Living in Oakland, or Blood on the Streets

One of the things I tell my journalism students is that if they show the initiative and energy to unearth a story about a problem they must also push through all the delicious detail of inequity and injustice to find those who can at least imagine solutions to the problem.

I don't want only hopeless wailing.

Yesterday three Oakland cops were killed, and one is now apparently dead-in-life, as the result of a confrontation with a heavily armed parolee not that far -- about two blocks, I reckon -- from a crossroads on the route we take when we drive down to A's games.

If my kids were on the story, what possible solutions, what *reasonable* solutions, would they uncover? For always there must be good judgment in choosing among suggested solutions. The news does not write itself.

More Jesus? More centers to promote Zen meditation? Certainly more money for schools -- as if just the opposite weren't happening. Certainly more and better gun control -- as if the Democrats hadn't given up on that one for the very practical reason that it's a loser, and -- as the Bush years have shown us -- losing "for the right reason" does not result in a just universe giving you virtue points that protect the world you live in from the depredations of the depraved winners.

Politics is the art of the possible. What do we learn about the "possible" after a bloodbath like this? I don't know. I do, however, believe one should try to do something. One should listen to suggestions from those who study the problem as well as to those who are immersed in it, to the pragmatists who triangulate, to the meliorists who know it's always half a loaf, half a loaf forward.

(Charge of the Light Brigade. Only the fossils will get the reference. It seems to be a warning against rash action.)

The last several years, we haven't been going to community meetings down at the Baptist Church on Lakeshore Avenue. That would be a good idea, I think.

There's that stanza from Eliot's "Prufrock":

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,	115
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

Well, you know, there are two ways to read this. You can conclude it's an exercise in self-mockery verging on self-loathing. But you can also choose to think: Better to be up there on the stage in a bit part, paying attention to what others are saying and getting ready for your single word, your nod of agreement, than just lounging in the audience, cultivating a set of fine feelings.

Birds Are Wild, Beautiful and Just Outside Your Window

Big Pat says, you want to see some birds of Oakland, here's your birds of Oakland.

It Takes a Long Time to Write Short, If You Insist on Writing Well

If I had the time I would look up the Mark Twain and the John Kenneth Galbraith quotes on how much time it takes to write a brief bit of prose that is artful and casual and irresistible and seems to have dropped from one's fingers with the inevitability and the haste of an autumn leaf in a high wind.

It takes time to write something good that seems not to have taken time.

And it's not just pimping the style -- or making the style lose the porkpie hat, the bling and fur coat; some of us run our style the way a pimp runs his whores with as much taste and contribution to the public good -- that takes the time, it's figuring out if something one says is worth saying and pruning or discarding if it isn't.

Succinctly said is often not succinctly done. And that's why I haven't posted since Wednesday. On Thursday walking around Lake Merritt and talking to E. on the cell, I saw three helicopters hovering over the downtown side of Lake Merritt, all of them quite high up.

I didn't know why they were there. After getting off the phone with E., I turned on my walking radio and discovered they were there in response to the killing of a young black man at the Fruitvale BART station by a BART cop earlier in the week, a shooting death in the style of an execution even if that wasn't the intent. A protest had turned violent the night before, and that's why the helicopters were there, and (I gather) the police were massed nearby.

Well, I've got to write about that, I thought. But it seemed that anything worth saying would take a long time to consider, draft, tweak and finally post. I didn't have the time to *invest*, I thought.

Now, days after the event, I am writing as much out of penance as of need, though I still lack the time to even begin to do justice to my confusion. So I will think one thought, modestly cast as a question, and leave it.

I don't think this kind of violence -- all against property -- moves things in a useful direction. I don't *think* so. I concede it could be three-cushion shot, and the chain of cause-and-effect could be long, and if you are an anarchist with Phoenix dreams about violence that begets more violence and is a first step toward burning it all down so we can do better, then it's all good, as the kids say.

Maybe. Time passes, definitions blur, accounts diverge, the powerful control the narrative, and talking about how blood and anger bring peace becomes an academic exercise, right?

But it does make me wonder -- again -- about the demonstrations, violent and otherwise, in the Sixties and early Seventies. What did they, at last, accomplish? Did they shorten the war and show us the way? Did they give us Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes? And you know what those folk gave us.

I'm of the opinion Obama thinks the antiwar demonstrations gave us Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes, which is not a good thing no matter how you spin it.

Doesn't matter what he thinks. Matters what I think. And at this point in my wondering, I conclude it would be more useful to read 37 good books on the topic and have 72 conversations with my acquaintances who were in the thick of it and didn't twist into conservatives as a result.

And, then two or three years from now, I have a footnote to this post.

Another Favorite Restaurant Gets Invaded and Robbed

It's the clever Furenzu just across the line in Emeryville.

It's a favorite where we have sat many a time. Maybe the cops should just follow us around. No joke, though. I wonder when, in spite of all our good intentions, we will forgo a late-evening visit to a fine Oakland restaurant because of some sudden tingle up the back of the neck, one of those premonitions that are not psychic insight but simple fear.

How do you stop such robberies? I'm guessing they are damaging enough to the tax base that you put up a reward big enough to bring out a snitch.