Well, it is election day here in California, and I suppose I should tell you how I’m voting, because that’s what I do. None of this should be shocking. And it is kind of a boring election. Partly, this is true simply because I think that things are going reasonably well in the state. But going through everything has really made me realize that I need to pay more attention to what’s going on in education in this state. There is so much money to be made off educating California’s children, I have real questions about a lot of the people who are swarming around trying to “help” failing schools. Of course, I think the whole school reform movement is a joke anyway and I have radical ideas about education—namely that it shouldn’t be about providing the best labor force for the economy. We are educating citizens, not factory workers, or even worse, grill managers.

Anyway, away we go…

Governor

Jerry Brown—not because I agree with him, but because he’s been a very good manager and he has shown that we need a governor who knows what he’s doing. Politics isn’t a job for amateurs—at least not at this level.

Lieutenant Governor

Eric Korevaar—because he’s a Democrat and he’s not Gavin Newsom. I don’t know, but when I look at Newsom, I see Mitt Romney.

Secretary of State

Derek Cressman—but I can’t remember why. I think I just liked his statement.

Controller

Betty Yee—because she seems to be the only serious Democrat.

Treasurer

John Chiang—he seems to be doing a good job and I’m a Democrat

Attorney General

Kamala Harris—Why break up a good team?

Insurance Commissioner

Dave Jones—I’ve given up on third parties, even though I do have a fondness for those kooks in the Peace and Freedom Party.

US Representative: 5th District

Mike Thompson—because he’s the only Democrat. I don’t have a problem with Thompson, but I do think he is too conservative for the district.

State Senate: 2nd District

Mike McGuire—Because I met him a long time ago and he seemed all right.

State Assembly: 2nd District

Jim Wood—because I have a bad feeling about John Lowry, who may be a perfectly good guy.

State Superintendent of Public Instruction

Tom Torlakson—because I don’t think Lydia Gutierrez is yet up for the job, and Marshall Tuck worries me.

County Supervisor: 4th District

Deb Fudge—because she’s the establishment Democrat, even though it is a non-partisan office.

County Controller

David Sundstrom—because I don’t like Gary Wysocky, who again, may be a perfectly great guy.

District Attorney

Jill Ravitch—because Victoria Shanahan is literally in bed with the Sheriff’s Department (she’s married to a deputy sheriff).

Proposition 41

Yes—I’m always for building homes for the poor.

Proposition 42

Yes—local governments are screwing with citizen rights.

There you go. Not too exciting and some of my reasons are petty. That’s democracy, folks!

If you live in California, you need to vote today. As far as I’m concerned, you owe it to me, just like I owed it to you and every other Californian. Citizenship is a responsibility. Find the time. Vote. However you vote, we as a country and a state are better for it.

Afterword

For the record, I have not yet voted as I write this. It is not even 3 June 2014 yet. But this is how I will vote, and by the time you read it, it will almost certainly be how I did vote.

Update (3 June 2014 8:21 am)

Well, I’ve voted. This was a weird election for me because for some reason, I got a mail-in ballot. I didn’t ask for one and I don’t like them. I like going to the polls—it’s fun. But I found out that you can get a mail-in ballot and still go to the polls. It’s actually a lot easier because there is no transcribing of my choices from the sample ballot. But since I’ve never done it before, it stressed me out. I had dreams about poll workers treating me hostilely. In one of them, she insisted upon weighing me and measuring my height to make sure I was the right person.

Too few people understand that citizenship is not just about rights; it is also about responsibilities. That’s why I think everyone should vote at a minimum, although I do think as a country we make it harder than it ought to be—especially for the working poor. But if a democracy is not constantly tended to, it turns inexorably into an oligarchy which I believe I have been seeing my whole life. When it comes to one thing that everyone cares about—the economy—there really isn’t much choice among the parties. “Liberalism” has come to mean “social liberalism” and “conservatism” has come to mean “social conservatism” because both parties now agree on what I call “economic conservatism.” And the worst kind of economic conservatism. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you really should read Dean Baker’s excellent The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive, which is available in electronic form for free from the Center for Economic and Policy Research.)

Well, as I was making my final preparations for tomorrow’s vote, I decided to dive into the propositions. They aren’t terribly exciting. There’s a bond measure for veterans’ housing and a curious little measure—Proposition 42—about who ought to pay for the cost of providing access to meetings and documents as dictated by the 1968 California Public Records Act and later laws. It seems that local governments are circumventing these rights by pleading poverty. Proposition 42 says that local governments have to provide access, eat the cost, and shut up. The issue is clear as far as this is concerned: the rights must be paid for, so we do need to sort this out. I’m fine with requiring the local governments to do so, but I would also be fine with the state government paying (although I can see that providing some bad incentives). Regardless, local funding is on the ballot and so I’m for that.

But while going over it all, I noticed that there was only one person arguing against both these measures: Gary Wesley. I don’t know how I managed to not know about Wesley until this time, but it has only been recently that I’ve been following politics while in California. Still, it is a major oversight because Wesley is a legend. Back in 1986, The Los Angeles Times wrote, Self-Appointed Rebuttal Writer: He Can’t Resist Saying ‘No’ to Ballot Measures. At that time, they described him as a “33-year-old San Jose attorney.” If I had to guess, I’d bet he is now a 61-year-old San Jose attorney. (I’m more sure of the age and occupation than the location.) And he’s been doing this since 1978—36 years!

Don’t get the wrong idea about Wesley, though. He isn’t some crank like, “Old man yells at cloud!” He seems to do this as a public service—as a civic duty. You see, if a proposition gets on the ballot, it must have supporters. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be on the ballot; it isn’t magic. But often, a proposition just isn’t controversial. Take for example, Proposition 41: there aren’t a lot of people who are interesting in blocking funding to help homeless veterans. So Gary Wesley steps in and provides a counter argument. The Times articled quoted him as saying, “I don’t feel that strongly about it. I would submit an opposing argument to almost anything.”

I don’t know anything about Gary Wesley other than that he does this one thing. But he is a hero. I almost want to vote against these propositions just to show how strongly I feel. But I’m certain that would go exactly counter to what he is doing. This is about democracy and citizenship. We need a whole lot more Gary Wesleys in this country.

I’m very fond of the Janis Ian song, “The Bridge.” The first line of the song is, “The bridge that spans the gap between our souls…”

That is the obvious symbolism of a bridge: something that brings people and places together — that fills in the missing bits of our communal soul. I live very close to one of the most famous bridges in the world: the Golden Gate Bridge. And although I cross over it quite often, I still get a thrill out of it. It is magnificent and it spans the void that separates the Left Coast from its Capital, which is San Francisco.[1]

For me, it is a symbol of the connection that all we Left Coasters share.

Symbol of Hope, Symbol of Death

But sadly, the Golden Gate Bridge is also a symbol of loneliness, despair, and death. On average, every two weeks someone kills themselves by jumping from the bridge. And because so many people have killed themselves with the Golden Gate Bridge, it has become something of a destination for people who see their best way forward as death.

I’ve long been fascinated by a quote from jump survivor Ken Baldwin, “I instantly realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable — except for having just jumped.” Those words have haunted me, because their meaning is clear: for most people, suicide is the result of a weak moment. Most people who are stopped or survive never try again. It’s like the old saying, “Wisdom comes to some suddenly.”

CHP Sgt Kevin Briggs is known as “Guardian of the Golden Gate.” Over the last two decades, he has stopped over 200 people from jumping from the bridge.A great deal of effort is spent watching for people on the bridge who look like they might be jumpers. But it is surprisingly hard to tell.

The Documentary The Bridge

Last week, I watched Eric Steel’s 2006 documentary, The Bridge. He put together a crew of 12 people who spent a year filming the bridge, every day. The results are amazing.

The film starts with various shots of the bridge and the bay and most of all of the people walking across the bridge and looking over the railing.

And then there is an older man looking over the edge. He looks like a tourist. He climbs over the rail and jumps. Many, perhaps most, people regret their decisions as they fall as Baldwin did. But this man doesn’t seem to have any regrets. He doesn’t try to reorient himself. He just falls to his death. It was shocking to watch. And it is not the only jump that was filmed. During the filming, 24 people killed themselves from the bridge, and the filmmakers got footage of 23 of them.

The Filmmakers Are Trying to Save Lives

Before you get the idea that the filmmakers were some kind of ghouls, let me be clear: they did not approach this as nature photographers, just capturing whatever happens without getting involved. When they could help someone, they did. And during the year, they prevented six suicides themselves.

One is in the film where a young woman climbs over the railing. The cameraman talks about it afterward. There is a tendency for people who do this kind of work to become detached from the reality that they are filming. But finally, it hit him, “She going to jump.” So he leaned far over the railing, grabbed her by her jacket and flung her back onto the sidewalk. They fought for about three minutes before authorities showed up and took her to the hospital. One hopes that she is now glad things turned out that way.

We Live for Others

In what was probably most compelling to me, the filmmakers captured an attempted suicide that is prevented by some CHP officers. They talk the guy down. The filmmakers found the guy and interviewed him later. He told his story about being in a very unhealthy marriage with lots of drugs and infidelity.

So he kissed his young son goodbye and went to the bridge. He was very candid about how the officers got him to stop, “They used my son against me.” But he seemed glad that they did.

Not a Fun Film — But Important

Overall, the film is kind of a downer. But it does have a hopeful message. If people can be stopped, or even slowed down, there is hope.

A lot of people have mental problems that are treatable. I hope that wider access to healthcare (especially here in California) will help matters. But the movie is worth checking out.

Since it was made, the bridge authority has been in the process of installing a “plastic-covered stainless-steel net below the bridge as a suicide deterrent.” Of course, nothing will stop everyone. But every bit the process is made harder saves lives.

See The Bridge — It’s Edifying

The whole film is on YouTube as I write this, but it will be taken down. You should buy it or rent it, of course. Here is the trailer:

[1] For the record, the Bay Bridge is my favorite with its double span. And by Left Coast, I mean the nation defined in American Nations, which includes Oregon and Washington, but not (Thank God!) Southern California.

I have a secret list of films that I think are magnificent. Some of them are silly like His Girl Friday and some are epic like Ran. But there is one film on the list that I don’t even like talking about because I really don’t know what it is, Francis Cooppola’s The Conversation. I’ve watched it twice just this week, and I have watched it dozens of times over the last three decades. It is different every time I see it. And to even talk about it is to minimize it. But talk about it I will do, even though I think it hopeless.

On its most basic level, The Conversation is the story of a murder plot. A couple has a conversation that is being secretly recorded by our hero, Harry Caul. But Caul mistakes the actual purpose of his work, which is not to uncover an affair, but to lure the suspicious husband to a hotel room where he can be murdered. But if that were all that was, it would be nothing more than Blow Out, which is a fine film, but not great. Instead, the film is interested in deeper questions, like Blowup, which The Conversation is clearly an homage to.

The Meaning of The Conversation

But whereas Blowup, in as much as it deals with anything, is about the nature of perception, The Conversation is about the nature of reality. Caul starts the film arguing with his landlord about having keys to his apartment. She tells him that she must have keys in case of a fire. He responds, “Well, see, I would be perfectly happy to have all my personal things burn up in a fire, because I don’t have anything personal. Nothing of value. Nothing personal except my keys…” That does sum up the state of his life. Since his business is invading other people’s privacy, the only thing he has is his own privacy. And what he is keeping private is a kind of non-life: he has a kept woman, Amy, he occasionally sees; he plays saxophone along with jazz records; and he has his work. And his privacy obsession stifles the blossoming of the two genuinely positive things in his life: his love of Amy and his love of jazz.

If Caul was truthful when he said that the only personal thing he had were his keys, then he has lost everything at the end of the movie. And that is, for many years how I saw the ending. He has found out that his former client has recorded him in his apartment. So Caul literally dismantles the apartment—never finding the bug. After giving up, we see him in his apartment, which is now a mess of debris, playing his saxophone. He is doubtless being recorded. The blinds and curtains have been torn down, so he is also visible to the world. He is naked. But is that a bad thing?

What Caul is doing at that moment is exactly what he would have been doing if he still had all the keys to his life. So the positive take on the ending is that Caul hasn’t lost his privacy; he has simply lost the illusion of privacy. And that illusion doesn’t shatter suddenly. Using a pen microphone, Moran manages to record Caul having the most honest conversation he has in the whole film. The next day, he learns that his client has known all about him from before they even hired him. This certainly was a painful realization for him, but in the end, he’s discovered a great freedom.

Now I know what regular readers will think about this: there goes Frank just trying to turn what is an incredibly depressing ending into something positive. Maybe. But I think there is a good reason to believe that he has been transformed. If he had been beaten, he wouldn’t be playing his sax. But there are points of his back story that point to a kind of rebirth. During the dream sequence, he tells the story of a near death experience and after he regained consciousness, “I remember being disappointed I survived.” And then, when his work in New York leads to the murder of three people, he flees all the way to San Francisco. He repeats over and over again, statements like “It has nothing to do with me” and “I’m not responsible.” But he knows better. In the confessional, after mentioning some minor things, he says, “I’ve been involved in some work that I think will be used to hurt these two young people. It’s happened to me before. People were hurt because of my work—my work. I’m—I’m afraid it could happen again, and I—I was in no way responsible. I’m not responsible.”

I think that after the ending, Harry goes into work. Maybe he decides he’ll only work for the IRS or go into another line of work altogether. He gets on better with Stan and everyone. Maybe he manages to find Amy. Regardless, he finds a woman to have an actual human relationship with. And he starts living. But The Conversation isn’t about a rebirth because Harry Caul has never really lived. It is, in a sense a birth—he’s finally made it out of the womb. The most remarkable thing about this is that our hero’s name is “Caul,” and the caul is “the amniotic membrane enclosing a fetus.” Most births take hours or days, this one took 44 years. Better late than never. Happy birthday Harry!

Other Meanings — If You Like

Okay, you don’t like my take on the film? I have at least a dozen others. One that I’m quite fond of is that nothing is happening externally in his most recent job. It is just a husband spying on his wife and the husband dies in a car crash—a pure coincidence. What’s really going on is that Harry Caul is finally coming to terms with his responsibility in the 1968 welfare fund case that led to the three murders. He sees a similarity in this case and begins hallucinating. There was no argument in the “Jack Tar Hotel. 3:00. Room 773″—no blood overflowing the toiler. There is no one recording his apartment. He tears it apart because he’s gone crazy. He is punishing himself for the sin of spying by creating a world that is now spying on him. But I don’t find that fulfilling, because that is basically what his whole life had been about up until that point: hiding from people he assumes are doing to him what he does to them.

Or you could see The Conversation the way most people see it: he has been destroyed, and now all he has is his sax that he plays alone, not even along with records. But that is not only boring, it dismisses what is probably Gene Hackman’s best acting performance ever. He is playing a character who talks very little but says very much. And it is a disservice to the character to think that he ever thought that being a good spy meant he was immune to being spied on himself. That’s why he created a life of his own that was so small that there was virtually nothing to spy on.

So right now: I think The Conversation is about the birth of a man. But I will doubtless change that opinion later. Or at least refine it.

The Conversation as Cinematic Art

Regardless of meaning, The Conversation is also a masterpiece of filmmaking as art. I’m rather glad that Bill Butler did the cinematography rather than the obvious choice of Gordon Willis (who just died last month at 83—of cancer). I love Willis’ work, but it is highly stylized and Butler’s more naturalistic approach works really well here. Some of the surveillance camera moves are a little too cute, but I don’t blame that on him.

The acting is strong, most especially Hackman. But some of the minor roles are really great too, especially Allen Garfield as the slimiest of characters: Moran. Also, I thought that Teri Garr managed to create a whole reality in her very small part. If there is one part that is weak, it is Harrison Ford as Martin Stett. He seems ill at ease in the part and although he doesn’t really hurt the film, he just seems out of place. Of course, I’m not a big fan of Ford. I like him well enough, but he’s wildly overrated.

More than most films, The Conversation lives and dies by the editing. And this editing is fantastic. Although the viewer is riveted, it is actually paced very slowly. And just as the tapes of the conversation are layered, so is the editing of the film. Taken all together, it is very much like a fugue. But with every pass we are drawn deeper and deeper into it. I think we have to credit this to Walter Murch more than to Richard Chew, who was nominally the editor of the film. Murch is both an editor and a sound designer, and that is the combination that is most impressive in the film. I’m sure Coppola was very involved too.

Over all, there were a lot of great people doing their best work on this film. But it is easy to see how the film could have been ruined. And I think we have to thank Coppola above all for never losing track of what he was making. He started with a great screenplay, got the right people to help him make it, and brought the whole thing home. Interestingly, the film lost the Best Picture Oscar to Coppola’s other film, the far weaker The Godfather Part II. But The Conversation did win the Palme d’Or, which is typical: Cannes has a much better history of spotting genius in real time.

Two Other Issues

There are two other things about the film that bug me. One is that almost everyone who sees the film is obsessed (at least for a while) about how Harry Caul was recorded in his apartment. I guess this is natural, but it is irrelevant. As Caul himself knows: there are always ways. The film also doesn’t reveal how Caul recorded the 1968 welfare fund case, but no one seems concerned about that. Both questions are irrelevant, and their answers would be boring. The point is that Caul being a great spy is of very little use to him in protecting his own privacy.

The other issue is the change in the recording of the line, “He’d kill us if he got the chance.” Even time, the inflection is the same, “He’d kill us if he got the chance.” This implies that they are worried that he is going to kill them. But after we know that they were the ones who murdered the older executive, the line is repeated with a different reading, “He’d kill us if he got the chance.” That implies that they are going to kill him before he kills them. Basically, it is a complete reversal of the meaning of the line throughout the film.

When I first saw the film, that was the killer line. It worked perfectly. In an instant, everything changed. It is highly effective. And I don’t like it. It can be justified, because it is the one time we don’t hear it repeated on the tape. It is Harry Caul’s memory and just like the audience, he suddenly sees the line differently and that he had the situation exactly backwards. But it still feels like a cheat and it isn’t necessary.

For the past couple of days (and to a large extent for the last many years), Dean Baker has been taking George Will to task for the fact that he is a complete idiot—most recently in, George Will Still Can’t Get Access to Government Data. I have a visceral hatred for George Will, because he is so much just William Buckley: the Next Generation. Although just like with Star Trek, the next generation has none of the spark of the original. What’s especially true is that Will doesn’t have the erudition of Buckley, and every time he includes an obscure reference, you know one of his many assistants came up with it. As I’ve noted before, if he were a liberal, he wouldn’t even be a blogger; but because the media are so desperate for any conservative who makes any sense at all, he’s a journalistic star.

This weekend, Will published, Showdown in Tar Heel Country. Mostly the column is just, “Thom Tillis: ra ra ra!” So who really cares? But Will then starts to talk about what a great job the Republicans have done with the North Carolina economy. That’s where he gets into trouble. That’s where he always gets in trouble, because he’s a total hack. He is the William Lane Craig of conservative politics: facts never stand in the way of what he knows to be The Truth™.

So George Will wrote, “The state has added more than 200,000 jobs in three years. Unemployment has fallen from 10.4 percent in January 2011, then eighth-highest in the nation, to 6.2 percent, one of the largest improvements among the states in the past 13 quarters.” Of course, the 200,000 jobs number has no context, and state unemployment numbers don’t necessarily mean that a larger percentage of the population is employed. Baker got right to the heart of the matter: what has been the percentage of job growth in North Carolina? Well, it turns out it is 5.18%, which isn’t bad, but the nation as a whole had a growth rate of 5.12%. So North Carolina has done about as well as the nation has. And then Baker noted, “Furthermore, the number of jobs in North Carolina is still a full percentage point below its pre-recession peak, while nationally the number of jobs is down by less than 0.1 percent from pre-recession levels.”

As for that claim about the unemployment rate going way down. Well, let me tell you what really happened. The unemployment rate in North Carolina stayed markedly above the national level. It was only in the last year that it plummeted. And it didn’t plummet because people got jobs. It plummeted because extended unemployment benefits were ended (because of George Will’s beloved Republican Party), so those who were at least nominally looking for a job dropped out of the labor market altogether. So in as much as the Republicans in North Carolina affected the economy of the state, they seem to have made it worse.

But maybe we should applaud Will. After all, he does get the basic facts right. He just does it in a totally deceptive and disingenuous way. This article is actually an improvement over what Will does whenever he writes about global warming. Still, it is an outrage that this sub-genius partisan hack is given such a prominent place in the mainstream media.