Editorials

Okay, it’s time to get back to work. “The holidays” have come and gone, even my birthday, January 22^nd . Valentine’s Day is just around the corner, and I believe we still celebrate President’s Day, though I’ve always preferred Lincoln’s Birthday.

While I was mostly off duty, I had time to think about what we’re trying to accomplish here, though unfortunately I still haven’t reached much of a conclusion.

When we foolishly undertook the task of salvaging online the remains of our previous attempt to provide Berkeley with a print newspaper, we continued to be inspired by the oft-quoted slogan that papers are supposed to “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.” But just recently I’ve learned that this phrase was lifted from one of Finley Peter Dunne’s satirical columns, purportedly written by one Mr. Dooley, an Irish bartender. Here’s the whole context, from Dunne’s 1902 book, Observations by Mr. Dooley:

“Th’ newspaper does ivrything f’r us. It runs th’ polis foorce an’ th’ banks, commands th’ milishy, controls th’ ligislachure, baptizes th’ young, marries th’ foolish, comforts th’ afflicted, afflicts th’ comfortable, buries th’ dead an’ roasts thim aftherward.”

If you can decode this now seriously non-PC attempt to represent Mr. Dooley’s Irish brogue in English spelling, you’ll learn that everything significant anyone ever did used to show up in the many daily papers available at the turn of the 20^th Century. Alas, no more. 

Not only do today’s anemic print papers seldom afflict the comfortable, they don’t even report very well on the life milestones which Mr. Dooley credited their predecessors with chronicling for their readers. My mother sometimes said, quoting Mr. Dooley’s contemporary, her Gilded Age grandmother, “no real lady should have her name in a newspaper except when she is born, she is married, or she dies”—but events like these now go unheralded in what substitutes for the local press. No more birth announcements, wedding photos, death notices (except as paid ads). 

Also, readers don’t hear much any more about what the state legislature is up to, except at election time. Even then, the crucial primaries in increasingly one-party states get little coverage, except perhaps reports on how much money each candidate has raised. 

Local news outlets, both print and online, report more on candidates’ personalities than they do on the political trends and issues which shape campaigns. And around here what’s called “news sources” are more interested in which restaurants closed this week than who’s running for what office on which platform. 

These days, the trailing edge of what’s been known as the Berkeley Daily Planet is essentially a journal of opinion. We have been fortunate to have some opinionated writers who keep track of what’s going on and share their observations online. But I’ve found it harder and harder to cram opinions into the legacy format created for a print paper with a paid reporting staff, with various headings (News, Columns, Public Comment, Events…) which don’t appropriately describe their mostly-opinion content. 

I’m not sure how many readers just click on the front page at berkeleydailyplanet.com to see the whole assortment of articles in an issue, but I also send a list of links to recent pieces to about 1000 people who have signed up for free “subscriptions”. I believe that these subscribers are people interested in learning about what controversies are going on and are looking for ideas about what can be done about them. Besides the expected Berkeley residents in this category, there are longtime subscribers and occasional readers all over the world who recognize in Berkeley’s civic life patterns that can be observed in similar towns all over the world. 

Thanks to COVID-19 Zooming, in the past couple of years it’s been possible for “concerned citizens” to look in on all kinds of governmental activity everywhere, and it’s often not pretty. It’s a perfect illustration of the old saw that if you care about laws and sausages you shouldn’t watch them being made. But it’s hard to follow what’s going on in all these online meetings without the help of explainers who donate their comments to the Planet on a regular basis. 

These days, the most valuable explaining can be found in Kelly Hammargren’s comprehensive weekly calendars, gleaned from the untidy assortment of agendas and Zoom links promulgated by city agencies and commissions about their meetings. Kelly makes her detailed lists available to several progressive organizations to distribute through their own online methods, and the Planet is lucky to be another beneficiary. Here we headline her work “The Berkeley Activists’ Calendar”, but if I’m slow to post her latest version you can find it on the Berkeley Neighborhoods Council or the Sustainable Berkeley Coalition sites. 

Each entry in the calendar provides a clickable link which lets the user virtually attend in real time, and another one which lets you look at the agenda for that meeting. Kelly adds her own brief comments on what’s worth paying attention to. 

The sausage maxim is amply demonstrated if you click through to any civic event on the calendar, which is something I increasingly try not to do. As I occasionally watch one meeting or another, it’s become apparent that lacking comprehensive media scrutiny the local electeds are losing their grip on governance. 

The most recent appalling example was the council’s discussion of how many additional residential buildings (“Auxillary Dwelling Units” or ADUs) should be built in the high fire risk zone in the Berkeley Hills. The right answer, if you know anything at all about recent California wild fires on the urban-forest interface, is NONE. But thanks to new state legislation supported by Berkeley’s very own YIMBY representatives and their collaborators, every home in that fire-prone area must now be allowed to add at least one residential outbuilding to what are now single family sites. Local jurisdictions like Berkeley have almost no control over this process, but they can add more permissible units if they vote to do so. 

At the January 27 Berkeley City Council meeting, two of our self-identified YIMBY councilmembers (Kesarwani and Droste) were feverishly lobbying for the city of Berkeley to allow two new additions for every Hills parcel, despite dire warnings from the fire department that those narrow curvy streets would not only make it impossible to fight fires in the Hills, but pose a significant threat of spread to the Berkeley Flatland homes. 

Their obviously doctrinaire motions were so incoherent, so loaded with pseudo-legal YIMBY gibberish, that when the council finally voted on Kesarwani’s incomprehensible proposed amendment to the draft ordinance, which would have doubled the already huge number of residences permitted in the Hills, Councilmember Ben Bartlett (a member of the California Bar) voted the wrong way the first time and had to call for a re-vote. This was, of course, after midnight, the Berkeley City Council’s preferred time for dealing with controversial topics 

At least, thanks to Zoom, I was able to watch the chaos on my IPad from the comfort of my bed. 

My conclusion after watching this farce is that most Berkeleyans don’t know or don’t care about what’s going to happen from the Hills to the Bay when the fires and/or earthquakes inevitably arrive. With no more newspapers to cover city public affairs, they never will. Sadly, the biblical promise that “you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” doesn’t always pan out, either clause. 

Most voters are not aware that the YIMBYfied state legislators, led by Berkeley’s two representatives, Senator Skinner, Assemblymember Buffy Wicks (now chair of the assembly’s Housing Committee) and their fearless leader Senator Scott Wiener, have resolved to put an end to local land use planning, which will have disastrous results. 

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CORRECTION: The bill number and author were wrong in the previous draft.