Features
Letters to the Editor
WHERE?
Editors, Daily Planet:
There’s an obvious solution to the Oakland/Berkeley sculpture dilemma: Put the “Here” on the Oakland side so that Berkeley will be “There.” Berkeley can be very smug about this, because people driving past who think that they are there will actually be here.
Robert Gable
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PRETTY NEAT
Editors, Daily Planet:
Let me make my position clear from the outset of this letter: I am a long-time resident of Oakland and love my hometown dearly. I think the “Here/There” sculpture is pretty neat. I’m sure I don’t speak for all Oakland citizens but most of us here (or there as it were) have lived with the “there” for many years and also proclaim it from the rooftops (a flag atop the Tribune tower—and now Sears building) and in art (a huge colorful metal sculpture in downtown City Center), so its not a label we are offended by or find derogatory.
I don’t know if Berkeley citizens are being offended for us, but this whole border sculpture seems a tempest in a teapot...and if they found it offensive and divisive, why didn’t they find it so before it was approved rather than just before it was to be installed? It seems like a pretty fun piece of art and I’m for big public art pieces. We don’t have enough of them. I hope the Berkeley City Council goes ahead and approves this project.
Pamela Magnuson-Peddle
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THE SHAFT
Editors, Daily Planet:
It’s outrageous that anyone in government would approve $50,000 to be spent on something like this. It’s bad enough that our so called artwork downtown consists we have a Giant Red Tuning Fork and a piece of something that looks like it’s covered in bird crap, do we really need this? How much additional money is it going to cost Berkeley taxpayers for round-the-clock security to protect this new artwork? Do we really want to drive a bigger wedge between Berkeley and Oakland?
Since our Civic Arts Commission finds this so tongue-in-cheek, why don’t we just erect a $50,000 giant dildo at that intersection to symbolize the shaft that is being given to the tax-paying public in Berkeley by our Arts Commission and elected officials.
Jim Hultman
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INTERPRETATIONS
Editors, Daily Planet:
With respect to the “Here/There” artwork on the Berkeley Oakland border, for purposes of property tax assessments, which is worth more, “here” or “there”? Let the local governments settle the dispute. I would like to offer a helpful suggestion. Instead of “Here/There,” the artwork on the Oakland Berkeley border should be changed by making it into an equilateral triangle with one point labeled “here,” the second point labeled “there,” and the third point labeled “everywhere.” All art is open to many varied interpretations stimulating discourse. This modest change brings to mind a few interpretations:
• We are all one world.
• A tribute to the Beatles
• The hoped-for circulation of the Daily Planet.
• The Republican view of the Bush mandate.
• The Democratic reality of their waning power.
• The neocon view of U.S. foreign policy.
• The ego of this letter writer.
It’s amazing how art will stimulate the mind.
Paul M. Schwartz
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RFID TECHNOLOGY
Editors, Daily Planet:
It seems to me that the discussion of RFID use by the Berkeley Public Library has been long on heat and short on light. There are some real issues, but if the letters to the editor are anything to go by, the issues don’t seem to be well understood and aren’t being effectively debated. In the interests of trying to move the level of the public debate up a notch or two, here are two Internet links I’ve found (using Google) that appear to offer useful information about RFID technology as applied to libraries.
The first (www.cs.berkeley. edu/~dmolnar/library.pdf) is a scholarly paper from UC, very technical. If you aren’t an engineer, I recommend just reading the introductory paragraphs of each section, and even those can be tough. It does describe some possible ways that the RFID labels in books could be used to compromise privacy of library patrons.
The second (www.VTLS.com/doucmens/privacy.pdf) is by people in the RFID industry, and thus has an obvious bias in favor of RFID use, but it gives an easy-to-understand description of the how the technology works and describes clearly how it is applied in libraries as well as warehouses and stores. So for anyone who is asking him/herself “What the heck is an RFID anyway?” this is a good paper to read first. One caveat, though: I would take the authors’ assertion that there is no way to read library-type RFIDs beyond 18 inches with a fair pinch of salt. I’ve read elsewhere that the read-range depends more on the reader than it does on the passive label - although the ranges being discussed were on the order of tens of feet, not miles.
David Coolidge
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MORE ON RFID
Editors, Daily Planet:
I have been aware for some time that a new system is being introduced into the Berkeley Public Library. Each book will receive a sticker which will supposedly make checking books in and out and which will make books easier to find. It will also decrease time needed for the workers to check the books in and out. This system is called RFID. A large amount of money, $650,000, has been borrowed to pay for this system!
In Berkeley, a huge change like this would ordinarily have been preceded by newspaper articles and by meetings where information was presented and feedback was requested. There would have been publicity given to the question of paying the cost of RFID. A decision would have been made, a positive decision followed support of a majority of Berkeley citizens.
However, this decision seems to have been made by the person in charge of the Berkeley Public Library with no input from Berkeley citizens or library workers. Apparently library worker criticism has been followed by punishment. I have not met one Berkeley citizen who supports RFID. This huge and expensive decision seems to have been made by one person, the person in charge of the library.
How could such a decision be overturned? Perhaps by the mayor of Berkeley. I am thinking of suggesting to him that he overturn the decision to have RFID added to the books in the Berkeley public Libraries.
Julia Craig
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LANDMARKS REFORM
Editors, Daily Planet:
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but there are major problems with the Landmarks Preservation Ordinance and the Landmarks Commission. Carrie Olson’s recent letter in defense of the commission suggested that she is unaware of the problems.
Many people who have been before the commission regale their friends with tales of its ineptitude. The problems I personally witnessed were meandering, pointless meetings that went to midnight and an absence of agreed-upon standards. I saw an inept, insensitive, and impractical commission.
The Landmarks Commission has a major credibility problem. The commission’s credibility problem is sufficiently serious that ardent preservationists can and do find themselves in opposition to it. The commission needs to reform and become, as the saying goes, “user-friendly.” The commission needs to admit it’s in trouble.
Sandy McCoy
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BIKE TO WORK DAY
Editors, Daily Planet:
Hey, I wound up stuck in Donner Pass area with the storm this week—what happened with Thursday’s Bike to Work Day? There’s no coverage on your website of the planned Berkeley event that day (May 20). Was it called off due to the rains? I was hoping to ride with Mayor Bates, who missed last year’s event. I bet he missed this year’s too, if it even happened, as I got no response to my “will he or won’t he” message, e-mailed to the mayor’s office the prior Monday.
Jim Doherty
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HISTORY LESSON
Editors, Daily Planet:
It is sad to find a young person so vituperative as is Christian Hartsock (“Busting the Filibuster,” May 20), especially when he has so little sense of history. It is the Republicans who are threatening to change the rules, not the Democrats who are breaking them. Mr. Hartsock seems unaware that when Republicans were the minority in Congress they made use of the filibuster to bar many Clinton judicial nominees from being approved. Bill Frist himself successfully filibustered against a Clinton appeals court nominee. Mr. Hartsock seems not to understand that the Founders were intent on protecting the interests of the minority—they never intended pure democracy, “mob-rule,” as some have called it, in our country. Thus, although Al Gore won the majority of votes in 2000, because of the intervention of the Republican-majority Supreme Court, the electoral college vote gave the presidency to the minority candidate, George Bush.
Mr. Hartsock seems to be ignorant of the essential concepts of the balance of powers and separation of church and state to protect the interests of minorities in our country. The attack on the filibuster not only insults the history of our Congress, it shows the Republicans to be terribly short-sighted. No matter how much our recent elections have been corrupted, Republican rule will not continue indefinitely.
Charlene Woodcock
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OAKLAND SCHOOLS
Editors, Daily Planet:
The 2002 revelation of the “largest school district deficit in state history” gave legal license for a state execution of the Oakland Public Schools body politic. State Administrator Randolph Ward has picked apart and isolated its political remains with his state conferred autocratic muscle.
Ward is generally perceived as a grim reaper applying the killing touch to neighborhood schools, programs and district morale. The Oakland school’s politically dead are having out of political body experiences engaged in protests that once carried clout and now deliver a ghostly punch! Ward is more political ghost buster than union buster.
Some teachers marched and chanted for Oakland’s “rich corporate businesses” to bail out Oakland’s fiscally mismanaged schools. There were no teacher chants, or whispers, for a district bailout from big teacher unions. The National Education Association (NEA) and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) compete for (teacher dues) market share and political influence. It is big teacher union businesses, not Oakland corporate businesses, that grab money from teacher pay checks. In Oakland it’s about 2 percent of average teacher pay, with one third of these union dues retained locally, by the Oakland Education Association (OEA) teacher union. The other two thirds get scooped up by OEA’s parent affiliates, CTA and NEA.
Accusations of Ward’s union busting should be of less concern to Oakland teachers than his ongoing busting of their jobs and wages. In addition to “feeling their pain” big teacher union business should share some of it by declaring a debt free moratorium on Oakland teacher union dues until the state stops punishing them for fiscal mistakes they didn’t create and their unions can’t remedy or ameliorate.
Big teacher unions’ temporary loss of Oakland teacher revenue wouldn’t seriously impact their mega flow of mandatory teacher dollars from other districts, while providing Oakland teachers more usable income. A pinch of dough from that cash flow could be diverted to maintain OEA’s measly budget, equal to one third of retained Oakland teacher union dues.
Just think of it! Union brothers and sisters in richer school districts inadvertently helping their union brothers and sisters suffering the unjust consequences of fiscal mismanagement in a poor diverse urban school district! I need a Kleenex.
John Willson
Twenty-five year Oakland teacher and union representative
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MISSING BERKELEY
Editors, Daily Planet:
It was 1984 and I wasn’t about to graduate high school back here in Berea, Ohio. My oldest sister, Kerry and her boyfriend were, for one reason or another, living in Berkeley at the time.
We were about to lose our house for non payment of property taxes so I had nowhere to go. I ended up moving to Berkeley for two months and have not recovered since. I miss the magical feeling in the air and the friendly people I would meet on my walks around College Avenue where I stayed. I imagine I looked at things differently through the eyes of an 18-year-old with his own problems back home but it was still such a wonderful experience. I remember the 49ers won the Super Bowl, the arsonist who set local dumpsters on fire, learning of People’s Park, taking the BART, walking my neighbor’s dog up in the Berkeley hills, the warm weather that would bring out the smell of eucalyptus, working at Round Table Pizza and hearing Chaka Khan’s hit “I Feel For You” on the radio. Speaking of music, whenever I hear a song back here that was popular while I was living in Berkeley a crazy feeling comes over me and I take a mini mental vacation for the remainder of the song. It’s funny how music can do that.
By far, my most memorable experience was being caught up, quite literally, in the anti-apartheid rallies on Sproul Hall. I would walk my “StumpJumper” (mountain bike) up on the steps and watch people go by and soak up the local talents of the street performers. It seemed like one evening, out of the blue, a rally got underway and I was pulled right into it. I admit that I wasn’t the most socially conscious 18-year-old but I couldn’t help but to feel the mood of the moment and after getting the scoop from someone next to me I decided to chime in with the rest. Talk about culture shock. It felt so new and good to me to know a different way of thinking other than my own.
Due to family matters I moved back to Ohio two months after I landed in Berkeley and I’ve been wanting to go back ever since and in the very least to vacation there. I’m a freelance photographer now (when it can pay some bills) and I’ve dreamed about the photos I’d take of a place where I once lived and walked the streets. Berkeley will forever be part of my identity even if I was only there for a couple of months because there’s an electrical current in the air and a rhythm to life in Berkeley that made every day special to me.
I just wanted to share my little story with the Berkeley Daily Planet and wish you lucky people a wonderful day. Thanks.
Kirby Kulow
North Olmsted, OH
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HERR DR. FRIST
Editors, Daily Planet:
Frankenstein is a story we’ve all heard before. It speaks to society’s obsession with “playing God” through science. Dr. Frankenstein is a misguided villain who creates life by accident and later regrets his decision.
In Congress, we now have a Doctor Frist, who like Frankenstein, is trying to “play God” with the Judicial Branch. His intentions are not to merely to make appointments to the court, he really wants to use the courts to dictate social policy and control our lives. He hopes to create a judicial monster that he and his supporters can manipulate to do their evil bidding.
As a doctor, Sen. Frist cannot be blamed for wanting to “play God.” It is, after all, a role he has been training for his whole life. However, he now seems to have cast aside the Hippocratic chains of medical ethics: “To never deliberately do harm to anyone for anyone else’s interest,” and has given himself a license to do harm to the U.S. Constitution and the American people.
Like Frankenstein, Frist and his supporters, will not be happy with their judicial monster. It will eventually turn on them! In the movie, once the monster kills the doctor’s assistant, Fritz (similarity to “Frist” is coincidental, but ironic), the doctor, falls into a state of shock, and eventually joins the crowd of townspeople as they hunt down the monster to kill him. By trying to socially engineer the U.S. justice system, Frist and his assistants will eventually find it necessary to destroy the key tenet of American justice: its independence.
Paul Page
San Francisco
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FAY STENDER
Editors, Daily Planet:
I agree with May 17 Brian Gluss’s proposal in the Daily Planet that Berkeley should have a “Fay Stender Day” to commemorate Fay Stender. She is a worthy honoree.
However, I take strong issue with a statement in Mr. Gluss’s article, in which he says, speaking of Fay’s work for prisoners: “It was this work that ultimately got her killed. (There is no rational explanation for such evil acts.)”
As usual, Berkeley tries to cover up the reality of her death. To quote an article in the June 1997 issue of Commentary magazine about what actually happened: “Around the same time, Fay Stender, Huey Newton’s former attorney, had become the target of a Panther vendetta for her refusal to smuggle a revolver into prison to help the gunman George Jackson escape. One day, a hit man arrived at her door, forced her to sign a ‘confession,’ shot her five times, and left her for dead. A year later, paralyzed and hiding from reprisal in Hong Kong, Stender took her own life.”
Fay Stender devoted her life to defending the Black Panthers and similar radical groups. And how did they express their gratitude for a lifetime of sacrifice on her part, committing her brilliant mind to help their cause? They murdered her for not being revolutionary enough.
I was personally involved in this case so I know more than can be revealed here, but I will affirm that Fay Stender was a good human being who did what she thought was the right thing. The villains in her death are the very same black revolutionary groups she naively tried to help. To say, as Mr. Gluss did, that “There is no rational explanation for such evil acts” is a self-deluded cop-out. There is a rational explanation: Revolutionary groups, then and now, lack any moral foundation and will always resort to violence, even against their own kind.
Fay’s shooting was one of the turning points in Berkeley history. It was the night the dream died—the dream of racial brotherhood, the dream of a liberal utopia, the dream of socialist revolution. It was all revealed to be a cruel hoax, a fantasy world created by well-meaning dreamers unaware of real human nature.
And it was not only a turning point for Berkeley, but for the entire Leftist movement in America, which disintegrated as those five shots rang out, never to be put back together again.
Since that night, the Left has been based on a lie, and continues to be to this day.
Joseph Daniel Johnston
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TOWN-GOWN
Editors, Daily Planet:
I love Berkeley and I came from Texas A&M, and believe me, the way things go there is little negotiation between the university and College Station. Granted it is a small town but they get what they get, yet the city still gets the windfall of tax receipts from the 40,000 or so kids who attend. The university consists of hard people led by President Robert Gates, former director of Central Intelligence, and they have the presidential library of one of Berkeley’s arch enemies, President George H. W. Bush. In contrast we get Cal, whose sole purpose isn’t to run over people, as can be illustrated in that there was a competition to manage Los Alamos earlier this year and UT, Texas A&M, and some other non-factors all dropped out because there was no money in it, but for honor and prestige Cal stayed in. City of Berkeley, you do not know how lucky you are to be dealing with such genteel people. And I will withhold further opinion, but why don’t you start acting like grownups rather that running off to sue them? Have you seen how screwed up Memorial Stadium and the kids’ athletic facilities are? Do you realize what a positive impact getting the alums to come back to see the Bears beat Oregon and SC have on not just the university but the town?
Steve Pardee
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JEFFERSON SCHOOL
Editors, Daily Planet:
What’s in a name? When referring to a person, a name is simply a means of identification. Associations and reasons a person is given the name depend on their parents’ choice and/or beliefs. Some Americans look to their heritage. Others look at books when choosing a name, while those looking to escape the past association with oppression and/or slavery look for names that reflects their ethnic group(s). The name “Jefferson” within itself means nothing. However the name of a Berkeley school is to be changed, or a discussion and vote are to take place over possible change. I’m wondering why. Slavery as I see it became an issue only for those who give reasons and believe them. The statement [by teacher Marguerite Talley-Hughes] “because that’s what was happening. . .etc” bothers me, because history tells many stories of that time period, as history will continue to do. That rationale from an educator is a wasted argument. The comments [from people at the meeting] in the eighth paragraph [of the article about it] should become the focal point, and may serve Berkeley in many ways.
Charlene Matthews
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YOUTH VOTING
Editors, Daily Planet:
I would like to remind everyone that tonight (Tuesday) is the City Council meeting in which the council will look at the topic of youth voting and local choice in Berkeley. Please come at 2134 MLK Jr. Way at around 7:30 p.m. to help us. Bring a sign if you can and help us cheer for youth voting! For more information, visit our website at http://berkeley.youthrights.org or our national website at www.youthrights.org.
Rio Bauce
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FIRST LADY’S MISSION
Editors, Daily Planet:
All signs suggest our federal system based on the separation of powers is undergoing a critical 21st century makeover. The legislature emits stinking fumes like an engine needing lubrication. The judiciary reels under the slings and arrows of outrageous activism. The executive branch works hard to perfect its talent for spinning fiction from fact: rewarding incompetence, covering bullshit with sugar-coatings of “democracy” and “freedom,” hiding death and outsourcing torture it can’t or won’t do…
I wonder, in this triple-crippled period, why the first lady ventured into a hate-filled Middle East with a message of goodwill delivered in candid mode. Is she supposed to be the antidote to disaffection in the region? Does she represent the yin to match her husband’s yang? Or is she stepping onto the global stage to do for us what QE2 does when England needs a foreign Band-Aid?
Marvin Chachere
San Pablo
