Ghosts and Hopes – Old Books and Urban Reflections for October

It is nearly Halloween. But I have been thinking of the photograph below since the long, heady days of early summer, when I captured it on a bike errand to deliver paperwork to my son’s school. The nature of the paperwork has already slipped my mind. But the image of this grave marker-like plaque, erected in 1954 for a junior high that long ago morphed into the rundown but successful and diverse small academic high school my son now attends, has stayed front and center.

It is not Pieter, or Peter, or later “Don Pedro” Lassen’s name on the plaque memorializing the construction of the old junior high that has held my attention these past months (though his curious life story is worth looking up on Wikipedia). Instead, as you may have already guessed, the name that has stuck with me is Didion. Third down along the left you can see it, a “Mrs J F Didion,” stalwart of the Board of Education, without any doubt some elder relative of the most famous person to yet emerge from Sacramento. Besides, I suppose, twice former governor Jerry Brown. 

I’ve always enjoyed Joan Didion’s writing, but it’s only been recently, as I’ve begun to entertain the possibility that I could succeed in some meaningful way as a writer myself, that I’ve entered the ranks of her legion fanboys and (mostly) fangirls. It’s too bad this didn’t happen earlier, before Didion died almost two years ago, in December 2021, of Parkinson’s-related complications. But Halloween is a time to venerate ancestors, and not just those of one’s own family. Also, perhaps, it is a time to give breath to repressed hopes and dreams. 

In a nice bit of magical timing for me, right around the time I snapped the photograph of the plaque, Caitlin Flanagan, that most ardent and devoted and powerful of Didion fangirls, published an account of her road trip to visit key sites in Didion’s life. Her long, elegiac travelog in The Atlantic has somehow filtered deep into my imagination. It made me desire, like Flanagan, to “feel close to the girl who came from Nowhere, California (have you ever been to Sacramento?), and blasted herself to the center of everything.”

Pursuing this vague desire, I decided to read Didion’s famous early essay collections Slouching Toward Bethlehem and The White Album cover to cover for the first time, and avoid cherry picking, as I have done in the past. Now that I have followed through on this decision, I guess I can say that I commend the same the endeavor to you. Reading Didion is a pleasure, not a project.

Beyond this, I learned that Flanagan and others are correct. Didion was a conservative. This is a fact I previously knew to be the case, but that somehow gets obscured by her personal style and chosen subject matter. I have recently come to understand with force (and perhaps with age) that I share this conservative leaning, but only in certain ways. If you read Didion’s early essays closely, you can see that she was the real deal. For instance, look at the piece titled “On the Mall,” in The White Album, where she fantasizes about making money on shopping center development.

Related to Didion’s conservatism is a tragic, melancholic take on American culture that speaks to me very directly, and that reminds me obliquely of Marilyn Robinson, especially Robinson’s fabulous essay collection The Givenness of Things. Beyond this appealing eye for the tragic, Didion had a poet’s touch for details and particulars, an unapologetic hardness mixed with real personal vulnerability, and a cultivated sense of style. She was apparently an excellent cook, a hobby that I share, and with her husband an epic thrower of parties, a hobby I want to cultivate. She was also a motivated and observant traveler. Her essay “In Bogota,” also in The White Album, is one of several I had always skipped in the past. It closes with this acid sentence: “It seemed to me later that I had never before seen and would perhaps never again see the residuum of European culture so movingly and pointlessly observed.”

On reading this sentence again, I realize there is a coldness, a harsh distancing to Didion that I sometimes don’t like. Perhaps she is at her best writing closest to home, and here I don’t mean Sacramento, where she grew up, or San Francisco, where she penned her famous, gorgeous smackdown on Haight Ashbury hippie culture. Instead I mean her adopted home (in her younger years) of Los Angeles. There is a certain warmth and sympathy to her writing about Southern California that touches me, even the essays about murderers. Or, perhaps, here again, I have been influenced by Flanagan, and her moving description in The Atlantic of the persona Didion adopted in LA. “This is the Joan Didion who invented Los Angeles in the 1960s as an expression of paranoia, danger, drugs, and the movie business. The Joan Didion who took amphetamines to work and bourbon to relax, the tiny girl who was entirely in command of the helpless ardor she inspired.”

An Eruption of Racism Caught on Audio, and LA Politics

Perhaps the last paragraph is a good segue to current events, since the most interesting, and certainly darkest urban news story I found this October emerged from Los Angeles. It relates to a conversation, first reported by the Los Angeles Times, that was secretly recorded at the offices of the LA County Federation of Labor. During the conversation, LA City Councilmembers Kevin deLeon, Gil Cedillo, and Nury Martinez, together with Labor Federation President Rob Herrera, were caught in an extended eruption of racist banter. Martinez, who has since resigned, offered up the ugliest comments, but the words of deLeon and Cedillo, both heavy hitters on the California political scene for more than a decade, were almost equally hurtful. You can see a good description of the basic events in both this Vox article and this piece (among many) in the LA Times. 

The open racism (and anti-Semitism) expressed by the three powerful City Councilmembers is as shocking in its openness as it is hurtful in its content. These elected leaders felt at ease to spew slurs with an impunity that might have been expected in 1920s Alabama, but not nominally progressive 2020s Los Angeles. Particularly striking to me were the comments directed at Oaxacan Angelenos, described by Martinez as “short” and “tan feos” (so ugly). See this excellent KCRW radio piece on the more than 200,000 Oaxacan immigrants who have fled to LA for a combination of economic opportunity and freedom from exactly this brand of anti-indigenous bigotry within Mexico.

Another interesting take comes from Washington Post columnist Jason Willick, who speculates in this piece on how the whole incident might affect the hot mayoral contest between longtime political insider Karen Bass and billionaire Rick Caruso. In the piece, Willick recounts a conversation with Caruso in which the candidate wonders about “who the hell did it,” in other words who bugged the Federation of Labor offices. It’s a perceptive question, I think. In another Post opinion piece , Willick, who is clearly hot on the trail of this issue, takes on the question of how race-based redistricting creates a structural breeding ground for just this kind of ugliness. “One lesson of the unfolding scandal is that runaway race-consciousness in the redistricting process is apt to divide and polarize,” he writes.

The Closet of Questionable Takes Opens its Doors Again

Jason Willick’s work on this issue stands in stark tonal contrast to another opinion piece in the Post, by Weingart Foundation president and CEO Miguel Santana. In the piece Santana riffs heavily on “zero sum games” but does not reference Heather McGhee’s recent reintroduction of the zero sum game as a major trope in public policy discourse (see my review of McGhee’s excellent book The Sum of Us and Yascha Mounk’s podcast interview with her just this month). He goes on to caricature LA’s past as a kind of uncomplicated, irredeemable mess of white racism (is the ghost of Tom Bradley listening here?), and to tout the lefty-sounding past achievements of Martinez, Cedillo and deLeon. This before, with an almost audible wistful sigh, he calls for their ouster. “In a way,” Santana opines, “the conversation between the three Latino Councilmembers exposed that even those who are champions of racial and social justice can be seduced by power and succumb to the zero-sum framework.” To which I’ll say that it exposed a hell of a lot more than that. 

Sacramento Leaders Struggle to Follow Through on Promises

I am coming to the end of what I have to say this month, but I don’t want to forget about this Sacramento Bee article. The article describes how none of the 20 new shelters and sanctioned camping spaces proposed in a citywide plan last year have opened. None! This is a complicated issue and you can read the article, but I will say that for the first time I am starting to get frustrated with Mayor Steinberg. He’s an excellent public servant, and I support and admire him. But I’m beginning to wonder if Steinberg has grown too tired, or is just too consensus-oriented by disposition, to lead on this issue. Another possibility, of course, is simply that the underlying barriers to progress are very deep. See this KCRW interview with author Sam Quinones for one interesting and (to me) new take on the intersection between homelessness and the fentanyl and meth epidemics. I hope to read Quinones’ book this month.

Back to School for a Hopeful Story of Renewal

This newsletter article opened with a Halloween image of a gray metal plaque from 1954, and I want to end it with a cheerful mural from 2022. There’s something intrinsically hopeful about working with teenagers, as hard as the work is sometimes. I see great hope for America at the enormously diverse high school where I work as a teacher, and I see it at my son’s high school as well. See this article, on the Sacramento City Unified School District website, related to the mural initiative he has led to beautify the long ago investment made at the campus of the former “Peter Lassen Junior High School.” 

In truth, West Campus High School deserves to have a much nicer building than the beat up old junior high where it now resides. But this is the case for many California schools, and West Campus still shines despite a lack of appropriate investment in public infrastructure. I am enormously proud of my son’s role in making his school shine even brighter.