Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

The Melting-Pot Gazette

alhambra

Seventeen people squeeze around a dark wood table in a low, redbrick office building on the outskirts of Los Angeles, picking at a potluck dinner of fried chicken, pad thai, and Cherry Coke. The group is as oddly matched as the menu. There’s Eric Sunada, an engineer who also runs a small environmental non-profit. Kerrie Gutierrez, an instructional aide and mother of five. Joe Soong, an analyst for the Los Angeles Police Department. But they do have one thing in common: They are all newly minted journalists, contributors to a novel kind of local news outlet in the ethnically fractured, ... Read More

A Note on the Brush Fires in Camarillo

california-fire

I grew up not far from the part of Southern California that's burning out of control right now. Camarillo is about 20 miles away from my mom's place. Environmentally it's the same place, and with a good wind a fire like the current one will jump 20 miles faster than you can get from your living room to your car. A chaparral fire is something to see, if you haven't. I saw a fire catch a cow once. Sure, a cow's not such a fast creature. But they have self preservation instincts like anyone would. Cows used to graze on a sloping hill covered in live oaks above a vacant bit of meadow we called ... Read More

California’s Gun Medicine

gun-medicine

Night after night, dressed in a black jumpsuit and a bulletproof vest, John Marsh knocks on the doors of violent felons and mentally ill people and asks them for their guns. People hand them over more often than you might expect. Last year, Marsh, a special agent with the California Bureau of Firearms, and the 33-person team he heads, confiscated 2,000 illegally-owned weapons. Marsh is the lead agent for the Armed Prohibited Persons System, a program in which state officials comb through mountains of data to find people who have lost the right to own guns, and then send Marsh’s team to ... Read More

How the Trailer Park Could Save Us All

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Residents call life at Pismo Dunes Senior Park "Pismodise." Park manager Louise Payne calls it "a holding tank for the great beyond." Louise has short hair and blunt bleached bangs that give her the air of a preteen skateboarder, but at 72 she's often found rolling by the park's 333 trailers in her electric golf cart, alternating between her roles as mother hen and whip-cracker. California is a notoriously youthful culture, but eventually the perpetually young get very old. If they're lucky enough to live in Pismodise, which is on the Central Coast, they can exit its palm-lined entrance, cross ... Read More

Mentally Ill? Here’s a Bus Ticket

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Things are screwed up in Nevada, which you probably already knew because things are screwed up everywhere and especially so in Las Vegas. But this, from today's Sacramento Bee, seems more screwed up than most: Since July 2008, Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Hospital in Las Vegas has transported more than 1,500 patients to other cities via Greyhound bus, sending at least one person to every state in the continental United States, according to a Bee review of bus receipts kept by Nevada's mental health division. In case you missed that: they're busing mentally ill patients across the United ... Read More

Prius Sales Suggest Californians Really Are More Eco-Friendly

When it comes to the environment, California car buyers are, if you’ll excuse the expression, walking the walk. In 2012, the top-selling car in the state was—wait for it—the Toyota Prius. According to the California New Car Dealers Association, 60,688 Prius models were registered last year. Runners-up were the Honda Civic with 57,124, the Toyota Camry with 50,250, and the Honda Accord with 49,420. (The figures represent sales to individual consumers, not fleets.) The website L.A. Observed notes that the Prius isn’t even on the top 10 list nationally. “We’re just that ... Read More

The Game Done Changed, Governor Brown

Election Day is tomorrow, and Prop 30, a California ballot initiative notable for its tax hike on the wealthy to fund education, is hanging by a thread if recent polls are any indication. This is a huge deal, given the budget cuts the state will face without additional revenue. For the measure’s supporters, it must have been frustrating to read California Governor Jerry Brown’s butt-covering maneuvers (he's championing the initiative) in the New York Times yesterday: The money is needed for schools. I don’t want people to wake up the day after the election and say, ‘Why didn’t ... Read More

Ditch Day Economics: California Schools Paying $35 a Day, Per Kid

In my coworker's email this morning, from the school principal: Hi parents. My sources have told me that seniors are planning a ditch day tomorrow. I hope that is not the case because ditch days are considered unexcused absences and everyone who participates in a ditch day, tomorrow, or any other day, will be issued a Saturday School that must be served before graduation in June. Unexcused absences cost our district roughly $35 a day for each student who ditches. In this economy we cannot afford to lose any money. We have a senior picnic in May that is meant to give seniors a day to ... Read More

The Corrections

Ambrose Bierce Sitting Under a Tree.

THE MORASS THAT IS CALIFORNIA POLITICS today may have originated in mid-January of 1896, when a middle-aged man boarded an eastbound train in Oakland. With his ex-soldier’s ramrod bearing and his red-gold hair turning gray, the traveler was not likely to have gone unrecognized. He was Ambrose Bierce, the West’s most famous newspaperman, who used his San Francisco Examiner column to skewer fools and rogues, as well as to coin the acerbic definitions later collected in his Devil’s Dictionary. (Example: “PEACE, n: In international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of ... Read More

Local Governance: Unlocking Realignment

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THE ISSUE: California’s system is centralized, with many decisions, particularly on spending and taxes, made at the state level rather than at local levels. THE BACKSTORY: Much of Think Long’s work took place during Gov. Jerry Brown’s first year in office. Brown’s signature reform policy was called “realignment,” the term for his attempt to shift some responsibility, and some money, for corrections from the state to the counties. This was in part a response to court orders requiring reductions in the state’s prison population, and in part an effort to save money, since the ... Read More