Sorry for the low-tech rerouting, but: 

If you reached this page because of a link to a numbered item that is no longer on my main page, you can get to it by adding "#" and the number -- e.g. "#727" -- to the end of the URL above.

Don't know if people remember this song from 2004. I do. I'm going to be busy elsewhere these next few days for obvious reasons.

10/29/04 12:13 p.m. (Link here)

I haven't been able to check the source directly, but a copy of this photo arrived from a friend of a family member recently. The friend's description says an unaffiliated group of farmers in Hadley, Massachusetts decided to spell out a political question in constrasting colors of cabbage plants. Knowing Hadley politics this is almost too good to be true, but if the text is accurate, photo credit goes to Frank Ward. A little Googling shows that the image, with text similar to what the friend sent, has appeared on Western Massachusetts Indymedia and on a local message board where the poster was also charmed but a touch skeptical. Well, anyway, if this is some kind of hoax it sure is a clever one.

10/29/04 9:20 a.m. (Link here)

...Every American citizen must have the right to vote...Yet the harsh fact is that in many places in this country men and women are kept from voting simply because they are Negroes... No law that we now have on the books...can insure the right to vote when local officials are determined to deny it... There is no Constitutional issue here. The command of the Constitution is plain. There is no moral issue. It is wrong--deadly wrong--to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country. There is no issue of States' rights or National rights. There is only the struggle for human rights.

So did we defeat our worst national shame only to sink back into it within forty years?

10/28/04 4:32 p.m. (Link here)

The voter suppression problem is getting even more important than the winner of next week's election. If we as a nation don't knock off shenanigans like this, and fast, we'll become a banana republic to the rest of the world.

10/28/04 12:32 p.m. (Link here)

Lovely tribute in the Globe: "All across New England you can hear the sound of blackboards being erased." Says there are Red Sox flags appearing on gravestones in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge. Finally, finally.

10/28/04 11:47 a.m. (Link here)

So they did it. The folks J. has been calling "the weird hair team." Exuberant in a chilly waterlogged field while the St. Louis fans turned sour and thin-lipped and booed their own players. Even Tony LaRussa had a mean Giluiani look, which he didn't when he managed the A's in '89. While the Boston "idiots" played smart and loose-limbed and left behind the Babe and Buckner and all the other curses. Finally, victory. This is Boston's year after all.

10/27/04 12:04 a.m. (Link here)

It's never a dull moment in San Francisco politics. (Out-of-town readers who feel otherwise are invited to skip this item and view these cute kitten pictures instead.) This week, it's the spectacle of Gavin Newsom, glamorous boy mayor, forced by the city's hotel lockout to choose between the unions and the Hotel Council, both of which helped elect him. Upshot: he joins a picket line with members of Local 2, the politically noisy hotel and restaurant union, which didn't even endorse him for mayor last year. The Chron is being surprised and it sounds like some union folks are pleasantly astonished. But the move makes sense for a couple reasons & don't tell me it's based on populist sentiment. (1) Newsom is on a program to prove he's his own man. He started pointedly disagreeing with ex-mayor Willie Brown not long after Brown helped elect him. And (2) When we were all getting polling calls for a while there, I think more than one poll asked whether it was a good idea to support organized labor. I've been guessing for a while that the Newsom bloc may make a point in coming supervisorial elections of noting that the Supervisors to their left (especially Gonzalez and Daly) are willing to accept support from non-union developer types. Now that he's in office, Newsom needs the unions' public support more than he needs the Hotel Council, and when the grandstanding is over, Newsom will be back helping out downtown big business on lots of other issues. All he cares about is people? Yeah, bring on Richard Gere in "Chicago" singing, "All I Care About Is Love."

10/26/04 10:25 a.m. (Link here)

Not to recommend spoilers in this of all elections but the Kafka-Orwell 2004 page is worth a wheezy giggle. [UPDATE: Oops, I should have credited Mags for this one.]

10/25/04 11:25 a.m. (Link here)

I have some Orwell-related vacation photos up at Horizon as of last night.

Am meanwhile trying to catch up on this "reality-based community" business. Seems the U.S. got weirder while we were away. Of all the historically reverberating rhetoric we've heard these last four years, this may be the single sentence most likely to make Hannah Arendt spin in her grave: "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality." urrgggggh.

[P.S. It's a strong consolation that "Member of the Reality-Based Community" is catching on as a helpfully unifying label for the large category of persons -- not all Democrats by any means -- who believe two plus two does happen to equal four regardless of the equation's political consequences.]

10/24/04 9:16 a.m. (Link here)

Just got a note from a San Francisco reader asking about the shadowy "California Urban Issues Project," which he says is sending him flyers without adequate contact information. This group is a 501(c)(4) "expenditure lobbyist" entity that has apparent ties to downtown business organizations but does not disclose the source of its funding. I've been watching these folks since they first cropped up a year ago and they still haven't come clean about precisely who is behind them. Now they've showed up yet again in the local Board of Supervisors election -- as usual, pro-Newsom and, as usual, using the essentially Republican tactic of courting well-heeled voters by playing on fear of the poor.

I'm not quite back to a normal posting schedule yet but if anyone in SF has copies of the latest CUIP flyers, please email me -- or, better yet, post scanned images of these things &/or mail them to the Bay Guardian so they can be analyzed in full public view, not just in the narrow bandwidth that CUIP's direct mail guys have in mind.

10/21/04 6:59 p.m. (Link here)

Oh dear, looks like it has been very nearly three weeks. Sorry about that.

We've been in various places, including a driving trip from Madrid, Spain to Arles, France and back, guided by the shades of Cervantes, Orwell, Walter Benjamin, and V. Van Gogh. Most memorable were two visits at sunset: one to a war-damaged hillside in the Sierra de Alcubierre and another to the hills on either side of Portbou where poor old Walter met his end. We did also have a cup of coffee in Huesca. But the more I've learned about that Spanish war, the more alien and awful it seems, and the less suitable for romanticization. Just too many bones, not to mention all the splintered and complicated alliances. War being, of course, always dreadful after all.

We wondered if the province of Aragon has recovered from that war even now, though per Orwell the farm country there was especially poor in 1937 too. Yes, we were visiting in the autumn after much of the harvesting (the grapes were still heavy in some fields), but it did seem like there just weren't enough people around, in the small towns or out doing farm work. Whereas Zaragoza, capital of the province, is working on a huge housing construction boom. Are the villages just sending all their young adults to the towns maybe? Dunno. Sietamo is pretty and quaint, as is Huesca, but Barbastro still looks hunkered down -- I think Orwell said "bleak and chipped," and it's still not a bad description. Hard to form any fair opinion of such places in a few minutes' visit but all except the biggest towns in that area seemed too quiet.

I'm catching up slowly on the U.S. political situation. For now here are a couple of good links: Bush Relatives for Kerry and the William Gibson blog, which has started up again. Gibson's explanation: "as the Spanish philospher Unamuno said, 'At times, to be silent is to lie.'"

10/3/04 6:37 p.m. (Link here)

Been out of proper Net contact for a few days and it´s such a relief to see Kerry truly did win the debate. Supposing there´s any such thing as winning such a spinfest, but maybe there is. From news reports it sounds like he finally stated some kind of pride in having recognized the Vietnam War was wrong. And people liked what he said. Maybe this is where it all begins to turn for the better...?

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