fending off the highly bankable depression of a Prozac nation with the ameliorative properties of Japanese rice balls. He’s also bent on finding a little truth amid the “tsunami of propaganda” that characterizes the society outside. To this latter end, he’s got the classic recordings from the Anthology of American Folk Music on heavy rotation, markers of another era of American depression — marvelous songs Newton and Aylesworth actually perform live (including the song borrowed for the play’s title) in lilting harmonies to their own musical accompaniment.
But our DJ sets some archival interviews spinning too, in counter-rotation to one another, as it were. The other characters (played by Aylesworth, acting out the interviews the DJ intersperses throughout the program) are two formidable contemporaries and spiritual adversaries of the mid-20th century: Edward Bernays and Harry Smith. The juxtaposing of these two figures, polar extremes yet both highly influential in the economic and cultural spheres, becomes the motive propelling Aylesworth’s deceptively casual, humorous, melodious, and intriguing new play.
Bernays, considered a father of the public relations industry (“public relations” being a phrase he coined to substitute for the tarnished term “propaganda”), was by the 1920s and for decades afterward the much sought-after guru of ballyhoo. He sold everything from cigarettes to presidents to a bloody US-backed coup in Central America on behalf of the United Fruit Company. Bernays was also (not incidentally) the nephew of Sigmund Freud, whose ideas he put to pioneering use in the realm of what he called “the engineering of consent.”
On the other side of the stage (and every other important extreme) is Harry Smith, the play’s prickly patron saint. A character too protean and idiosyncratic for a neat label, Smith was among other things an experimental filmmaker and the musicologist who compiled the legendary multivolume Anthology of American Folk Music, recordings largely made in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Originally issued on the Folkways label in 1952, it was so influential in the folk music revival and beyond that Bob Dylan (our DJ reminds us) once boasted that he would not have existed but for Harry Smith. Along the way, the play broaches Smith’s other passions as a jazz enthusiast, painter, and even a record producer (he recorded the Fugs’ debut album in 1965, which leads to the story recounted in the play of how he came to be consulted on the best way to levitate the Pentagon as part of a famous 1967 antiwar action).
Aylesworth plays the nonagenarian Bernays with a high, rasping voice and a set of repetitive, almost cartoonlike gestures that (along with a tendency for the “taped” interview to slow down and speed up at odd, sometimes telling moments) poke fun at the self-congratulatory figure. Bernays is a man so far from shy about bragging of his connections and achievements that he unconsciously paints an entirely grim view of modern society with the cheeriest of dispositions. By contrast, Smith (played with equal facility and a slightly hyperbolic, wry affect) has a cantankerous air about him. While forthcoming enough, he casts back a knowingly cautious, skeptical, even sarcastic tone to his various interviewers.
Here are two spiritual fathers, you might say, of the 20th-century United States, whose diametrically opposed outlooks constitute and reflect something like a metaphysical rift in the culture at large. Blended with Aylesworth’s simple yet choice staging, the acute and droll performances, and the laid-back but excellent renditions of selections from the Anthology, See That My Grave Is Kept Clean approaches its themes with a charm all the more forceful for being quirky and understated.
And if our DJ channels the despair of the age, it’s clear that despair cuts two ways too. It leads either to the acquiescence and metaphysical poverty of Bernays-style fables of freedom and plenty or to the awakened, agitated thought, action, and social conscience of a Harry Smith, which seeks nothing in the end more than the obliteration of myth and the reanimation of the senses. With its rousing good humor and a shrewd theatrical assurance whose crystalline simplicity resonates with far-reaching themes, See That My Grave Is Kept Clean gives eloquent voice to the restless rebel wide awake beneath the glossy, manufactured surface of the American dream. SFBG
SEE THAT MY GRAVE IS KEPT CLEAN
Through Sun/27
Thurs.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m.
Traveling Jewish Theatre
470 Florida, SF
$15–$20 (Thurs., pay what you can)
(415) 831-1943
www.constructioncrewtheater.com
It’s criminal what Congress has done to the working poor
OPINION Congress’s Republican leaders belong in prison. They have openly violated one of our most basic laws, the 68-year-old Fair Labor Standards Act. It requires Congress to set the minimum wage high enough to guarantee a standard of living necessary for health, efficiency, and general well-being.
The current rate of $5.15 an hour comes nowhere near to doing that. Even those who manage to work full-time make only $10,700 a year – $206 a week or about $900 a month, minus taxes and other deductions. They and the 15 million other Americans who are paid at or near the minimum – more than one-third of them provide the main or sole support for their families – are by any reckoning poverty-stricken and barely surviving.
The law allows states and local governments to adopt minimum-wage rates higher than the federal rate. Although California and 20 other states, San Francisco and 139 other cities and counties, and the District of Columbia have done so, the higher minimums cover only about half of the country’s workers.
Democrats have argued long and hard in the current session of Congress for a higher federal minimum, as they have in every other session since the $5.15 rate was set in 1997. But the Republicans who’ve been running Congress have higher priorities – raising their own pay and cutting the taxes that are such a burden to their wealthy supporters.
Oh yes, the GOP leaders did introduce a bill that would have raised the minimum. But the measure made that contingent on cutting the estate taxes of the very wealthy – a linkage, opposed by even some Republicans, that guaranteed the bill’s defeat.
They’ve raised congressional pay in every session since 1997, while doing nothing for the working poor. That’s added more than $31,000 to the minimum wage of congressional members, currently $165,200, with a $3,300 raise scheduled for Jan. 1. Unlike minimum-wage workers, who rarely have fringe benefits, members of Congress also get free health care, pensions, and other expensive extras.
The minimum wage for ordinary people would have risen to $7.25 an hour over the next two years under the latest Democratic proposal blocked by the GOP’s congressional leaders. Its main proponent, Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, promised that the fight to raise the wage “will continue all across America.”
It is certain, in any case, that Democratic candidates will make it an issue in this fall’s election campaigns. They are well aware, certainly, of polls showing that an overwhelming majority of Americans favor a minimum-wage increase.
So why in the world are Republican leaders so adamantly against it?
Because their big-money backers in the restaurant business, who employ about 60 percent of all minimum-wage workers, are against it, as are many other business and corporate interests. The opponents have even formed a group, Coalition for Job Opportunities, to spread the fiction, much favored by the GOP, that a higher minimum would force employers to eliminate jobs.
Actually, the number of jobs has grown after each of the 19 times the minimum has been raised since it was initially set at 25 cents an hour in 1938.
The job growth has been spurred primarily by the increased spending of those whose pay has increased. Like all low-wage workers, they must spend virtually every cent they earn, thus raising the overall demand for goods and services and creating the need for new employees.
Think of the general benefits to society if the minimum-wage workers who now must depend on government assistance could earn enough to make it on their own.
Think of the benefits to employers. As several studies have shown, raising workers’ pay raises workers’ morale and, with it, their productivity, while decreasing absenteeism and recruiting and training costs.
Think of the benefits to small retailers. Opponents of a raise say they’d be hurt the most by a higher minimum wage, but it’s far more likely that they’d be among the greatest beneficiaries. For minimum-wage workers have no choice but to spend most of their meager earnings in neighborhood stores for food and other necessities. SFBG
Dick Meister
Dick Meister is a San Francisco-based writer who has covered labor and political issues for four decades as a reporter, editor, and commentator. Contact him through his Web site, www.dickmeister.com.
Can Werbach reform Wal-Mart?
EDITORIAL Those with power rarely use it to help the powerless: workers, foreigners, or the planet. That’s why we’re fascinated by the green noises that we’re starting to hear from übercorporation Wal-Mart and with its decision to hire our hometown environmental heavy hitter Adam Werbach, a move that reporter Amanda Witherell explores in this week’s cover story (see “An Unbelievable Truth,” page 15).
We’re skeptical of Wal-Mart’s motives and commitment to putting the planet before profits, so we truly hope that Werbach hasn’t been co-opted into a greenwashing effort. But because of the positive potential in this arrangement, we’re willing to trust Werbach’s judgment. In turn, we urge him to remember his roots and expect him to document his experience inside Wal-Mart and blow the whistle if Wal-Mart isn’t honoring its promises.
Let’s take a minute to look at the timing and potential of this. Wal-Mart is on the ropes even though it’s the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world. The activists and communities that oppose it are banding together like never before. And they’re getting bolder in that opposition, such as when the city of Hercules earlier this year used eminent domain to seize land from Wal-Mart rather than allow a store in its community.
Wal-Mart has also lost some political clout. First it lost its most supportive Democrat when fellow Arkansan Bill Clinton left the White House. The Republican Party it sponsors is also likely to lose ground in the midterm elections, just as the country’s trade deficit hits record levels.
People are also waking up to the fact that Wal-Mart’s poverty-level wages and lack of good health insurance end up being subsidized by taxpayers. And there very well could bubble up a backlash against the kinds of obscene wealth-hording being pushed by Wal-Mart’s Walton family and others, as reporter George Schulz also details in this issue (see “Shackling the Tax Man,” page 11).
Finally, consider two high-profile media moments from this summer that put more pressure on Wal-Mart. The Al Gore film An Inconvenient Truth has succeeded in placing global warming near the top of people’s concerns. This pressing environmental problem is made much worse by Wal-Mart’s practice of importing and distributing goods all over the planet.
The other was a widely circulated essay in the July issue of Harper’s Magazine, “Breaking the Chain,” which made a strong case for the federal government bringing an antitrust action against Wal-Mart and smashing the chain to pieces. The article focused not on the widely discussed environmental and labor arguments, but on how Wal-Mart’s market power and the way it wields it hurts the economy and other businesses because it can dictate terms to all of its suppliers, a concept known as monopsony power.
So we all have good reason to believe that Wal-Mart executives and their newfound concerns for the people and the planet aren’t just motivated by altruism. And this corporation has a long way to go before anyone should believe its executives intend to transform it into a force for good. We simply don’t trust Wal-Mart and don’t think anyone else should either.
Ah, but what if? That’s the question that will cause us to hold our fire for now and watch to see whether Wal-Mart’s actions follow its rhetoric. Given Wal-Mart’s monopsony power over suppliers and near monopoly power over consumers, this corporation has the power to force substantial changes in the wasteful and overly consumptive habits of the average American. The potential here is phenomenal.
Is Werbach the guy to help them realize that potential? Maybe. He’s been an inspiring and effective crusader for economic and social justice for most of his life, which is why we were thrilled when Sup. Chris Daly snuck him onto the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission.
But in that role, he hasn’t been the bold visionary that we’d hoped for. Community Choice Aggregation, that baby step toward public power, moved way too slowly and didn’t go far enough, largely because Werbach failed to lead. And the movement for real public power has long been stalled, even on a commission that should be focused on kicking Pacific Gas and Electric out of San Francisco, although we’re pleased by the latest sign of life: the SFPUC is trying to offer public power from renewable sources on the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard property (see “Public Power Play,” page 10).
Werbach needs to be a forceful and uncompromising advocate for Wal-Mart to radically change its business model, and if he hits serious roadblocks, he must be willing to quit and talk about his experience with the Guardian or another publication, no matter what the personal cost. SFBG
Rage and resistance
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
“It’s a whole different feeling on the East Coast.” Raymond “Boots” Riley, Oakland’s most famously outspoken rapper, is talking. The Coup, the group he’s led for more than a decade, has just returned from a series of spring New York dates. Their latest album, Pick a Bigger Weapon (Epitaph), has just dropped. It’s a good time to clock the distance between the coasts. “They’ve got a whole different code of language and lifestyle — and the same with the political energy that’s there. It doesn’t even translate,” he says. “We were in New York for four days, and like the old saying goes, ‘It’s a nice place to visit.’”
He pauses, perhaps for breath, perhaps to check himself, before continuing, “There are a million things to plug into back there. You don’t even have time to make a mistake. With all the stuff you hear about Oakland, the truth is that people walk down the street and say ‘what’s up’ to each other even when they’re strangers.”
For Riley, that sense of community is crucial. It keeps him going. Because exposing the dark hand behind the daily injustices heaped on the populace — and empowering people to stand against it — is what Riley is all about. Beginning with the Coup’s 1992 debut, Kill My Landlord (Wild Pitch), through his latest, the group’s fifth full-length, he has created a deeply personal, heartfelt, often funny body of work that captures the East Bay’s radical legacy, as well as its funky, booty-shaking musical sensibility.
ACCIDENTS WILL HAPPEN
For those whose eyes were focused on other things — understandable under the circumstances — the original drop date for the Coup’s fourth album, Steal This Album: Party Music (75 Ark), was 9/11. If current events weren’t enough, the original cover featured Riley and Coup DJ Pam the Funkstress in front of a crumbling World Trade Center. It got the group a fair bit of publicity — not all of it favorable, including scrutiny from the political police. The result was that in some quarters, Party Music was seen as too hot to handle.
It contributed to a potentially lethal — career-wise — four-year-plus interlude between albums. Riley is frank about the delay.
“A couple of years were about us touring to make sure that people found out about that album,” he explains. “For a long time when we toured, we’d get into town and find out that the album wasn’t in the stores. I don’t apologize for anything about that album, and I wanted to make sure that it didn’t just disappear.”
But a nearly five-year wait?
“Well,” Riley says, “there was the business of what did I want the next album to be. And in the past, the first 12 songs I liked, there was the album. But this time, I had 100 songs I liked, I kept obsessing about the music, and a lot of that was me running away from making the album.” Party Music may not have gone putf8um, but it boosted the Coup’s visibility and reputation among more than just funk lovers. The past few years have seen an upsurge in political activism, and the group managed to find fans among those who like rebellion with their music. High expectations came with the territory.
“I got sidetracked when I started this album for a little bit,” says Riley. “I set out thinking I was going to have to address everything in the world. I was taking on too much.”
It’s instructive to understand what “too much” means to Riley.
“At first I’d think about writing a song that would break down the Palestinians’ fight for land,” he says. It led to what he calls overthinking the problem. “Some people look out at the world and see things simply. I see things in their complications. It’s how I understand the world, but it also can lead to problems. That comes out in my music sometimes, because I can always do something over by just erasing a line.”
What this led to in the case of Bigger Weapon was a classic hurry-up-and-wait situation. There was a time, for instance, when Riley would go into the studio and just follow his instincts. Now many listeners were knocking at the door. The president of Epitaph, Andy Caulkins, was one of them.
“He’d call me,” Riley remembers, “and say, ‘We’re really excited about this album. It’s really the time for it.’ ‘Laugh, Love, Fuck,’ a kind of personal manifesto, was the first song I turned in. After a few of my conversations, I’d be wondering if this was what they expected. But I realized that what motivates me to think about things on a world scale, it has to do with what is happening in my town, how it’s similar and dissimilar to what’s going on in the world. Otherwise it’s like I’m sitting in class, and it’s just a bunch of facts. When I first got into organizing I was 15, and I was really excited about learning things, and I think I read every book that was shoved at me. What stuck with me is the parts of the books that my actual real life made clear.
“How I write best is just me being myself — when I have what I call moments of clarity — just feeling things, reacting to things as I live my life. That’s when it works.”
The material is so personal that at moments Riley had difficulty handling the idea of a public hearing. “I have songs on here,” he says, “that I couldn’t look at people when I first played them … ‘I Just Want to Lay Around in Bed with You’ and ‘Tiffany Hall.’ The last one is about a friend of mine and what her death signifies to me. Those songs were hard for me in that very personal way.”
These tracks were foreshadowed by cuts like “Wear Clean Drawers” and the wrenching “Heaven Tonight” from Party Music. The former is a kind of heartfelt message to his young daughter warning her about the difficulties that life has in store for her; the latter is built around the story of a young woman with hunger pangs that are the unjust punishment of poverty.
At the time that he wrote “Drawers,” Riley remembers thinking, “Maybe this isn’t why I got into rapping, that I needed to break the whole system down.”
In fact, his songs do indict the system, like the tracks on the latest album — not by imparting lofty lessons, but by focusing on the human particulars. Ultimately, the album shows a confident Riley at home with an unambiguous approach to songwriting.
TAKE THE POWER
To say that the rapper is unapologetic doesn’t begin to describe his resolve. The truth is that he never budged from the original World Trade Center a flambé cover of Party Music, and there’s no give in Pick a Bigger Weapon. The title itself works two ways: as advice to the dispossessed and as a challenge to the powers that be.
“In my life,” he says casually, “I’m still probably the only person I kick it with who considers himself a revolutionary. I mean, I’m not in an organization, but I think that in this world the people can take power.
There are no doubt folks who feel that Riley lives in a different universe. When asked about the skeptical among us, he tells a story he heard from guitarist Tom Morello of the late rock-rappers Rage Against the Machine. Morello has become a Riley friend and fellow traveler who can be found on occasion playing behind the Coup, as well as working with Riley as a guitar-rap duo. According to the guitarist, Rage some years ago was working on a video with outspoken director Michael Moore. The idea was for Rage to arrive on Wall Street on a busy workday, where they’d set up and play, loud. The financial district population would, they thought, be pushed up against the wall by the Rage challenge.
What happened was unexpected, and for Riley serves as a case in point. “They showed up on Wall Street,” he explains, “and expected all kinds of chaos with people scared, threatened by their music, and the police coming and everything. But what happened was, out of the financial district came about 100 people in suits chanting, ‘Suits for Rage! Suits for Rage!’ The point is that there are a lot of people who don’t want to be part of the system and don’t see themselves as part of it.”
“We all hear about the problems, like you can’t say anything or the FBI’s gonna put you in jail,” continues Riley. “But the thing is that people need to feel empowered. I try to make music first that makes me feel good about life, that makes me feel empowered. Some beats make you feel like, ‘Damn, I’m gonna beat somebody’s ass,’ and sometimes might do that, but I try to make music that draws on a lot of different feelings.”
As Riley says, the album has many flavors. But when all is said and done, the essential message can be found on the first full track, “We Are the Ones.” Over a booming, bouncy bass line, he sounds almost laid-back as he raps, “We, we are the ones/ We’ll see your fate/ Tear down your state/ Go get your guns.”
It’s frank, on the ferocious side, and exactly what audiences have come to expect from the Coup. It took Riley nearly five years to release it, but Pick a Bigger Weapon is in your hands. Use it wisely. SFBG
THE COUP
With T-Kash and Ise Lyfe
Sat/12, 9 p.m.
Independent
628 Divisadero, SF
$20
(415) 771-1421
www.independentsf.com
How to fix the sewers
EDITORIAL Every time it rains heavily in San Francisco, millions of gallons of barely treated sewage flow into the bay. The city’s ancient sewage system has only one set of pipes — the stuff that’s put down the toilets and drains and the stuff that comes out of the clouds use the same underground pathways — and when there’s too much precipitation, the old pipes and storage tanks get overwhelmed, and there’s no place for the putrid mix to go but into the local waterway.
The raw shit is obviously unhealthy for people and for aquatic life: the bay doesn’t flush well, which means our sewage sticks around awhile. Even in dry weather, the city’s sewage system frankly stinks. Residents who live near the antiquated sewage treatment plan in Hunters Point have to smell it every day. A full 80 percent of the city’s wastewater winds up in a treatment plant in Bayview that everyone agrees is a relic from the 1950s that at the very least needs to be upgraded substantially.
There’s really no way to get around it: the politics of sewage is the politics of poverty, power, and race. As Sarah Phelan reports (“It Flows Downhill,” page 15), the west side of town has a well-constructed treatment center that doesn’t issue any odors at all and handles only a fraction of the city’s sewage. The heavy shit, so to speak, gets dumped on an area that has way, way too much of the city’s nuisances already.
In the meantime, it’s entirely reasonable for San Franciscans to ask why this environmentally conscious city makes such an awful mess of the basic problem of disposing of stormwater and human waste.
So the planning process that’s now underway for overhauling and upgrading the city’s wastewater system is an opportunity to undo decades of environmental racism and take a totally different approach to handling the water that comes into and flows out of San Francisco.
The first step, as Alex Lantsberg points out in an op-ed (page 7), is to stop looking at all that water as a problem. Water is a resource, a valuable resource. This city has constructed an elaborate system to bring freshwater into town from the Tuolumne River, 200 miles away. And yet, the fresh, potable rainwater that falls on the city creates a crisis every winter. There’s a serious disconnect here.
Take a look at a satellite photo of the city and you see a lot of flat rooftops and concrete roadways that together make up a huge percentage of the topographic landmass of San Francisco. These are places that now simply allow rainwater to run off into the storm drains. There’s no reason that those roofs can’t collect that water into cisterns, which could turn that rain into sources of drinking water, water to wash with, water to irrigate plants … water that otherwise would have to be sucked out of a high Sierra watershed.
There are vast amounts of space in the city where concrete — street medians, building fronts, sidewalks, etc. — serve as nothing but conduits for sloshing rainwater. With a little creativity, some of that area could be filled with plants that could absorb some of the rain — increasing green space and making the city a better place to live in the process.
And with modern technology, there’s no reason that all of the streets have to be impermeable concrete. As city streets are torn up, there are ways to look at pavements that are less than watertight, allowing some of the rain to soak in.
There are, in other words, ways to make San Francisco a model city for handling wastewater in an environmentally sustainable way. That won’t be the cheapest way to get the system repaired, but in the long run, it’s the only reasonable approach.
There are also ways to end the injustice that comes from living in the southeast neighborhoods and getting the worst of everyone else’s crap. If the city is about to spend more than a billion dollars upgrading its sewers, a key part of the project must be eliminating both the fecal outflows and the noxious odors that come from the Hunters Point treatment plant. If the more recently built west-side plant can be odor-free and avoid releasing untreated waste, this one can too.
Fixing the sewer system — and rebuilding the Hunters Point treatment plant — isn’t going to be cheap. To its credit, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission is pushing to levy new charges on developers whose buildings add to the sewage burden. But in the end, there will have to be some sort of citywide water and sewer rate hike.
There’s going to be a huge fuss when that’s proposed. It ought to be set up so that big commercial users pay more than small businesses and residents, but in the end, it has to raise enough money to do this right. Trying to fix the sewers on the cheap will just leave us with the same stinking mess that the southeast has suffered under for decades. SFBG
Dam telling debate
By Steven T. Jones
The debate over whether to tear down the O’Shaughnessy Dam in the Hetch Hetchy Valley — which a state report this week concluded is possible, but with a prohibitive price tag of up to $10 billion — is interesting for what it says about the power and perils of activist journalism, particularly when the big boys deign to practice it. Despite their current revisionist history, the San Francisco Chronicle pushed hard for the construction of this dam 100 years ago (waging a nasty smear campaign against John Muir and other conservationists in the process — read Gray Brechin’s great book Imperial San Francisco for the whole story). Then, as now, that paper and its downtown allies wanted growth at any cost. But today, it is another newspaper crusade that has propelled forward the riduculous notion of spending needed billions of dollars to undo a historical error. The Sacramento Bee and its associate editorial writer Tom Philip turned the idea of some environmentalists and studies by UC Davis in a full-blown offensive to tear down the dam, in the process winning a Pulitzer Prize and convincing Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to order the study that came out this week.
Now, just imagine if we could get the media mega-corporations to put this kind of effort into eliminating poverty, reducing American militarism and police state excesses, creating socialized medicine, or any of a long list of important social and economic justice concerns, rather than pursuing sentimental pipe dreams. Then we might start making real progress.
Instead, we’re left with the latest skirmish in the age-old Sacramento-San Francisco rivalry.
How to end the violence
OPINION Despite its loss at the polls earlier this month, the spirit of Proposition A, the homicide prevention charter amendment on the June 6 ballot, lives on. Prop. A would have mandated that the city invest $10 million in violence prevention efforts. Instead of the typical police response to violence, Prop. A sought to address the root causes of violence, the social isolation and limited opportunity that are so endemic to the neighborhoods most impacted by street violence.
Prop. A offered a menu of strategies, including community outreach and organizing, job training and job creation, and reentry services so that ex-offenders have more than a couple hundred dollars in their hands when they leave prison. It was clear to everyone involved in the Prop. A campaign that this was about ameliorating the harmful effects of poverty and racism.
Even before the election, Prop. A was having an effect. Just two months after saying that no further investment was necessary to stem the tide of violence, Mayor Gavin Newsom crafted an ordinance with Sup. Fiona Ma to increase funding for violence prevention efforts. Responding to community groups, the Board of Supervisors stripped from the original Ma-Newsom legislation a bunch of police department goodies, including a ropes course, surveillance cameras, and bookmobiles — and beefed up the provisions on jobs and workforce training and added school-based violence prevention efforts, street outreach programs, and reentry services.
Overall the Board of Supervisors invested close to $6.9 million in programs and services. That’s a great initial investment but not enough, especially when a significant portion of the new funds can only be used for people under the age of 18.
The budget process offers the opportunity to serve the 18-and-older population and build on the foundation set earlier this spring. To this end, the budget committee added back over a million dollars to save San Francisco’s Trauma Recovery Center for the victims of violence and sexual assault. Now as a result of great advocacy from the violence prevention community and some unprecedented collaboration between the district attorney, the public defender, and the sheriff, the budget committee can program outside the box.
Before the committee Thursday, June 29, will be proposals to increase street-violence prevention outreach efforts, wraparound case management for victims at San Francisco General Hospital, housing relocation services for families impacted by violence, and reentry programs for ex-offenders. All of these programs can be part of a national model for other cities to emulate.
Contrary to the mayor’s line that the city does not need to contribute more resources to violence prevention, I believe city-sponsored resources make a dramatic change in how people caught up in all sides of the epidemic can have better choices and a dignified way out of these mean streets.
Violence is solvable if we make the right choices. SFBG
John Avalos
John Avalos is a legislative aide to Sup. Chris Daly. He dedicates this column to Andrew Drew Elle, a.k.a. DJ Domino, who was shot to death on Tuesday night, June 20, at 24th Street and Folsom.
Latter daze
In playwright Dominic Orlando’s Juan Gelion Dances for the Sun, Latin American peasant Juan Gelion (a charismatic Johnny Moreno) abandons a promising career in the church to found a new one — or is it the old one reborn? Even Juan doesn’t seem sure. But he renounces material wealth, goes about healing the sick — beginning with beloved cousin Mariana (Juliet Tanner), who lies dying from a botched abortion — and collects a band of unlikely followers, including his cranky atheist brother (Hector Osorio) and a chipper but mentally unstable American (Alexandra Creighton).
Following a half-understood inner voice, Orlando’s hesitant messiah takes his band to the United States. Once landed in Florida, they go toe to toe with America’s military-industrial Christ complex, personified by a secretive rapture-hastening group of three Beltway fundamentalist power brokers and their golden boy, up-and-second-coming governor of Arizona Arn Darby (Nick Sholley). These four asses of the apocalypse, convinced their rich, war-making selves constitute God’s chosen, latch onto Juan Gelion as the false messiah, or adversary, prophesied in Revelations. They arrest and interrogate him, leading to a showdown of supernatural proportions and a surprising denouement. Along the way, more mundane and metaphysical concerns get an airing, along with a smattering of songs from, or accompanied by, the story’s narrator-chorus, a sardonic guitarrista played by composer Deborah Pardes.
Unlike the millennial millionaires it lambastes, Crowded Fire’s world premiere has both style and soul. Artistic director Rebecca Novick’s crisp pacing and appealing cast make it relatively easy to forgive the story’s thinner patches and loose ends, and the production strikes a fine balance of humor and drama throughout. Moreover, its fanciful story line contains both a well-grounded critique and a sincere spiritual question at its core. James J. Fenton’s lovely scenic design, meanwhile, with its graceful parabolic arches and delicate branches (combined with Heather Basarab’s lambent arboreal lighting) makes compellingly manifest Juan Gelion’s antiauthoritarian "church without walls." Delivering sass to the sanctimonious carries a bit of its own presumption, especially if your own thoughts on religion tend towards HL Mencken’s. But bucking the budding American theocracy is a timely subject. These people really are the living end.
MAKING HAY
Last Planet Theatre, never a company to shrink from a challenge (or to foist one on its audience), has pulled off a startling production of Franz Xavier Kroetz’s Farmyard, a difficult but quietly compelling exploration of love and suffering amid a bleak, isoutf8g landscape of rural poverty. The unflinching and idiosyncratic Kroetz, who not long ago was Germany’s most performed living playwright, may be far less well-known here, but his work finds kindred spirits in artistic director John Wilkins and his cast.
The story unfolds with a kind of aggressively stylized naturalism on a humble American family farm, where Beppi (Heidi Wolff), the retarded teenage daughter of the farmer (Richard Aiello) and his wife (Emma Victoria Glauthier), falls in love with an aging, randy farmhand named Sepp (Garth Petal), who has seduced her with stories. When Beppi becomes pregnant, the farmer takes retribution on Sepp’s beloved black shadow of a dog (Hilde Susan Jaegtnes, effectively swaddled in rags and shoe polish) before turning to his wife for help in solving the problem of their daughter.
The plot is bone simple, but its reverberations are subtle, strange, and unsettling — just as Kroetz’s stunted characters prove remarkably present while rarely managing more than a few brusque words or phrases. Whole scenes come wrapped in silences, long pauses measuring the distance between characters while binding them together. In a way, silence is the play’s principal subject: the silence of moral judgment, the absence (despite the swift trade here in the Commandments and the passing of sentences) of any voice or say beyond the inexorable force of life itself.
In that emptiness opened up so effectively in Farmyard — and echoed in the gentle bleakness of the surrounding country (beautifully evoked in James Flair and Paul Rasmussen’s scenic design, as well as Alex Lopez’s radiant lighting scheme) — it’s life that finally defines and bridges the void. And life converges in Beppi, whose name seems to mark her perpetual child status even in the midst of sexual awakening and motherhood, with all the innocent and anarchic force any farmyard could hope to contain. Wolff’s supple, perfectly assured performance is the natural standout in a cast composed of strong, focused portrayals all around.
Wilkins’s sharp staging adds a unique contribution to the play’s unsettling ambiguity by disrupting its heavy silences with a jarringly lush, sophisticated set of Shirley Horn torch songs. For all its in-your-face effect, the music makes a subtle point in the precise way it both works and doesn’t work: We can’t help aligning the words and ambience with the action, even while recognizing the absurdity of the match. But then what exactly is so absurd? In the end the songs perfectly measure, manipulate, and throw back our own programming, and still — it’s impossible not to add — how fitting that out of absolute darkness comes this beautiful, seemingly otherworldly paean to life. *
JUAN GELION DANCES FOR THE SUN
Through April 8
Thurs.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.
Traveling Jewish Theatre
470 Florida, SF
$18–$30
(415) 255-7846
www.crowdedfire.org
FARMYWARD
Through April 1
Thurs.–Sat., 8 p.m.
Last Planet Theatre
351 Turk, SF
$10–$18
(415) 440-3050
www.lastplanettheatre.com
Transjobless
tali@sfbg.com
In the transgender community, to have full-time work is to be in the minority. In fact, a new survey of 194 trans people conducted by the Transgender Law Center (TLC), with support from the Guardian, found that only one out of every four respondents has a full-time job. Another 16 percent work part-time.
What’s more, 59 percent of respondents reported an annual salary of less than $15,333. Only 4 percent reported making more than $61,200, which is about the median income in the Bay Area.
In other words, more than half of local transgender people live in poverty, and 96 percent earn less than the median income. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that 40 percent of those surveyed don’t even have a bank account.
TLC doesn’t claim the study is strictly scientific — all respondents were identified through trans organizations or outreach workers. But the data give a fairly good picture of how hard it is for transgender people to find and keep decent jobs, even in the city that is supposed to be most accepting of them.
It’s been more than a decade since San Francisco expanded local nondiscrimination laws to cover trans people, but transphobic discrimination remains rampant. Fifty-seven percent of survey respondents said they’ve experienced some form of employment discrimination.
And interviews show that job woes are hardly straightforward.
Navigating the job-application process after a gender transition can be extraordinarily difficult. Trans people run up against fairly entrenched biases about what kind of work they’re suited for. Sometimes those who are lucky enough to find work can’t tolerate insensitive, or even abusive, coworkers.
Marilyn Robinson turned tricks for almost 20 years before she decided to look for legal employment. She got her GED and, eventually, a job at an insurance company. The first six months went OK, but then a supervisor "thought he had the right to call me RuPaul," she told us. "And I look nothing like RuPaul." Suddenly the women in the office refused to use the bathroom if Robinson was around. She left within a month.
Once again, Robinson was on the job hunt. She interviewed for a receptionist position, and thought it went well. But on her way out, she saw the interviewer toss her application into the trash with a giggle.
"The reality is, even a hoagie shop in the Castro — they might not hire you," she said.
Still, many activists say the increased attention being paid to trans employment issues is promising.
Cecelia Chung from the Transgender Law Center told us there’s a "silver lining" in the effort the "community is putting into really changing the playing field. We’re in a really different place than we were five years ago."
Activists say true progress will require broad education efforts and the cooperation of business owners throughout the Bay Area. But the project is well under way, with San Francisco Transgender Empowerment, Advocacy and Mentorship, a trans collaborative, hosting its second annual Transgender Job Fair March 22. More than a dozen employers have signed up for the fair, including UCSF, Goodwill Industries, and Bank of America.
HURDLES
Imagine trying to find a job with no references from previous employers. Now envision how it might feel to have interviewer after interviewer look at you askance — or even ask if you’ve had surgery on a fairly private part of your body.
These are just a couple of the predicaments trans job-seekers face.
Kenneth Stram runs the Economic Development Office at the San Francisco LGBT Community Center. "In San Francisco there are the best intentions," he told us. "But when you scratch the surface, there are all these procedural hurdles that need to be addressed." As examples, he pointed to job-training classes where fellow students may act hostile, or arduous application processes.
Giving a prospective employer a reference may seem like a fairly straightforward task, but what if your old employer knew an employee of a different gender? Do you call the old boss and announce your new identity? Even if he or she is supportive, experience can be hard to erase. Will the manager who worked with Jim be able to speak convincingly about Jeanine? And what about your work history — should you eliminate the jobs where you were known as a different gender?
Most trans people can’t make it through the application process without either outing themselves or lying.
Marcus Arana decided to face this issue head-on and wrote about his transition from living as a woman to living as a man in his cover letter.
"It became a matter of curiosity," Arana told us. "I would have employers ask about my surgical status."
It took him a year and a half to find a job. Fortunately, it’s one he loves. Arana investigates most complaints of gender identity–related discrimination that are made to San Francisco’s city government. (Another investigator handles housing-oriented complaints.)
When he started his job, in 2000, about three quarters of the complaints Arana saw were related to public accommodations — a transwoman had been refused service at a restaurant, say, or a bank employee had given a cross-dressing man grief about the gender listed on his driver’s license.
Today, Arana told us, at least half of the cases he looks into are work-related — something he attributes to both progress in accommodations issues and stagnation on the job front.
TG workers, he said, confront two common problems: resistance to a changed name or pronoun preference and controversy over which bathroom they use.
The name and pronoun problems can often be addressed through sensitivity training, though Arana said that even in the Bay Area, it’s not unheard of for some coworkers to simply refuse to alter how they refer to a trans colleague.
Nine out of ten bathroom issues concern male-to-female trans folk — despite the fact that the police department has never gotten a single report of a transwoman harassing another person in a bathroom. One complaint Arana investigated involved a woman sticking a compact mirror under a bathroom stall in an effort to see her trans coworker’s genitalia.
But a hostile workplace is more often made up of dozens of subtle discomforts rather than a single drama-filled incident.
Robinson told us the constant whispering of "is that a man?" can make an otherwise decent job intolerable: "It’s why most of the girls — and I will speak for myself — are prostitutes. Because it’s easier."
The second and third most common forms of work-related discrimination cited by respondents in the TLC survey were sexual harassment and verbal harassment.
But only 12 percent of those who reported discrimination also filed some kind of formal complaint. That may be because of the widespread feeling that doing so can make it that much harder to keep a job — or find another one. Mara Keisling, director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, in Washington, DC, said that "it’s a common understanding within the transgender community that when you lose your job, you generally lose your career."
ANOTHER KIND OF GLASS CEILING
Most of the trans people we spoke to expressed resentment at being tracked into certain jobs — usually related to health care or government.
Part of that is because public entities have been quicker to adopt nondiscriminatory policies. San Francisco city government created a splash in 2001 when it granted trans employees access to full health benefits, including sex-reassignment surgery. The University of California followed suit last year.
But it’s also because of deeply ingrained prejudices about what kind of work transgender people are suited to.
Claudia Cabrera was born in Guatemala but fled to the Bay Area in 2000 to get away from the constant insults and occasional violence that befell her. Despite her education in electrical engineering and business and 13 years of tech work, it was difficult for her to find a job — even after she was granted political asylum. In 2002 a local nonprofit she had originally turned to for help offered her a position doing outreach within the queer community.
Cabrera doesn’t make much money, and she sends some of it back to her two kids in Guatemala. But that’s not the only reason she would like another job. She wants to have broader responsibilities and to employ her tech savvy.
"There is a stereotype here in San Francisco [that] transgender folk are only good for doing HIV work — or just outreach in general," she said.
Whenever she’s gotten an interview for another kind of job, she’s been told she is overqualified. Does she believe that’s why she hasn’t been hired? "No," she laughed. But she also acknowledged, "Even though there is discrimination going on here, this is the safest city for me to be in."
Cabrera is now on the board of TLC and is working to create more job opportunities for herself and others in the trans community. She often repeats this mantra: "As a transsexual woman, I am not asking for anything that doesn’t belong to me. I am demanding my rights to live as a human being." *
TRANSGENDER JOB FAIR
March 22
1–4 p.m.
SF LGBT Community Center, Ceremonial Room
1800 Market, SF
(415) 865-5555
Bolivia’s ballot-box revolution
The timid rays of the sun receded from the Bolivian tropical savannas, bathing the valleys and disappearing behind the Andean mountains, on the afternoon of Dec. 18. They seemed to foretell that the Bolivian schizophrenic "political culture" was dying. And it happened.
On that day, indigenous Bolivia came out of political anonymity. In a move unprecedented in Bolivian and Latin American democratic history, the great indigenous majority, previously excluded and subordinated, elected one of our own, using the power of responsible and conscientious votes.
An indigenous man, Evo Morales Ayma, is our president! Yes, the llama herder from the forgotten Orinoca village. The man who as a child survived by following sheep and llamas and eating the dried orange peels the truck drivers threw out on the roadside, who as a ragged boy "celebrated" his "joy of living" once in awhile with a dishful of hank’akipa (cornmeal soup); a Bolivian who was born on his mother’s skirts (not in a hospital) under the dim light of a homemade oil lamp; a man who, like many others, dreamed of one day attending a university and becoming a professional but learned that, because of the exclusionary political culture and abject poverty, those dreams were unattainable.
Evo learned the lessons of political leadership in the school of life while working with the unions in Chapare (the tropical province of Cochabamba where he emigrated with his parents because of dire poverty in the highlands). He was deeply moved and outraged when he learned one of the coca growers’ leaders had been burned alive by the military. Later on, the union would open his eyes, mind, and heart to understand the causes of poverty of the Bolivian people.
The Bolivian neoliberal elite, promoted by the United States, tried very hard to avoid and stop the democratic revolution of the indigenous people, but it was too late. The contained anger and outrage on the face of so much corruption and betrayal by the shameless traditional politicians had reached the limits. Now was the time. Indigenous movements, laborers, farmworkers, social organizations, professionals, intellectuals, students, women, day laborers and theunemployed got together, armed with voting ballots and voting booths, to start a democratic revolution.
Before today the Bolivian social movements were labeled as communist and anarchic, or as drug dealers and disrupters of order by the official national and international media. By now the world knows by the results that we Bolivians are not terrorists or drug dealers. We are only people who want to live, people capable of solving our own historic problems using the democratic tools of the game.
The sun shone bright on the morning of Dec. 19. It washed away 180 years of exclusionary darkness and subordination of the indigenous people of Bolivia.
Never again against us! Never again without us! All of us together make Bolivia! Our destiny calls us to work in unity on the multicolored fabric of our national identity!
Jubenal Quispe
Quispe is a Bolivian lawyer and activist who accompanied a San Francisco Presbyterian Church delegation known as Joining Hands Against Hunger on a recent tour of Bolivia. Translated from the spanish by Nancy Gruel.
For more information see "Evo Presidente!"