Robert Louis Stevenson Monument

Robert Louis Stevenson monument

Portsmouth Square Park in San Francisco predates the 1848 Gold Rush, and its monument to poet and author Robert Louis Stevenson is 128 years old. Portsmouth Square is undergoing a $71 million renovation, and Chinese-American organizations want the monument to be removed, apparently because "Stevenson 'had nothing to do with Chinatown.'” Writer Ron Lee, whose grandfather was a friend of Stevenson's, says removal would be a mistake.

Before marrying and leaving San Francisco in 1880, Stevenson lived in Chinatown. While in the city, he made daily jaunts to Portsmouth Square, where he sat for hours on end, watching the comings and goings of residents.

He also became friends with a loquacious Chinese teenager named Chow Chong, who later in his life became my grandfather. Chong’s family lived in a building facing the square on what is now Walter U Lum Place, and he took Stevenson on tours of Chinatown.

My grandfather belonged to a family of seafarers who routinely sailed their ocean-going junk on trade expeditions back and forth to Kwong Hoy, China. They were in the funeral trade and members of the clan in their home village manufactured teakwood coffins to be sold in San Francisco. They also embarked on monthly trips to Monterey Bay, and Stevenson described his newly found Chinese friends as “vagabonds of the seas.”

R L Stevenson (Brittanica)

Stevenson was invited on two occasions to join my grandfather’s family on a voyage to the Chinese fishing village at Point Alones in Monterey Bay. Along the way, they anchored at China Beach on the northern tip of San Francisco, and Stevenson watched while Chong and his uncles climbed a hill and started digging up boxes. Stevenson, who would go on to write the classic novel “Treasure Island,” imagined his new friends must be uncovering their own hidden riches. Instead, he learned that boxes contained human remains of Chinese nationals that had been earmarked for repatriation to villages across the Pacific.

The practice known in Cantonese as “jub gwut,” meaning “pick up bones,” was a sacred tradition to Chinese “sojourners” who had come to “Gum San” (Gold Mountain) with hopes of earning a fortune and then returning home. If one should unfortunately perish along the way, their remains were considered by their descendants to be more valuable than gold, and a burial back in an ancestral village was a sacred vow.

The voyages, plus Chong’s tales of avoiding pirates and British gunboats in the seas around China, deeply influenced Stevenson. In 1880, he published stories in a magazine called Frasier’s that were similar to those that had been told to him by my grandfather’s family, only with a treasure-hunting theme. It’s speculated that those stories eventually led him to write “Treasure Island,” and I often wonder whether the novel’s protagonist, Jim Hawkins, was partly inspired by a Chinese teenager.

Stevenson also wrote disapprovingly of rabble rousers such as Denis Kearney, whose racist rants went a long way in the eventual passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred most immigration from China.

Despite the fact that Robert Louis Stevenson was not Chinese, or that his monument may have been funded by a man who was an anti-Chinese racist, it seems like a good idea to retain the cenotaph in the renovated square. Stevenson did nothing objectionable and had a historical connection to Chinatown. Besides, haven't we had enough attempts to erase history? I hope this is one monument that won't be torn down.

Norm Van Brocklin

Football Hall-of-Famer Norm Van Brocklin (1926-1983) had retired as a player and was a coach for the Vikings and Falcolns when i began following sports. Veteran sportswriter Tony Kornheiser had a short tribute on today's Pardon the Interruption:

Happy Anniversary, Norm Van Brocklin. This is posthumous, but around this day 74 years ago the Rams quarterback passed for a still-NFL record 554 yards. Van Brocklin had 5 touchdowns as the Rams beat the then-New York Yanks. Van Brocklin won two NFL championships, one with the Rams, one with the Eagles. He was the NFL MVP in 1960. After 9 Pro Bowls and 12 seasons as a player Van Brocklin turned to coaching, first coach ever for the Minnesota Vikings. Also coached the Atlanta Falcons.

Van Brocklin suffered a number of illnesses, including a brain tumor. After it was removed, he told the press “it was a brain transplant. They gave me a sportswriter’s brain to make sure I got one that hadn’t been used.”

His career was spectacular, but the remark about the entire sportswriting profession belongs on the insult Mt. Rushmore.

The Safer Haven

We've talked about how bad the stagflation was during the late '70's and early '80's, but don't take it from me. Here's what Federal Reserve history has to say: [bold added]

The economy was already in weak shape coming into the downturn, as a recession in 1980 had left unemployment at about 7.5 percent. Both the 1980 and 1981-82 recessions were triggered by tight monetary policy in an effort to fight mounting inflation. During the 1960s and 1970s, economists and policymakers believed that they could lower unemployment through higher inflation, a tradeoff known as the Phillips Curve. In the 1970s, the Fed pursued what economists would call "stop-go" monetary policy, which alternated between fighting high unemployment and high inflation. During the "go" periods, the Fed lowered interest rates to loosen the money supply and target lower unemployment. During the "stop" periods, when inflation mounted, the Fed would raise interest rates to reduce inflationary pressure. However, the Phillips Curve tradeoff proved unstable in the long-run, as inflation and unemployment increased together in the mid-1970s. While unemployment trended down slightly by the end of the decade, inflation continued to rise, reaching 11 percent in June 1979 (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis).

(WSJ graph)

In 1971 Richard Nixon canceled the convertibility of dollars to gold under the Bretton Woods system, which had been in place since 1944. The delinking of the dollar from gold and the combination of inflation and unemployment unprecedented since the Great Depression made it a period of maximum economic uncertainty. The gold price spiked from the $35/oz. under Bretton Woods to a high of $850 by the end of the decade.

The gold market is spiking again. In fact it Hasn’t Rallied This Much Since 1979. [bold added]

A modern-day gold rush is stretching from Costco store aisles to underground vaults in London to the flickering screens of Wall Street. Old jewelry now glimmers with potential dollar signs.

Gold’s value has ballooned by 40% this year, putting it on track for a greater annual price jump than during the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic or 2007-09 recession, according to Dow Jones Market Data. Futures for the precious metal haven’t surged so much in a year since 1979, when a global energy crisis fueled an inflationary shock that thrashed the world’s economy.

Costco 1 oz. buffalo gold piece

These days, it isn’t a financial meltdown that is drawing people to one of the original market refuges. The recent run-up to record prices—reaching $3,682.20 a troy ounce on Monday—instead stems in part from the White House, with investors big and small rushing to shield themselves from an uncertain outlook for the U.S. economy and its role in the world.

A lot has changed in the past 50 years. What hasn't changed over the centuries is that people flee to gold in troubled times.

Perspective

Charlie Kirk at the 2024 Republican convention (Politico)

24 years later the significance of September 11th is receding from memory, much as December 7th already has for most Americans. Besides, many people don't feel like reminiscing (again) about 9-11; what's on their minds is yesterday's murder of Charlie Kirk.

9-11 does allow us to put some perspective on the events of yesterday, however. "Everything changed" on September 10, 2025, is something I've read repeatedly on social media. No, I'm afraid not; tragic and emotional as it was, the killing of one man pales in comparison to the death of 3,000 people and the destruction of the twin towers in 2001.

Then, as now, some identifiable groups are easy to blame for the horror. However, the principle of individual responsibility is still strongly ingrained in the culture, and most Americans are able to resist condemning entire groups for the actions of a few members.

Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) are the enemies of rational decision-making, and if we are honest with ourselves, there was a lot more FUD in 2001 about the next terrorist attack than there is today about how many people will get killed because of their politics.

We have the motivation, ability, and character to get through today's problems, if only we can see it.

Fight or Flight

Because of the likely election of Zohran Mamdani ("globalize the intifada") to mayor, many Jews are considering leaving New York City. Dovid Margolin, chronicler of Jewish life, points to an example from New York's history that shows that there is an alternative to flight:

What’s different today is that there’s an alternate route for the city, born in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

From the early 1900s to the mid-1960s Crown Heights was an upscale, mostly Jewish neighborhood: a mix of secular Jews and observant ones, rich and poor, American-born Dodger fans and Holocaust survivors. Then things began to change.

Migration patterns, a massive social-services infrastructure that welcomed dysfunction, and a breakdown in policing destroyed many New York neighborhoods. The newcomers were black, but race wasn’t the issue. It was the gangs, drugs, violence and a pernicious new strain of antisemitism mysteriously condoned by elites. During one three-month period in 1968, 11 Jewish institutions in New York were vandalized, set on fire or firebombed. As in other parts of the city and country, many Jews began to leave Crown Heights.

The "Rebbe" (1902-1994)

The neighborhood, however, was also home to Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, seventh leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement. The Rebbe, as he is known, charted a new course. “A phenomenon has recently spread among the Jewish people, like a plague, God forbid, of abandoning Jewish neighborhoods,” he said at a public gathering in 1969. Panic was causing people to flee, harming those left behind, especially the poor, elderly and infirm.

“People claim there’s no solution, but that’s not true,” the Rebbe said. “To start, one must stand firm and not run away.” He argued that Jews abandoning one place automatically weakened the resolve and position of communities facing similar challenges everywhere.

“I’m very concerned about Crown Heights,” Mayor John Lindsay told the Rebbe when he visited him in 1968. “It is very key to the whole community of Brooklyn.” The Rebbe saw even more: “It is a test case, not only for New York” but for the world.

Many Jews continued to leave for the greener pastures of Westchester County and Long Island, but the Hasidim stayed and planted their roots even deeper. They organized a citizen patrol, built schools, worked to head off the sale of synagogues, and created nonprofits to buy homes and resell them to community members. The Rebbe encouraged the opening of a Hasidic art gallery and a flower shop. He asked that weddings and other joyous events be held within the community to raise morale and support local kosher establishments.

It wasn’t always easy, and not everyone appreciated the Hasidim for bucking the trend. Following the 1991 riots, Al Sharpton dubbed the Crown Heights Jewish community a “Fort Apache in the black ghetto.” But they persevered, transforming the neighborhood again into a wonderful place to live, work and raise a family. In the process, they realized the Rebbe’s vision for saving the American city.

It is ironic that many of the young transplants to New York who voted for Mr. Mamdani live in such places as Crown Heights, unaware that had it not been for increased policing, government reforms they despise, and, most important, the locals who persisted during the city’s darkest days, they wouldn’t have dared enter the neighborhoods they now colonize. They know little about what came before them—and where their ideological fantasies lead.

Santayana's observation bears repeating: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it".

Pearl Harbor: Receding into History

Last year's Pearl Harbor Day post was about Lou Conter, the last survivor of the USS Arizona. Lou Conter died last spring.

Conter died Monday morning [April 1, 2024] at his home in Grass Valley, Calif., according to his daughter Louann Daley.

Born in Ojibwa, Wis., in 1921, Conter was 20 years old when the USS Arizona was bombed by Japanese forces at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.

The USS Arizona’s bombing was the deadliest of the attacks that day, killing 1,177 people—nearly half of the 2,403 who died during Pearl Harbor. Conter was one of just 334 people assigned to the USS Arizona who survived.

Conter escaped the burning wreckage. As he and others guided crew members to safety, “more often than not, their burned skin would come off on our hands,” he wrote in his 2021 memoir, “The Lou Conter Story.”

“It was horrible,” he wrote. “Absolutely horrible.”

Despite his work that day, he said he didn’t want to be called a hero.

“I consider the heroes the ones that gave their lives, that never came home to their families,” Conter said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal last year. “They’re the real heroes.”

...He got his pilot wings in November 1942, and was part of a team that flew Black Cat aircraft overnight doing bomb runs in the South Pacific, Conter said. He was shot down twice, once in September 1943 and a second time three months later. Both times, Conter said, he used a lifeboat to get to shore.

After World War II ended, he returned to California and signed up for the reserves. In the early 1950s, he served again in the Korean War.

Conter retired from the Navy in 1967 as a lieutenant commander and became a real-estate developer in California.

Pearl Harbor is nearly as remote from today's children as was the Civil War from the first Baby Boomers. We grew up in a world where the deeds of "ordinary" men like Lou Conter were taken for granted. Now such strength of character seems uncommon, and its prevalence in the World War II generation impossible to imagine. R.I.P.

Veteran's Day

Below is my post from 2013, slightly edited:

November begins on a personal note with my birthday. In recent years the celebration has been muted. (I'm at the age when I look back more than I look ahead.)

Dad, near Tokyo in 1945

Today, Veteran's Day, we remember my father and his five brothers, World War II veterans all, who have passed on. Dad's ashes are at the family church, while the others are interred at Punchbowl.

On November 19th the nation will honor the 161st anniversary of the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln's great speech in the aftermath of an horrific battle. And on November 22nd the nation will remember the life and death of John F. Kennedy 61 years after his assassination.

In a strange way revisiting traumatic events such as WW II, the Civil War, and the JFK assassination gives rise to hope. The obstacles that the nation overcame 61, 80, and 161 years ago dwarf those that it faces today, and there is no good reason why we shouldn't be equally--and ultimately--successful in solving our problems as well. © 2024 Stephen Yuen

The Bread of Life

Today's Gospel was from John 6:

Jesus said, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

The lady minister discussed Holy Communion, the sacrament in which Christians partake of bread and wine that represent the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ.

Then she gave a quick overview of transubstantiation and consubstantiation, doctrines that Christians have argued about for centuries. The former is the Catholic tenet that the bread and wine are actually transformed into Jesus' body and blood, while the latter is a belief that the bread and wine remain intact but are joined with Jesus' body and blood during the mass.

Queen Elizabeth I

Elizabeth I (1533-1603), before she became Queen of England, rejected both doctrines and accepted the Calvinist principle that the bread and wine were but symbols; Jesus Himself wasn't physically present during Communion, though God was. She wrote:

Twas God the Word that spake it,
He took the Bread and brake it:
And what that Word did make it,
That I believe and take it.

Elizabeth I of England, along with Isabella of Spain, were among the greatest--and keenest--monarchs in European history. Their actions (financing Columbus' expeditions, driving the Moors out of Iberia during the Spanish Inquisition, defeating the Spanish armada and keeping England independent from Spain) shaped the world today.

Four centuries before women's rights, these powerful women didn't understand that they should have stepped aside to let white males control everything.

"endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights"

Trump supporters pray at the site of the
assassination attempt Saturday. (WSJ)

While there has been a great amount of contemporary controversy surrounding the appropriateness of religion in the public square, there is no question that one of the founding documents of the United States of America was based on Christian principles: [bold added]

There is ample precedent for a religious interpretation of the Declaration. On July 4, 1821, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams described it as the culmination of a Christian revolution. In “theories of the crown and the mitre,” Adams proposed, “man had no rights.” The discovery of inalienable liberty of conscience in matters of doctrine led to a re-evaluation of man’s obligation to ecclesiastical and civil powers. Whig reformers took tentative steps against “the oppressors of church and state” in Britain but still saw freedom as a privilege. The natural basis of rights was recognized only in America, where the government was founded on “a social compact formed upon the elementary principles of civil society, in which conquest and servitude had no part.”

...Adams’s words remind us that reconciliation has always been a feature of the American enterprise. We’d do well to heed his encouragement “to bless the Author of our being for the bounties of his providence, in casting our lot in this favored land; to remember with effusions of gratitude the sages who put forth, and the heroes who bled for the establishment of this Declaration.”

One doesn’t need to be a Christian nationalist to believe something miraculous happened in Philadelphia in 1776. Yet appreciation for that event should make even secular Americans wonder whether there are forces at work in history that transcend human understanding.

The Bible cites frequent instances of God's intervention in the affairs of man. His absence in the modern era--if He didn't stop the Holocaust of the Chosen People, when will He intervene?--lends credence to the notion that the Bible's examples were greatly exaggerated, or even imaginary, and/or that God has chosen to be aloof.

Every now and then a miracle occurs--the Founders' creation of a governing structure that lasted over 200 years, the clearing of the weather on D-Day, or the split-second turning of Donald Trump's head--resurrects the idea that God watches over the United States of America. Your humble blogger doesn't quite believe it either, but it's comforting to know that it's a possibility.

And now, for your edification, here is ChatGPT's take:

What evidence is there that the United States of America is a Christian nation?

The question of whether the United States is a Christian nation is complex and can be approached from various perspectives: historical, cultural, legal, and demographic. Here are some points often cited as evidence supporting the idea that the U.S. has Christian foundations:

Historical Evidence

1. Founding Fathers' Beliefs: Many of the Founding Fathers, including George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, were influenced by Christian ideals. Some of their writings reflect Christian values.

2. Colonial Charters and State Constitutions: Early colonial charters and state constitutions often referenced Christianity and required officeholders to be Christians.

3. Declaration of Independence: The Declaration of Independence references a "Creator" and "Nature's God," which some interpret as aligning with Christian beliefs.

Cultural Evidence

1. Major Holidays: Christmas and Easter, both Christian holidays, are national holidays.

2. Pledge of Allegiance: The Pledge of Allegiance includes the phrase "under God," which was added during the Cold War era.

3. In God We Trust: This phrase is the national motto and appears on U.S. currency.

Legal Evidence

1. Supreme Court Rulings: Some Supreme Court rulings, especially in the 19th and early 20th centuries, made references to the U.S. being a "Christian nation" in dicta (statements made in decisions that are not legally binding).

2. Chaplains in Government: Both the U.S. Congress and the military have chaplains who are predominantly Christian.

Demographic Evidence

1. Population: A significant majority of Americans identify as Christian. According to various surveys, the percentage has been decreasing but remains a majority.

Counterpoints

1. Constitutional Secularism: The U.S. Constitution does not establish a national religion and includes the Establishment Clause, which prohibits the government from making any law “respecting an establishment of religion.”

2. Diversity of Belief: The U.S. is home to a wide variety of religions and belief systems, and religious freedom is a foundational principle.

3. Founding Fathers' Intent: While many Founding Fathers were influenced by Christian ideals, they were also influenced by Enlightenment thinking and intended to create a secular government.

In summary, while there are many elements of American history, culture, and law that reflect Christian influences, the U.S. was explicitly founded with a separation of church and state, and it is home to a diverse array of religious beliefs.

Spreading the Gospel of Net Present Value

Your humble blogger studied accounting and finance before the personal computer was invented.

The only electronic devices that we brought to class were calculators that performed basic arithmetic. And so it was that we labored over present value/future value problems, pencilling out intermediate solutions so we at least could get partial credit from the proctor.

After learning how the basic formulas were derived, we were taught how to use books of tables to bypass much of the repetitive drudgery in financial calculations. The future-value table below is from McGraw-Hill.

Until financial calculators and PC's came on the scene, such tables were used in finance for 3½ centuries(!) These tables seem extraordinarily crude today, but when they were first published in the 1600's, it sparked the widespread acceptance of "discounting" as an alternative payment. It wasn't businessmen or bankers who spread the word, but the Anglican church. [bold added]

In the early 1600s, the officials running Durham Cathedral, in England, had serious financial problems. Soaring prices had raised expenses. Most cathedral income came from renting land to tenant farmers, who had long leases so officials could not easily raise the rent. Instead, church leaders started charging periodic fees, but these often made tenants furious. And the 1600s, a time of religious schism, was not the moment to alienate church members.

Interest-calculation book from 1700.

But in 1626, Durham officials found a formula for fees that tenants would accept. If tenant farmers paid a fee equal to one year’s net value of the land, it earned them a seven-year lease. A fee equal to 7.75 years of net value earned a 21-year lease.

This was a form of discounting, the now-common technique for evaluating the present and future value of money by assuming a certain rate of return on that money. The Durham officials likely got their numbers from new books of discounting tables. Volumes like this had never existed before, but suddenly local church officials were applying the technique up and down England.

Spreading the "Gospel of Net Present Value" was one of the most important developments in capitalism. With apologies to the bard,

Neither a borrower or a lender be
But if you are either
Be mindful of the NPV.

O.J.'s Legacy

The 1994 Bronco "chase" (spectrum)

Every newspaper (yes, I still read at least three of them every day) has carried obituaries of O.J. Simpson, who died this Wednesday from cancer at the age of 76. His outstanding career in college and professional football and his subsequent work in film, TV, and advertising alone merited pages, but the big story was his 1994-1995 trial for the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman. WSJ columnist Peggy Noonan captures that unique, "crazy" period in history:

Our crazy country. The O.J. Simpson case was the beginning of knowing we were crazy and admitting it. It was 30 years ago this June, the murder followed by the Bronco chase, and I find myself wanting to tell those who weren’t there what a sensation it was, what an amazement.

Everyone over 40 this weekend will be saying, “I’ll never forget when I heard the verdict,” and, “Did you watch the Bronco?” The case burned itself into our retinas; everyone in the country was in the path of totality.

As much as anything and more than most, the story was the beginning of the modern media age. It was the beginning of hypercelebrity and marked by the emotionalism of crowds. Crowds ran to California freeway overpasses on June 17, 1994, to see the Ford Bronco containing Simpson roll by, surrounded by police cruisers. They cheered and pumped their arms. They didn’t see it as a tragedy, the story of the beautiful young woman and mother, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her 25-year-old friend, Ron Goldman, who had been brutally stabbed to death. They saw an exciting drama unfolding before their eyes, like Al Capone shooting his way out of a bank heist surrounded by cops. Simpson was a guy everyone liked. So they cheered. And people watching thought: Whoa, what are we seeing, what is this?

Some new kind of fame was being presaged. A close friend of O.J.’s, Los Angeles lawyer and businessman Robert Kardashian, an apparently quiet fellow no one had heard of, was thrust into the case from the beginning. At a news conference he read a public letter from O.J., just before he turned himself in. The letter said he had nothing to do with Nicole’s murder. “I loved her. . . . If we had a problem, it’s because I loved her so much.” It was classic abusive-husband patter.

Kardashian, like other O.J. attorneys, would become famous, and the fame would be a lesson to many. After fame comes wealth and power and everyone gives you a good table. It is probably true that none of this was lost on his former wife, Kris, who had been one of Nicole Simpson’s best friends, or on his children, Kourtney, Kim, Khloe and Rob. Their show, “Keeping Up With The Kardashians,” debuted in 2007. They were the first reality-TV family, famous for being famous. They are billionaires now.

“It marked the end of cozy, afternoon soap opera entertainment and ushered in a tabloid culture of Kardashians, Jenners, and lesser beings,” former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter said by email. “Also, it made, for a time, Dominick Dunne the most recognized print reporter in the world.” Dunne’s colorful and breathless reports each month in Vanity Fair covered the case like a blanket—who snubbed whom in the courtroom, who said what at Brentwood’s glittering dinner tables...

If the signal moment was the Bronco chase, it was the court case that would have lasting significance. It was a prime example of how our legal system got bogged down in distractions, inanities, and poor police and legal work. It dragged on nine months. The judge, Lance Ito, also became a celebrity, and apparently liked it. He kept three open computers on his bench. No one had ever seen that before. Jay Leno on “The Tonight Show” had a regular sketch, the “Dancing Itos.” There were endless, meandering objections. The prosecutor, Marcia Clark, had to get her hair and makeup done, and a new wardrobe.

And the cast of characters! Kato Kaelin, the house guest who never left. Mark Fuhrman, the police detective who seemed solid on evidence and then was torn apart for having once used racial epithets and was accused of planting evidence.

And the phrases that bubbled up from the courtroom and entered the national consciousness: “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”

And, of course, the terrible and historic moment when the jury announced its verdict.

The trial felt like it had gone forever but the verdict came in within a day. No one in America did a bit of work from the moment it was announced that the jury had a verdict. Everyone ran to a TV set. From Robert D. McFadden’s O.J. obit in the New York Times: “Even President Bill Clinton left the Oval Office to join his secretaries. In court, cries of ‘Yes!’ and ‘Oh, no!’ were echoed across the nation as the verdict left many Black people jubilant and many white people aghast.” Exactly true.

A friend wrote Thursday afternoon: “Trial as spectacle has been with us for a long time (think Lizzie Borden), and so have juries doing unusual things. But this seemed to take it to a new level. If memory serves, the volume of the New York Stock Exchange went down to basically nothing for a few minutes as the verdict was announced. That’s real.”

Reaction famously fell almost completely along racial lines. It was one of those 20th-century moments when you realized race is here to stay as an unending factor, an unyielding actor in American life. White and black saw two different realities. Whites: All the evidence points to his guilt, he’s one of the most admired men in America, race isn’t the story here.

Blacks: This is what you do to black men, you railroad them on cooked-up evidence, there’s plenty of room for doubt.

It showed in some new and unforgettable way the divided country. The verdict itself didn’t divide the country; it revealed it, again and not for the last time, as divided. Reaction was called shocking, revelatory. But what it was, was simpler. It was painful. It left you with a tight and mournful feeling in your throat.

Before O.J., American blacks lacked confidence in the legal system. After O.J., everyone lacked confidence in the legal system. It looked cynical, performative, agenda-driven, not on the level.

I would say he got away with murder because I believe he was guilty. But in a way he didn’t get away with it; it stalked him the rest of his life. And that is tragedy, too, because he’d been such a hero, a winner of the Heisman Trophy, a football star, a man of great accomplishment whom everyone admired.

That’s all.

The O.J. case revealed so much and started a new age. Within a few years the internet would become ubiquitous, and at that point the new age would become more so.

I remember going to lunch at a popular bar-restaurant in San Francisco. Instead of the TV being tuned to sports, it showed a slow-moving Ford Bronco being trailed by police cars on an LA freeway. I couldn't hear the sound and had no idea what the fuss was about.

Over the next year, one could not avoid the O.J. Simpson story; it was on all the network news. In their thirst for material reporters unearthed every scrap of information about every character in the drama: the defense team, the prosecution, law enforcement, and witnesses. Many cashed in on their new found fame.

The O.J. Simpson trial showed how much society had regressed in the late 20th century. Tribalism had taken hold; it didn't matter what you did, what group you belonged to determined whether you deserved punishment, facts and evidence be damned. It was okay to exploit the tragedy of a double murder if it meant a lucrative book deal.

The genie was out of the bottle, and there would be no turning back.

Mourning Macy's

December, 1972: Union Square glitters (Chron photo)

As alluded to in yesterday's post, the loss of Macy's is the end of a San Francisco cultural icon.

Department stores were already cultural hubs in San Francisco when Macy’s opened in 1947. The working class Emporium on Market Street had been the center of San Francisco holiday celebrations, hosting a Santa Claus parade and placing rides on the building’s roof. Union Square’s City of Paris department store was the upscale king, with its stained glass atrium roof and 70-foot Christmas trees.

But Macy’s San Francisco was the juggernaut that managed to eclipse and outlast all comers. Taking up three-quarters of a city block, it felt like the epicenter of retail in San Francisco, if not the entire state.

With the success of the San Francisco flagship, Macy’s California expansion was swift. By 1978 there were 22 stores in California, with plans for more. Profits were so high that Macy’s California President Ernest Molloy was sent to bail out the struggling New York stores, later becoming CEO of the entire company.

..Tuesday’s announcement will land harder on San Francisco residents than the recent departures of other major retail outlets like Nordstrom and Old Navy. Macy’s is where San Franciscans bought their back-to-school outfits and their first suits and prom dresses. In some cases, it’s where they took the 38 Geary during Christmastime to ogle the store’s elaborate window displays and make their first San Francisco memories, period.

As the city tries to reinvent its downtown core, and perhaps the identity of its entire shopping district, Macy’s San Francisco will be the hardest void to fill.

Retail reached its zenith at the end of the 20th century. Out-of-town shoppers flocked to Macy's and the other stores on Union Square; there was nothing like them in the rest of the Bay Area.

The suburbs grew more affluent, the malls got bigger and glitzier, and San Francisco became grimier and unpleasant. There was no reason to fight the traffic into downtown and pay $20 for parking.

Those of us who were there mourn the City that was, and the wonderment that was lost.

82 Years Later

Last May the WSJ featured Lou Conter, 102, the last survivor of the USS Arizona, which was sunk on December 7, 1941:

The USS Arizona’s bombing was the deadliest of the attacks that day, killing 1,117 people. It accounted for nearly half of the 2,403 who died during Pearl Harbor. Conter was one of the 334 people assigned to the USS Arizona who survived.

He became the last known survivor in April, after his former crewmate Ken Potts died at 102 years old.

The warship’s ammunition storage exploded during the bombings. The USS Arizona was so badly damaged that it was left to sink instead of being repaired. Its ruins are still underwater and viewable from the USS Arizona Memorial, which was built to hover over the warship.

Conter helped pull crewmates out of the burning ship.

“As we guided these men to safety, more often than not, their burned skin would come off on our hands,” Conter wrote in his 2021 book, “The Lou Conter Story.”

Gun turret: the rest of the Arizona lies beneath

He often wondered why he made it out of the USS Arizona alive.

“God didn’t want you to go that time,” he said he told himself. “There’s a lot more for you to do for the country.”

..He got his pilot wings in November 1942, he said, and was part of a team that flew Black Cat aircraft overnight doing bomb runs in the South Pacific. He said he was shot down twice, once in September 1943 and a second time three months later. Both times, he used a lifeboat to get to shore.

After World War II ended, he said he returned to California and signed up for the reserves. In the early 1950s, he served again in the Korean War...

He is now on a new mission: Go back to Pearl Harbor this December.

It has been about four years since Conter has been to the annual remembrance. His doctor had forbidden him from taking the nine hours of flights from his home in Grass Valley, Calif., to Hawaii.

“I’d like to go once more,” Conter said.

According to the Honolulu Star Advertiser, Lou Conter was one of five Pearl Harbor survivors who showed up at today's ceremony. Thank you for your service, Mr. Conter, and safe travels.

Remembering That Day

On the 60th anniversary of his assassination, I am rerunning this post I wrote 20 years ago:

Mrs. Matthews calmly told us the news, but her normally severe demeanor seemed strained. She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. The class grew quiet. In the face of tragedy we tried to act like adults, who we thought would not cry or shout or otherwise carry on.

After an interminable wait, school finally let out, and kids got into their buses or waiting cars. My ride wouldn’t come for another hour so I wandered around the empty halls. I thought about going to the main office to call Mom, but the phone was only to be used in the direst emergency, like the time I got sick in Mrs. Millar’s fourth grade class and my father had to take off work to pick me up. I borrowed a book from the library and went across the street to wait for my uncle. I opened the book but didn’t see the pages.

These days we say we are “shocked” or “stunned” by an occurrence, when, in truth, our imagination, combined with knowledge of actual horrors experienced over the past 40 years, has inoculated us against surprise. But those reactions are appropriate to this seminal event, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, that signaled the end of our childhood.

The entire week was quiet. No one felt like playing football, so games were cancelled. The churches were filled, just as they were a year earlier when we prayed that God would spare the world. It was a week of blackness--black suits, dresses, and veils filling our black-and-white TV sets and newspapers.

In 1960 my parents supported Richard Nixon, and, being an imitative child, so did I. But once JFK was elected, he became the President and had our unswerving allegiance. The world was extremely dangerous. As we learned in geography, Russia had the most land, China had the most people, and these colossi were united against us. And more and more were joining their fold: people in Africa, in South America, even in neighboring Mexico, were burning the flag (I remember when some burned the old flag with 48 stars: didn’t they know that Hawaii and Alaska had become States?). The map of the world that hung on the bedroom wall was bathed in red, the color of communism, while the blue part--the United States, Canada, Western Europe, and Japan—seemed puny in comparison.

At school we would practice ducking under our desks in case the bombs started falling. People say now that these instructions were a big joke, but I didn’t know anyone who laughed. Life and Look magazines ran page after page on the devastation wrought by atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I studied the huge mushroom cloud produced by the thousand-times more powerful hydrogen bomb over Bikini Atoll. Today children have nightmares about the Twin Towers falling; we worried about towers vaporizing…..everywhere.

President Kennedy also contended with many problems on the Mainland, as we called the contiguous 48 states. (I don’t want to give the impression that in my tender years I was a news junkie: it was primarily to advance my vocabulary that I read the grown-ups’ newspapers, the morning Advertiser and evening Star-Bulletin.) Good news was rare. Powerful labor unions, such as the Teamsters and steelworkers, went on strike and shut down much of the country. Troops had to be sent to Alabama because Governor Wallace wouldn’t let black kids go to school. The powerful Mafia was a big problem on the East Coast, and Robert Kennedy, the callow Attorney General, seemed inadequate to the task. As the Untouchables TV series vividly showed, you needed men with machine guns to take them on, and the President’s younger brother did not have the authoritative air of Elliott Ness.

The troubles came to a head in October, 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis. The fear in adults was palpable, and I became convinced, after a few days of excruciating tension, that the world was going to be destroyed. Every night I concentrated with special fervor on the final line of the children’s prayer, “if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take”. When the Russian ships turned around, and Mr. Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles from Cuba, I felt the exultation of the patient who is given a second chance, and President Kennedy was my doctor.

He is remembered for his grace, his wit, and his handsome family. But I remember most of all the contrast between the joyful heights of Thanksgiving, 1962 and the somber depths of Thanksgiving, 1963. He saved us all, and then he was gone.
© 2003 Stephen Yuen

Happy Days of Yore

Alumni Ron Howard (Richie Cunningham) and
Henry Winkler (the Fonz) - WSJ photo

WSJ editorialist Matthew Hennessey has a problem with pre-teen TV: [bold added]

like most parents, my wife and I are always on the hunt for “safe” shows for our kids to watch. Tween programming is as vapid as ever, but these days it comes with a distinct woke overlay. Pronoun preaching and climate propaganda have replaced slapstick and potty humor. None of that works for us.

His solution? "Happy Days," currently found on Amazon Prime. Mr. Hennessey's son especially likes the Fonz.

“Happy Days” was a half-hour situation comedy on ABC from 1974-84. Created by Garry Marshall, the show was set in Milwaukee and revolved around the middle-class Cunningham family, Howard and Marion and their children Richie and Joanie. Minor characters, Potsie and Ralph Malph, palled around at Arnold’s Diner, but the star was the Fonz...

It’s impossible to overstate the cultural importance of the Fonz in his time. He was the biggest thing on TV, which was the biggest thing in America...in leather jacket and tight jeans he was as cool as they come. The Fonz was a light caricature of the greaser archetype—slick, tough, a chick magnet. He rode a motorcycle and spoke in an incongruous Brooklynese (the mid-’70s were the height of the “Italian Stallion” phase of American masculinity). His cartoonish catchphrases—“Whoa!” “Sit on it!”—were ubiquitous.

"Happy Days" (1974-84) for me fell in that too-busy-to-watch-TV period after graduation but before kids. I did tune in occasionally to spinoffs Laverne & Shirley and Mork & Mindy, notable for the off-script improvisation by Robin Williams, as well as the H-D mother ship, but none of it was must-see programming worthy of being recorded on the new VCR.

"Happy Days" appears to be enjoying a revival. It didn't jump the shark after all.

Mark Twain on the Annexation of Hawaii 25 Years Before It Happened

At Kuhio Avenue and Kanekapolei Street in Waikiki:
statue of Princess Kaiulani (1875-1899)

We have posted before about the annexation of Hawaii by the United States in 1898 (here, here, and here)

Here's Mark Twain's 1873 opinion against annexation. (It's really a polemic against American politics and culture.)

We must annex those people. We can afflict them with our wise and beneficent government.

We can introduce the novelty of thieves, all the way up from street-car pickpockets to municipal robbers and Government defaulters, and show them how amusing it is to arrest them and try them and then turn them loose -- some for cash and some for "political influence." We can make them ashamed of their simple and primitive justice. We can do away with their occasional hangings for murder, and let them have Judge Pratt to teach them how to save imperiled Avery-assassins to society. We can give them some Barnards to keep their money corporations out of difficulties. We can give them juries composed entirely of the most simple and charming leatherheads. We can give them railway corporations who will buy their Legislatures like old clothes, and run over their best citizens and complain of the corpses for smearing their unpleasant juices on the track. In place of harmless and vaporing Harris, we can give them Tweed. We can let them have Connolly; we can loan them Sweeny; we can furnish them some Jay Goulds who will do away with their old-time notion that stealing is not respectable. We can confer Woodbull and Claflin on them. And George Francis Train. We can give them lecturers! I will go myself.

Mark Twain rails against individuals, institutions, and behaviors who have 21st-century counterparts.

Marin County Leads the Way

(Tripadvisor photo)

Marin County became (in)famous as the land of hot tubs and peacock feathers in the 1978 NBC documentary, I Want It All Now. In the eyes of many in the national TV audience that documentary confirmed Marin County as the home of wealthy, non-traditional sybarites.

That stereotype only applied to a small number of residents, and Marin County in any event continued to be one of the Bay Area's most desirable places to live during the next four decades. That is, until last year.

from July 2021 to 2022, Marin lost more of its population than any other county in the Bay Area over the same time period, according to estimates recently released by the California Department of Finance. The county’s population dwindled by about 6,600 people — a loss of 15 residents for every 1,000 people that lived there in 2021...

(Chronicle graph)

One reason why Marin County lost population, experts said, is that its residents haven’t had a lot of kids lately — nor are they likely to.

The county’s median age of 46.9 years is the highest of any Bay Area county, and more than nine years higher than the state overall...

All of these factors — older population, low number of jobs relative to nearby counties and high rate of move-outs — are connected to Marin’s lack of housing, [Public Policy Institute's Hans] Johnson said.

Marin built just 5,862 homes from 2010 to 2021, or 32 units per 1,000 residents as of its 2010 population. That number is by far the smallest of any Bay Area county.

When I Want It All Now was shown in 1978, California was much more diverse, culturally and politically. It was the home state of conservative governor Ronald Reagan, who would be elected President two years later, and Richard Nixon, who served as President from 1968 to 1974. Marin County was at the left end of the country's political spectrum, and Orange County was on the right. California could accommodate everyone.

In retrospect Marin values won. The county was at the vanguard of the Progressive takeover of California, and today not a single Republican holds a California State office; the last elected Republican U.S. Senator was Pete Wilson (1988).

In 2023 Marin may be leading California again, this time on a different path.

while Marin may be an extreme instance of the Bay Area-wide trend in population loss, it’s still an example, rather than an outlier. California, after all, lost nearly 500,000 people in just two years, from mid-2020 to mid-2022

Demographic trends, especially regarding birth and death rates, are difficult to reverse. Marin, the Bay Area, and California haven't hit bottom yet.

Thinking Like a Greek

We live in an age of specialization and compartmentalization. Science, religion, mathematics, politics, philosophy, and literature are separate fields of study. Each of these has dozens of sub-categories with their own terminologies and modes of thinking.

However, the ancient Greeks

didn't make a distinction between philosophy and science, nor did they recognize the range of disciplines such as physics, chemistry, mathematics, astronomy, etc. that we do today. There simply wasn't the depth of knowledge and range of information that later made separate disciplines practical. In the Greek era, one individual could be an expert in several fields.

The splintering of knowledge makes it difficult to recognize patterns that may cross knowledge silos. More importantly, some believe that there is a deeper underlying reality to the universe that is understood only piecemeal by experts in their respective specialties. No human being has yet fully grasped, much less been able to explain to his fellow creatures, such a reality.

In a book to be released this Tuesday, Professor of theoretical physics Heinrich Päs ponders the "One."

his book proposes, rather than a definitive answer, an exploration of both the mind-bending conclusions of modern physics and the long history of the beguiling notion of a unifying, universal fabric. His book proves a heady mix of history, philosophy and cutting-edge theory that is fascinating, provocative and at times infuriating.

I'm a sucker for these books that explain the nature of the universe, where it came from and where it's going. If the writer presumes to discuss the nature of man, then I must resist the temptation to tell him to stay in his lane, which in this case is theoretical physics. He's thinking like an ancient Greek.

Californians: An Undeserving Lot

Downtown Sacramento, 1862 (Chron photo)

We've posted before on the Great Flood of 1862, when 300 miles of the Central Valley, including Sacramento, were submerged. Chronicle reporter Carl Nolte writes how the Great Flood was only one of several natural disasters that struck California in the 1860's:

[Cabrillo College professor Sandy] Lydon likes to talk about the great winter of 1861-62, the mother of all natural catastrophes in California. “It rained for 43 straight days,” he said. “Imagine a storm like the one we had just now every day for six weeks without letup, without a single sunny day.”

It had snowed heavily that November and early December, an early winter. But in mid-December, heavy, warm rains came in and melted the snowpack, flooding the entire Central Valley from around Redding to Bakersfield — 300 miles of water, 30 feet deep in some places. Perhaps 4,000 people were killed, and the damage was estimated at $3 billion in today’s money.

The next season was entirely different: a huge drought. Practically no rain at all. The drought was so severe that thousands of cattle died of starvation or thirst. At that time, Southern California was largely pastoral, a practice left from Spanish and Mexican times. That drought ended those days forever and led to a Southern California search for a reliable water supply and the subsequent growth of Los Angeles.

The drought led to wildfires that blackened the sky in the summer and fall of 1865. There were major earthquakes in 1865 and in October 1868. The 1868 quake, on the Hayward Fault, did considerable damage in San Francisco. Mark Twain, then a San Francisco newspaper reporter, covered it.

Later that year there was an outbreak of smallpox in Northern California. So in six years California had a flood, a drought, wildfires, two earthquakes and a plague.

The Californians of the day didn't blame SUV's, fallen power lines, or laboratory leaks for these calamities. Instead they went about their business supplying gold and materials to the Union war effort and completing the Transcontinental Railroad.

Today we have vastly more wealth, technology, and know-how to address our problems, yet do much more complaining and vilifying of our fellows. We are truly an undeserving lot.

20+C+M+B+23

(Image from Stellar House Publishing)

For the past two years January 6th has been regarded in some quarters as the day when American democracy nearly fell. Future scholars will judge whether the events at the Capitol were historically significant (in my opinion, not very), but it should be noted that January 6th was already an important date in Christendom. (The retreat of religion from public life has not yet come to the point when the newer meaning has supplanted the old.)

The Feast of the Epiphany was an occasion for Catholic and Anglican services.

In a more observant time the Feast of Epiphany was celebrated in Church on January 6th, even if the sixth fell on a weekday. The children's Christmas pageant was held on Epiphany, rather than Christmas Eve, because that was when the Magi (three kings) by tradition visited the manger.

Chalking the door of St. Philip's, Uvalde, TX

Against the trend, an Epiphany ritual is being rediscovered.

From the Epiphany and continuing for days to come, more and more Episcopalians are joining other Christians around the world in writing this ancient yet ever-changing formula on their doors: 20+C+M+B+23.

The numbers, letters and symbols have been called “holy graffiti,” and some people suggest the combination looks like the start of an algebraic equation.

The letters C, M, B come from the traditional names for the wise men: Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar, whose arrival at Mary and Joseph’s home is celebrated on the Epiphany. (Tradition also says that three men visited the infant Jesus because the gospel writer Matthew, the only one who describes such a visit but does not number them, says they brought three gifts, gold, frankincense and myrrh. Their names appear in a Greek manuscript from 500 AD translated into Latin, which many biblical scholars consider the source of the names.) The letters are also an abbreviation for “Christus Mansionem Benedicat,” which means “May Christ bless this dwelling.” The first and last numbers refer to the current year, and the plus signs in between represent the cross.

“Chalking the door,” as it is known, is seen as invoking Christ’s blessing not only on the physical house but on the people who live there and those who visit.

Maybe secularism is bottoming out, and we're on the verge of a fourth Great Awakening? Crazier things have come true.