Betsey Culp

A jubilant Gavin Newsom stood beneath the great rotunda of San Francisco City Hall yesterday, surrounded by happy people celebrating the State Supreme Court’s support for same-sex marriage. His reasons for joy were undoubtedly twofold. Not only had a just cause won, but the event, which the Bay Guardian’s Steven T. Jones calls “the most important civil rights ruling in a generation” had truly established him as a civil rights leader.

Here in San Francisco, Newsom’s public image rests on his role in furthering same-sex marriages. But elsewhere he’s known for his promotion of sustainable cities. Same-sex marriage is rarely mentioned.

He’s elsewhere a lot. Hardly a day goes by when his office and the media don’t announce that he’s just departed for, or just returned from, some far-off destination. At the beginning of this month, he headed off to Israel. He swung by New York City on the way back, pausing long enough to be interviewed by a beaming Dana Goodyear for the New Yorker Conference. No sooner had he touched down in San Francisco than he was off again, this time to testify before the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. Only a State Supreme Court decision on the constitutionality of same-sex marriage in California prevented him from going on from there to Chicago.

In all these trips, his focus is the same: sustainability, green building, fighting global warming at the city level. He’s come a long way from the wet-behind-the-ears mayor whom Tad Friend described in 2004 in the New Yorker magazine. The images that Friend presented in his article were vintage San Francisco stereotypes — he ended with this scene:

A suspiciously serene rally in favor of legalizing marijuana was going on [opposite City Hall], and the air was suddenly pungent with the substance in question.

I tried to counter them with a piece of my own in the San Francisco Call.

That was only four years ago, but it was a very different time. Taking a leaf from the book of his hero, Robert Kennedy, Newsom was attempting to solve the problems of San Francisco’s perennial homeless population. In the wake of 9/11 and the bursting of the dot.com bubble, the city’s economy was reeling. The war in Iraq had begun less than two years before, and the country was about to return George W. Bush to the White House. For the average American, global warming was just a gleam in a few environmentalists’ eyes.

Since then, both the Bush administration and the war he promoted have become festering wounds in the nation’s side. The economy has flown some astonishing loop-the-loops before descending in a frightening spiral. Even most die-hard conservatives consider the issue of climate change to be real, although some of their methods for addressing it remain less than serious.

Here’s where the new Newsom comes in. In the past year or so, he has refashioned his image from the Scourge of Homelessness to the Green Mayor. And the chief executive of the city that Tad Friend described as “an avatar of social rebellion” is now being talked about as the next governor of California. (Can you say “Gavinor”?)

The transition was probably gradual, but Newsom himself credits the 2007 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, for the change. In the course of his discussions there, he was surprised to realize that

the debate on global warming is over.

The new political theme would be the nexus of economic reform with environmental action. The new political leader would be a combination of Bobby Kennedy and Bill McKibben and Warren Buffet. In an interview at Davos, Newsom said,

How big an issue will global climate change be in the elections? If it’s not dominant, then the American people aren’t doing their job holding us to account. I can’t imagine a more important issue that unites the entire planet around one value. What else does?

He added, in the context of the 2008 election,

The presidential candidate that can link the issues of poverty & job creation to those that have been left behind in the last decade, the last half century, to the issue of global narrative on the environment & sustainability, that’s the person I’ll be electing, or voting for, in this election.

He was also talking about himself.

In his various travels, which the people of San Francisco hear very little about, Newsom presents himself as the mayor of a rapidly greening city. He says he was inspired to travel to Israel because of a plan to institute a nationwide network of electric cars there. His performance at the New Yorker conference included an almost poetic waxing on the subject of composting:

composting in food scraps
& getting into our public schools
& just seeing these little kids run up
& get rid of their little extra pasta or their beans
& then using that compost
& bringing it back to the schools to do edible schoolyards
& to have these kids learn an extended narrative of an urban-rural partnership
& understanding where food comes from, understanding their own environmental connection to food
& slow food movement
& the impact of agriculture as it relates to our waste stream
& the like

In Washington, he was the green businessman, explaining in hard facts and figures how San Francisco’s new building program was created with the support of builders and how it fosters the economy.

For once, the world is seeing a San Francisco that is not a city of kooks and wild-eyed radicals.

As Newsom travels, and as he presents himself to the political world, he must be aware of people’s knee-jerk reaction to the city he represents. It’s a major obstacle to being taken seriously. And in fact, he often jokes about it.

But he does more than that. He actually distances himself from the city of San Francisco, allying himself with his audience. In explaining anti-Israel demonstrations at San Francisco State to the Jerusalem Post, he said,

I think there is a lot of bias and bigotry, and frankly a lot of anti-Semitism.

When Dana Goodyear said that San Francisco had been described as “37 [sic] square miles surround by reality,” Newsom chimed in,

That’s a good way to describe it.

In Washington, he spoke of the city’s early legislation to require LEED certification for municipal buildings.

At the time people thought, “Again another typical San Francisco idea — San Francisco values — sky’s going to fall in — world’s going to come to an end — major tax increases — companies are going to run out of San Francisco.”

All of which, he added, was proven wrong.

It’s a tricky business, introducing yourself as a San Franciscan to the rest of the world. The quirky images beloved by the media can obstruct a clear view of our 47 square miles of reality. And it must be even more risky when the world regards you as “an aggressive progressive” (Dana Goodyear’s term).

What to do?

It seems to me that there are two alternatives. There is the one that Newsom has chosen: Distance yourself by joining the tomfoolery. The local press pays very little attention to the far-reaching scope of Newsom’s green plans and even less to events that occur outside the Bay Area. San Franciscans are unlikely to discover that their mayor has been playing Peter and denying his ties to them. And even if they do, it probably won’t make any difference in his future.

But there’s another possibility, one that’s far more generous and far more constructive. The local press has, for reasons of its own, not been interested in exploring the significance of Gavin Newsom’s initiatives. And the mayor’s office, for reasons of its own, has never spent much time on promoting its activities locally. It’s far more interested in publicizing what it regards as roadblocks erected by an obstructionist Board of Supervisors and the “chattering classes.” But you can’t tell me that our businessman-turned-mayor couldn’t find ways to market himself at home if wanted to.

Imagine what would happen if Newsom took even a portion of the energy he devotes to campaigning away from home and began to publicize his very real achievements to constituents here beyond the business community. Of course, he’d have to acknowledge the contributions of those obstructionist supervisors to the process. But the resulting spirit of cooperation might allow the city accomplish twice as much.

In the broader scheme of things, however, that might damage his prospects for higher office. It could be dangerous to be too popular in a city like San Francisco.

Thanks for reading. I’m outta here till Monday.

Once upon a time, there was a mayoral election. One of the candidates was the mayor’s “hand-picked successor.”

Young and handsome, [the candidate] was a political moderate: he was popular with business — particularly the tourist industry — because of his tough stand on the homeless problem, but he still retained the [present mayor's] affinity with labor, including the big unions in city government like the transit workers.

Another candidate

was a firebrand lawyer from the Green Party who was interested in controlling development and improving the lot of the citizenry in San Francisco’s poorer neighborhoods, like the Mission and Hunters Point. His base was built in those neighborhoods, but he had other supporters throughout the more liberal districts like the Haight and the Castro.

But wait! There was a third candidate,

a conservative businessman involved in retail. He had the support of the “downtown” business interests, including banking and real estate, and was popular in the predominately Chinese neighborhoods of the city, like Chinatown, Sunset, Richmond, and Visitacion Valley.

Did you think I was talking about the Newsom-Gonzalez race of 2003?

I’m not. Nor am I Noodling on the News. But someone else is.

The three candidates are characters in Runoff (Bleak House Books, 2007), a whodunnit by San Francisco mystery writer Mark Coggins. The setting is San Francisco, strewn with bodies. Yes, plural. The book has as many violent deaths as the last act of Hamlet. Maybe more. And private investigator/jazz musician August Riordan is responsible for a number of them.

Riordan channels Sam Spade, even to the point of occupying an apartment on the corner of Post and Hyde. His voice sometimes echoes the master detective’s, as in this description of a cheap motel room on Lombard:

He gave me a key for a first-floor room next to the ice maker and the concrete stairwell. Inside was a carpet with the sort of pattern you see when slime mold grows on split pea soup, and several badly done imitations of the paintings of the kids with big eyes. There was also a bed with a sagging mattress that enveloped your butt like gel in a dental mold and a TV with one of the color guns on the fritz. The stains on the ceiling looked worse than most people’s garage floors.

But Riordan is far more free with his fists… and his knife… and his Glock automatic… and a few stray cleavers… than Dashiell Hammett’s “blond Satan” ever was.

The action takes place between the time of an election and the runoff that followed. At issue is whether the preliminary election was rigged. If it was, who did it? How? And why?

The “why” part is easy. The city’s “most precious resource” is real estate — in other words, housing. And two developers stand to profit if their candidate wins. On the Green side, there’s Ralph Wood, head of the Nautilus Housing Development Corporation, commonly known as NHDC. Supporting the incumbent and his successor is Arthur Calder, pro-development head of the San Francisco Home Builders League. The prize: the key to Hunters Point shipyard.

It turns out that the “how” part isn’t much more difficult. Unlike author Mark Coggins, who’s a Silicon Valley veteran, August Riordan is a techno-klutz, unable to program a cellphone. But he has a friend, Chris Duckworth, who knows better. Duckworth’s alter ego is Cassandra, a jazz-singing

Mae West-like medley of swaying hips, heaving bosom and wafting perfume.

But by day, he’s a font of information about “all matters technical.” And Riordan quickly discovers that

electronic voting machines, or more accurately, electronic voting systems and processes, are vulnerable at many points — when the software is being developed and installed, at the precinct when the votes are cast, when the USB drives are collected from the machines, at election headquarters where the votes are tallied. All of those places.

The “who” part of the puzzle is harder to unravel. And more fun. Particularly when you add in Leonora Lee, “The Dragon Lady of Chinatown.” And Tony “Squid Boy” Wu, who studied at Oxford and heads the San Francisco branch of a major Hong Kong gang. And an anarchist who calls himself Roadrunner. An ex-priest named Maurice Salaiz. A rogue backhoe driver known only as Red. You get the picture. It’s the San Francisco we know and love, writ large.

Who did it? And equally important, who won the election? There’s the rub. You’ll have to peruse the pages of Runoff to find out.

On May 4, the Chronicle ran a piece by Eddie Muller on San Francisco mystery writers. This posting is the first in an occasional series on the authors that Muller discusses.

In preparation for the article, Muller interviewed 30 writers, asking them,”Why do you feel this area has attracted, or bred, so many writers?” Mark Coggins replied:

I think San Francisco has served the same function for literary types roaming the country as a lint collector in a dryer. Writers like Twain, Hammett and Kerouac came to San Francisco as much because they’d come as far west as they could go as any other reason. The fact that San Francisco offered more in terms of culture and appreciation of literature and creative endeavors than the typical western city made it possible to stay — or at least stay long enough to write something of lasting significance.

Thanks for reading. I’m outta here till Friday.

It was a major film, created by a major director. And yet the producers found it so offensive that they refused to release it. An official at BBC, one of its sponsors, said after a screening,

My ass hurt.

One of its producers called it

worse than useless.

After the director retrieved a copy and it was shown in the United States, critics like Harold Rosenberg hated it. Writing about the film in the January 20, 1977 New York Review of Books, Rosenberg quoted another filmmaker, Luis Bunuel:

Movies seem to prosper in an intellectual and moral vacuum.

Rosenberg added that this particular movie

presents a dilution of the moral awfulness of the death camps and the killing of civilians and war prisoners, and it trivializes the significance of this vast organized death system by fitting pictures of corpses being dragged to pits into a rhythm of night-club performers, lush landscapes, chatter in sauna baths, and gentlemen reminiscing reflectively at their fireplaces.

Not everyone agreed. When the film first appeared in 1976, Vincent Canby wrote in the New York Times that it

expands the possibilities of the documentary motion picture in such a way that all future films of this sort will be compared to it….

It… marks off, explores, calls attention to, and considers, tranquilly, without making easy judgments, one of the central issues of our time: collective versus individual responsibility.

And when it was shown at a Human Rights Watch film festival in 1995, the program said,

If you can commit to seeing only one 4 1/2 hour film in your lifetime, make the necessary arrangements to see this stunning masterwork. In one courageous, lyrical tour de force, [the director] takes on the sweep of history from Nuremberg to Vietnam, exploring the questions of guilt and responsibility for the horrors of war.

The film in question: Marcel Ophuls’s Memory of Justice.

Until recently, I had never seen it. I had never even heard of it, although I was familiar with The Sorrow and the Pity, Ophuls’s classic depiction of France during World War II. It took Philippe Sands, writing about Guantanamo in the May issue of Vanity Fair, to call it to my attention.

Toward the end of his article, Sands tosses out a reference to

the Oscar-winning 1961 movie Judgment at Nuremberg, whose themes are alluded to in Marcel Ophuls’s classic 1976 film on wartime atrocities, The Memory of Justice, which should be required viewing but has been lost to a broader audience.

Thanks to the wonders of the internet, I managed to turn up a copy. It turns out that The Memory of Justice is an astonishing film, with an astonishing story behind it.

In the mid-1970s, thirty years after the end of World War II, some British producers were watching with horror as the war in Vietnam unfolded. They persuaded Ophuls to make a film about the similarities between Nazi atrocities and U.S. massacres in places like My Lai. At least, that’s what the Brits wanted. Ophuls refused to be pinned down, saying that the topic was

an open question — but one that had to be explored.

Once he began interviewing people, he discovered that his initial caution was correct. He couldn’t follow the producers’ guidelines; he

was unable to crosscut, say, Auschwitz and Viet Nam . . . emotionally, I have found it wrong.

Instead, he presented them with a very long — and very different — film that explored in agonizing detail

the necessity of judgment, as opposed to the impossibility of judgment.

Producer David Puttnam protested:

We bought a concept, with particular stress on the interviews. We got a long, rambling personal statement, which is commercial death for us.

Ophuls countered that all they wanted was

a radical-chic version for America… [but] theatrical equations (Auschwitz-Napalm or Hitler-Nixon)… could only lead to the reinforcement of cynicism and hopelessness.

The British producers took over the film and chopped it up, simplifying its carefully constructed presentation. Time Magazine reported,

Many of his interview questions have been cut, along with footage of his family (his wife was a member of Hitler Youth) and of Germany during the Weimar Republic and later in the painful process of denazification. Also excised was a scene of middle-aged Germans, nude in a mixed sauna, discussing their feelings toward Jews. The BBC had particularly objected to the sequence on the ground that pubic hair had no place in a political film.

The story doesn’t end there.

Ophuls’s assistant managed to steal a copy of the original version and transport it to New York, where new financing was found. Ophuls restored the missing scenes. In 1976 Paramount released The Memory of Justice in the United States. And the critics went wild, one way or another.

Why does this film inspire such enthusiasm? And such hatred? For the same reasons that Philippe Sands finds it relevant now, thirty years later, when the United States is engaged in another horrifying war. It refuses to offer easy answers to difficult questions.

Sands’s Vanity Fair article and his new book, Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values, scheduled to be published next week, argue,

The abuse, rising to the level of torture, of those captured and detained in the war on terror is a defining feature of the presidency of George W. Bush.

Like the prosecutors at Nuremberg in the 1940s, and like Marcel Ophuls in Memory of Justice in the 1970s, he asks who is ultimately responsible for atrocities committed in a war.

Who is guilty? No one? Everyone?

In the case of U.S. activities in Guantanamo, Sands sides with the principles set forth at Nuremberg:

The origins lie in actions taken at the very highest levels of the administration — by some of the most senior personal advisers to the president, the vice president, and the secretary of defense. At the heart of the matter stand several political appointees — lawyers — who, it can be argued, broke their ethical codes of conduct and took themselves into a zone of international criminality, where formal investigation is now a very real option.

He adds that the people behind the interrogation of detainees like Mohammed al-Qahtani

face a real risk of investigation if they set foot outside the United States. Article 4 of the torture convention criminalizes “complicity” or “participation” in torture, and the same principle governs violations of Common Article 3 [of the Geneva Convention].

He quotes a European judge who said to him,

It’s a matter of time. These things take time. And then something unexpected happens, when one of these lawyers travels to the wrong place.

In the end, Ophuls comes out on the side of Nuremberg as well, rejecting the idea of collective guilt that was so popular at the end of World War II. But he also suggests that in our complex and all-too-human world, it is never possible to achieve true justice. Hence, the epigraph that gives the film its name:

Plato believed that human beings were guided in the course of their brief lives in this imperfect world by the dim recollection of some previous and perfect state of the Soul, by the vague memory of Ideal Virtue and Ideal Justice.

In this imperfect world, that might be all we can hope for.

Thanks for reading. I’m outta here till Monday.

Dunes. One of my favorite mental exercises is to stand on a hilltop in San Francisco and try to imagine what the area looked like two hundred years ago. Erase the houses and streets. What would I see? Dunes. Lots of them. All over the Outside Lands, now home to the Sunset and the Richmond). Even downtown. In the 1840s,

the right-of-way of Market Street was blocked by a sixty-foot sand dune, at the location of the Palace Hotel now, and a hundred yards further west stood a sand hill nearly ninety feet tall. The city soon filled in the ground between Portsmouth Square and Happy Valley at First and Mission Street. The dunes were leveled and the sand used for fill.

These dunes were not the endless reaches of desert sand found in Dune or Lawrence of Arabia. Or the sandy expanses that I grew up with on the East Coast, in places like Jones Beach and Fire Island. San Francisco’s dunes were fairly stable hills, covered with a green lacework of tiny plants, spread like antimacassars over an overstuffed easy chair. Bush lupin. Monkey flowers.

Climb to the top of Turtle Hill, at 15th and Noriega. On a clear day, you can see tomorrow. The majestic scenery contrasts with the poignancy of the view at your feet. Some of these small plants — the dune tansies and the Franciscan wallflowers — are marked for extinction. Although far more humble than the proud and gorgeous rose so beloved by Saint-Exupery’s Little Prince, their fate is no less precarious.

There’s a wonderful website run by Earth Island Institute called Nature in the City. Its goal is

To conserve and restore the nature and biodiversity of San Francisco and connect people with nature where they live.

Good idea! But the preposition in the title is disturbing. And so is the one in the final phrase of the mission statement. “Nature in the City.” “Connect people with nature.”

Not so long ago, people accepted the mind-body dualism proposed by philosophers ranging from Plato to Descartes. The idea was that human beings were composed of two separate entities — the mind and the body — and ne’er the twain shall meet. Made us kinda special, compared with the other, dumber critters of this world.

But no more. Modern science and New Age metaphysics have both demolished the theory. The human mind and body are now taken as a package deal, as one and the same thing.

Now the dichotomy has shifted from inside us to our relationship with the outside world. It’s we versus them. People versus nature. Remember Terence’s old saying, “I am a man, so nothing human is strange to me”? It suggests other things are indeed strange — because they’re nonhuman. The statement lets human beings off the hook for whatever happens in the rest of the world.

This dualism is an issue that the environmental movement is only beginning to address. But as long as we think in terms of a human-nature split, we’re going to have a hard time rectifying the damage that our actions have caused.

The times they are a-changing, perhaps out of necessity. San Francisco “The City That Knows How,” would to well to look slightly to the south. Every year Sustainable San Mateo County issues an “Indicators Report” on the state of the county:

The sustainability of a region typically is measured by markers, or indicators, of community vitality. These include assessments of resources such as air quality, water quality, and biodiversity; social and economic indicators such as housing affordability, crime rates, and unemployment.

Sometimes clichés say it all: We’re all in this together. Sink or swim. That’s the nature of a city.

MediaWatch. It all started in a piece by Carl Nolte published on March 7, called “One Rincon residents are moving in,” where one of the new residents said,

“I feel like an urban pioneer.”

Nolte continued the image, but his tongue seemed rest firmly in his cheek.

Then along came C.W. Nevius, in a column published Sunday. Nevius has found some spirits who are kindred to Nolte’s. One

calls herself a pioneer — ready to take to the edge of the urban frontier, stake out a small piece of property, and hope that it will turn out to be a place they can make a home.

Another, an architect, says,

“They’re homesteaders. Modern homesteaders, charting a new course.”

Nevius chimes in:

They’ve certainly got that pioneering spirit.

Calling gentrifiers “pioneers” is so old hat. Way back in 1996, geographer Neil Smith published a book called The New Urban Frontier. Even then, the term was a bit moldy. Smith notes,

In the language of gentrification, the appeal to frontier imagery has been exact: urban pioneers, urban homesteaders and urban cowboys became the new folk heroes of the urban frontier. In the 1980s, the real estate magazines even talked about “urban scouts” whose job it was to scout the flanks of gentrifying neighborhoods, check the landscape for profitable reinvestment, and, at the same time, to report home about how friendly the natives were. Less optimistic commentators indict the emergence of a new group of “urban outlaws” in connection with inner-city drug cultures.

Moldy or not, words have meaning. In this case, Smith adds,

The term “urban pioneer” is… as arrogant as the original notion of “pioneers” in that it suggests a city not yet socially inhabited; like Native Americans, the urban working class is seen as less than social, a part of the physical environment. [Frederick Jackson] Turner was explicit about this when he called the frontier “the meeting point between savagery and civilization,” and although the 1970s and 1980s frontier vocabulary of gentrification is rarely as explicit, it treats the inner-city population in much the same way.

And it still does.

Thanks for reading. I’m outta here till Friday.

Joy to the World. Visit a major city almost anywhere in the world, and you’re likely to find public art lurking around every corner. Some of it is good; some not. But its mere presence enlivens city streets and amuses passersby.

Visit San Francisco, and you’re likely to feel that something is missing. Except for a few carefully placed pieces, San Francisco has little public art to boast of. Do we think that human-made art detracts from the beauty of natural settings? Tell that to Andy Goldsworthy. Or are we scared that unworthy selections will make us look foolish? Our barren streets already do that.

Suddenly, during the past week, the city has started to come to life.

Wednesday several large bronzes by the Spanish artist Manolo Valdes took up residence in Civic Center Plaza. Solid but whimsical, they provide happy echoes of works in other mediums. They also echo the sculptures in the garden at the de Young Museum.

At the de Young, a different sort of sculpture has taken up residence. Dale Chihuly’s Saffron Neon Tower, composed of blown glass, rises from the center of the Pool of Enchantment, its yellow glow contrasting the dark museum tower behind it.

San Francisco artist Ron Henggeler notes that

the Pool of Enchantment, which has been greeting visitors at the entrance to the de Young since 1917, is by the famous San Francisco sculptor Earl Cummings. It consists of two pumas and an Indian boy playing a flute. Cummings was a protégé of Phoebe Apperson Hearst (mother of William Randolph Hearst). She financed his studies in Paris. Cummings studied as a pupil of Douglas Tilden at the Mark Hopkins Art Institute. (In the former Hopkins mansion. Douglas Tilden is one of California’s and San Francisco’s most famous sculptors. In his day Tilden was known as the Michelangelo of the West.) Cummings eventually became a leading light in San Francisco’s artistic and social circles. He exhibited frequently at the Bohemian Club and after the catastrophic destruction of the city in 1906 was appointed San Francisco’s first Parks Commissioner. He served on that post for 32 years and his influence is still seen all over San Francisco in the display of many well-known public sculptures and monuments.

Another work by Chihuly, Yellow Sun, is in the front courtyard at the Legion of Honor.

The two bits of light are merely the beginning. A full-scale exhibition of Chihuly’s work will open at the de Young on June 14 and run through September 28. And Valdes’s sculptures will be here through August.

After that… after that, others might come. Or our plazas and courtyards might return to their customary bleak state.

MediaWatch. According to front-page stories in yesterday’s Chronicle and Examiner, Mayor Gavin Newsom is jubilant over a recent city controller’s report on the success of his “Care Not Cash” program. Jubilation is nice, for anyone. But it’s not front-page news. The articles present the usual “he said, she said” duet that often passes for news these days: an official statement followed by a quote from a “critic”:

Jennifer Friedenbach, head of the Coalition on Homelessness, said the program puts people in hotel rooms that the poor have always lived in and “their income was taken away to pay for it.”

“It’s not a permanent solution,” she said. “It’s more of a shell game.”

The Coalition usually gets its facts right. If the charge is true, the highly touted success is pretty empty. Any self-respecting newspaper would find out.

The Dark Side. A Newsweek article titled “Getting Away with Torture” closes bleakly:

Despite the fact that senior members of the Bush administration may have violated the War Crimes Act of 1996, the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice, there is scant serious talk of legal accountability….

High-ranking administration officials and enemy combatants may have broken the law, and their legal situations are weirdly parallel. Both show how the rule of law can fracture under the strain of politics. Those alleged lawbreakers at Guantánamo can never be acquitted for purely political — as opposed to legal — reasons. The alleged lawbreakers in the Bush administration will never be held to account on precisely the same grounds.

A recent ACLU report announces the release of documents containing

new details exposing the role of psychologists in military interrogations. The documents also uncover new information about the failure of military medical personnel to report abuses at Abu Ghraib, the military’s use of unlawful interrogation methods subsequent to a directive that was ostensibly meant to end such practices, and detainee deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Director of the ACLU National Security Project, Jameel Jaffer, adds,

Four years have passed since the Abu Ghraib photographs were first published, and yet no senior official has been held responsible for the abuse and torture of prisoners. Senior officials made torture into official policy. Accountability is long overdue.

“Accountability for the authorization of torture and abuse by high-level officials” will be the focus of a House Judiciary Committee Hearing on May 6. Any bets on the outcome of the hearing?

20-20 Hindsight. Political consultant Joe Trippi is having second thoughts about the advice he gave John Edwards.

I should have told him emphatically that he should stay in. My regret that I did not do so — that I let John Edwards down — grows with every day that the fight between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama continues.

Joe, there’s no time like the present. Don your Nikes and just do it.

Thanks for reading. I’m outta here till Monday.

… is an injury to all.

The International Longshoremen’s Union has a long and honorable history in San Francisco. On Thursday, May 1, its members will extend that history by closing down all West Coast ports, in an action that recalls the waterfront strike of 1934:

The ILWU west coast longshore workers have voted to stop work to protest the US war and occupation on Iraq and Afghanistan on May Day 2008. They have also called on the AFL-CIO, Change To Win (CTW) and other labor organizations to join them in action on May Day against the war and to commemorate the International Workers Holiday.

Iraqi port workers responded:

May Day Message from the Port Workers in Iraq to West Coast dock workers in the U.S.

General Union of Port Workers of Iraq

April 29th, 2008

In solidarity with the ILWU, the General Union of Port Workers in Iraq will stop work for one hour on May Day in the ports of Umm Qasr and Khor Al Zubair….

We are certain that a better world will only be created by the workers and what you are doing is an example and proof of what we say. The labor movement is the only element in the society that is able to change the political equations for the benefit of mankind. We in Iraq are looking up to you and support you until the victory over the US administration’s barbarism is achieved….

Meanwhile, labor leaders in Iraq sent the following message:

May Day 2008 Statement from the Iraqi Labour Movement

To the Workers and All Peace Loving People of the World

April 29th, 2008

On this day of international labour solidarity we call on our fellow trade unionists and all those worldwide who have stood against war and occupation to increase support for our struggle for freedom from occupation - both the military and economic.

We call upon the governments, corporations and institutions behind the ongoing occupation of Iraq to respond to our demands for real democracy, true sovereignty and self-determination free of all foreign interference.

Five years of invasion, war and occupation have brought nothing but death, destruction, misery and suffering to our people. In the name of our “liberation,” the invaders have destroyed our nation’s infrastructure, bombed our neighbourhoods, broken into our homes, traumatized our children, assaulted and arrested many of our family members and neighbours, permitted the looting of our national treasures, and turned nearly twenty percent of our people into refugees….

Somewhere, Harry Bridges must be dancing.

Thanks for reading. I’m outta here till Friday.

When the world was too much with samurai in 17th- and 18th-century Japan, they headed down to the Yoshiwara district of low-city Edo. Last week, in a similar mood, I headed down to the Drama & Desire show at the San Francisco Asian Art Museum. There I had to make do with paintings of kabuki actors and courtesans. The samurai had the real thing. But since the paintings in the museum were commissioned by wealthy samurai, they also saw what I saw.

We saw a place gone topsy-turvy. Outside the walls of the Yoshiwara, Buddhist priests talked about the fleeting quality of life in this world. They called it ukiyo, the floating world. Inside the Yoshiwara, ukiyo became the very reason for life:

Living only for the moment, turning our full attention to the pleasures of the moon, the snow, the cherry blossoms and the maple leaves; singing songs, drinking wine, diverting ourselves in just floating, floating: caring not a whit for the pauperism staring us in the face, refusing to be disheartened, like a gourd floating along with the river current: this is what we call the floating world.

It was a sensuous life, filled with textures and colors, grounded in the sights and seasons of the natural world.

But still, it was topsy-turvy. Outside the Yoshiwara walls, devout painters depicted saints in familiar scenes drawn from the sutras. Inside, irreverent painters depicted popular entertainers in the same scenes. Imagine George Clooney in drag, portraying the Virgin Mary.

Everything was upside down. Outside, Confucian teachers defined social relations as dutiful, and women as good wives and mothers. Inside, social relations were playful, for those who could pay. Women were fascinating, intelligent, cultured creatures, who inspired dreams and works of art. And they were courtesans.

They were sexual beings, as were the men who flocked to their sides. In a country that had only passing familiarity with Christianity, sex was not original sin. It was just sex. It was fun. It was one of the pleasures of the floating world. And it was one of the many visual themes that attracted artists. (At the same time, it goes without saying that life for denizens of the Yoshiwara was risky and restricted. But so was the life of a samurai.)

Many of the paintings in the show are triptychs. On the left is the portrait of a middle-class woman. On the right is a geisha. In the middle, the place of honor, stands a courtesan. In other paintings — often panoramas of an entire street — a courtesan in a bright kimono and obi sits prominently in the center. It’s hard to find a modern, Western parallel. Critics have compared courtesans to movie stars, but they must have been referring to a different era. It’s hard to imagine Paris Hilton, or even Angelina Jolie, inspiring men with the kind of star-struck longing that these women commanded.

Something has gotten lost in translation. And it’s our loss, for both men and women.

There’s an old short story called “Tattoo” (”Shisei,” sometimes translated as “The Tattooer”) by the writer Tanizaki Jun’ichiro that illustrates what I mean. Although known for its elements of obsession and sado-masochism, the story is essentially a tale of transformation. The plot revolves around the elaborate image that a tattoo artist inscribes on a young woman’s back. The image — a spider — changes her from a demure maiden to a powerful, self-confident woman.

A spider. What kind of spider could do that? Surely not the small brown variety that spins cobwebs in the corner of your attic.

The earliest translator of this story into English made an odd choice. I don’t know if he had been inoculated with a deep sense of sin. Or he had a horror of strong women. Or he simply knew nothing about spiders. But he turned this one into a black widow.

The transformation was as extreme as the one that the heroine underwent.

Tanizaki’s spider was a jorogumo — a courtesan spider. (Click on the link & scroll down to see her in all her glory.) Unlike the black widow, its bite is not lethal. Unlike the black widow, it is a beautiful creature. Like its human namesake, it stands out in a crowd, its red, yellow, and black markings resembling the pattern on a richly embroidered kimono.

When “Tattoo” appeared in 1910, the glories of the Yoshiwara had begun to fade. Following its astonishing defeat of Russia in 1905, Japan had taken a position among the major powers. The rest of the world took the country seriously. And many Japanese questioned whether something had been lost in the process.

Tanizaki originally set the story in the present, but then he rewrote it, moving it back to an earlier, less fraught time. “Tattoo” is too bizarre to be nostalgic. Tanizaki was too much a man of his own era to yearn for the past. Like the painters displayed in the show at the Asian Art Museum, his concerns were artistic. Like them, he was excited by the act of creation. And creativity, he must have known, thrived when people were comfortable in their own resplendent skins.

Thanks for reading. I’m outta here till Wednesday.

On the third planet from the sun, Bob Egelko wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle:

San Francisco — Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, a now-defunct organization that was once on the government’s terrorist list, said it learned it had been a surveillance target from a document that the National Security Agency inadvertently turned over in 2004.

The foundation returned the document at the government’s request. The Ninth U.S Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in November that the document was so sensitive that Al-Haramain’s lawyers couldn’t even rely on their recollections of it to establish wiretapping.

Elsewhere, in a parallel universe, a lawyer named Joseph L. walked down a long corridor in one of those gray nondescript buildings that houses government bureaucrats. In front of him, a uniformed guard stood beside a closed door. The door’s frosted glass was lit from behind. It was labeled with black lettering that read, “International Trading Corporation.

As L. approached, the guard held up his hand. L. stopped. He shifted his briefcase to his left hand and began to reach into the inside pocket of his suit jacket. The guard stepped forward and grasped L.’s wrist.

“Keep your hands where I can see them,” he said.

L. withdrew his hand and waited.

The guard snapped, “Identification, please.”

“It’s in my pocket,” L. said. “May I get it out?”

The guard pulled out an electronic wand and waved it over L.’s body. The wand emitted a soft beeping sound.

Satisfied, the guard stepped back. “Go ahead,” he said.

L. pulled out his wallet and handed his driver’s license to the guard, who read it carefully and consulted a list by his side.

The guard turned and pressed a button on the doorframe. L. could hear the sound of a buzzer on the other side.

The door opened. A small dark man looked out and motioned to L. to follow him.

The two passed through a large empty anteroom and into another hallway. After they had walked about a hundred meters, they came to a doorway flanked by two guards. One took L.’s briefcase and scanned it with an electronic wand. The other held up a small device that looked like a camera and pointed it toward the irises of L.’s eyes.

The guards nodded, and the small dark man rested his forefinger on a sensor near the door. The door swung open. He led L. into a small windowless office and seated him before an antiquated computer.

“This is where you’ll prepare your brief,” he said.

L. nodded. He knew the drill. How many times had he done it before, in the same office with the same unnamed man by his side? And yet the man never showed signs of recognizing him.

L. began to type. His task was simple: to prepare a brief in support of his client’s case, in response to the government’s arguments. He had never seen the government’s arguments and never would. They were based on classified documents, and their release might endanger national security. It was up to him to imagine what those arguments might be and to frame an appropriate response.

L. typed steadily for two hours, pausing only occasionally to rub his wrists. He was a poor typist, plagued by misspellings. All the while, the small dark man sat on a straight-backed chair, staring at the wall or examining his fingernails. The only sound was the soft click of the computer keys.

Finally, L. leaned back in his chair and stretched. He pushed the Print button on the computer and waited while his brief was spewed out page by page. He read what he had written, made a few corrections, and printed it out again. This time he handed it to his companion. He knew his own security clearance was so low that he could not expect a copy. He had no idea if the judge would receive one. He knew that the judge would never see the documents on which it was based.

The small dark man unplugged the computer and ran L.’s first draft through a shredder. He emptied L.’s briefcase and shredded his notes as well. Silently beckoning to L., he led him back the way they had come, down the long corridor, through the anteroom, and out the door.

L. walked quickly out of the building. When he reached the sidewalk, the sound of the passing traffic seemed deafening. The warm pungent air assaulted his nostrils. He paused, sloughing off the constricting atmosphere he had just left.

He wondered if he should call his client and tell him how the session had gone. There wasn’t much point to it. He never dared say too much, on the assumption that their conversations were being monitored. In any case, he was never sure that his efforts would bear any fruit. But he had to try. The knowledge that L. was working for his release would bring some measure of hope to his client, even if that hope soon turned out to be unfounded.

He pulled out his cellphone and dialed the number of the Terrorist Detention Camp.

Meanwhile, back on the third planet from the sun, Patrick Radden Keefe wrote in the New Yorker:

In October, [lawyer Lynne] Bernabei wrote a letter to the Justice Department. The attorneys representing Al Haramain had been dealing with a novel quandary of legal ethics. If they had a reasonable belief that any telephone conversation with Seda or Buthi might be monitored by the N.S.A., could they talk to their clients without violating attorney-client confidentiality? Bernabei requested confirmation that the government was not intercepting her “written or oral communications” with her clients. Two weeks later, she received a response from the lawyers at the Justice Department. They wouldn’t confirm or deny.

Thanks for reading. I’m outta here till Monday.

SOMETIMES THE NEWS sounds like it’s a literal translation from Albanian. The words are familiar. But they don’t make any sense… Maybe Humpty Dumpty has been running the show. You remember, the ovoid figure Alice encounters in Through the Looking Glass:

“When I use a word,’”Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”

Like Alice, my head is spinning.

YESTERDAY BEGAN COLD & GRAY, so I made a strong cup of coffee & curled up on the couch with the San Francisco Chronicle. I don’t mean to pick on the Chron. It could have been any newspaper… Outside, the fog hovered far off, outside the Golden Gate. In my living room, even though the words on the page in front of me were bright & clear, their meaning was decidedly fuzzy. I considered importing a foghorn from the bridge… Reasoning that bellowing never solved anything, I didn’t. Instead, I got lost in the pea soup that passed for news. Floundering like the Cosco Busan, I crashed right into the first story.

A STUDY conducted by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health and the University of Washington found,

A long, steady rise in life expectancy in the United States apparently isn’t being shared by everyone, and hasn’t been for years….

Race appears less a factor in health disparities than income.

Americans — even white Americans — are dying early. Scary stuff. But what’s this “income” stuff?

Alameda County Health Officer Dr. Anthony Iton added some local observations:

We found the same thing in Alameda County. Blacks in the flatlands live less long than blacks in the hills; whites in the flatlands live less long than whites in the hills.

Even scarier. What’s going on?

The Humpty Dumpty reporters masterfully avoided using the one word that would best explain the situation: class. The story circled all around it, like a parent playing hide & seek with a toddler, but the word never appears. Never.

Why not? It’s a perfectly good word. But Humpty Dumpty hasn’t mastered it.

AS EVERYBODY KNOWS, there are races in the United States & genders. But only one class. And all of us — Bill Gates & Joe Sixpack alike — are part of it… Everybody but Harvard University knows that. In a recent roundtable discussion, Harvard social scientists asked, “Is the United States Coming Apart As a Society?” Their response:

The shocking fact is that segregation by class has increased.

The shocking fact is that they used the word class at all. But Harvard being Harvard, I guess it can afford to shock. They continue,

too often in our public discourse in America class is taken as a code for talking about race.

Public discourse. That’s the substance of our political discussions. As the present presidential campaign has made clear, American politics is all about race & gender. The smart folks at Harvard have noticed the problem as well:

American politics is notable for never having been sharply polarized along class lines. There isn’t an ideology that one can use to organize around these issues. And that seems to be a really powerful constraint on doing anything about this through standard political mechanisms.

Yup. It’s hard to pay much attention to a problem that has no name.

The issue is figuring out how to find language and a framework that move the white middle and upper-middle classes to see it as in their interest to support progressive policies.

Kinda sends chills up your spine, doesn’t it, to hear that word spoken out loud in polite company… But Harvard takes its role as educator of the elite very seriously.

Can you be the head of a major corporation without really understanding these issues? I would say it’s our responsibility at the very least to ensure that nobody should graduate from Harvard without understanding the nature of inequality in the world.

Maybe they could give a class on the subject to reporters as well.

AS THE DAY WENT ON, Humpty Dumpty continued his disconnect between the world as he defined it and the world we live in… Early in the evening, SFGate updated its website with the news people had waited for all day:

NEWS ALERT | UPDATED 6:06 PM PDT.

Clinton defeats Obama in Pennsylvania primary

DAVID ESPO and BETH FOUHY, Associated Press Writers
(04-22) 18:16 PDT PHILADELPHIA, (AP) —

Hillary Rodham Clinton won the Pennsylvania primary Tuesday night, defeating Barack Obama and staving off elimination in a riveting race for the Democratic presidential nomination….

She showed her blue collar bona fides one night by knocking down a shot of whiskey, then taking a mug of beer as a chaser. Obama went bowling in his attempt to win over working-class [sic!] voters.

And in the manner that bloggers worldwide have come to know and love, the story concluded:

Share your thoughts on this story.

MY FIRST THOUGHTS were unprintable. So were my second… How does a thoughtful person respond to an election that’s based on bowling and beer? Then I remembered the words of a writer far more skilled than I:

Things have been going swimmingly at the Adults for Change headquarters. Our motto, “Yes, we’re elitist: You want to make something out of it?,” has gained new currency, and people are flocking to the idea that, yes, actually, they do want a president who’s smarter than a shiftless layabout, and I mean here no disrespect to shiftless layabouts….

We are a pressure group dedicated to the proposition that both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are experienced and intelligent public servants, and we’d really like to hear their opinions on a wide variety of non-gotcha issues….

Clinton is a lifelong wonk, and Obama comes from a farm state — they know what the real issues are. We’ve had 7.5 years of a president who couldn’t find an issue with a flashlight and three valets. Could we please put the Swiftboaters and the Beltway insiders in a cage, and let the candidates talk sensibly about sensible things?

Hooray for Jon Carroll! Forget about that foghorn on the Golden Gate Bridge. It just makes a lot of noise anyway… Cut & paste Carroll’s column onto an email form & send it to every politician & media maven you can think of.

Start at the top:

Barack Obama

Hillary Clinton

John McCain

Thanks for reading. I’m outta here till Friday.

WANNA WIN an easy bet? Next time you’re walking down a busy street in SF, wager that most of the people there have never read Herb Caen. Go up to ten passersby & ask ‘em. Easy 20 bucks! Not only will more than half never have read Caen’s columns; they most likely will never have heard of him… A Berkeley friend recently descended from his ivory tower & asked me to describe those columns. They created a whole city, I said, that became the real San Francisco for millions of people. His description wasn’t necessarily true. And it left out a lot. But it was the only picture out there for 60 years… In the 11 years since Caen’s death, the city has changed. Like the rest of the country, it’s gotten a lot younger. Those twenty-somethings who clog our sidewalks weren’t even reading the newspaper when Caen typed his last three dots…. Yes, typed. He was old school. But take a look at any of those antiquarian pieces. Except for their lack of links, they could be postings on the Web, for the Sackamenna Kid had the soul of a blogger.

CAEN RARELY VENTURED South of the Slot. Neighborhoods like the Mission hovered just outside his field of vision, providing what he calls in Baghdad by the Bay

a special flavor — not of San Francisco, but of any small town in any era of the American story.

Imagine Our Town set at 24th & Mission… His idea of Earth Day would have been an afternoon at the ballpark. And his mind would have undoubtedly boggled at the image of his pal Willie Brown in running shorts, carrying the Olympic torch. Toothpicks, for Caen, were meant to hold olives in martinis… He would have missed a terrific show on Saturday. While Northsiders were showing their kids the wonders of composting at Crissy Field, Southsiders took to the streets to celebrate the workers of the earth in the Cesar E. Chavez Holiday Parade.

THE MISSION WAKES UP early, even on weekends. When I wandered down to 24th Street about 8:00 on Saturday morning, the SFPD was already towing parked cars to clear the way. When I went back about 1:00, the procession had just passed & the parking spaces were full again. I wondered where the cars had gone for the five hours in between… The parade, with the usual contingents of union reps & political candidates, made its way to the appropriately named Cesar Chavez School & set up shop in the playground. Outside, on Folsom, SF’s finest leaned on their bikes, chatting with the folks in the street. Just inside the gate, the polished-till-they-dazzled cars of the Boulevard Kings stirred up lowrider memories. Farther inside, the drums of Danza Azteca Ixtlalli set the pavement to vibrating. One tall brown-skinned dancer, his chest bare & muscular above a short white apron, his feet moving with impossible speed, may have set a few pulses to vibrating as well… Mothers & children converged on the scene from all directions. One little girl & her mother walked along, chatting happily in Spanish, until they turned a corner & heard the drums. The girl stopped. Her eyes flashed with excitement. “Come on,” she said in English. “Let’s go.” Only four years old & taking on the world… Above it all, on the wall of the school, the larger-than-life figure of Cesar Chavez hovered, smiling a benediction.

RUMP IN THE AIR, a small terrier trotted ahead of me as I left the festival & walked toward Garfield Park. In tow were a couple of Urban Pioneers at the end of a long leash. When the party reached the park, the little dog decided it was time to head for higher ground. Several men were asleep on the slope near the poolhouse — Caen would have called them “Skid Rowgues,” but these guys just looked tired. The pup marched herself & her people right into the middle of them, squatted & offered them a wet, doggy greeting. The slumberers looked at her, bleary-eyed. The UP’s stood there, oblivious. They didn’t know it was better to let sleeping gods lie.

BACK ON BERNAL HILL, the wind was fierce. It blew the last remnants of the plum blossoms into pink snowdrifts. It must have blown the resident kestrel pair to shelter, because they were nowhere to be seen. Usually, they hang out near Peralta Park, where the folks who live on the hill keep an eye on them. The dogs who live on the hill give their rapt attention to the pursuit of balls & ignore the raptors… On quieter days, the birds follow a regular ritual. They meet on top of a utility pole — you can see white stains covering the sides — where the male turns over his latest catch to the female. She flies off to a nearby treetop & waits a few minutes before heading over to the nest & hungry babies. He flies off in the opposite direction, scanning the skies for predators. Reminds me of some male humans I know, who are happy to bring home the bacon but wouldn’t be caught dead changing diapers.

BACK TO CAEN, who set this train of thought in motion. His vision of SF may have had rose-colored edges. But it was clear-sighted, maybe too clear-sighted for the city he served. Take the end of his very first column:

Painful Thought: On clear days, when Treasure Island is plainly discernible from the mainland, we look somewhat dolefully at the palm trees which have magically arisen on its surface. We don’t like to believe that this is a concession to the Easterner’s idea of California, an idea planted and nurtured by the Chamber of Commerce of Southern California. Come, all ye fogs!

After Caen died, the City of San Francisco set aside a small portion of the Embarcadero as “Herb Caen Way…” (note the three dots). And then, in a fit of ionic injustice, it proceeded to line the thoroughfare with palms. Come, all ye fogs indeed! Sic those palms!

Thanks for reading. I’m outta here till Wednesday.