Oakland police have shut down streets along the Berkeley border in North Oakland as they search for a suspect wanted for assault with a deadly weapon, police said.

The search is happening in the area of 65th to 66th streets and Herzog to Idaho streets, Oakland police said at about 5:15 p.m.

The suspect is described as a black man in his 30s standing 5 feet 7 inches tall, weighing 175 pounds and wearing a black beanie cap, a gray jacket and blue jeans, police said. 

Anyone who spots the suspect in the area has been asked to call 911.

The Berkeley Neighborhoods Council will show The Vanishing City in a free forum on Wednesday April 8 at the East Bay Media Center, 1939 Addison Street from 7:15 to 9:30 PM.

The film documents how New York City destroyed vibrant neighborhoods and displaced diverse low and middle income residents by promoting the development of luxury high rises through a series of tax and zoning initiatives. Following a municipal fiscal crisis in the early 1970’s, tax exemptions for new housing and rezoning for density ignited a building boom that was accelerated in later decades by the use of eminent domain and mass evictions. Interviews with neighborhood organizers, academics, and politicians on the local and state level provide personal takes on the political narrative.

Jacquelyn McCormick, the President of the Claremont Elmwood Neighborhood Association, will introduce the film, which will be followed by a discussion with Stephen Murphy, Chair of the Planning Commission and its role in planning the future of Berkeley. Topics may include affordable housing, community benefits, and the priority development areas (PDAs). 

The City of Berkeley has six Priority Development Areas (PDAs) identified in the Plan Bay Area regional plan adopted by the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) on July 18, 2013. These PDAs include: South Shattuck Avenue, Telegraph Avenue, University Avenue, San Pablo Avenue, Downtown Area, and the Adeline Corridor. These PDAs are growth opportunity areas that have attracted numerous planning and capital grants to support City programs and infrastructure. Two examples are the coming Shattuck Avenue reconfiguration and the recently funded Adeline Corridor Study.  

The City applied for PDA designations in 2007 with subsequent development along the transit corridors. Many of the individual projects have been controversial, mostly due to poor zoning interface with surrounding neighborhoods, but little attention has been paid to the underlying philosophy of the PDAs. The primary rationale is that the Bay Area population will grow, and compact neighborhoods dependent on mass transit will result in lower greenhouse gas emissions by reducing long commutes. 

The forum will give the community a chance to discuss these assumptions. For more information, go to berkeleyneighborhoodscouncil.com or email bnc50@berkeleyneighborhoodscouncil.com. 

 

So, I went myself to Thursday night’s meeting of Berkeley’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, and not to unduly prolong the suspense, they voted to do the will of Berkeley’s corporate masters, as expected. That is to say, they declined to designate Campanile Way on the University of California campus as a historic resource worthy of preservation, neither the road itself which is on campus nor the view from the Campanile out to the Golden Gate, which encompasses a fraction of the middle of the city of Berkeley and sweeps out over the Bay.

This account is much too long, so unless you’re interested in gory details you could stop reading now. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

I went not as a news reporter, which most often I’m not at this phase of my life, but wearing another hat, as one of the several former LPC commissioners who were present to express their opinion. (That would be a metaphorical hat—the best physical hat in the room was the flowered bonnet worn by a designation opponent who identified him/herself as Alfred, and who wore a lovely ‘60s prairie dress to go with it.) 

What I found most surprising, as I told the commission, was how candidly the commissioners who voted against the designation announced their enthusiasm for downtown skyscrapers, specifically for the Mark Rhoades scheme which will demolish the home of the Shattuck Cinemas, aka 2211 Harold Way. When I was on the commission, back in the distant placid pre-Planet days, we were not supposed to make decisions based on our opinion of any projects proposed to replace the designated landmark. I gently chided Chair Austene Hall, a very nice lady and (disclosure) a friend of mine, for allowing proposed projects to dominate the discussion—the several curmudgeonly chairs who ruled the LPC with an iron hand in my day would never have tolerated this. 

Landmarks Commissioners are charged with impartially evaluating the merits of the building, landscape or view which has been brought before them. Designation is not destiny, a concept which some of the commissioners on Thursday pretended not to understand—unless they are actually ignorant of it, which is possible. 

All landmark designation does is add an extra level of scrutiny to the permitting process. If (just to pick a random example) the L.A. financier who’s targeted the Shattuck Cinema building were to ask for it, the Berkeley City Council would be able (and likely) to grant a permit for a building which would block a landmarked view simply by adopting a statement of overriding considerations in the Environmental Impact Report process. 

Thursday’s decision just pumps up the parcel owner’s profits another notch by making that step unnecessary. 

Nick Dominguez, the commissioner specially appointed by my new District 8 Councilmember Lori Droste for this meeting, admitted that he understands the concept. I suggested that he would get another bite of the apple even if he voted for designation, since he’s also Droste’s appointee to the Zoning Adjustment Board, which gets to rule on permits for 2211 Harold Way. When announcing his vote on Thursday he said that he thought downtown development, especially of housing, was more important than landmark preservation. He’s entitled to his opinion, but when he’s appointed to sit on the Landmark Preservation Commission it’s an odd place to express it. 

Presumably he reflects the opinion of his principal, Councilmember Droste. However when the commissioners were asked, several times, to reveal any “ex parte” discussions they might have had with others outside the meeting, including their appointersk, he didn’t say that he’d talked to her about this project. Maybe not, but it seems odd that she’d appoint him with no interview or anything. 

And it seems even odder that Mayor Tom Bates’ appointee, Kimberly Suczynski Smith, didn’t disclose any conversation with the Mayor or his staff, given that her predecessor Rose Marie Pietras was fired because she openly supported designating Campanile Way. Did the Bates people really appoint a successor without talking to her about this project? 

Of course it would have been possible to guess how she’d vote, given her employers. Suczynski Smith works for Oakland’s Pyatok architecture firm, which has designed at least one major dorm on the UC Campus (one of the nicer ones) and she also lectures in UC’s College of Environmental Design. It’s hard to imagine that she’d vote against what the University wants. 

And what the newly-privatized University of California at Berkeley wants to do with downtown Berkeley is not hard to figure out. If there’s any doubt, the embarrassing performance of Emily Marthinsen,
Assistant Vice Chancellor, Physical and Environmental Planning, would give you more than a clue. 

She testified in the public hearing on the designation by reading from a printed script. Her excuse was that she was so busy with family Passover preparations that she just didn’t have time to speak ex tempore, but hard to imagine, again, that U.C. honchos didn’t demand to vet her testimony beforehand. 

To get the full flavor of the performance, the first thing you should know is that she used to be Steve Finacom’s boss. Steve is a distinguished longtime Berkeley resident, past president of the Berkeley Historical Society, board member of the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association, regular local history columnist for the Bay Area News Group papers, occasional contributor to the Berkeley Daily Planet and Berkeleyside.com, past LPC commissioner and one of the authors of the Campanile Way Landmark application. 

Steve used to work for the U.C. office which used to be called Capital Projects, but is now called Real Estate Services. In that job, he was part of the team that wrote U.C. Berkeley’s Landscape Heritage Plan and Landscape Master Plan. Along with several one of his colleagues, Steve was recently laid off by Marthinson, just about the time that the name of the office was changed from Capital Projects to Real Estate Services. 

The name change reflects a new role: Now the remaining staff in the transmogrified department, headed by a new guy whose former job was as a developer, is busy “monetizing resources” in NewSpeak—or “giving private developers a piece of the action” in plain English. 

If there’s any question in your mind about what that’s going to mean for the U.C.B. campus, just take a look at the plug-ugly parking structure which has erupted on Gayley Road next to the deep-in-debt Memorial Stadium extravaganza and debacle. U.C.’s leased the land to a private corporation which built the garage and collects the revenue. One of Marthinson’s online descriptors is UC Berkeley’s “Campus Planner”—and if that’s still her job, she should be deeply ashamed of allowing that hideous building to be placed in such a sensitive spot. 

Her script started out by claiming that the University would remain neutral on whether Campanile Way should be landmarked, but then it went on to slam Finacom’s application six ways from Sunday. The most transparently ridiculous aspect of her presentation was claiming that the application’s quotes from the Landscape Heritage Plan didn’t reflect what the Plan writers intended—but Finacom himself was one of them. Obviously, there’s been a paradigm shift along with a name change in the office where he used to work. 

And the Mayor’s Commissioner Kim Suczynski Smith didn’t say, I don’t think, a single word during the whole evening. When Steve asked if the new members had listened to the tapes from the previous hearings, she just nodded a bit. There was a kind of deer-in-the-headlights demeanor about her. From her resume, which mentions community planning, I’d guess that she knows better, but she voted the way U.C. wanted, though without apparent enthusiasm. 

The rest of the hearing testimony was lively. About 40 knowledgeable and articulate people spoke in favor of the designation, some of them tried and true preservationists, but with a sizeable contingent of born-again Save the Shattuck Cinema activists, who have collected at least 4,000 signatures from opponents of the Harold Way project. The University’s faculty and staff, current and retired, were well represented too, including among others Nad Permaul, a U.C. Political Science faculty member, a past president of the alumni association and a retired top U.C. Berkeley administrator, who spoke very movingly about the historic vision of the campus. Former Mayor Shirley Dean, for years an ally of some of the councilmembers who appointed the negative LPC commissioners, also made an eloquent presentation. 

There were just 8 or 9 speakers who opposed the designation. Among these, only a couple even mentioned whether Campanile Way and its bay view qualified under Berkeley’s Landmark Preservation law. That’s probably because most of them were from elsewhere, knew nothing about landmarks, and had simply come to tell the LPC that they really really did want better housing for themselves, hopefully in Berkeley. 

I recognized some as adherents of the tiny San Francisco BARF group (Bay Area Renters Federation), recently in the business press because founder and top dog Sonja Trauss was personally gifted with $10,000 by a Yelp founder just because, he claimed, he likes what she’s doing. She was there in person, a bundle of nervous energy, surrounded by her claque. 

To me they appeared more pathetic than threatening. They are pretty ordinary young people (now defined as under 40—most looked like 30-somethings). They seem to believe, mostly, that building the kind of luxury apartments now planned for downtown Berkeley and being erected in quantity in San Francisco will somehow result in older homeowners moving out and turning their houses over to the BARFies and their ilk. It’s a kind of sad cargo cult mentality. 

It seemed almost cruel to tell them that the folks who now live in nice (hugely over-valued) middle-class houses in Berkeley are just not about to sell out so they can move into fancy downtown condos, even the ones with bay views and marble counters in the kitchen. In Berkeley, Palo Alto and elsewhere, “ageing in place” is the new trend, and luxury developments will be primarily pieds-a-terre for the jet set of the 1%, just like they are all over the developed world. 

About those views, by the way. The worst performance on a generally depressing commission roster was by one Paul Schwartz, appointed by District 6 Councilmember Susan Wengraf. He went on and on, ad nauseam, about how the view from the Berkeley Rose Garden was much nicer than the view from the Campanile, and also it was nearer to his house, where the view was even nicer. 

I realized, belatedly, that a substantial portion of the Berkeley electorate, the people who voted for the councilmembers who appointed this bunch of commissioners, already live in houses with perfectly gorgeous views of the Bay and the Golden Gate, which makes a publically accessible view like that from the Campanile much less precious to them. They don’t have to care what happens downtown, because they never have to go there. An increasing number of them are Berkeley snowbirds, people who hold down good jobs on the East Coast or in the Midwest but can escape to view houses in our town when the weather Back East is annoying. Some of them even live here almost year-round, particularly some leftish journalistic types, though I’ll name no names. 

The vote Thursday was on the staff-written motion to deny the application, a draft remarkable for the total absence of factual findings to support its conclusion. (This might constitute grounds for appeal.) 

So who voted how? No surprises here. 

If you know who are the pro-corporate conservatives, the progressives and the chronic waffler on the Berkeley City Council, you can predict how their appointees voted: 

For denial: Mayor (Tom Bates) Kimberly Suczynski Smith; District 2( Darryl Moore) Mary Canavan; District 5 (Laurie Capitelli) Tom Beil; District 6 (Susan Wengraf) Paul Schwartz; District 8 (Lori Droste) Nicolas Dominguez 

Against denial: District 3(Max Anderson)Christopher Linvill; District 4(Jesse Arreguin) Austene Hall; District 7(Kriss Worthington) Anne Wagley 

Abstain: District 1(Linda Maio) Dmitri Belser . 

Looking at that lineup, it becomes apparent that those who actually run Berkeley behind the scenes, the hired staff, viewed the LPC’s public hearing, like all encounters with the public, as sound and fury signifying nothing. 

The remedy might be found in the 2016 election, when (surely!) Tom Bates will finally have retired. Betting is still on District 5 Councilmember Laurie Capitelli to get anointed and maybe appointed to the mayor’s seat before Bates leaves. Several lively progressives are being talked about for competition, as well as for open council seats, which will probably include those of Wengraf and Capitelli. But with the views in the hills still nirvana-like, it might be hard to achieve a progressive council majority. 

[And how about Berkeley’s real housing needs? Listen up, kiddies. No amount of luxury apartment construction will ever buy you homes in the hills. 

The same remedies are still needed to provide housing for moderate and low-income people: tough inclusionary zoning for developments, realistic in-lieu fees on development to fund building workforce housing, rent control, vacancy decontrol. And yes, a livable minimum wage, even for UCB service employees.]

If it wasn’t such a cliché, I might say that you can’t make this stuff up. How could it be ethical for Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates, who will eventually be reviewing variances sought by 2211 Harold Way in his quasi-judicial role, to lobby himself using the services of his taxpayer-funded aide, who seems to be organizing “a special Berkeley sub-group” of the now notorious SF BARF group which fronts for developers?

It appears that the Berkeley activities of the pro-development San Francisco Bay Area Renters Federation are being coordinated out of the office of Berkeley Mayor Bates, or at least by one of his city-paid staffers. A reader who lurks on the San Francisco BARF list-serv forwarded this communication to us: 

 

---

From: Gregory Magofna <gregory.magofna@gmail.com>  

Subject: [sfbarentersfed] Berkeley Community Benefits/Housing Mitigation Fee 

Date: April 7, 2015 PDT 

To: SFBArentersfed@googlegroups.com 

I know a special Berkeley sub-group was created upon my request, I will get to that with specific projects in the coming weeks. I just wanted to let the group know about something on tonight's city council agenda: Significant community benefits for developments over 75 ft in Downtown Berkeley. 

The fight is over what else developers should be required to do and NIMBYs have been making outrageously impossible demands to meet to block the project. There is talk of another meeting coming up just on this so it's not the end of the world if no one attends, but it does set the stage for the other 4 tall buildings in downtown. Please plan on coming to the special meeting in May. 

 

---

And who might this Gregory Magofna be? From the City of Berkeley website page for the Mayor’s office: 

 

 

---

Gregory Magofña, Legislative Aide
gmagofna@cityofberkeley.info  

Gregory's work spans from managing the office's administration and the Mayor's calendar to working on constituent services and economic development initiatives. Gregory staffs the Mayor on the East Bay Green Corridor, the Berkeley Startup Cluster, and issues surrounding Telegraph Avenue, including student relations. 

Last night at the Berkeley City Council it was announced that the discussion of what constitutes the “significant community benefits” vaguely required for Berkeley’s planned tall buildings would be carried over until May 5. 

Evidently, based on Magofna’s email, which was sent yesterday at 5:38:52 PM, the BARFers had prior notice that they didn’t have to show up last night. Building critics were present in force at the beginning of the meeting, since they don’t have a plant in the Mayor’s office, as were arts advocates who seem to be looking for a piece of the action in the new building. By the time the item came up late in the evening, however, many in both groups had gone home, to return on May 5. 

By the way, after this story first appeared, another reader has pointed out that on December 5, 2014, Magofna cast the only "No" vote on Berkeley's Housing Advisory Commission on a motion that said "…the HAC strongly believes that the new high rises in the Downtown must also provide additional affordable housing benefits, in addition to other proposed community benefits,…".

I disagree with this Paul Schwartz (I never heard of him. What business is he in and what is he doing on The Landmark Preservation Commission? Who appointed him?). My friend Becky O'Malley knows about such matters, and I trust her judgment.

LPC member Paul Schwartz's literary hissy fit is replete with vague complaints and accusations leveled at Becky O’Malley for her critical review of the Landmark Preservation Commission meeting about the view of the Golden Gate from the U.C. Berkeley campus. 

I read the article he didn’t like: Berkeley LPC Follows Orders as Predicted. One might thank that the member of the Landmark Preservation Commission would specify the alleged mis-quotes and personal attacks, perhaps supplemented by factual corrections. But no. 

Ms. O’Malley did say that the Landmark Preservation Commission is tasked with considering the merits of proposed new landmarks, not facilitating proposed development projects. She also said that Nick Dominguez, an LPC commissioner appointed by Council member Lori Droste for the reported meeting, acknowledged his understanding of this principle, but chose not to act on it. It seems odd to me too, that an LPC commissioner at an LPC meeting would trumpet the cause of a proposed project as a reason to deny the public’s request to preserve a view as well known and famous as the view of the Bay from the U.C. Berkeley campus. 

Maybe Mr. Schwartz feels it was wrong of Becky to suggest that Lori Droste might have discussed the landmark proposal beforehand with interested parties. (Surely not!) Or maybe he finds it abhorrent to wonder if Tom Bates' appointee to the commission might have had a word inserted into her ear by a mayor who gives State of the City addresses in private venues. 

Becky O’Malley is a seasoned and savvy observer of government practices in this city. If LPC commissioners, whose duty is to seriously consider the merits of a requested new landmark, instead speak as advocates of a development project, she has to have some reaction. 

A lot of concerned long-time Berkeley citizens have watched the steady march of big development, including the ‘proposed’ huge tower in the middle of downtown Berkeley, with stark disfavor. The Daily Planet editor’s characterization of the LPC meeting as a thin charade strikes myself and others as the only reasonable conclusion she could have reached.

How soon you forget our history! Vaccinations stopped the spread of many noxious diseases. My grandmother lost 5 children in one week to diphtheria. When I went to school, many children were absent at times because of scarlet fever, mumps and measles, and their families were quarantined. Warm pools were built in many cities, including Berkeley, to treat children paralyzed because of polio. I saw faces scarred by small pox and chicken pox. Pregnant women who caught rubella had children who were deaf, retarded and otherwise damaged. Boys who had mumps were unable to father children. 

You may not wish to vaccinate your children, but are you willing to take responsibility for the effects of these diseases on your family and on others? What if your child spreads a disease that damages another child or family? Some children have very good medical reasons for skipping vaccinations. Belief in non-scientific myths is not one of them.

It now appears that a City Ambassador unlawfully attacked two men in Downtown Berkeley and moreover the Ambassador and the Berkeley Police misled both the public and the court as to what had transpired. 

We know this now because of two well publicized videos. In the first video we see the attack. In the second, we see the Berkeley police being informed of the first video's existence: a fact they would later deny knowing. 

Whatever mission the Ambassadors and the Berkeley Police believe themselves to be on, apparently it transcends such virtues as truth and law and public trust. 

I want to talk to you about how this appalling situation came to pass and what we can do it about. 

This is not an anomaly

John Caner has told the public this is some sort of bad apple situation. He has promised to investigate the "training and hiring practices" of the ambassador program. 

I say NO! There is something much more dangerous going on here. Caner's remedy completely ignores the real problem. He is making things worse! 

This is no bad apple situation. This is the necessary and inevitable outcome of an anti-homeless drum-beat that has gone on for some time in Berkeley. The Ambassadors and the police, behaving violently and unlawfully against the weak, are very much expressing what is asked of them by the politically powerful in Berkeley. 

Let's talk about where we are, how we got here, how we get out, and where we can go that is better. 

Official Cynicism

In 1890 the drafters of the new constitution of the state of Mississippi expressed a sudden and profound interest in the literacy of the state's voters. They led the nation in imposing a literacy test on the right to vote. 

Of course, in truth, the drafters wrote cynical, untruthful legislation. In person the conventioneers were more honest: "We came here to exclude the negro. Nothing short of this will answer," declared S. S. Calhoon from that dais at the convention. 

More recently, maybe you have heard that this past week the Governor and legislature of Indiana took a sudden interest in the religious liberties of business operators. In Indiana they legislated dishonestly. Within hours of passing a new law for religious freedom, already signs appeared on businesses: "Jesus says: No Gays Allowed". 

In Indiana they legislated religious freedom but in truth they were there to exclude homosexuals. Nothing less would do. 

I would claim this is precisely the same sort of cynicism we see when Linda Maio, Jesse Arreguin, and the Downtown Berkeley Association put forward legislation ostensibly aimed at restoring so-called "civility" to downtown. 

Mississippian S. S. Calhoon could pretend to care that voters should pass a test of their knowledge. Governor Pence in Indiana could pretend he cared about a highly abstract concept of religious freedom. Yet both spoke untruthfully and here in Berkeley we are no better. 

Council may pretend to have a deep concern about protecting parking meters from panhandlers, or about people using our wide-rimmed planters to stretch out, as the planters were designed to be used. 

No: we know the truth. When John Caner proclaims from the podium: "If you look at Berkeleyside, you see the comments" we know what comments he means. Berkeleyside is a forum that features abundant anti-homeless hate speech. A lot of speech aimed at excluding the homeless from society: 

"If they are capable of all this to fight for their rights as this situation emerges to the public why aren’t they capable enough to band together for jobs and real help. We have tolerated them long enough, and already gave them two whole parks in Berkeley to take over." 

"Looks like things may have come to an end today as city workers where throwing anything left on the street into a truck this morning after 7am, where the rowdiest of the homeless camp all day. Hate to say it but it is about time." 

"Losers" 

"Berkeley needs to adopt a policy of aggressive nonviolence towards the homeless with the idea of making it unpleasant enough that they will leave of their own accord. Regular rousting, confiscation of their junk, hosing of the sidewalks, etc would all be appropriate" 

"I will buy you a bus ticket back there if you promise not to return until you have secured employment here that enables you to live in a hard sided domicile with an address." 

It is not just the local news blog. During her campaign, Lori Droste answered a Downtown Berkeley Association questionaire with the frankness of a political rookie: 

"Some best practices for reducing problematic street behavior include: 

Public education to discourage panhandling and contribute to vouchers or homeless organizations. 

Zero tolerance policies for anti-social and dangerous behavior." 

We have the general picture, right? Panhandling is of course not only perfectly legal but it is a protected right under the U.S. Consitution. Thus, we will not outlaw panhandling but we will "educate the public" (a public that apparently excludes panhandlers) to "discourage" panhandling, while the state will concentrate on "zero tolerance" for "anti-social behavior". 

(Personally, I think it is "anti-social behavior" to try to "educate" anyone not to help the poor directly, to their face, like a human being, but Ms. Droste apparently disagrees.) 

We know the truth too, when Linda Maio takes to the airwaves to declare that we are here to exclude the homeless, even when she defensively notes that they'll still be permitted to skulk around downtown between 10PM and 7AM. 

False Apologetics

In the list of vile quotes I offer above, I risk being accused of ignoring context. Many, perhaps most of the people quoted are very quick to insist: They do not mean to "criminalize the homeless". No, they want only to protect a nebulously defined "society" or even just "business" from the homeless. The most cynical part: they say their intent is to get the homeless into "help", at least those who otherwise refuse "programs". 

People on the streets will tell you again and again, and in almost any city: These laws are meant only to create an excuse to harrass the homeless, to fine them, to send them to jail, to beat them, and to deny them the full and equal protection of the law. 

There is no record of any homeless person being helped by having their belongings taken away and discarded. 

There is no record of a single homeless person who refused help suddenly accepting help because of being cited for panhandling too close to an ATM. 

We are all adults. We do not have to be cynical here. We know full well what is going on. Harrassment, begets tickets, begets weekends in jails and rotations through involuntary commitments. Nobody is helped. Rather, the state simply plays out its role as the designated vigilante squad of the politically powerful. 

The Politicians Lose Control

When a Berkeley Ambassador, who has a reputation of similar incidents in the past, attacks and beats two men, 

When the Berkeley Police collude to mislead the court and cover up his crime, 

Each of these direct and indirect City employees is doing exactly the job they have been given. 

This is the thing about cynical public policy: 

The cynicism allows the politicians to save face even as their employees get the message and act out the true intent. 

It is nauseating to watch Berkeley politicians feign surprise or outrage over this violent attack on two Berkeley residents and the subsequent coverup. 

These were model employees doing the job they are given. 

Before one Ambassador was fired (after video of his behavior emerged), earlier he was promoted, I am told. He was promoted in spite of repeated complaints about similar behavior in the past. 

Malicious Practices

There is a historic precedent for the two-faced, false civility that promises to criminalize the poor in order to help them. Wikipedia tells us that "The Malicious Practices Act of 1933" in Nazi Germany gave rise to a memo from the Prussion Minister of Interior reading in part: 

"...those to be considered A-Social are persons who demonstrate through behaviour towards the community, when may not in itself be criminal, that they will not adopt themselves to the community. 

"The following are examples of asocial: 

"Persons who through minor, but repeated, infractions of the law demonstrate that they will not adapt socialist state, e.g. beggars, tramps, whores, alcoholics with contagious diseases, particularly transmitted diseases, who evade the measures taken by the public health authorities." 

For such persons the presecription was "protective custody," also known as a free one way train ticket to Dachau. 

Arbeit Macht Frei, Berkeley? 

Real Problems

Berkeley City Council has spent countless hours and too many legislative acts on questions such as whether or not it should be lawful to nap on a wide-ledged planter in the late morning; or whether 10 feet or 15 feet is too close to a parking meter to panhandle. 

Berkeley City Council has not given such attention to deliberating the consequences of the global financial crisis of 2008. Or that of 2001. 

Berkeley City Council yacks it up about how how poor people must be specially targeted for policing to protect businesses, yet out of the other side of its mouth council encourages high commercial and residential rents in hopes of winning development projects whose transfer taxes might help to paper over -- for just a few years -- decades of council neglect on infrastructure spending. 

Berkeley City Council again and again acknowledges the inevitable inadequacy of social services to the problem of ending homeless yet never once... 

...not once... 

...not once has Council ever acknowledged the reality that we face a now permanent crisis. That there will always be people on the street, probably in large numbers, for as far as we can project into the future. 

Never once has Berkeley City Council given serious consideration to the actual problem it faces. 

A Theory of Civility

Here is a rule of thumb: The greater the stake each person has in sharing a space, the higher the level of civility that is likely to emerge. 

It is a very simple idea. 

Applied to Berkeley, it means that the economically privileged must recognize that people staying on the streets is a long term situation, not one that can be "fixed" or regulated out of sight. 

As simple as this idea is, it is profoundly different from what Berkeley practices today. 

Today we create policy as if the first and foremost beneficent goal were to assist people off the street. (Since we know this is fully impossible, this goal is untruthful; it is a cynical policy.) 

What is the alternative? 

We need policy to make the lives of people on the street less harsh for however long they will be there. 

This is nearly the exact opposite of everything we do. 

Lori Droste says we should educate the public not to give to panhandlers. NO! We should have signs that read: 

"Visitors take note: BERKELEY WELCOMES PEACEFUL PANHANDLING." 

Today the City and the commercial district property owners are as stingy as can be with public restrooms that people on the street can access (whether during business hours or in the wee hours of the morning). We should not have porta-potties, we should have a public bath that is open 24/7, staffed and attended. 

Today the City moves to make it more difficult for people on the street to feed themselves while convening in the city's civic center. Instead, the City should be facilitating the well organized distribution of free food in our busiest districts. 

Linda Maio remarked on KPFA and from that dais that she felt the homeless will tend to obey clear rules laid down for them. 

I suggest she has not quite the right idea. The better idea is that all people tend to return genuine respect and civility when that is what is shown towards them

One of the political truisms of our times is that for every inconvenient truth, there always arises a plethora of convenient myths to confuse and mislead the public by obfuscating the real issues at stake, and nowhere is this more evident than in the recent debate over the future of development in Berkeley occasioned by the 2211 Harold Way Project. 

I will not dwell on the negative effects of ripping out such civic and cultural icons as the Habitot and Landmark Shattuck Cinemas and reducing the heart of the downtown to a monstrous construction site for at least 4 years as being so egregious as to be self evident, but will concentrate on the more devious and self-serving deceptions that are being propagated. 

First, there is the cynical use of the slogan "Affordable Housing" which of course begs the question: affordable for whom? Yes, there is a housing problem in Berkeley, but it is a crisis for the minority and working and middle-class residents who have made Berkeley the diverse and vibrant polity that it is, however, building the huge behemoths currently envisioned and slapping luxury lofts and condos on top for the Ayn Rands and Donald Trumps of the world to lord it over the few who could still afford to stay in Berkeley offers no real solution but merely exposes an exercise of Realpolitik worthy of a Putin. One has only to look across the Bay to see the deleterious effect such policies are having on such traditional neighborhoods as the Mission to realize that this is not a direction we in Berkeley should take. 

Then, there is the brazen attempt by some politicians and their developer cronies to interpret the results of the recent vote on Measure R (the fruit of their deceptive campaign during a sparse by-year election-which only passed because of the catch phrase about "saving the Post Office") as some kind of mandate for the profligate and unfettered development of the downtown area. No matter how one voted on the measure, it is clear that most people expected that such development would proceed according to Green principles, such as net-zero energy grids. etc. The despotic removal of Rose Marie Pietras from the Landmarks Commission and the attempt to remove the debate re: significant civic benefits from the appropriate boards and commissions, where it would at least be argued on the merits and kick it back to the City Council, where it will become a political football, shows quite clearly that the only "green" concerns of these self-proclaimed advocates of "growth" is that of the almighty greenback and the procurement of cushy deals for out-of-office politicians through the all too pervasive revolving door. 

And lastly, there is all this palaver about "millenials", though why this generation who just happened to come of age at the turn of the millenium should be attributed some special knowledge and given pride of place in the current debate is beyond me. Most of my generation were just as naive and unseasoned at that age, but we at least, were grounded in the realities of the Civil Rights Movement and the derailing of the Amerikan war machine and never evinced such smugness and callous unconcern for those less fortunate which seems to be the hallmark of this current crop, who seem more concerned with cyberspace than civic space. 

I certainly do not claim to have all the answers, but certainly the debate should not be rushed without exhaustive public input. As a good first step, I think we should demand the reinstatement of Rose Marie Pietras and the putting in place of some kind of tenure safeguards for appointees (after all,some of the best things that happened for our country in the recent history of my lifetime were due to appointees who voted counter to the wishes of their "masters", viz. Earl Warren and C. Everett Coop). In addition, we need to demand the passage of legislation to forbid former City staff, for the maximum time allowable by law, from involvement in any future development projects in Berkeley and the assignment of the debate to the proper forum of boards, commissions and town meetings. 

 

Ms. O’Malley attended the Thursday April 2, 2015 LPC commission meeting as an advocate of a view on a particular zoning issue. She stated she was not there in a role as a reporter. The vote did not go her way. 

The LPC, after hearing the views of all members of the public present, after reviewing the staff report of the City of Berkeley Planning Department, and after hearing the recommendation of the architect of the UC Berkeley campus, decided to follow the recommendation of the City of Berkeley Planning Department and the recommendation of the University of California Berkeley campus architect.  

Because the decision was not favorable to her viewpoint Ms. O’Malley threw a tantrum, a journalistic tantrum. She used her bully pulpit, the Berkeley Daily Planet to engage in personal attacks on the majority members of the Landmark Preservation Commission. She misquoted them, misrepresented them, described them as being puppets of “corporate masters” and stated they were either ignorant or corrupt. Those who agreed with her, were portrayed as knowledgeable, interested in the public good, intelligent well- meaning members of the community.  

She not only resorts to name calling, she also engages in generalizations and labels. Those who agree with her are “progressive”. Those who disagree with her are “conservative” or are “puppets controlled by corporate masters”. She doesn’t define her terms, merely abuses them.  

If you don’t follow her dictates and choose to exercise your independent judgment, be prepared to be unfairly and personally attacked. I believe we all know how media, both print and broadcast can slant, distort, misreport, quote out of context, belittle and denigrate those they disagree with. Her op-ed piece is a perfect example of this type of gutter journalism. Perhaps she has been watching Fox news and learning from them. Unfair and imbalanced is not the sole province of the right wing. The far left is equally guilty. 

Ms. O’Malley likes to control people. If you don’t go along with her dictates she will engage in character assassination.  

The lesson for all of us is that if you want to engage in civic responsibility and be involved in government in any form, be prepared to be denigrated and personally attacked. Those who disagree with you may throw a tantrum. Some of us do not outgrow our childhood.

Governor Brown’s executive order imposing mandatory water use reductions of 25 percent on California’s cities and towns is certainly a step in the right direction. But why has California’s giant agriculture industry, which accounts for 80 percent of the state’s water use, been given a free pass? There is little incentive for California’s agricultural farmers to conserve and make the hard choices eliminating water intensive crops such as alfalfa and rice in favor of water sustainable crops. Almonds use about 10% of California’s water and alfalfa about 12%. Almonds are an export cash crop funded by ‘eastern banks’ at high profit margins but contribute little to the local economy. Each almond requires about 1 gallon of water. 

Farmers should be encouraged to phase out these water intensive crops with assistance from the state and federal government. Fracking, which uses enormous quantities of water and is extremely hazardless to the environment and may trigger seismic activity – should be banned. 

Finally, the multi-billion boondoggle high-speed rail should be abandoned in favor of a building a freshwater pipeline from Oregon to California.

Literature and drama classes help students to find emotional balance. They open doors to how other people live. By entering in imagination into other people’s lives, students become friendly and more open to others. They see their own pain and difficulty as part of the process of becoming adult. They see their own happiness as part of the process of giving praise. 

Our nation is built on the diversity of a multicultural and multilingual society. 

We have become global in the 21st century. We have international collaboration in the fields of education, medicine and technology. It is especially important in this global century to have more courses in cinema and literature. The closer we come to how other people see themselves the more capable we are of offering respect and attentiveness. 

Schools and colleges should all add literature and drama courses to their curriculum for the emotional health of students and for cooperative living on our earth.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in his pre-election racist diatribe against Arabs, pledged unequivocally, “there will never be an independent Palestinian State.” In recent interviews, rabbis, scholars and Jews from across the country and a range of denominations said that his campaign tactics had further divided American Jews and alienated even some conservatives, who had already suspected that he was more committed to building settlements than to building peace with the Palestinians. 

Many Americans were further outraged to learn that Israeli intelligence spied on the US-Iran talks and then fed the information to congressional Republicans in a desperate effort to scuttle the US-Iran nuclear talks. 

William Quandt, who served on the National Security Council under Presidents Carter and Nixon, stated that there is a need to impose a cost on Israel’s intransigence and military occupation. 

It is time the US presents an ultimatum to Israel. End the brutal and suffocating occupation; develop specific timelines to establish a Palestinian State, lift the crippling siege of Gaza and repatriate tax revenues withheld from the Palestine Authority. If Israel fails to respond to such demands, all US military and economic support should be halted immediately.

As you know, both Republican dominated houses of Congress have approved a morally outrageous budget that will, in effect, deprive millions of Americans of necessities so that the very rich can enjoy more luxuries. It seems that the Republicans have abolished empathy. Yet incredibly, the Republicans feel morality is on their side. The writer, Upton Sinclair made an excellent observation that explains the moral blindness of the greedy --- "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding". As Paul Krugman observed, many of those with very high incomes are concerned that adequately funding social programs will increase their taxes.  

Clearly, increasing inequality, which results from slashing social programs, causes more widespread and deeper poverty. For example, by cutting the food stamp budget, 11 million recipients would lose their food stamp eligibility or a family of four including two young children would lose four months of groceries. As the result of budget cuts in Medicaid and the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, 37 million recipient would lose their health insurance. And by privatizing Medicare, which the Republicans also voted on, it will result in substantially higher costs to patients. It would also make it more difficult for seniors to choose their own doctors. In short, the Republican budget is a disaster for the overwhelming number of Americans. 

Is there any good news beside the pleasant weather in the Bay Area? Yes, indeed there is. No Democratic member of either house voted for the budget. Perhaps this might be a turning point, that more Democrats are realizing that they cannot ignore the wishes of those who have voted for them. Perhaps they are beginning to understand that to do so could result in a major decline of the Democratic Party.

Sixteen months before the Republican convention, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush is a slight favorite to win the GOP presidential nomination. Given that Hillary Clinton is the overwhelming favorite to win the Democratic nomination, Bush vs. Clinton should be an interesting race. Although Jeb Bush is a typical right-wing Republican, he will attempt to soften his image and portray himself as a “compassionate” conservative, as did his brother in 2000. 

The latest CBS News poll shows that 51 percent of Republican respondents “would consider voting for” Bush as the Republican nominee. (The next five were Mike Huckabee [42 percent], Rand Paul [39 percent], Marco Rubio [39 percent], Ted Cruz [37 percent], and Scott Walker [35 percent].) 

Bush is the frontrunner among the business-conservative wing of the GOP, ahead of his principal competitors for this segment: Walker, Christie, and former Texas Governor Rick Perry. Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee is the favorite of the Christian-conservative wing of the GOP, ahead of his principal opponents: Senator Rubio, Senator Cruz, former Senator Rick Santorum, and surgeon Ben Carson. Kentucky Senator Rand Paul is the favorite of the GOP’s libertarian wing. 

After their respective conventions conclude, both candidates will try to claim US political middle ground. Clinton will attempt to establish that she is not as liberal as most Democrats. Bush will try to prove that he is not as conservative as mainstream Republicans. 

Out here on the left coast, we understand that Hillary Clinton is not a liberal. She is a third-way Democrat, that’s why most of us aren’t very enthused about her. 

Although he’ll try, it’s unlikely that Jeb Bush can differentiate himself from Hillary Clinton on foreign policy. Moreover, Americans are focused on domestic policy; the latest Gallup Poll indicated that Americans continue to be primarily concerned with Jobs and the economy, as well as government and healthcare. 

Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush differ on most domestic issues. On economic inequality, Bush talks about the skills gap and the education gap. Award-winning economist Thomas Piketty observed that if Republicans, such as Jeb Bush “are really serious about the skill gap and the education gap, then they cannot at the same time cut the tax on the rich.” to invest more resources in education.” 

When Bush was governor of Florida, he became an advocate of charter schools. Political writer Alec MacGillis observed that Jeb Bush’s education reform program, “was of a piece with his larger agenda to privatize state-run services, from prisons to Medicaid.” Bush pushed “school choice.” As a result, “by 2002 for profit-companies were managing three-quarters of the state’s newly approved charter schools,” which were “free of public oversight and collective-bargaining agreements,” and spent “about two thousand dollars less per student than traditional public schools.” 

On job creation, Clinton supports increasing the minimum wage and Federal job creation plans. Jeb Bush called for the elimination of the Federal minimum wage, “We need to leave it to the private sector.” Bush is not in favor of Federal job creation plans and opposed the 2009 stimulus package. A 2002 analysis of his term as governor found, 

[Bush] championed tax cuts that chiefly benefited business and the wealthy, trimmed the state’s payroll, [and] stripped job protection from thousands of mid-level civil servants… while Florida led the nation in job creation, much of that was in low-paid service industry jobs that left many Floridians without health insurance and scrambling for affordable housing amid a real estate boom that helped fuel business-friendly tax breaks.

 

As one would expect, Clinton supports the Affordable Care Act. Bush referred to Obamacare as a monstrosity; he wants to repeal it, and have the government provide only catastrophic coverage. 

Clinton believes global climate change is real and would reduce carbon emissions via government regulations. Bush responds, “I’m not a scientist.” 

On immigration, Jeb Bush has a more humane attitude towards undocumented immigrants than do most Republican candidates; Bush said, “Immigration is not a felony but an act of love.” Clinton supports immigration reform and a “pathway to citizenship.” 

Jeb Bush is conservative on social issues. He was an early supporter of the Indiana Religious Freedom Restoration Act. “I think Gov. Pence has done the right thing.” Real Clear Politics observed: “During his governorship, Bush asserted himself frequently on hot-button issues that highlighted his staunch social conservatism, particularly in opposing embryonic stem cell research and abortion rights… Bush began a nearly two-year fight to keep alive Terri Schiavo.” 

A recent New York Times article preicted that Jeb Bush plans to run on a “unifying” message. It’s reminiscent of the claim of his brother, George W. Bush, that he would be “a uniter not a divider;” that he was “a compassionate conservative.” 

Nonetheless, on an issue-by-issue basis, Jeb Bush is a staunch conservative. He’s not any more compassionate than Dubya was. 

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Bob Burnett is a Berkeley writer. He can be reached at bburnett@sonic.net

It has been widely reported that the San Francisco Sheriff's deputies are accused of forcing inmates to fight "gladiator-style" to entertain guards who bet on the outcome and even forced the inmates to train for future fights. What has not been widely discussed, is, if the allegations are true, what responsibility does San Francisco Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi have for the misconduct? What did he know and if he did not know, why not? 

The Sheriff should have been on alert as the deputy sheriff, who is accused of arranging the present misconduct, was previously accused of sexually assaulting inmates in 2006. Why hasn't this deputy been suspended until an independent investigation is conducted? 

Many sheriff's deputies and others in the sheriff's office must have been aware of what was going on, but reportedly failed to report the alleged misconduct to Mirkarimi. Significantly, this alleged misconduct was revealed by a San Francisco Public Defender's investigation rather than by the Sheriff's own criminal investigations unit.  

In addition to his present difficulties, Mirkarimi is remembered by San Franciscans for the 2011 domestic violence incident. Lets look back. Mirkarimi was elected sheriff in November 2011 and served from January to March 2012, at which time he was charged with domestic violence battery, child endangerment, and dissuading a witness in connection with a December 31, 2011 New Year's Eve altercation with his wife Eliana Lopez. Mirkarimi ultimately pleaded guilty to one count of misdemeanor false imprisonment. Under the plea agreement, Mirkarimi was sentenced to three years' probation, one year of weekly domestic violence batterers classes, parenting classes, a hundred hours of community service, and fines and court fees of about $600. 

San Francisco Ed Lee suspended Mirkarimi from office pending an ethics investigation. Before the Ethics Commission hearings, Mirkarimi argued that the bruise he caused to his wife's arm was not "domestic violence." Given this out-of-date thinking, I could not imagine how the sheriff would benefit from his court-ordered counseling. And how could someone on domestic violence probation oversee and lead the Sheriff's Department's innovative, nationally recognized batterer treatment programs. On August 16, 2012, the Ethics Commission ruled 4 to 1 that Mirkarimi had committed official misconduct by falsely imprisoning his wife. 

According to the San Francisco city charter, removing a public official for misconduct requires the vote of nine of eleven supervisors. I concluded after reviewing the facts that Mirkarimi's actions fell far below the standards of decency that San Franciscans demand of their sheriff. Unfortunately, only seven of the eleven supervisors voted to allow Mirkarimi to keep his job as sheriff and he was reinstated as sheriff in October 2012. Ross Mirkarimi has announced that he will seek re-election as sheriff. Retired Chief Deputy Sheriff Vicki Hennessy who was appointed acting sheriff during Mirkarimi's suspension, has announced she will oppose Mirkarimi. For the first time since the domestic violence case, voters will get to decide whether Mirkarimi should keep his job as sheriff. The alleged "gladiator-style" allegations during Mirkarimi's watch will not help.  

I for one am voting for Ms. Hennessy this November.

It is important for people with schizophrenia to distinguish imagined threats versus real ones. Psychosis can take over the mind and can make us feel threatened, anxious, and frightened. This emotional upset can then snowball into worse symptoms of psychosis. It is important for us to prevent getting excessively upset over things. Once we become excessively upset about real or imagined problems, it opens the door for a possible relapse.  

Real threats do affect everyone from time to time. However, actions that are based on imagined threats can cause real threats to come into existence that hadn't existed before. Becoming psychotic is a genuine threat to life and limb.  

When acting on delusions, we could inadvertently harm ourselves or others. Even if mostly nonviolent while mentally acutely ill, there is still the consideration of the damage done to one's living situation, economic situation, reputation, and friendships. Numerous life circumstances can change for the worse when one has a relapse of being mentally acutely ill.  

Meanwhile genuine problems exist that all people, mentally ill or not, will encounter. They must be dealt with and not denied out of emotional convenience. There are things in life that are uncomfortable to face. Yet, if we do not deal with these things, we could end up much worse off.  

For example, if you have a health problem, one that necessitates going through discomfort to treat, you can either treat your health problem of suffer the consequences. High blood pressure might merely necessitate taking one or two pills every day--no real discomfort. Yet I know someone who refuses to treat his high blood pressure. This same individual has lost more than half of his teeth because it was too uncomfortable to take care of them.  

I know another person who has maxed-out all of her credit cards, and is now in a situation of needing to rent an apartment. It would have been a lot easier to find something had the person dealt with her credit rating.  

Threats do exist in our lives and don't go away when we refuse to acknowledge them. It is not a state of enlightenment to always be happy if that happiness is the consequence of emotionally convenient denial.  

{I was once a member of a group of people who were followers of Ken Keyes. (Not "followers" in the usage of Twitter, I mean followers, as in cult.) Keyes promoted a spinoff of Buddhism. The philosophy was that all pain was due to an "addiction" which was a term they coined instead of calling it an "attachment" which is the Buddhist usage. It didn't mean that you were a drug addict or something, it meant any painful emotion connected to an event. 

{The problem was that people were trying to free themselves from addictions but were not taking care of survival issues. If you were worried about making your mortgage payment, you were supposed to let go of the worry because your house was "an addiction." Sometimes we require a bit of fear to mobilize into action. Ordinary emotions are not useless, contrary to what some spiritual growth people may believe.}  

It takes work merely to acknowledge a problem regardless of what type of problem exists. For example, acknowledgment of having a mental illness; it is something most people would rather not face. The illness itself makes it more difficult to acknowledge the illness. Most people's egos tend to be averse to acknowledging having a defect. Combined with this is the short-circuiting of the brain that might exist in many mental illnesses.  

In a delusional person, a neurological shortcut seems to exist that bypasses syncing with facts. This may have begun as a self-protection mechanism. In the precursor to getting ill, there may have been realities that we had to deny because they were too difficult to face at the time. This unskillful attempt at protecting the ego ultimately takes on a life of its own.  

As soon as the alternate neurological route--of short-circuiting the perception of reality--is established, we are essentially stuck with it and we must deal with it through medication.  

(Please keep in mind that what I am giving you is merely my opinion.) 

When we are in treatment after becoming delusional, we have the potential to track reality and to then acknowledge realities, difficult or otherwise, that are in front of us. Once a problem is acknowledged, the person who has the problem (whatever that problem is) is then in a position to do something about it.  

When in treatment, we are not automatically wise. Naiveté, induced by medication and by an environment in which mental health professionals are reassuring, may be comforting, but it is not optimal.  

This is not to say that we should torture ourselves with every problem we might have that we can fret about. A good equilibrium can be maintained if we chew on a problem for a little while and then release it. Once you have done everything you can do about a situation, there is no point in continuing to worry. Also, sometimes our minds can make a problem far more terrifying and monumental than it ought to be. The human mind, even short of being psychotic, can also imagine a lot of difficulties that don't actually exist.  

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Want to read more of my work? I have books available on Amazon including a self-help manual, a collection of the first year of this column, and a short science fiction collection.  

 

Two new (2014) books:

Atul Gawande (1965- ). Being Mortal: Medicine and what matters in the end.

Donald Hall (1928- ). Essays After Eighty.



Frontline’s Feb. 10, 2015 program was based on Dr. Atul Gawande’s book, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters In The End. Gawande’s fields are journalism, public health, and surgery.

He must have been in his late forties when he wrote this book about the modern experience of mortality. Born in Brooklyn, New York, he went to Stanford for his B.S., Oxford for his M.A., and Harvard Medical School. He has been both a MacArthur Fellow and Rhodes Scholar.

“Mortal” is an adjective relating to human beings subject to death. It is also used to mean deadly, fatal. Gawande writes, this is a book “…about what it’s like to be creatures who age and die, how medicine has changed the experience and how it hasn’t, where our ideas about how to deal with our finitude have got the reality wrong.” When doctors and patients talk death, hope is not a plan. The goal of medicine should not be a good death, but rather, a good life to the very end. 

Mainstream doctors are turned off by geriatrics. “…incomes in geriatrics and adult primary care are among the lowest in medicine…a lot of doctors don’t like taking care of the elderly.”  

Health professionals have a classification system for the level of function that a person has. If you cannot, without assistance, perform the 8 Activities of Daily Living (use the toilet, eat, dress, bathe, groom, get out of bed, get out of a chair, and walk ,) then you lack the capacity for basic physical independence. The Independent Activities of Daily Living are shop, prepare food, housekeep, laundry, manage meds, phone calls, travel on your own, handle your finances. 

The field of palliative care emerged over recent decades to bring this kind of thinking to the care of dying patients. …But it is not cause for celebration. That will be warranted only when all clinicians apply such thinking to every person they touch. No separate specialty required.  

Admission to hospice care is restricted. Hospice is a care philosophy based on belief that every person with a life-limiting terminal illness, regardless of age, is entitled to be as free of pain and symptoms as long as possible. Some folks, including “professionals,” assume that hospice provides assisted suicide. It is currently possible to obtain physician-assisted suicide, albeit not easily, in three states. Popular literature conveys two pictures of hospice-- an at-home service and a building/program elsewhere. It can be confusing. 

Dr. Gawande is saying what matters in the end is the life led. 

xxxx 

Essays After Eighty is, according to Publishers Weekly’s starred review, loaded with insights into the human condition. Jane Gross comes closer with her New York Times “Growing Older, Not Happier” review.  

Donald Hall was born in 1928, placing him in his early eighties while compiling these essays. He has led a life of letters (book jacket) in academe and on the road with poetry readings. He resigned after a year as Poet Laureate. “When I was young I could project, and now without a microphone I can’t be heard in the tenth row… the debility of age.”  

 

There have been several hirsute adornments (phases, seemingly) and wives, two children, divorce, cancer, New Hampshire… The book jacket consists of a close-up view of an aged face with bushy eyebrows and bulbous nose. Hall apparently has always had beards or not shaved.  

 

The linguistics of Hall’s “Death” essay initially appealed to me-- he starts right off with “I will not pass away.” Right on! No euphemisms for me either. He continues “… My problem isn’t death but old age. I fret about my lack of balance, my buckling knee, my difficulty standing up and sitting down.” Working for and on him are four women in their fifties. One is a trainer. One “keeps the house. She washes my clothes, she drives me to the doctor. She arranges my furniture for comfort and safety.” 

 

On divorce: “The marriage lasted fifteen years, ending in 1967. Divorce was miserable, as it always is, and we divorce for the same reasons we marry. … Yet to my surprise and gratitude, it [her cancer] brought us together again, and it was a comfort [for him] to sit beside her and reminisce” as she died.  

 

On hospice: Some fortunate people die in a hospice, which is tender but brief. …Some hospitals perform palliative care for the terminally ill. Others of us still die at home…These days most old people die in profit-making expiration dormitories. Their loving sons and daughters are busy and don’t want to forgo the routine of their lives. One said he would not diaper his parents—so he handed them over to women who diapered at the minimum wage.  

 

xxxx 

Senator Dianne Feinstein has endorsed California’s assisted-suicide bill. “The right to die with dignity is an option that should be available for every chronically suffering terminally ill consenting adult in California,” Feinstein, D-Calif., wrote in a letter to the authors of SB 128, the End of Life Option Act. “I share your concern that terminally ill California residents currently do not have the option to obtain end-of-life medication if their suffering becomes unbearable.” 

 

 

Donizetti’s comic opera L’Elisir d’Amore is a perennial crowd-pleaser, full of rustic exuberance, well-delineated characters, and a brilliant vocal and instrumental score. This opera has captivated audiences ever since its première on May 12, 1832, at Milan’s Canobiana Theatre, where it was an instant success. Recently, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music gave two fully staged performances of L’Elisir d’Amore on Thursday, April 2, and Saturday, April 4 in their Hume Concert Hall. 

After a spirited orchestral prelude conducted by Scott Sandmeier, L’Elisir d’Amore got under way with a group of peasants taking a noontime break from their chores in the shade of several trees. Giannetta, a peasant girl sung by soprano Sabrina Romero, celebrates the cool shade. Nemorino, an unlettered but sensitive peasant lad, observes the young and pretty Adina reading a book. To himself, Nemorino sings of his attraction to Adina, “Quanto è bella, quanto è cara (“How lovely, how dear to me”). Right away, from these first words, young Mexican tenor Mario Rojas as Nemorino staked out his claim to a first-class lyric tenor presence, exhibiting a voice that is beautifully nuanced and supple, yet deeply expressive and passionate. As the recipient of the Plácido Domingo scholarship, Mexico’s most prominent young artist award, Mario Rojas is presently a sophomore at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. 

Adina, sung by soprano Evan Kardon, interrupts her reading with laughter, and when questioned, replies that the story she’s reading strikes her as funny and absurd. It’s a love story, she says, about Tristan’s unrequited love for Isolde (Isotta in Italian). Obtaining a magic potion, Tristan drank it and became irresistible to Isolde, who married him and lived happily ever after. Adina and the peasants sing of this magical elixir of love. 

To martial music Sergeant Belcore enters the scene. As Belcore, baritone Daniel Cameron struts around like the cock of the walk. Impressed by the beauty of Adina, he presents her a flower. “No girl can resist a soldier,” he croons arrogantly. Impetuously, Belcore proposes marriage to Adina. Observing this, Nemorino despairs. Adina replies to Belcore with flirtatious caution, singing, “Non è si facile Adina a conquistar” (“It’s not so easy to conquer Adina”). As Adina, soprano Evan Kardon has a fine voice with a slight edge to it. In this opera her opening music is characterized by playful detachment, as if she’s aware of both her station, as daughter of the owner of this farm, and her beauty; and she obviously delights in teasing her suitors. 

Left alone on stage, Nemorino and Adina embark on a duet over the question of love. Adina declares herself incapable of settling on one suitor. When asked why not, she replies, “Chiedi al aura” (“Ask the breeze why it softly blows from flower to flower”). When Adina asks Nemorino in turn why he persists in pursuing her, he replies, “Chiedi al rio” (“Ask the river why it flows to the sea”). In this exchange, Adina still adopts her air of playful detachment, and her musical lines offer coquettish ornamentation, while Nemorino’s melodic lines are lyrically simple yet passionate. 

Soon the sound of a trumpet announces the arrival of Dr. Dulcamara, an itinerant medicine man, who quickly sings the praises of his quack remedies. Sung by bass-baritone Sergey Khalikulov, Dulcamara rattles off an entertaining buffo aria, full of patter in monotone declamation. Khalikulov’s voice is ingratiating in this humorous role. There is little hint here of the sometimes sinister aspect of Dulca-mara. Rather, this Dulcamara seems to accompany all his patter with a sly wink. The local peasants are taken in and buy his quack remedies. Nemorino buys an elixir of love – actually, a bottle of cheap wine. Dulcamara says it will make Nem-orino irresistible to women; but it will need a day to take effect (by which time Dr. Dulcamara will be long gone). Nemorino chugs his elixir and becomes happily intoxicated. He feigns a lack of interest in Adina, who begins to wonder what’s going on. To seek revenge on Nemorino, Adina agrees to marry Belcore in three days time. Nemorino, smug in his confidence in Dulcamara’s elixir, thinks he has plenty of time for the elixir to take effect tomorrow and make Adina love him instead of Belcore. 

However, Belcore and Adina announce their intention to wed, and the villagers prepare a wedding feast. Nemorino becomes desperate and seeks more of the magic elixir from Dulcamara. But he lacks the cash to buy it. Belcore offers to sign up Nemorino as an enlistee in the army, for which he’ll get cash. Nemorino hesitates, yet acquiesces and signs the papers. With the cash, he buys another bottle of Dulcamara’s magic elixir of love.  

Meanwhile, the peasant girls get wind of something that neither Nemorino nor Adina knows – Nemorino’s uncle has died and left him a fortune. The local girls now all make a play for Nemorino. He believes it’s the elixir now taking effect. When Adina sees Nemorino surrounded by all the local girls, she sheds a tear of regret and jealousy. Nemorino, seeing this tear, disengages himself from all his female admirers, and sings this opera’s greatest aria, “Una furtiva lagrima” (“A furtive tear”). This, of course, is one of the most renowned and most performed arias in the entire Italian repertoire. Mario Rojas sang this beautiful aria exquisitely, with a subtlety and timbre reminiscent of the great Nicolai Gedda. The applause for Mario Rojas at the conclusion of this aria was explosive. Young Mario Rojas will hopefully be singing this and many other great arias in opera houses around the world in future years. He is definitely a singer worth watching! 

With this aria, Nemorino realizes he has won Adina’s love. She quickly acknowledges this, informing him that she has bought off Nemorino’s enlistment papers, and they embrace. Belcore happens to see them locked in an embrace and realizes he has lost out. But he happily asserts he’ll find lots of other women along the way. Dr. Dulcamara boasts of the miraculous powers of his magic potion and everyone joins in celebrating the love of Nemorino and Adina.  

Finally, a word must be said of the staging of this opera by Jose Maria Condemi. Utilizing a unitary set that was augmented by the addition of a long table for a wedding feast and a maypole for the village dances accompanying the wedding celebrations, director Condemi kept the action moving all throughout L’Elisir d’ Amore. He also utilized a narrow runway placed between the audience and the orchestra pit as a site for increased intimacy, putting the singers in close proximity to the audience, as was the case, significantly, for Nemorino’s “Una furtiva lagrima.” 

In addition, this runway served as a convenient take-off site for singers’ entrances and exits through the side aisles of the audience. It all worked perfectly and gave this production a flair and intimacy that were extremely welcome in this emotion-ally intimate opera.

Gaetano Donizetti’s opera Poliuto, now rarely performed, experienced a difficult delivery at birth. Donizetti, who was appointed director of the Naples Conservatory in 1837, originally prepared Poliuto for an 1839 première in Naples. However, when Neapolitan censors gave him trouble over Poliuto, Donizetti resigned his post in Naples and took off for Paris, where he produced in quick succession Poliuto, La Fille du Régiment , and La Favorite.  

Paris was in some ways the optimal destination for Poliuto, since this opera was based, albeit very loosely, on the great 17^th century French dramatist Pierre Corneille’s Polyeucte. The French public, proud of their literary and dramatic heritage, would be familiar with Corneille’s play and welcome its transposition into an opera by Donizetti, who in 1840 was at the peak of his illustrious career. Since Corneille’s play dealt with Christian martyrs in Armenia, an eastern province of the Roman Empire, circa 250 AD; and also presumably because the libretto for Don-izetti’s Poliuto, written by Salvadore Cammarano, differed quite drastically from Corneille’s play; Donizetti’s Poliuto was given the title Les Martyrs for the Paris première and was performed in French, with the de rigeur addition of a ballet. 

Whereas all the characters of Corneille’s Polyeucte, whether Roman pagans or Armenian Christians, were rigorously honorable; Cammarano’s libretto for Donizetti’s Poliuto created an entirely new character, Callistene, who is the unabashed villain of the opera. Likewise, whereas Corneille’s play was a high-principled tragedy written in the neo-classical style of the age of Louis XIV, Donizetti’s opera was a melodrama written for the 19^th century Italian opera-going public. The differences in tone are striking. 

West Edge Opera’s production of Donizetti’s Poliuto offered a scaled-down concert version led by Musical Director Jonathan Khuner at the piano, plus a cellist, violinist, and clarinetist. In addition to a fine cast of singers, a small chorus sang as the Armenian congregation of Christians. I caught the Wednesday, April 1 per-formance of Poliuto at Berkeley’s Freight and Salvage.  

Poliuto, sung by tenor Michael Desnoyers, is an Armenian nobleman who, at the beginning of the opera, converts to Christianity at the urging of his Armenian Christian friend Nearco, ably sung by tenor Michael Jankosky. This conversion is carried out secretly in a cave because a recent Roman decree has outlawed conversion to the new faith on pain of death. Thus, Poliuto seeks to keep his conversion a secret even from his beloved wife, Paulina, an Armenian noblewoman who practices the old pagan faith. However, Paulina, troubled by a dream, follows her husband and observes from a distance his ritual baptism. Beautifully sung by soprano Elizabeth Zharoff, Paulina finds herself moved to tears by the Christians’ prayer that offers blessings even to their enemies. As Poliuto, tenor Michael Desnoyers sang capably, though his tone seemed to me a bit brittle. On the other hand, the gorgeously full, rich tone of Elizabeth Zharoff resounded gloriously throughout the fine acoustic space of Berkeley’s Freight and Salvage theatre.  

Prior to her recent marriage to Poliuto, Paulina had fallen in love with Severo, a Roman general. When Severo was reportedly killed in battle with the Persians, Paulina dutifully accepted her father’s choice of Poliuto as her husband. Suddenly, however, Severo, whom Paulina thought dead, now appears as proconsul sent from Rome to govern Armenia and quash the Armenians’ recent devotion to Christianity. Severo, ardently sung by baritone Anders Froehlich, arrives in Armenia with hopes of marrying his beloved Paulina. The shock of this sudden turn of events throws Paulina into a torment of conflicting emotions, admirably expressed in an aria of noble sentiments, at the close of which she steely rebuffs Severo’s hopes.  

Meanwhile, Callistene, pagan High Priest of Armenia, (a character totally invented by librettist Cammarano), has insidiously planted a seed of doubt in Poliuto’s ear regarding Paulina’s earlier love for Severo. When Poliuto observes from a distance the tense but impassioned meeting between his wife and Severo, Poliuto becomes enraged, thinking his wife is betraying him. However, news comes to him of the arrest of Nearco, his best friend and fellow Christian. When Nearco is threatened with torture if he does not name any new convert to the outlawed Christian faith, Poliuto proudly steps forward and turns himself in. Paulina falls at Severo’s feet and begs for the life of her husband in the name of the love she and Severo once shared. Enraged, Poliuto smashes the altar of Jupiter and is dragged away for execution. 

After intermission, Callistene, robustly sung by bass John Bischoff, announces that many Armenian Christians have announced their willingness to go to death alongside Poliuto rather than renounce their faith. Callistene worries aloud that Paulina may persuade her former beloved Severo to grant clemency to her husband, Poliuto. Cammarano’s libretto even makes Callistene secretly motivated by Paulina’s earlier rejection of his lust for her. In a magnificent sextet, Callistene seeks to manipulate the population to demand Poliuto’s immediate execution, while Poliuto, Nearco, Paulina, Severo and Paulina’s father, Felice, sing of their conflicting emotions. 

In his cell, Poliuto dreams of Paulina and awakes to find her before him. Recognizing her innocence, Poliuto forgives Paulina and they reconcile. She declares her readiness to convert to Christianity; and Poliuto, seeing that her conversion is genuine, baptizes his wife as a fellow Christian. They ecstatically resolve to go to heaven together. When Severo and his men arrive to lead Poliuto to the arena where he will be fed to the lions, Paulina declares her conversion to Christianity and vows to accompany her husband to immortal life in heaven. Severo begs her to reconsider in the name of her father, Felice, but Paulina is resolute in her faith. Poliuto and Paulina are led to their death in the arena, and Severo falls on his sword in despair. 

Thus ends Donizetti’s melodramatic reworking of Corneille’s tragedy Polyeucte. In reviving this rarely performed Donizetti opera, West Edge Opera has assembled a fine cast, led by the outstanding singing of Elizabeth Zharoff as Paulina and Anders Froehlich, as Severo; and this company has shown that it provides Bay Area audiences with exciting new opera experiences – a task they will fulfill yet again on May 3^rd, when they perform Verdi’s rarely seen I due Foscari at Walnut Creek’s Rossmoor Event Center, and again on May 4^th, at Berkeley’s Freight and Salvage.