Donald was out, only he was called safe by umpire Jim Joyce, who after the game reviewed the play and decided along with everyone else that it is an indisputable fact that the runner was really out. At that point, however, the call cannot be overruled by the umpires, and the game, officially a 1-hit shutout instead of a perfect game, was over.

In the aftermath, the umpire tearfully apologized for his mistake to the pitcher who had nearly hurled the third perfect game this year and perhaps because of this it has become one of the biggest sports stories of year, covered by NPR and all of the country’s major newspapers. Maybe this attention stems from the fact that the “perfect game” is a rare thing in baseball: 99% of all baseball games see runners on base by some means or other. In fact, the only other time there were two perfect games in a baseball season was in 1880 and there had never been three perfect games in a single season until this year. Joyce’s tearful apology becomes part of the event, adding to its legend.

Still, with everyone in agreement that this game really was “perfect” and in light of the fact that it will never officially be called such, the neatly bound-up reality of baseball has been brought into contrast with its messy cousin, actual reality. Baseball, of course, is a game that employs “an official scorer” who records everything that happens in the game. The official scorecard produced by that scorer is the gospel of all baseball statistics and anything outside of it is apocryphal. In the vast majority of cases few disputes are allowed to survive beyond the game, so this official scorecard stands without challenge. In this case, however, fans, players, and even umpires have been forced to admit that this official version of reality contains an error.

This problem has led to a heated discussion that the call should be overruled by the commissioner of the sport, Bud Selig, who has refused to do so on the grounds that it would allow future calls to be considered for negation as well.

All these events, the moment, the aftermath, the discussion, are participatory in the same way that professional sports generally are, but the unusual complexity surrounding discussions of this imperfect game reveals some interesting tools in the sports world for understanding cultural value.

For instance, it allows us to ask the following question: what draws so much attention to a moment like this? In other words, why is the conflict between actual reality and baseball reality felt so painfully by fans? Obviously there are historical moments of greatness involved for particular athletes, but why do the fans yearn to see the record-books turn this moment into the canon they know it should be? Another way of phrasing this idea more generally is to ask, why does it appear so important for fans to see something that is going to be in the record-book some day?

This tendency probably occurs more in baseball than in other sports, because baseball supports a stats-obsessed fanbase who participate in levels of erudition and nerdery that only the most astute academics can compete with. This statistical chicanery produces a sporting culture where the highest level of achievement is admission into the sacred “Hall of Fame,” where a player’s whole statistical body of work is canonized and stamped with a mark of superiority.

Last week, for instance, while I was watching a baseball game, a friend of mine sent me a text message that read, “The Padres have a 28% chance of winning right now.” In the following inning, he sent another that read, “Now it’s down to 15%.” His source for these statistics was fangraphs, a baseball statistics website that he says “will totally change the way you watch a baseball game.”

Baseball is so nerdy that lots of historical nerds have been obsessed with the sport and its propensity for cerebral wheel-spinning. Jack Kerouac, for instance, famously made up his own players and obsessively charted their careers pitch-by-pitch in games that were played entirely in his head. Indeed, it’s the perfect sport that someone will someday let computers play for fun.

To some fans, this is the relevance of baseball games where watching any single one may produce some event that becomes part of baseball lore. To me, this statistics obsession seems to devalue the sport by turning it from a momentary event into a cog in the sport’s long history of statistical production.

This conflict, therefore, is one of permanence versus momentary importance. Indeed, one of the most interesting commentaries on the game comes from a New York Times Op-Ed penned by Paul Clemens, who watched the game on TV.

Clemens writes comments on the day following the perfect game:

The Tigers won Thursday afternoon’s game in a blowout. Before that contest began, General Motors gave Galarraga a Corvette.

“They should have given him a Saturn, or a Pontiac,” my father said, mentioning two of G.M.’s defunct brands. He meant no disrespect to Galarraga, or to Saturns or Pontiacs. He owns a Pontiac. It was merely his Detroit practicality reasserting itself, part of the collective return to earth the day after something that had been, briefly, so elevating. “They need to clear out all those discontinued models,” he said.

It’s a funny comment, but it draws a painfully clear picture: sports are always briefly elevating. No one seems to assume the glory awarded is permanent, and this impermanence makes it even more painfully obvious that sports history ultimately doesn’t matter. There’s always another game to play and eventually will always come along a better pitcher, batter, third-baseman, etc.

Thus, this collection of important moments in sports, of which Galarraga’s game is included, is yet another moment in the statistical production of the sport, and as such pretty meaningless in the long run. And yet it does matter to lots of people. So how do viewers experience this meaning and its almost immediate evaporation?

Perhaps the question is not why it matters, but why we engage in another error: assuming that other types of glory are permanent in contrast to sports. Maybe baseball, for instance, simply reminds us of the fleeting impermanence of everything.

That answer is too glib, certainly. I like watching baseball games, but it seems to me there is nothing redeeming about the sport and it can be just as easily watched or forgotten about for long periods of time. It’s always there, spinning its wheels in effect. Some would argue that it exists as a form of entertainment and as such is beyond the ken of critical engagement, but this answer is never satisfactory.

Instead, we should look to our obsessions with the sport and its status as “the National Pastime” as a commentary on our ability to make and define meaning. In general, I see it as a kind of success that events can be extremely important at a particular moment in time without having to last forever, and the absurd tenor surrounding the calls to reverse the umpire’s decision reveal a yearning for permanence that is, ultimately, self-defeating.

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As initially conceived the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau would regulate every business “engaged significantly in offering or providing consumer financial products or services,” but a lot of these businesses don’t want consumer protection and it turns out they’re willing to fight it by any means necessary. To be sure, “significantly engaged” does not include the butchers and florists that some have used as fear-inducing examples, but it does include an industry largely ignored at the national level: payday lenders.

Payday lenders offer “payday loans”, stopgap loans that in name are supposed to help consumers survive until payday. According to the Center for Responsible Lending, however, these loans not only target the poor but are actually designed to be difficult to pay off.

Here’s how they work: a borrower goes into a payday lending establishment and writes a post-dated check for the amount borrowed plus fees. Payday loans are usually between $300 and $500, offered as a short-term advance on a borrower’s paycheck. For this service, the payday lender usually charges the maximum rate allowed by state law, usually around 15% or $15 for every $100 borrowed. This means that a $300 loan carries a fee of $45, and borrowers have a two-week period to pay off their debt, at the end of which the payday lender has promised to cash that post-dated check.

The problem is that for anyone who wants to borrow $300, two weeks is an awfully short period of time to pay off their loan. Thus, at the end of the two-week payoff period, payday lenders are often more than happy to offer their borrowers a “rollover”, where they simply renew the loan and collect a new fee. Some states outlaw this practice, and in these states, there are no legal restrictions on the same payday lender offering our hypothetical borrower yet another $300 loan (to pay off the first), while this new loan also draws another $45 fee.

It seems straightforward enough, and for their part, payday lenders claim their services are just like any other consumer good, but the problem is that once you’ve started this cycle of renewing a loan, it can take quite a long time to pay it off and all this adds up to a lot of bimonthly $45 fees.

Further, many payday lenders oppose legislating their industry at all, arguing that their loans cannot be measured in terms of APR (a yearly yardstick) because they offer only short-term loans. However, this turns out to be contrary to how most borrowers experience the loans. For instance, if our hypothetical borrower manages to stretch out his $300 loan for a full year, he will have paid $1170 in fees alone ($45 every two weeks) in addition to the principle he owes ($300), all of which amounts to a 400% interest rate.

Indeed, for most customers of payday lenders, this is exactly the problem: a temporary, short-term loan turns into a crippling long-term burden. In a 2007 report titled “Springing the Debt Trap,” the Center for Responsible Lending demonstrated that:

• Over 60 percent of these loans go to borrowers with 12 or more transactions per year;
• 24 percent of these loans go to borrowers with 21 or more transactions per year; and
• Nearly 90 percent of repeat payday loans are made shortly after a previous loan was paid off.

Furthermore, even in states where rollover lending is banned, the Center for Responsible Lending found that 90% of the payday lending business is generated by borrowers with “five or more loans per year.”

Ostensibly, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau would rein in such ballooning interest rates and predatory practices, and this is why the payday lending industry has lobbied heavily against being included in the bill’s scope.

As stated in a Washington Post article earlier this month,

During the “Hill Blitz” organized by the Financial Service Centers of America, a trade group, about 40 industry executives pushed to exempt check cashing from the purview of a proposed bureau that would oversee consumer financial products.

“There is a sense of urgency to get something done,” said Eric Norrington, head of government affairs for Ace Cash Express. “We’re sort of asking the question: Why are we even a part of this?”

To anyone familiar with their business practices, it’s obvious why the payday lenders are part of this bill. Nevertheless, they have managed to score a “carve-out” along with the auto dealers (the second biggest lending industry in the country behind mortgage dealers) and this should exempt them from the proposed bureau’s purview.

In other words, the initial concept has been turned into a squabbling mess. It’s hard to imagine that anyone outside of organized crime or banking would see check cashing as a legitimate business model. Nevertheless, their lobbying efforts have secured them protection from the new bureau designed to save consumers from businesses like theirs.

Earlier this week, Rolling Stone published a lengthy diatribe by Matt Taibbi revealing this and other bad news from the fight over financial reform. Taibbi works himself into a lather over the finance industry’s attempt to wholly water down all efforts at oversight and reform, but his ire stems from a citizen’s helplessness in the face of money and power being used to craft irrational public policy. It’s almost cliche at this point to complain about the power of lobbyists, but he’s right.

Taibbi writes:

The financial-services industry has reportedly flooded the Capitol with more than 2,000 paid lobbyists; even veteran members are stunned by the intensity of the blitz.”They’re trying everything,” says Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio. Wall Street’s army is especially imposing given that the main (really, the only) progressive coalition working the other side of the aisle, Americans for Financial Reform, has been in existence less than a year – and has just 60 unpaid “volunteer” lobbyists working the Senate halls.

The contrast here is clear, but Taibbi moves on (somewhat dramatically) to analogize our efforts at financial reform to world war, describing the “four main fronts” of this battle, one of which is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. In each case, according to Taibbi, the momentum is there for sound public policy, but finance industry lobbyists fighting tooth and nail have scored surprise victories that have significantly weakened or outright crippled true financial reform.

It’s no wonder then that only 22% of our citizens trust our government and that most have similar distrust for banks, financial institutions, and corporations. Of course, while these same poll respondents say they do not necessarily want more governmental oversight in the economy, 61% do say they want corporations to be subject to more regulation.

In other words, citizens’ distrust is in the right place, but, as the payday lender’s story illustrates, as long as lobbyists backed by powerful corporations have this kind of influence, no reasonable reform can be expected.

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I think there are some useful things to gained from the book, and I expect it to become (along with the Simpsons) one of the lenses we use to reflect on our era.

The Obsession with Reality

Did you ever think this national obsession with “reality television” was fascinating according to the terms themselves, “reality” and “television”? In fact, one might assume that the interest in “reality” televised should be somewhat ridiculous since we all live in reality every day anyway and it should be, as my life obviously is, dull.

With that said, there is a long history in our culture of fascination with “real” stories and “real” people. Even Wordsworth was fascinated by the “language really used by men” (quotes from the preface to his Lyrical Ballads). He wanted his poetry to avoid poetic artifice, instead capturing “incidents and situations from common life,” as well as “the essential passions of the heart,” which were altogether best expressed by what he called “low and rustic life.” An interesting note on class prejudices here, Wordsworth seems to suggest that the lower classes have the truest emotional moments, worth treating poetically. In short, their emotional responses are less contrived and less artificial because they are poor. He moves on to suggest that “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” and here his emphasis on spontaneity outlines the same automatic assumption that viewers of reality television have, that spontaneous emotion is the true emotion. In other words, emotional responses are authentic when they are immediate and unprocessed.

For the past week my mother has been trying to tell me about this show she’s been watching where men and women get married according to a voting body: the audience. Apparently, although the rules are beyond me and my students laughed at how alien I made it appear in my description, suggesting that I am “so out of touch” with contemporary life, these people meet each other and related family members and friends and then they are voted on by those watching the show. Those with the most votes as a match get married. My mother records this show and calls friends to discuss what has occurred in each episode. When she speaks about the characters she describes them as if she knew them in real life.

I have come to think about this as a fascinating thing. Apparently, as my students have informed me, this television show is the most popular show in the country, with millions of viewers if not, no doubt, thousands of people voting on these television couples weekly, and perhaps even millions of people calling each other to discuss who was left at the alter and who will live happily ever after.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about the subject of reality television recently because I’ve been re-reading Don Dellilo’s White Noise in one of my English classes (the same one that thinks I am out of touch). In the book, specifically the “Airborne Toxic Event” chapter, Jack and the family are caught dead in their pattern of performing their lives when a catastrophe strikes and they have no idea how to respond to it. They are forced to evacuate their homes amidst a mass exodus of cars all desperately trying to escape the “cloud of deadly chemicals.” Aside from being one of the funniest moments in American fiction, this chapter has some stunningly apt moments that relate directly to the problem of reality. The first is when the family makes it onto the freeway and find themselves looking into other cars to see the faces of other evacuees in order to find out how frightened they should be. It’s hilarious but somehow fitting that this family, stunned into primitivity by the fact of modern technology and the incomprehensible world of noise (advertising, media, all psychic data) that encompasses them, cannot assemble legitimate reactions to something as stark and obvious as catastrophe. Or perhaps catastrophe, because it goes against the routine of daily life, is inherently the least obvious thing, and therefore, the most difficult to interpret.

In that case, Delillo has another example that everyone should be able to relate to: the subject of death. In a moment of personal insight, Jack describes his relationship with death, “It is when death is rendered graphically, is televised so to speak, that you sense an eerie separation between your condition and yourself.” I added the emphasis to point specifically to Delillo’s constant use of television as the source of reality. Jack understands he is separated from death, or the condition of dying, only when it is televised for him, in a moment during the “Airborne Toxic Event” chapter where an official, someone “with access to data,” assesses his risk after being exposed to the toxic cloud. He spends the rest of the novel otherwise obsessed with death in ridiculous ways. He is, in fact, safe, but he fails to realize this, instead acting out his life as an exaggerated response to his overwhelming fear of mortality.

Later in the chapter, a mysterious man shouts:

We look around and we see no response from the official organs of the media. The airborne toxic event is a horrifying thing. Our fear is enormous. Even if there hasn’t been great loss of life, don’t we deserve some attention for our suffering, our human worry, our terror? Isn’t fear news?

In the world of White Noise “reality” is something that is filtered by television, and made comprehensible by the culture that feeds off of television, or other forms of media. This man, speaking in cataclysmic/prophetic tones, is merely emphasizing the ways in which their catastrophe remains unreal to the world if it remains untelevised. In a way this makes sense. We find ourselves extending our antennae in the world, and television, the news, and radio all must work as extensions of our sensory abilities to perceive the world around us when they bring us information about the world beyond the world that we know. The moment of humor occurs when the man’s pronouncement borders on suggesting that the catastrophe remains unreal to those who experienced it because it has not been televised. Thus, television grants the status of “reality” to important situations for everyone. The question for these fictional characters becomes “how will I remember my life if I’ve never been on T.V.?”

And, in a way, this is precisely the question that we may be asking ourselves. When we find ourselves as a culture obsessed with the authentic, the “real” as televised weekly, we may have come to a point where we are no longer really sure what “real” is, or even what “real emotion” is. It could be that the patterns we have been witness to, infinitely repeated in story form and mythologized (death, war, love, conflict, revenge, violence, as well as all archetypically recognizable narrative forms), have muted our understandings of our own emotional responses even as they have trained us to know how to respond according to a standard form. How do you feel when your wife cheats on you? Well, you respond like Othello in anger. What does love consist of? Well, it consists of sacrifice and hand-holding and marriage as seen in every family sitcom ever aired. The patterns of narrative we have inherited from the immediate forms of media we are enmeshed in have trained us to know how to respond emotionally to a norm in certain situations. Perhaps this is the point of cultural narratives, to teach ethics, morality, and condition social responses. Even so, the dazed characters of White Noise exaggerate the problem to such a degree that one begins to wonder if all of this cultural noise, radio, television, etc., has not stunted our ability to react personally to particular emotional moments, i.e., if the norm has not been substituted for the individual emotional response.

In any case, the subject of reality television seems to make this problem more apparent. Overall, it would seem that the problem with reality television is not that it is inherently bad television, on the contrary, it is probably some of the best television of the last ten years (as my mother would attest); but our obsessions with it may signify our neurosis surrounding “being real” and have real emotional responses to our own lives. When we want to know what “real” is we watch it on television.

Still, the most glaring reality about reality television is its utterly contrived nature. This is all too obvious to anyone who stops to consider the artifice inherent in situations where people get married by voting or are required to compete for large sums of money, entirely in front of the lens of the camera. Here lies an important question: when people use the term “reality” for “reality television” do they think this is truly “reality?” and what do they think is real about it? In fact, if these people are real, then what are we who are watching? Are we merely performing the reality of our lives?

In White Noise, for instance, this is precisely what happens. An example of this comes early in the novel where Jack and Murray visit an attraction called “the most photographed barn in America.” “The most photographed barn” as Murray says is not really a barn, but an idea of a picture of a barn. And what do these two find when they arrive–many people taking photographs of the barn. “No one sees the barn,” Murray says and he’s right. Delillo uses Murray to show the ways in which those who photograph the barn are taking part in the performance of the reality of the barn. They do not see the barn, but they take part in the history of the idea of the barn. This is a complicated way of saying that they show up because they are convinced this is something worth seeing, and when they get there they do merely what everyone else does. This is the nature of performing reality: we do what everyone else does (or what the pervasive images surrounding us tell us to do) and the performance of reality stands in place of reality itself.

One person who gets referenced a lot in discussions of reality and contemporary culture, not to mention White Noise, is Jean-Paul Baudrillard. It is not uncommon in Baudrillard’s language to see suggestions of reality paired with discussions of violence. The “violence of the real” or the “violation of the real” are both concepts he uses. Reading Baudrillard one almost comes to believe it would be possible to kidnap all of the “real” and hold it hostage, achieving the most horrific act of terrorism possible. In fact, he obsesses over “the real” in ways that often make him seem just that, obsessive, or even paranoid, and yet his pronouncements on our contemporary world are coming to seem more and more useful as our mediated world progresses.

Baudrillard describes a world in which image and reality come to hold about the same weight. He thinks of reality and the image of reality as pointing to the same depthlessness. They both succumb to the status of reality with little forethought or deeper insight. Still, we live in a world where reproductions of reality are taken for granted, and this focus on “the real” must signify some greater concern with reality. We reproduce and take for granted images of reality as reality and they, in fact, are reality to such a degree that the concept “reality” often begins to fall apart. Baudrillard describes in a 1996 essay the reproduction of L.A.-Disneyland in Orlando Florida as a life-size museum of something that already exists somewhere else.

Baudrillard describes how our fascination with “reality” creates a process of recursive cloning:

We saw Benetton with his commercial campaigns, trying to recuperate the human drama of the news (AIDS, Bosnia, poverty, apartheid) by transfusing reality into a New Mediatic Figuration (a place where suffering and commiseration end in a mode of interactive resonance). The virtual takes over the real as it appears, and then replicates it without any modification, in a pret-a-porter (ready-to-wear) fashion.

If this operation can be so successful in creating a universal fascination with only a tint of moral disapproval, it is because reality itself, the world itself, with its frenzy of cloning has already been transformed into an interactive performance, some kind of Lunapark for ideologies, technologies, works, knowledge, death, and even destruction. All this is likely to be cloned and resurrected in a juvenile museum of Imagination or a virtual museum of Information(1).

When Baudrillard says, “the virtual takes over the real as it appears,” he means that our images of the real substitute themselves for real and become real, while we, meanwhile, are obsessed with the image of what is real. These reproductions of the real are never questioned as unreal, but instead are bought and sold as pieces of real. What remains close to Baudrillard’s mind, is the fact that all of this “reality” is constantly being bought and sold. “Reality” is manufactured as a commodity these days. Indeed, when we start to examine in an “image vs. reality” fashion, we begin to attempt to reconstruct what is real, attempting to find the real “real,” and for Baudrillard this neurotic searching touches off yet another round of “cloning” and “resurrecting” the real, as he notes above. This all points, in my mind, to a broader neurosis about what real living consists of, perpetuated by the constant images of “reality” that we are marketed with.

It makes sense, in a way, that societies who are constantly subject to messages demonstrating their lack, lack of hand soap, lack of fun, lack of freedom, that these societies would eventually become neurotic about all of the experiences they’re missing out on. Thus, the marketing of reality creates the need for it and supplies the self-perpetuating neurosis.



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Alaias are virtually flat (finless!) pieces of wood that have been spotted in Australia and the US. Featurewise, they’re hard to paddle, hard to ride, and reportedly zippy down the line of pocket-ample waves. Without fins locking them in place, they also spin around waves like the arm on a cotton candy machine.

In the surfing world they’re an oddity, but they’ve been given credence by their provenance (the word and the board style are linked to the origins of surfing in Hawai’i) and also by some respectable shapers and pro-surfers who have taken on their mantle.

Still, it’s hard not to note that this kind of attraction would never have taken root in the surfing-stubborn nineties, where conformity dictated that everyone at the beach rode three-finned shortboards. Therefore, the room surfing has made for the alaia phenomenon reflects not only on the state of surfing as a whole, but on the state of our consumer culture.

First of all, those who wish to ride alais are, in fact, encouraged to build them themselves. Tom Wegener, the guru of the alaia phenomenon, sells a kit to those interested.

Further, alias are interesting by virtue of what they’re made out of: wood. This gets to a neurosis within surfing that has been building for about ten years, a neurosis given greater urgency by the shuttering of Clark Foam in 2005: surfing is very toxic, and this doesn’t jibe with the friend-to-the-ocean attitude most surfers adopt.

Of course, Clark Foam offered the predictability and uniformity of mass production, both features demanded by surfboard shapers who wanted to begin each of their boards with a well-known starting point. Beyond that, Clark and the broader surfing industry turned board building into a mass produced empire, and this trait also contrasted sharply with an old paradigm in surfing, the surfboard as work of art

Indeed, surfing has always relied on certain quasi-religious undertones perhaps because they’re easy to fall back on in the face of the unpredictability of the ocean. This surfing mysticism imparts meaning not only to the ocean but also to the mechanism by which we build our relationship with the sea, our surfboards, and this is perhaps where the surfboard as objet d’art originates from.

Thus, the idea of returning to wood to ride waves appeals to many who are made uncomfortable by the plastic goods surfers have ridden for the last 50 years, and the self-made aspect of the alaia has become an attempt to take back the entirety of the surfing experience. “Build it and ride it yourself,” devotees encourage the aspirants.

Of course, these attitudes aren’t new even if they are marked in the world of surfing. This trend toward making-it-yourself is part of a broader consumer backlash movement that has always been part of environmentalism. Ultimately, this movement is interested in answering the question: Where do our products really come from and how does our consumption implicate us in the history of these products?

With environmental issues gaining in urgency, this question has arrived in new and interesting ways. An ambitious new project called sourcemap.org, for instance, has started building maps that reveal not only the history of a product, but also its environmental impact. It’s no coincidence, for example, that the Patagonia Surf Shop sells Alaias and offers shoppers similar software that reveals the source of all Patagonia products.

What can be learned from the ways in which surfing has taken up this discussion? In a way, one lesson we consumers have imbibed for years has transformed itself: mass production makes things convenient for consumers, but it also makes them inherently meaningless. Anything that can be infinitely reproduced (as has been noted here before) is worthless, in the sense of imbued meaning. This result comes out of our expectation that only unique objects have inherent meaning and by inverse relationship anything that comes out of a factory does not. An alaia made in someone’s garage with old tools, for instance, is something that is bound to be loaded with meaning.

For a long time surfing was simply about consumption, a narcissistic pursuit of pleasure and small-minded glory. Now, surfing feels relevant again, threatening to boil over with discussions that affect people who don’t live on the coasts: where should our products come from? Can we make things without unmaking our world?

(For more on surfboard-making, check out Swaylocks.com, one of the coolest sites in the universe.)

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Another local landmark, the Mount Soledad Cross, shares these traits, but combatants on this issue have been quiet ever since a judge ruled that the cross was constitutional as part of a war memorial. Oddly, the war memorial part of the equation didn’t exist until 70 years after the cross was put up on the land. In fact, a non-profit foundation dedicated the site as a war memorial in 1989, long after a string of crosses had first been installed there (including one that was burned down by the Klan in the ’20s, interestingly enough).

Similar to the issue of the Mt. Soledad Cross, the questions of intent and representation also show up in the Children’s Pool debate with the focus there being on the legal mandate the city of San Diego undertook when it took over ownership of the land.

The sole impetus for the construction of the Children’s Pool in the early 20th century was Ellen Browning Scripps. Scripps was enormously wealthy from investments in her brother’s newspapers and she had already donated money to found a dozen other institutions still around today, including the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Scripps Hospital, and the La Jolla Public Library, when she decided that the children of La Jolla needed a place to learn to swim so as not to be sucked out to sea. (For a comprehensive history on the construction of the project, see this article by Jeremy Hollins from the Journal for San Diego History)

This was early in the history of the city’s lifeguard services, and at the time San Diego didn’t have the resources or the knowledge to protect a public that was just beginning to explore a previously feared ocean. Many drowned every year, and while it’s hard to imagine it now for one who grew up a few blocks from a crowded beach, the ocean was considered dangerous, unpredictable, unruly.

That’s why Ellen Browning Scripps decided to create a safe place for the children of San Diego to swim, and it’s also why she invented, funded, and even dragged from halfway across the world the engineer who was eventually to complete the project. Scripps then gave the Children’s Pool to the city with the stipulation that it be preserved as an area for public swimming.

Seals near San Diego taken by flickr user leeco

In the ’90s then and apparently from disuse by the human population, the protected beach of the Children’s Pool became a favorite roosting spot for a local seal population, and the seals then became a local curiosity. A series of lawsuits followed, started by one swimmer who objected to the seal’s dominance of a beach built for swimmers, and in 2005  a judge ordered that the beach needed to be cleaned of its inflated bacteria levels from the seal excrement in order so that humans could use it as legally mandated. Finally, another judge ruled today that the city must remove the seals in order to comply with the previous decision about their bacteria.

Now, one thing about San Diego is that the public here really loves its public spaces. Ordinances and ballot measures relating to the city’s beaches always generate controversy and the Children’s Pool  is no different. On one side are local groups that want to dump the seals to have the Children’s Pool back for the children. They use the (probably accurate) legal argument that the city was originally mandated to keep the space as a public park and swim area. On the other side are environmentalists and fans of the seals (and there are many of them) who figure the public has a lot of public space already in which to congregate and swim, and that the seals have as much right to the space as we do.

Indeed, it does seem selfish to take yet another piece of coastline from a wild population that has few other safe spaces. Contrary to 1921, there are many other safe places for children to swim and so the Children’s Pool in this comparison will likely mean less to the human population than it will mean to the seal population. Outside of that, many ecologically-minded types are coming to feel an ethical responsibility to animals that have been pushed out of every other locale in their regions. When wild animals take some of that space back, some are happy to grant them what they’ve won after they’ve lost so much.

Amidst the latter attitude is where I tend to find myself. Actually, there even appears to be some human benefits to leaving the space to the seals, who could serve as educational tools and symbols of conservation for residents. In this regard, they do serve the community.

The city plans to use recordings of dogs barking to eject the seals, but they are not allowed to engage in any activity that harms the seals under the Marine Mammals Protection Act. According to one Voice of San Diego post, however, such a project may approach monumental difficulty as the recordings are sure to annoy the seals instead of encouraging them to go away. Consequently, the situation has a lot of promise for prolonging the argument about what to do about the seals while, in the meantime, the city blasts money at the problem and preserves the status quo.

La Jolla Children's Pool by flickr user chilsta

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It was always absurd to ticket homeless people for sleeping on city property and so this news, which comes as the result of a lawsuit ruling stipulating that it is unconstitutional to ticket the homeless when adequate shelters to house them don’t exist, makes sense. Still, in contrast to the state of affairs in downtown San Diego where folks can be discovered huddled under blankets in the 80-degree midday heat, the legal right to sleep on the sidewalk is not complete: “Starting immediately, people can sleep on city property from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. without fear of police citations. That is unless they are doing something illegal, such as being drunk or fighting.”

It’s a progressive (if not legally mandated) response to the settlement, but it’s sure to perpetuate the discussion over homelessness downtown. Ever since the new ballpark was installed in the continuously gentrifying eastern area of downtown San Diego, business owners seeking to capitalize on money flowing into and out of the ballpark each game day have been complaining about the homeless population there. They’ve also been looking for somewhere to build a homeless shelter, but it’s a hard thing to house when no one wants to live next door.

Federal stimulus money may help in some small way with the homeless problem, if a location for one can ever be agreed on. Shelters are supposed to be better ways of spending money on homelessness than the usual ignore-and-prosecute methods, and the $6 million promised San Diego for its homelessness problem would be a good start in that direction. As one editorial in the Union-Tribune recently pointed out, shelters save cities money over the other methods and the editorialists offer their own establishment as an example:

For example, in the 1990s, a statewide study revealed that the Rescue Mission alone saved taxpayers about $50 million a year because its residents did not end up in emergency rooms or the county mental health system, nor were they defacing property or committing crimes.

And this, I suppose, is what I find interesting about the issue: it typifies a political discussion where little forward-thinking is employed because the most marginalized citizens are the easiest to expediently deal with. Whereas it makes fiscal sense to build homeless shelters, it’s a politically difficult task to do so, and thus the political incentive is to do what is logically absurd: keep ticketing these people and hope they’ll go somewhere else.

(See other photos of San Diego taken by flickr user tallcj by following the photo above to his flickr page)

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Even when paired with a recycling outpost, the message still struck me as an odd and contradictory message to broadcast: how could something so apparently “valuable” be used as disposable packaging on just about every American consumable item? In fact, the lifecycle of the plastic we see on a daily basis stands as an argument that it’s anything but valuable. Plastic is associated with cheap manufacturing and disposability, not value.

As for the second idea, that plastics are so valuable that we should recycle them, this connection is truly a difficult stretch of intuition. A valuable thing is meant to be kept around for years and eventually sold on eBay to someone who will pay too much in shipping to receive it. A valuable thing is not something we generally recycle (which is really a guilt-free way of throwing something away). The contradiction is revealed by restating it in plain terms: “Plastics are so valuable you should throw them away responsibly.”

Ostensibly offered in the public interest, this ad campaign is a puzzler, but its apparent contradictions are resolved when we learn who dreamed up the message. It turns out that the folks responsible work for the Plastics Division of the American Chemistry Council, whose primary interest is the promotion of plastics, meaning that as long as plastics continue to be produced, they couldn’t care less about how much of the stuff gets recycled.

To read the website of the American Chemistry Council is to hear the rethinking of plastic as one of the primary building blocks of life, without which modern existence would be entirely unthinkable. Their website cheerily promises to be a place where you may, “Find out more about how American Chemistry is helping you live longer and get more out of life.” Plastics certainly are valuable to the American Chemistry Council, which exists to promote the consumption and continued usage of the stuff in its many forms, so they’d be overjoyed to change the American perception of plastic to be along the same lines as diamonds or luxury cars. They’d be happy with any outcome that increases our reliance on plastic, which is why they focus more on the plastic body parts that help grandpa hold his granddaughter and less on the shopping bags that have combined to create a Texas-sized island in the Pacific Ocean.

Of course, what with all the consumption of plastics and the primacy of the stuff in Wal-Marts and Targets littered across the country, you might think the American Chemistry Council plays an unnecessary role. The problem, and the reason for the PR campaign, is that plastics are increasingly getting a bad rap for being wasteful, permanent, poisonous, and excessively environmentally destructive. Along with our increased negativity about plastic have come calls to stop producing it, to produce less of it, and to consume as little of it as possible. Indeed, there are citizens’ movements, pieces of legislation, and information campaigns working to achieve these goals. Many US states and some cities, including San Francisco and Los Angeles, have  outlawed plastic shopping bags and in some areas even Wal-Mart has promised to play along.

In actuality, it makes sense to reduce our consumption of plastic because it lasts forever, and it cannot be disposed of or burned without producing the most toxic chemical combinations we’ve seen, not to mention that it’s strangling sea-life in a huge swath of the Pacific Ocean.

Changing perceptions of this little thought-about component of daily life is probably good news for our environment, but bad news to the American Chemistry Council, so they’ve decided to win us over with a recycling campaign and an ideological argument that links plastic to precious resources such as water. It’s a weird way to get our attention, linked to a feel-good campaign to increase recycling. It’s unlikely to succeed, however, and the sooner we whittle down our reliance on this stuff, the sooner we can be assured it will stop ending up in waterways and oceans, and the sooner we can cease worrying about the dangerous chemicals it’s composed of.

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In April of this year, the Future of Music Coalition issued a report on the aftermath of the FCC decision, asking the question, “Has anything changed?” For anyone who’s turned on the radio recently the answer is regrettably obvious: radio playlists are as predictable now as they’ve always been.

In the report, titled: Same Old Song: An Analysis of Radio Playlists in a Post-FCC Consent Decree World, researcher Kristin Thomson concludes that little if anything has changed since the FCC’s consent decree in 2007. One problem with radio is that a group of owners enjoys near monopoly control.

Thomson writes,

By 2002, virtually every geographic market was dominated by four firms controlling 70 percent of market share or greater. In addition, nearly every music format was controlled by an oligopoly. In 28 of the 30 major music formats nationwide, four companies or fewer controlled more than 50 percent of listeners. As a result, an increasingly small number of companies determined what music was played on specific formats. In addition, radio station group owners introduced cost-cutting measures that reduced local staff and centralized programming decisions at the regional, or cluster, level. With individual station autonomy drastically limited and a broad trend toward shorter playlists, musicians had far fewer opportunities to receive airplay.

In short, a small group of radio station owners now controls most of the radio stations in the country, and they use computers to send the playlist out to every station in their group. This results in the peculiar scenario that anyone who’s driven across the country has discovered: each city has all the same radio stations as every other city and their playlists are wholly predictable. In this way radio has become as predictable as McDonald’s, even while small music scenes across the country are spewing out more and more unique, independent music.

Thus, in the aftermath of the FCC’s consent decree, the FMC found that radio station playlists haven’t changed much at all. Somewhat more surprisingly, they discovered that radio stations play mostly old music, because it’s safe and won’t turn off listeners.

“Radio relies on the hits,” Thomson writes.

When looking at airplay share by release date, in almost every format measured, more than 50 percent of the spins on the playlist were of songs more than five years old. This demonstrates that radio tends to play it safe; it sandwiches new material in between recognizable hits from the past to keep its core audience from changing the dial when content becomes too unfamiliar. But this strategy also points to the problems of the forced scarcity that commercial radio represents. Because there are so few slots available for new material on any given playlist, these slots become highly coveted and valuable. This is the environment where payola becomes attractive, as moneyed interests try to buy their way onto the air.

At some point, of course, listeners will likely get tired of hearing songs that are more than five years old when there’s so much new music being created. In addition, radio, like newspapers, is under threat from the world of new media, even if its medium (music in a car) hasn’t been made totally obsolete by the internet yet. An interesting component to this discussion, however, is that the internet has been offering more and more free music options and with the rise of mobile computing and internet resources like Pandora garnering greater success, it’s only a matter of time before people stop listening to music on the radio. Thus, as it offers greater airplay to the artists of tomorrow, the internet is sure to kill off radio as effectively as it has hurt the newspapers.

At least in the case of newspapers, there may be some regrets.

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This is great news, because as we all know, coyotes and other wildlife are losing habitat at incredible rates, if nature documentarians such as the BBC and (newly joined to the club) Disney are to be believed. Last April Disney released a feature-length documentary titled Earth, an edited re-hash of footage previously broadcast by the Discovery Channel and the BBC for their Planet Earth series. In the piece, Disney worked to treat the subjects of habitat loss and global warming with the gravitas appropriate to a family-friendly, inoffensive film. Footage of bird behavior, waterfalls in Africa, and animals dying were all narrated by James Earl Jones with an insipid script that was designed to stay inside the polite boundaries of political discourse. This is because Disney has two somewhat contradictory goals in mind, according to the New York Times:

The company wants to depict nature in an unflinching manner, partly to attract top-notch documentarians to future projects and partly to foster environmental awareness. At the same time, Disney’s goal is to create hit entertainment. While producers have tried not to anthropomorphize the animals in “Earth,” the movie does turn them into characters with story arcs devised to tug on viewer emotions.

Further, as noted in the review, most of the footage contained in the film (60 percent) has already been shown elsewhere for free, so while the film purports to be an awareness-generating mechanism, drawing attention to the issues our planet’s wildlife faces, it is also an ingenious way to capitalize profitably on the genre of ecological entertainment.

The BBC has been doing this for years, albeit somewhat more respectfully. Using lavish vistas, ambitious footage and writing filled with superlatives about the animal world, the BBC has spent years producing a string of respectable and successful nature documentaries. They’ve done Planet Earth, Blue Planet, and the Secret Life of Birds, not to mention …Mammals, …Insects, etc.

These films, all narrated by David Attenborough, have been popular in my household, but they are not free of ideological errors that can sometimes perpetuate the problems they claim to address. For instance, one of the hallmarks of the original BBC series Planet Earth were vignettes that narrated the processes used to obtain footage of extremely elusive and rare animals. In one of these pieces illustrating their footage of the snow leopard, David Attenborough describes the harsh conditions and wild terrain that must be traversed in order to capture the rare snow leopard on camera. The problem is that Attenborough’s description loses sight of a few important details: the snow leopard is increasingly rare because of habitat loss due to human encroachment. Further, the emphasis here is on the difficulty involved in getting footage, but this emphasis perpetuates the myth that there are still wild places, places untouched by human wanderers, workers, or residents (something this video footage expressly contradicts). Finally, the snow leopard and other rare animal footage serves to propagate another older and altogether more startling myth, that not only do wild places still exist, but they’re also still surmountable, if not by hunters, warriors and adventurers, at the very least by cameramen and women, people who act as stand-ins for the adventurers and explorers of old.

And yet this ideological response, the will to dominate and subsume the natural world with our cameras if not our weapons, is exactly what got us into this mess in the first place. The will to live and feed anywhere, to travel the world and film rare animals in action, is the same human ambition we lament when we describe the fall of the North American bison.

For their part, the coyotes have made an interesting point. As they thrive in our cities unnoticed, they’re adapting to the human world, now more dominant than Nature, and in doing so they’re pointing to the kinds of things wildlife must do to thrive in the new Earth: they’ll have to avoid us on our own ground, eking out niches of urban wilderness, soon to be the only kind of wilderness left outside of nature documentaries.

A Cape Cod coyote captured on film by flickr user Chris Seufert

(The last few weeks have seen disruptions to my weekly writing schedule, but I should be free for most of the rest of the year to find stuff to say, as long as the world promises to stay interesting.)

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Beyond that, some commentators have even predicted a record low turn-out for the special election, so it doesn’t look good for California politics. It looks especially bad for the California budget, which will be directly impacted by the ballot measures’ success or failure. According to the San Diego Union-Tribune,

Three [of the] measures have an immediate effect on next year’s budget: Proposition 1C, which is intended to raise $5 billion by borrowing against future lottery revenue, and propositions 1D and 1E. The last two transfer money from mental health and child development programs previously approved by voters.

If voters reject those three measures, the state deficit will grow to $21.3 billion from $15.4 billion in the fiscal year that starts July 1.

Still, the fact that there’s going to be a least a $15.4 billion deficit if the measures pass ($23 billion if they don’t) is discouraging to voters. As has been reported, the governor has already laid-off 5,000 state workers, in addition to threatening to shorten the school-year by a week and cut healthcare coverage for children. These steps don’t really reassure anyone that these ballot measures will be a step toward fixing the problem.

In fact, ballot measures might be part of the problem.

California’s ballot initiative system comes in part from a deep distrust of lawmakers. Previous ballot initiatives have cut real estate taxes and granted mandatory funding to programs in education and healthcare. In each case this mandatory funding has been instituted under a suspicion that politicians will always short these programs in the future and whenever it’s politically viable to do so. In contrast, proper budgeting, whether for a household or a state, requires flexibility and this is something mandatory spending does not allow for. Can you imagine the founding fathers writing constitutional amendments to manage the United States budget? That’s the kind of thing that happens in California. Prior ballot initiatives have put hard numbers to a fluctuating economy, unnecessarily binding the state in lean times to idealistic funding minimums for the programs voters have approved.

Furthermore, California is one of the few states in the United States to employ a full-time legislature, but we also have the strictest term limits of any state in the country, allowing state assembly members only six years and state senators eight before they’re forced to retire from these positions. This translates into a legislature that is constantly learning every decade how to write a budget. It’s paradoxical, actually, that we would pay a full-time legislature and allow them such a short leash, hamstringing them in a variety of ways that make budget discussions difficult at best.

California’s conflicted relationship with its legislators is one reason the state finds itself in budget difficulties every year. The state famously requires a “supermajority” (two-thirds of the vote) to even pass a budget, something that only Arkansas and Rhode Island require. This may work for smaller states, but it seems somewhat crazy for the world’s eighth largest economy to bind itself in knots every year trying to pass a budget.

The supermajority rule is undoubtedly another effect of the short leash California legislatures are held to. If they have to agree with each other, the reasoning goes, their destructive power will be reduced. This doesn’t work out so well in practice, as a minority can band together and obstinately make demands. In addition, with California’s starkly gerrymandered districts, the legislators who do get elected come out of rabidly political districts (drawn to protect the party seat), so these people are wholly assured of permanently disagreeing with anyone on the other side of the spectrum.

In sum, it really doesn’t look good for California, which might need a whole new constitution to fix its problems, so says a recent article in the Economist. They write:

California’s current constitution rivals India’s and Alabama’s for being the longest and most convoluted in the world, and is several times longer than America’s. It has been amended or revised more than 500 times and now, with the cumulative dross of past voter initiatives incorporated, is a document that assures chaos.

California is “the ungovernable state,” according to the Economist, chiming in with a perspective that seems more accurate every year. We hate and distrust our legislators, but when they try to involve us in the difficult decisions of fixing our deficit, we hate and distrust them for passing the buck onto us.

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