Nowtopian

Farewell Bob Isaacson

Bob Isaacson at the annual Fourth of July party at Huffaker Park along Mission Creek, 2013.

Saturday, May 7, 2022 at the Bayview Boathouse, a memorial for Bob Isaacson.

I am sorry not to be here in person, but as I am still testing positive for Covid, I think it best to stay home.

I met Bob Isaacson around 2010. I had known the amazing book Vanished Waters: A History of San Francisco’s Mission Bay for some years; it was (and is) the main source for understanding the history of the eastern side of San Francisco—Mission Bay, once a body of water, and now a dense and modern neighborhood. The book was produced in 1986 by the Mission Creek Conservancy and written by historian Nancy Olmsted. I was interested in getting more copies and when I made inquiries, Bob responded to let me know the book was out of print.

One thing led to another, and a few months later I was involved with Bob in exploring how we could reproduce the book and publish a 2nd edition. It was made more difficult by the fact that all the original materials for the first edition were lost, so it was going to take a fair amount of sleuthing and research to find the maps and photos from the first book, and of course all the text would have to be re-done as well. This was up my alley, being a book designer and longtime typesetter, as well as a self-taught historian and curator for Shaping San Francisco’s digital archive at foundsf.org.

About a year later, we had a sparkling new edition, with new and improved maps and images, and several new chapters that I wrote, some of which depended on Bob and his ability to wrangle a number of key participants in the multi-year process of building the new Mission Bay, to participate in a series of oral history interviews.

Bob himself was an indispensable character through all the years that Mission Bay went from a derelict industrial and rail yard zone to the dynamic neighborhood it is today. Along with Ginny, Corinne, Toby, Phillip, Ruth, and other Mission Creek Conservancy members Bob’s years-long effort to make Mission Creek an ecological gem has borne fruit. What was once a smelly Shit Creek, is now an ecological wonderland, a birding paradise, and a thriving waterway with rich life on and below the surface. Bob worked tirelessly to reconnect the area to its own history, both socially and ecologically. And he did it with great modesty, kindness, and good humor.

Few San Franciscans have left as important a legacy as Bob Isaacson, and though he has gone largely unheralded during his life for his steady presence and dedicated vision, I’m here to say that he deserves to be remembered in the pantheon of our most revered, and that he will not be forgotten. Thank you Bob!

A heron stands in the pickleweed overlooking Mission Creek, a vision inconceivable without the stalwart efforts of Bob Isaacson.

Organ Recital

A luxury tech bus graveyard near the SF dump on Tunnel Road! (probably they are just parked there when not in use)

Once again I’ve left my blog languishing. I have a better excuse than usual. I’m working on a new novel! Have about 75,000 words written so far, and probably as many more to come. I hope to wrap up a first draft sometime in summer, and then there will be the rigorous purging and rewriting… we’ll see how it all goes. But the good news is that so far I’m having fun. I got past the beginning slog, and now the book is just coming to me every time I sit down to write. I always have a chapter or two in mind and just go into the moment and let the story unfold. It’s a blast when it flows like that.

That said, I still carry on reading all sorts of fascinating books, some of which should help my character and scene development in the novel (sneak preview: it’s set starting in 2023, but mostly later in the mid-2020s, finally ending in 2050, working title is “When Shells Crumble”—it was supposed to the prequel to my 2004 novel After the Deluge but it has shifted too much and I wouldn’t characterize it that way anymore… though there are a few connective tissues).

And I also can report that I am continuing to be cancer-free. The melanoma has not reappeared and I just had my every-three year colonoscopy and it didn’t turn up anything worrisome either, I’m happy to report. I have had a weird shoulder/upper arm injury that has persisted for several months now. I just had a great therapeutic massage today and am optimistic that a new approach to my daily exercise and posture may help me recover sooner than later. I have had to give up weekly frisbee throwing (that’s probably how I hurt myself in the first place) but continue to enjoy petanque, and can’t help but love having my granddaughters leap into my (aching) arms! I’m on Medicare now, which is a much worse deal than the CoveredCA deal I had until I turned 65 a month ago. But it’s better than nuttin’.

The Russian attack on Ukraine is dominating the headlines and pushing out of sight the dire humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan imposed by the US impounding billions of their national assets. Rendered invisible also are the ongoing catastrophes in Yemen, Gaza, Sudan, Somalia, etc., all fueled by US arms sales and political support for barbaric regimes. Meanwhile climate refugees are fleeing violence and collapsing ecologies in Central America, northern Africa, and other regions, all of which is driving the rightwing xenophobia that continues to gain political momentum. It’s a bad time on ol’ Planet Earth!

This building on 25th Street a few blocks from my house is organized against being evicted by way of California’s evil Ellis Act.

Price Wars is a new book by Rupert Russell, an enterprising journalist who decided to visit many of the most problematic spots on the globe to see what was driving the crises. He visits eastern Ukraine, exactly where the new Russian attack is unfolding as I write. He goes to Kenya and Guatemala too. But his main point is that prices, that seemingly neutral outcome of market transactions based on supply and demand, are anything but neutral or “natural” (as the neoliberals tend to argue). He details the role of speculation and derivatives in driving all sorts of price dislocations (in energy, food, and other basics of modern life) which completely separate prices from their signaling function, and instead become a means of deceiving large numbers of people while a very small number of people are pocketing vast social wealth.

It is the collectively shared perception of reality, rather than reality itself, that drives prices.

p. 171

Their irrationality serves a rational interest. It is how those who sit atop the market pyramid are able to transfer wealth from others to themselves. It is precisely prices’ inefficiencies and inaccuracies, their ability to manipulate, hide, amplify and narrate that makes them engines of enrichment as well as engines of chaos… The market mythologisers have deployed the same tactic. As I had seen again and again, migrants had played a pivotal role in keeping the would-be reformers at bay. The Feed, filled with the “rapist hordes” and “invading caravans,” served up ready-made scapegoats, deflecting attention from the inscrutable financial alchemy to the photo-friendly “barbarians at the gate.”

p. 239

In my previous post I discussed in depth various aspects of our militaristic society and the omnicidal impulse shaping the colonial logic that has spread across the planet for the past five centuries. I read Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War by Howard French (Liveright Publishing Co., W.W. Norton & Co., 2021). French is a longtime New York Times reporter, which doesn’t necessarily establish much credibility in my mind, but this is a wonderful book. It helpfully backs up the “beginning” of our timeline to decades before Columbus’s 1492 voyages to the Caribbean. He recounts the tale of a prominent king from Mali who traveled in the early 1300s to Mecca by way of Egypt and gave away several hundred tons of gold along the way to prove his power and wealth. Stories of this gold-laden monarch and his kingdom in Africa made it to Europe and sparked early Portuguese exploration voyages along the West African coast decades later in the early 1400s. Our common histories have portrayed Portuguese exploration as a brief sojourn along West Africa before one of their explorers finally made it around the southern tip of Africa and “discovered” the Indian Ocean, eventually establishing trading posts in East Africa, India, Malaysia, Indonesia and China (Macau). French corrects this deeply deceptive account. Actually it was a slow process, taking many decades, before that journey around the Cape of Good Hope and into the Indian Ocean. During those decades Portuguese traders gained preferential access to gold trading first, and then trading in black humans in West Africa and eventually further south in what is later Angola. With this early trade in gold and slaves, the Portuguese state became one of the wealthiest in that period, eventually taking over the island of Sâo Tomé where they pioneered the sugar plantation using slave labor (this followed the heavy exploitation of the Atlantic island of Madeira, and then later the Canary Islands). The integrated sugar plantation was then transplanted to Portuguese colonies in northeastern Brazil before finding its full barbaric development in the Caribbean under Dutch, British, and French control more than a century later.

Continue reading Organ Recital

Refusing to be an Imperial Subject

Among my earliest memories in the late 1960s are anti-Vietnam war protests that I mostly experienced on TV. There was a cloud of teargas that wafted into my 6th grade classroom in North Oakland from the Governor Reagan-ordered National Guard assault on People’s Park protesters in Berkeley in 1969, but most of the upheavals of that era took place before I really came of age. By the time I was 15 in 1972, wondering if I would be drafted, the Vietnam War was winding down and the draft was soon abolished. During that time I had a class that focused for a month or two on “military justice,” emphasizing it as a quintessential oxymoron. I also heard about the U.S. role in the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile by way of FM radio newscasts that were great alternatives to the mainstream media (and exemplary of a time when the media’s hegemony and “truth” was being challenged from the grassroots left, not the aggrieved, resentful white right).

Here’s a collage from 2003 just before the attack on Iraq, attributed to the Committee for Full Enjoyment. (Yes that’s me when I still had hair!)

My political evolution through the 1970s into my early adulthood led me through anarchism (by way of the Spanish Civil War), anti-nuclear and pro-farmworker politics, and a consistent antipathy to the military. A bumper sticker of the era (that I had on my various vehicles) was white type on black background that mimicked the look of a contemporary ad for the U.S. Army: “Join The Army. Travel to exotic distant lands, meet exciting unusual people, and kill them.” When Reagan shockingly became president (surely he was too dumb and right-wing to be elected? Well, no), fired the Air Traffic Controllers and fired up the wars in Central America (and Grenada and Panama, plus backing Saddam Hussein in the 8-year Iran-Iraq war), local anti-war efforts focused on stopping arms shipments and halting the home-porting of the USS Missouri. When the Cold War collapsed in 1989, base closures followed, including nearly all the military properties in San Francisco and many around the bay. For a brief moment it seemed like maybe there was going to be a “peace dividend” and the long post-WWII slide into a military-industrial dominated society would begin to turn around.

The bumper sticker of my 1970s

As several of the books I look at here (see end for links) help to make clear, that didn’t happen, and it took a good deal of obfuscation and ideological gymnastics to ensure the continuity of the massive military budget when all the ostensible reasons for its maintenance were publicly disintegrating. David Vine in The United States of War has given us a detailed history of U.S. expansionism and empire from the pre-revolutionary colonial attacks on indigenous North America all the way to the recent offensive against ISIS in Syria (the book was published before the final collapse of the U.S. war in Afghanistan, now being carried on by Biden’s executive seizure of $7 billion in Afghan national assets, and ongoing punitive sanctions). Vine’s book is replete with informative maps that show each era of military-led expansion, first by building forts in other nation’s lands across the North American continent to facilitate western expansion and colonial subjugation of the first peoples, then seizing 1/3 of Mexico in the 1840s, and eventually the Philippines and a variety of islands in the Pacific and Caribbean by the turn of the 20th century, ending with a detailed look at the dramatic expansion of the U.S. military across the planet after WWII, with a less-known expansion of bases and hostilities across Africa since 2001.

It’s easy to imagine that the U.S. took a serious turn for the worse at various moments in history. A favorite of historians of a certain era was the seizure of the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii in 1898, ostensibly the first time the country became imperial in the manner of European states. But Vine is clear that that is a false understanding, and that there was never a period of U.S. history that wasn’t expansionist and covetous of neighboring (or far-flung) lands. Another moment some historians emphasize is World War II, and the fact that the U.S. was the only power physically stronger at the end of the war than at its outset. From its orchestration of a new world order in the post-war era, the United States embraced its new role as a pre-eminent superpower, though the Cold War competition with the Soviet Union became its explanation and rationale for its own militarism and incessant meddling. I never imagined the U.S. was anything but venal and ruthless in the 1950s, but Vine brought some statistics forward I hadn’t previously heard:

In a single year, 1958, the CIA led the government’s efforts to train more than five hundred thousand police officers in twenty-five nations, creating secret police units in nearly half and “strengthening repressive capacity” of undemocratic governments in particular. . . During his eight years in office, President Dwight D. Eisenhower authorized 170 major covert operations in forty-eight nations.

p. 201 and 202

Alfred McCoy in his latest To Govern the Globe: World Orders & Catastrophic Change offers a parallel list:

Between 1945 and 2000, the US intervened in 81 consequential elections worldwide, including eight times in Italy, five in Japan, and many more in Latin America. Between 1958 and 1975, military coups, many of them American-sponsored, changed governments in three dozen nations—a quarter of the world’s sovereign states—fostering a distinct “reverse wave” in the global trend toward democracy.

p. 227

I’ll come back to Vine a bit later when I return to the sheer madness of the economic side of this imperial project. But before that, it’s important to delve into its twisting self-justifications, which from the early days of the Cold War went through an Orwellian rebranding from war to defense, using deeply rooted definitions of the liberal self to render the brutal truth of a militarized empire largely invisible.

Joseph Darda has a great book called Empire of Defense—Race and the Cultural Politics of Permanent War. It’s probably one of the best treatments of the logic of U.S. militarism and foreign policy I’ve read (even though I just went through the eight books listed at the end during the past six weeks—along with several others!—there are dozens of books on these topics that have been published in the past few years). I would put Darda’s book as a bookend with Stephen Mexal’s book on 19th century western liberalism that I discussed way back in 2014. Darda lays out how President Truman reorganized the military establishment in 1948, changing the Department of War to the Department of Defense, creating the National Security Council and the NSA, the CIA, and the foundations for the expansive spook bureaucracies we now have (though we have little conscious idea of what they do with the hundreds of billions of secret money they spend every year). But the U.S. was inheriting the role of defending a colonial world order, but knew it had to do it while seeming to be anticolonial. The deep Jim Crow racism of WWII-era US life was a problem internationally, and when prominent Black activists submitted a document to the United Nations called “We Charge Genocide” against the United States, it set off urgent efforts to reframe the US role in the world. Here’s Darda’s main argument in a nutshell:

There is nothing aberrational about racism in the United States. It is woven into the American creed. Liberalism defines the human by universalizing the characteristics of white Western man and valuing all others based on their adoption of, or failure to adopt, his characteristics. It defines humanity through inclusion but also through the violence of assimilation and exclusion, securing the liberal freedoms of some by looting the land and labor of others . . . The liberal state, facing a rising anticolonial tide, constructed a color-blind color line through the idea of defense…. But defense also means defining who does and doesn’t count as mankind. Defense is a racial regime through which the state distinguishes between the human with the right to self-defense, the deferred human to be assimilated, and the nonhuman to be killed . . . The collapse of colonialism and the erosion of Jim Crow threatened to undo a world long governed by white Western men. The empire of defense contained the emerging crisis by criminalizing those threatening to change that world, turning Asia and Africa into a crime front and black and brown America into a war front. It policed the crisis through repression but also by reform and, by preaching anticolonialism and antiracism, made it difficult to tell the difference.

p. 12, 13, and 23

And Darda is clear that from Truman onward, the line between war and policing has been blurring continuously. Both the Korean and Vietnam Wars were defined as “police actions” at the start. Eventually the efforts to police drugs turned into the War on Drugs. Essentially policing and war-making are two sides of a process whereby elites create boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate ways of living. By the time the Cold War ended in 1989, the Drug War had been a major activity for the military in Central America and the heavily militarized police inside the U.S. itself. Darda shows how the first Gulf War (and the ensuing bombings of Somalia and Serbia in the 1990s) were framed as “humanitarian wars,” a rationale trotted out on behalf of the women of Afghanistan and the suffering masses of Iraq, too, in the first decades of the 21st century.