My mother never accepted, after her stroke in 2017 and a diagnosis of dementia (which she never accepted, either), that she was no longer capable of driving safely. Even in her final weeks in a care facility, she lamented, “I’ve got to start driving again.”
The potential danger of an incapacitated senior’s refusal to stop driving was demonstrated in Santa Monica in 2003, when an 86-year-old man admitted he got confused between the accelerator and brake. He drove for an entire block through a farmers market, hitting stands and pedestrians, killing 10, injuring 70.
The man was found guilty of 10 counts of manslaughter. “Hitting the accelerator instead of the brake seems to me to be a clearly negligent act,” the judge said.
Much driving advice for seniors focuses on safety, including alternatives such as ride services, but there’s little attention on getting an incapacitated person to admit the potential for danger.
Only some twists of fate stopped my mother’s denial from having more severe consequences. A doctor and the DMV had to clear her to legally drive again — her license was suspended — and she tried and failed to get clearance
Also at just the right time her Prius’ battery died, and a replacement cost several thousand dollars. My mother, a great procrastinator, balked, but kept threatening to buy a new battery — or a new car. I feared she might stop procrastinating long enough to find an unscrupulous car salesman.
I chauffeured her for two years, while she spun sob stories to healthcare providers about how she “had to” drive because I couldn’t be expected to “drive 40 miles” to drive her. When I tried to explain the distance was more like 20 miles and distance wasn’t an issue, the professionals responded as to some trivial irrelevant family quarrel, instead of the evidence of dangerous delusion it appeared to me to be.
My father also lived in denial about his dementia, and about his impaired driving skills. He lived on the second story of a stairs-only apartment, so his physical inability to get down the steps was what mercifully kept him off the road. “I just need somebody to help me to the car!” he’d rage.
“You need to see and hear well to drive,” I’d try to explain.
“I can see! I can hear!” he’d bellow. He complained he couldn’t hear even with two hearing aids turned up full (he always blamed the aids and batteries) and he couldn’t see even halfway across the room — but just try and tell him that impaired his driving.
I asked several resources if my mother could be counseled about her failure to accept her impairment, only to hear variants on, “She has dementia, so she’d just forget anyway.” She had times, though, when light broke through the dark clouds of dementia. Someone may have been able to cast some light on why she was so reluctant to admit the truth.
Historic San Pedro High School is working on a $245 million remodeling project that will add three new buildings and update five existing ones, adding 34 new classrooms in the process.
“San Pedro High School is going to maintain its historic status, and all the things that make it a great school for decades, while also modernizing certain elements,” said Principal Steve Gebhart at a construction update community meeting on April 28.
The project began in 2015, passing through environmental studies and earning state approvals, including an environmental impact report. The Board of Education finally approved the $245 million budget on April 14, and construction was approved to begin on May 10. Representatives from the Los Angeles Unified School District said the contractor has begun mobilizing on the site. The work is scheduled to be completed in 2027.
The school will build three new buildings, representatives from LAUSD said. One building will include administration, food services and general classrooms, as well as a cafeteria with indoor and outdoor student dining. It will also have specialty classrooms, including digital imaging, culinary arts and engineering, and four science labs. In addition, it will provide a new main entrance to the campus on Leland Street. The second building will be a single-story band and visual media building with a flexible video or broadcast classroom. The third will be a small central plant building for the boilers and chillers, which will provide hot and chilled water to the campus for heating and air-conditioning.
“They are within the confines of the historic structure, but internally the rooms will be just as fabulous as the brand-new buildings,” said Dean Taylor, senior project development manger.
The school will also upgrade and restore the historic library, which is on the second floor of the main building.
The project will not extend beyond the current campus boundaries, and will only use its existing land. It should take about six years.
“It’s a very complex project,” Taylor said. “Not only complex in the way that the buildings are put together — they’re all cast-in-place concrete buildings — but also the topography of the site is very challenging.”
The reason it is challenging is because the school is sloped about 60 feet from its high point on Leland and 17th streets to its lowest point, on the northeast corner of the campus. This makes construction and accessibility difficult — they have to be careful where they place buildings, ramps, paving, retaining walls and parking.
The reason the school is using cast-in-place concrete buildings is so that they fit in with the existing buildings, LAUSD representatives said. The buildings that were built in the 1930s were made using the same method. It involves using the concrete itself for both the structure and visible finish. Molds made of wood or metal are created, and then the concrete is poured into them.
The school is going to demolish several buildings, including its shop building, industrial arts building and four portable buildings. It will also remove 112 trees on the campus, but will replace them with 148 new trees.
Taylor said that the new buildings integrate well with the existing buildings. They have the same color scheme, and a similar design.
“The new buildings are really quite understated, and not trying to compete with the historic buildings elsewhere on campus,” Taylor said.
Ed Cadena, senior project manager, said the construction would affect most of the campus. The only exceptions would be the baseball field and the football field.
“The fact that this is such a comprehensive construction development of the high school, it obligates us to do some significant phasing of the work, and to introduce some temporary classrooms,” Cadena said.
In the first phase, which will last from 2021 to 2023, three new buildings will be constructed, including the new admin building, classroom space, a new lunch shelter and the central plant. During this phase, the construction crew will also install some utilities from the existing campus into the new buildings, including water and electricity.
While the construction crew will not be changing the baseball field, it will be using it as a construction staging area. It will be used for setting up offices, staff parking and mockups. While it’s being used, the school’s softball program will be relocated to the satellite campus, the Olguin Annex to San Pedro High, which is about 1.5 miles away. The school’s baseball program will remain at the main campus.
During this phase, the school will also use the north parking lot for interim housing.
“If you walk to the campus recently over the last couple of months, you’ve seen some activity out there,” Cadena said. “We have brought on board some interim housing, or temporary classrooms, so that we can initiate this first phase of construction.”
The second phase of the project will overlap the first, taking place from 2023 to 2025. The classroom building referred to as the “Old English building” will be remodeled in this stage, and the auditorium and small gymnasium will have their barriers removed.
In 2024, the science building will be remodeled, including conversion of some existing classrooms, upgrading of some bathrooms and connecting it to the central plant to give it a dependable air conditioning system.
In 2025, the school will update the larger gymnasium, including a seismic upgrade, resurfacing and bringing air conditioning to the main court.
“We very much expect that it will be traditional hours, ending somewhere between perhaps 2:30 to 3:30, depending on how long the day really needs to be to get work done, sometimes in anticipation of something starting the next day,” Cadena said.
“In consideration of this project, there’s a lot of things that we looked at and put into play to safely develop this site with consideration for the educational environment and the community,” Cadena said.
These considerations include an 8-foot-high chain link fence around the construction site, as well as a sound blanket to muffle the noise. In addition, all the contractor’s employees will be cleared by the Department of Justice.
Representatives of LAUSD said they expect construction to continue with a fully functioning campus with maximum enrollment throughout the school year.
Semite: of relating to, or constituting a sub family of the Afro-Asiatic language family that includes Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, and Amharic. (Merriam Webster)
Who is a Semite? Who is an Anti-Semite?
Is a Polish-Yiddish speaking individual a Semite?
Is a Palestinian (Christian or Muslim) a Semite?
If I support Palestinian’s can I be referred to as supporting Semites?
Mark A. Nelson, San Pedro
Responses to California’s Comeback Plan and American Families Plan in Advocating for Students On High Cost of Textbooks
Textbook affordability is a large problem in higher education, and I know someone who could not afford to buy a textbook for a class and as a result, almost failed the class altogether. The professor assigned homework through the textbook’s website so my friend lost easy points in the class because of her inability to pay for the $150 textbook in the first week of classes. Textbook prices have become outrageously expensive and have hindered the accessibility of higher education for far too long.
As a UCLA student and an intern on the CALPIRG Students Affordable Textbook campaign, I care about textbook affordability because students should not have to choose between paying rent and paying for their textbooks. Luckily, there is a realistic solution to this problem. Open textbooks are peer-reviewed and edited and are provided to students free of charge. The UCs are top universities that pride themselves on accessibility and diversity but have not implemented a free textbook program.
Therefore I urge the UC schools to consider implementing this system to allow all of their students to have the same opportunities to pass their classes. I fully believe that open textbooks can help students, expand educational opportunities, and lead higher education into the open resource world.
Madison Muggeo, University of California, Los Angeles
Earlier this year, President Biden recognized that students everywhere are struggling to fund their education with his American Families’ Plan. Not only has the pandemic placed many families in an unfortunate economic position, but many students have had to defer from attending college due to the rising tuition costs. To read that he has now presented a comeback plan that will speed up this support is amazing! It is wonderful that the leader of our country plans to support college students and low income families and I have a direct program he can endorse to make this happen!
As an intern and the Visibility Coordinator for the Affordable Textbooks campaign with CALPIRG Students, I am here to encourage the implementation of a UC-wide open textbook program. The article shared that Biden’s plan will be “cutting the cost of student housing and working to reduce the cost of textbooks.” Tuition is an obvious financial burden on students, but purchasing class materials has hindered students just as much for decades. Textbook prices have become outrageously expensive! Students have been struggling to balance textbooks prices and paying for their wellbeing, and it is time to denormalize that. Since the UCs are a major factor of California’s education reputation, I believe this program is the perfect pathway into aiding students nationwide with open resources. The UCs, as world-class educational institutions, could lead higher education as a whole into the open resource world.
Overall, textbook affordability is an element of college affordability that has a simple solution. UC students would directly benefit from this financial relief and other schools could be inspired to take that initiative for their students. Open textbooks can help students and expand educational opportunities.
Aryeal Lands, University of California, Los Angeles
Frequent readers of this column will remember Port Executive Director Gene Seroka’s rejection of the neighborhood council proposal to use two port properties, parking lots E and F, to temporarily house the area’s unhoused residents. He gave three reasons: First, they are being used as overflow for the San Pedro Fishmarket and as a “laydown site” for construction at the Ports O’ Call site — construction that really has not started yet.
Second, they’re being used for Port Police training — this may be true, but it’s not like there’s a shortage of vacant parking lots at the harbor these days.
And third, it’s too polluted to allow habitation — this last point is contested territory. The Regional Water Quality Control Board’s report on the matters says the contamination is under the landscaped area west of the paved portion of the site, a point confirmed by Chris Cannon, the environmental director at the port. This means that the parking lot is not contaminated.
At the May 18 Central San Pedro Neighborhood Council meeting, Augie Bezmalinovich defended Seroka’s position as one of the port’s public relations deputies by repeatedly interrupting me when I clearly had the floor speaking on this item. The chair did not call him out of order. His ultimate argument though was that the port is not in the “housing the homeless business” but is in the “cargo business!” This is clearly more the true objection than all the other excuses.
pollution.At the time, this ended the discussion and the motion I was supporting lost narrowly as some of the council had tired of the bullying and left the meeting.
However, I have this rebuttal:
The Port of Los Angeles is also not in the air pollution control business, but because of its activities over many years various agencies are forcing them to address and correct their historic business practices and invest millions of dollars on clean air technologies. I might also add that because of the port’s lax oversight of and the bad practices by its tenants, it is now financially responsible for tens of millions of dollars and many acres of toxic clean up.
The same way the Port of Los Angeles is not in the environmental mitigation business, they are now because of public pressure and legal issues. Let us not forget that the port is also not in the tourism business, per se, yet they are just now in the process of spending the last $50 million on the waterfront promenade and town square plaza, both of which address tourism.
Tourism is not counted in TEUs. So much for the, “we’re only in the cargo business” excuse.
Clearly, this port and the Harbor Commission understand they have bigger obligations to the surrounding community and to the people of the State of California than just the cargo business. Air quality, water pollution, economic/environmental justice, toxic clean up and local economic benefit via tourism are in fact policies of our port that arguably don’t go far enough. But they still admit responsibility for them.
The current disagreement is about expanding their still narrow perspective to address the greater good of the local community. What is best for the people of the state and what does it mean to be good community partners in this time of crisis over the homeless issue? Even the State Lands Commission is reviewing the overarching State Tidelands Trust doctrine, which affects all of the state owned lands. And because of their policy review the people surrounding the twin harbors of the San Pedro Bay need to be asking if this is enough.
Betty Yee, California State Controller, who sits on this commission wrote:
When the Commission met [Feb. 24], we adopted our new Strategic Plan that acknowledges flexibility and adaptability as we embrace an evolving Public Trust Doctrine that reflects changing societal values and needs. In this spirit, what you have raised with the Port of LA does have Commission staff thinking about how to address these changing needs.
Clearly in times of crisis like the last year, attitudes can change, policies can shift, new perspectives can emerge. It is in moments with challenges like these that we see whether our leaders have the vision to see these changes. Right now, at the local level, it appears not.
For those who don’t understand the history, California became a state on Sept. 9, 1850, and thereby acquired nearly 4 million acres of land underlying the state’s navigable and tidal waterways, known as “sovereign lands.” These tidelands and submerged lands, equal in size to Connecticut and Delaware combined, are overseen by the California State Lands Commission. They are entrusted to local municipal entities like Los Angeles and Long Beach by legislation.
The neighborhood councils are not asking the port to shoulder the entire expense alone nor to even manage a homeless encampment, for there are other entities who could do this. They ask that the port merely donate a small portion of land on a temporary basis for what is considered an emergency situation. The larger issue of what the impacts of industrialized ports have on our community and our environment is a complex one that is worth considering closely.
The port complex and businesses who operate there are direct beneficiaries of our national trade policies, which have over the last 40 years been exporting jobs and importing an ever increasing quantity of foreign products. See the recent stats in our news briefs column.
Over the same period, tens of thousands of good paying blue-collar jobs have vanished from Los Angeles and during this same period we have seen homelessness grow. Now I haven’t seen the study which proves the correlation between the two, but I do believe that there is a nexus between how profitable our ports are with how desperately poor the homeless have become because of job losses.
I would also like to remind all community members that Bezmalinovich is only the messenger and not the decision maker. There is still a public process for the redress of grievances, and we as neighborhood representatives of our various constituencies have a legitimate right, if not obligation, to represent those grievances no matter how unpopular they may be with the Harbor Department of Los Angeles.
His flippant dismissal of the influence of neighborhood councils as being unable to take positions contrary to Port of Los Angeles is insulting. I remind all concerned that it was just such a dismissal of community concerns by the port that launched the years long legal battle over the China Shipping terminal, which ended up costing the port some $65 million in a legal settlement. The arrogance of public officials to not negotiate in good faith with community partners is not only expensive, but it costs in the loss of goodwill.
WILMINGTON — On May 13, more than a hundred people called for an end to the ongoing violence by marching down Pacific Coast Highway in Wilmington.
The Peace March was organized by the Victory Outreach Church of Carson along with such other community groups as the Los Angeles chapter of the Parents of Murdered Children, United Wilmington Youth Foundation, I Heart Wilmington; all walked the one mile to Banning Museum park, chanting, “We want peace!” and “No more shootings!”
Mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, friends, church clergy and community leaders held signs showing the names and faces of the murder victims. Donna Arviso Narez walked in remembrance of her son, Daniel Arviso, 19, who was murdered by gang members in 2007 while walking home in Wilmington.
“Two guys and a girl murdered him in Ghost Town [East Wilmington] as a part of a gang initiation,” Donna lamented as she held her sign showing her son’s face.
Likewise, the families of victims, such as Mark Gonzalez, James Dominguez or Anthony Iniguez, are pressing for justice and an end to the violence.
The Los Angeles Police Department escorted the demonstrators, as did a bicycle brigade of mostly children, providing protection from vehicle traffic. Many cars passing by on Pacific Coast Highway cheered before honking their horns in support.
Between April 18 and May 15, there have been four homicides in the Los Angeles Harbor, an increase of 33 percent over the previous month, which saw three homicides between March 21 and April 17.
There has been a 117 percent increase in homicides over 2020 and a 160 percent increase over 2019. The rise in violent crime over the past couple of years after a long period of decline belies modern policing’s limitations in promoting public safety
The demonstrators finished the march by gathering in a circle as Pastor Hector Cruz of the Victory Outreach Church led the group in somber prayers for the victims.
“We got to start with the kids, you got to get them early,” said Cruz, when asked what the community can do to prevent more gang violence. “They need an outlet, role models, something….”
Cathy Familathe, the leader of the Los Angeles chapter of the Parents of Murdered Children also addressed the gathering, sympathizing with everyone who lost a loved one to violence and emphasizing the importance of continuing to speak out.
“Losing someone to murder is not the same as cancer or a car accident.” Familathe stated. “The families struggle to ask themselves what got in the [perpetrator’s] heads? (She then pointed with her microphone.) Everyone here knows what it feels like to lose someone.”
Just before the crowd was about to be led into a moment of silence, a mother, Sammy Martinez, referenced the police officers present as she shouted, “But you support the number one gang members … the LAPD?”
Martinez’s son, Ernie Serrano, was a victim of police brutality leading to his death in Riverside in December 2020. Martinez was in attendance to support her friend, Valerie Rivera, whose son, Eric Rivera was shot and killed by Los Angeles Police officers in Wilmington in June 2017. Familathe, still presiding over the gathering, responded to Sammy,
“If your son was murdered by a police officer, then you have a seat at my table,” she said, as she pointed to the table behind her with the names and pictures of the victims. “Your son or daughter’s picture belongs on that board if they were murdered by a police officer.”
Among those in attendance included representatives from Rep. Nanette Barragán, California State Assemblyman Mike Gipson and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti.
Sammy Martinez attended the May 13 peace rally in support of her friend, Valerie Rivera. Both mothers lost their sons following encounters with the police. Setting aside whether they had criminal records and drug addictions, neither were armed and both cases show how ill- equipped police officers are in addressing individuals experiencing mental health crises.
On June 6, 2017, Eric Rivera, 20, was shot and run over by Harbor Division police officers of the Los Angeles Police Department, 11 seconds after encountering him on Wilmington Boulevard, near Pacific Coast Highway. It was later found that Rivera only had a water gun.
A pedestrian heard Rivera saying to himself in Spanish “He’s gonna pay me today!” while openly carrying a gun with no attempt to conceal it. Fearing that Rivera posed an imminent threat, he reported him to the police. Three squad cars arrived within minutes.
According to a fact-finding report released by the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office a year later, Rivera entered the Jack in the Box restaurant, walked directly to the soda fountain machine and began to throw ice in the restaurant. An employee at the restaurant reported that Rivera was talking to himself while holding a green plastic toy water gun. Rivera filled the toy gun with water and soda and sprayed the contents throughout the restaurant. According to the employee, during the ten minutes he was in the restaurant, Rivera talked to himself and appeared “stressed … mad … anxious.” The employee believed he was under the influence of an illegal substance because of his behavior. The employee asked Rivera to leave. Rivera complied with the request after arguing with the employee. He left walking southbound along Wilmington boulevard. Fifteen minutes later, Rivera was killed by police.
Ernie Serrano, 33, died in police custody at a Jurupa Valley grocery store in December 2020 where he spent hours erratically coming and going, at times attempting to make purchases with his identification card. An armed security guard approached Serrano, then a fight quickly ensued.
In the aftermath of Serrano’s death, Riverside Sheriff Chad Bianco said Serrano was reaching for the security guard’s gun when deputies arrived.
Bianco said encounters with Serrano began on the evening of Dec. 14, when the suspect’s family called 911 complaining that he was “not acting rationally, and was out of control.’”
Deputies went to the residence and found Serrano, who had several prior convictions in Los Angeles and Orange counties, including for assault on a peace officer, “belligerent, aggressive and displaying obvious signs of being under the influence,” the sheriff said.
“Deputies used a taser to force Mr. Serrano to comply,” Bianco said. “He was treated at a local hospital and taken to the Robert Presley Detention Center.”
Serrano was booked on suspicion of being under the influence of a controlled substance and felony obstructing a peace officer. However, because the county correctional system was operating under court-mandated capacity limitations due to the coronavirus public health emergency, Serrano was released on his own recognizance the following morning.
That evening, he went to the market, and for the next “two to three hours” floated in and out of the store, exhibiting bizarre behavior, “cutting in front of people in the shopping aisles” and on several occasions trying to buy goods by offering his driver’s license as a payment device, the sheriff said.
Bianco said deputies used non-lethal measures such as baton strikes and tasering. After subduing Serrano, deputies placed a spit hood over his head because he was spitting out the blood flowing into his mouth from a gash over his eye.
A deputy who was involved in the prior day’s arrest reportedly noted that when he and his partner took Serrano to a hospital for a pre-booking medical examination, “his heart rate was like 190.”
Store surveillance video shows deputies held Serrano on the checkout counter for about seven or eight minutes, repeatedly asking him to calm down. However, he abruptly went silent and limp, at which point a corporal yelled, “He’s stopped breathing.”
Serrano was laid on the floor, where deputies removed the handcuffs and mask, initiating chest compressions for Cal Fire paramedics, who had been staging outside the store. They tried to revive him, but he was pronounced dead a short time later at Riverside Community Hospital.
Sheriff Bianco said that Serrano died from acute methamphetamine intoxication with fatal arrhythmia, a condition in which the heart beats with an irregular or abnormal rhythm.
Neither case should have been death sentences for Serrano or Rivera and their families.
The burden and costs of American amnesia: New book investigates ‘Dissenting POWs’
Two days after Christmas, 1970, CBS and NBC aired clips of an interview with two POWs–senior naval pilots, one who’d flown in Korea and both of whom opposed the ongoing Vietnam War. Historians estimate that 30 to 50% of POWs felt the same. Yet, while POWs loom large in American public memory of Vietnam, the very existence of these dissenting POWs has been virtually banished.
What’s been forgotten, what’s been remembered—or invented—in its place, how that happened and why it still matters as we struggle to withdraw from Afghanistan half a century later are explored in a new book, “Dissenting POWs: From Vietnam’s Hoa Lo Prison to America Today.” It’s co-authored by Tom Wilber, the son of one of the POWs interviewed on national tv, and Jerry Lembcke, a Vietnam veteran whose 1998 book “The Spitting Image” debunked and explored the origins of the widely believed myth of antiwar protesters spitting on returning veterans, and who’s written several other books debunking Vietnam War myths.
Random Lengths interviewed Lembcke about his new book, starting with a question about how the new book compares with his first foray. The interview has been edited for clarity.
https://youtu.be/0w6q5kzzpk8
Random Lengths: I want to start off by making a comparison and see if this makes sense to you. In “The Spitting Image” you examined the widely believed myth of antiwar protesters spitting on returning veterans and you said there were two ways that the memory of anti-war veterans have been repressed—first by pathologizing returning veterans and then by rewriting history to represent them as being spat upon by those whom anti-war veterans actually joined with.
“Dissenting POWs” seems to argue that the existence of antiwar POWs was repressed in more complex ways—first, by promoting the prisoner-at-war myth, grounded in early American captivity narratives; second, via the narrative of brainwashing that emerge from the Korean War; third, via the pathologizing narrative you dealt with inyour book on PTSD; and fourth, the distracting fantasy of missing POWs, which you dealt with in your book, “CNN’s Tailwind Tale.” In both books, in both cases, it wasn’t just a matter of forgetting what happened, but replacing what happened with alternative narratives. Is that a fair assessment of your argument?
Jerry Lembcke: I think that’s a fair assessment, yes. Both books at some level are studies in social memory and forgetting. One of my points is that we as a people collectively we don’t just forget, but it’s that the memories that we have get pushed off screen, so to speak, by something related, but something different and oftentimes a kind of reversal of that memory that we have.
For example, the war in Vietnam was lost and in many ways the memory of the War in Vietnam has been lost by the American public, and it was displaced by the idea of the war at home—that the real war was not in Vietnam all along, the real war was at home. The real war was about liberals in Congress who had kind of emasculated American culture through the 1960s by government funding programs and so forth, and that then during the war, specifically, liberals in Congress tied one hand behind their back, not allowing us to fight the war that needs to be fought, and radicals in the streets demoralized US fighters in Vietnam and gave aid and comfort to the enemy by their opposition in the street. And surprisingly now, or at least when I started to work on these projects, that’s really what Americans remember.
Time and time again, people will come up to me and say. “Oh, you’re a Vietnam veteran. Thanks for your service. And then I’ll say something. But then they oftentimes just cut to “It was really terrible what happened to you guys when you came home.” And that just stops me. Like the fact that I’m a Vietnam veteran has to do with my homecoming experience because that’s what they know. That’s what they’ve been led to believe. That’s kind of what made the Hollywood screens in the post-Vietnam War era, and for Americans what they see on television and what they see on a movie screen is in large part what they remember.
RLN: So, let’s begin by looking at the reality that’s been obscured. You deal primarily with two groups of prominent antiwar POWs, two officers and eight enlisted men, both of whom faced legal action on their return. What distinguished the two pilots, Edison Miller and Gene Wilber?
Lembcke: Class. Class background. Both Miller and Wilber were from modest backgrounds. Wilber was born into a sharecropper farm family, worked as a farmhand on the rented family farm when he was young. Miller was orphaned as a child, grew up in Iowa. Neither of them went to college, which is interesting. They both enlisted soon out of high school in the Navy in the late 1940s, just after World War II. They worked their way up through the ranks of the Navy and they were both outstanding. Both in sort of basic physical skills but also testing very highly on mental skills and they then they may be made it on their own into officer rank, and both became high-ranking pilots.
That background, that professional trajectory set them apart from their peers. All of the other pilots–as far as I know—were at least college graduates. Many of them were graduates of the military academies—Annapolis for the Navy pilots or the Air Force Academy. These schools were hard to get into. Many of these guys were from elite families and of course it’s through their political connections that they got into the schools. Which isn’t to say they weren’t smart and capable people, but they resented people like Wilber and Miller. It was a sort of “How did you guys get here? I never heard of you at the Academy. What the heck.”
Not only that, but again Wilber and Miller were very accomplished as pilots. They had done as much, maybe surpassed some of these other pilots. So, they were resented.
Cutting to another take on this, my co-author Tom Wilber and I find that the dissenting pilots like Gene Wilber and Ed Miller, they had a more empathetic identity with the Vietnamese because they can recognize—particularly being from rural backgrounds—they had some greater sympathy and empathy with the Vietnamese then did the more elite pilots.
These pilots flew off aircraft carriers if they were in the Navy or if they were Air Force, they flew off bases in Taiwan or off very large airbases in South Vietnam—very large and very well protected. They had bowling alleys, they had swimming pools, they had offices. When these guys got shot down, they had never met another Vietnamese before. Miller and Wilber did not either, but again they had this kind of class background that enabled them to make some emotional, psychological connection with these people and understand the predicament that the South Vietnamese were in.
RLN: Okay so you write that their most important exercise of dissent was through an interview with Canadian journalist Micheal Maclear, which was broadcast on NBC and CBS. Tell me about that, what was the message conveyed in that interview?
Lembcke: Maclear seemed to have been after the conditions under which the POWs were living in Vietnam. He did a kind of panoramic, silent videotaping of their rooms in which they lived—and by the way, at the time he portrayed them as rooms, not cells. And that was a real eye-opener for me. Then, when I was reading the memoirs of the POWs, by golly, even in their own memoirs, they oftentimes referred to them as rooms, not cells. How many Americans have ever known that?
McClure did this interview in December 1970 and Christmas furnishings were out, you saw that. Then he sat down with two of the pilots, Wilber and Bob Schweitzer was the other one. It was mostly about their conditions of how often we got mail from home, how often they got other things, like candy and clean underwear and things like that. The tape that he made for the CBC then was picked up by two US television networks and was broadcast on the news in the States.
RLN: Can you talk about how it was framed in the US?
Lembcke: Charles, Collingswood was one of the narrators—I think for CBS—and he really framed it as a piece of communist propaganda. He said—paraphrasing, we quote directly in the book—“What you, the viewers, are about to see is communist propaganda. And you are about to be told that our fighters now in prison in Hanoi are living in rather ordinary comfortable conditions. But we know that that is not true. But, here is what this fellow Maclear wants you to believe.” And then we see the tape and we listen to the interview and then Collingswood closes with some kind of bookend with what he started—“What you have just seen is some very clever propaganda.”
RLN: This wasn’t their only action but it was sort of, but brought them into direct conflict with the Senior Ranking Officers who set up an impromptu chain of command. What did they do to create the now familiar narrative of the hard-core holdout POW?
Lembcke: It’s a rather complicated story actually. In the first year of pilot captures, 1964, there’s not even any claim, even by these guys that they were tortured. Then later, maybe ’66, ’67, some claim they were tortured, some say they weren’t. We also know that after about 1969 nobody claims to have been tortured or at least very few. So, there’s a sort a window period.
Here’s what we think happened. Some of this comes out of Craig Howes’ book “Voices of the Vietnam POWs.” He thinks that this small group of about a half-dozen Senior Ranking Officers (SROs) felt like they had compromised their hard-coreness by giving statements to the Vietnamese, about the illegality of the war, the impropriety of the war. By the time all these younger, newer pilots began to come in, and people who been captured in the South began to move north and they began to come into the prison system, these the senior ranking officers—this very small group—begin to feel like “What if they found out that I said this or I said that, and then some of these newer guys do the same thing? And when we all get home, they say ‘Well, you know, Senior Ranking Officer John Stockdale did this? Or Jeremiah Denton did?’”
So, these guys made up this fairytale, that “Boy, we really had it rough in the old days when we got here. You guys now are coming into a pretty soft situation, but we had the shit beat out of us when we came in. And yeah, to get some relief from that, by golly we said some things that we know we shouldn’t have said, but we went right back into the torture chamber. We really toughed it out.” And in a kind of finger-shaking manner, they said to these newbies, “And that’s what you guys better do. Because if you don’t forget were going to get you with charges when you come home. We’re going to charge you with collaboration. We’re going to discredit you in view of the public.”
Craig Howe uses this term that a “virtual curriculum” was constructed by these SROs that they enforced on the newer arrivees. And I think Howe uses the word to memorize, to adopt this as their story too. “Yes, I came in 1966, and boy did they beat the devil out of me.” So, what Tom Wilber and I say our book is that’s the beginning of the construction of the mythical hero POW, and that’s what comes home, that’s kind of what gets implanted in the public presentation, and that’s what sticks in the American public memory of the POWs.
RLN: So how did they respond to the McLaren interview? How did they deal with Miller and Wilber more generally?
Lembcke: By isolating them. By a kind of iron fist and velvet glove. They tried to win them over, early on—”Why don’t you join the club? We have to have solidarity here. We’ll all be better off if we stick together,” and so forth. And when that didn’t work—or it was kind of back and forth—they would ostracize them, they would badmouth them to the new arrivees, say “Stay away from Wilber and Miller” and “Don’t have anything to do with them.” So, we saw it kind of go back and forth.
Eventually they got more hard-core. Eventually there were actually threats that were made. I don’t know if they were made face-to-face directly to them, but there was a kind of license given to other hard-core people to “get Wilber and Miller if you can,” a kind of thinly veiled threat of physical accident incidents or even more. Apparently even after they got back to the states, that threat was reiterated.
RLN: There were also charges brought by Rear Admiral Stockdale. What happened with that?
Lembcke: There were charges that were that were made but then they were dismissed. Just a little bit of background the military officially decided rather early on that there would be no charges. That would be destructive to the corps, that it would involve too many other POWs being brought in as witnesses or to testify and it would not be worth the trouble. But they left the door open for some POWs to make charges against other POWs and so that’s what Stockdale did. But those charges also were dismissed a few months after they came home. And charges were also brought against eight enlisted men known as the Peace Committee.
RLN: Who were the Peace Committee in terms of their race and class background?
Lembcke: That is one of the most interesting stories in the book.
These were people who were ground troops in the south. They were Marines and Army people. they were captured in the south and then they were brought, they were detained as prisoners in the south, but slowly moved north and they landed in Hanoi in 1971, I think. As you alluded to in your introduction, other historians who looked into this—and Tom and I quote—conclude that 30 to 50% of the POWs were against the war, or we have reason to believe spoke out in some way or other express their discontent. In contrast these eight were self-identified as a Peace Committee, and then charged.
Five or six of the eight were black, Chicano, one who we dedicate the book to, Al Riate, was born on a Native American reservation in California. His mother was Native American, his father was Filipino. Only one of the eight was from a middle-class background. The other person we dedicate the book to his Bob Chenoweth was white working-class from Portland Oregon. He and Riate both joined Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda Indochina Peace Campaign after the war.
What was really interesting about the story, taking a step back, these eight all clearly identified with the Vietnamese early on. Their hearts were won over particularly by the kids. James Daly was a black Army soldier from Brooklyn and it sounds like his heart was melted when he got to Vietnam and he met these kids, as he says in his book he wrote with co-author when he got back. We quote from the book, cite the book and he very early was expressing his reservations about the war. Even beyond his opposition to the war, he realized he shouldn’t be here, and he made a big mistake by coming to Vietnam. So, we tell their stories in colorful sketches–a page or two on each of the eight, and it’s just great reading.
Now one of the eight, Abel Larry Kavanaugh, committed suicide shortly before the case was dismissed, which then cleared the way for them being the cast as mental health casualties of their years in captivity.” How did this fit into the larger framework of portraying antiwar GIs and veterans as psychologically wounded, traumatized?
Lembcke: First of all, a bit more on Kavanaugh. He was afraid that they’re going to be convicted, and he committed suicide before the charges were eventually dropped. And his suicide was a kind of trigger for a change of narrative.
It was as if the press looked at this, they got squeamish, and maybe the military got squeamish, too, and thought charging these guys as criminal—that is to say, criminalizing dissent—is kind of un-American. And criminalizing dissent in this case is not a very empathetic way to treat these guys. So, what other narratives are there out there? If we were live, a lot of listeners might be saying, “Well, if you’re not criminal, how about what if you’re psychologically needy? You did things, you’re kind of acting out.”
That was the narrative the press picked up on, which was already in play, by that meaning the larger population of Vietnam Veterans who’d been coming home for years who by 1968, 1969 were coming out against the war as veterans. They had formed Vietnam Veterans Against the War, by some accounts, they became the most effective contingent of the antiwar movement. They had been there, they had done that, they had seen it. You can’t argue with these guys, they’re saying the war is wrong.
So pro-war people and the press, the New York Times in particular, began to repackage this image of antiwar Vietnam veterans and began to—here’s the phrase, “medicalize their dissent.” They’re not criminal, certainly, but going forward somehow America is going to have to come to terms with the fact that our warriors came home as anti-warriors. So what are we going to do with these guys? You’ve already used the term, it pathologized them. That’s an empathetic way of dealing with them. It’s a sympathetic way of dealing with them. But it’s a way of bracketing their dissent.
Maybe we don’t want to legitimate what they’re saying, maybe what they’re saying is kind of cathartic. They’re saying these things as a way of dealing with their own stress, and their own trauma, but we shouldn’t really listen to as a political voice. So, with dissenting POWs let’s put them into the same into the same basket. Let’s psychologize them, psychologize their political views. And then that was kind of the end of the dissenting POW story, it kind of fades into the rest of the dissenting Vietnam Veteran story.
RLN: While the traumatized POW/veteran emerged as a narrative after the Vietnam War, the brainwashed POW preceded it, coming out of the Korean War. The specter of brainwashing was so pervasive, it even played a role in preventing POWs from playing a more crucial role in the anti-war movement. Could you lay out what was involved there?
Lembcke: First of all, brainwashing is a kind of psychologizing, too. And pilots in particular in that generation a lot of these pilots had been pilots in Korea and a lot of Americans came into the Vietnam War years really speak in the stories of the Korean War POWs who got brainwashed some of them so brainwashed that they didn’t want to come home after the war in Korea. This was really, really on the minds of the American people and it was really really on the minds of particularly pilots when they went off to war in Vietnam. We have quotes from one at least saying, “I knew if I was ever shut down and captured by golly, they would never brainwash me. That would never work on me.”
So, this was a really big deal. It was so much on their minds and it’s almost subtext then as the Vietnam War POW experience. And so these SROs, they’re constantly not only fearing that they themselves might get brainwashed, but they’re very fearful that their underlings will be brainwashed. Because, because of the class background, they really believed that these enlisted men, captured in the south, are quote-unquote “men of weak character.” I mean, why else would they not have gone to college, right? These are people with deficient character, deficient manhood, who are very vulnerable to communist propaganda.
RLN: That was interesting, but what surprised me was the degree to which brainwashing fears played a role in raising tensions between the POWs and the antiwar movement. What about that?
Lembcke: That tension came to a head in 1967, when there was a delegation of antiwar activists who went to Hanoi. The delegation was led by Tom Hayden and it included other SDS people, and Carol MacEldowney was one of them and she kept a very detailed journal that was published a couple years ago by UMass Press, and we make use of it an excellent window on what these SDS people were thinking. They went there not being sure they would meet with me any pilots, but then when they were allowed to meet pilots, their immediate thought, “Oh, are the Vietnamese letting us see pilots who have been brainwashed?” And, “How can we trust what the pilots are saying?”
They were also fearful that they might get brainwashed. And I think one of the best quotes that Tom Wilber and I have in our book is that they were afraid that if they came home to the States and reported what they really saw and what they really heard, and what they really believed, that they would be dismissed as having been brainwashed. So while they were still in Vietnam, they begin talking about, “OK, how should we deal with this? How should we how should we report this?” And that the density of that got increased by the fact that some of them thought that they were subjected to brainwashing, that the Vietnamese were trying to brainwashed them, these antiwar activists who had come would come there.
RLN: You write that “The coup de grâce to American memory of the POW experience was dealt by the rumors that some POWs had been left behind when the United States departed Vietnam.” How did these fantasies not only distract from the reality of POW dissent, but re-cast them as villains in some cases?
Lembcke: Back when I was talking about this earlier, I was saying that the image of the pathologized POW then bleed leads into that of other Vietnam veterans and I ended that by saying that’s kind of the end of the story, you’re reminding me that that there is another facet to this. Shortly after almost 600 POWs come home in February and March 1973, not long after that, the rumors began to circulate that not all of our POWs came home. Some of them got left behind. Where are they? Where are some of these POWs? And so that then becomes a story the press really begins to pick up on.
That continues—1973, 1983, 1993—I’m skipping way ahead here, but in in 1998, CNN broadcast a story about Operation Tailwind, a secret raid into Laos in 1970. CNN did an 18 month investigative report, and broadcast that on this raid US Special Forces used sarin nerve gas to kill GIs who had defected to the North Vietnamese.
Well, CNN soon after retracted that story as insupportable by the facts. I wrote another book about this–where does a story like this come from? And who believed it? I got a tape of the CNN broadcast and listened to this tape, and one of the supposedly eyewitnesses on this raid says, “We saw these Americans being held in this camp in Laos. We don’t know if they’re defectors or POWs.” And then at the end of this tape, Peter Arnett, legendary war correspondent who does the voiceover for the CNN broadcast, says, “How do we know, no POWs were killed on this raid?” This is 1998 and this is still out there. This is speculating that US Special Forces on this raid in 1970 or ’71 actually killed US POWs.
Now, as it turned out, and i didn’t know this I wrote when I wrote this book—my book is called “CNN’s Tailwind Tale”—but there’s this quite large conspiracist community out there that believes that not all of our POWs ever came home, and that some of them were killed on secret operations like Operation Tailwind that CNN reported. Those people are out there. They still believe this. So, the dissenters themselves then get associated with this kind of conspiratorial stuff—enemy behind the gates.
The Republican Party still runs on the idea that we lost the war in Vietnam due to betrayal on the home front. We didn’t lose to the Vietnamese, we lost to Washington insiders. Closely aligned with that imagery is these dissenting POWs, who were certainly behind the lines, they were off screen. Nobody really knows what they did, who they talked to, who they collaborated with, what kind of information that they shared. So, they’re kind of accoutrements in this larger betrayal narrative that feeds into this conspiracist narrative about POWs who supposedly never came home.
RLN: Another angle you write that “Casting POW dissenters as sadsack losers precluded their inclusion in the great American captivity narrative at the center of the nation’s founding mythology, wherein the captive hero remains a prisoner at war loyal to the commission on which he was sent,” but you note that the captivity narrative was always questionable from its beginnings. Why is that so?
Lembcke: Anthropologists study the heck out of the captivity narratives. Two things on this. One is that a lot of the European settlers in the 17th century who were who were taken captive and held as captives really didn’t need to be held as captive because they identified with the Native People. They didn’t want to come home. And the most interesting stories on that are women, the wives, the girlfriends, the women would get captured by the Indians and then they would decide that they wanted to stay. Captivity narratives were about the dangers outside the gates, the Native People or the Indians who are out there. But they were also about the “inner Indian,” the other within the collective self or even within the individual self, that kind of wanted to be outside the gates, over the fence, so to speak, and was distrustful.
So these Protestant fire and brimstone preachers were always trying to keep people inside the fences, and they would always use the danger of the Native others as a reason why you shouldn’t go out of the fence. And what anthropologists discover is that the preachers were also afraid that if people got out and really met the others on the outside, and got to know the Native People, they wouldn’t be so afraid.
We can see that this is what the SROs in Hao Lo prison in Hanoi were afraid of. They prohibited their underlings from learning the Vietnamese language. They said, “Look you take lessons in Vietnamese while you’re being held here prisoner. This is one of the things were going to charge you with for collaboration with the enemy, or giving aid and comfort to the enemy.” So they disallowed this.
Why? I write it’s the same thing with the captivity narratives. It might be Craig Howe who uses the term “the white gook.” They were afraid of the white gook. They were afraid of the inner Vietnamese kind of surfacing, and these people, their underlings, again particularly these men captured in the south, these men of “weak character” they will begin to think, “Hmmm. What’s wrong with these Vietnamese people anyway? I kinda like them. I kinda like their ways.”
I just want to say a bit more here. Bob Chenoweth tells us about his stay as a captive and Al Riate. They lived with the Vietnamese in the south as captives rather freely. They went out gathering food unguarded sometimes. And they went out to villagers near the camp where they were being held. They would go to other villages where food was donated to them for them, the prisoners, as well as the cadre who were running the camp. They kinda lived a Vietnamese lifestyle. My reading on it is that they kinda liked it.
Bob Chenoweth tells this great story about Al Riate who walked away one day and walked into it a North Vietnamese artillery camp. Riate had learned a little Vietnamese and he walked in and sat down and had tea with the North Vietnamese, who then by the end of the day, took him back to his camp. But it comes off as just totally, totally innocent.
RLN: In the last chapter you write about specific examples of those is continued in the spirit of the dissenting POWs you talk about one of those examples and how they relate back to the Vietnam POW experience?
Lembcke: The most dramatic one is Chuck Searcy a Vietnam veteran who goes back to Vietnam and founds an organization to find landmines and unexploded ordnance in Quang Tri Province near the former DMZ [demilitarized zone] where – years after the war, peasant farmers are still being wounded and killed when they hit these unexploded ordinances. He starts this organization which trains the Vietnamese to do this work as well, to find these things and detonate them safely. He’s been written up in the New York Times, and become a celebrated figure. I’m not sure he identifies so much with the POW dissenters as kind of with the broader antiwar veteran dissent.
RLN: At the end of your introduction you write, “The banishment of POW dissent from memory leaves a void in American political culture where new generations of uniformed war resisters will look for role models, and civilian activists will look for allies in their efforts to end U.S. wars of aggression. Filling that void is the mission of this book.” But isn’t there also a need for military and political leaders to learn something as well? After 20 years in Afghanistan doesn’t our own establishment, at some level, realize there’s got to be a better way?
Lembcke: Sure they do. My own thoughts on that is that we need to find a different way of exercising our economic and cultural assets internationally, a post-imperialist life for America. We need to find a way of making peace with the rest of the world, living in peace with the rest of the world, and the antiwar veterans are a way of doing that, of taking a leadership role in that.
One of the things I hope our book does is cause other people who’ve been in the military to identify with the POW dissenters. My hope, frankly, is that some other of the people who were POWs in Vietnam and who were among that 30 and 50% who expressed in some way or another opposition to the war, while they were, but then went silent when we got home. I hope some of them will see this book and say, “God, I’m 85 years old. You know I really think that I should say I was part of this too, and I really should have spoken out before and I’m glad to speak out now.” Even if only one would do that it would be a huge help. Of course, it would be an even greater help if they lent their voices and told us something that we don’t know about what went on. That would be just a huge, huge service to us.
RLN: Finally, what’s the most important question I haven’t asked? And what’s the answer?
Lembcke: I have a good answer to that. There was a film that came out in 2006, called “Sir! No Sir!” a great film, it was a great inspiration to the current generation of people in the military, to young people. It’s been shown thousand times on college campuses. I know because I get invited to college campuses, I’m in the film as the author of my book “The Spitting Image.” So I put I get dragged along with the film to talk about talk about the film and the veterans’ antiwar movement.
But why are there why are there no dissenting POWs in this film? Why is that part of the G.I. and veteran antiwar movement not told in the film? It’s a question that i want to ask filmmaker David Zeiger, if in the making of “Sir! No Sir” did he come across this story? Did anybody ever say to him, “What about this chapter of it” and I would also like to ask of you other historians, other people in antiwar work, when the war was still going on and after 1967 when the Tom Hayden group came back, what happened to that information? Did it not find its way into the antiwar movement? And what was the level of awareness within the antiwar movement that there were these guys in lockup in Hanoi who were speaking out against the war?
There’s a whole bunch of questions there. Of course, had you asked me, the answer would be, “I don’t know.” But those are all things that I do want to know.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Studs Terkel specialized in oral histories, so he knew whereof he spoke when over 40 years ago he lamented that “even in the history books [and] the memories of people” it was as though the Federal Art Project never existed.
This sentiment comes at the beginning of The New Deal for Artists, a 1979 documentary meant to help fill that void. Although the rise of the internet has exponentially increased the available information on every subject under the sun, a new digital remastering of the film — itself an oral history, told by artists whose careers were launched and lives were saved by the still-little-known New Deal program — not only feeds us stories of the past but gives us food for thought about the future and the role of government.
With the Great Depression raging, Franklin D. Roosevelt assumed the presidency with a fervent belief that government could and must play a larger role in the day-to-day lives of the American people. To enact this “new deal” with Americans his administration created what came to be known as an “alphabet soup” of programs to put people to work. Chief among these was the Works Progress (later: Work Projects) Administration, or WPA. And it was under the WPA that the Federal Art Project, or FAP, was born in 1935.
Over the course of its eight-year history, the FAP would at least briefly employ roughly 10,000 artists, paying them $23.60 per week to ply their various trades — an astounding sum considering that in today’s dollars this amounts to $1,840 per month during America’s worst-ever economic crisis.
Because the FAP was purposely set up to free artists from the creative constraints of having to worry about the marketability of their work — oppressive in the best of times, let alone during the Depression — the program fomented what narrator Orson Welles called “an unprecedented artistic renaissance” in the United States. Writers including Terkel, Saul Bellow, Nelson Algren, and Ralph Ellison were sustained by the FAP for a time. Richard Wright wrote Native Son while enjoying its financial support. Without the FAP we likely would never have heard of painters Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, or Jackson Pollack. And although Orson Welles was one of few artists getting steady work during the Depression, it was the FAP’s Federal Theatre Project that propelled him into the stratosphere, furnishing him the opportunity to stage a version of Macbeth that proved to be both a sensation and a landmark in theatre history, employing 150 Black actors — only four with prior stage experience — plus African drummers and dancers.
The progressive nature of so much FAP work — the birth of American Abstract Expressionism, the Negro Theatre Unit (remember, this in the 1930s, when Black people could not elsewhere get hired as theater techs), the “social documentary” style of WPA photographers like Dorothea Lange “giv[ing] voice to the voiceless” — is one of The New Deal for Artists central themes. As presented through the lens of writer/director Wieland Schulz-Keil, FDR’s progressive approach to enabling artists propelled the country forward both socially and artistically.
But we all know what happens eventually to progressive idealism in our Land of the Free: it gets painted red by politically opportunistic conservatives. Thus, the last third of The New Deal for Artists documents the sad rise of the Red Scare, as right-wing reactionaries get the government to clamp down on content critical of capitalism, a rein-tightening which culminates in the WPA’s shutting down the pro-union, Welles-directed musical The Cradle Will Rock four days before its Broadway opening. (It was produced the following year by Welles’s Mercury Theatre and is now regarded as a classic.) Before long government censors were “suggesting” changes to a book on the history of civil liberties — and the abridgement thereof — in the State of Illinois, and before long FAP was only a shadow of its former self.
What you take away from The New Deal for Artists may depend on your political bent. What cannot be denied, however, is that the government’s choice to nurture thousands of artists during the worst of economic times changed the course of American art history while providing relief and training for thousands of Americans who might never have otherwise found work, Americans who produced hundreds of thousands of works telling stories that otherwise would never have been told.
The New Deal for Artists tells their story, in their words. Listen to that story and you learn a bit more about our American story, which may include a moral about how we all benefit when artists are not simply left to the mercy of the “free market.”
Art still evokes controversy, unintended or otherwise. I saw this recently in a strange clash in taste and property values on top of an appropriation of the Me Too movement in Long Beach. Citing the aforementioned reasons, a member of the historic Bluff Heights neighborhood association in a letter to the city objected to two recently proposed murals to be exhibited on a Long Beach marijuana dispensary, saying they were too sexually explicit. The images included a purple flower on a backdrop of the same color [it wasn’t stated but it could be because the stamen was in view] and on another side, a well-endowed young woman in a garden with a butterfly, her fingers gently touching her chest. They called the art “objectionable” but it is also an easy target.
In San Pedro, censorship has recently taken on a different form concerning the local press. As an arts and culture columnist who covers San Pedro, the Harbor Area and greater Los Angeles, part of my job is to cover the First Thursday ArtWalk and artists who make it happen for the community at large. At the latest art walk stakeholder meeting on April 27, my efforts were at the least abridged and ultimately censored.
Random Lengths Newscovered the first stakeholder meeting, which took place in January, to look at what was potentially being planned as artists and the arts district work to relaunch the art walk as Los Angeles opens up from more than a year of being closed. For our second story we consulted three local artists to gather their input on the history of San Pedro’s art walk and their ideas for it going forward. As a follow up to that story, I attended the April 27 Zoom meeting to hear about the art walk stakeholder survey results and the plans gleaned from that document going forward. Prior to the event, after I reserved my place, I agreed to speak to the meeting facilitators about any questions I may have before writing about the meeting, per their request.
Censored
During the meeting, members of the press were asked to “announce” themselves and their publication in the chat, which I did. We were told this was because some people wanted to know [about the press] before they were quoted in an article that they didn’t know about. We were then assigned to break out rooms, but I was excluded. However another publication’s editor was assigned to a break out room as well as another Random Lengths News reporter who was there in the capacity of an artist — a photographer; he was asked to promise not to reveal the contents of his break out session since he was not there as a reporter. In the break out rooms the survey results were considered and built upon. After attendees returned to the main meeting, I heard the “best of” those ideas.
The intention of the report was for artists and interested stakeholders to have an open or “democratic” discussion on the survey results and the future direction of the arts district.
To my best recollection, the second meeting had fewer artists in attendance than the first meeting. Without adequate reporting on these meetings, it’s not possible for the artists and the larger community to participate in the discussion. This is problematic and can appear to lead to manufactured consent.
Facilitator and Angels Gate Cultural Center executive director Amy Erickson said the purpose of this conversation was to determine the structure that would enhance the organic quality of the art walk. In her view, the Chamber of Commerce and the Property Ownwers Business Improvement District have central positions in this structure.
Then Erickson turned to the survey. She said people love the event the way it is.
The “First Thursday Art Walk” is by most accounts referred to as First Thursday. It’s easy, people know what and when you are talking about and it’s become the de facto term used by many locals. Further, many people attending First Thursday go for the street fair environment. I would venture to say, some may not even be aware that the event was intended and initiated as an art walk. They may see crafts for sale and the occasional live music happening and presume, that’s the “art,” or that it serves as art, even though they may be aware that galleries are open too. This begs the question, how are people drawn to the galleries?
I mention this because in this scenario, art becomes a casualty, an afterthought with the general community who haven’t been exposed to what’s happening in their downtown arts district. I make an effort to call it “art walk,” verbally and in writing about the event. It may seem miniscule, but words and names are important. They are identifiers providing information that people respond to.
In these recent go-rounds with the planning and relaunching of the art walk, it’s important to consider this and the message the arts district puts out.
The Meeting
If the apparent shaping of manufactured consent wasn’t problematic, the revisioning of the arts district’s history was.
Just before the meeting started, executive director of the Grand Vision Foundation and board member of the Chamber of Commerce, Liz Schindler- Johnson, offered a synopsis of the art walk’s history.
In Schindler-Johnson’s recollection, the artwalk started in 1998 as a collaboration between local artists, restaurateurs and a very, very small business improvement district, different from the PBID of today.
She speculated that the artwalk drew in foot-traffic of about 50,000 people a year — “a very small operation that had big dreams.”
Schindler-Johnson identified Robin Hinchcliff, who also was one of the former executive directors of Angels Gate Cultural Center, as the driving force in bringing artists together and getting them to commit to opening up their studios once a month and to the public.
Schindler-Johnson posited that the art walk helped to start changing the narrative about San Pedro and what there was to do in downtown San Pedro.
“Many people thought, ‘there’s such an aversion to downtown San Pedro’ but it was people who thought there wasn’t much to do,” Schindler-Johnson said. “The artwalk started changing people’s perceptions and it also made it attractive for other artists to come be part of downtown San Pedro. It changed who was here on a very regular basis.”
She said there have been many different aspects of First Thursdays over the years from exclusively people who were there to see the galleries, “but really very small numbers of people, maybe 100 to 200 at the most.”
The art walk sometimes featured classic cars, then food trucks came, about 2008 or 2009. It was always controversial but “brought profoundly more people to the event, whether art lovers or art buyers, or not is always up for discussion.”
She called the San Pedro arts district a naturally occurring one and credited spontaneous generation for its success despite not having any specific management or supervision. The PBID over the years has generously supported some of the marketing for the event.
“From the Lofts to the [National] Watercolor Society we have created, all of us together, have created more of an impression of a walkable artist-driven environment and … it’s been one of the top greatest improvements to our immediate community that I can possibly think of,” she said.
She followed this by asking her husband, CEO of Jerico Development and PBID board member Alan Johnson if he wanted to add anything. Alan agreed to his wife’s assertions by describing the genesis of the artwalk as a kind of creative push and pull between local artists and small downtown businesses, crediting the resulting changing nature of the artwalk as the key to its survival.
Getting to the survey, most respondents said the art walk borders are between 5th Street and Pacific Avenue to 8th Street and Pacific and over to Harbor Boulevard. San Pedro is home to Cornelius Projects a few blocks south on Pacific Avenue at 14th Street. It makes sense to include this asset in the art walk and in potential trolley routes, if that is revived.
Most people in the survey consider the art walk a regional event — opposed to a community event, which was the second most voted option. It’s curious why that is and what constitutes a regional event. Art certainly does. As artist Ron Linden noted in our last story, the cachet provided by the arts district is something the downtown area benefits from.
Considering this is also how artists make their livelihoods, the art they create deserves the highest focus in relaunching this art walk. The issue is besides marketing the galleries, this survey doesn’t appear to support the framework necessary to showcase art on a regional level. It does, however, support a community street fair. San Pedro is also home to professional artists who are fluent in this level of promotion. Heed their knowledge, utilize their insights and talent to create a regional affair befitting this historical port town that artists have flocked to and created in for more than a century.
Wrap up
Erickson said the arts district has never had funds to pay for this event. It wants suggestions and it will take all the data and bring it to the PBID, Chamber of Commerce and other partners. At this point, I requested in the Zoom chat box that they also ask the artists for their input.
PORT OF LONG BEACH — Ocean carriers bringing the greenest ships to the Port of Long Beach can earn the world’s most generous sustainable vessel financial incentives, starting July 1.
The Long Beach Board of Harbor Commissioners in May approved changes centered around incorporating the international Environmental Ship Index or ESI into the port’s Green Ship Incentive Program, which began in 2012. A voluntary system, the ESI identifies seagoing ships exceeding the current emission standards of the International Maritime Organization.
The Green Ship Incentive Program has helped improve air quality, encouraging shipping lines to send their newest, cleanest oceangoing vessels to the POLB. More than $1.7 million in incentives were paid to participants in 2020.
Port of Long Beach Executive Director Mario Cordero noted more than 50 ports worldwide and more than 8,000 vessels participate in the Environmental Ship Index.
The updated program includes three incentive levels ranging from $600 to $6,000, depending on a vessel’s ESI score. Vessels with main engines meeting International Maritime Organization’s Tier III standard, which require dedicated NOx emission control technologies, are eligible for an additional $3,000 credit, meaning a vessel could be eligible for up to $9,000 on every call.
Port Exempts Natural Gas Vehicles from Clean Truck Fund Rate
The Long Beach Board of Harbor Commissioners on May 24, voted 4 to 1 to approve an exemption from the clean truck fund rate for the cleanest natural gas-powered trucks, as a transitional step to a future when zero-emissions cargo trucks are widely available.
Natural gas trucks are lower emitters of nitrogen oxides, a building block of smog, and provide a step toward cleaner air as the port strives for the goals of the San Pedro Bay Ports Clean Air Action Plan.
In considering a rate to encourage the trucking industry to invest in cleaner vehicles and reach zero-emissions for cargo trucking by 2035, the Port of Long Beach and Port of Los Angeles have set a rate of $10 per twenty-foot equivalent unit – a standard measure for one 20-foot-long cargo container. The Ports have not yet implemented that rate, but are working on a system with a third-party vendor that will collect the rate for the ports.
Zero-emissions trucks had already been determined to be exempt from the future rate. Monday’s action by Long Beach is designed to encourage the industry to make an interim step while zero-emissions technology catches up.
The low nitrogen oxides exemption will apply to trucks picking up or dropping off loaded containers at the Port of Long Beach that use natural gas engines meeting the 0.02 grams of nitrogen oxides per brake horsepower-hour standard. The vehicles must be purchased and registered in the Port Drayage Truck Registry by Dec. 31, 2022.
Diesel emissions from trucks have been cut by as much as 97% compared to 2005 levels. Trucks remain the port’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions and the second highest source of nitrogen oxides, a contributor to regional smog formation.
The Clean Air Action Plan (CAAP) has established a goal of zero-emissions trucks by 2035.
Harbor Commission Approves Port of Long Beach Budget
The Long Beach Board of Harbor Commissioners May 24, approved a $622.4 million budget for the Long Beach Harbor Department, more than half of which is dedicated to capital improvement projects.
The budget for fiscal year 2022 begins Oct. 1 and is 4.2% lower than the budget adopted last year. Operating revenue is projected to be 8.7% higher due to strong anticipated performance in containerized cargo volumes. The Port’s fiscal year 2022 budget will be considered for approval by the City Council later this year.
For the next fiscal year, the Port plans to add 11 full-time positions and transfer an all-time high of $20.6 million to the city’s Tidelands Operating Fund, which supports quality-of-life projects along Long Beach’s 7-mile coastline.
Additionally, the budget sets aside $329.1 million in an ongoing capital improvement program to modernize terminals, rail, bridges, waterways, roads and other infrastructure to support the ongoing growth of operations at the port.
Overall, the Port of Long Beach plans to invest nearly $1.6 billion in strategic projects over the next 10 years.
