Say Adios to Villaraigosa?

People of Los Angeles, please raise your hand if you are even remotely impressed with the city’s management and public services. Anyone?

The public services provided by Los Angeles are severely lacking. Traffic is horrific with no end in sight. Hospitals are being closed down in areas where they are needed the most. The people of the city have little confidence in any of the city’s leadership or the city’s infrastructure. The mayor is mired in scandal, and has proven to be woefully inadequate. Los Angeles is in desperate need of new political blood and ideas, and it all starts at the top with Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

The Mayor has had a very rough past few months. In early June, it was announced that Villaraigosa’s wife of 20 years was filing for divorce, due to the Mayor’s extramarital affair with local Telemundo TV anchor Mirthala Salinas.

Usually, I could care less about anyone’s personal life. Everyone makes mistakes in life. However, public officials (especially high ranking ones) are held to a different standard, whether it is fair or not. Many politicians have had failed marriages, and their political careers survived just fine. However, when these mistakes are repeated often they fail to be merely lapses of judgment and instead form a more truthful image of one’s character. And unfortunately for Villaraigosa, this is not the first time he has been cast in the spotlight due to his infidelity.

In 1994, Villaraigosa commited an even more shameful act of adultery. The day after he was elected to the state assembly, his wife Corina filed for divorce (they later reconciled). Corina had been battling thyroid cancer during the campaign, and Villaraigosa had built himself up as a “dedicated family man”. However, Corina learned that her supposedly dedicated family man of a husband had in fact snuck off for a few days with another woman. Not just any woman, but the wife of one of his closest friends, which led to his friend’s divorce. This act of betrayal should have revealed to voters the man’s true character. Many of Villaraigosa’s closest friends and political allies were outraged and distanced themselves both privately and publicly, especially since they had helped build his image in the campaign.

It seems the only thing that Villargoisa struggled more with than fidelty was passing the BAR exam, which he failed four times before giving up.

But this is America, and American’s have very short memories. Despite some setbacks, Villaraigosa prospered. Behind a new campaign in which he played up his Latino heritage, Villaraigosa won convincingly in the 2005 campaign for Mayor. Regarded as a hot new Democratic figure in the country, it has been assumed that the Mayor has had his eye on the Governor’s position in 2010. Villaraigosa had done what many other politicians had already done and battled through questions about his character and appeared set to ride his wave of popularity all the way to Sacramento.

Unfortunately for him, his true character revealed itself again with this latest act of infidelity that has led to his divorce.

Now comes the real issue: If the Mayor was actually accomplishing anything here in the city, it would be easier for voters to look past his shortcomings as a husband and father. However, this is not the case. In the past two years since he has taken over, very little has been done in the city that was a result of his actions.

Villaraigosa made numerous promises during his campaign. He promised to plant 1 million trees, build a subway that stretches to the ocean, and to fix the city’s disappointing public school system among other things. In his two years in office, little to any of these programs have been put in place.

Traffic is still horrible. The recently announced $150 million to synchronize the city’s traffic lights is a step in the right direction, but comes from the state and not by any creative measures taken by the Mayor or his staff. Thank Arnold and the California voters instead Los Angelinos. Despite the Mayor claiming “I want to say to the people of Los Angeles: Promises made, promises kept… When I campaigned for mayor, I said we would synchronize the traffic signals and it would be expensive”. However, this money came from Prop-1B, which paved the way for $40 billion to help fix the state’s infrastructure and traffic problems. How Villaraigosa is claiming any credit at all for it is vexing.

The city’s medical system is inept. The controversy surrounding King-Harbor that became national news when Edith Rodriguez was allowed to keel over and die in the waiting room while a janitor swept around her resulted in nothing other than the closing of the hospital in a poor community that desperately needed one. The Mayor had ample opportunity here to turn a tragedy into a positive, but instead of pushing for sweeping reform in the hospital’s infrastructure he did nothing but allow the county to shut it down as an easy and cheap solution.

To top it off, the school system is still highly bureaucratic and underperforming compared to other major cities in the nation.

With Villaraigosa firmly in power till 2009, there is little we can do short of a recall. Concerned citizens must voice their displeasure about the Mayor and his practices until real changes are made. If Villaraigosa has any hope of winning the gubernatorial elections in 2010, he has a lot of work to do. Start to fix Los Angeles, and all will likely be forgiven. Continue on the current course of little action-little results, and Villaraigosa will be just another spectator.

Oh, and I’ll be on the look-out for those million additional trees. I haven’t noticed anymore yet.

Who Couldn't Love the L.A. Times?

So I have felt that I perhaps have been neglecting this blog a bit in recent weeks and only talking about some off-topic subjects, so I want to shift the focus back onto LA a bit. I was reading the LA Times online today and randomly found perhaps the websites most interesting feature: its updated daily Homicide Map!

Not only does this "map" show where all 629 homicides in LA County occured over the past year, but many other details are provided. Pictures (if they could find them)are included, as well as details such as Age, Gender, Cause of Death, and my personal favorite, Race.

Apparently, Sunday is the day to most be on the lookout, as about twice as many deaths occured on Sunday compared to other days of the week, with Saturday coming in at a distant second. Thankfully there is a handy bar graph to visualize all of these facts.

It also looks like more homicides occur during the summer months. Anyone have any ideas why? The heat? Boredom?

I wonder how many of these homicide maps there are in other newspapers across the country.

I also wonder where LA ranks in term of most murderous cities in America. I'm sure the data is out there, does anyone know?

Religion in Public Intellectualism

To add on to my previous post on Public Intellectualism, the role of the so-called cleric in the realm of intellectualism is one that is highly debated. Some hard-line secularists claim that the two realms of religion and intellectualism are mutually exclusive – one is based on belief and the other facts. Others claim that religion has a large role in the public intellectual realm. The truth, as usual, lies somewhere in the middle. Once again, I will encourage you to head over to the increasingly cited Stephen Mack, who wrote a companion piece to his own Public Intellectual essay entitled Wicked Paradox: The Cleric as Public Intellectual.

Mack makes a lot of convincing arguments in this piece. While I don’t usually agree with Mack on everything, I think he does a fair job of protecting the role that religion has played in shaping American politics against the angry secularists who denounce its legitimacy in their field. While I myself am not a very religious person at all, I still agree that religion played perhaps the central role in forming this nation, and the Constitution is based on many of the good things that religion is supposed to provide. Mack does a nice job of explaining this in the following passage:

In many ways, American political history is the history of activist theologians from the right and the left. These men and women have been intellectuals of a special kind—people whose religious training and experience shaped their vision of a just society and required them to work for it. They have been key players in some of our most important reform movements, from abolitionism, the labor movement, and civil rights to the peace movements of various generations

This hostility towards any religion in the public intellectual field reminds me of point I made in my previous post about the pessimism towards the role of intellectualism as a whole in America. I find many of these public figures to be angry people who seem to feel they are above the rest of the country in their intelligence and importance. While I wholeheartedly agree with strict separation between church and state, I find it undemocratic to try and ban the discussion of religious values in formulating public policy. Many of the tenants of religion (specifically the Judeo-Christian values found in the majority of American figures, but found in the vast majority of all major religion) are aimed at promoting harmony and peace. There is nothing wrong with promoting just laws and policies aimed at these goals, and our country has been formed to try and guarantee at least “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as promised in the Declaration of Independence.

Now when it comes to education, I agree that religion should not be prevalent. When it comes to that realm of intellectualism (academia), the two seem to be incompatible. However, public intellectualism covers a lot more ground than just academia, and thus there is a room for religion in the realm. So I agree that evolution should be taught instead of creationism, and no public funds should go to promoting any religion in the classroom. Fortunately, these things are already protected by the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Our government is designed to neither promote nor prohibit any particular religion, and so far I think it is doing a pretty decent job at it.

Recently, the role of religion in the public sphere has been magnified during the last seven years of the Bush Administration. The outspoken liberals on the left have been blaming plenty of things on the Bush Administration’s using religion as a crutch to round up support from the conservative religious population, and the conservatives claim that the liberals are attacking religion itself with their extreme secularism. There is no doubt that the Administration made a strategic decision to target the religious right in the small states and Middle America, with very successful results. However, how much has religion actually played on any important legislation? Abortion is still legal, and creationism is still not being taught in school. The only real issue with strong religious points of contention has been the debate over same-sex marriage. However, this has not been a conservative vs. liberal issue, as many democrats oppose legislation legalizing it as well. Why? Well, because virtually ALL political figures are religious themselves (and if they are not, they have to play like they are for the voters)! It is not the religious right vs. secularist left battle that it is often portrayed as. Once again, religion plays a large role in public intellectualism.

So where do we go from here? Over the course of our development as a country, we have been working to arrive to the point we are at today. There is a clear divide between religion and the state (and education), yet religion is still extremely prominent and represented by our elected officials. Public intellectuals will have to ease their anti-religion stance and recognize its importance in their field of expertise. It permeates all of society and is something that should not be feared or persecuted against.

Public Intellectualism

From the earliest philosophers to the latest columnists, many people throughout history have been labeled “Public Intellectuals”. These people have and continue to serve an important role in society, providing the public with figures to look to when evaluating issues that require informed opinions. Sometimes these individuals feel they know the solution to every problem, and others simply prefer to point out problems. Through Public Intellectuals, societies have literally sprung to life based on principles that had not been exhibited prior. Plato, perhaps the earliest known published Public Intellectual, outlined his vision for the perfect city in Republic (although how perfect that city would be is highly debatable). John Locke, JS Mill, and other liberal thinkers provided the inspiration for the U.S. Constitution.

Fellow blogger Stephen Mack raises up an interesting issue in his essay entitled The "Decline" of Public Intellectuals. In his post, Mack argues against the growing notion of America as being a place of “anti-intellectualism”. Instead of the country being anti-intellectual, perhaps the so-called Public Intellectuals are simply not used to receiving criticism, something that comes along with that title that many have bestowed upon themselves. Mack shoots down the ‘America as the deathbed of public intellectualism’ myth quite well in this passage:

Without replaying the whole debate, two points will suffice: One, the fact that academic institutions wield enormous financial, technological, and cultural power—and the fact that, more generally, education continues to be the centerpiece of some of our most cherished social myths (i.e., “the “American Dream”)—are both powerful reasons to doubt that Americans suffer from some instinctive hostility to intellectuals. Two, what is sometimes identified as anti-intellectualism is in fact intellectual—that is, a well articulated family of ideas and arguments that privilege the practical, active side of life (e.g., work) over the passive and purely reflective operations of the mind in a vacuum.

To expand upon his first point, academic institutions indeed harbor a tremendous amount of influence on virtually everything in American society. All one has to do is to watch any television program dealing with any particular social or scientific problem or read any academic journal and you will find representatives from hundreds of universities who are more than willing to serve the role as ‘expert’ for the masses. These people themselves form the majority of the Public Intellectuals found in this country, vastly outnumbering the few who operate solo or through the press. Who else do we turn to when an issue or topic needs explaining or further exploration? These public intellectuals deal with issues ranging from political unrest in the Middle East, to global warming, to natural phenomena and disasters, all the way to trying to explain the legal process to the masses when our favorite celebrity is arrested for driving drunk for the fifth time while high on cocaine. We as Americans look to these figures to give forth their expert opinions and derive our own thoughts from their views.

Not only do we look to these professors and intellectuals for their input, we flock to these institutions to pursue, as Mack puts it, “The American Dream”. In today’s culture, one cannot hope to find a decent job or role in society without at least a bachelor’s degree from a major university. From the moment a child is born, most parents will do everything they can to ensure their children “goes to a decent college”, and this is reflected in their upbringing. If we as Americans displayed the type of hostility towards intellectualism as claimed here by some disgruntled writers and here by Richard Posner, this obsession with pursuing high levels of education would be frowned upon, not encouraged.

As Mack alludes to, perhaps what is perceived by these pessimists as anti-intellectualism is just an alternative way of living. I would go another step forward and suggest that it may just be criticism. It is very possible that those who fancy themselves to be Public Intellectuals believe so strongly that their words are infallible that, when exposed through public channels, they retreat into their cave of self-justification and label these legitimate criticisms as an attack on intellectualism itself. Instead of behaving like true intellectuals, these commentators shun things that they do not partake in themselves and label it as un-intellectual and therefore just another chink in America’s self-worth and the further decline of society towards the idiotic.

In fact, I would also suggest that this proclamation of America’s intellectual decline is rooted in the common myth of nostalgia. In society, a yearning for the “better days” of the past can be found in every generation. Many people clamor for the days of old when people were of “stronger moral fiber” and the such. The WWII generation was “the Greatest Generation” and each subsequent generation has failed to live up to their lofty status and hopes. This can be found in many aspects of society, as we are constantly reminded by our elders of the days when there was virtually no crime and horrible things that are commonplace supposedly were unheard of. The truth is there were just as many perverts and criminals in the past, but it was simply shielded from the public eye as well as the younger members of the population. Looking at this nostalgic characteristic of the public, we can see that perhaps these intellectuals saying the world is going to hell can be lumped in with this myth of the superiority of the past. In truth, people today are far more educated than they ever have been, and society as a whole is much more in tune with the way things work and trying to look at things from a more intellectual viewpoint.

The decline of public intellectualism is merely a myth that is being spread around by a group of pessimistic and angry individuals who feel they are not being taken seriously enough. Whether it is due to the alternate lifestyles of individuals as Mack points out, or whether they are simply growing bitter with the growing world and their lack of size in it, this angry posturing is getting old. Not everything is bad with today’s society, and there is a lot of intellectualism to be found around the globe.