Betsey Culp

Over Labor Day weekend, Slow Food came to San Francisco. That’s Slow Food, capitalized, as opposed to fast food, lowercased. Its arrival was preceded by a petition calling for a “New Vision for a 21st Century Food, Farm & Agricultural Policy,” which begins:

We, the undersigned, believe that a healthy food system is necessary to meet the urgent challenges of our time. Behind us stands a half-century of industrial food production, underwritten by cheap fossil fuels, abundant land and water resources, and a drive to maximize the global harvest of cheap calories. Ahead lie rising energy and food costs, a changing climate, declining water supplies, a growing population, and the paradox of widespread hunger and obesity.

Eric Schlosser describes the foodfest in this week’s Nation.

According to the Slow Food trinity, food must be “good, clean, and fair.” The “good” refers to taste; the “clean,” to local, organic, sustainable means of production; and “fair,” to a system committed to social justice.

Schlosser is impressed with the event, but not blown away.

It earned high marks for the good and the clean but next time could do a hell of a lot better with the fair. At the moment, the majority of Americans — ordinary working people, the poor, people of color — do not have a seat at this table. The movement for sustainable agriculture has to reckon with the simple fact that it will never be sustainable without these people. Indeed, without them it runs the risk of degenerating into a hedonistic narcissism for the few.

But one thing is obvious:

What had previously been considered a slogan — “slow food” — was now a genuine social movement.

“A genuine social movement.” Slow Food is serious business. Not much eating going on —even Schlosser

never made it into any of the taste pavilions at Slow Food Nation, where the ideal of “good” was amply represented.

But hard work and good intentions abound.

The original American foodie, M.F.K. Fisher, would have understood. She would have said it was all because of Queen Victoria. Yes, Her Most Gracious Majesty, By the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland Queen, Defender of the Faith, Empress of India. That Queen Victoria.

In an article published in 1974, Fisher describes the 19th-century development of what became the preferred mode of cooking in the United States. It apparently all began in 1846 when the queen’s chef published a book called The Modern Cook, and housewives on both sides of the Atlantic lined up to buy a copy. My Yankee mother would have been horrified to learn the origin of her cooking techniques, but they mirrored the ones adopted by these Victorian ladies. From the book, they learned to dine as Her Majesty did, with only two courses — entrée and dessert — instead of the multicourse dinners served on the decadent Continent. They chose simple sauces and used few spices, in contrast to France’ more imaginative cuisine. And in many American households, the specter of Carrie Nation joined Victoria and alcohol was banned, or at least banished to the husband’s study.

Apparently Victoria believed that “household management” was based on the stern curbing of all low animal instincts, so that kindly guidance away from them was both indicated and desirable.

In other words, food was serious business.

M.F.K. Fisher would have understood the Slow Food Movement, but I doubt that she would have joined its ranks. Her position on food was far from serious. New York Times reporter Molly O’Neill writes,

Her first book, Serve it Forth, published by Harper Brothers in 1937, took America by the shoulders and said, “Look, if you have to eat to live, you may as well enjoy it.”

And enjoy it, she did, passionately and sensuously.

Fisher, who would have turned 100 this year, is the current featured writer at the Book Club of California. Biographer Joan Reardon kicked off the exhibition Monday night with a slide show. Fisher’s books are on display in the club’s offices, surrounded by bookcases filled with other examples of fine bookmaking. But Reardon’s talk was held in a larger space usually occupied by the World Affairs Council. To get to it, members of the audience walked down a corridor lined with food — photographs from the book Hungry Planet: What the World Eats.

For M.F.K. Fisher, food was all about context. What you ate acquired meaning because of the occasion on which you ate it. Randall Tarpey-Schwed, a collector of Fisher books, recalled that in The Art of Eating she

described the “subtle, and voluptuous, and quite inexplicable” pleasure that she derived from eating sections of tangerine that had been warmed on a radiator until plump and then set out on an icy, snow-packed window sill. “I cannot tell you why they are so magical. Perhaps it is that little shell, thin as one layer of enamel on a Chinese bowl, that crackles so tinily, so ultimately under your teeth. Or the rush of cold pulp after it. Or the perfume. I cannot tell.”

In the reminiscence “A Thing Shared,” she tells of a trip she took with her father and sister when she was a little girl. They stopped for dinner.

I forget what we ate, except for the end of the meal. It was a big round peach pie, still warm from Old Mary’s oven and the ride over the desert. It was deep, with lots of juice, and bursting with ripe peaches picked that noon. Royal Albertas, Father said they were.

The pie was good, but the occasion made it extraordinary.

That night I not only saw my Father for the first time as a person…. I saw food as something beautiful to be shared with people instead of as a thrice-daily necessity.

The little girl’s realization remained with her throughout her life.

People ask me: Why do you write about food, and eating, and drinking? Why don’t you write about the struggle for power and security and about love, the way others do?

They ask it accusingly, as if I were somehow gross, unfaithful to the honor of my craft.

The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it… and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied… and it is all one.

For Fisher, eating was like a love affair. Or good sex. It was also like good therapy. In How to Cook a Wolf, written during the Great Depression and on the eve of World War II, she says,

One of the most dignified ways… to reassert our dignity in the face of poverty and war’s fears and pains, is to nourish ourselves with all possible skill… and with our gastronomical growth will come, inevitably, knowledge and perception of a hundred other things, but mainly of ourselves.

Victoria must have turned over in her grave.

But that’s just one woman’s opinion. Thanks for reading.

Hey, guys! John McCain really did a number on you when he selected Sarah Palin as his running mate. And he’s been jerking your chains ever since. Why did you let John McCain jerk your chain last week? There’s been a whole lotta jerkin’ goin’ on. And y’all did a cute little dance in response, jumping up and down, back and forth.

I assume that Palin, like many other VP candidates, was chosen to act as party pit bull, leveling attacks at the opposition that might be considered unseemly coming out of the mouth of someone headed directly to the Oval Office. If so, she did a good job, and she did it with a certain kind of folksy panache. That’s what candidates are supposed to do.

But others saw her performance differently.

New York Times columnist Judith Warner’s chain was jerked in one direction:

Palin sounded, at times, like she was speaking a foreign language as she gave voice to the beautifully crafted words that had been prepared for her on Wednesday night.

But that wasn’t held against her. Thanks to the level of general esteem that greeted her ascent to the podium, it seems we’ve all got to celebrate the fact that America’s Hottest Governor (Princess of the Fur Rendezvous 1983, Miss Wasilla 1984) could speak at all.

Could there be a more thoroughgoing humiliation for America’s women?

Snap. Tammy Bruce was jerked in the other direction. Humiliation? Not at all, she wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle. Far from it.

For Democrats, she offers something even more compelling — a chance to vote for a someone who is her own woman, and who represents a party that, while we don’t agree on all the issues, at least respects women enough to take them seriously.

Whether we have a D, R or an “i for independent” after our names, women share a different life experience from men, and we bring that difference to the choices we make and the decisions we come to. Having a woman in the White House, and not as The Spouse, is a change whose time has come, despite the fact that some Democratic Party leaders have decided otherwise. But with the Palin nomination, maybe they’ll realize it’s not up to them any longer.

Clinton voters, in particular, have received a political wake-up call they never expected.

Snap again. In Salon, Joe Conason was yanked over to Judith Warner’s side:

It is hard to think of a more cynical and contemptuous political act this year than John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential running mate. Having served as governor of Alaska for less than two years — and as mayor of a small town before that — her qualifications for national office are minimal.

Palin is the epitome of tokenism, exactly what conservative Republicans have always claimed to scorn, until today, as the politics of quotas and political correctness. Even Rush Limbaugh is a feminazi now (at least until Election Day).

But if Palin’s résumé is limited, to put it politely, she possesses the only two qualities that McCain now seems to consider essential: She is a right-wing religious ideologue with female gender characteristics. Suddenly that is all anyone needs to qualify as a potential commander in chief of the world’s most powerful military.

It’s stories that jerk chains. And storytelling was out in full force last week.  Joan Walsh, writing in Salon, noticed it:

By the time Palin took the stage, she no longer seemed like an Alaskan Annie Oakley, a gun-toting, hockey mom biker-gal; she’d become pioneer victim girl, Pauline tied to the train tracks by mean Democrats and the liberal media. But Palin shook off the victim mantle by coming out swinging, first blasting “the pollsters and the pundits” for writing off McCain last year, then tearing into Barack Obama with glee, teeth bared like a Rudy Giuliani in heels.

A doctored photo in my email summed it up: Sarah Palin wearing an American-flag bikini and a big smile, stands beside a swimming pool, cradling a rifle.

In the past week, the world has turned the old Women’s Studies slogan on its head. The political has become the personal. Issues have become anecdotes. The war in Iraq was transformed into a woman’s oldest son, about to head into battle. Teenaged pregnancies turned into a photogenic 17 year old. Birth defects emerged as a beautiful five-month-old boy. Gun control was reduced to moose hunting. And so on. The technique worked well for Ronald Reagan. And it’s equally effective today.

It’s time to flip it back and resume the political debate. The only trouble is that the venerable slogan doesn’t want to stay upright. Sometimes the easiest way to talk about policies is in metaphorical terms. But people can always change the metaphors and thus reframe the discussion.

Take, for example, the most obvious feature of the GOP’s Palin lovefest, the sanctification of motherhood. We can point to the reasoned arguments of NARAL and Planned Parenthood. Or we can pull out a well-worn copy of The Handmaid’s Tale and begin reading:

A shape, red with white wings around the face, a shape like mine, a nondescript woman in red carrying a basket, comes along the brick sidewalk towards me. She reaches me and we peer at each other’s faces, looking down the white tunnels of cloth that enclose us. She is the right one.

“Blessed be the fruit,” she says to me, the accepted greeting among us.

“May the Lord open,” I answer, the accepted response.

But that’s just one woman’s opinion. Thanks for reading.

I’ve been reading George Lakoff’s new book, The Political Mind. Lakoff set progressive politicians aback several years ago when he told published Don’t Think of an Elephant. He suggested then that the right had learned a lesson that the left had yet to learn: how to dominate political discussions by the way it frames its arguments. The term “tax relief,” for example, immediately characterizes taxation not as a necessary part of running a democracy but as an affliction that we need relief from. Once the phrase is introduced into a conversation, it is hard to argue against tax cuts.

In The Political Mind, he makes the same point. But he carries the discussion farther, embedding it in explorations that have been made in his own field of cognitive linguistics. Forget about the Old Enlightenment view of rationality, he says. Forget about the idea that

If the people are made aware of the facts and figures, they should naturally reason to the right conclusion.

A “rational person,” someone who makes conscious decisions based on logical and unemotional thought processes, doesn’t exist. On the contrary,

Emotion is both central and legitimate in political persuasion….

But if you stop at conscious reason and emotion, you miss the main event. Most reason is unconscious. It doesn’t look anything like Enlightenment reason.

And virtually all of it matters for politics.

In making political points, we use language. Words. That’s where framing comes in.

Words have meaning, of course. But meaning is neither static nor universal. You and I define words according to our own personal contexts — frames. A mother is a female person who feeds you and kisses you good night. Or a mother is a selfish drunk who abandons you in times of crisis.

Our minds connect these rich, lived definitions into even richer metaphors. A caring mother protects her children; the motherland protects its family of citizens. We turn these metaphors into narratives, populated with heroes and villains. We tell other people these stories and they understand, because they have had similar experiences.

Even more important, they understand because a basic human trait is empathy. If we appreciated this,

We would understand that our brains evolved for empathy, for cooperation, for connection to each other and to the earth. We cannot exist alone.

We would embrace the fact that empathy is at the heart of American democracy.

What happened to competition, to the survival of the fittest? Metaphors, Lakoff says. Faulty metaphors.

I was thinking about this recently when I paid a visit to Mission Dolores. When did you go there last? If it was a while ago, you might discover that it has changed. The old, white building is still there, with its brightly painted place of worship. The old cemetery is still there, with tombstones commemorating Franciscans like Father Francisco Palou and San Franciscans like the executed gambler Charles Cora. But something is different. The mission has been reframed. The cast of characters — Spanish priests, Mexican soldiers, and Indian workers — hasn’t changed. But the meaning of their actions has, giving new importance to the Indians. A plaque, dedicated in June 2001, says,

Mission Dolores… Founded in 1776 by Fray Francisco Palou, OFM and built by people of the Ohlone Nation in the Village of Chutchui 1788-1791. To them we pay honor as the founders and first builders of this community and church.

This is not the first time that a reframing has taken place. Once upon a time, about a hundred years ago, historian Herbert Bolton constructed a frame that portrayed the missions as civilizing agents, with the missionaries teaching backward pupils much-needed lessons:

The civilizing function of the typical Spanish mission, where the missionaries had charge of the temporalities as well as of the spiritualities, was evident from the very nature of the mission plant. While the church was ever the centre of the establishment, and the particular object of the minister’s pride and care, it was by no means the larger part. Each fully developed mission was a great industrial school…. The women were taught to cook, sew, spin, and weave; the men to fell the forest, build, run the forge, tan leather, make ditches, tend cattle, and shear sheep.

Bolton’s description was reframed a number of years ago, as people realized that the Indians who inhabited California’s missions had paid a high price for their education. These people, once regarded as needy students, became victims of horrible crimes against humanity:

Locked within the missions is a terrible truth — that they were little more than concentration camps where California’s Indians were beaten, whipped, maimed, burned, tortured and virtually exterminated by the friars.

After that, it took a while for scholars to realize that people who are known only as victims are chained to a subservient identity. A master-victim society is defined solely by power relationships, and neither masters nor victims in it can be regarded as human beings. Scholars may also have begun to wonder what was really going on, in a place occupied by more than a thousand Indians and little more than a hundred Spaniard and Mexicans, a place that was obviously a thriving community. A few years ago the mission was reframed yet again:

We must not forget that it was the Indians of the California Missions who created these immense agricultural, ranching, and manufacturing enterprises. Within one generation the Ohlone, Miwok, Patwin, Wappo, and Yokuts peoples of the Bay Area had built several churches and dozens of buildings including housing, workshops, storerooms, granaries, mills, bathhouse, and aqueducts. The material progress of those first thirty-five years is astonishing. The Indian population of the mission went from nothing to over 1,000 persons. By 1810 the Indians had almost one thousand horses, over twenty thousand sheep and cattle, and were growing over 8,500 bushels of wheat, barley, corn, beans, peas every year.

The present curator of Mission Dolores, Andrew Galvan, is a descendant of these energetic people. And some of the changes at the mission have taken place under his watch. But Galvan’s appointment is actually a result of the reframing: the description above, was written by his predecessor, Brother Guire Cleary.

A good frame is flexible, expanding to include new elements as they appear. In the case of Mission Dolores, it’s impossible to ignore or erase the harsh treatment that the missionaries levied on the Indian residents. But it is possible to give new meaning to the mission experience, one that emphasizes the humanity of all the participants. Brother Guire concludes his account:

My personal view is that the missions operated with the best of intentions and with nearly the worst of results. To this day the California Missions represent pride and pain, memory and faith for the First Peoples who built and lived in these twenty-one missions of Alta California.

Pride and pain. The height and depth of human lives. Lives filled with emotions that inspire empathy in other human beings. The basis, says George Lakoff, for progressive politics.

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

(Warning: Contains a spoiler.)

Once upon a time, in the not-too-distant future, the material world overwhelmed the physical world. In other words, there was so much garbage on earth that it crowded out the people.

Human beings, being human and therefore somewhat intelligent, realized the spot they were in and took off for outer space, leaving a corps of robots to clean up the mess they had made. For several centuries, the bots labored, gathering up debris, compacting it into cubes, and piling them neatly. Over time, the mechanical workers began to fall apart, until only one remained. He took good care of himself. He recharged his solar panels as needed and replaced worn out parts with salvaged ones. Day in and day out, this little Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class continued at his appointed task, with only a single cockroach for company.

But Wall-E was a robot. He didn’t need company. At least, he didn’t at first. As the years went by, however, Wall-E began to change. Seeking shelter from the elements — for survival, not comfort, of course — he created a home for himself. He began to collect odd little artifacts — a light bulb, a doll, a slew of cigarette lighters. He found an old tape of “Hello, Dolly!” and divised a way to screen it. He watched that movie again and again, drawn especially to the singing and the poignant moment when the hero and the heroine join hands. He began to develop a personality.

Wall-E might have continued like this indefinitely, bringing home his treasures, watching his movie, meticulously piling his cubes of trash into rectangular patterns. But one day the city where he lived received a visitor. A lovely, white, ovoid Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator. Eve.

Wall-E, poor lonely Wall-E, immediately fell in love with Eve. He followed her everywhere.  He plied her with presents. He watched over her. But she was a young robot, without his transformative experience. She felt nothing. She was on a mission, assigned to discover whether there was plant life on earth.

It turned out that there was.

Eve dutifully took the tiny plant Wall-E gave her and returned to her space station, followed by her knight in rusty armor. There, in the midst of self-sufficient robots and humans gone flabby from years of weightlessness, he did his best to protect her from harm. Eventually, her precious cargo caught the attention of the ship’s captain, who realized that it was time to return to earth and restore the planet to its former glory.

And so they did. And everyone lived happily for a while, if not forever after.

It’s a good yarn. Pixar made it into a captivating animated film. But like its hero, the film has taken on a life of its own. In Sunday’s New York Times, Frank Rich said,

Mr. McCain should be required to see “Wall-E” to learn just how far adrift he is from an America whose economic fears cannot be remedied by his flip-flop embrace of the Bush tax cuts (for the wealthy) and his sham gas-tax holiday (for everyone else). Mr. Obama should see it to be reminded of just how bold his vision of change had been before he settled into a front-runner’s complacency. Americans should see it to appreciate just how much things are out of joint on an Independence Day when a cartoon robot evokes America’s patriotic ideals with more conviction than either of the men who would be president.

Jessica Jensen, writing in the Huffington Post, said,

The movie is an inspirational environmental call to action, and yet there is no mention of how or where people can learn to cut carbon emissions, save water, reduce their trash production, etc. Why didn’t Pixar put up a simple screen with “ten recommendations for loving planet Earth” at the end of the film — or a link to a site with educational information? It pains me that MILLIONS of people will see this movie and learn nothing about what they can do to save the planet!

On the other hand, Shannen Coffen, writing in the National Review Online, thought the film’s “call to action” went too far. He called the movie “Godforsaken dreck”:

From the first moment of the film, my kids were bombarded with leftist propaganda about the evils of mankind.

Meanwhile, Patrick J. Ford argued in the American Conservative that the movie’s message was actually conservative:

The real tragedy of these callous conservative critics (say that three times fast) is that they are missing the real lessons of the movie, ones I found immediately attractive to a traditional conservative. In the film, it becomes clear that mass consumerism is not just the product of big business, but of big business wedded with big government. In fact, the two are indistinguishable in WALL-E’s future. The government unilaterally provided it’s citizens with everything they needed, and this lack of variety led to Earth’s downfall.

Oh my! In the face of all these heavy hitters, what’s a poor, self-respecting robot to do? He didn’t know he was a political talking point. All he wanted to do was to get the girl.

When my son was little, we went to see the movie “E.T.” I have no great fondness for Steven Spielberg. In fact, my animosity toward his films is a family joke. As we walked out of the theater, I began expounding on the distasteful decisions he’d made in this one. My son listened to the lecture for about a minute before he interrupted: “Mom, it’s just a movie.”

So is “Wall-E.”

This is not to say that we can’t — or shouldn’t — find underlying meaning in movies or other works of art. The possibility of layered interpretations is what distinguishes valuable works from the pedestrian. But during the past few years, we’ve become Johnny One Note, and that note is politics. Johnny sang loud and long during the recent presidential campaign, where candidates trying to express genuine concern for genuine issues found themselves reduced to sound bites and horse-race handicapping. He continues to sing out every time anyone mentions the very serious problems facing Americans — health care, the economy, global warming.

His song drowns out the sounds of reality. It deafens us to what should be a siren’s call, ineluctably drawing us closer to the things we value most — our bodies, our communities, and our natural environment. “Couldn’t hear the brass; couldn’t hear the drum.” All we can hear is Johnny, blowing his political horn.

In contrast, “Wall-E” is nearly a silent film. There’s very little standing between the viewer and the life-and-death situations that the robots find themselves in. Yes, “Wall-E” is just a movie. And Wall-E is just a robot. But even though he is made of metal, not flesh and blood, his anguish — and joy — sings to anyone who listens. It’s up to us to pull the plug on Johnny and so we can hear his song.

Thanks for reading. I’m outta here till next Tuesday.

Sumer is icumen in, the old song says. And quite a summer it promises to be.

In addition to the usual games at City Hall, there will be June weddings, lots of them, led off by the remarriage of Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, this time in a court-sanctioned ceremony.

In the beginning, there were two women. They founded a social club called the Daughters of Bilitis because they wanted a place to hang out with their friends and dance… with each other. They started a magazine called The Ladder to let women like them know that they were not alone.

In case you missed the excitement that these women started more than fifty years ago, it’s good to remember that in 1955, gay bars were illegal. It was even against the law in some places for women to wear men’s trousers. In the eyes of Joseph McCarthy and his fear-mongering minions, homosexuals were as subversive as card-carrying Communists. In San Francisco four years later, City Assessor Russell Wolden, running for mayor, announced that the Daughters of Bilitis

is a matter of grave concern to every parent. It exposes teen-agers to possible contact and contamination in a city overrun by deviates.

And all because a couple of women were determined to create their own space.

A simple act. A beginning.

On the cultural front, the city’s cup is running over with exciting, “world-class” events this summer. Frida Kahlo has taken up residence at SFMOMA. Dale Chihuly, whose glowing glassworks have been welcoming visitors to the de Young and the Legion of Honor since the beginning of May, will have a full-fledged exhibition at the de Young. The Legion of Honor hosts a group of women Impressionists — Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Eva Gonzales, and Marie Bracquemond.

But the new Contemporary Jewish Museum got a head start on all of them by opening last weekend. The media, here and elsewhere have focused on the building, Daniel Libeskind’s imaginative tweaking of the old PG&E power station on Mission, and only touched in passing on the art displayed inside. Talk about judging a book by the cover! It’s a strange and wonderful building — how often do you see a cube poised on one pointy corner? But don’t they realize it’s a museum we’re talking about? Museums are usually containers for exhibits, not just interesting shells.

What’s inside?

All sorts of good stuff — William Steig’s drawings, assorted explorations in sound, photographs of Bay Area Jews — but especially a collection of art, old and new, gathered under the rubric “In the Beginning: Artists Respond to Genesis.”

You remember Genesis: “In the beginning, God created heaven and earth,” and so on for seven days. A very short section at the beginning of the Torah; a very short section at the beginning of the Bible. But its meaning has fascinated scholars and artists since the beginning of time. And the new exhibition is no exception.

There are old drawings by people like William Blake and Marc Chagall, new installations that include electronic media and oral testimonies. Perhaps most stunning is a room designed by Mierle Laderman Ukeles, which re-creates the Kabbalist creation story of Tikkun Olam, or “Repairing the World.”

In the process of creating the world, the story goes, God made vessels of light and poured a divine substance into them, but the vessels shattered, sending out little sparks that lodged in matter everywhere. The world has been fragmented ever since. Every time a person takes a material object — a desk, a wrench, a floor mop — and uses it for a good purpose, the trapped sparks are freed and reunited.

Ukeles has lined the sides of the room with strings of two-sided mirrors, which catch and reflect the light —- one side to illuminate an individual’s path and the other to “capture the sacred images of Others.” But these mirrors will not hang there forever. She offers a trade: on specified days — the first is July 31 — visitors intending to perform a good deed may exchange their signed promise for a mirror. Then, Ukeles says,

This flow of light, COVENANT, and personal Tikkun into the world will transform the artwork…

By joining me in this journey, your light will be known within here, and then, through your Tikkun action, it will radiate out in the world.

To Mierle Laderman Ukeles, the idea of using service to transform the material world into art is nothing new. In 1969, when she was pregnant, she watched her own body changing at the same time that the social and political worlds around her were being transformed. She felt frustrated by

the image of the “housewife” as someone locked into an irretrievable system of dependency.

She wrote “Maintenance Art — Proposal for an Exhibition,” in which she reframed housework — the “maintenance art” —

as a means to the survival of personal freedom, art and all other social institutions. In other words, maintenance art was a necessary part of the human condition. Through this approach to the problem, Ukeles began to extend the references in her work outside of a purely feminist content in order to reveal the conditions of work, and the stereotypes handed to maintenance workers on all levels, whether in public, private, or corporate enterprises.

The manifesto turned into action in 1973, in an early bit of performance art, when

she washed the floor of the Hartford Art Museum during regular public visiting hours, surrounded by sculpture and painting, as well as its entrance way (Hartford Wash: Washing, Tracks, Maintenance: Inside and Hartford Wash: Washing, Tracks, Maintenance: Outside). After all, as an artist, the museum was her home away from home. To it she brought her performance art inside and outside — whether as wife and mother or as maintenance worker, ignored as service workers usually are.

It’s only natural that, for the past 30 years, she has been artist-in-residence for the New York City Department of Sanitation. In 1983, she covered a garbage truck with a tempered glass mirror, perhaps anticipating the mirrors she hung in San Francisco.

The reflecting truck is a metaphor for the interrelationship between “us” whose images get caught in the mirror and “those” who collect our garbage.

Now she’s offering us dozens of mirrors to “repair the world.”

And all because a woman was determined to create her own space.

A simple act. A beginning.

Thanks for reading. I’m outta here.

It’s hard for the City of San Francisco to get a fair shake these days, either in the media or among the general American public. Its image precedes its reality. And that image, as we who live here know all too well, is misleading.

San Francisco has its share of unusual people — “fruits and nuts” used to be the customary appellation. New York and Boston have plenty of eccentrics of their own, but they appear on the city’s stage as sweet “characters,” not weirdos. And the oddballs who wander around Capitol Hill in Washington somehow acquire an aura of normality.

Despite their economic prowess, despite their technological know-how, despite their political leadership, the people of San Francisco are usually depicted as grown-up flower children, singing “Kumbaya” and naively sticking daisies into rifles. Images of the Summer of Love die hard.

You can blame it on the hippies. But I blame it on Saint Francis.

Much of Saint Francis’s fame today rests on his sweet interaction with members of the animal world. It was Francis who preached to the birds, who eagerly listened to his sermons. It was Francis who concluded a pact between local dogs and a hungry wolf, so that the wolf was pacified and no one in his town was hurt.

Yet this was the Catholic friar who founded one of the most powerful religious organizations in the world. Imagine that the Dalai Lama had created a cadre of sub-lamas who fanned out over the globe, forming a vastly influential economic and cultural network. And then imagine that the world still insisted on regarding the Dalai Lama as an avatar of peace and harmony. The thought turns the mind topsy turvy.

So why do we continue to allow the distorted reputation of Saint Francis to cloud the image of San Francisco? It’s time for a new patron saint. And I have one in mind.

Let me describe him to you:

[His] jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down — from high flat temples — in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond Satan.

A blond Satan. Or perhaps a something more worldly:

The looseness of his lower lip and the droop of his upper eyelids combined with the v’s in his face to make his grin lewd as a satyr’s.

Recognize him? Meet Sam Spade. Amazing — he doesn’t look a thing like Humphrey Bogart.

But Dashiell Hammett’s private detective taught Bogie a thing or two. When necessary, he could adopt an air of zen-like detachment:

Spade, propped on an elbow on the sofa, looked at and listened… impartially. In the comfortable slackness of his body, in the easy stillness of his features, there was no indication of either curiosity or impatience.

That’s on good days. On bad ones, he became an avenging angel:

Blood streaked Spade’s eyeballs now and his long-held smile had become a frightful grimace. He cleared his throat huskily…. He no longer either smiled or grimaced. His wet yellow face was set hard and deeply lined. His eyes burned madly.

Sam Spade also had an image problem. But it was the opposite of Saint Francis’s. It was intentional.

“Don’t be too sure I’m as crooked as I’m supposed to be,” he said. “That kind of reputation might be good business — bringing in high-priced jobs and making it easier to deal with the enemy.”

Sounds a little like Rick Blaine, discussing his dealings with the Nazis in Casablanca.

In other words, Spade taught Bogart everything he knew.

He could teach the rest of the world a few things as well. About loyalty. About a hard-headed sense of reality. About standing up for what’s right.

And about having fun.

When you get right down to it, Spade is far better qualified to be our patron saint than any old Italian guy. And when the chips are down, he would take the job very seriously, because he was familiar with this city from top to bottom.

Spade’s eyes had lost their warmth. His face was dull and lumpy. “I know what I’m talking about,” he said in a low, consciously patient, tone. “This is my city and my game.”

Wouldn’t you want him on your side? I would.

Dashiell Hammett set the standard for modern crime fiction when he introduced Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (Knopf, 1929). On May 4, the Chronicle ran a piece by Eddie Muller on San Francisco mystery writers. This posting is the third in an occasional series on the authors that Muller discusses.

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

In case you were worried, it’s still a man’s world.

In spite of Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the presidency, sexism is still alive and well in the United States. If anything, Clinton’s visibility on the stump has opened doors for sexist remarks that would probably have remained private a few years ago.

And women have noticed.

In February feminist writer Robin Morgan published a passionate protest against the sexist treatment of Hillary Clinton that said in part:

Goodbye to the HRC nutcracker with metal spikes between splayed thighs. If it was a tap-dancing blackface doll, we would be righteously outraged — and they would not be selling it in airports. Shame.

Goodbye to the most intimately violent T-shirts in election history, including one with the murderous slogan “If Only Hillary had married O.J. Instead!” Shame.

Goodbye to Comedy Central’s “Southpark” featuring a storyline in which terrorists secrete a bomb in HRC’s vagina. I refuse to wrench my brain down into the gutter far enough to find a race-based comparison. For shame.

Goodbye to the sick, malicious idea that this is funny.

In April Joan Walsh took up the thread by posting a video on her Salon blog:

I’d urge people who are minimizing the sexism Clinton faces, or who are trying to argue that racism against Obama has been just as public and disabling, to make a YouTube video that’s comparable to this, and that features media stars — not Clinton surrogates, not Obama critics, but guys paid by major news networks — using comparable slurs against Obama. Maybe it’s possible. I doubt it, but maybe.

Watching the video makes you see Tim Russert and Keith Olbermann in an entirely different light.

In the blogging world, the Washington Post noted, verbal attacks — and physical threats — aimed at women have become common:

A female freelance writer who blogged about the pornography industry was threatened with rape. A single mother who blogged about “the daily ins and outs of being a mom” was threatened by a cyber-stalker who claimed that she beat her son and that he had her under surveillance. Kathy Sierra, who won a large following by blogging about designing software that makes people happy, became a target of anonymous online attacks that included photos of her with a noose around her neck and a muzzle over her mouth.

As women gain visibility in the blogosphere, they are targets of sexual harassment and threats.

Yesterday the issue reached the pages of the New York Times. In the magazine section, Peggy Orenstein wondered how to talk about the election with her four-year-old daughter:

Contemplating the “Life’s a Bitch, Don’t Vote for One” T-shirts, the stainless-steel-thighed Hillary nutcrackers, the comparison to the bunny-boiling Alex Forrest of “Fatal Attraction,” I struggle over how, when — even whether — to talk to girls truthfully about women and power.

A news story was less dramatic but equally down-beat. Kate Zernike painted a composite picture of the kind of woman most likely to become president:

That woman will come from the South, or west of the Mississippi. She will be a Democrat who has won in a red state, or a Republican who has emerged from the private sector to run for governor. She will have executive experience, and have served in a job like attorney general, where she will have proven herself to be “a fighter” (a caring one, of course).

She will be young enough to qualify as postfeminist (in the way Senator Barack Obama has come off as postracial), unencumbered by the battles of the past. She will be married with children, but not young children. She will be emphasizing her experience, and wearing, yes, pantsuits.

Oh, and she may not exist.

It was in this context that I read Laurie R. King’s A Grave Talent (St. Martin’s Press, 1993) last week. The book is one of Eddie Muller’s “Noir Picks” of contemporary crime books set in the Bay Area. The gender of its main characters turns traditional crime novels — and even traditional literary novels — upside down.

The focus of the book is a painter known to the world as Eva Vaughn, who lives in a back-to-the-earth community in the Santa Cruz mountains. She’s not merely a good painter; she’s a great one. We learn

that her oeuvre of paintings and sketches represented the first real threat to the supremacy of Abstract Expressionism since it had conquered the art world beginning in the forties. That her approach to art, painstaking and painfully traditional, had already begun to make people think about the role of art and about “painterly” paintings…. That, most amazing of all, it was a woman who had swept in like a Vandal through Rome, a barbarian with power on her side against the civilized art establishment; a woman, an outsider, a source of absolutely maddening frustration.

The power of this female barbarian is also behind a series of cruel murders: four brown-haired little girls have been found nude, strangled. The crimes and the process of solving them are just as insistent as today’s political campaigns in raising questions of gender and power in contemporary American social relations.

One of the police officers assigned to the case is Inspector Kate Martinelli. Yes, a female homicide cop. She knows why she’s there:

She had been assigned to this specific case because she was relatively photogenic and a team player known for not making waves, that she was a political statement from the SFPD to critics from women’s groups, and worst of all, that her assignment reflected the incredibly out-dated absurd notion that women, even those without their own, were somehow “better with children.”

She’s a good cop. She’s also a lesbian. And she understands how the world works. At the end of the book, after the murders are solved and the murderer is safely behind bars, she’s assigned to another case. This one involves the slaying of

one of the country’s most outspoken, most eloquent, most militant, most worshipped, and most vilified radical feminist lesbians.

When Kate realizes what has happened, she dissolves into laughter. “Now,” she says,

“now I’m the department’s representative to the chains-and-leather dyke brigade.” She wiped her eyes and blew her nose, and suddenly the laughter disintegrated and she heaved a sigh. “Ah, well, as they say: only in San Francisco.”

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

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

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.

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.