Over 30 years ago, California’s decision to require cleaner cars didn’t sit well with American automakers.

“Detroit said, ‘What, are you people mad out there in California? We’re supposed to make different cars for every state?’” explained Steve Westly, former California State Controller and author of two books on alternative energy.

But within months, every state in the country matched California’s law, and countries around the world soon followed.

“California can lead the clean tech revolution,” Westly said.

At Zócalo and the New America Foundation’s conference, Where’s My Green Job, at San Francisco’s Marine Memorial Club, Westly outlined how far clean technology has come, how California can lead, and what to do about China.

Keynote Speaker: Steve Westly

Since California’s work to clean up car emissions decades ago, the state has continued to lead on environmental policy, Westly said. Los Angeles has been a prime beneficiary of stronger environmental regulation, seeing cleaner air every year for decades. More recently, the state pledged to meet 20 percent of its energy needs with renewable sources by 2010, a goal that the state is largely on track to meet. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has set a new goal of 33 percent renewable energy by 2020, Westly said, at a time when “Washington is paralyzed, saying, ‘Can we get to 14 or 17 percent?’” California also pioneered stem cell research with its Proposition 71. “We all hear complaints that Sacramento is broken,” Westly said. “From a global standpoint, we are still leading.”

The boom’s only just begun

The state government isn’t the only leader on clean technology. Ten years ago, Westly noted, many investors would have said “there is no clean tech venture capital.” Today it has surpassed biotech and information technology to be the largest venture segment. California companies are pioneering new technology, Westly said: Tesla is producing electric cars; Amyris is making diesel and jet fuel that emits 80 percent less carbon than the standard; Sunpower is developing solar cells. Arizona, Florida, and New Jersey companies are innovating in the field as well, Westly noted, and “are dying to pass us.” Florida is building a solar power facility that will generate 70  megawatts of electricity, and Dulles Air Force Base — “those liberal thinkers in the U.S. Air Force,” Westly said — is working on a 500-megawatt solar facility.

The companies make for sound investments as well. A122, which makes batteries for electric cars, went public with a $2 billion market cap; Silver Spring Networks, which focuses on efficient energy, is expected to go public later this year with a market cap of $3 billion. “It’s not about PhDs, MBAs, and Tesla owners,” Westly said. “It will have a broad effect on our economy.” Jobs at Tesla, for instance, certainly include engineers and marketers, but also machinists and assemblers. All the companies need sales people, Westly said in Q&A, especially if salespeople have some basic technical background.

Blue-collar

High-tech shouldn’t be the sole focus of the green movement, Westly noted. “Most venture capitalists want to talk about breakthrough algae findings 20 years out. It’s wonderful, God bless them,” he said. But blue-collar venture capitalism is crucial, as is improving the efficiency of buildings. Key policy efforts could make for a greener economy in the shorter term: Westly recommended retrofitting old buildings; increasing fees for solid waste dumping and more robust recycling policies; tax credits for energy efficiency; and expanding the state’s feed-in tariff to encourage renewable energy. Westly would also raise fuel efficiency requirements for cars and make sure AB32, California’s renewable energy effort, doesn’t get rolled back, as some gubernatorial candidates have proposed and a proposed ballot initiative aims to do.

A good run

California’s long leadership in the clean-tech field could be challenged by an unexpected source, Westly noted. China’s rapid growth has created a lot of pollution — a new coal plant pops up once a week, and China expects to result in 82 million lung-related deaths over the next 25 years. “Five hundred million have been lifted out of poverty into the middle class in two decades. And they’re all consuming,” Westly said.  But the country is also making some strong steps to green its economy: raising auto emissions requirements to 42 miles per gallon (and requiring automakers to comply quickly); planting 150,000 square miles of trees; pledging 20 percent renewable energy by 2020; and creating a 50 percent feed-in tariff for wind power. China could soon become the center for innovation, rather than manufacturing. “I don’t want that to happen. It reverses our entire history,” Westly said. Though if it does, Westly noted, “The Roman empire had 500 years. The British had 400. We’ve had a good run here, from 1880 to about 2025.”

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Watch a video of Westly’s keynote speech here.
Read Westly’s In The Green Room Q&A here.

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Discussion: How Do We Start a Long-Run Green Boom?

At a CVS recently, Lisa Margonelli began to wonder if green has gone too far.

In addition to its acceptably green reusable bags, she said, the drugstore was handing out green paper leaves that promised a dollar of “green savings.”

“They had no bearing on anything green. It was a cardboard leaf,” Margonelli, author of Oil on the Brain: Adventures from the Pump to the Pipeline and a fellow at the New America Foundation, said, wondering whether the concept has become “so fashionable that it is truly devalued.”

Margonelli joined Collaborative Economics’ Tracey Grose, Fresno Sustainability Manager Joseph Oldham, Kaiser Permanente’s Kathy Gerwig, Spring Ventures Founding Partner Sunil Paul, and Michael P. Wilson of the Berkeley Center for Green Chemistry to talk about what green means, how green can be low-tech, and how to go green strategically.

Not just Priuses

California currently has an estimated 159,000 green jobs, spurred, Margonelli noted, after years of innovative regulation and investment in green industries. “It’s counterintuitive, but regulations create new jobs,” she said.

Green jobs grew by five percent while regular jobs fell by one percent over 2007 and 2008. Green jobs include those involved in producing and providing products and services that will green the economy — by conserving energy and reducing waste, for instance — explained Grose, who has created a database of green firms.

But the state’s greening has some hurdles to overcome. The concept of “green” isn’t always clear, and is too often considered “fancy stuff for fancy people,” Margonelli said, like Priuses and bamboo flooring. Candidates for governor aren’t entirely supportive of California’s renewable energy goals because they claim it will hurt the economy — Meg Whitman proposes a one-year moratorium on AB32, and Steve Poizner is more strongly against it. A ballot initiative proposes freezing the law until unemployment comes down to 5.5 percent. “The scary thing is it’s not too hard to get a ballot initiative passed here, if you get people confused enough and upset enough,” Margonelli said.

The economy also makes thinking in the long-run more difficult than usual.  “We think in terms of little booms — a biotech boom here, a green energy boom in Emeryville,” Margonelli said. Instead, we should think several decades ahead and consider how to address the state’s problems — from global warming to budget, mortgage, aging, and healthcare crises — in a sustainable way. Grose added that better energy and efficiency standards will open new markets for new products. Individual businesses and local governments can start the process. “As a business, the dollars you don’t spend on your energy bill, you can invest in new capital or in hiring new people,” Grose said.

California on steroids

One local government that is beginning the greening process is Fresno, which Margonelli described as “California on steroids.” The city’s population has grown eightfold, and its area twelvefold, since World War II. Residents use twice as much water per capita as Los Angeles. Air pollution is bad enough that one in three children has asthma. The recession and mortgage crisis hit especially hard in an area plagued for decades with high unemployment and low median income, Oldham said. The city is the largest in the central valley and has a huge baby boomer population now passing into retirement. On the city’s zoning rules, Oldham said, “all they really do is promote sprawl.”

Fortunately, the city’s green plan is “not soft and squishy,” Margonelli said. Oldham said it began with a goal to reduce energy use in built environments 30 percent by 2020. For a city spending $750 million a year on electricity and natural gas, that came out to $225 million “that would circulate in our economy if it wasn’t spent on energy,” Oldham said. The city began conducting energy surveys and going into homes doing simple energy fixes — adding or repairing insulation, installing solar panels. “These upgrades will get a 30 to 40 percent improvement” in energy use, Oldham said, though the city needs much investment to get there, particularly with its tax base beginning to retire.

The bottom line

Kaiser Permanente provides another example of down-to-earth greening. The healthcare company, which serves 8.5 million patients and had 167,000 employees, began its efforts over 10 years ago. Much of its work focuses on around the pollution caused by medical products, Gerwig said: the number one cause of pollution from dioxin, a carcinogen, is medical waste incinerators. Kaiser launched a program to phase out products that use the harmful plastic PVC, used in everything from IV bags to carpets. Kaiser also focused on using safer chemicals, offering sustainable food in its healthcare facilities, and taking action on climate change. The program has been good for the bottom line. “That whole myth about green costing more? We can blow that myth away,” Gerwig said. Particular products, for instance, may cost more per-unit, like a mercury-based blood pressure readers, but have hidden costs — the potential for spills requires training, spill kits, hazard waste clean-up. Switching out 14 products — including the blood pressure readers and lighting in operating rooms — for more energy-efficient products saves Kaiser $14 million every year.

Cautionary tales

As cities and businesses green, Margonelli cautioned, a smart over-arching strategy can prevent some worst-case scenarios that have arisen in the past, particularly with green chemistry. Replacing existing chemicals with green ones can create health risks, Wilson said. In one instance, an automechanic suffered advanced neurological damage — losing sense and motor function in his limbs — after being exposed to hexane, a chemical used to clean breaks and engines. Hexane replaced a carcinogenic chemical previously used in the auto industry. The California Environmental Protection Agency did “a great thing” to prohibit its use, Wilson said, but they didn’t have a sense of what would come next. In another instance, building workers in Oregon were putting insulation in large commercial buildings to improve energy efficiency. But the product they had been using in those confined crawl spaces could cause sterility — something the workers only discovered after they Googled the material. In the U.S., Wilson noted, manufacturers of chemicals aren’t required to disclose the toxic properties of their products, which go into consumer and commercial goods and industrial processes.

And there are broader challenges for greening, explained Paul, whose Gigaton Throwdown aims to get investors thinking about how to reduce carbon emissions by one billion tons per year. Regulations don’t always work well — a heavily subsidized wind turbine market collapsed when California killed the subsidies, for example, bankrupting all but one turbine company. That makes investors hesitant, he said. California’s education system, thus far its biggest asset to greening, is now suffering. And finally, Paul noted that venture capitalists aren’t particularly interested in job creation, much less green jobs. “Venture funds don’t care,” he said. “Most people don’t care about green jobs. They might care about a job that generates some green.”

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Read In The Green Room Q&As with the panelists:
Lisa Margonelli, Joseph Oldham, Kathy Gerwig, Sunil Paul, Tracey Grose, Michael P. Wilson

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See more photos of the conference and reception here.

*Photos by Mabel Jimenez.

John Rich founded the Young Men’s Health Clinic at the Boston Medical Center as a modest project with a big goal.

“At that time, you could pretty much do anything as long as it didn’t cost anybody any money,” joked Rich, author of Wrong Place, Wrong Time: Trauma and Violence in the Lives of Young Black Men.

Rich’s plan was to draw young African American male patients from other parts of the hospital — the surgery wards, the dermatology clinic, the emergency department — so that he could provide follow-up care and find out more about the patients’ lives. His findings were striking: 45% of patients had suffered violent injuries in the past. More than half had witnessed a shooting or stabbing, a quarter said they didn’t feel safe, and nearly half said they had previously been harassed by the police.

“Trauma was the problem,” Rich told the audience at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Rich explained how trauma — not violence, or their status as injured victims — structures the lives of young black men and why understanding this can point the way toward a solution.

Wrong place, wrong time

Urban violence is often understood only as a matter of homicide, Rich explained. Indeed, young black men are more likely than any other group to be victims of homicide — 19 times more likely than young white men of the same age. But it’s “only the tip of the iceberg,” Rich said. For every homicide, there are an estimated 94 nonviolent fatal injuries. And violence is a recurring injury, Rich said. Some studies have found that, out of a group of gunshot and stabbing victims, within five years, nearly half had suffered another shooting or stabbing, and one in five had died.

The prevalence of violence leads to some assumptions, Rich noted, often uncomfortable, that “young black men don’t get shot — they get themselves shot.” Rich began to gather stories of young victims of violence. Many were injured because they were at a party where “some interpreted disrespect lead to a fight. ” Some were trying to avoid being robbed, had gone out late at night to a convenience store, or were simply mistaken for someone else. Many of them, Rich said, explained their injuries by saying, “I guess I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Urban PTSD?

Rich applied his understanding of trauma to study the impact of these violent injuries. Over the past three decades, Rich explained, there has been an “explosion” in the study of trauma, whether in returning combat veterans or victims of sexual assault. Rich began to see similar symptoms in victims of urban violence, including depression, hypervigilance, a refusal to leave home, nightmares, sleeplessness, and numbness. “Young people who have these symptoms often believe they’re going crazy,” he said. “The burden for that lies on the medical system. We fail to explain what we know as the normal aftermath of trauma.” Nine in ten victims of violence are treated within hours and sent home, leaving them to cope with trauma alone. Many turn to drugs to forget or buy weapons to feel safe. When they return to the hospital with “emotionless faces” doctors and nurses assume they are guilty, or lack empathy, Rich said, worsening trauma symptoms. “It’s a vicious circle and we’re part of it.”

Your normal is not my normal

For many victims, violence is a daily reality, tied to codes of respect. “I began to hear them use the word ‘sucker’ over and over again,” Rich said, explaining that a sucker is someone who doesn’t retaliate when pushed, of whom others take advantage. “You wouldn’t want to be a sucker,” Rich said. “I would venture it’s not an unfamiliar idea to you in the audience,” noting that we romanticize the idea of standing up to bullies. This “code of the street” protects and provides identity “when other avenues to have an identity are closed off to you.”

Rich came to understand this through a young man he mentored, Roy. “The central guiding notion of Roy’s life was, winning justifies everything,” Rich said. Whereas Rich’s father was a dentist and his mother was a teacher who worked hard to make sure he was safe, Roy was taught and raised to fight, and often ignored by his parents. He was a smart student but mocked by others for it. And he grew up in what Rich characterized as an atmosphere of “intense racism.” Many people “withdraw or recoil” from young black men, he continued. “They get followed in department stores. The body language of many of us around them is one that continually denies their humanity.” Or as Roy put it to Rich, “Your normal is not my normal.”

Treating trauma

Roy went on to work for six years in the office of Senator John Kerry, Rich said, and now works with other young black men “whose lives mirror his own.” Roy’s healing process is ongoing, and relies on breaking the cycle of violence through treating trauma. Rich applies this method in his clinic. He tells patients to expect disturbing symptoms, to avoid drugs or buying a weapon, and to call a doctor for sleeplessness and anxiety. He avoids simply treating them or punishing them and considers them as injured and in need of healing. His staff also assists them with tasks like getting an identification card, taking them through potentially intimidating institutions and using the opportunity to offer mentoring and counseling. Long-term engagement is key, Rich said, rather than “hit-and-run mentorship,” particularly for young men without supportive parents. Similar work is being done in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Unfortunately, Rich noted, “What we pay for is medical treatment of a wound. We do not as a society value the healing of the minds of these young people.”

Payment isn’t the only problem, Rich said. Our policy actions sometimes go against our knowledge of what eases trauma, whether it’s cutting physical education in schools or pulling mental health services out of prison, “as if that’s a perk,” Rich said. “We need to actively rehumanize them in our own minds, and think of them not as a drain but as a resource. This is not only about how we decrease violence, but about how we help young people to thrive.”

Watch the video here.
See more photos here.
Buy the book here.
Read an excerpt from the book here.
Read Rich’s In The Green Room Q&A here.

*Photos by Francisco Arcaute.

Two years to the day since Raul Castro took office in Cuba — replacing his long-ruling and then-ailing brother Fidel — Julia Sweig visited Zócalo at the Skirball Cultural Center to talk about changes in the country and its relations with the U.S.

“Your timing, Zócalo, is excellent,” Sweig said.

Focusing on recent history, Sweig explained the changes Raul Castro’s leadership initiated, the roadblocks his reforms encountered, and where Cuba stands today.

Thirty-four minutes

In the summer of 2006, Fidel Castro, suffering a severe intestinal illness, announced he would step aside and hand provisional power to his brother Raul. Soon afterward, Raul began to build consensus on reforms among the leadership and to encourage Cubans to speak more freely about their grievances. Though Fidel recovered — quite a feat, Sweig noted, to be “83 and to find himself not governing, not living on the adrenaline of the last 50 years” — Raul remained in charge. He launched his rule with a 34-minute inauguration speech. “In contrast to the several-hour speeches of his brother,” Sweig said, it was “right out of the box refreshing.” Raul, she said, “sounded more like Margaret Thatcher than Karl Marx,” emphasizing efficiency and productivity. He encouraged agrarian reform, allowed Cubans to have cell phones for the first time, and opened to Cubans foreign hotels generally reserved for tourists. And, Sweig said, “He hinted at privatization, without using that word.”

Underlying all these changes, Sweig said, are Cuba’s still “very very impressive marks” on indicators like infant mortality, maternal mortality, life expectancy, and education. Though political and civil liberties are restricted, the number of political prisoners has declined from thousands to 200. And over the last few decades, Sweig noted, Cuba has gone from being outside the mainstream international system to helping foment revolution in Latin and Central America, having diplomatic ties to most every country in the U.N. General Assembly, and hosting “a parade of heads of state,” including from Russia and China. “Cuba’s critique of American power came to be shared globally,” Sweig said of the Bush era, “and so Cuba gained many friends, with the exception of the United States.”

From Elian to Juanes

The U.S. elections occurring as Raul took power raised more hopes for change in Cuba. The Bush administration’s Cuba policy was characterized by cutting back cultural ties and emphasis on regime change — and which even nixed the twice-annual immigration talks the countries had been in the habit of having since 1994. The Bush administration also “very explicitly, almost verbatim” talked about interrupting succession between the Castro brothers, but the country managed a stable and quick handover. The Bush administration also cut informal cultural ties so much that, Sweig said, “had there been chaotic upheaval, the U.S. would’ve been left at sixes and sevens without a fresh Rolodex of individuals to call on the island.”

Barack Obama, on the other hand, “hinted and made overtures toward a new Cuba policy.” Obama was able to do this in part because of the changing demographics and political preferences of Cuban Americans, whose voting power in Florida and campaign finance contributions have long framed U.S.-Cuba policy. But, as Sweig noted, “We have seen in the last several years, from Elian Gonzales to the concert by Juanes in the fall this year, a real shift.” Since 1994, 400,000 Cubans have moved to the U.S. They’re less political than the first generation of immigrants, are becoming more American than Cuban, and have broader policy interests, Sweig said. Because of their influence, Obama was able to carry 35% of the Cuban American vote — the same percentage Bill Clinton captured on a very different platform of cracking down on Fidel.

Crises, Congress, and controversy

The reforms didn’t go as planned , in part because of major external crises. Raul made his financial calculations based on continued high growth, but Cuba suffered food and fuel crises, followed by three hurricanes that wiped out 10 percent of Cuba’s GDP. Then came the global financial crisis.

Obama was slow to follow through on reform, Sweig said. He attended a summit with Latin American and Caribbean leaders — who took the “virtually unanimous position,” whether left, right, or center, that the U.S. should “drop this obsession with Cuba.” Obama allowed American telecom carriers to enter Cuba and put into place some diplomatic mechanisms, “but there it stopped.” And though the policy may still evolve, and though the Honduras coup “petrified policymakers from doing the right thing,” Sweig said, on Cuba “the Obama administration is more Bush than Obama.” And though “Congress holds most of the cards” and a new bill has proposed lifting the travel ban, the bill is unlikely to pass. Cuban American representatives in Congress “have dug their heels in even more,” signaling their power to direct campaign finance and votes away from would-be reformers.

Complicating matters are some recent events. The first, Sweig said, is the arrest of an American, Alan Gross, who was working to develop civil society and promote democracy and was accused of being a spy. The policy review Obama promised, Sweig said, “is being forced by [this] very unfortunate decision by the Cuban government.” Second, a Cuban dissident died recently after an 11-week hunger strike. Raul Castro characterized it as the U.S.’s fault. Finally, after a recent bilateral diplomatic meeting between the countries, Sweig noted in Q&A, Americans met with Cuban dissidents, which “created havoc” for the Cuban government. Though dissident opinions can be found in the official government the meeting represented “an ugly and awful game that’s going on.” Sweig noted that she “did not imagine that with Fidel Castro no longer in power and with Barack Obama in office, the two countries would have come to this moment of profound discord and irrationality.”

Oil! And time.

Some developments could change the situation, Sweig said, and the first is oil. Cuba believes it sits on significant oil resources in its offshore waters, and has solicited bids from state and private companies from around the world to explore and drill. It has not, however, solicited bids for waters closest to the U.S. “I think this this is a strategic decision,” Sweig said, “to entice American energy companies to make the case” for opening Cuba.

The other is time, although, Sweig said, “it’s uncomfortable to think about or talk about in polite company.” Fidel is 83; Raul is 78 and expected to serve only one five-year term. Cuba’s cultural life is rich; its advocacy of gender rights expansive; and its problems with race increasingly in the open. Sixty percent of Cuba’s population was born after 1959. “Although the embargo hurts,” Sweig said, given these realities, “it is no longer possible to blame most of Cuba’s problems on the U.S.” Still, Sweig said in Q&A, despite the “natural simpatico” between Cuba and the U.S., the post-Raul path is unclear particularly with purges of younger leaders, the reform process may take decades yet, and Cuba won’t quickly become a multiparty democracy: “I don’t see that coming any time soon.”

Watch the video here.
See more photos here.
Buy the book here.
Read Julia Sweig’s In The Green Room Q&A here.

*Photos by Aaron Salcido.

On his flight to Los Angeles, Gregg Easterbrook, author of Sonic Boom: Globalization at Mach Speed, read what he called a scary book. It predicted the imminent decline of the U.S., the takeover of our lives by technology, and major war and disaster.

“Not mine,” he assured the crowd at the Hammer Museum. “I’m an optimist.”

The book turned out to be not a recent bestseller, but rather The Education of Henry Adams, dating back to 1907. No matter how frightening the world seems today, Easterbrook explained, fear about the future is nothing new. And even as the world becomes a better place — with more prosperity, freedom and education across the globe — fear will remain, and possibly get worse, as globalization speeds up at an ever-faster pace.

Getting better all the time

The last several decades have brought a greater quality of life to more people than previously thought possible, Easterbrook said. Life spans have increased and education levels risen, particularly among girls and women. According to the United Nations, 4.2 billion people live at a roughly middle-class level — and about 80 percent of the 2.2 billion people who have been added to the Earth’s population in the last few decades have joined that class. “It’s a tremendous sociological achievement,” Easterbrook said. In decades past, 1.3 billion people lived on less than a dollar a day; today, half a billion people do.

Freedom has spread throughout most countries, though “obviously not all — it’s a halting battle.” Communications grow cheaper and easier, and information is more readily accessible. “Whatever you think of Google,” Easterbrook said, “I think they’re going to succeed in their project of making all public information available to anyone at no cost. That will happen in our lifetimes.”

Butter, not guns

Global international trade likely has much to do with these changes, particularly in the developing world, Easterbrook argued. But it’s also true for the U.S. Without global trade, the U.S. would not have the superpower relationship it does with China, he said. For all China’s problems, it competes with the U.S. in terms of economic power rather than military power — a first for rival superpowers in world history. China’s cities — Easterbrook cited Shenzhen in particular — have experienced skyrocketing growth. Shenzhen “went from a bunch of rocks to one of the greatest cities on Earth in 30 years,” he said, noting that Paris took centuries and even Los Angeles took 80 years.

The deemphasizing of military power is true for other countries as well, in part because of the end of Cold War-era proxy conflicts, but also because of improving economic ties, Easterbrook said. He cited his “favorite fact” — that global arms spending has been declining on a linear basis for 25 years. Per capita, in today’s dollars, the world spends 40 percent less on military expenditures than it did 25 years ago. Combat has declined on an almost linear basis for 25 years, in terms of the number and intensity of wars and casualties inflicted.  “Nations are more concerned with market share than with acquiring territory,” Easterbrook said. “Would you rather possess all the ideas at Google or all the bauxite in a mine?”

More steel, fewer finned Cadillacs

Even indicators that seem negative — like the decline of the manufacturing sector — may be part of a bigger and brighter picture, Easterbrook explained. As the world moves toward more efficient production — to, say, high-yield agriculture and more productive factories — jobs are lost in those sectors. China has lost 28 million manufacturing jobs in the time the U.S. has lost six million. Germany’s car-making center is declining much like Detroit. The U.S. makes more steel than it did 30 years ago, but the workforce is about 80% smaller, and there are fewer emissions and less waste. The American service sector makes up 60 percent of the economy — which is still less than the Scandinavian countries’ 70 to 75 percent.

“Unless you’re willing to live with finned Cadillacs, there’s no way to change this” trend toward efficiency, he said. (He acknowledged in Q&A that there is no guarantee that automation won’t eventually make for too few jobs.) And though the loss of individual jobs is heartbreaking, it frees resources toward industries where productivity can’t be increased. “Teaching,” Easterbrook suggested. “Classical music is just as inefficient as it was 300 years ago.”

A big ‘but’

Easterbrook had one caveat. “I don’t think any of these things are going to make us any happier,” he said. “I think it’s going to do the opposite.” The rapid pace of transformation — from accelerating technology to climate change to economic liberalization — will increase anxiety and insecurity. Countries will look more and more like each other, and primarily like the U.S., which, Easterbrook joked, will mean more freedom and prosperity but also more traffic, litigation, and superficiality. And confidence in institutions is declining everywhere, he said in Q&A.

“I have coined a pop psychological term: ‘collapse anxiety,’” he said. “We fear some imposed calamity — resource collapse, terrorism…. I don’t think that’s going to happen but it is a reasonable fear.”

But if the past is any indication, Easterbrook said, in the long run, everything once frightening will be seen as good. In the last 100 years, he noted, the agricultural workforce in the U.S. declined from 70 percent of Americans to 2 percent — a change that seemed calamitous decades ago. And distrust between countries may ultimately fade, he said, once global population stabilizes and starts to decline around, the U.N. predicts, the 22nd century.

Easing the boom

Meanwhile, although Easterbrook said he “cannot think of any way that any enlightened president could prevent stress from economic change,” American leaders could eliminate stress that comes from poor healthcare and education.  Healthcare reform is, he said, “such a total mess it makes you despondent about the condition of American politics.” Though Easterbrook wasn’t certain what could be accomplished this year —  and noted that the health insurers offered a decent and little-publicized deal last spring—the U.S. could follow either a single-payer-type  model like France, or make catastrophic insurance mandatory and let everything else be purchased privately or not at all, the more libertarian option.

Education is in poor shape as well, with states like California — once a pioneer in public schooling — slashing spending. “We need a future where every single person attends college,” Easterbrook said. Quoting from his book, he added, we’re heading toward a “free, prosperous and well-informed future. Just remember to cover your ears.”

Watch the video here.
See more photos here.
Buy the book here.
Read an excerpt here.
Read Easterbrook’s In The Green Room Q&A here.

*Photos by Aaron Salcido.

At the Actors’ Gang, Jaron Lanier greeted his audience as no other Zócalo audience has ever been greeted: “Hello, humans.”

It was an appropriate way for Lanier, a Silicon Valley visionary and author of You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, to begin to explain why humans still matter in a computer-obsessed age. Exploring everything from what he calls the first computer — dating back to the ancient world — to why the iPad won’t save the world, Lanier argued that crowds may not be so wise, everything doesn’t need to be free, and the Internet needs a major redesign.

The evil seed

Lanier brought onstage and played what he termed the first computer — an instrument called the khaen, a mouth organ made of several interconnected pipes, which he picked up in Laos. The khaen, he explained, predates Western civilization, and “is the oldest thing made by people that has an array of similar things that can be turned on and off. It’s the first computer memory.” Ancient Romans made a much larger version, powered by steam and played by men hitting it with planks — the prototype for the pipe organ, and much later, the player pipe organ and player piano. “This,” Lanier said, brandishing the khaen, “is the evil seed.”

What Lanier termed the “first spot-on detailed description of the web” is more recent than the khaen, but still older than might be expected: it appears in E.M. Forster’s short story, “The Machine Stops.” “Go home and pirate it off something,” he joked. The story is a dystopic one in which “people feel their lives have been leeched, that they’re not as real as they used to be. At the end, the good news is, the machine breaks down. Everyone goes outside and sees the sun.”

Free art

Lanier emphasized that no matter how flawed the Internet, he wouldn’t want the world to go the way of Forster’s story. He credited the Internet with revealing something startling good about mankind in the 1990s — that humans, given the chance, “cease being purely receptive couch potatoes and would instead become expressive, creative people.”

But “a sour, smelly rind grew on the surface of this beautiful thing called the Internet,” he said. “I am partially responsible for it.” About 20 years ago, Lanier was among a circle of thinkers who argued that artists should give away their work for free — that being paid for self-expression was bad for humanity. Today, he said, it seems that a generation of artists has been lost, unable to make a living without being paid for their work. Musicians, Lanier noted in Q&A, can’t tour forever if they want to have children; they can’t sell T-shirts if, eventually, sophisticated technology will let anyone make any T-shirt at home.

Karl Marx, tech writer

The notion of computers functioning for humans and better than humans, isn’t a new idea, Lanier explained. In the 19th century, as industrialization moved at the pace of “a steam-driven, gear-operated version of Moore’s Law,” people began to fight against being replaced by machines, from the railroad-building robot to the loom. “There was something about human dignity at stake,” Lanier said. “People shouldn’t think of themselves as disposable parts who are worthless once the right machine comes along.” Karl Marx understood this dynamic, Lanier explained, calling him a “tech writer” but saying that, like Forster, he came to the wrong conclusion about the course of the future.

The writer who got it right, for Lanier, is H.G. Wells in “The Time Machine.” In the world of the story, no one has to work, and humankind divides into those who benefit from the system and those who don’t.

The Wiki president and the anti-Eve

Lanier blames our tilt toward Wells’ vision on two tendencies. One is the urge to confuse anarchy and democracy. “It’s very natural to say everything be as open and as free as possible,” but if it were so, Lanier said, “You end up actually closing things off.” Evolution couldn’t happen quickly and complexly without cell walls, and every president gets four years between votes. “If Wiki were running the government you would have total chaos of everything, always,” he said.

The worst examples of human behavior, Lanier said, occur when humans act as mob members rather than as individuals, which democracies tend to cultivate. The desire to join a mob is within everyone, Lanier said, citing the pack mentality of “people in the comments section of a blog.” Though crowds can have wisdom, particularly when it comes to coming up with discrete, numerical outputs, they can’t manage a complex, or inventive idea: “We have a term for that: design by committee.”

The second tendency is newer, Lanier said, “a new religion…that is just for digital geeks,” the belief that in another decade or so, as computers learn to improve themselves, all human consciousness will be subsumed by a computer. Humans, then, would live in the computer, freed from bodies, aging, and death. The idea comes in part from Alan Turing, one of the principle inventors of the computer, Lanier said. Turing wrote of a thought experiment shortly before killing himself like an “anti-Eve” with a cyanide-laced apple:  he imagined a computer that could behave like be indistinguishable from a human. The kernel of the religion — and any religion — was in this denial of death, Lanier said.

Today, the moment computers take over — the Singularity — is a popular concept in the tech world, Lanier said, espoused by many of his friends. “It’s a very peculiar life I’m leading at the moment.”

Web 2.0: a human erasure machine

The belief in the Singularity leads to “crap code”, Lanier argues, that imagine the computer to be humanlike, or better than humans. Microsoft Word attempts to predict its user’s wish to create an outline, he noted, and teachers under No Child Left Behind are made “stupid to make an algorithm seem smart.” Search engines are designed to seem to have an intelligence — a sense of what the user wants.

Web 2.0, Lanier said, is “the biggest ritual of the human erasure machine.” All speech is broken down and de-contextualized, except advertising, and privacy becomes theft — because information is sold to advertisers, Lanier argued. “I just have to talk Google into giving up the advertising model. The only problem is all these shareholders,” Lanier joked.

And unlike Google, Facebook and Twitter, Lanier argued, aren’t even real businesses, but rather “just pure ritual…to erase people, to create the illusion that the net is coming alive.” Facebook could be seen as particularly insidious to art, Lanier noted. “Twain, Keroauc, Dylan on Facebook — they wouldn’t have been able to reinvent themselves. We would have lost them. You can’t move to a new town. You can never afford to turn it off.” Young people “use it out of fear instead of love,” he said, to manage reputations rather than for free self-invention, creating a “cheerful conformity.”

And while the iPad may help the publishing industry in the near-term, Lanier said, it remains a “walled garden,” like iTunes for music and Amazon for authors. “The only way forward is a universal micropayment system, so you never have to cross over a barrier, and anybody has democratic access to becoming a seller,” Lanier said. “Google’s going to hate it. Apple’s going to have a problem with it. It’s gotta happen.”

Watch the video here.
See more photos here.
Buy the book here.
Read an excerpt here.
Read Jaron Lanier’s In The Green Room Q&A here.

*Photos by Aaron Salcido.

After 70 years, Gourmet magazine ceased publication in October by order of its parent company, Conde Nast. While the decision to cut the magazine that long set the standard for epicurean living — with its heavily-tested recipes, expert food photography, and rich writing — was much discussed, KCRW’s Evan Kleiman joined Zócalo to have a different sort of conversation, as she joined former Gourmet editors Ruth Reichl and Laurie Ochoa and former Gourmet writer Jonathan Gold.

“This is a wonderful, homey reunion,” she said, “and an opportunity to have a conversation about things you maybe didn’t hear discussed.”

Kleiman, Reichl, Ochoa and Gold recalled the magazine they came to when they arrived in the 1990s, the ways they transformed it, and the way it transformed the way Americans see food.

Judge by the cover

When Gourmet recruited Reichl to become editor, she explained, “I said I would do it if Laurie and Jonathan would come with me.” Reichl, Gold and Ochoa had worked together on the Food section of the Los Angeles Times, revamping it within days of taking charge.

The three would try the same transformation when they came to Gourmet, at a time that Reichl called a particularly vibrant one for food. Gourmet had covered American food for decades but, she said, it had become “old-fashioned.” “I thought of it as a publication for about a thousand very wealthy people, who used it to give to their travel agents and say these are the trips that I want to take,” she said. “There was no fun. There was no sense of this food revolution.”

Reichl tried to infuse it with the politics, sociology, and environmental science of food just coming to broad attention for Americans.  Ochoa recalled that the first cover under their tenure sought to introduce the feeling of a farmer’s market — a woman holding berries out to the reader in her open hands. The inspiration, Reichl said, came from a favorite photograph of hers, of a French peasant woman holding a handful of chanterelles, suggesting “this is for you, I want to feed you.” Reichl wasn’t entirely pleased with the final image — the “pretty young model” and the berries didn’t get the same “sense of the wonder of food.” But Ochoa noted that the first cover balanced the storied past of Gourmet — by keeping the logo, for example — while instituting a new image. And the covers, Kleiman said, are crucial because “the cover brought you in. To me, as a kid, it was the first inkling that there were worlds about which I knew nothing.”

Contents and caterpillars

The inside of the magazine — the offices and the pages — underwent changes as well. The magazine had long been edited “from the top down,” Reichl explained, with an editor selecting and assigning stories. She helped start weekly meetings in which staff would present ideas; old staff suggested issues about produce and farmers, as well as more in-depth travel. Conde Nast “basically said do what you want,” she said. Cooks, too, were more involved — discussing and debating recipes, each working in their own small kitchen (dreading, Gold pointed out, taste-tests by Ochoa and Reichl). “They never assumed that they knew everything already,” Ochoa said. Gold recalled going into a restaurant with a group of chefs for annual trips, like “a group of locusts that were devouring not just the food but stripping all the information to be gleaned from the cuisine, the waiters, the chefs.” Test cooks were allowed, dating from Gourmet’s flush early days, one annual trip per year to anywhere in the world, for cooking classes. “That is gone forever in America, that kind of luxury,” Reichl said.

Reichl and her team also began to be more flexible timing the magazine, rather than deciding what would be covered long in advance, and recruited strong literary writers rather than old standbys. “We had to introduce creative chaos in the system,” she said, adding later that “You let people follow their obsessions, and that’s when you get the best pieces.” (To which Gold replied, “Food is a subject that has, and always will, attract the obsessive.”)

For Gold, the move from newspaper to magazine gave him many more words to work with. “It sounds pretentious,” he said, but he “wanted to try at least to do for restaurant writing what Pauline Kael had done for movie writing — to take something that had been pretty purely a consumer column, though sometimes a very well done one, and be able to explode it.” Gourmet let him do it, Gold said, by giving him more space and letting him visit restaurants up to 10 times before reviewing.

Those multiple visits didn’t always go well for the restaurant, as Gold revealed. On his last visit to a very expensive Alain Ducasse restaurant, he found, in his “beautiful little green salad, a tiny little green inchworm,” he said. “You’ve seen The Very Hungry Caterpillar?” When the restaurant staff saw him playing with the worm, Gold said, “I told him it was OK, I’m from California. We understand these things. It means the lettuce was organic.”

Closing

The initial response to changes to Gourmet weren’t all thankful — thousands wrote in to say, Reichl admitted, “You have ruined the best magazine in America.” Reichl hired staff to handwrite notes in response, to explain their decisions to readers. Ochoa noted in Q&A that Gourmet was the rare magazine that didn’t condescend to its readers.

When Gourmet closed, its circulation was just under a million readers, a record, and its impact growing as Americans began to think about ethical eating and the politics of food. The December issue — which Reichl said had five covers, three elaborate full meals, and other special features — was only two weeks away. The test kitchens are “lonely, unused, but still there,” though their fate is unknown, she said. The website will remain up, without updates, and the recipes remain on Epicurious.com. Its 3,500-strong library of cookbooks will be donated to NYU.  And there may be plans to put the magazine onto discs. “Magazines are not dead,” Reichl said. “We’re not going to have print magazines in the way we have had them, but it doesn’t mean we’re not going to have magazines.”  Reichl admitted too that magazines may have to get smaller, recalling one small publication telling her, “Here’s why we’re the future and you’re toast: there’s six of us and there’s sixty of you.”

But the magazine’s legacy remains, Reichl said, having been “the voice of American food for a very long time…at the very time that American food was coming of age.”

Watch the video here.
See more photos here.
Read In The Green Room interviews with the guests: Evan Kleiman, Ruth Reichl, Jonathan Gold and Laurie Ochoa.

*Photos by Aaron Salcido.

For those who haven’t had to consider caring for the elderly, long term care may a seem distant and not very pressing or merely basic issue — a matter of figuring out whether or not to rely on a nursing home.

But as Debra Saliba, director of the Anna and Harry Borun Center for Gerontological Research at UCLA, explained, “how we support persons with long-term care needs says a great deal about how we as a society care for our more vulnerable members.”

Saliba explained to the crowd at NPR West that though long term care options have expanded and improved over her career, the system is still “fragmented and very poorly coordinated,” with little clarity on best options, quality, and access.

In an event generously sponsored by the California HealthCare Foundation, Saliba joined California Culture Change Coalition Executive Director Bonnie Darwin, Gary Passmore of the Congress of California Seniors, and Gretchen Alkema of the SCAN Foundation to chat about what exactly long term care is, the problems we face in finding good care for ourselves or our family, and how to improve a system that all families encounter, sometimes in the most difficult of circumstances.

What to eat and where to live

Long term care encompasses a large array of services that a large portion of the population requires, or provides, Saliba explained. While people of any age may need it, two-thirds of those who receive long-term care are over 65, and the older a person gets, the likelier they are to require such care. Seventeen percent of the 35 million Americans age 65 and older currently receive long term care; by 2030, there will be 70 million people over 65. As Americans grow older and life spans lengthen, healthcare costs are rising, particularly in the final six months of life, and demand for longer term is likely to increase. Already, 30 percent of Americans self-identify as providers of long term care; family and friends are the sole caregivers for 70% of the elderly.

The category of long term care covers everything from assistance performing basic activities — like eating, bathing, shopping and housework — as well as full care in a home or assisted living environment. Alkema noted that many elderly also require interdisciplinary care from multiple sources, from meal services, support after hospitalization, legal and financial services, and social services.

People not parts

The range of care options can make it difficult to know what a family member needs, how to find it, and how to pay for it. As Passmore explained, most long-term care decisions are made at difficult times — such as when someone is in the hospital. Alkema added that the decisions often have to be made within a day or two and thus can’t be accomplished — bathrooms can’t be renovated, and front steps can’t be converted to a ramp, for example. And while these micro-level questions matter, the larger question to consider when choosing care is whether the person requiring care is comfortable in a nursing home or assisted living home, or whether they want to be as independent as possible, Passmore said. Maintaining independence is becoming the trend, he added, a positive development despite some safety concerns.

A major hurdle for accessing care, Alkema, Passmore, and Darwin agreed, is cost. While public programs help the very poor, Passmore said, “there is this big vast middle.” In Los Angeles County, Alkema said, there are many services available, but most are paid for by the individual needing care or his or her family. Few, Darwin said, buy long-term care insurance in their 40s, when it’s affordable, and in any case, policies a decade or two old may already not fit today’s healthcare cost needs. Many elderly are also “reluctant to spend money on themselves,” she said. A nursing home can cost between $40,000 and $60,000 a year, Saliba said, though as Alkema noted, few people stay in them for a year.

For those who do have resources, the number of options is confusing, and coordinating care a daunting task. Alkema explained that older adults experience particular physiological changes — on top of their particular medical conditions. “Often times our healthcare system will focus on a particular body part or a particular condition and not think about the whole person,” she said. “It’s not about the congestive heart failure and the diabetes, it’s about, are they able to get inside their homes?” Everyone from the doctor to a part-time volunteer is part of a long-term care team, and better coordination and more training would help even though, Alkema said, “we could train 100 geriatricians a day and there would not be enough to support the aging of our population.”

The last secret

Once a family has accessed care, quality can be difficult to ascertain. “Sometimes we don’t appreciate that until we’re in a nightmare,” Passmore said. Nursing homes, despite some bad press, are “probably the most regulated, monitored, standardized part of the long-term care system,” he said. Most are inspected regularly, with requisite follow-ups and corrections. Warden care centers — usually run by an individual in a converted residence — are only inspected once every seven years, he said, which is “the lifespan of a frail elderly senior.” And California has no state standards for training home care workers. These workers have particularly difficult tasks and close relationships with the elderly, but because it is often a minimum wage role, “you can’t expect someone with a master’s in gerontology to come take care of grandma,” he said.

The result can be failures in care or even outright elder abuse, which Passmore described as “one of the really ugly unspoken problems in our society.” While child abuse became unacceptable a generation ago — and public and private systems arose to reinforce the norm — elder abuse “is the last secret.” Elders may be reluctant to report their family; families may feel uneasy approaching authorities. Abuse can range from the physical to the emotional — particularly where finances are involved.

Consumers of long term care can only attempt to make the most informed choices, beginning, Darwin said, by making sure that the elderly person is as happy as possible with their care situation. The panelists noted that some websites, particularly the California HealthCare Foundation’s recently-launched CalQualityCare.org make it simpler to examine options for care — with explanations of types of care, a searchable database of ratings, and a quiz to determine the type of care you or your family member needs. And most importantly, families need to visit often and pay attention to care. “State inspectors are important, but when family visits frequently, nothing beats that in terms of quality,” Darwin said.

In lieu of reform, get hitched

A systemwide fix for long term care seems challenging to say the least, the panelists agreed. State budget cuts have slashed care for the elderly. “It makes as much sense to me to say let’s just close the I-5 because we can’t afford to fund a new lane,” Passmore said. No state or country, the panelists agreed in Q&A, provides an effective overall model for care, and even small-scale individual programs are hard to repeat.

Still, advocates are working to improve care. Darwin’s California Culture Change Coalition, realizing that “even the very very best nursing homes can be kind of depressing,” are working to transform nursing homes into something other than junior hospitals by reducing turnover and rotation of caregivers, for example.  Long-term care insurance can help with costs, particularly if purchased in the late 40s or early 50s, even though insurers are struggling with rising costs, Passmore said. Some nursing homes — attempting to replicate the VA model — require face-to-face or virtual meetings of care teams, Saliba said, though doctors are typically missing. Other homes require the presence of a nurse practitioner to supervise care.

And for those who don’t want to wait around for improved care, there is one way to take matters into their own hands. To improve late life health, Saliba said, “The best plan of all is to get married and stay married.”

Watch the video here.
See more photos here.

*Photos by Aaron Salcido.

Of all the many immigrant communities that have come to the U.S., Mexicans may have the most unusual experience.

“Most immigrant experiences in the U.S. have a very simple beginning, middle and end,” said Gregory Rodriguez, founder and executive director of Zócalo. “For Mexican Americans, it’s not that easy. The process isn’t that linear.”

Instead, Mexican Americans struggle with “a confusing and sometimes painful collision of competing identities” — between new and old cultures, English and Spanish language, generational divides, all compounded by new waves of immigrants.

Rodriguez moderated a Zócalo panel at the Guadalajara International Book Fair, exploring how Mexican Americans see Mexico. Writers Dagoberto Gilb, Michael Jaime-Becerra and Daniel Hernandez — all California natives — spoke frankly about their sometimes conflicted attitudes toward the land of their parents and the land in which they were raised.

Native and foreign

Rodriguez outlined the vacillating history of Mexican Americans. The earliest Mexican Americans were not immigrants — “they became American by virtue of conquest and annexation,” he explained. In 1890, the majority of people of Mexican origin in the U.S. were recent immigrants. By 1940, the majority were native born, and by 1970, the great majority of adult Mexican Americans were third generation. The pattern shifted in 1990, by which point the majority of adults of Mexican origin in the U.S. were foreign born. Today, he said, another shift seems in the works: the fastest growing portion of the Mexican origin population in the U.S. is second and third generation.

Disconnect

Gilb, Hernandez, and Jaime-Becerra are all part of the second or third generations, and all mentioned having an initial sense of alienation from Mexico. Gilb grew up in Los Angeles — his mother was an immigrant, “illegal, as they would say,” and his father was “a white guy who spoke Spanish.” His family worked at an industrial laundry downtown, the staff of which was 70% Mexican, he estimated, but he had little contact with Mexico — beyond Mexicali and Tijuana — until he was much older. “Mexico was a fiction,” he said. “Just a fiction.”

Jaime-Becerra grew up and still lives in El Monte, a city east of Los Angeles that he pronounced, as most do, with an American accent. His legal name was “Michael” but his father called him hijo and his mother called him Miguel. “My parents grew up in a Los Angeles that was not very friendly to Mexican people,” he said, explaining their choice to legally name him Michael. Growing up, he said he spoke less Spanish than the Vietnamese woman who staffed a local convenience store, and he began to learn the language only while watching dubbed episodes of Happy Days and talking to his grandmother.

Hernandez described feeling disconnected from Mexico because of Mexican attitudes toward him as he grew up in San Diego and attended college at UC Berkeley. “You were defined as Mexican by mainstream culture in the U.S., but Mexicans didn’t see you that way, and recent immigrants and people in Mexico would call you a pocho,” he explained. Hernandez, who now lives in Mexico City, where the natives easily identify him as an outsider and where many recent deportees from the U.S. face discrimination, called himself a “proud pocho.”

Jaime-Becerra also recalled the “precise moment” when he realized he wasn’t accepted by Mexicans. He was a sophomore in high school and arrived on campus wearing “tight black jeans, a leather jacket, pointy black shoes,” and his sister in a plaid skirt, “monkey boots,” and a Depeche Mode T-shirt. He recalled, “A kid walks by and looks at us, completely disgusted, and goes, ‘Pinche nu-wavers.’”

Connect

Despite the disconnect, all three panelists experienced, too, a shifting attitude toward Mexico over the years. Gilb explained the evolution in generational terms. While his mother’s generation complained at times about the church, or the poor mail system, or poverty, his generation “romanticized the Aztec,” he explained. “Mexico had deities and natural things that were cool. We had a romantic vision of what Mexico was.” Today, Gilb noted, he’s happy being “I like the Mexico that I can afford. I am definitely an Americano, and I like being the Americano and being in Mexico.”

Jaime-Becerra grew close to his family through trips to the small town near Chihuahua, from which his father’s family hailed. And in the U.S., he watched as Spanish became the dominant language in El Monte. But he also appreciated that the immigrant experience isn’t so easy outside of particular urban areas. The immigrants who move to areas with small Mexican American populations, he said, “are incredibly brave.”

Hernandez noted that Mexico and the U.S. are coming closer together culturally and economically. Just as business travels across the border, Mexicans are embracing Mexican American culture, he said, through rockabilly, hip hop, and other trends. The second generation in the U.S., meanwhile, is growing up on films like La Bamba and Born in East L.A. “Those films were huge in allowing us to define ourselves,” he said. Hernandez noted that he showed up to the U.S.-Mexico World Cup qualifying games in “a blue T-shirt and green socks. I could play it both ways,” he joked.

Still, the panelists acknowledged the real complexities of the Mexican American identity. Gilb discussed in Q&A the trouble the term Hispanic (“When you say that word, you will become a Republican) and Latino (since over two-thirds of those described as such are Mexican American). “The history of the U.S. is Mexican American,” he said. And Hernandez, though he applied for a Mexican passport, did so less for reasons of identity and more for practicality. He did it, he said, “at the climax of the nightmare of the Bush era. And I thought, I need another passport, just in case.”

Watch the video here.
See more photos here.

*Photos by Miguel Izquierdo.

The question of what makes a Los Angeles writer initially seems simple.

“They live in Los Angeles or write about Los Angeles,” said Laurie Ochoa, a longtime Los Angeles journalist. But that’s just the beginning, Ochoa noted, of understanding a city so large and diverse, rife with stories of glamour, wealth, crime and want.

Ochoa moderated Zócalo’s panel at the Guadalajara International Book Fair on the subject, chatting with the LA Weekly’s Jonathan Gold, Lakewood scribe D.J. Waldie, and novelists Gary Phillips and Yxta Maya Murray on finding the real Los Angeles and telling its stories.

Writers’ writers

The panelists’ choices for their favorite Los Angeles books made clear how vast the category of Los Angeles writing is, spanning genres and even different media. For Murray, Mona Simpson’s Anywhere but Here captures “feeling really tiny in this gigantic sea of Los Angeles.” Phillips cited Jonny Otis’s Upside Your Head, an oral history of Central Avenue that captured Phillips’ father’s Depression-era generation of African American migrants.

Waldie said Carey McWilliams’ Southern California: An Island on the Land was a favorite because he best explicated the longstanding and well-known Los Angeles mythology of sun and noir. And for Gold, the best Los Angeles book is about loving and hating the city: Richard Meltzer’s LA is the Capital of Kansas. “One of the necessary conditions for loving Los Angeles is being able to hate it with as bright a flame,” he said.

Gold and Phillips also named contenders that aren’t even books. Philips proclaimed his love of Car Craft magazine, which he read with his dad while they worked on cars. Gold cited “the 50 years of baseball broadcasting by Vin Scully, which sounds more like Los Angeles than any book I can think of.”

Digging

Because of the vastness of their city and its stories, the panelists noted, a Los Angeles writer is something of an archaeologist, an excavator. As Phillips put it, “I grew up in Los Angeles, yet of course, it’s a city that is constantly hanging around me.” In his lifetime, he noted, African Americans have gone from being the city’s largest minority group to its smallest. Immigrants have reshaped large swaths of the city and throughout the greater Los Angeles area, particularly the San Gabriel Valley.

Waldie agreed, but added that there are parts of Los Angeles that are essentially unchanged from the late 19th century. “The past is simply there. It’s gotten dusty, but it hasn’t been torn down or replaced,” he said. He also noted that he also explores the city from a different perspective — that of a non-driver. “I am one of the strangest of Southern Californians. There is a special place for us in hell. That is, in the MTA bus system,” he joked. Unlike the many writers who have lionized the city’s driving life — or berated it — Waldie noted that his experience is distinct and more intimate, one that covers him with “the dust and grime and smog of the city.” He imagines Los Angeles as “a pattern on the ground,” and so wrote a book that mirrored its series of small patterns.

Gold noted that though he buses often, he primarily discovers the city through his truck, looking for “the soft spots on the grid,” the hidden and unusual and transforming places. “It’s almost a trance,” he explained. “I go wherever my car takes me, and Los Angeles is so big and so spread out that you can drive for 100 miles and essentially still be in Los Angeles.” And it’s crucial the natives do the excavation, he added, rather than New York magazine writers who “parachute in, stay at a hotel in Beverly Hills, and write about what they can find within 10 minutes of their posh hotel room before they go back and have their room service dinner.” Los Angeles, he said, is more like Guadalajara than Hollywood: “There are certainly more Jalisco immigrants in Los Angeles than there are screenwriters.”

For Murray, the excavation is more intimate, with a perhaps unknowable aim. She noted that the Los Angeles that inspires her most is the Los Angeles of her memory. As she recalled, “You’re 12 years old, you’re living in the suburbs, it’s really sunny outside,” she said. “On TV there are all these amazing things happening in Los Angeles but you’re in your bedroom and you don’t have that many friends.” What keeps her writing, she said, is the “sense of dislocation,” and “the dream of trying to be something more than that little squid reading.”

Pio Pico to Queen of Lakewood

Another common thread in Los Angeles books, Ochoa said, is a fear of failure. Waldie explained why that fear is particularly suited to a city constantly reinventing itself, and full of people doing the same. “If the story of Los Angeles is you get a new life, and if that life doesn’t work out you get another one,” he said, “suddenly the story is endless anxiety about whether you bought into the right new life.” This sense of unease “makes noir a default condition in the narrative of the city.” Gold added that the city’s own reinventions make it seem as though it has no past. Its residents can’t recall its historical places and moments — the defeat of the last Mexican governor of California, Pio Pico, for instance.

Still, Phillips noted, the allure of self-reinvention still attracts. “It’s always struck me that even today, every day, at the Greyhound bus terminal on Vine and Hollywood, people still come to Los Angeles in pursuit of a dream or in pursuit of the last chance,” he said, adding that it is a constant trope in mystery and crime fiction. Murray once pursued the classic Los Angeles dream as well. After winning the title Queen of Lakewood, she said, “of course the next step you have to take is acting.” Playing the “ethnic extra” or the “Mexican victim,” she said, “I grew up with a Napoleon complex, a maniacal gleam in my eye, and also the feminist dream that anything I wanted to do I could.”

Zombies

Another classic Los Angeles mode is science fiction, even if, as Waldie put it, the genre “destroys Los Angeles over and over and over again.” The city is “the great model of dystopia,” Gold said. And though Murray imagined that Los Angeles may just end up taken over by zombies, the panelists seemed optimistic about the future of the city and its writing. As Waldie put it, “I have the strong impression that the literature of Los Angeles has not been written, and it will be written by people who don’t look like me.” Phillips agreed. “There is a Los Angeles canon that exists now, but that will of course be replaced by the new people who reflect and live and work.” But he, like the other panelists, said he would always be an L.A. writer, even if he moves, because “that’s how we roll.”

Watch the video here.
See more photos here.

*Photos by Miguel Izquierdo.

Every 10 years, the Census Bureau performs its comprehensive count of the American population, a tally that determines the crucial question of Congressional representation, among other things. And every 10 years, controversy erupts.

The 2010 Census will be no different, explained Arturo Vargas to the crowd at the California Endowment.

“This is one controversy we have seen in every Census since at least 1970 — efforts to not include either non-citizens or the undocumented,” said Vargas, who serves as Executive Director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials.

Vargas joined fellow panelists Jennifer Lee of UCI, Paul Ong of UCLA, Jorge-Mario Cabrera of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights Los Angeles, and moderator Steve Padilla of the Los Angeles Times to explore the intricacies of this year’s Census, the Bureau’s long and sometimes strange history, and why a count isn’t just a count.

Why the Census matters

The Census’s latest controversy came earlier this month, when Sen. David Vitter, a Republican from Louisiana, tried to block the Census from counting noncitizens. The Senate blocked the plan, Vargas said, asking, “Doesn’t this guy read the Constitution?”

The count raises such ire, Vargas noted, because it is about “two things nobody freely gives up”: power and money. As Ong explained, states grow or lose population at different rates, requiring adjustments of Congressional seats for fair representation. “That’s the core mandate” of the Bureau according to the Constitution, Ong said. Beyond that, the Census helps enforce voting rights by collecting information on racial composition and gender; employment, income, housing, and other statistics help federal, state and local governments allocate public resources. The federal government alone, according to one estimate, distributes $440 billion to state and local governments based in some part on Census information, Vargas said. State and local governments also allocate additional money based on the information — meaning that for everyone who isn’t counted, governments lose money.

What 2010 Holds

This year’s Census will differ from previous years in a few significant ways, the panelists noted. Ong pointed out that everyone will receive a short form rather than either a short or long form (the long versions once went out to one in six households). The detailed information once collected by the long form is now done through a separate count — the American Community Survey — an ongoing effort performed monthly that tallies 2.5 percent of the population ever year and provides timelier information. (As Vargas noted, 250,000 households will still receive two forms in March and in April, because the Census and the American Community Survey will occur simultaneously.)

Cabrera added that, for the first time, Census forms will be bilingual. About 13 million households will receive Census forms in Spanish and English, according to their surnames and whether they live in an area where 20 percent of the population speaks Spanish. It’s crucial for the country when immigration is a major domestic issue, Cabrera said. Census forms will also be printed in six additional languages, with 56 language assistance guides available, Vargas added. Bilingual forms weren’t used previously in part because the Census was sensitive to criticism from families that spoke English but received bilingual forms. And many growing pockets of Spanish-speaking immigrants still won’t receive the forms, if they make up less than 20% of their community — a likely occurrance in Southern states were immigrant populations are booming but still small, Lee noted.

Despite this effort to count Latino immigrants, many are boycotting the Census, Cabrera said, because of the lack of movement on immigration reform. “By counting me, you’ll get money, you get political clout, but you don’t give me anything back,” Cabrera said, explaining the logic of the protest while noting that his organization is “vehemently against a boycott because we feel it is counterproductive.”

And while undercounting is all but inevitable, Ong said, the real worry is “differential undercounting” — where certain populations are overrepresented, and others are underrepresented. For instance, unofficial housing units in Los Angeles tend to be undercounted. California could stand to lose (or at least not gain) Congressional representation for the first time ever. States in the Midwest stand to lose as well, while Southern states stand to gain. During a recession, the Census may also miss those who are temporarily homeless and living with family or friends. And the undocumented may not fill out forms because of fear.

Counting and creating race

Despite distrust of the Census by the undocumented, the Bureau is steadfast in its assurances of confidentiality, Ong said. The only instance in which they released confidential information was data on Japanese Americans, tens of thousands of whom were subsequently interned during World War II. Vargas emphasized that the Census Bureau now can’t release such information on, for instance, Arab Americans, even under the powers of the PATRIOT Act. The Census also recently appointed an ombudsman on privacy.

The Census’ history is more complicated than a single past controversy would suggest, as Lee noted. Racial and ethnic categorization have transformed over the centuries according to Census terms. In 1790, the Census codified the Three-Fifths Compromise, which counted black slaves as three-fifths a person. In 1850, the count included a tally of “mulattos.” In 1890, in ever finer racial parsing, the Census added “octoroon” and “quadroon” to capture precise racial make-up. By 1930, the extent of racial mixing made such categorization too difficult, and the one-drop rule won. And until 1970, Americans didn’t mark their own race — Census evaluators did it for them. In part because of this history, “Americans have become very attuned to identifying blackness,” Lee said.

Also in 1930, “Mexican” was listed as a racial category, until Latino civil rights advocates demanded it be nixed because it implied Mexicans were not white. Today, Americans are asked their race — white, black, Asian, native American or some combination — and their ethnicity, where they can identify whether they are Hispanic, and from what country. Half of Latinos do not identify in any racial category, Vargas said, and check “other,” which the Census automatically re-categorizes among the other racial categories. Lee added that half to 60 percent of Hispanics racially identify as white, unless presented with “Hispanic” as a racial group alongside white. In that case, one study found, only 13.7 percent would identify as white. As Ong said, “The Census has implicitly created a new racial category — non-Hispanic white.” He added that the Census also implies, incorrectly, that various Asian ethnicity and nationalities are “races”, by grouping them under the Asian racial category. (The listing of countries, however, was a victory in 1970 for those who argued that Asians don’t think of themselves as “Asian.”)

2010 and 2020

There are many questions the Census still doesn’t ask. Religious affiliation is untouchable, as Padilla noted, because the separation of church and state means the question has no legislative purpose, as all Census questions must. Sexual orientation is still off the books — some seek it for informational purposes, others fear the privacy issues, and still others don’t want differences in orientation legitimized by the Census. More practically, Vargas pointed out, the survey still doesn’t ask about Internet access. The latest Census must be delivered to the president on December 31, 2010 — after forms are mailed, and after enumerators visit homes — and will surely undercount, and not ask all the right questions.

Cabrera offered simple advice, at least, for those who fear the count: “If you don’t want anyone knocking  on your door, fill out your survey when you receive it in the mail.”

Watch the video here.
See more photos here.

*Photos by Aaron Salcido.