Editorials

It’s That Time of Year—or actually it’s the trailing edge of the year, the remains of another year which has come and gone, seemingly in the twinkle of an eye.

For the politically minded, the good news at the national level is that the infamous Red Wave turned out to be a mirage. The bad news is that the Red Menace will be kinda sorta running the House of Representatives for a couple of years, and they could do a fair bit of harm in that time.


(For those of us well past a certain age, it’s beyond ironic that The Repugs have morphed into The Reds, a title formerly owned by lefties of all stripes.)

And of course, 2022 started with a bang with the investigation into the Republican Riot in the previous year. The best you could say about that event is that the hearings about it made for some great TV.

For the politically minded, local chapter, the bad news is the relentless progress of the neo-liberal version of urban renewal, Sacramento style, spearheaded by the likes of Scott Wiener, Nancy Skinner and Buffy Wicks. Evidently the message about what’s happening in downtown San Francisco hasn’t reached Sacto, let alone Berkeley.

It turns out that Manhattanization is still not a good brand. Who knew?

Those Big Ugly Boxes, both the expensive tiny apartments for techniks and their empty former offices, are now a drug on the market, if you believe the aghast stories in the shrinking SF Chronicle.

And along with the annoying things that this gang and their allies are doing, what they aren’t doing is even worse.

Unhoused people are camping everywhere. Citizens of Everywhere believe that’s because the Everywhere City Council has created munificent incentives for Those People to pitch their tents on Everywhere’s streets.

The usual simple questions still have the obvious answers.

To wit: Why are Those People still poor? Because they don’t have enough money.

Why do some of Them act crazy? Because they’re mentally ill and can’t get help.

Why are they so dirty? Because they don’t have showers.

Why do they sleep in tents? Because they don’t have houses

Etc., etc. etc.

So-called Democratic legislators, who enjoy a super-majority in the state legislature, persist in pushing market-based neo-liberal solutions worthy of my father’s generation of old-timey moderate Republicans: Build a whole bunch of any kind of units and the market will decide what’s needed.

Well, it looks like the market has decided that Those People can damn well sleep in tents on city sidewalks. And it’s evidently not a city’s job to help them move inside, except in dribs and drabs to create photo ops.

No one’s offering cash, treatment, sanitation or shelter in quantities close to matching the number of people who need these obvious solutions, But BTW, let’s get rid of those tedious CEQA regulations to make speculative development easier, okay?

What seemed not to work in the 1970s still doesn’t work now, so maybe it’s time to give up inveighing against it. The Manhattanization of San Francisco (and now Berkeley) is just as dark and dreary as Bruce Brugmann in the seventies SF Bay Guardian warned us it would be. As he (and I) predicted, people don’t like working there anymore—even the techniks I know prefer to work at home in the ‘burbs. The office space vacancy rate in San Francisco is now 27%. (And also as predicted, PG&E is still thuggish, up to no good, as it always was.)

The international situation is no more logical. Loony autocrats rule major nations, perseverating in ancient conflicts.

Hey guys, let’s revive the Russian Empire: It was so much fun the last couple of times, says President Putin.

Let’s just re-think Israel’s tired old democracy into a religion-ruled Utopia, suggests Prime Minister Netanyahu.

At the end of the year, those of us who write about politics among other topics are sometimes expected or at least permitted to make recommendations regarding the perennial question of What is to be Done? Что дѣлать?, a title Lenin lifted from an earlier radical, Nikolay Chernyshevsky.

It's a good question, and as yet no one has really come up with much of an answer. Liberal democracy with free and fair elections seems like a good idea, as do various flavors of socialism. Just how many organizational principles call themselves socialist can be guessed at from the lengthy and dense Wikipedia entry for “democratic socialism”, a rabbit hole down which we will not go today. But it’s discouraging to reflect on how many chief executives at all levels have taken office espousing the highest democratic principles and then gravitated toward autocracy—in recent memory, all the way from people like President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua down to mayors of towns like Berkeley who are in thrall to developers.

I’ve been writing about this for about fifty years, and my ultimate conclusion is the French maxim: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose—“the more it changes, the more it’s the same thing”.

I am reminded of what my girlhood idol, Tom Lehrer, is reputed to have said, that he gave up writing satiric songs when Henry Kissinger got the Nobel Peace Prize. After fifty years of watching people make the same mistakes over and over, it might just be time for me to give up generating admonitory verbiage. 

As another hero of my youth, Pete Seeger, sang, When will they ever learn? They pay no attention, and suffer the consequences.



The really good news is that Tom Lehrer has put all of his songs in the public domain, accessible and downloadable at https://tomlehrersongs.com/. Thanks to Richard Brenneman for letting us know about this.

Meanwhile. Happy New Year to all, with a hope that 2023 will shape up.