THE DOUBLE EDGED SWORD:

Living Up To The 'Sucka Free' Sobriquet

by Colin Hussey

We're being cheated. We're being played for suckers, and we know it. We know it but have been afraid and/or unsure of how best to stop it. We're being cheated by luminaries of the local, national and world stage, after all. There's a bunch of them, and they've been doing it for ages, now. And we gave them the power.

The acting is bad, the writing is worse, and the narratives in the offing leave a sour stench in their wake. Who here's tired of the Daly/Newsom feud? I sure as hell am. If, as Chris has put it, San Francisco's become a "playground for the rich," then Daly and Newsom are among the high-rollers, and our communities are their gaming tables.

Does it matter that Newsom happens to be playing better than Daly, these days? This was in evidence during a June rally before City Hall where a bunch of Newsom supporters were on hand to decry Daly's proposed budget cuts, while a bunch of Daly backers were summoned to rally for more affordable housing and got punked, as it turned out to be a Gavin show, while Chris was stuck in a committee meeting inside. Later Newsom would seek to cut the number of public trash receptacles to spite the garbage collectors, and Daly would lose his chair of the Budget Committee over an offhand remark on a purported coke habit of his enemy's... then receive further censure after getting into a nasty confrontation with D8 Supervisor Bevan Dufty. (Bevan Dufty??? That's a new low even for Chris.) Way to run the City, guys!

Then there's the perplexing case of D4 Supe Ed Jew. Whereas Daly is bad at basic diplomacy, Jew, from what I've pieced together, has neither knack nor nose for sleaze. As a politician, you can be corrupt, you can be incompetent at public policy, you can be sometimes neither and (in the case of Bush) sometimes both, and still manage to survive in office and get reelected, even. But you're dead in the water, if you're incompetent at corruption. Jew's supporters have every right to feel betrayed. He was elected to fight shady dealings, not become enmeshed in them.

We're being cheated in Sacramento, where our state legislature is budgeting more for prisons, this year, than education. The prison-industrial complex is swallowing locales like Susanville, where the correctional facilities have become pretty much the only show in town, and countybound parolees are finding it nearly impossible to make an honest living. So they stay stuck in the system on the taxpayers' tab.

We're being cheated nation-wide by major party bigwigs and donors who are also cheating themselves. How on earth did a Clinton-versus- Giuliani presidential race become acceptable as a foregone conclusion? Giuliani's a crooked ex-Mayor who owes his political standing entirely to 9-11. He wasn't anyone's idea of presidential material prior to that catastrophe, and no amount of selling being done by his publicity team and a compliant national news media has convinced me otherwise. And what, if anything, has Senator Clinton done to check and balance the Constitution-shredding excesses of the Bush administration? She was among the appeasing doormats who greenlit the Iraq invasion/occupation and the PATRIOT Act. Are we to believe she'll suddenly gain a backbone from being elected president? Yeah, and I'm Clark Kent.

One cannot help but suspect there being powerful Republican interests who want Clinton to be the Democratic opponent and Democratic counterparts banking on Giuliani heading the GOP ticket, the strategy being to thoroughly scare their respective bases into voting for whomever they themselves offer as nominee, no matter how odious. Why should we as voters, regardless of party affiliation, have to put up with this?

We're certainly being cheated by mainstream news media and nationally syndicated opinionmakers, whose apparent through-line for too long has been, "Be afraid. Be very afraid." It's a big reason why we're facing the prospect of a Clinton vs.- Giuliani race in the first place. Well, if you've not done so already, it's high time to embrace the exact opposite paradigm, as conveyed and printed directly in this humble neighborhood 'zine: Be brave. Be very brave.

True, the inclination to be afraid may take years of conditioning to overcome. However, with the world as it is, we really can't afford to cower. When we make decisions and non-decisions out of fear, we tend to get played for chumps. We sacrifice liberty for safety and get neither. We appeal to authority figures, who are often good-hearted yet flawed and close to impotent, saying, "something must be done" about this or that problem, heaping a load of power and responsibility upon them but with no clear strategies for fixing the problems, and then we wonder why they get worse.

For if we leave it to authority to come up with all the plans without our input, what we invariably get are more walls and cages, more badly written laws to help fill those cages in perpetuity, more topheavy bureaucracies with ambiguously defi ned responsibilities, more protracted warfare and less of our tax dollars going to good use. Empowered citizens check and balance the powers of state, corporate and criminal elements-who else is going to do so? When we stay scared, gangsters rule our streets and the world itself.

It takes bravery to be a citizen, to be politically active, to speak up at public meetings, to run the risk of being wrong or sounding foolish, to ask probing questions of public officials and offer them fresh ideas, to ride the streets of this crazy City on a bike, challenge an entrenched incumbent, vote no matter what and live vibrantly in spite of all the murderers, thieves and frauds who dominate the news.

One more important thing to keep in mind is that not all government is failing. I recently had to make a trip to the DMV to renew my lapsed license, and not only did the process go way quicker than I thought it would, I received my new ID in the mail just over a week later. So here's to the California Department of Motor Vehicles. How they've managed to become so quick and efficient is, for now, one of life's great mysteries, but at least one government institution has proven to me that not only are satisfying outcomes possible in the public sphere, they do on occasion happen.

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