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GELFAND’S WORLD - On November 11, 2011, a four-hundred-foot section of San Pedro's scenic coastal road, Paseo Del Mar, was destroyed in a landslide. It still has not been rebuilt. Counting on my fingers, I notice that we are just 10 weeks shy of 13 years. Supposedly the plans have been approved, but there is never any money to get the job done.
The long era of the broken road began in the last months that Janice Hahn held the City Council seat, goes on to include the entire City Council career of Joe Buscaino, and is now nearly 2 years into the term of City Councilman Tim McOsker.
One thing about the once-existent Paseo Del Mar Road. It was perhaps the single best view of the Catalina Channel and Catalina Island in this area. There are other viewpoints, but this one was special.
The road was also one of the few ways out of San Pedro, and would have supplied an important escape route in the event of a toxic gas leak or serious fire in the Port of Los Angeles.
Somehow, the state of California can get roads fixed, even if Los Angeles can't. We might recognize that Highway 1 through Big Sur has been closed and reopened numerous times over this same time period. There is even an old history of Big Sur closures and repairs that you can find here. I'm not trying to suggest that San Pedro competes with Big Sur as a scenic highway or tourist attraction, but we do have a useful comparison in terms of the state of California always finding the funds to get the road open.
Politicians have been paying lip service to repairing Paseo Del Mar for most of these past 13 years, but the elected leaders of Los Angeles have continued to vote our city into impoverishment in order to serve the municipal unions which keep them elected. It's likely that the mayor has never even heard of Paseo Del Mar, but she shares equal blame with the City Council in that ruinous legislation.
You can put together your own list of unfinished (and unstarted) projects here in L.A., but I'll add one tiny project just to continue my list. There is a building in San Pedro that is recognizable as a one-time bank building. It was taken over by the city and under former Councilman Rudy Svornich, it became the Croatian Cultural Center. It was an odd choice of function for a city building, considering that there are other Croatian centers within a couple of miles of this structure. But for whatever reasons, Councilman Rudy pushed the idea and the CCC has been here ever since. It is nominally under the control of the city's Department of Cultural Affairs, or at least it was the last I looked.
The CCC building would actually be a good cooling center should we have a prolonged heat wave that endangers peoples' lives. It ought to be upgraded and kept available for that purpose. In the meanwhile, it could be made available for local governmental and cultural affairs, as it once was.
But in the city's newfound version of municipal poverty, the CCC has been designated to be leased out to the local Chamber of Commerce. This seems to be a way for the city to avoid the expense of maintaining the building as a public service location. It's just one more hit to the people of Los Angeles through the fault of City Council irresponsibility.
One non-city issue that goes along with the closure of Paseo Del Mar. The Vincent Thomas Bridge connects the end of the 110 (on the San Pedro side) with Terminal Island and ultimately Long Beach on the eastern side. The bridge needs work, because the road surface is wearing out. We are still waiting for the state to decide whether it will try to repair the bridge in one year, or whether it will take 2 or 3 years by closing parts of the bridge part of the time. We still don't know when the project will start, so it's hard for local businesses or even city government to plan ahead. What we can say is that with the bridge closed and Paseo still unbuilt, there will be even fewer ways out of San Pedro in the event of an emergency.
Donald said What?
A few days ago, Donald Trump admitted that he had lost the 2020 election. It got coverage, but not the headline coverage that it deserves. After all, Trump's Big Lie about the 2020 election was the foundation of an entire political movement, stimulated the first armed attack on the Capitol since the War of 1812, and contributed to the deaths of several police officers. It is the Big Lie that Trump rode to the 2024 presidential nomination and, until now, the argument he puts before his loyal followers.
So now he admits that he lost the election, if only by a whisker? This should have been the big story of the day, if not the whole month. It undermines the whole basis of the Stop the Steal movement and, indeed, Trump's nomination.
Well, maybe yes and maybe no. In standard Trump fashion, he walks back any statement that proves to be inconvenient to his political narrative. The current story seems to be that he lost it but it was rigged. This certainly seems to be self-contradictory. Notice that to believe this yarn, you have to accept that there was a wide conspiracy to change vote tallies, that this conspiracy ran across multiple states (at least 6 of them), and all this in spite of the fact that not one credible piece of evidence has ever been found to back up those claims. (There are those who will disagree with the above assertion, but they might consider reading the court transcripts of the five dozen lawsuits claiming some sort of rigging.)
I Led 3 Lives, or what it means to be a Comrade
Trump keeps trying to dust off that old term Comrade to tar Kamala Harris. There are a couple of generations who have grown up without being exposed to the right-wing party line that routinely attempted to tar people with the Communist label and which liked to use that Comrade word.
Just to get a taste of the way that the word Comrade was once used in American social discourse, we have the 1952 book I Led 3 Lives by Herbert A. Philbrick, and the 1953 television show of the same name. You can find it on Youtube, including the series pilot, which you can find here. It is the story of how Philbrick, who was a Boston businessman, infiltrated the Communist Party USA and became a counterspy for the FBI.
The style and photography (what film buffs refer to as mis en scene) is dark and foreboding. Philbrick moves through the American city he lives in as though it were a dangerous foreign capital, him being an American spy in peril of being caught and tortured. In the opening moments, he speaks directly to his fear of being identified as an FBI agent and thrown out a window.
I only mention this show to remind us of what the word Comrade is meant to imply: Allegiance to a foreign power, treason towards one's own country, and acceptance of a truly foreign economic ideology. Donald Trump has dusted off the Comrade label in order to apply it to our own home-grown elected official Kamala Harris. It is sleezy and slimy behavior on his part, but that of course is no surprise.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
