Betsey Culp

It has been reported frequently that George W. Bush is concerned about his place in history. His worries are over. He’ll have one.

Bush will be remembered as the American president who dragged the rest of the world into an expensive and destabilizing “war against terror.” As the American president who fiddled as the globe heated up. And now, as the American president whose disregard for the sensible monitoring of his country’s financial practices is threatening economies all over the planet.

No, he didn’t do it all by himself. But in the United States, the buck stops on the desk in the Oval Office of the White House. It’s his deal.

Mao Zedong famously called the United States a paper tiger: “Outwardly a tiger, it is made of paper, unable to withstand the wind and the rain.” That was then, this is now.  International leaders today must believe that they hold a real, live tiger by the tail. Turn him loose, and they risk annihilation. All they can do is hold on tight, for dear life, and hope that he tires before he can do any more damage. But even his collapse is to be feared, for if he lands on them, he will destroy them.

End of rant. It needed to be said. But wiser minds than mine are busily trying to unravel the many-stranded economic mess we’ve allowed ourselves to get entangled in. I’ve said enough.

In fact, I’ve said all that I will be saying for the next several weeks. My old disease has come back, not dangerously so, but temporarily requiring huge doses of a medication that turns my brain into cornmeal mush. I feel like an anti-drug ad: “This is your brain. This is your brain on prednisone.”  The I Ching says, “In this case withdrawal is proper; it is the correct way to behave in order not to exhaust one’s forces.” But the I Ching also says, “Perseverance furthers.” I’ll be back.

Thanks for reading.

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.

If you’re a traditionalist, you’ll pack away your white clothes on Monday night: as Labor Day comes to an end, so does summer. If you’re more of a traditionalist, you’ll head to the beach or a park for the last picnic of the season. But if you’re the biggest traditionalist of them all, you’ll march in a parade, carrying a banner or sign supporting organized labor.

We’ve done it as a nation since 1894. But labor commentator Dick Meister reminds us that — as in many other areas — San Francisco did it first. Says Meister:

It was on Feb. 21, 1868. Brass bands blared, flags, banners and torchlights waved high as more than 31000 union members marched proudly through the city’s downtown streets, led by shipyard workers and carpenters and men from dozens of other construction trades.

The marchers called it a jollification. The occasion was the passage of a state-wide law mandating an eight-hour work day. San Francisco had already passed its own law the previous December, covering all city employees. But even the city government had been dragging its heels compared to the private sector. Ever since the end of the Civil War, San Francisco trade unionists, always a feisty group, had been bringing an end to the customary ten-hour day in one field after another, using an astonishingly simple method. Workers’ organizations announced that after a certain date their members would work no more than eight hours a day, and that all subsequent contracts must include a clause to that effect. In an era marked by vigorous strikes, employers listened. As early as June 2, 1867, the Morning Call said,

The eight-hour system is more in vogue in this city than in any other part of the world, although there are no laws to enforce it.

And so, late in February of 1868, after the state had followed their lead, thousands of San Francisco workers marched down Market Street. Chris Carlsson notes in Shaping San Francisco that

they marched in order by when they began working 8-hour days: ship caulkers (Dec. 1865), shipwrights (Dec. 1865), ship joiners (Jan. 1866), ship painters (Mar. 1866), plasterers (Aug. 1866), bricklayers (Feb. 1867), Laborer’s Protective Benevolent Association (Feb. 1867), stone masons (Mar. 1867), stonecutters and marble polishers (May 1867), lathers (May 1867), riggers (June 1867), metal roofers (June 1867), house painters (June 1867), plumbers and gas fitters (July 1867), and the machinists, ironworkers, brass finishers, and their apprentices, not then working eight hours.

Carlsson adds that the new work standards didn’t last long. Employers understandably opposed the idea. The American economy tanked in the turbulent period following the Civil War, and thousands of unemployed workers in other parts of the country hopped on the new transcontinental railroad, seeking jobs in the Far West. At the same time, the vast workforce that had built the railroad found itself out of a job. The eight-hour day became a fuzzy memory.

But also a dream to pursue. The issue refused to die, either in San Francisco or in the rest of the country. In time, city after city and then state after state passed eight-hour-day laws. It wasn’t until 1938, however, that the federal government followed suit, and its law arrived laden with exceptions.

And now? Now we seem to have gone full circle. In an article published last year in the Nation, Steve Early and Suzanne Gordon point out that the practices of forced overtime and nonstandard shifts have made the issue moot.

One of labor’s greatest twentieth-century achievements — the eight-hour day and forty-hour week — is rapidly becoming a thing of the past for millions of people, with neither the AFL-CIO nor “labor-friendly” Democrats doing much about it.

The press has dutifully detailed its demise. According to today’s San Francisco Chronicle, the latest entry in the funeral procession is the University of California:

The annual overtime pay throughout the 10-campus UC system rose by 12.4 percent to a total of $135 million. It was shared among 49,218 employees, according to an analysis of UC’s $8.9 billion annual payroll.

It’s not that employers necessarily want to return to the days of the sweat shop. Early and Gordon say,

Extra pay for overtime hours — whether legally mandated or privately negotiated — was not intended to fatten weekly paychecks. It was supposed to be a financial penalty, encouraging employers to expand their workforce rather than rely on overtime to meet production needs.

But expanding the workforce means paying more for health insurance. Kim Moody and Simone Sagovac have published a pamphlet called “Time Out: The Case for a Shorter Work Week,” which explains,

When job-based benefits like health insurance began to bulk up labor costs, premium pay ceased to be a deterrent to overtime. It became cheaper for employers to schedule overtime than hire new workers

That’s one reason why the AFL-CIO has been throwing itself into a national health insurance campaign. But unlike the prosperous mid-1860s, when labor organizations could dictate terms, today’s workers are at the mercy of their employers unless government intercedes. In their party platform, the Democrats say that they are on the side of the workers:

Democrats are committed to an economic policy that produces good jobs with good pay and benefits. That is why we support the right to organize. We know that when unions are allowed to do their job of making sure that workers get their fair share, they pull people out of poverty and create a stronger middle class. We will strengthen the ability of workers to organize unions and fight to pass the Employee Free Choice Act. We will restore pro-worker voices to the National Labor Relations Board and the National Mediation Board and we support overturning the NLRB’s and NMB’s many harmful decisions that undermine the collective bargaining rights of millions of workers.

If they win the White House and the Senate, and if they remember who put them there, the old labor song might again become a reality:

Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest,
Eight hours for what we will.

Now that would be a real occasion for jollification!

Thanks for reading. I’m outta here.

The future of newspapers is a much-discussed topic these days. Print papers are struggling financially. Readership is down, and so is advertising, because people have found less expensive options on the Internet.

The situation is dire, but understandable: the Internet has injected new, unforeseen elements. Ultimately, it will manage to work itself out and news-gathering will adapt to the new technology.

Maybe.

But newspapers also face another, perhaps more disturbing element, one that is harder to understand. “The media” in general and print papers in particular have acquired a very bad rep. People don’t trust them. People don’t like them. They don’t like the papers’ content. They don’t even like having the papers around.

Am I overreacting? Take a look at this call to arms, published by the Municipal Art Society of New York:

The streets of New York City are littered with filthy, poorly maintained and decrepit newsracks that are both eyesores and potentially hazardous to New Yorkers.

Paris, London, Berlin and Amsterdam don’t tolerate this scourge on their streets, and Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami Beach, Houston and San Francisco have cracked down on the newsrack blight too. But New York City continues to tolerate it, and we think this is outrageous!

So we asked for your help in ridding our streets of these nasty newsracks.

As a beginning step, the society mounted an OUTRAGE! Nasty Newsracks photo competition. It posted the winning entry on its website on November 17, 2007.

The photo was judged to be the winner because it shows multiple violations of the City’s ordinances regulating newsracks: the newsracks are less than 15 feet away from a fire hydrant and all within a bus-stop zone; the bus is forced to discharge passengers outside of the bus-stop to avoid depositing them amid the racks; and the newsracks are dirty and unkempt, with one being used as a trash receptacle, and the glass door of another having been smashed in.

The proposed solution — a proper regulatory ordinance.

I’m puzzled. The six offending newsracks — yes, six, a well-established group, not a couple of mavericks — are violating an ordinance that is already in effect. Why has New York City not cited and removed them? They are “dirty and unkempt, with one being used as a trash receptacle.” As any newspaper owner knows, graffiti and vandalism are the bane of any city paper’s existence. Yet the victims are the ones who are punished, not the perpetrators.

The prize-winning photo shows a row of brightly colored boxes, a cheerful mixture of red and yellow and orange. They could have been related to the newsracks I described in the Flier nearly ten years ago, when San Francisco first sought to eradicate the journalistic scourge that was infecting its own streets:

They were a handsome lot as they paraded down the street: there was Weekly in cheerful red, yellow-coated Chron, Ex in white, Guardian in dapper black, and many others, each in its own special color. They had been on the street for many years, and the [Flier’s] little newsrack loved to listen to their stories. Murders, earthquakes, fires, celebrations — these old-timers had seen them all.

I wonder what the members of the Municipal Art Society would say if they saw the result of our crackdown. In accord with its contract with the city, Clear Channel has provided street corner after street corner with dark green monoliths. They are generally graffiti-free. But they are also generally half-empty. The bustling array of publications that once cluttered our sidewalks has decamped, making the sponsor’s original name — Clear Channel Adshel — truly appropriate. These are simply shells for ads.

But the program is booming. According to the Department of Public Works, it’s getting ready to expand, so that the city’s outer neighborhoods may share in the cleansing that has graced the downtown area. According to the Chronicle, to take this next step, DPW is planning to hire

news-rack program managers, sidewalk inspectors and engineers — additional city personnel needed to expand the program.

And those publishers who are still in the program are going to see their annual fees doubled, from $30 to $60 per box, beginning in September in order to pay for the added city employees. John Geluardi noted recently,

The fee increase poses a significant financial hit for your ever-humble SF Weekly.

And a person doesn’t need lessons in algebra to realize that such an increase can devastate smaller papers.

My 1998 Flier column is a funny children’s story, but it ends sadly. Not, I hope, presciently. Soon, it says, the Supes Finance Committee will approve the newsrack ordinance, and then the full board will follow suit.

Then the party could begin. Without the pretty red and yellow and gray newsracks. And maybe without their papers.

——————

In today’s Other Voices, the publisher of the Houston Tribune, Sharon Lauder, offers a look at how another city is wrestling with the same problem.

Thanks for reading. I’m outta here.

(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.

When I was growing up, my father had a career in mind for me.

Let me put this in context. My father was weird. He also traveled a lot. And he enjoyed the company of attractive women who tended to his creature comforts.

He wanted me to be a stewardess.

He never understood why I didn’t want to be. And I never had the heart to explain it to him. But when I see articles like the one in today’s Chronicle, I remember my father’s dreams for his daughter.

The Chronicle jubilantly reported that even though the American economy is gasping, San Francisco has been attracting record numbers of visitors who are happy to spend big bucks in its shops and restaurants and hotels — $8.2 billion of them. The weak dollar plays a part — more than 10 percent of these tourists are from overseas — but most of these people have traveled here from other parts of the United States.

Joe D’Alessandro, president and CEO of the San Francisco Convention & Visitors Bureau, recited what has become a familiar mantra in recent years:

Tourism continues to be San Francisco’s most vital industry.

The city knows how to sell itself. D’Alessandro added,

Thanks to (Mayor) Gavin Newsom and (City Attorney) Dennis Herrera (who argued in favor of same-sex marriage rights) and the California Supreme Court making sure that San Francisco will become the wedding capital of the nation — for everybody.

The Visitors Bureau is doing its bit, by spending “$1000,000 on marketing to gay, lesbian and transgender tourists.”

That’s on top of the $1.1 million that it spends (out of a $15 million marketing budget) on its “Taste S.F.” campaign, designed to remind the world that San Francisco is a “foodie destination.”

Food and romance. Can you say, “Coffee, tea, or milk?”

Now take a look at a description of the entire Bay Area — not simply the City by the Bay — found in a recent report called “Sustaining the Bay Area’s Competitiveness in a Globalizing World,” prepared by the Bay Area Council Economic Institute:

The Bay Area has a productive economy that draws on the talents of a well-educated workforce in one of the most dynamic urban centers in the world. World-class research universities, a vibrant technology and venture capital community in Silicon Valley, and the financial and commercial strengths of the region’s cities combine with the area’s natural beauty and mild climate to form an attractive environment for developing people, businesses, and industries. Bay Area universities receive a substantial share of the United States’ research funds, and the students educated in these schools often go on to develop successful companies that help build industries in biotechnology, software, Internet services and other sectors. In addition to the region’s traditional strengths in these sectors, opportunities are growing in digital media, nanotechnology, and clean energy technologies.

I realize that in times of economic turbulence, we should be grateful for any boost we can get. But tourists come and go. A well-educated and well-appreciated workforce goes on forever.

It’s partly a matter of image management. But only partly. It’s also a matter of how we see ourselves. Tell me truthfully, which place would you prefer to live in — one with yummy food or a productive economy? A theme park or a world-class city?

—————-

On a different note, the nice people at WordPress are very unhappy. It seems that they have spent hours developing a blogging program that allows readers to insert comments easily. But they’re being ignored. Instead, the readers of my columns send their comments to me by email. These readers are witty and insightful, and so are their comments, but their brilliance remains under the bushel of my Inbox, unappreciated by the rest of the world. Maybe they’re shy.

It’s very simple. All they have to do is log in at the bottom of a column, place their cursor in the little box, and type away. People might even respond. And then we’d have more wit and insight, blazing like fireworks, setting the cyber-sky on fire.

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