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Tag Archives: San Francisco

The Dogs of (Class) War

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Posted by Jonathan Mozzochi in Fiction

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Dogs of war, Gavin Newsome, Gig Economy, Hunters Point, Kamala Harris, on-demand, plutocracy, PTSD, San Francisco, Sea Cliff

 

Bloodhounds

 

He completed two tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan that included work as a grunt and later as a bomb technician, the latter earning him the nickname ‘Blood’, short for Bloodhound, in recognition of his superior bomb detection skills. After almost a decade of service, and as a result of his many physical and psychic wounds, his productivity declined. Finally he was honorably discharged, Purple Heart in hand. Subsequent his discharge his PTSD got worse, as did his many other physical ailments, and he slowly developed a debilitating addiction to OxyContin. Blood found it unconscionable that recent legislation made it difficult for him to obtain the medicine he needed to function. While no longer on the battlefield, he nonetheless understood that he had brought it home with him only to be denied the very thing he needed most to make it go away, if only temporarily. His family life deteriorated, punctuated by a divorce and homelessness. He wandered through a series of short term, menial jobs and omnipresent, terrifying loneliness. The most routine social interactions found him bewildered and often inexplicably angry. When he read an advert for a company that specialized in hiring vets (and convicts) for ‘elite’ canine care, he jumped at the chance to find some peace and affection with ‘man’s best friend’. But instead of a way out of his situation, that of a character wrongly condemned to some circle or another of Dante’s Hell, his introduction into the gig economy only plunged him deeper into the abyss. As is so often the case it all began innocently–even optimistically–enough.

The canine care gig was a quintessentially San Francisco startup– an ‘app based’ on-demand concoction that paired ‘charity’ with luxury. Blood was to be the primary ‘on-call’ guardian for three Bloodhounds housed on an estate in the Sea Cliff neighborhood of San Francisco. Blood was from another neighborhood of San Francisco, Hunters Point, a mere three miles from Sea Cliff, but a world away. The mansion, a sprawling architectural hate crime of dubious English Tudor pedigree covering four acres was equipped with a vast surveillance system–a state of the art panopticon. It even had a capacious lawn, a super premium in that dense cradle of plutocracy, where the Bloodhounds could ‘do their doody’. As an independent contractor Blood was responsible for his own taxes, insurance, time off, etc. What he gave up in pay he could reap with flexibility. He could always say ‘no’, although the longer he worked as a contractor for the company, the narrower his flexibility became. And the money was terrible.

His time spent with the dogs began with walks on the beach, bathing, games and even social outings where the dogs could frolic with their own kind. His undoing, later to be covered breathlessly by a media slavering for sensationalism, was not at all the dogs per se, but their owner: a billionaire dowager who insisted that her “precious ones” receive three outfit changes a day, individual hand feeding and a meticulous monitoring and analysis of their bowel movements such that the animals, while pampered, were also in a constant state of anxiety. Blood did what he could to assuage their pain.

Whenever the dowager was away, usually at a philanthropic event centered on (you guessed it) rescuing dogs, her disembodied voice would pierce every room, from one to another. She needed instant empirical confirmation that the outfits were arranged and on the dogs, their dietary regime intact, their stool samples evidence of good gastrointestinal health. There was always a ‘dog whisperer’ or another at the ready whenever one or more of the dogs was sick or disturbed–which, given the depraved regime of ‘care’ insisted upon by the dowager, was often. Always exasperated the dowager ordered her many servants about as a boot camp sergeant might harangue new recruits. In this Blood found familiarity; later contempt. Whenever the voice of the master erupted around them he and the dogs would jump, as if at the crack of a rifle shot, to rapt attention.

At charity and business events, no matter the urgency of the issue at hand, the dowager was not to be interrupted while she was barking instructions to the help on her cell phone. She was regarded by her peers as eccentric, but a real champion of the underdog. A gilded philanthropist and influencer who routinely made or spade political careers. Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsome knew her well. And a feminist! The dowager would outlive her husband by more than thirty-years and grow their fortune more than five-fold. The origins of the family fortune were somewhat obscure, having roots in antebellum Mississippi. The family patriarch, a Southern lawyer and savvy investor, had always been associated with Bloodhounds. Blood thought it odd that someone would insist on outfits for a breed of dog such as Bloodhounds until he began to notice a recurring theme to the costumes. There was the Sherlock outfit, the Prisoner outfit, the Beauregard, the Kentucky Derby and finally the Birth of a Nation outfit, at least that’s how the dowager described it.

This routine continued for a few months before Blood came to the terrifying realization, as with so much in this world, that he could neither protect the dogs from their owner nor steal them away. He, and the dogs, were trapped.

After about six months into the gig, having found a breach not yet made ‘suicide proof’ on the deck of the Golden Gate Bridge, he plunged off, making sure the three Bloodhounds went with him, an act he considered a mercy killing. The dogs, like himself, were too damaged to go on.

He also left a deftly constructed IED at the dowager’s manse. In order to ‘sniff out’ and defuse bombs one must be intimately familiar with their construction. Blood hacked facial and voice recognition software programs so his C-4 device, planted under the dowager’s bed, would only detonate if she, and she alone, was in the room. The explosion took out most of the third floor of the mansion along with the octogenarian meat sack who owned it. Because the explosion occurred early in the evening there were neighbors walking their dogs in the vicinity. One You Tube video captured a King Charles Spaniel licking up brains from off the front lawn. It went viral.

In Dante’s hell the sin of suicide always resulted in irrevocable condemnation and therefore instant admittance to hell. In a hell constructed by communists (forgive such an absurd thought) Blood would undoubtedly receive a pass for having taken an oligarch with him.

Capitalism will not willingly fall into the grave it digs for itself; nor will it likely stumble in. It must be pushed, or in this case, dragged in by someone willing to make the ultimate sacrifice.

In case you are wondering, all dogs go to heaven.

See you in heaven, Blood!

END

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Out of Prison, Into Debt: Bank Robbers and Bootstraps

27 Sunday Oct 2013

Posted by Jonathan Mozzochi in Essay

≈ 1 Comment

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African American, American Legislative Exchange Council, Black Bart, Frank Rich, Henry Wells, peace dividend, Pursuit of Happyness, Rand Paul, San Francisco, Wall Street, Wells Fargo, Will Smith, William Fargo

A Museum to Money

A cheerful young docent began our tour of the Wells Fargo Museum in downtown San Francisco with a ‘Q&A’: How many pioneers can that stagecoach, around which we sit, hold? Ten? Fifteen? The answer ended up being a seemingly impossible number (thirty-something I recall) and our cheerful guide continued loading our fifth-graders from Marin County onto the wagon, one by one, until collectively they resembled a terrifying creature with multiple protruding heads and limbs, rolling and writhing about in search of gold and prey.

At least that’s how I imagine many Native Americans, on first encounter, must have viewed them.

The museum was everything you might expect from a tourist trap devoted to a bank: a dumbed-down chronology of technological innovation and capital accumulation scrubbed of offending data, social conflict, or critical consciousness but with nods to major historical periods (the depression) and the bank’s prescient track record (they saw it all coming and are a huge success!).

Those plucky pioneers faced tough conditions, the museum seemed to say, but with plenty of grit and innovation, a healthy protestant work ethic, an insatiable desire for riches and the welcome stability of a solid financial institution, they endured and prospered.

Meh.

I got a bit chippy with the docent when the kids were lined up for their turn to fondle gold nuggets and coins. This was structured as the high point of the tour–a creepy sensual indulgence in commodity fetishism. The kids, pupils dilated, perfectly represented the ‘idolatry of wealth’ the museum embodied. The docent gave me a bemused look when I refused to fondle her wares. But there are always cracks, however small, in any edifice built by humans; the Wells Fargo Museum being no exception.

On the museum’s second floor there was a cardboard standup replica of Black Bart, a notorious and apparently somewhat successful, stagecoach robber. He was appropriately menacing, all dressed in black and despite a nearby wall that featured “Robbers and Heroes” (a clumsy dichotomy, that one), the kids, grinning and pantomiming gun play, had their pictures taken with the Robber.

No one posed with the oversized oil portraits of William Fargo and Henry Wells that adorned the entrance to the museum.

I wonder why?

Is it because Black Bart was eventually caught and the bank now enjoys a certain satisfaction in his display, the children sharing in his capture and demise? Contemporary thieves pose no threat to our modern titans of finance, who are, after all, modern Robber-Barons. This is no doubt part of the answer, but not all of it.

I tend to look for the awkward non-sequitur in installations such as these; that little something that might reveal an unintended truth. Such a moment came as a creaky service cart, not unlike that used to haul dishes in a restaurant, was wheeled out. On the cart was propped a framed portrait of a black man, ‘William Robison, Stagecoach Driver’ together with a page-length biography of the gentleman. The display appeared as an afterthought; perhaps someone’s hasty attempt to redress a grievance.

I wonder what grievance that could have been?

The display was cringe-worthy and appalling.

Consider that for a black man in mid-19th century America to be a stage coach driver for Wells Fargo would be the career choice of someone with a death wish.  He’s the guy the robbers have to go through to get the loot, probably the most dangerous job in that entire industry, the one you are most likely to be killed performing. So the black guy, probably reeling from the suppression of the revolution that was Reconstruction following the Civil War, can go to work for white bankers. For Wells and Fargo–Bill and Hank.

Our kids enjoy posing with the (white) Robber who, in order to get his loot, must shoot the (black) stagecoach driver who works for Wells and Fargo (who, incidentally, probably wouldn’t loan a black person a dime). That sounds like an apt metaphor for our racialized political economy. People can sacrifice themselves for the good of a bank and are memorialized with a shitty little cart.

The physical placement of a picture of an African American man on a cart also suggests black people are an aside for Wells Fargo, an after-thought, to be wheeled out when needed and stored in a dark closet, when not.

There was one other awkward and offensive little cart that featured a similar framed picture of a white female Wells Fargo employee, but the display was softened by its implicit inclusion in a larger exhibit mounted on a wall featuring more contemporary, and presumably more powerful, female Wells Fargo employees.

I’d almost feel better knowing the field trip was funded by the bank, rather than public funds. Both options are repugnant.

How about a ‘Banks and People’ installation where students can learn about the social, economic and political effects of financial institutions, especially when they go awry? Was it really necessary for my child to visit this place? Is this a part of a new program, ‘No Child Left Out of Debt’?

The Pursuit of Happyness

If the Wells Fargo Museum is designed to obscure the role banks play in the reproduction of social inequality, the 2008 film The Pursuit of Happyness, starring Will Smith, reproduces a subtle and cruel irony about that inequality: the very institution that in the real world destroys men such as Will Smith’s character is the same institution that the film-makers offer for salvation.

The Pursuit of Happyness chronicles the heart-wrenching ‘true story’ of an African American man and his young son struggling to survive in 1980s San Francisco. While watching The Pursuit of Happyness I wept as the protagonist and his young son are slowly reduced to indebtedness, abject poverty, and homelessness. Although the film is well acted and watchable, the narrative lessons implicit in its story make it loathsome–as mendacious and despicable a cinematic rendering of the African American experience I can recall, all the more so because it is really, really, painful to watch.

Our hero’s salvation comes at a price, namely his community. Note that the money Will Smith’s character loans an investment banker (to Smith a truly precious $5.00, but nothing to the banker) is magnanimously and ceremoniously paid back at the end of the film; but the money Smith loans an African-American ‘friend’ is not. Note how the illusion of a meritocracy is upheld in this film; how the bureaucratic reality of high finance is softened with a nod to affirmative action, as when Will Smith’s boss says that ‘usually’ the highest score on a test wins the job, but not always. We don’t actually know what Will Smith’s test score ends up being, but we can entertain a warm and fuzzy feeling imagining Wall Street as flexible and dynamic enough to reward such heroic effort as a way to humanize their warped meritocracy.

Smith’s wife leaves both he and his child; a reversal of the oft cited absence of African-American males in the lives of their offspring. The domestic implosion that follows soon after is brutally and effectively portrayed.

While the film’s setting is 1980s urban San Francisco and we get the obligatory portrait of Ronald Reagan, drugs are strangely absent, as is the AIDS crisis.

The precipitating event that launches our character’s descent into hell is an IRS seizure of his last few dollars. This is a nod to the libertarian populism at the center of the film’s message: those plucky ‘up by your bootstraps’ exhortations so essential to Rand Paul’s right wing torch and pitchfork appeal. Paul’s attacks on Wall Street are geared towards ‘liberating’ financial services so they can feed unhindered, not restrain their rapaciousness or much less ameliorate their harsh social effects.

The film unconsciously displays the social Darwinism that underpins the competition Smith has sacrificed everything to win, without following up to show what it has wrought: the dozens of ‘losers’ who have for months given free labor to the company, only to be left with nothing.

Only one survives–and thrives. Plucky pioneers, plucky black guys.

I was recently with my 10-year-old in the the Richmond District of San Francisco, near Ocean Beach, where the Golden Gate Park meets the Pacific Ocean. I pointed out that San Francisco’s public bus benches are exquisitely constructed so as to make sleeping on them impossible, whereas in the film father and son often found welcome, if temporary, refuge on benches that at the time would accommodate them.

Kinder and gentler.

That is the most disturbing aspect of the film; how our society treats children. Banks, as top-notch predators within our winner-take-all economic system, help tear asunder our modern families, making them disposable: easy to assemble and just as easy to disassemble. Financial institutions and other corporations, having created the conditions which hurl children to the mercy of the streets, are only too happy to perform the largely empty task of charity and take over the role of government in providing for the social good.

Except they don’t.

The proximate causes of this catastrophe are those grand bi-partisan experiments with ‘welfare reform’ and ‘workfare’ undertaken in the 1990s together with numerous illegal and unjust wars and a frenzied scrapping of that post cold war ‘peace dividend’. After having eviscerated our ability to care for the young and old, infirm and differently abled, war veterans and everyone else, we have shunted this responsibility to the very institutions that caused it in the first place.

I’ll tell you how that happens: it happens when we allow depraved charlatans such as Rand Paul to pose as populist reformers, or radicals, when in fact they are blood sucking freaks. Even the normally reliable Frank Rich with the New York Times Magazine, (“It’s Hard to Hate Rand Paul”, September 22, 2013) gives this American neo-fascist a pass because he now supports overturning mandatory minimum sentencing. You remember this almost three decade-long experiment in mass incarceration that doubled the number of imprisoned Americans from about 1 million to 2 million through racist policing, ‘three strikes’ legislation, draconian drug sentencing guidelines and a frightening increase in the privatizing of prison services?

Why would Rand Paul be opposed to that, you ask?

Because the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a sort of right wing sewer where libertarian lobbyists and ‘free market’ policy experts coagulate, have figured out a way to make more money releasing prisoners than they can make putting more in.  In her article “US criminal justice system: Turning a profit on prison reform?” Charlotte Silver argues that some corporations are hoping to changes sentencing laws so as to make money off newly released prisoners:

“In competition with private prisons are other industries which are coming up with solutions to reduce incarceration costs that will benefit them. For instance, a 2007 brief by ALEC recommended releasing people early from prison with conditional release bonds, similar to bail bonds, effectively setting up bonding companies as private parole agencies.”

The report suggests, in other words, that there are plenty of other people happy to step in and make money off of an inevitable “reform”.

Newly released parents can come out of prison in debt, perhaps to the same company they will then have to work for.

End.

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On Values Voters

05 Monday Aug 2013

Posted by Jonathan Mozzochi in Rant

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Tags

Barbie, Heterosexuality, Homosexuality, Pat Buchanan, Roy Cohn, Same-sex marriage, San Francisco, United States

 

February 2005 (re-edited September 2013)

The fact that 11 American states passed initiatives opposed to Gay Marriage makes my stomach turn. It screws up into little knots and I want to throw up. The thought of 86% of the voters of any state (even Mississippi) voting to ‘defend heterosexual marriage’ makes me want to get on the first bus to Canada.

But I’m here for the duration.

When you think about it, the effort to legalize same-sex marriage is as much about freedom from violence as it is anything else. That’s just the bare minimum any human being can demand. Freedom from violence posits equal access to those institutions available to others. Even if those institutions are kinda screwed up. Furthermore, one could argue that insofar as same sex relationships are not legally recognized, there will be a persistent context for gays and lesbians to continue suffering high levels of vigilante violence and institutional discrimination. In other words, if the state doesn’t recognize the fundamental right of gays and lesbians to live openly and legally in love, why should some peckerhead?

So, even though the institution of marriage is screwy, and I respect the argument by some radical gay and lesbian activists that one should not be in the business of joining an institution that enshrines inequality, I have to respect the audacity of San Francisco et. al., in carrying out those very public ceremonies last summer. The power of the state is awesome, and having it on the side of gay and lesbian marriage—regardless of the baggage that goes with the institution of marriage—is a good thing. That said, I do not agree with the notion that gay and lesbian marriage is ‘just like’ heterosexual marriage and therefore innocuous. On the contrary. I think gay marriage does undermine the sanctity of heterosexual marriage.

Only I like the idea!

People hate gays not because God tells them so, not because gays are wrongly stereotyped as pedophiles and not because they undermine Christian values. People hate homosexuality first because gay and lesbian relationships challenge male supremacy. And this goes way back to the former status of women as property of men.

Now I know, in today’s modern world there is no consignment of women to the property of men consecrated in the civil act of marriage. But have you been to a wedding lately? It’s not just that gender stereotypes have made a comeback since the glory days of the failed 60s sexual revolutions, it is that they are newly triumphant in their reclaimed central role. The world view of the typical homophobe is the world view of the predominant American male: an attic full of GI Joes and Barbie dolls. This is the first cause here, the first principle from which everything else flows. Clinging tightly to their dolls, and the dolls clinging tightly to them, these people then go looking around for reasons to support their world view. Facts that don’t fit in are cast aside, irrelevant. That’s not a misunderstanding, and it’s not, primarily about projection or denial or scapegoating. That’s a defense of a way of life. And that’s why Pat Buchanan calls this a culture war.

And he’s right; only I’m on the other side.

Here’s what’s implicitly understood whenever a man directs his loathing at gay sex: homosexual relations of any form directly challenge male control over female sexual power. The superglue that exists among men to control women’s reproductive and labor power is directly challenged by other men and women who opt out of this arrangement (Except, perhaps, in the case of Roy Cohn, but let’s set that aside for now).  Is it any wonder that the response is a visceral as it often is? That’s why, fundamentally, gay marriage is opposed. It’s not about any opposition rooted in a primordial need to reproduce the species, and it’s not about a gene that ‘causes’ heterosexuality (genetic destiny, hardwired heterosexuality), and it’s certainly not about God ‘cleaving’ a man and a woman and writing his instructions on some tablets (religious justification). All of this comes second. No amount of evidence to the contrary will change the minds of these people. And no amount of ‘mainstreaming’ will ever win gays a victory at the ballot box. No, we are definitely moving away from challenging core myths about gender relations. And because this is what comes first, we can expect more of the worst.

Ultimately, however, my opinion about this is that any consensual arrangements between living, sentient, thinking people are good in my book. And the state and Dr. Dobson should keep their grubby hands off those lovers. And because I’ve seen more love between two queens in a disco than I ever have at a breeder wedding ceremony, I support gay marriage. And I won’t give up promoting it for the support of ‘values voters.’

END

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