Nǐ hǎo, jiāzhōu!

Hello, California!

We are the Golden State’s two giant pandas, the first to enter the United States in two decades. And while it’s only been a few months since we departed southwest China for the San Diego Zoo, we’ve already met the governor, celebrities, TV broadcasters who love puns (“Panda-monium”), and thousands of everyday people, some of whom pay $115 to enter the zoo in the early morning and walk around with us for an hour. We now feel so at home in California that we’re wondering how we might take on the responsibilities of citizenship. For example, we hear so many of the people visiting us talking about your November elections.

So, why don’t you let us vote in them, too?

In asking this, we want to reassure you that we are reluctant to get political. Why take sides when we’re more popular than the Padres? (We never strike out, and we’re cuter than Jackson Merrill). The two of us are laidback types; zookeepers describe Yun, a 5-year-old male, as “mild-mannered, gentle and lovable,” and Xin, a 4-year-old female, as a “gentle and witty introvert with a sweet round face and big ears.”

And like so many of our fellow Californians, we ignore the news. We prefer to spend our time sunbathing, sleeping, and consuming as much grass as we can get our paws on. To clarify, our grass of choice is bamboo—the zoo grows eight species of it because we are picky.

We also must walk a fine line as “envoys of friendship,” in the words of the Chinese government, which loans us out to overseas zoos for $1 million a year. That means we and our fellow panda migrants—including old Sichuan friends who will soon head to the National Zoo in D.C. and perhaps the San Francisco Zoo—are really diplomats. And we represent a difficult client state that bullies its neighbors and inspires retaliatory tariffs and hateful rhetoric from a former-and-perhaps-future American president whose team uses the term “panda hugger” as a pejorative. (Pro tip: even if you love China, it’s best not to hug us—we are real animals, not stuffed bears.)

There are other reasons we might be wise to stay out of the political arena. For one thing, we are non-humans now living in a country that ranks low in the global Animal Protection Index. For another, we are newcomers to an America so deeply infected by xenophobia that a majority of voters support mass deportation of immigrants and their families. (Before JD Vance starts spreading lies about what we eat, let’s be clear—we are herbivores.)

Yet, despite all the ways in which we count as outsiders, we pandas, by our very presence, offer Americans a chance to understand your real challenges.

Try looking at things from our perspective. After all, we, like you, are a vulnerable species trying to survive on an increasingly inhospitable planet (there are fewer than 3,000 giant pandas in the world). We are also living proof that—in this age of moral relativism and lie-based politics—some very important things remain black and white.

Like the fact that true democracy requires the representation and participation of all living things.

Including us.

Sure, your human media is full of phony accusations that foreigners are voting in this year’s elections. They aren’t, but why shouldn’t they be able to? It’s increasingly common around the world for jurisdictions to open up local elections to non-citizens. San Francisco has done so for school board contests, for instance.

If we could vote in San Diego elections, we might cast a ballot for anyone who could stop the constant noise of jets flying low over us here in Balboa Park, as they prepare to land at the airport. Our participation also might raise the question of why we live rent-free in the expanded Panda Ridge complex while the city tears down encampments of the unhoused and allows the loss of hundreds of shelter beds.

Your national constitution has no prohibition against non-citizens voting—states, like yours decide. Unfortunately, California, while claiming to be a democracy defender, has decided to disenfranchise one in six of its adults based on citizenship, even though such people pay taxes, abide by the laws, serve in the military, and raise children who are citizens. California could enfranchise 6 million people by letting non-citizen residents vote.

It also could bring people together across national boundaries and create a framework for global political solutions if it reached agreements of “reciprocal voting” to allow Californians and residents of other states and countries to vote in each other’s elections.

Such a reciprocal system would demonstrate human interdependence. But interdependence on this planet encompasses all living things. Humans are less than 1% of the world’s biomass but have 100% of the world’s democratic rights. Plants are more than 80% of the biomass and are unrepresented, even though humans couldn’t live without them.

Providing representation to us animals and plants is not a new idea. There are efforts around the world to imagine democratic systems for various beings, including the Multispecies Constitution Project at the L.A.-based Berggruen Institute, where this column’s usual author is a fellow.

That project asks questions like: “What sorts of institutions could speak with—rather than for—the trees, the birds, the microbes, and the diverse humans of this planet?” The idea is that by incorporating the intelligence, experiences, values, and interests of other living things into governance, you humans will save ecosystems—and maybe yourselves. Intriguingly, some non-human creatures, like whales, are beginning to converse with you.

If the two of us could talk with you directly, instead of through the imagination of a human journalist, we might chat about the struggles of starting a family in California. We are a couple facing expectations to breed. And yes, San Diego is a great place to mate, and not just for all the sun-kissed humans in the beach-themed bars.

In fact, Yun’s grandparents lived at the zoo in the 2000s and had five cubs together here, including his mother Zhen Zhen. It seems unlikely that we’ll be that fertile. And we can’t know how long we’ll get to stay here, given the conflict between our birth country and our new home country.

But for now, we are Californians. Shouldn’t we have the same rights and responsibilities as all of you?

The post Why California Should Let Pandas Vote appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In the summers of 1897 and 1898, the San Diego, Pacific Beach, and La Jolla Railroad hired “Professor” Horace Poole to provide Fourth of July weekend entertainment. The spry 20-something doused himself with a flammable liquid and likely took a deep breath before setting himself ablaze, and diving from the top of the La Jolla Cliffs into the sea.

For this miraculous feat, Horace Poole is remembered well in San Diego. Poole Street in La Jolla is a hat tip to him, and his name regularly appears on local history website pages that mention the La Jolla caves.

This essay isn’t about Horace Poole, though. It’s about a lesser-known member of his family whose name only appears briefly, fleetingly, in the annals of history: his daughter, Elizabeth Rose, an early 20th century San Diegan we prefer to forget—even though her story and experiences were far more common than those of her illustrious father.

Young women of Elizabeth’s time are nearly invisible in our history books. They are silent, transient figures in a historical record that obscures about as much as it tells. How should we understand the persistent erasure of women’s history—particularly of centuries of life altering experiences—that society has ignored, forgotten, or dismissed as quotidian and mundane?

On March 29, 1929, Elizabeth Rose Poole, then 17, grabbed a silver spoon and likely took a deep breath before inserting it into her vagina—in hopes of inducing a miscarriage. She became ill, and her condition got progressively worse. On March 31, her parents called on Dr. C.R. Brown to attend to her, but he was unable to do much, and Elizabeth died on April 3, 1929. The coroner listed her cause of death as a “septic pulmonary embolism following abortion” and “acute septicemia.”

We know precious little about Elizabeth. As a teenage girl in 1920s America, she had achieved few of the milestones that would cement a place for her in official records or archives. She hadn’t wed, so there was no marriage certificate. Though her father was at one point well-known, she wasn’t a socialite. There were no mentions of her in the society pages.

Census records help historians understand the people we study, but here, too, Elizabeth Rose eludes. The 1920 Census indicates that the Pooles had six children; only Elizabeth’s younger brother was in school at that time, and while two older siblings worked, Elizabeth (then eight) and two other siblings were unaccounted for. By the 1930 Census, her younger brother and sister (ages 17 and 16, respectively) were both in school, and her older siblings were all working. Elizabeth’s death record in the medical examiner’s office indicates her occupation as “at school,” but I couldn’t find her in any of the San Diego high school yearbooks from the time of her death that I found online.

We will likely never know with whom Elizabeth became pregnant. Was it a boy from the neighborhood or school? Perhaps an older man? Someone she met over the course of her daily routine? A newcomer to town?

Other women who died from illegal or self-induced abortions in San Diego around the same time—like Thelma Jeanne Ferrie, or Gertrude Freedman—share similar blips in the historical record. They’re there, and then they disappear, leaving only slim pieces of evidence (an address, a marriage date) of their brief time on this earth.

Elizabeth didn’t have the “privilege” of being a wife. But being married wouldn’t necessarily have made her pregnancy any less inconvenient. Thelma Jeanne Ferrie, who died after an abortion attempt in San Diego in 1931, was married and had a young son. She sought an abortion after she, her husband, and her mother—who all lived together—realized they could not afford another child in the household.

We know about Horace Poole because a railroad company paid him to jump from a cliff into the ocean a few times—something few of us will do (especially since jumping from the top of the La Jolla caves is now prohibited). His life and memory are preserved because somewhere along the way, someone thought that exceptional act was worthy of remembering.

Last year, when I taught a course on the moral and social aspects of studying history, I posed several questions about this phenomenon to my students: Who decides what history is important? What responsibilities do we have toward the dead? And, do our subjects have the right to be forgotten?

As someone who has extensively researched and written about women who have had and sometimes died from illicit abortions in the first half of the 20th century, I have often pondered on the ethics of what I do: dig through archives to write and tell stories of women’s experiences, stories about which they likely felt shame.

Since women themselves have never wanted to talk much about the procedure—abortion stigma still exists today, even though times have changed—archives reflect medical authorities’ and law enforcement agencies’ investigations, rather than women’s experiences and feelings. Historians such as Leslie Reagan and myself have noted that in the 19th and early 20th centuries, many women had illegal abortions, and they shared information about how to access the procedure through close networks of friends, family, medical providers, and druggists. But word-of-mouth does not produce a historical record as robust as the paperwork produced by professional medical societies or law enforcement.

This paucity of sources raises questions about what we think is worthy of, or important to, remember. When we glorify stories like Horace Poole’s, we commemorate individuals for their exceptionalism. When we deal with widely-shared but controversial experiences such as death and abortion, we sweep stories under the rug. When I tell people I meet that I wrote a book about the history of illegal abortion, they usually respond with raised eyebrows, arms crossed in front of the chest, or some apologia—pro or anti-abortion. They’re uncomfortable. I’m (slightly less) uncomfortable. We move on to another subject.

As much discomfort as these stories may bring, they are worth sharing. Otherwise, we contribute to historical amnesia—a historical amnesia that might lead some Supreme Court justices to opine that “abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition”—which simply isn’t true. For centuries, abortion was a pervasive, personal, and painful practice in the United States, and a common, shared experience that the historical record neglected, while elevating the random and seemingly extraordinary feats of otherwise inconsequential men—like Horace Poole’s illuminated dive.

The post Invisible Women, Invisible Abortions, Invisible Histories appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

San Franciscans have Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, a classic film of cinematic heights and existential falls, to define their city by the bay. Los Angeles explains its fundamental fatalism about corruption and power through Roman Polanski’s nasty noir Chinatown.

But San Diego—a beautiful place full of people who have thought and fought for their country—has long had to settle for 1986’s Top Gun, a dumb, jingoistic, and misogynistic Tom Cruise vehicle about Naval aviators, as its cinematic signature. Sure, San Diego played other places in acclaimed films from Some Like It Hot to Citizen Kane (the latter filmed in the city’s Balboa Park). But when it comes to playing and expressing itself, San Diego’s stuck with Top Gun and the 2004 comedy Anchorman, about dumb and misogynistic local TV personalities.

The arrival of a Top Gun sequel—after 36 years—certainly doesn’t solve the problem, even if it is a box office hit. This ludicrous film mirrors American decline, while misrepresenting San Diego in the process.

Top Gun: Maverick is premised entirely on an error of fact, pretending that the eponymous school for Navy fighter pilots operates out of the North Island Naval Air Station.

But the real-life Topgun was relocated from San Diego’s Miramar Naval Air Station to Fallon, Nevada back in 1996, as part of post-Cold War defense consolidation.

It’s not coming back.

Except in the movies—because a vapid and predictable film wants to tap into the magic of San Diego.

Part of that magic lies in the city’s beauty. So, the movie transports audiences not just to the naval base on North Island, but to Point Loma, various parts of Coronado, and Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery. And we also get the tourism-bureau-approved privilege of watching Jennifer Connelly and Tom Cruise sail across the bay.

Another piece of that magic is San Diego’s image as protector of America. San Diego is California’s most American city, a striking contrast to Los Angeles and San Francisco, which see themselves as global metropolises, proudly out of step with the rest of the United States.

While other Californians debate whether to stand for national anthem at all, San Diegans sing the song themselves, often while flying the flag outside their front door. And the longstanding presence of the military provides the city with a deep well of patriotic renewal.

Top Gun: Maverick seeks to mine this well, but ultimately undermines it. When the movie taps into San Diego’s patriotism, it does the city a disservice.

While the original Top Gun was full of memorable, funny one-liners (“I feel the need, the need for speed” and “No points for second place”), the sequel decides to champion the line, “Don’t think—just do.”

The phrase isn’t just clunky. It reads as an indictment of both the film’s idiotic denouement (a Star Wars rip-off, with jets flying through a steep canyon to get off a miracle shot in the climactic moment) and of the United States itself.

“Don’t think” all too perfectly describes a country that thoughtlessly fails to vaccinate or wear masks—and ends up with more than one million people dead from COVID, apparently the highest death tally in the world. “Don’t think” fits an America that responds to gun violence by loosening restrictions on guns, making mass shootings routine. “Don’t think—just do” mirrors the American foreign policy that has kept us at war, in one place or another, for decades.

Pity San Diego, or any place else with a mission of defending such a country. Because so much of the time, to defend America is to defend the indefensible.

Which is why the movie is so unfair to San Diego. While military and aerospace are still highly visible in San Diego, the place is hardly dominated by these industries.

And San Diego actually does quite a lot of thinking.

In the original Top Gun, Cruise’s love interest was a mathematician with a PhD who worked for the Department of Defense; in the sequel, his love interest owns a bar. But San Diego, unlike Cruise’s cinematic partners, has become smarter over the past generation. It’s one of the country’s most educated cities, by measures that combine college degree attainment with the quality of its schools. It’s a leader in inventing new health and medical devices. Its remaining military installations are deeply grounded in science and tech. It’s a force in trade. And it just opened a new trolley line to its leading university, UC San Diego.

The film ignores this context, instead projecting its idiocy onto the city.

That’s too bad. San Diego deserves a cinematic touchstone as smart as it is.

The post <i>Top Gun</i> Is Too Dumb for San Diego appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The attempted recall of Gov. Gavin Newsom has many geographic roots. Its original proponent was a sheriff’s deputy from Yolo County. The recall petition drew signatures from significant percentages of the population in our smaller, North State counties. And East Coast conservative media and right-wing Republicans from other parts of the country have given it attention and money.

But a recall is about replacing one governor with another. And, for the second gubernatorial recall in a row, it is the frustrations of San Diego County, and its ambitious politicians, that are driving the process.

Back in 2003, the frustrated and ambitious San Diegan behind the recall of Gov. Gray Davis was Congressman Darrell Issa. An ordinary gubernatorial election didn’t hold much hope for a conservative Republican like Issa, but the recall election—with a huge field of replacement candidates—seemed to provide an opening. So, Issa, a car alarm magnate, provided the money to qualify the recall for the ballot, and formed a campaign team, only to abandon his candidacy.

This time, two ambitious men from San Diego lead in early polls of who would replace Newsom if the recall succeeds.

Former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer has long eyed the governorship but seemed to be too moderate to beat a more conservative Republican in a primary election. Faulconer embraced the opportunity of a wide-open recall race, and began campaigning before all the signatures were submitted this spring. Faulconer’s candidacy has given the recall, which had been backed by little-known pro-Trump activists, a bit of legitimacy; he is clearly the candidate that Newsom’s team fears most.

The other San Diegan, businessman John Cox, lost badly to Newsom in the regular 2018 gubernatorial election. But Cox, who has spent years searching for a way into political office, saw the recall as a second chance. He has now thrown his fortune behind the recall and his candidacy, broadcasting ads statewide that show him with a bear, to symbolize the “beastly” changes he will bring to the state.

Why is San Diego the home of recall leaders? Part of the answer lies in the state’s political change. While San Diego—which voted Republican in 19 of 25 20th-century presidential races—has become more Democratic, it’s still not as blue as the state as a whole. The city and county still elect Republicans like Faulconer, who is popular enough with San Diego Democrats to convince himself he might win statewide.

Another political answer to the question lies in San Diego’s little-known status as a hotbed of direct democracy. For much of California’s history, San Diego has been the easiest place to gather signatures on petitions for recalls and ballot initiatives. In some initiative campaigns, San Diego produced signatures at twice the per-voter rate of other counties.

But I suspect that San Diego’s affinity for the recall goes beyond politics. San Diego is a big place, the country’s eighth most populous city, but its cachet and influence don’t match its ambitions—because America’s Finest City, as it bills itself, has the bad luck to be located in California.

San Diego would be the largest metropolis in 43 states, but in California, it’s an after-thought, only the fourth most populous metro region, smaller than even the Inland Empire. Its news, its sports teams, and its leaders don’t get the same level of statewide attention that San Francisco’s and Los Angeles’s do.

San Diego is also a different sort of place than its big brothers up the coast. L.A. and the Bay Area are global mega-regions, proudly out of step with the rest of the United States. San Diego, by contrast, is the most unabashedly American of California cities. It’s a place full of military installations and veterans, who fly their flags and host our state’s largest Fourth of July show. Its location on an international border also reinforces its American identity.

San Diegans, many of whom have dedicated their careers to defending the nation, often see the rest of California as going too far beyond American law and tradition. So, it’s not hard to see why the recall, a reactionary tool, might appeal as a way of pulling California back to reality.

But that doesn’t mean the recall will succeed in installing a San Diegan, much less slowing down change. Back in 2003, the San Diego-funded recall was ultimately won by a foreign-born movie star from Los Angeles.

It doesn’t help the prospects of Cox or Falconer that the last California governor from San Diego, Pete Wilson, who ran as a moderate, has curdled into a full-throated supporter of Donald Trump. Late in life, Wilson, whose statue was briefly taken down in San Diego last fall, defends his anti-immigration politics with the fervor of a man who wants to go down in history as California’s answer to George Wallace.

This year, San Diego’s attempts to take out Gavin Newsom have succeeded in producing another recall election, which is no small feat. But since the election became a certainty, Gov. Newsom has grown more energized and popular.

In today’s California, San Diego has enough horsepower to demand the state reconsider who should be governor—but not enough to take the reins itself.

The post Why Does San Diego Love Recalling Governors?  appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Torrey Pines Natural Reserve is located in what is now called San Diego, the traditional and unceded lands of the Kumeyaay people, where I spent my first years of life. A famous golf course up the road, which occasionally hosts the U.S. Open, takes its name from the Torrey pine—as do several local schools. My memory of the reserve is a blur of family hikes and elementary school field trips, a composite out of sequence. Although my family moved away when I was in third grade, Torrey Pines State Beach and Natural Reserve formed a corner of the world that we came back to year after year.

This is what I remember: in order to even arrive at the first trailhead, you would hike up a steep, Sisyphean hill with sparse refuges of shade. The sand at the beginning of the trail was very warm and loose, and would always get in your shoes. If you were lucky, a cool ocean breeze would come along and wipe away the heat that liked to mellow on the trail, populated by lizards, bees, and the occasional squirrel. In springtime you could also see yellow cactus blooms and carpets of purple flowers and pinkish buckwheat, all contrasting dramatically with the deep blue ocean. Torrey Pines is a good place to remember that you are a body—not just that you have a body—sustained by earth, air, and sea.

During a recent visit with my husband, Ben, I was amused to discover that the “Sisyphean” hill could be briskly hiked in 10 minutes, and that one of the “giant” walls of white, partially eroded sandstone was no more than 12 feet tall. It felt like someone had taken a tilt-shift lens to my mental picture of the landscape, leaving it smaller—even toylike—and thus a bit less mythic and more in need of care. Still, the sand remained warm at my ankles, and I was now tall enough to feel more ocean breeze. The healthy Torrey pines at the start of the trail looked just as I remembered them: a bit scraggly, windswept into unique forms and dotted by large pine cones.

My heart sank as we turned a corner that overlooked the ocean and green estuary below. The vista was framed by an unsightly collapse of dead trees left in place, like rough skeletons folded over after a battle. I knew that the Torrey pines had struggled with bark beetles for some time, marked by large, black plastic traps strewn throughout the park, reminding me of solemn lanterns. But I remembered smaller patches of dead trees—not an entire hillside. Was this another detail that had been dilated by memory and distance?

Yes and no. A combination of drought, fire, and beetle infestation has indeed reduced California’s two Torrey pine colonies (the other is in the Channel Islands) from 9,000 trees in the 1970s, dwindling to 3,000 today. So when I visited as a child in the early ’90s, the diminishment of Torrey pines was already well underway. At school, I absorbed the urgent calls to “save the rainforests” and “save the whales.” Yet whereas those losses were more abstract, the Torrey pines were my first encounter with something being left to die. I remember wondering why no one was doing more.

Of course, the individual conservation stories of my childhood pale in comparison to the climate crisis children grow up with today. I thought about these different scales of disaster when we came across a sign that explained how historic levels of drought were making the Torrey pines even more vulnerable to bark beetles. Although there were plenty of bark beetle traps around, the sign explained that conservationists couldn’t give the trees extra water to help combat infestations because it would interfere with a “natural ecological process.” Although I recognized the impracticality of watering the huge park, this reasoning didn’t make sense to me: why justify one form of human intervention (extermination via bark beetle traps) but not another (more water)? If climate change driven by human carbon emissions is intensifying California’s experience of drought, then we have already been intervening in Torrey pine ecology, in a negative way. Limiting action to the invisible hand of “natural ecological processes” obscures other possible ways of imagining care.

For example, many Indigenous traditions offer ways of thinking about human agency as a beneficial part of nature and ecological processes, rather than separate from nature. In Braiding Sweetgrass, botanist and Potawatomi member Robin Wall Kimmerer explains how sweetgrass “likes” to be selectively harvested; it is measurably healthier when someone cuts it partially back. In California, a similar case is being made for bringing back Indigenous burning practices in fire-prone landscapes, like Yosemite National Park. Under what conditions did the Kumayaay leave the Torrey pines at today’s reserve, and how did they care for them during past droughts? This is a gap that the reserve’s official website entirely skips over.

Although I failed to find an answer, I discovered that a few trees didn’t wait to be watered, or moved, through human intervention. The local conservation nonprofit Nature Collective notes that several trees have unexpectedly “escaped into coastal wildlands including San Elijo Lagoon Ecological Reserve,” which is located about seven miles north of Torrey Pines Natural Reserve. Ecologists suspect that scrub jays may have been harvesting seeds from Torrey pines in nearby gardens, resulting in new germinations.

While I worry for the pines and the ecology they support on the ocean bluffs, I smile to think of them “escaping” into a brackish lagoon through the work of enterprising scrub jays. These rogue trees are a reminder that other living beings are ecosystem engineers. They intervene in their environments, creating niches and habitats. The rogue trees also show how preserves are temporary and porous things. If we pay close attention, the Torrey pines not only convey stories of damage and danger, but also introduce small, surprising spaces of unexpected abundance.

If memory itself is a kind of nature preserve, safeguarding the recollections of childhood, perhaps the pines show us an alternative to waiting for deterioration to set in. Memory is something that can still grow and change, that should be cared for, and that can even escape its historical boundaries. Maybe an old memory can take up residence in the lagoon of a new experience, or seed a new connection.

As we walked back down the trail that day, Ben noticed a granite bench under some shade, and suggested we sit down to admire the lagoon view. The breeze smelled like salt, and we watched the Amtrak train go by. I don’t think I’ve ever stopped there ever before.

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In recent months, America’s Finest City has seen its most civic-minded brains eaten not by zombies, but by a long-empty downtown office building. Perhaps compensating for the absence of typical Halloween rites, San Diegans have grown so frighteningly obsessed with the horrors at 101 Ash Street that they sometimes seem incapable of discussing anything else.

“Are we going to be proud,” asked Voice of San Diego CEO and editor-in-chief Scott Lewis in a recent Tweet, “that, during this pandemic, with our lives completely upended and the future of things like schools and libraries and the economy in doubt, so much of the local election was about this building?”

To make a long ghost story short, in 2016 the city government negotiated a complicated 20-year, $127 million lease-to-own agreement for the 19-story, 315,000-square-foot property. The deal was portrayed as a way to save $44.4 million and to house at least 850 city workers in a modern office building. Little more than a power wash would be needed before employees moved in.

That move still has not happened.

For reasons that are now the subject of constant speculation and investigation, city officials never inspected 101 Ash for ghosts, goblins, and other deficiencies before they signed on the dotted line. Eventually, it emerged that 101 Ash—which was built in 1968 for San Diego Gas & Electric and was most recently the headquarters of Sempra Energy—had asbestos contamination and issues with so many of its systems—electrical, elevators, plumbing, heating—that it would cost the city an additional $115 million to make the building safe to occupy. Meanwhile, the city has been left paying $535,000 a month to lease a space it can’t use.

The problems with the building received some notice in 2018, but they’ve exploded into public consciousness in this election year. Local media competed to offer new explanations of how the city could have been so dumb. (One outlet even published a piece based on forged documents.) An audit commissioned by the city showed that local officials accepted the seller’s claims that the building was in good shape. A reporter, using an investigative tool known as a “Google search,” discovered California Public Utilities Commission testimony from 2014 stating that Sempra had considered the building “functionally obsolete” because of asbestos and earthquake vulnerability.

Who’s to blame? There are so many different suspects that the fiasco resembles an English murder mystery—albeit one with more sunshine and better fish tacos.

The city bureaucracy has been blamed for incompetence, and some city real estate management employees were pushed out. Elected officials have been accused of politicizing city departments to the point that they were too cowed to challenge the lease agreement. The real estate company that brokered the deal has been blasted by everyone, especially since the contract had unusually strong language shielding the firm from liability. A previous owner of 101 Ash emerged to say he had notified the city about the asbestos and that the building had otherwise been in good condition before the city took it over.

The top candidates for mayor, City Councilmember Barbara Bry and Assemblyman Todd Gloria, a former councilmember, took responsibility while also shifting blame onto each other, and San Diego’s political culture. “I’m tired of us being a big city that acts like a small town,” Gloria declared during the campaign. “We keep making these small-town mistakes.”

As if to prove Gloria’s point, San Diego’s city attorney Mara Elliott added a note of small-time farce by trying to plug leaks from city council members and threatening criminal prosecution against a local journalist for possessing confidential city documents.

Calling the incompetence “impossible to exaggerate,” the San Diego Union-Tribune recited a litany of unforced errors over the past 25 years—from pension schemes to giveaways to the now-departed Chargers football team—and asked why the city can’t govern itself. Some critics pointed to the insular political culture, in which too few people talk to each other and share information. Others noted the outsized power of developers and campaign contributors, pointing in particular to a part-ownership stake in the building held by the powerful local businessman “Papa Doug” Manchester, a supporter of Mayor Kevin Faulconer.

The biggest share of the blame belongs to Faulconer, a moderate Republican who is leaving office this fall and had been considered the strongest challenger to Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2022. Faulconer, who made and promoted the deal, has damaged his credibility locally. If he still runs for governor, voters statewide should demand a full accounting.

But whoever is to blame, San Diego hasn’t produced any good answers yet for what to do about 101 Ash. Right now, the city wants to stop paying the lease and void the contract, which may only produce more costs in the form of legal damages.

Turning 101 Ash into a haunted house story for the whole state might be bad for Faulconer, but it would be healthy for Californians. We too often allow our leaders to rush into consequential decisions with little scrutiny, which is one reason why city halls in San Francisco and Los Angeles also face large and growing scandals right now.

More vitally, 101 Ash might get us to think more strategically about all the empty buildings the pandemic will leave behind. Californians might be tempted to laugh at this San Diego saga, but this movie is less Anchorman and more Paranormal Activity, the 2007 film about a couple who can’t figure out what is happening in the San Diego home they’ve just bought. And with office vacancy rates tripling over the pandemic, the rest of California could face similar nightmares.

Empty buildings are destabilizing anywhere because they are voids upon which we project our darkest fears (what might be lurking inside?) and our most peculiar ideas (what might we finally do with a blank slate?). In California, empty buildings can be especially dangerous, as our outsized dreams and powerful real estate interests make us do strange things.

California would do well to take this moment to survey and re-examine our entire built environment. What is the most efficient way to renew the state’s rapidly aging, decaying housing and building stock? Which empty commercial and office buildings should be knocked down for open space, and which might be profitably repurposed? Intriguingly, Prop 15, the property tax measure on the November ballot, might give us a clearer picture of our buildings, since it would require extensive new appraisals of commercial real estate over the next five years.

101 Ash may be empty, but it is full of lessons for Californians. Let’s not spend too much on our glut of empty buildings. Let’s not invest too many hopes in any single structure. And before you lease or buy your own haunted haunt, don’t be afraid to go inside and inspect the place for yourself

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Maybe that’s why more and more I find myself, as I wash the dishes or fold my son’s clothes, returning to scenes and impressions of where I once lived, trying to understand the distances of time, decoding a narrative that originates from there.

It took my parents 15 years to move about a mile from the old place. In the early ‘90s, just as I started working at a newspaper in Los Angeles, they left the three-bedroom apartment in Penasquitos Gardens where seven of us had lived for a two-bedroom, one-bathroom townhouse condo where only four of us would now be: my mother and father, and my two youngest sisters.

I rarely visited them in the new place. I worked constantly at the newspaper, through every holiday, and found myself at the condo only on special occasions, such as when family from Mexico was staying there during a vacation to the States. And when I went to work for a newspaper in San Francisco around 1995, my visits became even more infrequent. It wasn’t until my mother was diagnosed with Stage IV cancer that I started spending more time at the townhouse, flying down from SFO as often I could, trying to be as present as possible. After my mother’s death in 2001, and especially after I got married and then had a son, the visits ramped up, to at least three times a year.

When we go to visit my father, who lives alone in the condo now, we can look up from the sidewalk of the nearby four-lane road and see the fencing around my old elementary school. Across the street from the school, running up the hill, are squat beige blocks of apartments.

As if in a lucid dream, I let myself wander deep into those buildings, all of it low-income housing when I was there. I go up the slope past the park with the asphalt basketball court, past the cinder block housing for the two metal dumpsters where we tossed our trash, and past the windowless low-ceilinged laundromat evocative of a holding cell, and then go left along a dirty concrete pathway, to the place where we lived—that bottom-floor apartment, a few cardboard boxes stacked in the corner of its patio rarely used except for the one or two times my father, angered for reasons lost to me now, kicked my brother and me out there to sleep, until somebody tugged open the sliding glass door to let us back in. Once I sat in a kitchen chair there, taking my turn for my mother’s friend to cut our hair. I closed my eyes as she snipped around my ears. I listened contentedly to her and my mother talk about things I cannot recall.

The physical place would tell my wife and son nothing. They would just see a bland apartment block; it would require pointing out what can’t be seen, apparitions that would only mean something to a very few.

There was the white neighbor who got shot in the back as she kneeled in her living room in front of a balance scale, weighing the pot for the man who arrived at her door carrying a briefcase, ready to buy her product, but drawing a gun instead. In her back bedroom, two toddlers she was babysitting went on napping. She came by our place later in her new wheelchair to tell my mother what happened, beaming because though she couldn’t walk anymore she had finally found the Lord.

Or there was the boy from one of the many other Mexican families in our knot of buildings, who always elicited a withering look from my dad, because he was a kid who was obviously heading for trouble, as the songs say. He wrecked a car he was driving after partying and was left brain damaged. His sister had to escort him around, his head lolling to the side, an unreadable smile on his placid face.

We would go quiet whenever they walked by. Nobody ever said, I’m sorry, or How are you doing? The sister’s flat eyes filled us with dread and resignation; this is how you can end up, it was understood.

Everybody worked hourly, if they had a job at all. Kids were alone, unsupervised once they were out of school, because their parents were at work, night and day, or their parents were just somewhere else. We would stay out late, shooting basketball or playing two-hand touch football until it got too dark to see what we were doing. One night, when the darkness forced us to stop playing, an older kid got us to run a bunch of drills in the park: pushups, wind sprints, crawling on our bellies across the grass, whatever came to his mind. What the Gardens needed was a gang, he said; we needed to form up. This didn’t seem at all unreasonable. But the longer we drilled, the more fierce he became, until he seemed to be only talking to himself, envisioning a greatness that only he could behold. We begged him to let us go home or we’d be in trouble, and he relented, but we were to come back to this part of the park again tomorrow night. We were going to be bad-ass, we were going to be some real motherfuckers.

Nobody went back, but he followed his vision to some degree, eventually joining a gang many miles to the south of us.

Years later, he was in another neighborhood, pushing open the window to a stranger’s house, his leg hooked over the sill, when he caught a shotgun blast to the chest. That’s how it was told to us, anyway. He never came around again, though all the proof we needed to know it was true was the inconsolability of his baby cousin (a slender, curly-haired boy who tried to become as hard as his dead primo, though nobody took him seriously).

I find it poignant if distressing that among all the kids he was the only one who ever articulated an ambition, declared a desire that wasn’t limited to where we wish we could go eat or who we’d want to fuck or what car we’d want to buy if we could have afforded it.

But you don’t make plans, not in the Gardens, anyway. You just see what openings life affords you and you take them. And those decisions, like tributaries off a wide and mysterious river, paths that will take you who knows where, aren’t really choices. They’re just what happens to be available. Open the door, or not. It may make no difference, or it might mean everything. Like the man said, things happen to you.

I find it a small miracle I am where I am. I picked the right waters to follow, or if not the right ones, the ones that led to more streams, more options. But I had no idea what I was doing, beyond knowing I couldn’t stay in the Gardens.

Like everybody there looking to get out, I was working without a compass, taking guesses. Whenever I despair at what could be considered the shortcomings of my life—still renting an apartment, not much money in the bank, opportunities never seized because of obliviousness or ignorance or simply marginalization—I think of when we lived in the Gardens. My life could’ve been mean, my joys minimal, if at all.

I have done, I think, all that I could to improve the lot that was given me, and I should take comfort in that. But I’m also aware this is a line we all must believe.

There are one or two families that I knew as a kid still living in the Gardens, or so I’m told. People who have abided. I think of them sometimes, and wonder if they remember those of us who left. Do they also tell themselves that things could’ve been much worse? Can we respect that they did all they could, too?

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In the 21st century, we must learn the Peter Navarro Principle: if you’re maniacally angry and relentless in accusing others, your incompetence will be no obstacle to your rise.

That’s the career arc of Peter Navarro, who now is a leader of the White House’s efforts to reopen the country and produce enough medical equipment to protect America from COVID-19. So for all the frightening aspects of this moment—the rapid spread of the virus, the rising death toll, the lack of a vaccine—it’s even more chilling to think we’re dependent on this Californian to curb the biggest pandemic of our lifetimes.

It’s especially scary for San Diegans who knew him as a local politician. One book about his furious and failed political career called Navarro “the cruelest and meanest son of a bitch who ever ran for public office in San Diego.” If that doesn’t curdle your blood, this will: the author of that book was Navarro himself.

The tale of how one of San Diego’s worst politicians rose to power during America’s worst crisis since the Second World War is not about just one man. It’s a lesson about what kinds of people prosper when a nation’s civic conversation becomes dominated by anger and accusation.

Navarro’s career is often recounted as a mystery, centered on an apocryphal political about-face. How did a Democrat who sounded like San Diego’s Bernie Sanders in the 1990s and 2000s turn into a leading Trumpist?

But Navarro’s life is not really all that mysterious—it’s actually a highly consistent story of a man thoroughly devoted to the dark art of accusation.

Navarro was a working-class kid from the East Coast who earned a doctorate in economics from Harvard. His thesis, characteristically, was built around an accusation: that special political interests were “stealing America.” He joined the faculty at UC Irvine.

In San Diego, he soon made himself the area’s most prominent NIMBY. Navarro founded Prevent Los Angelization Now, an anti-growth group devoted to attacking anyone who dared to build housing or infrastructure.

Running as a Democrat, Navarro quickly jumped into local politics, and might have won high office—if not for his addiction to accusation. In 1992, with a huge lead in San Diego’s mayoral race, Navarro foolishly attacked his more conservative opponent Susan Golding over her ex-husband’s conviction for laundering drug money. Navarro’s attack was so gratuitous it created sympathy for Golding, who cried in the debate and rallied to win the race.

Navarro did not learn his lesson. He ran angry campaigns for city council in 1993, for county board of supervisors in 1994, for Congress in 1996, and again for city council in 2001. He lost them all.

The rejections spoke volumes. San Diego may be sunny but it has a history of electing difficult or divisive people, including mayors from Pete Wilson to Bob Filner. But San Diego drew the line at Navarro. Larry Remer, who’s worked as Navarro’s campaign consultant, recently called his former client “the biggest asshole I’ve ever known.”

True to form, Navarro did not stay classy in defeat. Instead, he published an accusatory book, San Diego Confidential. In the guise of a how-to guide for political candidates, it gleefully recounts every accusation of his campaigns, describes various San Diego figures as ugly and stupid, and airs sexual gossip about opponents.

Navarro gave up elected politics in the 2000s, but didn’t abandon accusation. The professor began publishing finger-pointing books with names like Death by China. His critiques went beyond criticism of the Chinese government’s human rights abuses and trade policies, veering into overtly racist claims. The books were peppered with “expert” quotes (“You’ve got to be nuts to eat Chinese food”) purportedly from a businessman named Ron Vara, whom Navarro made up as an anagram of his own name.

Just as Navarro’s campaigns became a joke in California, his books were not taken seriously in the academy. But the ridicule of Navarro didn’t matter, because in his devotion to anger and accusation, he was actually ahead of his time.

The internet was his opening. Navarro’s constant, over-the-top accusations were catnip to online trolls and right-wing media. With mainstream conservative intellectuals fleeing the Republican Party, Navarro had the political field wide open to sell himself and his attacks.

Navarro soon came to the notice of Donald Trump, who hired him in 2016 as a campaign advisor, and in 2017, gave him a top role on trade policy.

In the White House, Navarro was at first sidelined by mainstream aides with better credentials and social graces. But such internal rivals were no match for the abrasive Navarro, who routinely demeaned and undermined colleagues to win the confidence of Trump, a fellow master of accusation. By 2018, Navarro was using his growing influence to promote destructive trade wars with American allies, from Mexico to Canada to Europe.

When you make constant accusations, sometimes you’ll hit the right target. This January, Navarro, ever on the attack against China, wrote a prescient memo predicting that COVID-19 would become a full-blown pandemic. But, according to press reports, Navarro’s reputation for anti-China invective allowed others in the White House to dismiss his views as overly alarmist.

By March, Navarro had been given the most important task in the country: working with companies and other countries to secure medical supplies and machines for the pandemic response. But in this role, he was tragically miscast. For all his skill in accusation, Navarro had no experience in ramping up a large cooperative effort, and the administration’s failure to deliver the needed supplies has left states to fend for themselves.

The San Diegan still finds the time for accusation. Weeks ago, reports surfaced that Navarro launched a bitter personal attack on Dr. Anthony Fauci in the White House situation room. Navarro also publicly advanced the dubious claim that the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine would work as a treatment for COVID-19.

Perhaps you cling to the romantic notion that karma will catch up with a man such as Navarro. Or perhaps you believe that other officials or the media will hold him accountable. Maybe in another country, or at another time. But not now, and not here, in the United States of Accusation.

The post How San Diego’s Worst Politician Ended Up in the White House appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This Christmas, can you save San Diego by bringing the city the one gift its civic elite obsessively wants, but doesn’t get?

I’m talking deep obsession. Yes, Captain Ahab hunted his whale beyond all reason, and Javert pursued punishment against Jean Valjean.

But, St. Nick, I’ll bet you’ve never encountered a fixation as all-consuming as San Diego’s desire to expand its convention center.

After more than a decade of failed attempts at an expansion, San Diego’s preoccupation with this has become both sad and embarrassing. America’s Finest City seems stuck on the idea, unable to move on. In March, 2020, voters will once again be asked to approve an expansion—even though the measure seems likely to fail.

So, Santa, I beg of you, please find a way to give them more than 1 million square feet of new convention space, with all the ugly carpets and loading docks that their little hearts desire. That way, civic leaders can think about something else—anything else, really—again.

I realize that, from your vantage point on the North Pole, San Diego’s obsession with its convention center might seem silly. And yes, there are cities out there that lose themselves similarly in the pursuit of foolish things—like Sacramento and its endless efforts to hand subsidies to rich pro sports team owners.

But San Diego’s quest for a larger convention center is rooted in certain realities that keep the notion from being entirely ridiculous. The city’s economy and identity are very much defined by its role as a host—for the U.S. military, for one of California’s largest refugee populations, for tourists, and for great and important gatherings of people from across California, and around the world.

In this city of fun and gracious hosts, San Diego’s Convention Center has become an anchor, connecting the pieces of California’s most fun and fabulous downtown. The convention center is on the trolley system, in front of the waterfront, and is easy walking distance to the Gaslamp Quarter, Petco Park, and a dizzying array of restaurants, bars, and cultural attractions.

In our current era—when comic books and superheroes hold such entertainment sway—the convention center’s status as headquarters for the Comic-Con International convention has made it an American cultural capital.

That success, however, has put pressure on San Diego to keep expanding the convention center so it can hold onto all the Batmans and Wonder Womans who descend on the ever-expanding Comic-Con. San Diego’s failure to cope with that pressure has led it to some pretty strange places.

San Diego’s preoccupation with its convention center goes back a long way. The facility opened in November 1989, as the Berlin Wall was falling, and the Cold War was closing up shop. By 2001, the dawn of the post-9/11 era, an expansion doubled its size.

Just seven years later, in 2008, another expansion was proposed to accommodate more and bigger conventions. The center acquired the property to do it. Expansion made sense to the San Diego establishment; after all, the growth would bring more visitors and dollars to the city. What’s more, it could be paid for with a hotel tax paid by those same visitors.

But here it is, the end of 2019, and the promised expansion has yet to be delivered. The reasons involve a spectacularly maddening example of misbegotten California governance.

After the Great Recession briefly slowed momentum, a $500 million expansion proposal won support in 2012 and seemed likely to happen. But in 2014, a state appeals court ruled that the hotel tax to fund the expansion was unconstitutional.

The city decided not to go forward with a ballot measure to make the tax constitutional, or with a new financing scheme that would pass muster. In 2015, the project briefly seemed dead.

Proposals kept being made—and once made, they were changed. In San Diego, a ludicrous logic spread: If the convention center couldn’t pass legal or political muster on its own, perhaps it could succeed if it were linked to other projects as a package deal.

Most infamously, San Diego attempted to build a football stadium for the Chargers, who were threatening to leave San Diego and would eventually move to L.A., that was tied to an improved convention center. The goal was to build a combination center and stadium—a “convadium”—to convince taxpayers to support the investment.

But the public perceived that idea, correctly, as strange and foolish, since a similar proposal had failed in L.A.

Still, the city didn’t give up. In 2016, with the convadium idea in trouble, a third piece was added to the project—“a diversity-focused startup incubator and accelerator.” Local wags called this “innovadium” the “turducken” of projects. And San Diegans voted down two different schemes to finance the project on the November 2016 ballot.

At this point, less sunny places would have dropped the whole idea. But by 2017, San Diego was working to expand its convention center again, even though a hotel was already planned for the land the city wanted to use.

By last year, San Diego’s leaders, in their desperation, decided to launch a new ballot measure for this expansion. And to make it palatable, they decided to tie the expansion to the homelessness crisis. The ballot measure would tax hotels to raise $3.5 billion to fund more convention space (about 400,000 additional square feet, bringing the center to 1.2 million square feet in all), more services for homeless people, and popular road improvements.

As a nickname, may I suggest “Home-Con-Road”?

This proposal appeared to die—just like so many others—when the petition campaign didn’t get enough signatures to qualify for the November 2018 ballot. But city officials persisted. The measure then qualified for the November 2020 vote, before the city moved it to the March 2020 ballot, when the electorate might be more favorable to such spending.

It’s still likely to lose, since the measure likely requires two-thirds voter approval. (The “likely” is because California courts are fighting over standards for local taxation.)

Another defeat should be the end of the idea—except that San Diego simply can’t seem to stop itself. If we don’t devise a plan to get them a convention center with a beautiful bow on it this year, this perilous obsession could consume another decade of precious time and civic attention that San Diego could be devoting to other issues—its schools, its parks, its economic future.

The only way to end this obsession is magical intervention, and a gift of convention. Santa, please get yourself to this town.

The post Santa, Please Save San Diego! appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

My experience—I was trained in Mexico and now practice over the border in Chula Vista, in San Diego County—has taught me about just how vital immigrants are to California’s health care. It’s also shown me that immigrant physicians, like me, can play special roles in medical training and provide services and new perspectives in places where doctors are needed most.

I was born in Monterrey, Mexico, but moved to Tijuana when I was young. Medical school in Mexico is a seven-year program that starts right after high school, giving extensive contact with patients right from the beginning. At the medical school at the Universidad Autonoma de Baja California, I encountered all sorts of people and medical problems, reflecting the diversity of people who live and pass through that border city. I also volunteered as a medical student in the shockingly poor indigenous communities in Baja California del Sur. Mexican medicine is less dependent than American medicine on lab tests, so I became quite good at giving physical exams and talking with the people I treated.

In my 20s, I decided to immigrate to San Diego, as my family grew concerned about violence and crime. I could immigrate quickly with the help of my mother, who is a U.S. citizen, originally from Texas.

At first, I didn’t think I’d be able to stay in California, earn a medical license, and win a residency here. Such positions are very competitive. But then I had the good fortune to get into UCLA’s International Medical Graduate (IMG) program.

The IMG program solves two problems. Medical school graduates from Latin America find it difficult to make the transition to practicing here. And California faces a shortage of doctors in primary care, with more than 600 areas that are defined by the federal government as having a shortage of primary care physicians. Many of those areas are Latino, but fewer than 10 percent of doctors in the state are Latino.

So the IMG program prepares bilingual, bicultural immigrant medical school graduates who reside in the U.S. legally to earn a California medical license and obtain a residency in family medicine. In return, the program’s participants promise to practice in one of the state’s underserved communities for two to three years after their residency is over.

UCLA was great. The program didn’t just help prepare me for the licensing exams and score in the 99th percentile for U.S. students; it also gave me an introduction to the culture of American medicine. I helped teach a Medical Spanish course at Geffen School of Medicine, and, as part of a clerkship, I rotated through the UCLA hospital system. That, and my subsequent internship and residency in family medicine, came with surprises. For all the Latino patients I encountered, I didn’t encounter many Latino doctors. And I was shocked by all the resources and how quickly things happened: in Mexico, my patients had waited days and days to get CT scans, for example.

After residency, I decided to return to San Diego to practice family medicine at Family Health Centers of San Diego’s clinic in the extremely diverse City Heights neighborhood. Technically, this was a requirement of the program, but this is also the medicine I want to practice, in exactly the sort of place where I want to practice. I’ve since transferred to the Family Health Centers of San Diego clinic in Chula Vista.

My patients here remind me of the diverse working people I helped treat in Tijuana. And I’ve tried to use my background and experience on behalf of the community. I started a Spanish-language version of the diabetes group classes here. I often counsel patients who get assigned to specialists but struggle to communicate their needs.

But the value of having foreign-trained doctors is not only about speaking the language, but also about understanding the culture. Sometimes, that makes patients originally from Mexico more willing to share things with me. I’ve had a patient open up to me about rectal bleeding she was experiencing when she wouldn’t talk with other doctors.

In certain circumstances, my background gives me the chance to advocate, or convince my patients to be more assertive. I intervened on behalf of a patient who kept getting injections for an aching back and wouldn’t speak up despite the injections not working. I often remind patients that they have a right to have a translator when they are referred out of our system to see a specialist. And I’ve been able to make some progress convincing mothers from Mexico, where baby formula is highly popular, of the virtues of breast milk.

In family medicine, I have the advantage of seeing multiple generations of a family, from the grandma to the baby. That allows me to understand the family environment and diet and suggest changes that can reduce the risks of diabetes. With elderly patients, who sometimes struggle to read, I’m able to communicate clear dosage instructions through younger relatives. When dealing with a colicky baby, I talk with a grandmother about not feeding them in ways that may contribute to the problem.

And in border communities, I’ve seen treatment become broader and more culturally sensitive because we have both physicians and patients who have migrated from so many different parts of the world. We screen people for a variety of diseases from around the globe, and are very attentive to the risks associated with hepatitis B and other infectious diseases.

When it comes to health care, at least, the border isn’t much of a barrier anymore.

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