GELFAND’S WORLD-Readers of a certain age may remember Paul Coates, who wrote for the Los Angeles Mirror through the early 1960s. He was known for his short form journalism, which he called "mash notes and comment." It's a worthy tradition which was developed on the internet by writers like Ana Marie Cox, aka Wonkette, and continues …
In the Political Village: Perhaps we should agree that whichever political party avoids nominating a Bush or a Clinton has the inside track to the White House. Right now the carping is at the level of political cartoons about royal families, but this sort of opinion mongering continues to build insidiously. Maybe the two frontrunners are potentially wonderful presidents, but the way I look at it, starting out with a ten or fifteen percent negative based on your last name is a lot of freight to carry.
I also notice that the Democrats have a history of nominating outsiders, even when there is a compelling insider. Carter and Clinton come to mind, not to mention Dukakis. I don't know much about Democrat Jim Webb (he's a former Senator), but I suspect that he -- or some other current unknown -- will do a lot better than expected in the corn country primaries.
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FOOL ME ONCE: It's been a year when Los Angeles has once again made a fool of itself over the NFL. If the league or a billionaire owner really wants to bring a team here and is willing to pay for the steel and concrete, then we will be as Belgium during the wars. But we don't have to keep asking for our own debasement.
Professional football teams moved to Los Angeles in 1946, 1960, and 1982, in the era when the Coliseum was considered a pretty good place to play. The LA Rams set records when they played in front of crowds exceeding a hundred thousand spectators. The league, with its blackout rule, made playing in a stadium with that many seats into a mixed blessing, not only for the team, but for the locals.
Not everybody remembers that the first Super Bowl was played in the Coliseum in front of tens of thousands of empty seats (total attendance just under 62,000). There was something of a local rebellion against the league's decision to uphold the blackout rule even for that game. Los Angeles football fans learned what it meant to be second class citizens in the world of pro football. And in the world of pro football, everyone except an owner is a second class citizen.
At least the current mayor (actually every LA mayor in recent memory) has had the good sense to say that the city is not going to contribute its own money to a new NFL stadium. And guess what? Just a few days after the latest such mayoral dictate, the league once again announced that the cities of Oakland, San Diego, and St Louis are safe for the time being. Funny -- they all seem to have a team that used to be in Los Angeles, but we can't seem to learn our lesson. Also funny is that they've all played the Los Angeles card in trying to get their local taxpayers to pony up money for another stadium. And it has worked in the past.
Perhaps the members of our City Council who have been trying so hard to bring back the NFL should hold a press conference on the steps of the City Hall and announce that they are officially giving up on the quest. That might actually bring a team -- at least it would bring reality to the discussion.
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WAS THAT AN OLIVE BRANCH? Internationally, it's been an interesting year, if you want to put it that way. Probably the most important item, hardly even talked about right now, has been the rise and fall of Putin's Second Soviet Union, beginning with the armed invasion of Crimea, and ending in December with the decay of the Russian currency and what looks like some kind of temporary olive branch.
The western world has learned to distrust Vladimir Putin with a great intensity, but has to oppose him without a lot of arrows in our quiver other than economic sanctions. The sanctions, along with falling oil prices, actually seem to be working.
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WAR ON SCIENCE: We've mostly lost the year in terms of doing something about global warming, but we should hope that it's not entirely the case. This is the preeminent ecological, social, and moral problem of our age, but it continues to be largely untreated. Mankind is creating a new species die-off, some of it due to global warming and some of it due to our own population growth, and the problem isn't even on the public's radar.
The war on science continues to be carried on by the same people who complain about the war on Christmas. I'm willing to put up with hearing somebody say, "Happy Holidays," but the failure to fund cancer research seems to me to be of a different level entirely. If a foreign enemy were projected to kill off one-fifth of all living Americans, we would treat it as a major crisis. The newly elected majority party in the U.S. Congress seems to have missed that point.
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CYBER CRIME: That's just one of the problems we take for granted, albeit a significant one. At a less mortal level, we can think about some other unfinished business. Cyber crime and cyber terrorism come to mind. If nothing else, the great minds should be thinking about redesigning this whole internet thing so that it is fundamentally secure with a few flaws rather than fundamentally flawed with a few strengths.
Making it possible to identify the source of an email or any other internet packet would be a good start. This could have negative consequences in totalitarian countries, but we could make it an opt-in system in democracies.
{module [862]}
{module [662]}
The other thing we ought to do as a nation and as a people is to put the responsibility where it belongs when some major international corporation has its files -- including your secrets and mine -- broken into. The failures at places like Target and Sony suggest that there is a lot of work to do. The major banks and credit card companies should be directly responsible to you to protect your secrets.
That, by the way, includes the problems that are created by identity theft. The credit agencies, the credit card companies, and the banks which let some crook open an account in your name should be responsible for fixing the problems which result. People who have been the victims of identity theft report that making themselves whole again is a nightmare. The companies that are negligent should be the ones who are responsible for fixing things, and fixing them in a timely way.
By the way, it's also important for the whole cell phone system to be made secure. Nuff said.
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VON TRAPPS ACE PETER PAN: On a cultural note, I found that the televised live action version of Sound of Music was actually pretty tolerable. Peter Pan, not so much. Los Angeles continues to be a haven for live stage at the small theater level, including quite a few newly authored pieces. The city fathers will continue to fret about losing television and film production to other places, and will continue to use your tax dollars to recruit new production. It might work to a certain extent, but we should remember that film and television production are lots more mobile than they were in the past due to technological advances. We might also remember that London, Paris, New York, and New Jersey were film capitals before Hollywood took over.
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THE REVOLUTION CONTINUES: 2014 was a year in which the internet continues to flourish. It's been a revolution in the way we communicate that would have been hard to predict in, say, 1980, and not that easy to predict even in 1995. The long term slide of daily newspapers is one result. At the local level, another sad result is the increasing loss of book stores. The small local stores were already hurting as the giant stores took hold, and even the giants are feeling the pinch from Amazon.
During this same period, we have seen a new form of journalism flourish, the online blog. We should hoist a New Year's toast to Kevin Drum, Josh Marshal, Kevin Roderick, Orac, and of course our friends at CityWatch including Ken and Jim. On the national political level, we should also raise a toast to Henry Waxman, who hung in there through thick and thin for a lot of years.
The availability of instantaneous news and the huge growth of online opinion has made this a different world, to say the least. It is arguable whether the excess of misinformation drags down the value of the internet as a whole, but when you consider the positives contributed by the online version of The Atlantic, you have to admit that times have changed, and a lot of it has been for the better.
(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for CityWatch and can be reached at [email protected])
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CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 105
Pub: Dec 30, 2014
