As I shuffled off sleepily in the predawn hours, it seemed a lonely, quixotic thing to do. My parents humored me, but it was clear they thought their 22-year-old son probably had more productive ways to spend a late summer day.

By that evening, the day’s events were already being read as an epochal moment in U.S. history.

The March on Washington today

The need to register our convictions was more potent than the expectation that anyone was listening

is so closely identified with Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech that they seem like synonymous phenomena, and indeed the Rev. King’s words crystallized a movement and a moment as few other speeches in history have. From my foot soldier’s perspective, that eloquent vision was the emotional high point of the day, but in the end it was The March, not The Speech, that spoke loudest.

In the pre-dawn darkness of Aug. 28, 1963, accompanied by a college friend, I boarded a chartered bus on Long Island as a gesture of personal support for the civil rights movement that I knew mostly from newspapers and television news reports. The movement was primarily a Southern phenomenon at the time — sit-ins, bus boycotts and other demonstrations against maddeningly unjust and unconscionable local laws and practices. We were hoping to nationalize the movement, to spur the federal government to pass an array of civil rights and worker rights legislation that would at last put the full force of the government behind our national, moral and constitutional ideals.

This one-day roundtrip to Washington seemed to me at the time an important but probably futile exercise in moral witness. Few people in my circle of friends could see the point of it. And on the deserted streets of suburban, white, upper-middle-class Great Neck, N.Y., on that morning 50 years ago, the need to register our convictions was more potent than the expectation that anyone was listening. Like the other sleepy stragglers trudging aboard the bus, I just wanted to be counted.

It’s hard to propel oneself back into a historical moment – our views are inevitably colored by subsequent events – but let us try to recall that there had never been anything like the March on Washington; there was no model. Even the organizers struggled to characterize it. The marchers’ manual said, lamely, “The March on Washington projects a new concept of lobbying.” We have witnessed many massive marches in Washington in the intervening years – most notably anti-Vietnam war, pro-choice, gay-rights and Million Man marches. Although the 1963 gathering was formally known as the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, to us then it was known – and it still is – as The March on Washington.

People from hamlets and cities around the country converged on Washington, clogging the highways in every direction, with common grievances and common convictions, determined to grab the attention of a government that didn’t seem to be taking seriously the moral outrage that I and so many others felt through my teenage years. The participants were of all races, regions, ages, religions and economic circumstances. Although many brave and principled people from the North had gone south to help topple the barriers erected by racism, the two cultures had not previously joined

At a rest stop on the pike, we began to sense for the first time the unfathomable dimensions of our pilgrimage

in massive numbers to mingle, express their common convictions and demand redress – and certainly not in the nation’s capital.

We did not know what to expect at the other end of our journey, and the first leg of the trip was hardly notable – one bus heading west and then south, on empty roads long before the morning commute. So it was with astonishment and a rush of collective excitement that I can feel to this day that, in the predawn half-light approaching the nearly deserted Holland Tunnel crossing to New Jersey, we spotted – several tollbooths away – a bus adorned with a banner that read, “Harlem CORE Marches on Washington.”

Another bus going to the same place! It was a stunning coincidence, a heartening confirmation of solidarity. We opened the windows and cheered and waved in the direction of the other bus.

On the turnpike, we soon spotted other buses – one here, one there, then clusters of them, some riding in tandem like families of motorized behemoths. At a rest stop on the pike, we began to sense for the first time the unfathomable dimensions of our pilgrimage: There were parked buses as far as one could see, endless rows of them spilling off the paved parking lot far out onto the grass apron. Temporary loudspeakers crackled out the names of groups as their buses were ready to depart. By the time we approached the outskirts of Washington, the highway appeared to be nothing but buses.

Entering the capital, we passed through some of the city’s poorest African American neighborhoods. The unbroken line of silver buses bedecked with banners seemed at times to overwhelm the shabby houses we passed that morning, but in front of those houses was a welcoming committee more moving than any tickertape parade. Local African American residents – children in front, adults behind them, many dressed in white shirts and Sunday suits – stretched in seemingly unbroken lines for miles, looking up and applauding each and every one of the thousands of buses that wheezed and snorted past them.

There were no words in our vocabulary to describe the crowd at the Lincoln Memorial. It stretched beyond our field of vision in every direction. We had gone there to be counted, but there were far too many to count on that sweltering August day. Some said there were a quarter of a million people; some said a million. It made little difference – there were clearly far more people than had ever done this before, and far more than the “over 100,000″ that organizers had ambitiously heralded in advance. With no previous historical markers by which to measure such events, the imagination could not wrap fully around what few facts were available.

Nor was there any sense of racial differences in that sea of like-minded people. To this day, I cannot give even the wildest estimate of the racial proportions of the crowd; I simply didn’t notice — in itself a notable fact in that especially race-conscious era. I was overwhelmed by a joyous utopian vision of a world I had never inhabited. Martin Luther King articulated the dream, but down below in the crowd, we experienced it.

It was happening on the streets of Washington. It could happen anywhere, anytime.

I remember little of the official program. There was a drone of speakers, often

They were applauding each and every one of the thousands of buses that wheezed and snorted past them

only half-heard from deep in the crowd. My friend and I were about to go off in search of a bite to eat. We were discussing whether that was even possible in such a crowd — and where we might find it — when a middle-aged woman in front of us overheard our conversation and remonstrated in a deep Southern drawl, “Honey, you can’t go now. Martin Luther King is about to speak.”

We knew the name, of course – we’d been reading about him for years in the newspapers – but at the time he was one in a succession of speakers, a great many of them with distinguished credentials and recognizable names, at a distant microphone.

We dutifully stuck around for what turned out to be the speech of the century.

… Let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!

Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous peaks of California!

But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!

Let freedom ring from every hill and mole hill of Mississippi. From every mountainside … LET FREEDOM RING!!’

The words were electric, and reflected the sense of national convergence that we felt out in the crowd. His words were still echoing in my ears many tired hours later as we debarked into the darkness on Northern Boulevard in Great Neck. But the words rang not just in our own ears. When I got home, my previously skeptical parents were waiting up late for me, buoyed themselves by the epic panorama that had dominated the evening newscasts. History had passed that way, and they wanted to talk about it, to share in it.

Martin Luther King’s inspired dream on Aug. 28, 1963, redefined and reinvigorated the American Dream, and hundreds of thousands of people lived out that dream symbolically on the streets of Washington. Many of us realized for the first time the power of individuals to add their numbers together to influence government policy, and we realized the power of an ideal whose time was long overdue.

Fifty years later, it’s still overdue, which is why it may help to relive that day for those who weren’t around. In an era of continuing racial injustice, advertent or otherwise, in voting booths, schools, courtrooms, prisons and elsewhere, we must rediscover the meaning of a community that extends beyond our own neighborhoods and races. My hope is that this anniversary will help reinvigorate the ideals for which we converged on Washington from all corners of the country.

It’s time for each of us, in our own places and circumstances, to get back on the bus.

It’s rubbish.

Those who are mentally unhinged act out their bizarre delusions in idiosyncratic and sometimes taboo or illegal ways, but they draw their vocabulary, their imagery and their preoccupations from their culture. However grotesquely distorted the expression, the reference points or cues are all around them … and us.

In shootings such as the one in Tucson, when there’s a long history of overtly violent political rhetoric and winking dare-yous, one young, possibly deranged man may pull the trigger, but there are many other, more respected hands on the barrel. Those “co-conspirators” in the Arizona shooting include Sarah Palin, her similarly extreme colleagues, the followers inflamed by their histrionics and the more circumspect politicians who have given her and the movement she represents their passive or active support to further their own careers.

That Sarah Palin put Representative Giffords in her crosshairs is not a matter of conjecture. This 2010 gaphic from her PAC’s website says it all:

We’d all like to believe our shared narrative of civil democratic discourse, but those who choose to further their careers with vitriolic, highly personal, even violent rhetoric and graphics and melodramatic theatrics must share the blame, if not the legal culpability, for the shooting that followed a tragically predictable course.

In the coming days, we can expect politicians and
commentators to try to stabilize the volatile mood by denying that this was a political conspiracy. The first one I heard edging in that direction was James Fallows on National Public Radio on Saturday afternoon, hours after the shooting. At the start of his remarks, Fallows emphasized, rightly, that “we just don’t know very much about the circumstances, who did it and for what reason.” Still, he had plenty to discuss.

Fallows acknowledged that “We have in the United States a long and unfortunately rich tradition of political violence. And on the one hand, any attack on a politician, it seems to me, is by definition political because that’s how that person came into public view.” But he adds:

“… it’s striking how often the motives for the crime seem to be obscure or really hard to connect to mainstream political activities.” And he harkens back to the shootings of Representative Leo Ryan (near Jonestown in Guyana), Governor George Wallace and Senator Robert Kennedy.

In summing up, Fallows says those shootings had “huge political consequences, but the motives seem as much a mental disorder or personal politics as anything else. And we don’t know how that will finally play out here.”

Although he mentions Palin’s poster suggesting violence (see above), his conclusion is not that “violence-tinged” rhetoric contributed to the Tucson shooting but that “perhaps there will be less of that tone” in the future.

And perhaps everyone will rally around bipartisan values and find a common language. And perhaps the Tea Party and its enablers will recognize that they need to be more measured in their future political rhetoric. And perhaps it will be 90 degrees in the shade in Washington, D.C., tomorrow.

For those of a more realistic bent, it’s important to recognize that those who will cover up this tragedy with a blanket of feel-good platitudes do a disservice to our country’s future. The role of journalists is not to help us feel good about ourselves.

It would be more helpful to the body politic if we point out that any such deadly act has complex but traceable roots in the culture as well as in the individual psyche. In this case the most visible roots are Sarah Palin herself, her angry allies and their inflamed, uncompromising “Don’t tread on me” rhetoric that at times is indistinguishable from neo-fascism; a large cadre of mainstream politicians who cynically condone such attitudes with carefully phrased euphemisms of support in order to win votes; permissive gun laws (and their primary sponsor, the National Rifle Association) that further the Wild West, gun-first, “I got my rights” culture; and the demagoguery against immigrants and other nonthreatening, hardworking social classes.

Helping to hide from view the dangerous dysfunctions — and outright immorality — of our political “discourse” are the commentators and politicians who will go to illogical lengths to persuade us that there is no real political dimension to this supposedly singular act of madness; that we’re OK, Jack, and everything will automatically rebalance itself quickly in this, the Greatest Democracy on Earth.

No readings or events are currently planned. Anyone interested  in hosting one in the San Francisco Bay Area should email decca@psussman.com. Thank you.

The police officer who arrested eminent Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. is said to be an excellent and sensitive cop. He teaches a class in racial profiling. Here are a few discussion points he might want to add to the syllabus. They come from a white layperson who has written often about criminal justice issues and given a good deal of thought to the sort of ambiguous confrontation that led to Gates’ arrest.

These suggestions for the lesson plan are occasioned by the incident in which Gates became embroiled, but none is specifically intended as a comment on that case since there is no way for outsiders to accurately determine what occurred during the confrontation inside that house in Cambridge. They are advanced as points worthy of consideration in similar situations.

First lesson: If an officer arrests a citizen for an offense that is not the one he or she was investigating at the outset and arises solely from the officer’s interaction with the arrestee, then there is an extra burden of proof on the officer. When the arrest results from such a personal interaction, in the absence of imminently dangerous and overt threatening activity such as the brandishing of a weapon, it likely represents a subjective and suspect assessment on the officer’s part

There was no crime until the police presence itself created one.

and not a clear-cut violation of the law.

Second lesson: Officers who enter a home or a tense encounter suddenly, as most do at some point, must realize that their presence will heighten animosities that have no necessary relationship to illegal activity.

Third lesson (an elaboration of the second): People get angry. When angry enough, they are likely to swear or shout or verbally abuse the officers whose very presence sets off such outbursts. This anger and acting-out are understandable (albeit not commendable) emotional responses and are not an indication of illegal activity. It is not illegal to be angry or to shout. The First Amendment protects speech, and there is no law mandating citizen politeness to authorities. It is the officer’s duty to defuse tense situations with calming talk or such other means as would be helpful (see next lesson).

Fourth lesson: After the original cause for an encounter has been resolved — as it apparently was when Professor Gates proved he was the resident, not a burglar, in his own home — then the officer must urgently consider the
 friction his very presence is likely to engender … and leave the scene promptly. His or her job after the original reason for the encounter is resolved is to avoid escalation or the creation of a new issue.

Fifth lesson: Altogether too many people who have been cleared of suspicion in a crime are nevertheless arrested for resisting arrest or disturbing the peace or interfering with an officer in the performance of his or her duty. An officer’s hurt feelings may be legitimate and infuriating to him or her, but they are not an indication that a crime has been committed. The burden is on officers to do everything in their power not to incite such crimes or they become complicit in the infraction.

Sixth lesson (and the first to address race or class at all): When dealing with a member of a race or class with an ingrained distrust of police officers, based on past, individual police behavior or historical social-control practices — and even contemporary practices in some areas — it is incumbent on officers to understand the reasons for the residual hostility they are likely to encounter and take extraordinary measures to calm the resulting tensions peacefully and sensitively. Whether the distrust is merited in the circumstances of the current encounter is irrelevant.

Seventh lesson: When officers are white and suspects are not, there is an even greater chance that extraneous resentments may greet even the best-intentioned officer. It’s not fair that conscientious officers bear the burden of historical resentments engendered by others, but it is a fact that they must be prepared to address with a sensitivity that is based on imaginative as well as practical training techniques. They must be taught empathy, not just control, if they are to perform their duties equitably. And, once again, this is even more true when there is no longer evidence that a crime has been committed requiring any police presence.

Eighth lesson: With effective training comes a recognition that instinct is often suspect in dealing with “other” race and class groups, so methodical reasoning is all the more essential. For example, a reasonable assessment of a burglary suspect would certainly take into account that a middle-aged man who walks with the aid of a cane, wears rimless glasses and has a slight paunch — and no professional burglary tools in his possession — is most unlikely to be the culprit in a residential burglary. The burden of proof shifts to the officer, to prove his or her case.

These lessons are not a comprehensive list and they are not rules, but the kind of awareness they exemplify might have defused the tense Gates encounter short of arrest and would significantly reduce arrests of other innocent civilians nationally. Officers need to take continuing classes to familiarize themselves with the social divisions in a multicultural nation; they need to understand viscerally, not just intellectually, what their presence represents to others. Unless the police department itself is diverse, individual officers will not develop the deep cultural understanding they need to fulfill their professional responsibilities.

In the broader picture, Professor Gates’ reported anger and hostility are unfortunate but irrelevant. There was no crime until the police presence itself created one. Therein lies an urgent problem that law enforcement must address … urgently.

Meg Whitman has a problem with our right to marry, but it’s not at all clear what that problem is.

The billionaire former eBay boss, now running as a Republican for governor, spoke to a gathering of “high-profile high-tech Silicon Valley women,” reported Chronicle columnist Leah Garchik. According to Garchik’s source, Whitman said she’d voted for Proposition 8, banning same-sex marriage, based on her religious convictions and her emotions.

Whitman added, as if to stake out an “above-the-fray” compromise position: “You know, I just wish there were one term for everything: civil unions.”

Here’s where I started getting lost, because there is currently

I won’t interfere in their religious affairs. I ask only that they don’t interfere in our civil affairs.

 ”one term for everything.” It’s called “marriage.”

For some reason, Whitman apparently prefers her own “term for everything,” as a substitute for the one that has been universally recognized for ages, in this country and elsewhere.

Under Whitman’s system, Garchik reports, “government would grant civil licenses only. It would be up to individual churches to decide who they would marry.”

Again, that’s the current system exactly: Government grants civil licenses, called marriage licenses. They are civil documents only, with no religious significance whatsoever. If churches wish to perform their own rituals using the civil marriage license, they are welcome to, and most have chosen to do so. They are free to perform that ritual for any gender combinations they wish. Civil authorities have no right under the Constitution to control how churches use the civil license in their rituals.

Similarly, couples who wish to be married outside a church, using the same civil marriage license, are entitled to do so, receiving the same civil benefits and responsibilities as those who “consecrate” their marriages in a religious institution.

Whitman’s essential point seems to be that, although she wants to retain the nationally recognized civil license, she objects to it being called what it’s always been called: a marriage license. She apparently wants all of us who were married years ago, as well as those who will be married in the future, to change the name of the license that was or will be issued for us. Why? Is she trying to disrupt traditional marriages like mine by changing the name of the license that first bound us 
 legally and gave us and our children certain civil rights, privileges and obligations?

If any religious denominations want to discriminate against same-sex couples in their religious rituals, that is their right. However, it is everyone’s right, including same-sex couples, to have equal access to the same civil marriage license that my wife and I had when we were married 38 years ago.

I see no reason why churches should be allowed to expropriate for their exclusive use the term that civil authorities have used for their license for centuries: a marriage license. If that name is too tainted for people in Whitman’s church, they are free to change the name they use in their rituals. “Holy matrimony,” perhaps? Whatever; it’s their choice. I won’t interfere in their religious affairs. I ask only that they don’t interfere in our civil affairs.

“Render unto Caesar …”

Huffington Post is a noble and necessary experiment in citizen journalism — and indeed in journalism itself — and I have been pleased to be a contributor, however infrequent. But like all path-breaking experiments, it can be led astray by its very success, and I wonder if it is now in danger of being blinded by the dazzle of one of its own innovations.

Citizen journalists at Huffington Post recently received an email crowing, understandably, that “More than 2,500 of you helped make our tea party coverage the biggest distributive reporting success since the election.” As evidence of that success, the email noted that Huffington Post‘s citizen journalism “caught the eye of the blogosphere, on both conservatives and progressives [sic]. Rachel Maddow of MSNBC was among those watching your reports, broadcasting your photographs live on her show last Friday.”

Attention garnered is certainly one measure of success, but is that the best measure of journalism excellence? Is the volume of the reporting an adequate gauge of good journalism?

To get more specific: Should we not also ask whether the high-wattage attention focused on a series of fringe protests dreamed up by some p.r. wizard with an ideological agenda by itself distorted the importance of those protests?

Too often, in this celebrity-crazed nation, the attention paid to a subject is both self-justifying and self-reinforcing, and many of the errors of the mainstream media — even on issues far more important than a blonde beauty’s latest drunk-driving arrest — follow a similarly dangerous trajectory. That is,

Too often, in this celebrity-crazed nation, the attention paid to a subject is both self-justifying and self-reinforcing …

the unrelenting attention of “pack journalists” gives a credibility and importance to an event that it did not merit. (The reverse is also true: The paucity of attention paid to a topic marginalizes that topic and can help push it down to the bottom of the national agenda.)

The spin may vary from one news organization to another — one cable channel to another — but the attention itself may be what most people remember though it can be every bit as misleading as the crazed rant of a verbal bully posing as a journalist. (“Of course it’s important; it was the top story on the 6 o’clock network news.”) It is a symptom of the perversity of the human mind
that, as social scientists have argued, even the repetition necessary to debunk a myth can give it a measure of credibility, by the sheer act of repetition alone.

Examples are easy to find in the mainstream media, on issues of supreme importance — from Saddam Hussein’s complicity in the 9/11 attacks to the prevalence of the most recent headline-hogging crime. Misleading or not, stories like those have lasting impact in the real world: Hussein’s inflated “guilt” was a key part of the narrative furthering the war in Iraq, and those crime-of-the-moment stories often lead to ad hoc legislation that further distorts our crazy quilt of criminal sanctions.

All too often, such saturation coverage conditions public sentiment for quick and easy solutions. Those solutions may be as specific as “remedial” legislation or as general as the validation of “conventional wisdom” or as stubbornly pernicious as the reinforcement of racial, class and other stereotypes.

All of this may seem like a heavy burden to place on the coverage of an inconsequential fringe event like the “tea party” protests, but the level of coverage was not inconsequential.

Journalism is essentially anecdotal. Such coverage reinforces the reservoirs of anecdotal knowledge from which most of us draw our policy conclusions. In this instance, the public was likely to conclude from the attention paid to these p.r.-driven pseudo-events that the prevailing mood of the country has swung to angry grassroots advocacy of balanced budgets, lowered taxes and a reduced role for the federal government in financing systemic reforms of healthcare, the economy and the environment. There is no evidence that that is true, despite the excessive attention paid to a bunch of people at isolated locales parading around in tea-bag hats.

So what’s the antidote? Citizen journalism certainly has a valuable role to play in leavening news coverage with local perspectives and with the insights of experts outside the “usual suspects” featured on Sunday morning news shows. But massive, unfiltered exercises in citizen journalism can tilt public understanding as surely as the rush of passengers from one side to the other can threaten the stability of a small boat.

I used the word unfiltered intentionally. Despite the scorn heaped on the role of the MSM as filters of the information that reaches the public, we may be losing something important by so completely ditching the old model. The solution for information that has been inappropriately filtered may not be opening the spigot full-force.

Another word for journalism filters is editors. They are critical to the process of shaping the chaos of public events into some coherent form, including a rough hierarchy based on importance. Without them we are left with little more than the accumulation of data measured more by volume than significance.

By all means, let’s keep the citizens in citizen journalism. Let any interested reader find the raw data from hundreds of localities if they wish. But the measure of our success should be the perspective and understanding we provided for our readers, not how much data was accumulated by how many people or how much of it reverberated elsewhere in the national news echo chamber.

Of course, feeling the need to define its category before posting it under the heading “Previous Blogs” also betrays the mild discomfort of a longtime print journalist dipping his toes into the blogosphere.

* * *

For decades the voters of California have been freezing their peeves of the moment into constitutional permanence. Now the state’s voters are asked to solve the ensuing budgetary mess by once again creating a rigid, permanent constitutional fix for a transient fiscal crisis. Before Proposition 1A becomes yet another failed experiment in the politics of outrage, we should examine the dynamic that has brought us to our current fiscal impasse.

Among the primary culprits in restricting our ability to respond to extraordinary economic pressures are three constitutional mandates approved by the voters long ago that have placed legislators in a straitjacket as they try to resolve the pressure of extraordinary spending burdens and plummeting revenues brought on by the current depression.

The three measures most directly tying legislators’ hands are Proposition 13, which permanently distorts our tax base; the three-strikes initiative, which promotes unsustainable growth in our expensive prison system; and the two-thirds budget vote requirement that restricts legislators’ ability to respond to the other two pressures. Let’s review them briefly:

Proposition 13, a 1978 measure that was billed as the “homeowners’ tax revolt,” has ironically shifted more of the tax burden from businesses to homeowners. Its rigid formula for property assessment and taxation capped property taxes by an arbitrary numerical formula; starved many local services such as fire departments, police, schools and libraries; and generally tied revenue allocation into such knots that legislators and local officials had to raid other kitties to fund functions once financed by property taxes.

It also set a two-thirds vote requirement for legislative and local tax increases. Over the years, it has perpetuated – and even worsened – inequities among neighboring property owners and helped fuel a sense of

It’s a budgetary cure in the same sense that drinking a morning eye-opener will fix an alcoholic hangover.

the irrational burdens of taxation.

The three-strikes mandate, passed by voters in 1994, took many criminal sanctions out of the hands of judges and other professionals and subjected the nuanced art of sentencing to – once again – rigid arithmetic formulas that fail to reflect the gravity of the crime, the degree of individual culpability or the possibility of human change or rehabilitation. As a result, California has become one of the global capitals of lifetime incarceration, resulting in an ever-more-bloated prison system of increasingly geriatric (hence inordinately expensive), unthreatening prisoners.

The two-thirds budget vote mandate (with origins in Proposition 1 in 1933, during the mother of all depressions), combined with a polarized political system, has forced legislators to achieve virtual unanimity to resolve complicated budget problems. Politics and

governance are, above all, the arts of compromise and coalition-building. The two-thirds vote requirement and partisan ideological purity, whether on taxes or on spending, have made compromise and coalition-building next to impossible.

Certainly other factors contributed to our current fiscal stalemate – including the loss of institutional memory and personal working relationships in Sacramento caused by yet another voter mandate, term limits (Proposition 140, passed in 1990). But what the three constitutional measures emphasized here have in common are their profound effect on the governance of this large state and their inflexible, permanent dictates driven by transitory voter outrage that was stoked by political opportunists.

One-size-fits-all formulas virtually never solve the problems they were designed to, and they create unforeseen problems that restrict the options available to future generations confronting changed circumstances. But the simplistic political messages that gave birth to such measures endow them with an almost religious validity that insulates them from future revision as unforeseen circumstances demand.

So how are we asked to solve such dislocations in our body politic in 2009? With yet another arbitrary solution imposed on future generations: Proposition 1A, which creates a rigid budgetary process embedded, yet again, in the concrete of arithmetic benchmarks. It’s a budgetary cure in the same sense that drinking a morning eye-opener will fix an alcoholic hangover.

It is certainly understandable that beleaguered Californians, with falling incomes, uncertain employment status and heavy housing burdens, would be fearful for the future. It is fear that drives the politics of outrage. “We’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it anymore.”

Before we react out of anger and fear to endorse permanent mandates for our descendants – mandates dreamed up under midnight deadline pressure by legislators who were incapable of coalitions and compromises – let’s vote to amend or repeal the previous arbitrary, voter-approved solutions that got us into this mess: our ungainly prison system, our dysfunctional political process and our rigid tax structure.

The invitation to join SFGate’s new corps of bloggers called City Brights offers the opportunity to reach a substantial audience, a prospect no journalist or professional writer turns down easily. But it carries troubling implications.

The Gate, the online arm of the San Francisco Chronicle, compensates its bloggers in the currency of the web, hits and links, instead of dollars and cents, which is how writers used to be compensated for similar commentaries on the Chronicle’s OpEd page. “Hits and links” is another way of saying “for free,” and blogging for free for a news business that has just announced plans to lay off or buy out scores of paid staff journalists feels uncomfortably like scabbing.

What the Gate is offering its bloggers is the norm in the online world, but the timing of its offer is fraught with irony. The Chronicle is in deep trouble, groaning under accumulated losses caused, in part, by

Blogging for free for a news business that has just announced plans to lay off or buy out scores of paid staff journalists feels uncomfortably like scabbing.

competition from online sites, including its own.

The Gate will increasingly serve as the Chronicle’s face to the world, and if the paper folds, as currently appears possible, the web site may well be its only outlet. My blogging colleagues’ distinguished credentials notwithstanding, the Gate will likely substitute some of the amateurs’ free musings for the more informed, better researched news and analysis published in the newspaper. One-shot flashes of emotion and insight can never adequately replace the professional journalist’s persistent but less glamorous news coverage, day in and day out.

“Information wants to be free” is the Net’s rallying cry, but the traditional content providers and their families expect real remuneration for their labors. As for the readers … well, you get what you pay for.

Therein lies the tragedy of American journalism today. It’s a tragedy both for journalists, who were able to earn a living by holding a mirror up to their world, and for the nation that relied on those newspapers, however misguided at times, to help establish our communal agenda and provide much of the data by which we (bloggers and the rest of us) could define our culture and assess the operation of our governments. Even for its critics, in whose ranks I often found myself, the Chronicle has been the closest institution we have to an area-wide forum. It was a place where — in potential, if not always in execution — this gloriously diverse and inventive area could show it has more in common than a shared spot on the map.

The Chronicle served as an uncompensated wholesaler. Other local news media — including those on the web — based much of their local news coverage on what they read in the Chronicle. In the media food chain nationally, commentary, which makes up an ever larger share of our online diet, feeds on news stories usually developed by print journalists. As those print publications cut back and, increasingly, go out of business, the bloggers will be feeding on an ever more impoverished diet.

The Chronicle, like most other newspapers, has handled poorly the transition from print-only to a more varied information environment. Overwhelmed by an epochal information revolution — and often burdened by the debts of acquisitive media conglomerates — newspapers seem intent on acting out to the final curtain an outmoded economic model.

I share the sadness of those who mourn the layoff-by-layoff decline and potential demise of the Chronicle, more for what the newspaper sometimes has been and what it could have become than for what it seems fated to be with a fraction of its news staff.

Without the Chronicle, and barring the emergence of an independent, local white knight or a new killer app for

In the end what emerges from an excessive reliance on amateurs is still amateurish.

news, the people who live here will have to subsist increasingly on McNews — perhaps served up by short-order cooks at a franchised fast-food outlet like Dean Singleton’s MediaNews Group. The MediaNews chain has already gobbled up most of the local suburban newspapers and seems intent on realizing “economies of scale” by pruning staff and publishing the same generic, centrally edited news stories in all its local papers. MediaNews appears to be the ultimate beneficiary of a monopoly exemption favored by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

The disappearance of the dominant metro paper is likely to atomize the local population further into islands of special interest, probably in the form of competing and little-trafficked web sites, each with its own formula, bias, subject areas and constituency.

Those of us who have felt that too few local voices — of all races, interests and income levels — were reflected in the Chronicle must now face the prospect that without the paper we will have convenient, common access to still fewer voices. Although those voices will find expression somewhere on the web or in print, we will lose the forum where they could most constructively meet.

The cult of the amateur blogger is satisfying to the amateur — and in many ways informative for the reader. Amateurs serve as a crucial check on the corps of officially sanctioned “authorities,” and many have undeniably useful expertise. I celebrate the two-way pipeline that the Net facilitates. But few bloggers have the resources to research stories in far-flung areas or to dig deeply into affairs of state and local governance. In the end what emerges from an excessive reliance on amateurs is still amateurish.

I start my SFGate blogging with the hope that more of us will realize that we have a stake in the Chronicle’s survival and the retention of as many as possible of its skilled professionals. And I hope that both the newspaper and its web site come to realize that they stand a better chance of thriving by engaging openly with the community in devising strategies to preserve what used to call itself “The Voice of the West.”

Ultimately, the solution to newspapers’ woes, both locally and nationally, lies in finding new ways of merging print and web, new ways of becoming relevant and essential to their communities and new ways of “monetizing” news and informed analysis, not in “demonetizing” those who provide it.

It may have been the most important product placement in history, surpassing the American colonists’ dumping of crates of East India tea into Boston Harbor 235 years ago. When journalist Muntadar al-Zaidi crystallized world opinion by hurling his shoes at American President George Bush during a news conference in Baghdad in December, sales exploded at the Istanbul shoe company that identified the projectiles as its “model 271.”

Other shoe companies have also claimed paternity, but the only known evidence — the shoes themselves — is said to have been blown to bits as a security measure.

Huffington Post Istanbul Footwear Correspondent Anthony Giacchino forwards exclusive photos of the shoe heard round the world, which the company has recently renamed the “Bye Bye Bush.” And in less than a week, the shoe will attain still greater international renown when al-Zaidi’s traditional Iraqi gesture of contempt serves as inspiration for a Washington peace demonstration known as “Shoes for Bush.”

At Baydan’s Shoes, Ramazan Baydan’s factory in the nondescript outskirts of Istanbul, where the international furor unwittingly began, Baydan has told interviewers that he has been overwhelmed with international orders since the

lone journalist’s shoe-hurling during yet another of Bush’s “mission accomplished” press conferences, his last one in Iraq.

Nearly a month ago, Baydan told Bloomberg news that he had received more than 300,000 orders for what he has now renamed the Bye Bye Bush shoe — more than four times the company’s previous annual production of model 271. Ten days later, the number was up to 370,000 as orders that had started coming in from Iraq (120,000 initially) began to flood in from the rest of the world.

The shoemaker was sending advertising posters for model 271 throughout

the Middle East. The poster’s message was simple: “Goodbye Bush, Welcome Democracy.”

Baydan told Bloomberg that he was hiring 100 more employees to handle the added workload. Baydan said he had also received orders for 19,000 Bye Bye Bushes from the United States, as well as requests from distributors in other countries.

Huffington Post correspondent Giacchino traveled to Kucukcekmece, a dreary neighborhood about 40 kilometers from the center of Istanbul, to see Baydan’s small and hectic workshop. He was taken through the showroom, where model 271, now the Bye Bye Bush, has a prominent place.

Giacchino reports that model 271 is the talk of Istanbul’s shoe industry,

where opinion is split on whether the shoe was actually manufactured by

Baydan or whether he is simply a clever businessman with a brilliant marketing campaign. Many competitors in the Istanbul shoe business don’t believe Baydan could have recognized his shoe from the Baghdad video of the shoe hurling. Although a few have claimed the celebrated footwear was theirs, said the wife of one shoe wholesaler, “Baydan claimed the loudest.”

Although shoe makers as far afield as China have leapt to claim credit, Baydan will have none of it, telling the Christian Science Monitor: “I have a sensitive relationship with this shoe. I designed it myself, so it’s like a father and a child. I was very happy when I saw it on the video.”

Turks of a more philosophical bent, says Giacchino, are quoting a Turkish proverb: “The rich man’s money makes the poor man’s mouth tired.”

Giacchino, an Emmy- winning documentary film maker whose last film was The Camden 28, reports that it’s full steam ahead at the Baydan shoe factory. The film maker/footwear 2009-01-14-BBB2.JPG correspondent, who has just completed “Beltway Unbuckled,” a two-hour special exploring the cross of sex and American politics (scheduled to air March 15 on the History Channel), is considering doing a video himself on the famed Istanbul shoemaker.

Meantime, the shoe’s paternity is a trivial detail to the millions around the world who were inspired by the shoe-hurling to vent their suppressed anger at the commander-in-chief of the Iraqi invasion. Numerous shoe-related protests have already occurred, and the celebrated gesture of contempt is coming home to Washington on January 19, President Bush’s last full day in office. [See update here.] A coalition of peace groups is planning a “shoe hurling action” at the White House.

Organizers, including the Washington Peace Center, After Downing Street, Code Pink and other organizations, plan to rally at 11 a.m. at Dupont Circle and then march to the White House “with shoes.” Organizers, who have set up a web site at www.shoebush.org, say some war veterans will be traveling to Washington, prepared to hurl their combat boots.

Organizers promise a “cathartic shoe hurling action … in the spirit of journalist Muntadar al-Zaidi and for the widows, orphans and all those who have lost their lives in Iraq.”