“… the shutting down and subsequent rebooting of the planet presently underway may not in fact be a collection of ad-hoc measures that will fade as the contagion does, but that the coronavirus may come to serve as the catalyst for a new kind of society built upon the forms of digitized subjectivity that are forged within the unique historical circumstances of the pandemic.” —Ian Alan Paul, The Corona Reboot
I’m writing today, on the one-year anniversary of my mother’s death, and two weeks since I had major cancer surgery, to take a much longer look at where we are heading, as usual with the foundation of a half dozen or more books I read in the past few months. My own mortality as well as those of the people I love weigh heavily on my mind, etching in sharp relief the simple truth that we just are not here very long. Even a very long life that nears a century is a terribly small part of the sweep of history, both because of the limitations of individual experience AND the impossibility of truly understanding the scope of what is unfolding as we are living through it.
During the year since my mother died—prematurely in some respects, but also at age 83, not really cut short—everyday life has changed dramatically due to the pandemic. Perhaps it was premonitory, but my mother died after a weekend at the Gateway Skilled Nursing Facility in Hayward (where she was sent by Kaiser after the doctors there checked all the boxes that said she was ready to enter rehabilitation), the same Gateway facility where more elders died than any other place in Northern California in the first months of the local outbreak of Covid-19. So perhaps she was spared that indignity, but her own death was hastened by the overworked, inattentive staff maintained by the corporate overlords there when they didn’t notice for more than 12 hours that her oxygen levels had fallen dangerously low. She suffered brain damage and could no longer speak the next morning, and she died that evening after being rushed back to Kaiser. We felt lucky to be at her bedside in her last moments, watching her fight for life against the inevitable, and giving her what comfort we could. It was heart-wrenching, but it was real. Life is death and death is life…
And life is life, too! On May 31 my second granddaughter, Spinoza Bente Sphere Manning Hasan, was born, and she’s a delight. Following Halloul who joined us in May 2017, I can’t tell you how personally lucky I feel to have a growing extended family; it fills me with such love that it’s almost painful! Halloul and I get together at least twice a week to play for a few hours, and soon I hope I’ll be able to take both kids when Spinoza gets a bit older and more mobile. Halloul’s intellectual growth, sophisticated 3-year-old syntax, and all around playfulness is endlessly entertaining.
Spinoza home from hospital on June 1, 2020 with Halloul and me.
Dad meets Spinoza, July 3, 2020.
Sneaking out for ice cream!
After months of weird dislocations imposed by the pandemic, we managed to book a whole season of outdoor events for Shaping San Francisco’s Fall 2020. This has gone extremely well, in spite of frequently smoke-filled skies from unprecedented wildfires, and having to hold down the number of people who can attend any given event. Perhaps that has even accidentally helped, since our events have been mostly full with waiting lists, unlike the hit or miss we were used to over the past decade. I was able to take part in all the events until two weeks ago when I had cancer surgery. (We also have been able to maintain our income, thanks to the ongoing support of our donors, and some help from federal and state emergency grants that we were able to get.)
from the August 28 Bay Cruise, under smoke-filled skies…
Tabling during an impromptu community festival in Balmy Alley, Oct. 3 2020.
LisaRuth presenting on women printers across from the old DeYoung Building (home to the SF Chronicle from the 1880s til the 1950s) during our Market Street: The Contested Boulevard walking tour.
I got the bad news in July, after noticing a bump on my left cheek in January, that I had metastasized melanoma tumors. The doctors at Kaiser seem very capable and I’ve received excellent treatment I think. After the scary diagnosis, they put me on an experimental immunotherapy treatment that uses monoclonal antibodies to boost my immune system’s ability to target T-cells at this particular cancer. There were practically no side effects, and after three treatments, the tumors had noticeably shrunk. I had surgery on October 13, a parotidectomy to remove most of my salivary gland and neck dissection to remove about 30-50 lymph nodes. After 9 hours I woke up and was happy that my brain seemed ok. I soon noticed that the left side of my face was numb. I had been warned that I may be partially paralyzed for months or longer, but happy to say, most of my facial muscles are already working again after two weeks. I still have a massive numb area on my lower left cheek and jaw where the Frankensteinian scars run, and I have weirdness with my lips and mouth so eating and chewing are mostly the same, but not quite. I can’t purse my lips the same (Adriana and I have a daily Kiss-o-meter to check my progress) nor can I gargle properly. And the worst outcome is that my voice is not working. I can speak in a hoarse whisper. The doc says I have to wait 30 days to see if my voice returns, and if not, then we can look into further medical treatment to restore it. Ugh. It’s the worst of this for me. The best news is that the pathology report came back after 9 days and showed that I had no cancer! They found some dead cancer cells in the remains of the tumor, but no spreading to my lymph nodes and nothing still alive at the time of surgery. So it seems that the experimental treatment had a miraculous effect and already killed the cancer. My surgeon was truly surprised at this outcome. Score one for high-tech medicine!
On the wall in Hayes Valley, hyper-gentrified area that two decades ago was predominantly African American.
The impending Civil War I alluded to in the latter paragraphs in my last post looms ever closer. Apparently Fox TV’s Tucker Carlson wasted no time in defending the 17-year-old murderer in Kenosha Wisconsin as the victim, and his victims as casualties of a riot, a twisting of reality that will be so heavily amplified by the right-wing echo chamber that it’s not hard to imagine the dude getting acquitted by a jury and turned into a martyr for the burgeoning fascist movement. Today’s Guardian had a long article about a retired FBI agent’s investigation into the penetration of police forces by white supremacists and how little is being done to analyze, track, or confront this. Assuming that the majority of the population is actually sick of this racist authoritarianism and will vote out Trump (even if Biden is such a weak-tea version of most of the same values), the heavily armed supporters of deeply embedded white supremacy are very likely to rise up and start shooting if they think Trump has lost—which they define as the end of life as they know it (if only!) … Then what?
I was genuinely thrilled to see the NBA go on strike yesterday, and sympathize with how difficult it must be for them to formulate their next steps. (And kudos to the Giants and Dodgers, and the other 4 baseball teams who struck last night in solidarity.) Professional athletes’ entire leverage rests on playing or being ready to play. If NBA players strike and end the playoffs and the season, and likely by extension the collective bargaining agreement with the billionaire owners of NBA franchises, where will that leave them? Not in the spotlight they’ve been trying to use, not with the ongoing leverage over the sport they currently have. Could a mass spectator sport be destroyed by player action? So many interesting questions lurk in this moment. As I write, it seems the majority of pro basketball players have decided to continue their playoffs in their Orlando bubble, but some of the biggest stars apparently were advocating ending the season here and now. NBA players haven’t been as politically assertive as the women of the WNBA, but have been far more politicized than athletes in other sports, and they enjoy a long history to draw on.
While this latest outrage of racist police violence has grabbed our attention for the past few days, in San Francisco the more prosaic process of making the city’s budget has unfolded in the Supervisors’ Budget Committee. Mayor London Breed, who never hesitates to use the race card to silence critics or to rally support, loudly promised some weeks ago to reduce the overall budget for the police and sheriff by some $120 million over two years ($40 million each year from SFPD), and to move that money to bolster programmatic spending in the African American community… on closer scrutiny during the committee hearings, it turns out to have been a lie. She only proposed to reduce the budget by $18M, 2.6% from last year. Worse, during these minor reductions, she secretly held meetings with the (extremely right-wing) police union (the SF Police Officers Association) in which she promised them substantial wage increases in future years. After several public sessions lasting upwards of 12 hours, with hundreds of public comments by WebX, nearly unanimously in favor of major cuts and divestment from existing models of policing, the Budget Committee voted to make some reductions, but nothing as dramatic as the times would seem to call for.
Breed’s image always draws graffiti in the Mission.
Remarkable installation along Octavia Boulevard calling attention to the enormous displacement of Black San Francisco in the past decades.
With a Black Mayor who regularly touts her bonafides when it comes to taking care of the Black community, you might expect to see her taking a more aggressive approach to the police budget and policing in general (her own sibling is languishing in jail after all). But what we see unfolding in San Francisco has been foretold not only here (during Willie Brown’s tenure 1996-2003, when the black population fell precipitously and he was quoted saying if you don’t make $50,000/year maybe you don’t belong in San Francisco—that average salary has nearly doubled since then) and in many other cities across the U.S. where black politicians have taken power. In A People’s History of Detroit, the co-authors make the point:
The problem is rather that black urban regimes (those led by black mayors and majority black city councils) operate “in a local political culture and system dominated hegemonically by the imperatives of the very ‘growth machine’ that is the engine of black marginalization.” (quoting Adolph Reed, Jr., p. 197)
Going back to the mid-1960s, San Francisco’s ruling class, the holders of Big Capital, has forged alliances with organized labor, the black community, the Mission Coalition Organization, Chinatown organizers, the LGBTQ community, etc. to maintain a priority commitment to “economic growth” as driven by private business as the overriding organizing principal of city politics. Whoever has become mayor over the years, whatever their stated intentions to enact progressive legislation, has deferred to the interests of the city’s dominant corporations and wealthy individuals, and especially the real estate industry and its ardent supporters among the Building Trades. We’ve had two Black mayors, a Chinese mayor, and two different female mayors, but the basic direction of City politics has been consistent and unchanging, leading inexorably to the extremely polarized reality of absurd wealth amidst shocking poverty that we have today.
Here in the throes of Fogust, but it’s been quite foggy all summer (thank goodness!) The pink triangle on Twin Peaks for Gay Freedom was lit up by LED lights for the first time this year.
It seems like a year has gone by since I last blogged in May. (I spent a lot of time in the past month putting together a dozen and a half short videos based on “stops” in Hidden San Francisco.) The Black Lives Matter protests erupted and swept the country, larger and with more participants than any previous social movement in U.S history! The palpable, visceral disgust at living under an openly racist president finally boiled over and changed the whole tone of social discourse. The tacit or explicit approval of white supremacist culture is under profound challenge from all sides. It turns out a rather substantial majority of people living in the U.S. do NOT want to perpetuate a racist society, even if the ability to understand racism in its deep historical and structural foundations is not as strong as it should be. A poor and distorted system of teaching history (see John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight of August 2 for a good overview), combined with a long-term cultural preference for amnesia and denial, makes it hard(er) to impart a proper understanding of just how foundational racism is to both the United States and to capitalism. (Two books I read recently are great on this: The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States by Walter Johnson, and Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition by Cedric Robinson… more on these in a later post.)
Incredible art has burst out all over the many boarded up stores and restaurants all over the Bay Area, and presumably the world!
From the June 3 Black Lives Matter protest organized by Mission High School students and attended by about 15,000!
Dolores Park filled with protesters, nearly everyone with their homemade signs.
The most basic question
All the names on the wall behind this guy’s sign were killed by police too… in Clarion Alley
Meanwhile the Covid-19 pandemic has dramatically worsened—and right along with it, the social dysfunction and madness that denies the pandemic, that refuses common sense public health measures, and believes in the most outlandish, contradictory, paranoid conspiracies to explain what is going on, have all gone viral too. It turns out that outlandish, superstitious nonsense that purports to explain epidemics is nothing new. In Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present, Frank M. Snowden details the many panics and hysterias that accompanied the plague, cholera, typhus, and typhoid fever, before science developed new ways to understand them. The oddity of our current pandemic is how much scientific knowledge is present—and dismissed—in the midst of this crisis. In part this is a result of the triumph of the Cult of the Market, which leaves all explanations and solutions to market mechanisms regardless of the plain necessity of a massive, publicly funded and centrally coordinated public health campaign. The corrosive individualism that dominates U.S. life is a direct cause of the broad failure to adequately confront Covid-19. Ideological obsessions have literally ‘trumped’ common sense and well developed public health practices, putting us in the twin holes of increasing disease and death and economic collapse.
The government is teetering between a full-blown militaristic assault on its own cities and a blithe “nothing to see here” ostrich-head-in-the-sand approach to the unfolding events. From one day to the next, we are bombarded by the narcissist blowhard’s stunning ignorance, endless disinformation and self-serving promotional blather, to the dire warnings of local and state health officials, to soaring statistics of illness and death (even the basic numbers are denied by the crazies of the right and ultra-left). The trauma being inflicted on everyone in this society is going to be with us for a long time, regardless of when this pandemic is finally halted, or if Biden beats Trump—the new wave of PTSD will take its own toll for years to come.
Democracy Wall on Valencia still going strong.
Beneath all this is the underlying reality that what once passed for public discourse—primarily visible in the daily newspapers dominated by the Associated Press and its anodyne center-right-to-right presentation of the daily news—has been destroyed by the new Internet monopolists, Facebook, Google, Amazon. The silo-ing of opinion and news has proceeded so far that we now have a hard time imagining how to undo it. In reality, there has never been a true “public discourse” that included everyone. Most people just watched, whether the myriad minorities of our culture, anyone to the left of the center-right, or even the 40 million or so who believe the Bible is the literal truth. What has happened with the tweetification of news and information is that everyone is getting in on it, and so far, no one has established a hegemonic version of their “truth” as one that everyone shares. Instead, the multiple versions of truth and facts are ever more certain of themselves while denying the veracity of any contrary or inconvenient facts or ideas.
This is not to glorify the “good old days” of three networks with three white male anchors defining the parameters of acceptable discourse like it was when I was young. A good deal of the skepticism now prevalent towards experts and expertise is rooted in the revolt against authority that reached a brief zenith in the late 1960s and early 1970s—a revolt that was entirely justified and only failed to go far enough. Moreover, the hand-wringing of liberal lament over the lost civility of decades past elides the blatant exclusion of a majority of the population from that space of “civility,” whether African Americans, women, LGBTQ folk, etc., all left out until the militance of the mid-century upheavals thrust them briefly onto center stage. Criticisms of “shrillness” still dog women as they run for office, while various glass ceilings enforce gender and racial hierarchies more or less as they always have, the occasional black or female executive notwithstanding. The severe widening of the wealth gap, a decades-long process only becoming more exaggerated with every passing month, has opened an abyss into which millionaires and their “betters” seem committed to plunging society.
And that leads rather inexorably to another deep problem on our plates. For many activists the obvious solution to so many of the problems we can easily identify is to win elections and put the government on a new path—or at least help re-establish a basic commitment to facts and science! Even for the more radical, seizing the state one way or another still seems the path towards changing the direction of society. But the state has always been a creature of capital, serving to construct and then manage “free markets” to ensure the subordination of workers to the imperative of wealth accumulation and concentration. The brief interregnum of social democracy (in the U.S., the New Deal) in which redistribution and social safety nets were put in place by the state using a progressive tax system (upwards of 90% income tax on the richest during the “golden era” of 1950s Eisenhower Republicanism) has been unraveling ever since the 1970s. A half century later, it is a ghost that haunts political imaginations, but offers little by way of meaningful solutions for the transformative changes we simply must enact.
