Pacific Gas & Electric, the power utility monopoly for Northern and Central California, is on the defensive for a court filing last week that blamed victims of last fall’s catastrophic gas line explosion in a San Bruno residential neighborhood for negligence contributing to the disaster. Seriously. People going about their ordinary business at dinnertime one day, an underground gas line explodes and takes out half the neighborhood, a fire ensues and it takes the utility an hour-and-a-half to shut off the gas valve fueling the flames, months of subsequent investigation turn up a Dickensian tale of gross negligence on the corporation’s part, and now the company protests its innocence and implies that those killed and injured by the disaster bear responsibility for what happened. This is what lawyers get paid hundreds of dollars an hour to do: create fictional narratives that absolve their clients of all responsibility for anything that has gone wrong, while fixing blame on anything and everything else. In this particular instance, the business-as-usual legal filing is so odious that the company was forced to backtrack once it was made public.

A cynic might note that these kinds of corporate tactics are the logical end product of Reaganomics, which sought to strip government of its ability to regulate business and jiggered the tax code to cause a massive flow of capital out of the hands of the working and middle classes and into the coffers of the already rich and well-situated, with the fanciful idea that wealth and bounty would then generously trickle down to the unwashed masses. We are reaping the bitter fruit of that devil’s bargain on multiple fronts, these days.

“I seriously wonder if we’ve finally reached the moment, some thirty years in the making, when Republicans have come face-to-face with the stark political choices their anti-tax ideology ultimately forces them to make — and they have balked, turned away from the brink, realized they don’t really have the stomach for it after all, reducing their three decades of anti-tax jihadism in the end into one giant, long-running con.”

The general population has been so indoctrinated by this point with the toxic tenets of post-modernism that I think many don’t realize the significance of the game of chicken playing out in DC over the matter of U.S. debt. President Obama appears to have the upper hand. Next year’s election should be quite entertaining.

I’m finding the juxtaposition of Rupert Murdoch getting in hot water for building an empire based on bottom-feeding journalistic tactics and the game of chicken going on between the Obama administration and Congressional Republicans over the U.S. debt ceiling interesting, these days. There has been a dirty little “ends justify the means” symbiosis between politicians and the media for decades, and it has done incalculable damage to the body politic. Ronald Reagan’s presidency was a turning point on this, although a pundit more charitably inclined towards him than I noted a few months ago that Reagan would probably be horrified at where today’s Republican Party has taken his “government is the problem, not the solution” rhetoric. I think that’s fair enough. But the damage is done. Here’s hoping that such old-fashioned concepts as honesty and good faith dealings are coming back into style.

Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end;
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
Nativity, once in the main of light,
Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crown’d,
Crooked eclipses ‘gainst his glory fight,
And Time that gave doth now his gift confound.

Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth
And delves the parallels in beauty’s brow,
Feeds on the rarities of nature’s truth,
And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow:
And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand,
Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.

– William Shakespeare

RIP

Harold L. Olson
July 24, 1920-July 7, 2011

J. Fredrick Griffin
August 15, 1944-July 7, 2011

I made a donations run today, specifically to begin unloading some of the excess STUFF I’ve been carting around lo these many years. I am drowning in books, clothes, and extraneous household items, and it’s time to shed the things that fall short of William Morris’s dictum to “have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” Whew! I have my work cut out for me, that’s for sure. It feels as if I’m sloughing off a skin—the material objects no doubt reflect some inner psychological working, but I have no intention of bogging down in trying to analyze that. It’s just good to have the process underway. I even netted over $50 in cash and trade from Berkeley bookstores, so that’s a nice incentive to keep things moving along.

I took the dogs for an off-leash romp this morning at one of our usual regional park trails, a few ridges over from my house. As we headed back to the car, one of the park service informational displays caught my eye. It noted that the Spanish explorer Juan Bautista de Anza had passed through the area with a small group on March 31, 1776, and described how differently the landscape would have looked back then. Among other things, a diary entry from the expedition noted the abundance of tule elk and antelope roaming the hills.

Even so, it gives pause for thought. The abundance of unspoiled, open space in a gorgeous natural setting is one of the great riches of this area. It’s noteworthy that it’s still possible to reconstruct how the land might have appeared to the first Europeans who stumbled upon it. That’s something very much worth preserving in this cacophonous modern age.

At a certain point along the way from youth to adulthood, it dawns on you that with freedom comes responsibility. Adults can get away with things adolescents can’t because they’re the ones paying the bills. My generation was heavily involved in breaking down cultural barriers as we came of age, a fact that has had lasting consequences for better and worse. The older I get, the more I appreciate the fact that there is ultimately no mastermind in control of the outer boundaries and guard-rails framing the contours of what it’s possible to achieve. Our best shot is to have a clear-eyed view of those boundaries and how they operate, and then tailor our actions to work with, rather than against, the flow of energy contained within them.

Despite America’s multitude of problems and flaws, the ideal of every individual citizen’s right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is a flame burning bright as ever. Our country is a work in progress, and there is still much to be done.

Forty years ago today, the 26^th amendment to the Constitution was ratified, lowering the voting age in the United States from 21 to 18. It was a logical outflow of activism against the Vietnam War, because guys were legally required to register for the draft as soon as they turned 18. There was, simply, no credible moral argument for maintaining the three year age gap: if young men were old enough to be forced by the government to be sent overseas to fight and die for a cause they didn’t necessarily support, by definition they could be assumed to have the maturity to vote on the policies their government was carrying out. My brother turned 20 in Vietnam, a month after the Tet Offensive, so the issue had personal resonance for me. I registered to vote as soon as I turned 18. The first election I was eligible for was a special one for something like county garbage collector, but I dutifully went down to the polling place and cast my vote. When my mother was born, women hadn’t yet won the right to vote in this country, and I sensed it wasn’t something to take for granted.

I bought a small blackberry plant last year to see if it might grow in a spot on the north side of the house where a tomato had been planted in the previous season. I didn’t know if the blackberry would get enough sun there, but I figured it was worth a try. I didn’t pay much attention to the particular type of berry, other than to note that it was thornless and had a good reputation for prolific, tasty fruit. It seemed to settle in last year, and produced a handful of berries.

Over the winter, the thing snaked out a very fertile looking vine that eventually reached about six or seven yards. I thought that would form the beginning of a nice hedge, and I fastened a trellis to the fence so it could drape nicely. Then I had a drip irrigation system put in this winter, which the plant was obviously VERY happy about. We’re approaching “Little Shop of Horrors” territory, here. In addition to the snaking vine, which is now dripping with berries in various stages of ripeness, not one, but two super sturdy stalks have pushed their way out of the ground and grown so tall they were hanging over and blocking the walkway. You can already see that this thing is going to take over the entire northern perimeter of the property inside of two years. I did some triage today to get it from blocking the walkway, but the plant will clearly require further maintenance. But there are certainly worse problems to have than too many luscious blackberries. And thornless! That has already proven to be a saving grace, because I had to wrestle with the snake in order to clear aside room on the trellis for the giant stalks.

One of the cool things going on these days is that environmentalism and a conservationist ethic are coming back into vogue in a major way. It has been long enough since the Great Depression that things such as urban gardens are no longer stigmatized, as they were by members of my parents’ generation who associated them with downward mobility. The silver lining of economic downturns, at least in a place like California that is very focused on outdoor life and has always had a strong progressive tradition, is that advocates for a way of life not based on mindless consumerism have the wind at their back.

There was good news in the paper this morning about a legal settlement over urban sprawl in Contra Costa County. Greenbelt Alliance, an environmental advocacy organization, won a lawsuit that will require the city of Oakley, a growing area adjacent to the farmlands of the Central Valley, to set up a compensation fund to offset farmland that is converted to housing developments. It seems like a win-win situation, because it gives the city the flexibility to grow according to its own priorities while requiring developers to fund the preservation of an equivalent amount of farmland in the region. One of California’s problems is that too much of its growth has come about in a haphazard fashion with a lack of responsible planning for long term consequences. Hopefully, that is changing.