San Miguel

I took this picture of San Miguel Mission Church/Chapel in Santa Fe in May of 2004 during one of innumerable vacations in The Land Of Enchantment over the last thirty years or so. I've always liked the picture -- despite the primitive digital camera I was using at the time -- because of the massing of the building, and the dove seen in flight just above the cross. Mirable dictu et stupor mundi, eh?

Yes, well. These things happen in New Mexico, more often than you might think.

That vacation also included my first trip out to Chaco Canyon. Stupor mundi, indeed. I would go back any time, but the opportunity doesn't arise as often as I'd like.

It's quite a way out to Chaco from our place in the East Mountains, though not as far as many places are from practically any place in California. But that washboard road from the highway at Nageezi is something of a deterrent. People arrive at the Chaco Canyon Visitor's Center in full dudgeon because of "that road", yowling their heads off because "it practically destroyed" their car.

Yes, well. It's New Mexico. Take it slow and easy, you'll be fine. And so will your car. Drive around Santa Fe on a sunny day and you'll find that many residential streets aren't paved. Go out of town any distance, and you'll find unpaved roads everywhere.

It's not so far to Santa Fe from our little place in the country and the highway north runs through spectacular mountain scenery; the road I take into town from I-25 (Old Pecos Trail onto Old Santa Fe Trail right to the Plaza at La Fonda) goes by all the historical sights. Well, most of them. It goes right through El Barrio de Analco where San Miguel is located -- said to have been built as a mission church for the salvation of the Tlaxcala Indians who accompanied the Spanish when they decided it was time and the opportunity was ripe to settle New Mexico. According to the stories, San Miguel was the first church built in Santa Fe, and for some time it was the only church in Santa Fe.

Given the disputatious nature of the settlers, however, San Miguel's first incarnation had a rather dramatic conclusion.

Relations among the civil authorities, the military, and the clergy were frequently stormy, and in the late 1630s, with the governorship of Luis de Rosas, the trouble was brought to a head. Attempts to resolve the problems had been in vain. When Fray Bartolomé Romero and Fray Francisco Núñez were sent to Santa Fe in 1640 to meet with the governor and attempt a reconciliation, he verbally abused them, beat them with a stick, and had them imprisoned. The friars were later released, but the church was closed and its bells removed.

The culmination of the disputes between church and state was the razing of San Miguel in 1640, the adobes presumably taken down with the vigas and reused in other construction. The drama did not end with demolition, however. Late one night Nicolás Ortiz discovered his wife in Governor Rosas' house, which precipitated a turmoil that resulted in the murder of the excommunicated former governor some weeks later. Rosas was absolved of his activities against the religious by a priest named Juan de Vidania, who was arrested later by the Inquisition but escaped while en route to Mexico. This complex, fascinating, and bizarre chapter in New Mexican history brought into high contrast the chronic antagonisms within the civil administration and the church as well as those between church and state. ^{-- from} Sanctuaries of Spanish New Mexico. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993

How can you not love New Mexico with stories like that abounding?

San Miguel was rebuilt, but like most of the churches in New Mexico, it was burned during the Pueblo Revolt. It was restored not soon after the Reconquest, reopening for services some time around 1710, and it repeatedly fell to ruin and was rebuilt thereafter. The current appearance of the church differs significantly from its historic appearance(s); photos taken in the 19th century show repeated transformations.

1872

1880

1884

As far as I can tell, the current appearance dates from about 1955, though most of the elements of the present appearance were in place prior to then.

Not all of New Mexico is as determined as Santa Fe to enforce Colonial and Pueblo architectural styles, so parts of the built environment of the state seem strangely out of place compared to those areas which do maintain Colonial and Pueblo styles, as if contemporary parts of Texas and Colorado had been plopped down on in the midst of the ancient mud and stone buildings (or their ruins or their imitations) that seem to have grown out of the land itself.

John Gaw Meem is the godfather of the contemporary New Mexico Pueblo-Colonial architectural style, and he's both beloved and hated for it. He's been criticized for slavishly following the styles of the past -- which is not what he did at all. His Zimmerman Library at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque is an example of how he adapted the styles of yore to contemporary requirements, and it is hard to find anyone who's experienced the Zimmerman who is anything but delighted by it.

This is obviously not a copy of anything built in the past, and the interior is just a brilliant reimagining of New Mexico's spirit of place and its traditional architectural values

1938

and as seen in this video:



The residences and other buildings that Meem designed are treasured by New Mexicans today for their simplicity and beauty and how naturally they seem to integrate with the land and nature, in stark contrast to most contemporary architecture that seeks an almost desperate contrast with nature. By evoking traditional style without copying, and by adapting New Mexico's traditional architecture to contemporary needs, Meem found the contemporary truth within tradition styles.

San Miguel is considered somewhat anomalous compared to most of the mission churches in New Mexico because it doesn't quite follow the pattern of many of the others, yet its cubical masses seem to have had a strong influence on what came after.

The anomaly is the Romanesque stone Cathedral Basilica of San Francisco de Assisi in Santa Fe, beloved in its own right, but almost as alien to the landscape of New Mexico as a Texas suburban ranch house.


But in his brilliance, Father Roca adapted the style of the Santa Fe Cathedral to New Mexico's native architecture at the Santuario de Chimayo.


So it all fits together in the by and bye.

Land of Enchantment, indeed.

Lessons From St. Francis?

Cimabue's portrait of the Saint above is said to be a fair likeness of his appearance, largely because it was painted within a few decades of his death in Assisi, apparently with the advice of some of the brothers who knew Francesco in life.

There's something deeply sad and other worldly about it. The full-length portrait, in the Lower Church of the Basilica of St. Francis:

shows him with the Stigmata which he acquired toward the end of his life, well after the founding of the Franciscan Orders, and well after the time when the administration of those Orders had been taken from Francesco and put in the hands of Brother Elias, one of his first and most ardent followers -- and conveniently an administrative and architectural genius, though not necessarily a political one, as Elias himself would be removed from his position of authority over the Franciscan Orders in turn.

Cimabue's version of St. Francis is quite different than the more famous versions of Giotto in the same church; most of Giotto's versions show Francesco in a kind of mystical ecstacy, for the man had visions and heard voices after all. Today, of course, we'd call that a "condition" and label it schizophrenia, especially if its onset comes during the patient's early 20's, as was the case with the young Francesco. Medication and treatment would be advised, though a cure remains elusive.

But in Francesco's day, such a condition was considered either of God or the Devil, and appropriate tests and ordeals could be administered to determine which. In Francesco's case, he managed to charm the Bishop of Assisi right off the bat, so the tests weren't necessary, and from that point, the issue of whether he was possessed of demons or was a child of God simply wasn't an issue any more. With the Bishop's imprimatur, Francesco was pretty much left alone to develop his mission and calling as he and Divine Wisdom considered fit and proper and to gather about him such followers as he might.

His approach varied considerably depending on his state of mind. Francesco appears to have both bipolar and schizophrenic such that he was continually beset with contrasting states of utter joy and crippling depression. Add on top of this mental/emotional chaos his frequent physical illnesses and his penchant for mortification of the flesh and we have a picture of a man who must have had a very difficult time functioning at all, something that Cimabue seems to have captured in the portrait above. There is a definite "WTF?" impression about it.

Whatever his personal woes, Francesco's legacy is as vibrant today as his life's work was in his own time, though changes have been made to accommodate the Franciscan Orders to the needs and requirements of the Church. For their part, Franciscans have a mixed legacy through history, though apparently in Francesco's own time, there was no doubt about his and his followers' holiness.

Part of the Franciscans' mixed legacy has to do with their service to the Church and especially to the Spanish Crown in the New World -- which led to such unspeakable horrors against the Indians that even now the mind and heart recoils at what was done and why. The Pueblo Revolt in New Mexico resulted in the execution of 21 Franciscan priests (The Martyrs) who'd been sent to the Natives to save their souls, but wound up tormenting, exploiting and oppressing them -- on the orders of the Church and the Crown, of course -- sometimes quite as viciously as anything Francesco did to himself, if not more so.

Old Cross of the Martyrs in Santa Fe. Erected in 1920 in honor of the 21 Franciscan priests put to death during the first days of the Pueblo Revolt in 1680.

The issue for the Indians was not so much of an issue for the Spanish or their Franciscan missionaries, whose dismissal of Native interests and concerns was notorious throughout their era of conquest. I can't help but think that Francesco himself would not have approved of the highhanded and destructive behavior of the conquerors of the New World -- not that anybody who mattered would listen to him.

There was no real conception of a New World when Francesco lived -- except in the sense of that which could be acquired through Crusades against the Muslims, the Fourth of which got under way during Francesco's lifetime. That led to a remarkable encounter -- or perhaps a series of them -- between the Sultan of Egypt and Francesco at the Sultan's camp in the Nile Delta while a cease-fire between the Crusaders and the Sultan's forces was in effect. Francesco sought to convert the Sultan who had other ideas, but who saw the little monk (Francesco was said to be about 5'4") as a more appealing avatar of the infidel Christians, and with whom he apparently enjoyed parlaying. The Sultan was not converted, but he seems to have become enough of an admirer of Francesco that once the Holy City of Jerusalem was retaken from the Crusaders, the Franciscans were the only Christians allowed back in to care for the Christian holy sites, said to be due to the fact that St. Francis himself had provided the model of consideration and respect for the interests and views of Muslims, a characteristic that later Franciscans would have some trouble applying to the Indians of the New World.

Yes, I know, what happened wasn't entirely their fault, but it's much like the continuing problem of abusive police and military forces in our own day. Abuses become institutionalized far more easily than care and consideration, and failure to oppose or intervene in cases of abuse becomes just as institutionalized. Once that's the case, it is very hard -- almost impossible -- to change the dynamic without completely overturning the status quo. Franciscans may not have wanted to be, but they were participants in the abuses by their secular compatriots, and on some occasions might well have led the abuse.

Early on, though, Francesco and his followers had profound insights into the human condition -- both spiritually and temporally -- as it was in Italy at the turn of the 13th Century. They sought and put into practice another way of living, creating a Utopian spiritual and temporal world of their own in the midst of the crumbling mess being made of Umbria and Italy by The Powers That Be. Their Utopia was based on Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience (to God). They lived simply, served their fellow sufferers and nature, and expressed a joyfulness in life and creation that was practically unheard-of in connection with either the Church or secular powers at the time. The contrast between the simplicity of their lives and their joy in living compared to the misery that even the highest of the mighty seemed to suffer from was instrumental in building up the early membership in the Franciscan Orders, and that success inspired others to found Orders of their own; in Assisi, that meant the Poor Clares, founded by St. Clare, an admirer (and some claim a lover, but I think not) of St. Francis.

St. Clare of Assisi, the Patron Saint of Television, from a fresco by Simone Martini in the Lower Church of the Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi

The key, of course, for both the Franciscans and the Poor Clares was the simplicity and material poverty of their lives; they found it was possible to live well without striving in the material world. There was plenty enough for the well-being of all. They lived well enough on the surplus of the land and the gifts of their admirers that their communities became magnets for others would do likewise. And in their time, they were very successful.

A great deal of the material presence of St. Francis, St. Clare, and their followers has been preserved in Assisi and round about Umbria and Italy, so it is possible today to not only retrace their steps but to get a remarkably full picture of what their lives and their Utopia was like. And at least some of that picture was translated to the New World through the Franciscan missions that were established in California and New Mexico among other places.

It's actually remarkable to see how closely those missions followed the pattern set in Assisi and Umbria centuries beforehand. Each of the Missions was intended to be an expression of the Franciscan ideal. To an extent, they worked, at least for a time.

They worked to the extent they were joyful, let's say. And when their joy was interrupted, as it always would be, much as happened to St. Francis himself, they could quickly turn into miserable sites of suffering and death.

Yet there is something about the Franciscan mission wherever it has been extended that those who experience it don't want to lose. Much to the disgust of some, for example, Franciscans are notorious for singing and dancing and putting on shows, somewhat like the Mormons, but without the breeding. They have always sought to serve the least advantaged among populations, to lift up the weakest, to gently chastise the proud and the strong. St. Francis and St. Clare were notorious in their own time for feeding and caring for the lepers of Assisi, as many Franciscans today feed and care for those our current societies fear, denounce and despise. Their vows of poverty have meant they never lack for what they really need, and the community and companionship they find with one another and with those they serve has long been a model for intentional communities far and wide.

The ideal of a Franciscan community is to be as self-sufficient as possible, but as a mendicant order, Franciscans rely on the generosity of adherents and admirers as well as what the friars can do for themselves. In other words, they can produce for their own needs to a certain extent, but they can also benefit from the material surplus of the wider society. That surplus is ever-present.

Francesco himself demonstrated that repeatedly, but perhaps best known is the church of San Damiano outside of Assisi where he had gone to pray. The church was falling to ruin, and as he prayed, he heard a voice telling him to rebuild the church. He took it quite literally; accomplishing the task, however, seemed to him to require money for stone and building materials, which he got through the sale of cloth and his mule. But the priest at San Damiano refused the money, which he thought was ill-gotten, as the cloth he had sold belonged to Francesco's father. Francesco threw the money on the window-sill, so the story goes, and retreated to the church basement, where he stayed as a hermit for a month or so trying to understand what was wanted of him. Finally, he went back to Assisi to face his father's wrath, leading ultimately to the famous scene of Francesco's renunciation of his father and all his material things before the Bishop of Assisi, and his return to San Damiano as a mendicant and penitent. Shortly, followers came with stone and building materials, and the church of San Damiano was rebuilt from the generosity of those who had witnessed the scene in Assisi's plaza and had heard Francesco's call.

San Damiano became the initial convent for the Poor Clares, and Francesco moved on to repair and rehabilitate other rural churches and chapels in the Assisi region.

In doing so, the Franciscans often simply "occupied" vacant, abandoned, neglected, and run down buildings or took over land that was otherwise going unused. They didn't ask permission, they just did it. And from time to time, that got them into trouble with the authorities, both with the Church and secular authorities, leading to conflicts and struggles that would not be unfamiliar to observers today given the travails and attempts at repressing the Occupy movement.

Of course it helped somewhat that Francesco himself was a favorite of Bishops and the Pope in Rome and that the Franciscan Order had the imprimatur of the Pope; only two years after Francesco's death, he was proclaimed a Saint by Papal decree. Despite the political turmoil of the times, having such high level patronage was of immense assistance in establishing and legitimizing the Franciscans. So far as I can tell, Occupy has no such patronage from On High.

But the "occupation" strategy was very definitely -- and often successfully -- utilized by Francesco and the Franciscans as their movement grew.

Yet the minute Francesco was elevated to sainthood, what was left of the innocence of the Franciscan movement was lost. The Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi is a gorgeous pilgrimage site that contrasts starkly with the humble places where St. Francis actually lived and did his spiritual and temporal work. When parts of the Basilica's ceiling fell during an aftershock of the 1997 Umbrian Earthquake, killing four -- two Franciscans and two engineers checking for damage -- it was shocking (the video is still terrifying -- and seems to presage other events). The ceiling collapsed over the entrance and the altar -- ie: at opposite ends of the church. Repairs were undertaken quickly, and restoration was beautifully done, but the frescoes were lost from those areas of the ceiling that collapsed, and many other frescoes were damaged. In a sense, it was perhaps a reminder that Francesco would never have approved a church like that to honor his memory. It's too fine, too beautiful and far too decorative. Yet as someone from Assisi pointed out to him when he was railing against the fine accommodations the city had built for pilgrims who were already coming to Assisi in his lifetime, "This wasn't built for you. It was built by and for the Assisi Commune."

If there is a lesson from St. Francis for the modern era, apart from the spiritual, it is in the determination and persistence of Francesco to throw off the shackles of his past and adopt a new and simpler way of life, based on his profoundest beliefs in what was right and moral, and to hold on to his beliefs and practices through thick and thin.

Pax et bonum.

Brother Sun, Sister Moon

Tonight's sky should have one of those occasional celestial displays : the largest moon of the year, as it will be full and nearly the closest to Earth it gets.

Naked eye and binocular astronomy is always rewarding and can be deeply moving when you realize what it is you are seeing.

Franco Zeffirelli's glorious "Brother Sun, Sister Moon" is a reminder -- if one were needed -- how rewarding the simplest things and the faith that goes with them can be.

I don't know how much longer this HD internet version will be available from YouTube, as I'm sure the copyright bots are busy scouring the web for violations. But I hadn't seen the movie in 40 years, and it was an extraordinary experience to see it again today.

No matter how lapsed we may be, the stories of the Saints, particularly St. Francis for me, can still inspire and uplift.

Disastrous New Model Policing of Occupy by OPD

I've hesitated to post anything about this as I didn't see the videos until the day before yesterday, and it was hard to imagine reports of "arrests" in Oakland in connection with the May Day marches and rallies and visualize this as what happened:



But this is only part of it. From this video, it looks like just random mayhem by the OPD, snatching and grabbing likely targets at will, with neither cause nor reason, and firing a few rounds of flash-bangs and tear gas pretty much at random as well. This is what the New Model OPD crowd control response, ostentatiously announced by Interim Chief Howard Jordan in the days before the May Day events, looks like. What a mess.
But there is more:



These are the same events, but in greater detail. The randomness and the terror tactics employed by the Oakland police in so-called "crowd control" operations like this are obviously not controlling disturbances -- there were none before the police commenced their attack -- they are causing disturbances. And there are provocateurs -- assumed to be police agents -- in the crowd. Many of them according to witnesses.

At 4:06 you can see one casually pick up a dropped police club and hand it to an officer.

The random firing into the crowd -- a crowd which includes police officers -- looks like a panic move. Given the chaos precipitated by the police, panic among them would be almost expected.

It's Oakland, of course, so the crowd is chanting: "We are not afraid."

Some actually are afraid, though. And inspiring fear and dread in the crowd is part of the botched Plan we see being implemented.

Yet another -- and still longer -- view of the same events. Notice, there is no disturbance in the street until the police create one. These events are taking place as part of the march is about to arrive at Oscar Grant/Frank Ogawa Plaza in front of the Oakland City Hall (where the encampment was, and close to where Scott Olsen and others were injured by police firing into the crowd on October 25).



We don't know what precipitates the cops running forward, but from my perspective, they look like they are trying to get ahead of the crowd, perhaps to form a skirmish line of some sort to prevent something. This is how they operate.

But starting at 0:39 we see a bicyclist cross in front of them. She is jostled and then assaulted by police, pulled from her bike and thrown to the ground, screaming in shock and pain.

(Of course it's possible the bicyclist was deliberately trying to interfere with the police charge. Oh, these things sometimes happen. But I don't know. From appearances, she was simply riding her bike from one side of the street to the other and quite possibly didn't even see the police charge in progress until she was assaulted.)

If the police were intending to form a skirmish line at the Plaza for some reason, they wind up forming a messed up "force protection line" instead as they arrest and drag off the bicyclist. The crowd is highly agitated by these events but they do not respond to police violence with violence of their own (well, apart from their ever-present verbal contempt of the officers, which is not only routine, it is often quite rude. Oh my.)

A tall unhelmeted officer is seen at 2:22 and frequently throughout the rest of the video; he seems to be directing the action. He looks familiar from previous videos of encounters with the Oakland police, I'm thinking especially of one really stupid event when the police confiscated the sound equipment being used by demonstrators in front of the City Hall. IIRC, he was actually the officer who dealt with those who were protesting this police action with a certain unusual level of diplomacy and aplomb. But maybe it wasn't him.

At any rate, it's obvious from this video that the OPD is completely at sea; not only do they have no training or leadership in conducting this sort of operation (which they shouldn't be doing anyway), they are scaring themselves with their own incompetence. It's hard to maintain an aggressive posture when you don't know what you're doing.

They are holding on to each other for dear life, even though the crowd is not physically threatening or assaulting them at all (compare and contrast with Greek anti-police actions.) Really. Americans, no matter how pissed they are, wouldn't even think of doing something like that to American police.

So-called "nonviolence" advocates, of course, used to get their panties all in a wad over the merest suggestion of rudeness toward the police, accusing "OO" of engaging in "violence" because protesters confront the police assertively and loudly (oh yes, and some of them wear bandanas, also a mark of "violence.") I say "used to get" their panties bunched up because they have mostly shut the fuck up. Well, "mostly." There have been a few diaries over at dKos lately excoriating the "black block" for breaking windows, but even those have been taken with a grain of salt. We still don't know who actually committed the vandalism in San Francisco on April 30th for example, and there is a case to be made that it was the work of either the police themselves or hired thugs in order to further diminish participation in Occupy and other protest events.

At about 3:10 in the video you can make out the crowd chanting "Pigs go home!" as the police retreat. This has become a routine chant in Oakland because statistics show that about 90% of the OPD don't live in Oakland and couldn't care less about what happens to the city or its people. They function as a mercenary squad ("Mossos d'Esquadra") on behalf of the city authorities and their owners. They have no commitment to the People because they have no connection with them; thus they have a tradition, an institutional culture if you will, of acting with murderous impunity. Of all the many anti-police chants used in Oakland, "Pigs go home!" seems to hit them the hardest. Truth hurts.

Some members of the crowd use metal shielding against police aggression (actually, in the video, it is being used rather cleverly to contain the police). At about 3:48 you can hear the crowd chanting "We are not afraid!" as the police continue to retreat.

At 6:23 the police, under the apparent command of the tall unhelmeted officer, start to become aggressive. Two police vehicles have just left the scene -- we assume one of them contains the arrested bicyclist, but that's not entirely clear. Their aggression is incomprehensible, but many of the police actions in Oakland have made no sense for years, and thus the city has paid out many millions of dollars in compensation to victims of police incompetence and brutality, and the OPD is under Federal Court reform orders (which are being ignored or violated daily) and threat of Federal receivership for failure to comply. This has been going on for years. And years. And years.

What we're seeing in these videos are OPD's futile attempts to meet some of the requirements mandated by some of the repeated demands of the court orders.

At 7:08 you will notice a Black Clad One pass between two officers on the street. He his patted on the back by one of the officers, and it is only natural to ask whether he is one of the many (many) police plants and provocateurs in the crowd. I have no idea whether he is or not, but given the swift and brutal action of the police toward other Black Clad Ones -- and their apparent indifference to this one -- it makes you wonder.

Shortly after 7:14 we hear the sound of some kind of munitions being fired, startling everyone, including the police. The camera pans and we see smoke or tear gas rising from the street. Almost immediately, the police among whom the round went off, throw someone to the ground (not Black Clad) and begin the process of arresting him. One of the officers who throws him to the ground is carrying what looks like a bean-bag weapon, but it's not clear exactly what sort of munitions he's armed with. (Side note: during a local protest action, I witnessed a caravan of police arrive at the courthouse and assemble on its steps. Several of them carried automatic weapons, machine guns. There were no protesters anywhere near the courthouse.)

In the video, others are promptly grabbed and thrown to the ground; a melee ensues. But it is all a melee of police aggression. At 7:53, one officer is seen manfully pushing against the protester's metal shield (behind which there are several women). It appears that people are being thrown to the ground and trussed up all around, but there actually weren't very many arrests. This is another reason to suspect that at least some of those being manhandled and "arrested" were actually police in training...

Shortly after 8:08 in the video another round of something goes off while some hapless individual is being manhandled on the street. What it is and why it is being fired is unknown, but members of the crowd react as if there was shrapnel in the munition, whatever it was. The police drag their quarry away, and as he passes the camera, a splash of yellow paint is seen on his jeans. In an earlier video from another angle, police officers are seen splashed with yellow paint. Whether this fellow is one who was throwing the paint, who knows, but his trussing up and dragging away is quite different than that of some of the other arrestees. He is, for example, placed in metal handcuffs which were applied while his hands were in front of rather than behind him. He is dragged away by his cuffs, but then is aided to stand up on his own (seen in another video) after which... what? I haven't seen any video that shows what happens to him, but it does make you wonder.

Meanwhile, in this video, another round of something goes off behind the metal "Gender Strike" shield at about 8:27. The camera pans and we see only one person holding up the shield in a cloud of smoke. Others come to help, and an officer pushes the shield over. The tall unhelmeted officer passes by another Snatch and Grab installation on the ground (by now, it is looking somewhat... shall we say... "artistic") talking on his radio or cell phone (hard to say). The crowd has thinned somewhat, and he turns to the circle of officers surrounding their latest quarry. There are two people on the ground, lots of photographers, and plenty of people standing around wondering WTF. The unhelmeted officer paces while he chats on the phone or radio. A member of the crowd approaches the officers screaming. As I say, by now, this scene has become something of a performance art installation.

At 10:00 in the video, the man on the ground is seen clearly, and he's actually one who was being arrested earlier, well before the munitions were fired. In the following video, he is asked his name by one of the livestreamers, and he says he doesn't want to be on camera, and he won't give his name, and I think I hear him saying "Put the camera down!". Of course, it is too late. But his size and appearance raise some questions in my mind, in addition to the fact that his desire not to be on camera or to give his name -- while not unheard of among arrestees -- is somewhat peculiar, as is the fact that he was kept on the ground for so long while munitions were being fired at the crowd (which included police.)

A police officer is seen holding one of the iconic Oakland garbage can shields, which is curious, but there you are. Meanwhile, the video ends with a close up of one of the officer's "less lethal" guns, officers splashed with yellow paint and an announcement: "We need you to clear the intersection".

Yes, well...

By this time, practically the only ones on the street are the police and the photographers...

I will wrap this up with OakTownPirate's video from within the melee. At one point, he is shoved to the ground by aggressive police but he yells that he's a journalist and they seem to leave him alone after that.



And of course none of this would have happened at all if the police hadn't decided to become aggressive against peaceful demonstrators. Police aggression was the sole reason for the melee.

It may be Oakland, and people may be used to it by now, but it is still wrong.

The Cuyahoga Bridge Affair

So some rather dumb "Occupy Anarchists" in Cleveland were snared in the Fed's classic entrapment scheme that has been used so successfully against multitudes of Arab "terrorists" and others in our great and glorious war on all kinds -- well some kinds -- of terror...

I guess it's good to have confirmation that the Feds are looking at "Occupy Anarchists" as yet another variety of Domestic Terrorists. We knew this from the way civic paramilitaries (ie: police forces) were treating the Occupy Encampments and their eradication as if they were engaged in a National Special Security Event and that Occupy constituted an existential threat to the State.

If there was any doubt before, it should be laid to rest now.

The format is the same pretty much every time: an informant/provocateur is planted among the target group to troll for willing -- or sometimes not so willing -- participants in some grand scheme to blow shit up, cause mayhem, murder, or what have you. Whoever indicates interest in going along with this scheme is then targeted for investigation and arrest. The plot is always under the control of the Feds and their informant/provocateur and the public is never in danger. So they say, at any rate. The targets have no idea what's really going on.

It's happened so many times in the Muslim and Arab communities (and some of the others that have been targeted, like the "eco-terrorist" community and the anti-globalization community) that the signs of targeting and provocation and infiltration are generally well-known and anticipated. It's getting harder and harder to find willing (or not so willing) fools and victims.

The paranoid among the Occupiers have suspected this sort of infiltration/provocation and entrapment has been a feature of the Security State in dealing with Occupy from the outset, but until now, there wasn't any certainty of it. Now that we know, for sure, what to do about it becomes something of a pressing matter of concern. That we found out, for certain, on May Day is intended to be a kick in the nuts, so to speak, to serve notice to Occupy that its continued presence and disruptive tactics will not be tolerated.

There was a prelude incident. On April 30, in San Francisco, a troupe of Black Clad Hooligans went on a rampage through the Mission District. According to witnesses, they were "escorted" on their merriment by the police. According to witnesses, these hooligans were unknown to Occupy SF; they were strangers, and immediately, it was assumed that they were provocateurs, either police or paid troublemakers.

News reports about the events on the 30th were strikingly similar, making the case that the kinds of vandalism and violence that occurred in the Mission on Monday night was a likely harbinger of what would happen ("Let's hope not!") during the May Day rallies and marches.

The TeeBee news reports were so similar and the paint-splattered Mission police station backdrop so identical that it seemed to me -- and to some other observers -- that the whole thing had been carefully orchestrated to foster an image of "Occupy Violence" and thus dissuade the dissuadable from participation in May Day events.

Just so with the Cuyahoga Bridge Affair.

The authorities know they can't keep everyone away from Occupy events, but if they can keep the Good People away -- that is to say, those with a stake in things as they are -- then they have accomplished their objective.

That is, I'm convinced, what most of the garment rending in parts of the "nonviolence" community over Occupy's "failure" (because of all the violence, dontyousee) is really about. Making sure that those who superficially or sincerely believe in the "Ghandian" and "Kingian" ways of nonviolence, or who would like to pretend they do, don't get involved with Occupy and stay firmly attached to the system as it is.

In the meantime, we can be sure that if this relatively mild strangulation strategy doesn't work to end the Occupy uprisings, other, harsher, tactics will be employed.

We have seen this movie before, you know.

About This May Day Thing

Well.

It's General Strike Day.

I've been parsing the supposed "disbanding" of the New York City GA and Spokes Council. I first came across this notion the other day in a blog post I can't find right now -- and it really doesn't matter all that much -- having to do with something else, and I thought, "That's odd." I was aware of dozens of actions and activities in New York City alone planned for May 1, and the notion that somehow the NYCGA and Spokes Council, the heartbeat as it were of Occupy Wall Street, had disbanded during the preparations for the General Strike seemed daft, indeed bizarre.

But as I checked around on the various OWS and NYCGA websites I though maybe it was true as there was very little updating. Online discussions were limited or truncated. Obviously something had happened early in April to start shuttering things down but just what it was difficult to say.

Then I found the statement from Facilitation that they would no longer be providing facilitation services to either the GA or the Spokes Council... due to... something... that was not entirely clear. "Yer on yer own, folks!"

Hmm.

Well.

The primary issue, as far as I could make it out, was that participation had fallen to the point where only a few (say 25-40) diehards were left attending the GAs in New York, and the Spokes Councils had never really taken hold. They'd been contentious from the outset, and their constant squabbling led to lack of participation with SC as well. On a number of occasions facilitation was either verbally or physically assaulted, and as a Working Group, Facilitation decided it wasn't going to put up with this shit anymore. 'MmBye!' Meanwhile, no one was taking notes and livestreamers were refusing to attend and stream the meetings of either group; sometimes they were specifically disinvited in any case, there being a good deal of tension between the streamers and Occupy participants due to a perception that some of the streamers were most interested in promoting themselves regardless of any needs of OWS for Solidarity.

To say that the Revolution has been going through a rough patch is to put it mildly. Very mildly indeed.

Of course OWS itself is not the Movement; it is one of a number of independent and autonomous Occupys in New York City, one of hundreds around the country and the world. The notion that OWS is the HQ or Revolution Central is widespread but erroneous. Occupys do their own thing. What OWS began may have been the trigger for the Movement/Revolution, but OWS is not the HQ for any of the plethora of autonomous Occupys.

Because of the brutal police overreaction and occasional rioting against Occupy encampments, and the apparently very intense surveillance and disruption of various Occupys in the United States and elsewhere, it has been very difficult if not impossible for more than a few Occupys to maintain a continuous presence let alone continuous activism. As an organic and evolutionary Movement, however, Occupy has broadly responded to the state suppression unleashed with such fury against it by dispersal, somewhat like spores on the wind, wafting far more widely than I think anybody anticipated -- certainly this development wasn't anticipated in much of the internal workings I was aware of.

For example, I had seen Occupy more as a concentration of Revolutionary activism and as a basis for the development of intentional communities that would be able to survive any sort of repression, but that isn't quite how it worked out. Instead, most Occupys yielded to repression and allowed their encampments to be destroyed without (much of) a struggle. The intentional communities that spontaneously arose at Occupy encampments seemed to disappear, or, as in New York, they struggled mightily to hang on to their encampment spirit and largely failed.

This didn't mean that the spirit was gone; it meant that in many cases it had spread more widely than a concentration in a single site would have allowed.

There are few encampments left, but the encampments themselves were symbols, much like the iconic and symbolic tents have become. The encampments were demonstrations that Another World Is Possible, and they showed ways to do it.

The Alternative Spirit, if you will, is now just about everywhere, whereas there is very little focus on the concentrations of effort that the encampments represented.

I certainly find that's been true in my own approach to revolutionary (and Occupy) affairs. My focus and activities have changed significantly as the reduction in my blogging output and choice of topics shows. My attendance -- online or in person -- at local Occupy events is spotty at best, and my participation is very limited. Right now, I'm mostly interested in study and reconnection with some of the Alternatives of the past as well as an intensified preparation for a very uncertain future.

In that study, I have become convinced that pretty much all of the elements for Another World, putatively Better, already exist, and most of them are working pretty well. Hooking up with them means gradually -- or in many cases, suddenly -- decoupling from The World As We Know It. As I decouple, something that has been under way for the last few years, I find that the necessity to need and to have and to want and to do have diminished substantially. It's a surprising form of liberation. At first, I attributed it just to getting old, but I think there is something else going on as well. When you see that needing and having and wanting and doing are all tied in to our materialist culture and lifestyles and there are many appealing alternatives, every one of which is essentially an open door to Another World, it becomes easier and easier to Let Go.

And Letting Go, in these times, is the individual's revolutionary act.

"Letting Go" is the key element of today's General Strike; whether that is really clear or not to its participants remains to be seen. It's a start on letting go of the ties that bind so many Americans.

Whither the Revolution?

I can't say. I have no idea. It's all a muddle. Maybe last fall and winter's Occupy was a misfire, like that of the Decembrists. Maybe so. But even the failed Decembrist uprising laid the groundwork for things to come...

http://maydaynyc.tumblr.com/

Roadtown, a Western Fantasy

"Roadtown" was a Progressive futurist notion that Edgar Chambless came up with toward the beginning of the last century. He published a book in 1910, called "Roadtown" appropriately enough, that set forth his ideas about the linear City of the Future, and it apparently caused quite a stir, enough of one, in fact, to lead to much popular press. Nevertheless, January, 1914, issue of Sunset Magazine, published by the Southern Pacific Railroad, seems to be the last major press notice of Chambless's ideas for the Future. One of his plans at that time was to have a Roadtown exhibit at the Panama Pacific Exhibition the following year, but so far as I've been able to find out there is no record of any such exhibit.

Roadtown was intended to be a technological marvel and to use the latest technology of the era to improve the lives of citizens, city dwellers especially.

At the time, the City was considered to be the root of evil and the den of iniquity. I thought about this in connection with my mother's family's removal from Indianapolis and all its urban troubles -- including labor strikes and all that went with them -- to the very small and relatively isolated California town of Santa Maria in 1916. I tried to imgine what impelled them, and one of the obvious factors was the City itself. Indianapolis was a large, gritty industrial city at the time, and the lot of those on its economic margins (where I would say my mother's family lived) was not a particularly good one. When my mother's father was killed, life for her and her mother was made nearly impossible. There were few options available for young widows and orphans.

The lot of others was comparatively worse, and many poor City dwellers had no option to leave for California or anywhere else for that matter. They were tied to their sorry lot in life, and that was that. The United States may have been a Land of Opportunity, but it was Opportunity open to some, not all. The suffering of the poor was intrinsic to the Opportunities afforded to others. And the suffering of the poor in America's cities was intense and self-perpetuating.

One of the chief means social scientists imagined would alleviate the situation was to remove the City's population to the Country. Roadtown was seen as one of the ways to do that.

In essence, Roadtown is a version of a linear city that is built on top of the then prevalent interurban street railways.

Street railways were the principal public transportation method prior to the widespread adoption of the private automobile. In 1910, when Chambless published his Roadtown manifesto, there was little expectation that automobiles would ever become much more than vehicular toys for the rich; they were wildly expensive, unreliable, uncomfortable, dangerous, and so on. Outside the cities, roads were in deplorable condition. The commerce and sightseeing travel of the Nation was done by rail. For personal use, the bicycle was considered the most appropriate form of wheeled transport, and bicycling had become a popular national pastime.

So when Chambless -- a patent examiner -- came up with his Roadtown plan, the most up-to-date Futurist ideas did not necessarily include the Automobile as an important factor to consider. Not only was the need for them limited in 1910, their ultimate utility was questionable. Automobiles were on par with the then novel Aeroplanes. On the other hand, bicycles, interurban street railways and long distance trains were proven technology widely considered to be the most efficient and thus the most Progressive and useful transport systems for the Future.

Roadtown was conceived as a multi-layer, multi-mile long extension of the City along the interurban transit lines that had either already been developed or would be developed in the Future.

At the bottom, in a deep trench, was to be found the interurban express line, stopping maybe every five miles or so, that would deliver goods and people to and from the City cores from which Roadtowns would radiate. Above the Express lines would be the interurban local lines, stopping every hundred yards or so, to provide a means for goods and people to travel easily -- "effortlessly" -- within Roadtown itself along what were conceived of as silent running monorail lines, rolling on leathern tired wheels in futuristic, even somewhat streamlined cars that were something like this:

This test track was built and demonstrated in 1911 in the tideflats of Seattle, Washington. The rails were made of wood and track cost was estimated to be around $3,000 per mile. A bargain! The Seattle Times commented at the time that "the time may come when these wooden monorail lines, like high fences, will go straggling across country, carrying their burden of cars that will develop a speed of about 20 miles per hour." Like so many inventions, lack of financial backing prevented further development.

Above the local transit lines, and directly connected to the transit platforms via internal stairways, would be the residences of Roadtown citizens. In other words, the "front doors" of these residences would be on transit platforms, not on the street. In essence, there would be no streets, for all transportation would be along either the rail lines below ground or on the roofs of the attached dwellings above where there would be a Promenade -- open to the wafting breezes in the spring and summer, glassed in and steam heated in the winter -- where pedestrians, cyclists, and roller-skaters (using rubber-wheeled roller skates) could amble along the way, stop at leisure, and enjoy the bracing Country Air and rural sights as they chose.

The Roadtown dwellings would consist of five to seven rooms -- depending on family size and necessity -- two rooms deep and two stories high, built of precast (and we assume reinforced) cement (concrete), forms and materials for which would be rapidly and efficiently carried along the rail lines by construction trains and erected in a trice on a common plan. These attached dwellings would be between 21 and 33 feet wide. Approximately 1,000 dwellings would be found in each mile of Roadtown. Each dwelling would be provided, of course, with the latest equipment including electricity for lighting, gas for home heating and cooking, hot and cold running water, proper sewage, and telephony of many kinds which included applications that anticipated radio and possibly even television.

Each dwelling would be supplied with heat and refrigeration from central plants, carried in pipes below ground. In fact all utilities would be underground, easily accessible from below for inspection and repair as well as expansion when necessary through passages aligned with the rail platforms.

On either side of each dwelling would be the private plots of the residents, each the width of the dwelling and extending as far as the eye could see into the distance. Because not everyone would want to or be able to utilize such an abundance of land, arrangements would be made to limit the land-holdings of those who needed or wanted less, and expand the holdings of those who could utilize more for crops, though leisure and gardening purposes were by no means restricted or limited. The idea was to provide enough land for each household to enable it to grow sufficient produce (and if so desired, animals) for its own needs, and for those so inclined, to enable modest-scale intensive farming to produce surpluses for sale to those who weren't generally farm-folk by nature. Chambless seemed to recognize that not everyone who could benefit from Roadtown living had a green thumb.

Communal and cooperative ventures and endeavors were to take the place of the corporations and the trusts that dominated the economy in those days. On the domestic front, the drudgery of "women's work" in the kitchen and laundry particularly was to be eliminated through the utilization of central kitchens and laundries. Households would order their meals from the central kitchens which would prepare and deliver them at the appropriate times. Laundry would be sent out to be done in the central facilities -- which would of course include wet washing and dry cleaning -- to be returned when complete. Central vacuum systems would be installed so that all households would be free from dust and dirt, while automatic mechanisms would lift bedding into airing (and disinfecting) closets during the day and return it to the bedstead at night for restful and clean sleep.

Citizens would be able to work at home in low-impact industry, making necessary items for use or sale, while heavier industry could take place in factories set away from but convenient to Roadtowns. No factory or industry would be allowed to grow so large as to dominate the economy of any Roadtown or locality.

The Future, as seen by Chambless and the many Roadtown advocates is one of independence as well as community, of dignity and well as quirky eccentricity, of industry as well as abundant leisure and creativity, of freedom from drudgery, of education and entertainment, of innovation as well as preservation of tradition.

And yet, nothing quite like Roadtown has ever been undertaken, at least not on the scale Chambless envisioned it, nor for quite the purpose he had in mind.

Instead, the Garden City alternative has been almost universally adopted for suburban expansion of urban centers. Garden Cities essentially continue the endless grid of streets and surface, overhead or underground utilities that have been the hallmarks of Cities throughout history. The chief difference is that Garden Cities make the grids much larger than in the past, infilling the gridded sectors with curving streets.

The whole point of Roadtown is to get away from the street grid, eliminating it entirely.

And that still seems to be a bridge too far for even today's Futurists.

California Dreamin'

My mother was four or five years old when she came out to California on the train from Indiana with her mother and her new step-father. This was in 1916. California's population stood at about 3,000,000 at the time, mostly concentrated in two urban areas: Los Angeles with about 350,000 people and San Francisco with about 450,000.

The rest of California's population was scattered in rural areas and in small towns up and down the Coast and Valley. There were remnant Gold Rush towns in the foothills and mountains of the Sierras in the east and the Cascades in the far north, but most had become ghost towns when the easy gold was got.



My mother's parents settled in Santa Maria, which was at the time quite a fresh little town on the northern edge of Santa Barbara County. It was bordered on the west by newly plowed farm fields that led to the Guadalupe Dunes and the Pacific Ocean some ten or twelve miles away. On the north intermittently flowed (and sometimes flooded until it was dammed) the Santa Maria River. On the east were the Coast Mountains which blocked the Santa Maria Valley from the far more extensive Central Valley. And to the south were more rolling dune fields that seemed to stretch for dozens of miles until they blended into the Santa Ynez Mountains north of Santa Barbara. Oil had recently been discovered under the dunes.

Santa Maria had been founded sometime in the 1870's as Grangeville/Central City by a handful of farmers who saw potential in this windswept and rather chilly little valley that had once been part of the Rancho La Purisima that was headquartered at La Purisima Mission in Lompoc. When the California Missions were secularized in the 1820's, the land was pretty much abandoned except for the Chumash Indians who lived in the hills round about. It wasn't until the 1860's that settlement in the Valley was attempted by (Anglo) families whose names are still very prominent in the Santa Maria area.

The name of the town was changed to Santa Maria in 1885 because they say mail meant for Central City, California was being delivered to Central City, Colorado. Such were the vicissitudes of pioneering.

When my mother's parents settled there in 1916, Santa Maria had a population of between 2,000 and 3,000. It was a small town, but not a tiny town by the standards of the day, and Santa Maria considered itself highly progressive -- which in many ways it still does. Public education, water, sewage, electricity and so on were hallmarks of progressive infrastructure, along with active public health campaigns, scientific farming methods, irrigation systems, public parks and recreation and so on. Tidy little bungalows housed most of the people along wide tidy streets -- the width of Santa Maria's main streets is still impressive -- and the Southern Pacific Railroad ran a line along the Coast that stopped at Guadalupe on the eastern western margin of the farm fields to pick up the abundant produce that was grown then and still is. A spur line, the Santa Maria Valley Railroad, was run from the SP tracks in Guadalupe through the fields and to the produce packing plants in the Valley.

El Camino Real, the Spanish road in the province of Alta California, ran through the middle of town along Broadway. It's path is now followed or paralleled by Highway 101.

Perhaps most astonishing to these immigrants from Indiana were the flowers. The Valley was filled with wildflowers in the spring, and all through the growing season -- which was practically year round -- vast acreage was devoted to growing flowers for seeds and cutting in some of the most remarkable agricultural displays ever devised.


Well, of course, that and the fog and the ocean nearby. The Pacific wasn't visible from town but you could get to it reasonably easily either by going north to Pismo, which was even then a working class beach resort, or east through the dunes to what was essentially a wide deserted beach west of Guadalupe. The only thing about it -- apart from the wind and the cold and the fog -- was the tarballs. Oil leaked from fissures off-shore, and so the Guadalupe beach was often fouled with the smell of oil or the balls of tar that were washed up by the surf.



Oil would become my mother's step-father's key to living the relatively good life in California, for shortly after arriving in Santa Maria he was able to either open or become manager of an Associated Oil filling station. Car travel at the time was still in its infancy, but in California, the motor trip was already a way of life. My mother's step-father also worked as a mechanic at the Dodge Brothers dealership (I have the feeling that the dealership and the filling station were on the same site, though I have no real proof of it). Eventually, he wound up selling the Dodge Brothers cars as well.


Associated Oil became Flying A sometime in the 1920's or '30's, and I remember my mother telling me how proud her step-father was to have the Flying A logo on his station when the change came.

He retired in 1940 or 41 and bought a motor court up in Willits in the Redwood Country. Unfortunately for both him and his wife (my mother's mother) died within eighteen months or so and never had much enjoyment out of their retirement.


I'm surprised I remember as much of this story as I do. My mother was rarely inclined to talk about her childhood, and she harbored an intense resentment against her step-father (and her natural father, for that matter, whom she barely remembered.) From everything she said about him, her resentment was difficult for me to understand because she described her step-father as a very kind and generous man, strict but fair, and always willing to help a friend or a colleague in need.

She said he was never cruel to her, but she was always aware that she was not his natural daughter, and that seemed to make all the difference to her. She saw her mother as a saintly figure, but so far as I can recall, she never really had much to say about her.

I have often wondered what it must have been like for them to move from the gritty and hard-scrabble life of Indianapolis in the 'teens of the last century to the relatively easy life and lifestyle of pre-WWI California, and what they thought about it -- if they thought about it.

Picking up and moving to California was something that Americans did in those days, lured by the railroads and the real estate developers to low-cost land and homes and to pioneer communities where fresh starts were always under way. People were lured by the brochures, by Sunset Magazine, by incessant stories in the weeklies, and by a psychology of westward movement that almost assured that every year more and more people would depart from Back East -- which was anywhere east of the Mississippi -- and head out to California, or perhaps to Washington or Oregon if they could stand the constant rain.


California was a Promised Land like no other, and at least for some of the immigrants from Back East, it proved to be almost exactly as advertised. They came and prospered, living an adventure, and living well at lower financial cost than they knew where they came from, and with a far better sense of security than they had ever known before. It was possible -- back then, anyway -- to live modestly but well in California on a good deal less money than it cost to live poorly in any city Back East. It was possible to grow your own fruits and vegetables in your own yard or, if you wanted, to buy a few acres in the not-so-distant country and set out orange trees or any other crop you chose, and make a go of it as a small farmer or rancher. Many did and decided the rural life was not for them, but many others found they could take up residence in cities and towns in California and surprisingly fit right in almost immediately -- because nearly everybody was from somewhere else for one thing, and for another, because the early settlers tended to be friendly and welcoming.

Of course they were. They needed newcomers in order to prosper themselves.

The whole point of the California Dream was endless growth, after all, and without newcomers constantly arriving, there could be no economic growth, and without economic growth, there could be no Dream.

The Dream was built on the pocket-books of those who kept coming, and come they did for generation after generation.

While Santa Maria doesn't seem to be an obvious destination -- and it certainly wasn't in 1916 -- I can easily understand how my mother's parents would find it an almost ideal place to settle once they found it. I was never sure how they got there to begin with -- there was no direct passenger rail service, for example, and I don't know when they got a car, but driving continued to be something of a challenge for many years due to poor roads and unreliable vehicles. My mother never said what exactly brought them to Santa Maria rather than keeping them in -- say -- Los Angeles.

But I've lived in Santa Maria and I know it as one of the friendliest and most charming towns -- now a city -- in California, with a very "at ease" way of life. It is entirely unpretentious. Well, let me modify that a bit. The pretentious people tend to be known for what they are, and their pretensions tend to be the subject of friendly ridicule. This characteristic is said to go back to the earliest ranching days in the Valley, and I tend to believe it. A style was set back in the Old Days, and it's been carried on from then till now, and it shows no sign whatever of changing any time soon. Despite the fact that Santa Maria has grown substantially in the last 50 years (the span of time I've known the town), it still shows very much the same way of life and personality characteristics among the people as ever.

For me, it's not the place to be. I'm not very well suited to it, but I have no problem understanding why others -- especially newcomers from Back East -- find it delightful.

My mother's parents fit right in, and soon enough, they prospered modestly. They lived in a succession of tidy bungalows on the broad and tidy streets of the town, traveling extensively around California when they had the chance. My mother said she had been "practically everywhere" in the state by the time she was out of high school, going on road trips with her parents as often as possible. She was always happy to return to Santa Maria and said she didn't have any urge to live anywhere else until... well, after she was married the first time.

She married an oil jobber who worked for Associated and then for Standard Oil of California (now Chevron.) He had been coming by her step-father's station for some time, and they first met while she was still in high school. Her step-father did not approve of the young and somewhat flashy Texan who was making eyes at his step-daughter. He much preferred her to see the rancher's son that she had gone on dates with a few times.

As it happened, the rancher's son's family -- one of the First Families of the Valley -- did not approve of my mother, largely as far, as I can tell, as a matter of class. My mother's people were obviously working class, and her step-father was an actual mechanic. The ranchers of the Valley still consider themselves to be a kind of nobility (derived, I think, from the Spanish rancheros). They do not marry mechanic's daughters. They marry in their own class or above -- or they become monks and nuns.

As friendly as the Valley people are, there are certain lines and certain taboos that one does not cross or violate. Class lines being chief among them.

So my mother wound up marrying the Texas oil jobber who set her up quite nicely. I remember asking her how the Depression had affected her -- she married in 1932 -- and she said "it didn't." She showed me some pictures (I wish I had them now) taken of her outside her home in Santa Maria next to her car (she said it was a Dodge roadster purchased from her step-father). She was dressed stylishly for the time, looking very smart indeed. She said they lived very well and she never lacked for anything.

Except... the marriage was a failure. Her husband, it seems, had to travel a lot in his job, often staying overnight or longer at some of his destinations, and he was -- everyone agreed -- a charmer. One thing led to another... and another... and another... and so on. The fact that he was having affairs was well known to those in the business, but he was always devoted to his family -- which included his daughter, my (half)sister, and so it was a shock when my mother sued him for divorce after ten years of marriage.

It was apparently quite rancorous. My mother and sister moved in with her parents in Willits for a time, then my mother decided to strike out on her own, which wasn't a success, at least not initially. The story of her life from 1942 to 1949 was pretty chaotic, at least as I understand it, for even with the expanded opportunities for women in wartime, she still struggled mightily to maintain equilibrium and independence.

She said it was especially hard for her after her mother died in 1943, "so young" -- she was 54 -- as my mother put it. She never really talked about her mother with me, though, so I have only the sketchiest image of her, some coming from my sister -- who was very fond of her grandmother -- and some coming from friends of my mother's who were also friends of her mother. They said she was a strong and very sweet woman, and very fun to be around, and a damn good bridge player. She taught elementary school for a while, but as soon as her husband was making enough money to take care of the family well, she left the classroom and never went back. I've never seen a picture of my mother's parents, so I have no idea what they looked like. I can imagine, but beyond that, nothing.

It would have been so much easier for my mother simply to stay with her first husband (easy for a man to say!) since he had no wish for their marriage to end... I met him when I was a teen ager, and at that time he was a vice president for sales with Chevron; he was indeed a very charming man, married to a delightful woman he met soon after his divorce from my mother; they'd been married 25 years or so when I met them. They lived up on a hillside above Walnut Creek, in a sprawling ranch house with a spectacular view of Mt. Diablo. "California Dream" indeed.

I can't say that my mother ever looked back. Her reasons were complicated and tied in with other things in her life that caused her heartache and trouble till her dying day. Her relationship with my father was no less stormy.

But that's a story for another day.

The California Dream went well for my mother's parents, not quite so well for her. Subsequent generations -- my own, the two or three that have come after -- have a very different view of California. There's much about it I like, much about it that I question, and some -- not much -- that I despise, but I find I'm much happier in New Mexico -- "so far from God, so close to Texas." And I realize that a lot of my happiness in New Mexico is due to the fact that in many ways it is like the California I knew as a child, and indeed, it's not that different from the California my mother knew when she was a child. In some surprising ways, New Mexico is almost like California was 50 or 100 years ago.

Well. But the weather is different! And it's so close to Texas but so far from the sea!

[I may be on this tack for a while, I'm not sure. Biographical material is always interesting to me, though I'm sure it can induce catatonia in others. I beg readers' indulgence...]

Mossos d'Esquadra de Barcelona

Los Mossos d'Esquadra are the Barcelona police force.



The video is in Barcelona not Oakland, but the visuals and the action are strikingly similar. The police in both cities assault citizens, generally unprovoked, and typically with a casual nonchalance that the very least is disconcerting.

In the video, a couple on bicycles are fired upon by Mossos using "less than lethal" munitions. The projectile lands at their feet, and the young man shouts at the police, and they continue firing. For no reason.

Well. This was the evening of the day of the Spanish General Strike, March 29, 2012, and there had been... erm... confrontations throughout the day between strikers, protesters, and the Mossos. Many of the plastic garbage dumpsters used in Barcelona had been burned and a lot of windows of (mostly) multinational companies had been broken. The Mossos were dashing around the city in their Mossos Vans trying to intimidate protesters and squelch riots, but by evening, most of the disturbances had ceased and people were just standing around in the streets, as you can see in the video, while police maintained skirmish lines here and there in a show of force.

And there were incidents like this.

The impunity with which the police behave -- whether in the United States or Spain or practically anywhere else these days -- is one of the most striking aspects of this and so many other encounters between police and citizens. It's not so much the casual brutality, though that is just as important. It is the utter impunity with which they engage in such behavior, as if they know that they will never face any consequences.

It's yet another reason why there is a global revolution under way.

The Servant Problem

Few of us are old enough to remember what an illustration like the one above refers to. Fewer still were raised in a house full of servants who did the necessary drugery so the rest of the household could frolic and play at will -- or at least maintain itself in the manner to which it was accustomed.

In fact, the idea of "servants" is almost bewildering now; did people really "serve" in other people's houses? They lived there? They took care of Their Betters? How can this be?

Indeed.

You'll note that in the illustration, three of the five smartly turned out servants are women, two are men, but in the real world of the Servant-filled Household, the ratio of female to male servants was closer to 9 t0 1; few households had even one hired man, while many -- never a majority, it is true -- had at least one female servant.

My father grew up in a household that had one live-in servant, a woman named Harriet who did the cooking and looked after the younger children. There was also a man who looked after the yards and the car, but he apparently didn't live with the household. A woman came in to do the laundry once a week. And from time to time, "girls" would come to do the heavy cleaning. There were a lot of children when my father was growing up (he was the second oldest of nine) and it was too big a job for my grandmother to handle alone; my grandfather certainly had enough money to afford "staff," and though he'd grown up on a farm, he had no intention of being saddled with yard work and other chores himself. He had business to conduct and politics to engage in after all.

My father called Harriet the Housekeeper not the maid or the cook or the nurse or the nanny. The idea of servants was somewhat troubling to him as it was, he said, to many of those in his household and his community. His family was reasonably prosperous at a time when many people were not, so he considered himself and his family very lucky on the one hand, and obligated to the less fortunate on the other.

Being less fortunate, however, did not mean that someone necessarily had any less dignity.

"Housekeeper" is much a more dignified title than maid or nanny or cook.

My grandparents had servants because they believed they needed them in order to maintain their preferred lifestyle, and most of the servants they had were women because most of the work of the household was "women's work" and most of those available to serve Their Betters were women.

We may ask why that was so.

Why was it necessary -- especially among the middle classes -- to have servants at all, and why was there apparently a surplus of women in the working classes who were willing to go into domestic service?

The larger families of the era (my father was born in 1901) don't really explain it. In fact, the larger families should have made it possible for most people to get by with fewer or no servants. And that's essentially what happened. Most people in America at the time were poor, couldn't afford servants, and wouldn't have known what to do with them if they could afford to have them. The middle class was really quite small, a cadre of professionals and small land-owners who primarily served the interests of their Betters -- the Plutocrats and Oligarchs of the Gilded Age.

Those men lived very well indeed, in vast houses -- often several of them -- staffed by troops of servants who took care of every need and whim of their masters, to an extent almost unimaginable -- indeed, almost perverse -- by modern standards.

The Master/Servant relationship was critical to the social and employment conventions of the times. It was barely possible to even think outside that box.

My grandfather had grown up on a farm in rural Iowa, and his father -- I found out not so long ago -- had been brought to this country as a boy (well, a teenager) from Ireland by his father (who I know nothing in particular of, but I assume he was a tenant farmer in Ireland before the Potato Famine. According to the records I've seen, they emigrated in 1850, at the tail end of the Famine.)

I had been told that my ancestors were deeply involved in the American Revolution, descended from stalwart and quite early Colonial stock, at least back then they were immensely wealthy. I found out a few years ago that none of this was true. It was all Blarney. They were Irish not American Colonialists, and from what I could tell, they were Shanty Irish to boot. Which helped explain some of the things that never quite made sense to me when I was younger. Certain characteristics persist...

They had pretensions, though, as did many Americans, specifically many recent American immigrants, and so they did what they could to fulfill them.

Having someone to do the work of the household was part of it.

In 1910, according to Census records, there were approximately 1.9 million women working in domestic service nation wide; that works out to about one "girl" per household or family, but only about 10% of households had even one servant in their employ, which strongly suggests that only a few households employed most of the domestic servants (male and female) then at work in the United States.

It wasn't unusual for some of the more pretentious and better off households of the Plutocracy to have 30 or 70 or even 100 domestic employees, something that would be considered highly unusual now, even for our most robustly overcompensated CEOs.

There were so many servants in some of the larger estates because there was so much to do and there were few labor-saving devices available and used by households, even the most pretentious, in those days.

My father said for example, that they didn't get electricity in their house until around 1913. Cooking was done on a coal-burning range until the 1920's. I can only guess when the ice-man stopped coming.

Laundry was done by hand until washing machines were widely available, and even then, the process of using an early wringer washer wasn't that much of a labor-saving endeavor over the previous boiler and washboard tedium.

House cleaning was a twice a year affair during which the entire house was emptied of furnishings -- so as to "air" -- every surface was scrubbed to the bone, new paint or paper was applied where needed (sometimes even where not) and everything was put back more or less where it had been. This entailed days of effort and one can anticipate that several hired individuals (men and women) would be necessary to do all the moving and scrubbing and painting and restoring.

For the most part, poor people -- which meant the vast majority of Americans -- didn't follow this routine in their own households; they couldn't even if they wanted to. Some would be put to work serving other people's households, but most were kept more than busy trying to keep their own households together and to survive as best they could on their unstable earnings from "at will" employment in factories or working hard-scrabble farms.

My mother's father was a streetcar conductor in Indianapolis, for example. He wasn't well-off at all. During my mother's early childhood, the Indianapolis street railway was subject to a number of strikes, and I've read some of the testimony about the working conditions that led to the strikes. It wasn't pleasant reading. Many workers were paid -- when they were paid -- less than $.10 an hour, and their workdays were typically 12-14 hours long, so their earnings could be $20 a month or more if they could keep up the pace, but often they couldn't do it. Often, too, they were shorted in their pay-packets by various deductions and fines levied by the transit company. If they weren't able to maintain the pace of work, they were called on less and less, say only for fill-in work, and their pay plummeted even below the meager amounts they could make on a full time schedule.

Strikes were called to force an increase in wages, more regular scheduled employment, an end to common practices of favor and disfavor by the transit company, and a maximum 10 hour day. The strikes turned ugly, and from what I was told, I assume that my mother's father paid the price for his temerity in striking with his life. His death when my mother was 4 years old was deemed an accident, "crushed between the cars," but it happened soon after the end of one of the strikes, and at least in my view, it was probably not an accident at all. More than a few strikers were killed and injured during and subsequent to the Indianapolis transit strikes.

All this was before World War I, and as it happened, the transit strikes were essentially for naught as none of the objectives of the strikers were achieved.

After my mother's father was killed, her mother was in dire straits and in a quandary as often happened to widows in those days. She had no benefits, no savings, no property. But she had a little daughter to take care of and few or no prospects for either employment or re-marriage. So what was she to do?

As I understand it, her own mother took her and my mother in for the time being, but what arrangements were made, I don't know. I was told my mother's mother did go into domestic service briefly but found herself unsuited to serving other people and was either fired or quit within a few months. Lucky for her -- I guess! -- she did remarry not long afterwards, to a man who had been a friend of her late husband's, and shortly the new household moved to California, Land of Opportunity, where my mother's step-father ran a Flying A filling station, providing a modest living that was in many ways far better than anything they might have had in Indiana.

In those days you could live modestly and well in California whereas doing so in many places Back East was more and more difficult or downright impossible.

Since I've lived in the Gold Rush Country of California for many years, I've often wondered why so many people made the expensive, arduous and dangerous trek out here from what should have been a kind of libertarian paradise Back East, when they must have known there was practically no chance at all that they would find Gold and become rich, rich, rich.

I've read a lot of the correspondence of Argonauts from 1849-52 or so, and their stories are really striking and heartbreaking. It was, first of all, very costly to mount an expedition to California in the early years, and those who did so spent a lot of money up front for transport and supplies and continued to spend on the trek. Assuming they survived the journey, once they got to California, they were in almost every case deeply disappointed. They were barely alive, they were broke, many of the supplies they had so carefully assembled for the trek were long gone, much of it abandoned along the route. Often they were sick and could barely put one foot in front of the other. Everything they found in California was "wrong." It wasn't what they anticipated at all. Few ever found even a flake, let alone a nugget, of Gold. Many -- initially very many -- died shortly after arriving. Despondency, depression, starvation, murder and disease stalked the land.

And still they came.

Eventually, more came than perished and bit by bit a new society was pieced together on the ruins of what used to be and of expectations of what would be.

It was a new society that depended on more and more people coming West, something that was still true when I was a boy, and to a limited extent is still true today.

It depended on people who were dissatisfied enough with their previous lives to pack up and head to The Coast, prepared to risk everything for the possibility of a Better Life. California existed as a Land of Opportunity for the poor, the working class, domestic servants, and for others who were far better off, to try their luck at Something Else Again, and if they were lucky and persistent, they could do very well indeed -- as many did for many years, and a few still do today.

An elemental aspect of this New Society was to limit and eventually eliminate the need for servants and to ensure a sense of Dignity for all Californians. (Well, as long as you were White; racism in California was endemic and virulent when my mother was a girl; it still was in many ways when I was a boy.)

In California, you got rid of the Servant Problem by getting rid of the need for servants. Small households, efficient houses, easy and cheap access to electricity and water (often through public power and water companies), extensive public health and educational facilities, a relatively benign climate, all contributed to make it possible to live well without household help, and without the expectations and the strictures of hide-bound societies Back East.

It was a form of liberty few ever thought would be theirs, especially in the smaller cities that dotted the state. Finally, people could "relax." It was more a psychological than a physical relaxation, because people were still working very hard, but often it was in work they wanted to do rather than "had" to, and in many cases, it was work for themselves rather than someone else.

In a kind of ironic twist, the trade off for such relaxed liberty was conformity.

I'll try to get into that another time.