Sunday, November 26, 2006

Street Vermin

Clunk!
What the hell was that?
Where are we?
Somewhere around Cedar Lake or is it Lake of the Isles?
The twisting streets roll from one to the other and the multistory Georgian revival and craftsman homes blur together. We are lost.
It is a late fall Saturday night in 1982, and we are drunken teenagers looking for a party.
Was it from frustration or thrill that Ryan was driving too fast?
The street curved left, his parents Honda didn't quite. We hit the curb.

We get out of the car.
"Shit!" Sam's laughing. "Check that out!"
The hub cap is crumpled and the wheel seems crooked.
Ryan thinks quickly.
"Let's find another Honda. We'll just switch the hubcaps."
Sam laughs. "Yeah, let's fuckin' do it!"
We find another Honda, and Ryan pops it off with a crowbar.
Somehow they wrestle it on to the broken wheel.
We take off.
SssskkkkaaSssskkkkaaSssskkkkaa...
It didn't do anything.
That car was wrecked...a broken axle.

Mothers Against Drunk Driving achieved their greatest lobbying success in 1984 when the National Minimum Drinking Age Act forced every state to change their drinking age to 21, but is it the liquor that kills or the car?

We have a cultural design problem. Alcohol is a central part of U.S. culture, and our cities do not permit us to go out drinking without also driving. Why don't groups that spend millions promoting "the designated driver" advocate better public transportation and urban design with the same fervor?

Drunk or sober at 16 we were all speed demons. We took any chance we had to make our tires screech. The likelihood of a teen driver bending metal must be near 100%. While local news obsesses about the dangers of ghetto youth, the violent urges of suburban kids are allowed to wreak havoc on the highways.

T.W. Adorno writes,"Which driver is not tempted, merely by the power of his engine, to wipe out the vermin of the street, pedestrians, children and cyclists."

In other words, the callousness of the NRA's dogma "Gun's don't kill people, people kill people," is equally sick if applied to automobiles.

George Weller may have hit the gas, but his 1992 Buick Le Sabre killed 10 people.

Monday, November 20, 2006

Thanksgiving 2006

For the Sunday before Thanksgiving I was asked by my pastor to speak briefly to our congregation on what I was thankful for. This is what I said:

Thank you Miss Rosa, you are the spark,
You started our freedom movement
Thank you Sister Rosa Parks.

These lyrics by the Neville brothers honor the famous seamstress from Montgomery Alabama who defied the violence of Jim Crow and inspired a struggle for civil rights that continues to this day.

I hear the soaring vocals of Mahalia Jackson wash over me whenever I consider the courage of heroes like Parks, Dr. King, James Lawson, John Lewis, Fannie Lou Hamer...

And I am equally moved when I think of the thousands who often go unnoticed in their work for social justice.

One of these is Hee Pok "Grandma" Kim who learned her activism as a child aiding the Korean resistance to Japanese occupation and now in her 80s organizes fellow immigrants to demand the transit bureaucracy improve the deplorable conditions faced by the mostly working class people of color who ride the bus in L.A.

When I hear Christians say a million dollar home in the Encino hills with a collection of Porsches in the garage is a sign of God's blessing I am somewhat confused. It is true that everything we have is a gift from God, but shouldn't we see the truly blessed as those who have the strength to abandon material possessions--like the followers of Jesus--and give their lives over to serving the poor, the weak, the oppressed?

I don't have the gifts of a Parks or a Kim, but their resolve, and those who share their thread of the divine keep the dream flashing, pushing the divine within me to change the world.
And this is what I am thankful for.

Monday, November 13, 2006

Loft Living

Skip a life completely.

I have reached my seat and the bus door is closed.
"She's Coming!"
A woman with a cane is persistently limping down the sidewalk.
The bus pulls away.
"SHE'S COMING!!" the man shouts again.
The bus stops, and the woman steps on.
"I know we're in a hurry," the man comments.
"Safety is the MTA's number one concern." He looks back at the woman sitting behind him and shakes her hand. "Am I right?"
At the next stop several people get on.
"Step on up and find your seat. We're in a hurry," he says.

Stuff it in a cup.

I've seen this guy before. The commentator. He calls all the stops with the flourish of a streetcar conductor of old. "Victory Boulevard, transfer here for line 164."
When the bus is crowded he calls, "Let'em on, Let'em on! Move to the back!"
As people move off-"Watch your step. Don't forget your belongings."

She said, Money is like us in time,

In between messages, he engages in conversations with his neighbors. They must be one way conversations, but he is such a great performer--leaning in close, eyes engaged--it looks like talk between intimate friends.

It lies, but can't stand up.

These bizarre Augenblicken of public closeness remind me of a stoned moment from the summer of '88 sitting on the roof of a loft in downtown Minneapolis. At the top of our voices we sang Lou Reed lyrics to yuppies walking in and out of a Sports Bar.

Down for you is up.

Competing to see who could hold the longest note, that night I had the lungs of an elephant.

Linger AAAAHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH....ooooon!!!!!

The response from below was mixed. Most smiled and waved, but one guy, in an apparent effort to defend his ladyfriend from the serenade of strangers, looked up and shouted, "Shut the fuck up you Faggots!"
In our euphoria, we took this as encouragement. After all this was Minneapolis, where the night before we had visited the Disneyland of Gay Bars, "The 90s", which, on floor one, had both a male strip club and a disco, floor two, a piano bar, and floor three, a drag show.
"We love you too, Cutie!"

your pale blue eyes.

Sunday, November 05, 2006

Begin the Diversions

Heading south on Reseda at 2:15 on a weekday afternoon it is not unusual to hit a clog, but today is different. It's like we're waiting in line for American Idol try outs. What's the delay? Twenty minutes and four blocks later we find out. They are resurfacing a stretch of Reseda between Roscoe and Saticoy, so the two lanes of southbound traffic have to be diverted onto one of the northbound lanes. The Roscoe stop is on the south corner, but the driver lets people off on the north before merging to the left. On the south corner, a half dozen people wait, unsure what to do since the street in front of them has been torn up and blocked off from traffic. In other words, the bus can no longer pull up to the curb, so where will it stop? As the light turns green and the bus finally heads south into the northbound lane they find out--the bus just drives on by as they wave their hands hopelessly in the air.

Not surprisingly, at any given time there are over a dozen major resurfacing projects taking place on the streets of Los Angeles. The Bureau of Street Services has an annual budget over 170 million. Most of this budget comes out of general revenues collected on all city residents, whether they own cars or not. This makes sense since streets are vital to urban infrastructure. Only the most hard core libertarian would argue local streets be privately funded--each person choosing whether to surface in front of their house or not, making driving to the grocery store a bumpy adventure constantly moving from asphalt to gravel to dirt to cobblestone.

In Europe, mass transit was early on recognized as an equally important part of the transportation network that required publicly funding. By contrast, in the U.S. it was considered a private business which not only should be self-sustaining but also taxed, helping to fund the construction of roads. This logic, not--once again it must be emphasized--a GM conspiracy, is largely responsible for the collapse of public transportation in U.S. cities, including L.A.

This does not mean the auto lobby was without influence on public policy. One of their biggest victories was convincing both states and the federal government to create highway trust funds. These funds created out of gas taxes and other auto related fees were dedicated solely to the construction of highways helping to create the fantastic "freeway" systems that dominate cities. States created constitutional amendments prohibiting the diversion of these funds to anything but highways. This sounds reasonable until you realize that cars have to eventually leave the highway and go on local streets, paid for by local municipalities. In the 1970s cities recognized the need for public transportation, and a small slice of highway funds began being diverted to mass transit, but by then the damage had been done.

Non-divertability is still a bad idea, so I am opposing proposition 1A, which extends the restrictions on California's highway fund. Yes, it is now called the "transportation fund", and a sliver goes to mass transit, but the problem with non-divertability is it gives the illusion that car drivers are paying their way. As has been pointed out, gas taxes would have to be at least twice as high to cover not just the cost of local streets but also police and emergency services that keep drivers from killing one another any more than they already do.

On the other hand, to redress the legacy of transit neglect, non-divertability might be a good idea. No money should be diverted to building highway lanes until all California cities have fast and convenient public transportation.

Madaboutla's proposition recommendations:
State:
1a no
1b no---more highway lanes/more smog.
1c yes--I'm not a big supporter of state bond measures, a way to redistribute wealth to Wall Street elites, but housing is in more of a crisis than transportation.
1d no--of course we need money for education facilities, but progressive taxation, not bonds is the answer.
1e no--isn't flood control precisely the cause of ecological disaster?
83 no--even victims rights groups oppose this malicious measure.
84 yes--more bonds, but this flood control measure has a conservation focus.
85 no--sure children should let their parents know if they're in trouble, unless their parents are the trouble.
86 yes--higher cigarette prices, fewer deaths.
87 yes--higher gas prices, fewer deaths.
88 no--a new kind of regressive tax.
89 yes--public campaign financing is a start.
90 no--"property rights"=land theft.
City:
H yes--affordable housing bonds.
J yes--what the heck?
R yes--term limits are bad but lobbying limits are good.