August 14, 1997
Full Flaps
For a long while I resisted the revisionist assessment
of Willie Brown's mayoralty as being unfairly premature. I say that as someone
who witnessed his inconsistencies up close, while a community organizer
in the Western Addition in the late-1960s, and who carefully read the tea
leaves denoting his chameleon transformation into corporate gofer as Speaker
in the 1980s. More recently, I got swept up in the mass flutter which willingly
accorded Brown the benefit of the doubt, awaiting his reentrenchment as
the urban-arriviste who still bore the imprint of the deprivations of Mineola,Texas,
however much he may have shaken off the dust.
The pounding upon Brown by an early contrarian like KGO's Ray Talliaferro
I ascribed to Taliaferro's legendary enmity toward Brown, attributing invectives
like "screwball" and "little idiot" to the mulch of
late-night talk radio, where vituperation without an added edge means a
loss of ratings.
Wrong-o.
The rest of us ought not mince words any longer, either. What we have in
the present mayor of this city is someone apparently incapable of grasping
the direction in which cities must proceed --- a rather fatal flaw in one who
is acclaimed nationally as an urban Vishnu --- and specifically inept in understanding
his own city and advancing its showcase reputation for the benefit of the
country's other municipalities. But at the risk of being charged obscurant,
I'll say it another way: Willie Brown doesn't have it, possibly he never
did have it, and it's almost a certainty he never will. If the man's latest
confluence of utterances, proclamations and artful management hasn't yet
convinced you of that --- and I'm speaking merely of the past two weeks --- I suspect your
conversion will not be long off.
One has to strain to be civil reacting to Brown's failure to respond to
Ed Moose and other restaurateurs who offered to help save Fresh Start Farms'
urban garden project and the jobs of the dozen homeless workers who have
grown top quality produce for those restaurants for more than two years.
Fresh Start paid its people $8 to $10 an hour and had sales of more than
$100,000 last year, but found itself $50,000 in debt, a consequence, Moose
believes, of the group's pricing its products too low (funny how the poor
are so generous). Each of the restaurants was prepared to contribute to
keep the program alive, and sought complementary city input. The courtesy
of a response from City Hall would at least have been in keeping with neoliberalism's
newest up-by-your-bootstraps advocacy, though in an odd way Brown's delinquency
better expressed the New Democrat credo: have the decency not to die on
our streets, you people.
What was it, $3 million spent on the June Conference of Mayors? Where our
urban maestro halfstepped around in a tempest of fly jiviness and said nothing
remotely pertinent about city issues. And how much is being spent on the
Office of Protocol, or whatever it's called? It's $125,000 million, isn't
it, to tear down the Transbay Terminal and replace it with a smaller, less
efficient terminal no one wants, which will require commuters to walk further
to get to their offices? (Brown's vetoing of Caltrain's downtown extension
was phase one of this brilliant exercise in sustainable urbanism.) The social
types with whom Brown publicly dines and consumes designer vegetables formerly
grown on what were once rubble-strewn vacant lots --- are they concerned that their
tax breaks from the congressional budget agreement might not cover the cost
of that third sports utility vehicle? One last strained question, to close
our segment in rhetorical politesse: Might it just be advisable to brand
as contemptible leadership which lets a venture like Fresh Start go by the
boards without lifting a dialing finger?
Brown has frankly stated that he intends to "cover every inch of the
ground that isn't open space" in the city, which should more than adequately
have confirmed our suspicions about his pro-development servility. His firing
of Landmarks Preservation Board President Denise La Pointe now leaves no
doubt. Brown's attempts to "clarify" the role of the Landmarks
Board in response to LaPointe's refusal to truckle to the Planning Department
over a raft of ill-considered proposals is in keeping with his singular
ham-fistedness. He then chose Alicia Becerril, an attorney whose clients
include the Redevelopment Agency, to replace LaPointe. Official impudence
and cronyism of this sort are of course components of the swagger Brown
is proud to exhibit to the public. (I dunno, but do you find it of interest
that there are six portraits of this guy hanging in the mayoral environs?)
There are other terms for this atmosphere of authority and manner of policymaking,
and perhaps you already have one in mind (six letters, begins with a t;
no, not tin god, that's two words).
A supine Board of Supervisors and a press corps still swaddled in kid gloves
has facilitated Brown's self-ordained mandate (and, yeah, Moose and his
pals should at least have mounted some token protest; the bicyclists plainly
linked their own situation to Brown's blatant abandonment of mass transit
concerns, revitalizing that quaint effrontery known as democracy). The ballot
victory of the Hunters Point Mall has obviously emboldened Brown. As a manifestation
of generic urbanism, it's a masterpiece of globalism's bent toward a single
citizenship of consumption: poor kids (of color, need we add?) earning
minimum wage, marginalized even further to the city's outer edges, selling
chain-store trinketry and pop culture ideals. The erosion of intimacy, connection
and community in privatized cities is a breeding ground for the mini-Versailles
pols like Brown erect in homage to themselves. It shouldn't be surprising
that Brown feels quite at home in this welter of spatial and esthetic obliteration;
he is trained, after all, as a real estate lawyer, a fact probably insufficient
to have sounded a tocsin about his eventual corporate submersion, but ample
for future observation. More discernible was his expressed contempt for
the poor in recent years, and certainly his sullen rebuff of city workfare
recipients' efforts to unionize for pay equity last month was revelatory.
In effect, what we seem to have in Brown is a Colin Powell, with none of
the charm, and even less of the social conscience. (I would have said Colin
Powell-in-whiteface, but that might unfairly muddle the mayor's identity,
and be dismissed as the type of name-calling practiced by his sworn enemies
like Mr. Taliaferro.)
* * *
And now for something genuine.
I wouldn't be surprised if, every night at bedtime, Buddy Guy got down on
his knees and prayed he'd wake up as Luther Allison. That's how good Allison
was. There have been but a few vocalists in modern blues and rock who could
clamber inside a song and utterly own it, and he was decidedly among them.
Technically you could hear echoes of B.B. King, Clapton, Stevie Ray and
Ry Cooder in his guitar play, but he alternately fused and transformed those
techniques into a spiny and fertile sound exquisitely his own.
He played Chicago-style, hard, raw and fully, and he knew what a city was.
TAILSPIN
In the narrative where our lives are played out,
we inhabit several parallel worlds. It's all done with mirrors, refracted
images of everyday reality cast large against a familiar landscape.
A little girl, groomed for beauty princess crowns, is discovered brutally
murdered in her own basement. Discovered brutally murdered, in a white shirt
with a sequin star on the front. Discovered brutally murdered, with a red-ink
heart on the palm of her hand. With the release of each new detail over
a period of eight months, she is murdered again, like the fond fantasy of
a kiss, repeated over and over for the emotional release that comes with
each meeting of the lips.
A woman jogging in an urban college setting is assaulted by a dark man in
a ski mask. A woman walking her dog along a heavily traveled woodland trail
is grabbed from behind and assaulted by a dark man in a ski mask. A woman
crossing a crowded state university campus is dragged down a ravine and
assaulted by a dark man in a ski mask. In every new report each woman is
raped again, the thrilling rehearsal of all previous incidents heightening
the implacable horror of the latest.
A dark-haired woman sits emotionless before a large wooden table. The TV
camera tenderly traces her thin, tired face as a social worker, another
tired-faced woman, discusses her future. Quick cut. A squad of exuberant
men appear on the Capitol steps, shoulderpad to shoulderpad. Sound bite
completed, they break formation. High fives prevail.
In this parallel world, Washington reeks of testosterone, like a high school
locker-room. Snickers of successful seductions reaffirm can-do reputations.
The formerly private --- a tiger-inscribed rump; other well-hung, easily identifiable
meat ---
has become a mere initiation fee to an exclusive club. But much of the collective
snorting and pawing of the earth that goes on there is wasted. When manhood
wants proving, the bedroom is a poor second to a battlefield.
Here Hollywood, the supreme manipulator of mirror magic, rushes to the rescue,
with wars to suit all political predilections. A man can test his valor
against Middle Eastern insurgents, if he likes, or the IRA, or giant space
bugs. Or in the company of other would-be warriors, he can participate in
the supreme trial by ordeal, a fight-to-the-finish between the President
of the United States and fanatical freedom fighters from Kazakhstan aboard
Air Force One.
* * *
I did. Let me take you inside the contours of my head and show you the distorted
images projected there.
Like the President's plane, the theater showing the film was a male arena.
I instinctively slouched guy-style in my seat --- feet planted flat and wide apart,
head thrown back, hands hanging loosely from the armrests --- hoping that body language would
aid comprehension. But to no avail. The heroics depicted on the screen far
exceeded my amateurish attempts at imitative flattery. Nor did the camera
do justice to their deeds. These modern knights, wearing suits instead of
medieval armor and seeking the new grail of support for the status quo,
needed the Riefenstahl touch. (Poor Leni, whose eternal shame is not that
her films gave unwitting assistance to the Nazi cause but that she, an independent
and creative woman, could be used by the Nazis for their own self-aggrandizement.)
The dilemma posed by the film is classic: how does an honorable man choose
between mundane personal loyalties and duty to a higher abstract principle?
Agonizing in its empathic power, this dramatic device can valuably promote
ideological purposes, as the Japanese government of the late-nineteenth
century acknowledged when it conscripted playwrights and acting companies
into its service. The result: weeping audiences watched in understanding
anguish as, one after another in play after play, a larger-than-life hero
from the past killed his own son to save the child of his lord; drying their
tears, theatergoers vowed to offer an equal sacrifice for the sake of their
born-again nation.
Less neat but more attuned to multiple markets, Air Force One waffles.
Only the have-it-all ending can explain Limbaughland's characterization
of the film ---
which in fact espouses no political position beyond a Kristol-clear commitment
to policing the world --- as part of the Clinton liberal agenda. Nevertheless, the
implication is that real men don't eat crow, even to save their family.
In a Cabinet-level constitutional debate to decide whether the Vice President
should take charge as Acting President, the clinching argument holds that
the incapacity of the commander-in-chief is obvious: he has abandoned his
official role and is behaving as a husband and father.
Old themes, new trappings. Unlike the war flicks of the 1940s, this one
is full of chicks. I tended to identify with them, providing yet another
prism for their already diffracted images to pass through. There are only
five of them. Pause the flailing fists and flying bullets for a moment,
and take the time to meet them.
The Wife appears first in her public guise, as sexless as a Sicilian grandmother,
her hair pulled back in an ice-maiden French roll, dressed in funeral black
(to attend the ballet?). Once within the haven of her husband's airplane,
she literally lets her hair down and slips into something more comfortable.
She's a quiet one, saying almost nothing but smiling supportively or reassuringly,
as the situation requires.
The Daughter enters stage right, mugging for the press. Still young, she
is allotted more lines than her mother, notably a feisty speech to the head
hijacker and a role-reversing word of encouragement to her father as he
tries frantically to fly his large plane. She's her daddy's little girl,
complaining to him with great seriousness about being excluded from a visit
to a refugee camp. In response, he rather sweetly confesses --- as fathers often
do when their daughters ask for equal opportunities or equal rights --- that he was trying
to shelter her from the world's unpleasantness.
The Chubby Little Office Worker, perhaps in a symbolic nod to female communication
skills, operates the fax machine at a crucial moment. An African American,
she is the adoring mammy who keeps the 1990s plantation running smoothly.
We last see her in midair, feet dangling, properly rewarded for faithful
service, as she parachutes to safety.
Even more embarrassing is the Young Career Woman, a kittenish press secretary
who diffidently ushers the disguised hijackers into the president's entourage.
Singled out for execution, the captors jam a pistol into her throat and
mock her niceness. She falls apart, filling her final minutes with feeble
whimpers. In contrast, the National Security Advisor, a suit, is awarded
a proper soldier's death, quick and clean.
But the greatest ignominy is reserved for the Vice President. Square-jawed,
wearing a severe gray suit, her stoic reserve remains unshaken despite the
ad feminam taunts of the hijackers and the dismissive power plays
of her colleagues. To her is given the most highly charged moment of the
film when, hearing of the President's deliverance, she picks up the sheet
of paper that would have made her Acting President and tears it to shreds.
Her relief is almost palpable: the real man is back where he belongs.
In this parallel world, illumined by reflections from thousands of defective
mirrors, women exist to be attacked or protected by the men around them,
thereby in either case reinforcing male superiority and their own inferiority.
It's time to smash the mirrors and replace them with clear glass. In the
coming millennium, white men are going to need all the help they can get.
And I, for one, have my hammer ready.