South Africans got it right when they made “kuning,” the isiZulu word that roughly translates to “it’s a lot,” one of the defining words of 2023.

It was a lot this year.

2023 seemed an epoch of crises: the highest number of global conflicts in three decades, myriad climate disasters that claimed more than 12,000 lives, and the erosion of democracies worldwide.

Amid all of it, Zócalo was here—sifting through the pressing stories and providing context, perspective, and humanity.

Our favorite 15 essays of the year, selected by the Zócalo staff and you, our readers, remind us that even in overwhelming times, people forge ahead. They think deeply. They ask questions. They create. They build community. And they even have some fun.

May you enjoy revisiting these writings as much as we did, as we ready to ring in a new year.

Boxers Know the Power of an Entrance

By Rudy Mondragón

Can anyone make an entrance like a boxer? Before moderating the Zócalo panel “What Does Boxing Owe Its Champions?,” scholar Rudy Mondragón made the case that the boxing ring entrance is the most important ritual in sport. More than a mere act of bravado, he writes, a ring entrance communicates everything from pride to dignity to political protest—in just a few ephemeral, glittering, bombastic moments.

A boxer’s entrance is more than just flash. It’s how they make their mark in the sport and the world, scholar Rudy Mondragón writes. Above, William “El Gallo Negro” King wears a Mexican sarape with a rooster and a sombrero de charro, embracing his Afro-Mexican roots. Photo by Rudy Mondragón.

How Is a Poem Like a Political Campaign?

By Derek Mong

Most of us haven’t given much thought to how poetry and political campaigning might be alike. But Zócalo contributing editor Derek Mong, who won a National Arts and Entertainment Journalism award for this essay, has given it serious thought. Aside from the obvious—that “both benefit from a clipboard”—he unearths deeper threads tying the pursuits together.

My Work as an In-Home Caregiver Shouldn’t Be This Hard

By Alva Rodriguez

Alva Rodriguez is one of more than 550,000 caregivers in California’s In-Home Supportive Services (IHSS) program—workers who help an estimated 650,000 disabled, blind, or elderly Californians continue living in their own homes. Writing from Fresno for our The James Irvine Foundation-funded series “What Is a Good Job Now?,” Rodriguez describes the deep precarity of the job—“one of the toughest and worst-paying you will find”— and reflects on ways to improve this essential line of work.

What Mourning Looks Like in Monterey Park

By Wendy Cheng

On January 21, 2023, a gunman opened fire and killed 11 people at Star Ballroom Dance Studio in Monterey Park, resulting in the deadliest mass shooting in Los Angeles County history. Wendy Cheng writes about the outpouring of community support and solidarity in the wake of the attack, and the ways a public memorial for the victims reflected the city’s unique multiethnic and multiracial history as a home for “immigrants and lost ones.”

Whose Sedona Is It, Anyway?

By Tom Zoellner

During the pandemic, Sedona, Arizona, temporarily stopped advertising in high-end travel magazines. In the place of well-heeled visitors have come day travelers and overnighters from nearby cities that some residents say are destroying “Slo-dona”—and the town finds itself stuck in a fierce debate about whether it should “yank back the welcome mat to the middle class,” writes Tom Zoellner. Published in the fall, the piece generated enough chatter that just recently the city and the chamber of commerce put out a joint statement in response.

Intellectual Snobbery is for the Birds

By Tim Birkhead

Ornithologist Tim Birkhead shares how an encounter with a hobbyist birdkeeper who breeds bullfinches (who are, if you aren’t aware, “humbly endowed”) led him down a new line of research into the phenomenon known as sperm competition, and a better understanding of reproduction in birds. While the subject of Birkhead’s essay might make a middle schooler giggle, the story itself makes a powerful point: Researchers need to listen to people outside academia’s ivory tower.

Tim Birkhead, one of the world’s leading bird biologists, shares why being open to learning from people outside of academia’s ivory tower—in this case hobbyist birdkeepers—can lead to “unexpected and exciting results.” Photo by T.R. Birkhead.

Dianne Feinstein’s Most Important Job Was an Unofficial One

By Joe Mathews

Zócalo columnist and democracy editor Joe Mathews has made some big proclamations this year. That San Diego is California’s “finest college town.” That we should call it the California, not the Colorado, River. That the Santa Cruz otter absolutely should have bitten back. But one of his most memorable takes came in the wake of Dianne Feinstein’s death. Reflecting on her long tenure in U.S. political life, Mathews makes a case that her greatest role in office was as California’s “last ambassador to the American government.”

Reckoning With Racist ‘Lynch Law’ and Rape Charges, a Century Later

By Margaret Burnham

For two years, Zócalo has worked on a project supported by the Mellon Foundation that asks: “How Should Societies Remember Their Sins?” This essay by Margaret Burnham, director of the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project at Northeastern University, shows how such reckonings can lead to action and change through the story of John Henry James. In 1898, James, a Black man in Virginia, was accused of raping a white woman, murdered by a lynch mob, and posthumously indicted for assault. Burnham details how, 125 years later, a judge dismissed the indictment thanks to a campaign by historians, lawyers, and community members. The decision opens a “path forward for a crucial American reckoning with a thousand-plus state executions of Black males accused of assaulting white females,” Burnham writes.

The Struggle for a Latino Place in Chicago

By Mike Amezcua

Historian Mike Amezcua explores the parallel struggles of mid-20th century Black and Latino Chicagoans overcoming segregation and making space for their communities. “This history of Latino placemaking is far less known than the civil rights struggle led by King,” Amezcua writes. “But it remains an important context for later developments in Chicago’s urban and political history.” Readers were passionate about Amezcua’s piece, writing it in as a favorite in our audience survey.

My Mom is Out of Prison, But I’m Still Not Free

By Angel Gilbert

Most young people look forward to college as a time of independence, but when Columbia University student Angel Gilbert started school, she had already been on her own “for far too long.” In her Zócalo essay, Gilbert, one of millions of young people who have had an incarcerated parent, shares what it was like to grow up with a mother behind bars. “My emotional pain will never truly heal,” she writes. However, she adds that once she reaches her goal of becoming a lawyer, all of her experiences ensure that she will fight harder for her future marginalized clients.

Destined to Be Trans, Muslim, and Indonesian

By Amar Alfikar

Growing up in a traditional Muslim neighborhood in Java, Indonesia in the 1990s, Amar Alfikar, a trans man and activist, shares how he leaned into family and faith to understand—and embrace—his true identity. “If it was not for my family’s acceptance, I would have left my religion,” he writes. “Instead, I am pursuing an academic career in theology and religious studies and have become firm in my faith and thinking about gender diversity in Islam.”

Can Two Friends Agree to Disagree on Abortion in Post-Roe America?

By Joanne Samuel Goldblum and Colleen Shaddox

Joanne Samuel Goldblum and Colleen Shaddox found sisterhood raging about injustice—but they disagree about abortion. Read how they’ve worked to maintain their bond in post-Roe America. “Being truly pro-life or pro-choice requires us to knock down rhetorical barriers and focus on the areas where we wholeheartedly agree,” they write, “that every child has a right to be placed on a path to success and that no mother should have to sacrifice her own success to make that happen.”

Where I Go: The Candy Wrapper Museum

By Darlene Lacey

Darlene Lacey was 15 when she started collecting old candy wrappers. Eventually, she turned her hobby into an online museum. For our series “Where I Go,” she gives truth to the adage that one person’s trash is another person’s treasure, and shows the power of appointing ourselves as the curators of the things that matter to us the most.

Candy Wrapper Museum curator Darlene Lacey was 15 when she started collecting for her “roadside attraction.” Building the online museum has led to all kinds of surprises—including being sent a Necco scrapbook saved from a dumpster (pictured above). Courtesy of author.

Zócalo’s Diaspora Jukebox

As part of Zócalo Public Square’s 20th birthday celebration, we’ve been sharing the sounds of the Southland with “Diaspora Jukebox,” a series of playlists that celebrate the unique communities and musical traditions that represent greater Los Angeles. Our first “drop”—which had us moving to the rhythm of the city, dancing like it was 1982, and partying like a Zacatecano—culminated in an IRL dance party we threw at the Port of L.A. 

The Human Costs of Building a World-Class City

By Ankush Pal and Anubhav Kashyap

And, drumroll please: Our first-ever audience choice award goes to authors Ankush Pal and Anubhav Kashyap! They take a clear-eyed look at New Delhi’s effort to “polish” the city ahead of this year’s G20 summit, at the expense of poor and working-class people. “Rather than improving life in the city for everyone,” they write, “the beautification projects funnel public resources into creating a cosmopolitan bubble for a few.”

The post Our Favorite Essays of 2023 appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The death of Dianne Feinstein isn’t just the end of a pathbreaking life. Or a generational shift in power in the U.S. Senate.

It’s the severing of a crucial link holding California and the United States together.

In her half-century in public office, Feinstein played many roles and came to mean many different things to Californians, especially those in her hometown of San Francisco. But for the Golden State as a whole, her most important job was an unofficial one: She was California’s ambassador to the American government.

This job was challenging, and it became more so during the 30 years she spent in Washington, D.C. In that period, California, always an exception, grew rapidly apart from the rest of the country.

Over Feinstein’s tenure in the Senate, the Golden State became a more progressive and democratic place, even as much of America turned inward, into conservative populism and right-wing nationalism. As everyday Californians demanded more freedom, a conservative U.S. Supreme Court curbed rights. And as our state government grew more aggressive and embraced experimentation, the federal government became stagnant and dysfunctional.

In this era of accelerating polarization and side-taking, Feinstein was an outlier. She played for both sides.

She believed deeply in California, and its increasingly liberal values on LGBTQ issues, on women’s rights, on gun control, on protecting the environment, on advancing democracy. But she also believed deeply in the American system of government, in the anti-democratic U.S. institutions, including a Senate that all too often frustrated attempts to realize those values.

She didn’t just reconcile the contradictions of representing her state and her country. She built her career on doing just that. How? One answer, as her closest friends would tell you, was sheer brains. She embodied the famous observation of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the great chronicler of the phoniness of American ambition: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

The other answer was her legendary stubbornness, which was her real superpower. You’d have to be stubborn to commute across a large country for 30 years, to serve a state in a hostile national capital. You’d have to be stubborn to serve as a human bridge between two shores moving away from each other.

It helped that Feinstein was a wealthy woman with a talent for holding a party. California’s unofficial embassy in Washington was her home—in her early Senate years, a five-story townhouse in Kalorama, and later, a very ambassadorial $10 million estate.

As a diplomat, she knew her job was to talk to opponents and enemies, and so many of the guests were Republicans. She took the bullet for Californians and played nice with Chuck Grassley and Mitch McConnell and all manner of right-wing pols whose existence turned the stomachs of her voters back in the Bay Area.

It was no accident that the Republican to whom she grew closest was Sen. Susan Collins of Maine. Collins’ vote could swing the Senate, and decide whether Feinstein could get California the budget items and policy carveouts it needed. Is it any wonder that Feinstein organized an engagement party for the Maine senator, or gifted her a painting that hangs prominently in Collins’ office?

Feinstein practiced diplomacy with American enemies and rivals; she had the closest ties with important Chinese figures of anyone in Washington, keeping open lines of communication in the world’s most important relationship. Feinstein also employed her diplomatic skills to keep the fractious Democratic coalition—which included California’s all-too-few allies—together. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton met at her home to reconcile after the 2008 primaries.

But it became harder to be a diplomat as Washington grew angrier and more conservative. The Bush years saw the undoing of what should have been her legacy. The assault weapons ban she had pushed to passage in 1994 expired in 2004, despite all her efforts to renew it. And the cruel Trump years made her longstanding bipartisan efforts to reform immigration and prevent the government from using torture seem daft. The U.S. government, which she loyally served, had become a monster, capable of building concentration camps for migrant children.

A bitter irony, left unmentioned in the obituaries, is that her major enduring legislative legacy was the empty desert she preserved, via the California Desert Protection Act. Politically, her devotion to diplomacy, and her personal embrace of Republicans like Lindsey Graham, came to seem at best out-of-touch, and at worst, dangerous. Her friend Sen. Collins approved the Trump-appointed Supreme Court justices that would revoke women’s reproductive rights and block reasonable gun controls.

In 2018, the California Democratic Party, tired of Feinstein’s diplomacy and bipartisan conciliation, endorsed a combative opponent, Kevin de León, against her. “California Democrats are hungry for new leadership that will fight for California values from the front lines, not equivocate on the sidelines,” De León declared.

Feinstein won the election anyway, but her base of support collapsed. As she showed more signs of age, liberal groups and former allies called for her resignation.

At her death, she was the most unpopular Democratic politician in California.

Ultimately, Feinstein’s ambassadorship failed because California and the American government had simply moved too far apart. As a result, we live in a new Cold War, between our state and our nation, which Feinstein tried to prevent.

We also live in an era of daily mass killings with the assault weapons Dianne Feinstein couldn’t permanently ban. We live in a surveillance state that Feinstein sought to limit. We deport, without due process, unauthorized immigrants Dianne Feinstein wanted to integrate into American life. We now barrel toward war in East Asia while barely talking to a China that Dianne Feinstein had on speed dial.

It’s telling that Feinstein’s replacement, chosen by our culture-warmongering governor, is a hardnosed labor and political operative with experience in partisan battles. And it’s unsurprising that the leading candidates running to fill her seat are three of the most polarizing members of the House of Representatives.

These would-be Feinstein successors have recently issued statements praising her, but they won’t try to fill her shoes. No one wants to play Feinstein’s role anymore.

Rest in peace, dear Dianne, our last ambassador.

The post Dianne Feinstein’s Most Important Job Was an Unofficial One appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The fight over Dianne Feinstein’s future is a foolish waste of time. Both sides in the controversy over whether she should resign her seat now, or serve out her term, seem to be missing the point.

Some Californians say our senior U.S. senator must step down as soon as possible so that Gov. Gavin Newsom can appoint a politician who is healthy and young enough to show up in person for all votes. Others say Feinstein was elected to the post, and is the best judge of when she should leave.

But this is a false choice. In fact, it’s easy to give both sides what they want. We can make sure California is always represented in the Senate, while Feinstein can remain in the world’s supposedly greatest deliberative body for as long as she likes.

How? Two words:

Artificial intelligence.

Yes, we now have AI technology more than advanced enough to do a senator’s job, and with far greater flair and efficiency than Feinstein, who turns 90 next month, or many of the other older politicians who occupy seats in the upper chamber.

Indeed, we could create an artificial intelligence based on Feinstein—DiFi—that could be just as moderate and maddening as the human original.

AI could easily handle all the fundamental tasks of a U.S. senator.

Fundraising? DiFi could reach more people in more places faster (without all the carbon pollution of airplane flights)—and write less annoying email spam.

Legislation? An algorithm could introduce sensible gun-control legislation that gets ignored by red state senators, way faster than the human Feinstein.

Voting the party line? So easy that your 12-year-old could build an AI to do that in just a few minutes.

And with some voice software add-ons, the AI could deliver the same meandering, repetitive remarks in committee rooms that have become Feinstein hallmarks.

But why stop at handling official duties? A DiFi AI could solve political problems far outside the scope of a living, breathing Feinstein.

Right now, Gov. Newsom has to worry about the tricky politics of whom he might choose to replace Feinstein if she leaves early or dies; the AI spares him that choice.

And in 2024, three Democratic contenders to replace Feinstein will raise tens of millions of dollars to spend against one another—money that donors instead could devote to beating Republican senate candidates in swing states. Better for Democrats to unite behind the DiFi AI and spare themselves the costly internal warfare.

A DiFi AI also could expand the power of democracy, in a historic way. Right now, we can only vote for representatives who are alive at the time the ballots are printed. But a DiFi AI would allow Californians to keep Feinstein, or at least her algorithmic essence, in office long after she’s dead.

Yes, there might be knee-jerk objections to letting the dead represent the living, but those objections are easily dismissed, especially in this country. The United States is so good at killing people before their time—endless wars, ceaseless gun violence, misinformation-fueled pandemic responses—that the dead really need more representation from their own.

And Californians can hardly object to governance by ghosts. Today’s citizens do less governing of our state than ballot measures approved many decades ago—like 1978’s Proposition 13—by electorates of voters who are mostly dead now. And attempts to alter such measures are routinely dismissed as politically unrealistic.

Of course, there would be some technical challenges. Replacing a human senator with an AI of the same human senator doesn’t conform with the outdated rules of the Senate. But it wouldn’t be hard to convince senators to change those rules. U.S. senators have huge egos and think of themselves as indispensable. They also are old: The average age in the Senate is 64. An amendment making it possible for them to serve long after they’ve shuffled off this mortal coil might achieve rare bipartisan—even unanimous—passage.

Filling the Senate with AIs also might be good for the public discourse. After all, human senators are hard for constituents and reporters to get on the phone or text, but AI senators would only be a click away. Since AIs adapt to new information—unlike aging senators—AI politicians might be more accountable, too.

I’d benefit personally. Sen. Feinstein doesn’t talk to me—or many reporters—but, with some guidance from an AI-savvy friend, I recently asked the GPT-4 multimodal model, from Open AI,  to pretend it was a 90-year-old senator from California facing questions from a “provocative California columnist” about whether she should leave office and who should replace her.

Here’s a portion of the AI-generated chat:

Columnist: Could an AI replace you?

Senator: Replace me? Well, that’s an intriguing idea. Can an AI understand the needs of the single mother in Fresno, or the plight of the immigrant family in San Diego? Can it empathize with the struggles of the small business owner in San Francisco? Can it sit across a table from a foreign leader and negotiate peace?

Columnist: Well, with advancements in technology, they could probably do all of that.

Senator: But there’s a difference between doing and understanding. It’s one thing to process data, quite another to feel the weight of human experiences. And politics, my dear columnist, is not just about decisions. It’s about the people behind those decisions. AI may have my knowledge, but it can’t have my heart.

I marveled at the savvy of this DiFi AI. She seemed to make the case for human emotions—without actually answering the question. And she didn’t count herself out of the race, either.

Could the human Feinstein do any better?

The post We Can Keep Dianne Feinstein in the Senate Forever appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Then you are dead wrong.

Because our very senior senator, more than any other political leader in the state, actually represents California’s future. And while those political insiders campaigning to force her retirement may be correct about her diminished capacities, they fail to recognize just how much she resembles who we Californians are, and what we are becoming.

California’s future, like Feinstein, looks old. Californians are increasingly the sort of people who are well past their prime but don’t know it. We forget other people and even ourselves. Once among America’s youngest and fastest-growing states, California is now losing population and aging faster than the rest of the country.

Both trends should make us cherish our senator, who is 88, even more, because she represents a rare and precious demographic success story: People over age 85 who, through their longevity, are preventing a California population collapse.

This rising Feinstein Generation is by far the fastest-growing and most rapidly diversifying age group in California; by one estimate, it will grow 489 percent from 2010 to 2060. State analyses suggest that the post-85 group will dominate the 2030s, as the first Baby Boomers enter what you might call the new prime of California life.

Younger people, by contrast, show nothing but ingratitude for this cohort’s largesse, choosing to leave California (85 percent of departures are among those 25 to 64), or failing to move to the state in the first place.

Instead of whining about DiFi and her ilk, why don’t young people and younger politicians devote themselves to building up the younger generations they claim to champion? They could get busy having more children and enticing others to procreate, thus reversing declines in the number of California kids and increases in closures of schools (some of which will probably be repurposed for senior living). Incentives to have children might well be combined with greater investments in public education to extend school days and school years, improve instruction, and raise standards.

Another strategy would be to push harder to reverse the restrictionist immigration policies of our last three presidents—Obama, Trump, and Biden—that have contributed to a decline in international migration to California. Still another pro-youth strategy would be to build more and cheaper housing, so more young people could afford to settle here.

It’s hard politically to expand new public investment in California, particularly when it benefits young people who represent a declining share of the population. But it would be easier if politicians pursued more money for schools or child care in combination with more care for the growing population of the elderly. Investing in seniors is popular, with support for the governor’s Master Plan for Aging, which has five big goals around improving care and housing for the oldest Californians, recorded at around 80 percent.

Feinstein could help the cause by being less defensive about her decline. Indeed, her staffers and supporters, instead of disputing press reports about her lapsing memory or diminished cognition, should embrace her faltering. They make her a better representative of her state.

The senator, on her good days, might talk more often, and in public, about the needs for forward-looking investments, even if she experiences senior moments in the process. She should present herself, and her good fortune in having plenty of money to pay for care-giving, as examples: Every Californian should have as many people to keep an eye on them as Feinstein does.

It’s tempting to want someone younger and more energetic for the job of being one of two senators for nearly 40 million people. I myself recently accused Feinstein of stubbornly holding on, in a certain San Francisco fashion. And it can be unsettling to see one’s elected representative seem confused in public.

But take a step back. Who isn’t confused by the strangeness and pressures of American life these days? And to her credit, Feinstein hasn’t created nearly as much confusion as her much younger friend, Gavin Newsom, has done with ever-shifting COVID restrictions and policy announcements.

It may be time—as her hometown paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, is now arguing—for Feinstein to step aside. But the reason for retirement would not be that she is failing to represent our state. To the contrary, in one very important respect, every day Feinstein remains in office, she provides Californians with an indispensable example.

When we look at our senator, we are looking in a mirror.

The post Dianne Feinstein Is California’s Future appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The hostage takers are two of California’s oldest and most powerful mules. U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer are past retirement age, but refuse to quit their jobs now, when they could be replaced by allies who share their California values. Their stubborn insistence on staying in power could end up elevating right-wing political forces hostile to California, and to democracy itself.

The 88-year-old Feinstein, by not quitting while Gov. Gavin Newsom remains in office, could end up being replaced by a Trump-loving Republican. If Newsom is recalled and Feinstein dies or becomes incapacitated in the next year, during a Larry Elder governorship, the Senate would flip back to Republicans. The 83-year-old Breyer, by not retiring while President Joe Biden could nominate a replacement who could be confirmed by a Democrat-controlled Senate, risks having his seat go to another right-wing justice.

Why do Feinstein and Breyer cling to power, despite the risks? The conventional wisdom chalks their stubbornness up to their age and diminishing cognition.

But I don’t buy into such ageism. Instead, I see their political pig-headedness, their refusal to acknowledge present-day realities, and their unwillingness to cede power as rooted in their shared hometown, San Francisco.

Is there any human settlement on this godforsaken earth more stubborn than San Francisco? Even in California, where going your own way is the leading religion, San Francisco proudly defies conformity and good sense with politics, culture, and ideas that leave us scratching our heads. “Forty-nine square miles, surrounded by reality,” is how native son Paul Kantner, of Jefferson Airplane, fondly described his hometown.

Of course, San Francisco owes its existence to its stubbornness—it’s the rare global city to be thoroughly destroyed (by earthquake and fire in 1906) and to rebuild itself. Stubbornness remains a requirement of daily survival. While other Californians are routinely warmed by the sun, San Franciscans, isolated on a cold peninsula, must rely on their inner fire. You need a stiff spine to walk upright in those wind gusts. And in our era, just finding a place to live, and affording San Francisco rent, requires an iron will and a commitment to the city. (I refer you to the lead character’s magical, stubborn act of squatting in the 2019 film The Last Black Man in San Francisco if you’re wondering whether or not I’m exaggerating.)

So, how can we expect Feinstein or Breyer to know when to quit when they are from a place where just getting around town means there’s always another hill—Telegraph, Nob, Russian—to climb?

Both the senator and the justice come by their San Francisco stubbornness honestly. Feinstein, who is Jewish, was hardened first by the stubborn and demanding nuns at Convent of the Sacred Heart High School—and then, as a supervisor and mayor, by the city’s brutal, tribal, and quite male 1970s and ’80s politics. Breyer got a taste of those politics through his father—who was legal counsel to the board of education—and developed his talent for arguing as a debater at Lowell High. Both Feinstein and Breyer only went as far as Stanford for college.

Feinstein and Breyer also embody the local combination of privilege and self-righteousness that can make the place and its people so infuriating. Even now, with their city boasting unsurpassed beauty, epic wealth, and unrivaled cultural power, San Franciscans, including these two powerful people, still talk as if they are outsiders and underdogs.

Feinstein has fashioned an image as an independent-minded voice of reason. She prides herself on her willingness to collaborate with Republicans, and to fight with her fellow Democrats. Breyer portrays himself, in books and speeches, as a man of law and duty, unmoved by politics. Meanwhile, he sits on a high court that has been remaking our politics for decades.

The way that Feinstein and Breyer hold to such obtuse and outdated outlooks is itself very San Francisco. “People don’t grow up, they grow old,” the late, great San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen wrote. “One fateful way to counteract that is to live in the past, the occupational hazard of San Franciscans.”

Caen’s old warning points to a current irony: defiance of reality has never been more popular across the United States. So, is it any wonder—in our polarized and angry age—that the rest of the country has come to prize the brand of stubbornness nurtured by San Francisco? Americans elevated the most stubborn California politician of the younger generation, former San Francisco district attorney Kamala Harris, to the vice presidency, backing up a 78-year-old president. The proudly obstinate San Franciscan Nancy Pelosi, at 81, is widely considered indispensable as Speaker of the House.

In the past decade, Californians, improbably, reinstalled that stubborn old coot Jerry Brown in the governorship, and they made former San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, running on a platform of resistance to national political norms, Brown’s successor. Newsom is now trying to defeat a recall with a stubborn strategy of calling the vote illegitimate and telling people not to even bother voting on the question of who might succeed him if he’s recalled.

A San Franciscan, State Senator Scott Wiener, has become the most important lawmaker of this era, by stubbornly pursuing new housing construction that the rest of California loathes. And at age 87, Mr. San Francisco, Willie Brown, remains a political kingmaker, and behaves as if he is still his city’s mayor—17 years after he left office.

The attempt to recall Newsom is mostly grounded in misinformation and right-wing fantasy, but it does respond to a very real California frustration with the San Francisco political machine and its stubborn self-regard, even as the state is consumed by multiple crises.

I recently called one of my favorite San Franciscans, Quentin Kopp, a former judge and legislator who even San Franciscans think is too stubborn. When I asked him whether San Franciscans are more stubborn than the rest of us, he immediately answered, “Yes”—and then stubbornly deflected my questions on the roots of that stubbornness.

Kopp, who is 93, still swims every day and goes to his law office, where he represents clients that include a group of judges in their 70s and 80s who have been shut out of judicial assignments by the California Supreme Court. He says he has no intention of retiring.

When I asked about Breyer and Feinstein, he was adamant that both should stick around. Term limits for politicians have been a failure, he argued. And Breyer, as a judge, should not make political decisions about anything, including retirement. As for Feinstein, Kopp said he had just conveyed to a top senatorial aide that she shouldn’t bend to critics who see signs of diminished capacity or senility. To suggest a person quit because of age, Kopp said, “is insulting and regressive.”

The message from the City by the Bay is clear, America: if you’re waiting for stubborn San Franciscans to relent to outside pressure to retire, don’t hold your breath.

The post Can the American Republic Survive the Stubbornness of San Francisco? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I awoke before dawn on November 19, 1978, nearly 900 miles away from the city desk of the San Francisco Examiner, where I worked. As I stepped from the shower, I grabbed the Tucson Sunday paper and saw the front-page news about a massacre in Guyana, where two of my co-workers were on assignment. The story couldn’t have been less clear about which one of them had been shot to death on a jungle airstrip by henchmen of the Reverend Jim Jones, the charismatic and paranoid leader of the Peoples Temple who had transplanted his flock of nearly 1,000 parishioners from San Francisco to the South American jungle to escape exposure as a charlatan.

When I finally reached the Examiner city desk by pay phone, my first question was whether Tim Reiterman, my close friend and partner on many investigative stories, was still alive. Yes, he was alive, although he had been wounded. I was relieved, and immediately felt guilty. Reiterman’s survival meant Examiner photographer Greg Robinson had been killed.

Every mile of the drive back to San Francisco was urgent. As the sun set, radio reports described the unfolding horror of what had happened at Jonestown. The ambush at the Port Kaituma airstrip that had killed Greg, Representative Leo Ryan, and three others was just the beginning. The bodies of more than 900 residents of Jonestown lay scattered over the jungle campus. So many stories referred to cyanide-laced Kool-Aid that “drinking the Kool-Aid” became a commonplace expression. It was actually cyanide-laced Flavor Aid, as the makers of Kool-Aid have tirelessly pointed out over the years.

I arrived back in San Francisco very late. After a restless few hours of sleep, I was at the city desk, reporting and writing stories on Peoples Temple and the massacre. We dug into prior threats against temple members and Jones’ manipulations of politicians and the media, plus rumors of a Peoples Temple hit list. If a madman could take out nearly 1,000 lives in an evening, it was plausible that Temple operatives who remained in the Bay Area could pick off enemies closer to home. No one was safe from the terror, it seemed.

The city was fragile. Every media report, every law enforcement and political pronouncement–every thought, it seemed–was focused on the horror at Jonestown and the trail of events leading from San Francisco to the South American jungle. What could be more insane? More heart-sickening?

Reporting nearly around the clock was hard, but it was also a huge international story, and the work absorbed some of the angst. One relief was taking a first-person story from Tim Reiterman, who sounded groggy and weak, during his return to San Francisco. It was a small miracle to hear his voice.

I interviewed Peoples Temple lawyer Charles Garry over the weekend in his San Francisco office. Garry had to run an errand, but he told me to stick around. I helped myself to stacks of Peoples Temple files piled in the hallway. People who passed by my huddled figure must have thought I was an attorney or investigator, and I didn’t correct any misimpressions.

After a week at this pace and intensity, I was done in–dog-tired and ill. On Monday, November 27, I was tempted to call in sick. I didn’t. It turned out to be the day Supervisor Dan White killed Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk.

They were familiar figures. I had done many stories on Moscone and visited his home. His wife, Gina Moscone, served me cold coffee to let me know what she thought of my reporting. Milk and I had briefly collaborated on an exposé of underage prostitution at gay bathhouses, but it never saw print. White I had seen blow up at a Board of Supervisors meeting, banging his microphone when he got frustrated.

Around mid-morning that November 27, the police radio above the city desk crackled. It was noisy in newsrooms in those days, and you couldn’t hear the police radio from 10 feet away, but I saw the eyes of Fran Dauth, a deputy city editor sitting directly under the radio, get very big. She hustled over to me and said, “You, slick, sit down and start writing. There’s been a shooting in City Hall.”

I did write. And write. For the next three hours. The old-fashioned way: on a typewriter. I’d write a paragraph, and someone would rip it out of the typewriter, mark it up, and send it to the backshop. Everyone on staff was reporting the story and phoning in notes. The publisher was my legman.

At about 1 p.m. I was still writing when I heard something plop on my desk. It was that afternoon’s newspaper with the complete story. There was my lede story on the assassinations, along with page after page of profiles, pictures, and backgrounders. That effort was what newspapering was all about then: bringing readers the news about a big story on deadline. And its accuracy stood the test–except for my adding an extra letter to the last name of Moscone’s secretary, which I rue to this day.

I took pride in the fact I had not reported the rumor, as other news outlets did, that Peoples Temple hit squads were involved in the City Hall killings. The hit squads turned out to be the fevered imaginings of conspiracy theorists, temple defectors, and investigators.

One indelible moment from that day was Dianne Feinstein’s announcement in front of the mayor’s office that Moscone and Milk had been shot and killed. Just off-screen, you could make out the anguished cry, “Oh, Jesus Christ!” The voice was familiar. It was Examiner reporter Alan Cline, assigned to cover the impromptu news conference. His desk was next to mine. In the YouTube clip from that day, one of the first faces to pop up is that of an Examiner librarian. He was visiting City Hall on his day off and went to see what the commotion was all about.

The tragedy meant Feinstein would go from being president of the Board of Supervisors to mayor of the city. She said later that it had been a “day of infamy” for San Francisco. It was also a day of insanity piled upon insanity.

In mid-afternoon, attention shifted. I was pulled off the assassinations beat and told to resume my Peoples Temple reporting. Many more stories followed. Tim Reiterman came back to work. The paper sent him to Hawaii for R & R. It rained the whole time. He wrote a book, Raven: The Untold Story of the Rev. Jim Jones and his People, that unmasked Jones’ manipulation and corruption throughout his career.

Gradually the pall lifted from San Francisco. Mayor Feinstein restored a sense of calm and tranquility. Dan White was given a lenient sentence after employing the infamous Twinkie defense, but went on to kill himself soon after being released from prison early. No Peoples Temple hit squads ever terrorized San Francisco.

The mass murder in Jonestown and the assassinations at City Hall haven’t receded from San Francisco’s consciousness in 35 years. Or mine. In those few days in November 1978, facts hit home with relentless, gut-churning force. It was hard work to get them right. But it was important then, as it is now. Facts are always personal to somebody. It’s an extra lesson when that somebody is you.

The post I Covered San Francisco’s Bloody November of ’78 appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.