Category Archives: politics

Hamilton, Hamilton…Who Was He Anyway?

Posted on May 4, 2016 | 4 comments

Broadway megahit “Hamilton” has brought the Founding Parent (okay, Founding Father) into a spotlight unknown since his own era.

Let’s face it.  The Ron Chernow biography, turned into a smash Broadway musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda, has made Alexander Hamilton into the icon he hasn’t been–or maybe never was–in a century or two. Just this week, the hip-hop musical “Hamilton” received a record-breaking 16 Tony Award nominations.

His new-found celebrity has even influenced his modern-day successor, current Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, leading Lew to reverse his earlier plan to remove Hamilton from the $10 bill and replace him with the image of an American woman.

Instead, Hamilton will remain on the front of that bill, with a group representing suffragette leaders in 1913 appearing on the back, while Harriet Tubman will replace no-longer-revered and now-reviled President Andrew Jackson on the front of the $20 bill.  We’ll see other changes to our paper currency during the next five years.

But an intriguing question remains:  How many Americans—putting aside those caught up in the frenzy on Broadway, where theatergoers are forking over $300 and $400 to see “Hamilton” on stage—know who Hamilton really was?

A recent study done by memory researchers at Washington University in St. Louis has confirmed that most Americans are confident that Hamilton was once president of the United States.

According to Henry L. Roediger III, a human memory expert at Wash U, “Our findings from a recent survey suggest that about 71 percent of Americans are fairly certain that [Hamilton] is among our nation’s past presidents.  I had predicted that Benjamin Franklin would be the person most falsely recognized as a president, but Hamilton beat him by a mile.”

Roediger (whose official academic title is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor in Arts & Sciences) has been testing undergrad college students since 1973, when he first administered a test while he was himself a psychology grad student at Yale. His 2014 study, published in the journal Science, suggested that we as a nation do fairly well at naming the first few and the last few presidents.  But less than 20 percent can remember more than the last 8 or 9 presidents in order.

Roediger’s more recent study is a bit different because its goal was to gauge how well Americans simply recognize the names of past presidents.  Name-recognition should be much less difficult than recalling names from memory and listing them on a blank sheet of paper, which was the challenge in 2014.

The 2016 study, published in February in the journal Psychological Science, asked participants to identify past presidents, using a list of names that included actual presidents as well as famous non-presidents like Hamilton and Franklin.  Other familiar names from U.S. history, and non-famous but common names, were also included.

Participants were asked to indicate their level of certainty on a scale from zero to 100, where 100 was absolutely certain.

What happened?  The rate for correctly recognizing the names of past presidents was 88 percent overall, although laggards Franklin Pierce and Chester Arthur rated less than 60 percent.

Hamilton was more frequently identified as president (with 71 percent thinking that he was) than several actual presidents, and people were very confident (83 on the 100-point scale) that he had been president.

More than a quarter of the participants incorrectly recognized others, notably Franklin, Hubert Humphrey, and John Calhoun, as past presidents.  Roediger thinks that probably happened because people are aware that these were important figures in American history without really knowing what their actual roles were.

Roediger and his co-author, K. Andrew DeSoto, suggest that our ability to recognize the names of famous people hinges on their names appearing in a context related to the source of their fame.  “Elvis Presley was famous, but he would never be recognized as a past president,” Roediger says.   It’s not enough to have a familiar name.  It must be “a familiar name in the right context.”

This study is part of an emerging line of research focusing on how people remember history.  The recent studies reveal that the ability to remember the names of presidents follows consistent and reliable patterns.  “No matter how we test it—in the same experiment, with different people, across generations, in the laboratory, with online studies, with different types of tests—there are clear patterns in how the presidents are remembered and how they are forgotten,” DeSoto says.

While decades-old theories about memory can explain the results to some extent, these findings are sparking new ideas about fame and just how human memory-function treats those who achieve it.

As Roediger notes, “knowledge of American presidents is imperfect….”  False fame can arise from “contextual familiarity.”  And “even the most famous person in America may be forgotten in as short a time as 50 years.”

So…how will Alexander Hamilton’s new-found celebrity hold up?  Judging from the astounding success of the hip-hop musical focusing on him and his cohorts, one can predict with some confidence that his memory will endure far longer than it otherwise might have.

This time, he may even be remembered as our first Secretary of the Treasury, not as the president he never was.

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Posted in Alexander Hamilton, American history, Broadway musicals, fame, Harriet Tubman, human memory, memory, memory research, music, New York City, politics, psychological research, psychology, science, Secretary of the Treasury, Washington University in St. Louis

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John Grisham: Advocating Change via Great Storytelling

Posted on January 30, 2016 | 2 comments

I admit it. I’m a John Grisham fan. Ever since I read The Firm in 1991, I’ve read every one of his law-related novels, and I’ve relished reading all of them.

As a writer, I admire his highly readable writing style and the way his stories—filled with twists and turns–engage readers like me. As an erstwhile lawyer (like Grisham), I’m also in awe of his ability to skillfully weave legal issues into his stories.

Grisham’s latest, Rogue Lawyer, appeared last year, and I just finished reading it. What’s new in this novel is his protagonist, Sebastian Rudd, an extremely unconventional criminal defense lawyer who carries a gun and works out of a bulletproof van. Rudd, whose only friend is a burly paralegal/bodyguard, represents defendants other lawyers won’t. His encounters with a diverse group of atypical clients make up the gripping story lines that intersect in Rogue Lawyer.

What I found especially notable in this novel is Grisham’s focus on several significant issues that currently get some attention—but not nearly enough–in our current political and social climate.

Briefly summarized, here are some of the major issues Grisham highlights in Rogue Lawyer:

  • The corruption of our criminal justice system by some of the prosecutors, police officers, and judges who work within that system. Grisham focuses, for example, on what he sees as the rampant use of lies in court testimony by police and prosecutors. These lies, he makes clear, are aimed at convicting criminal defendants, fairly or not. Grisham unabashedly condemns the wrongful convictions that often result. As lawyer Rudd says at one point, “Getting a conviction is far more important [to these people] than justice.”
  • The use of phony “expert” witnesses in our courts. These witnesses are hired by lawyers to say what the lawyers want them to say. They “roam the country as hired guns testifying for fat fees.” Unfortunately, juries are usually impressed by these experts’ credentials and willing to take their testimony at face value, whether it‘s merited or not. Grisham writes that these experts brag about “their verdicts” (but rarely mention their “losses”).
  •  Human trafficking, which Grisham correctly calls “sexual slavery.” He points out, via one of his characters, that “[m]ost people in this country don’t believe there’s sex trafficking in their cities, but it’s there. It’s everywhere.” The traffickers “prey on runaways, homeless kids, girls from bad families looking for escape. It’s a sick business.” Fortunately, this issue is receiving increased attention. In San Francisco, a collaborative effort is taking aim at human trafficking, mounting an “awareness campaign” focused on reaching vulnerable teens.
  • The incarceration of one million “young black men now warehoused in decaying prisons, idling away the days at taxpayer expense,” the “unintended victims of tough laws passed by tough politicians over the past forty years,” mostly for nonviolent drug offenses. This is another issue that’s garnered more attention in the last few years, giving us some hope for change.

I commend John Grisham for shining light on these issues. His status as a best-selling author gives him a bully pulpit of sorts, a platform for raising the awareness of his readers. He told CBS News in October that he hopes Sebastian Rudd will reappear in more stories, exploring these and other issues he’s concerned about. He’d even like to see Rudd become the lead in a TV series whose episodes could touch on a wide range of important issues.

I hope that happens. And I hope that, via his storytelling, John Grisham’s focus on these kinds of issues has a broad impact on the public consciousness and leads to changes we sorely need.

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Posted in criminal defense lawyers, criminal justice, expert witnesses, human trafficking, incarceration, law, lawyers, police, politics, prosecutors

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Watching the movie “Z”: A tale of two Hoffmans

Posted on January 4, 2016 | 2 comments

January 1st marks an unusual anniversary for me.

On January 1, 1970, I watched the movie “Z”—a film I consider a powerful and enduring classic—under somewhat remarkable circumstances.

The 1969 film was directed by Costa-Gavras, a Greek-born filmmaker who lived in Paris. He based it on a book written in 1966 by Vassilis Vassilikos, who, using official documents, described the 1963 death of a Greek politician, Grigoris Lambrakis.

Lambrakis, an MD who taught at the medical school in Athens, was a leading pacifist and left-wing member of the Greek parliament. Shortly after speaking at an antiwar meeting in Thessaloniki, he was struck on the head by a club wielded by two far-right extremists. He later died of his injuries.

After his death, graffiti with the letter “Z” began to appear in Greek cities. Representing the growing protest against the right-wing government, it stood for the first letter of the Greek word, “Zi,” which means “he lives.”

In a filmed interview in 2009, Costa-Gavras discussed the making of “Z.” (You can watch this interview, as I did, on a DVD of “Z.”)

His focus was clear: political oppression. His cast: Yves Montand as Lambrakis, Irene Pappas as his wife, and Jean-Louis Trintignant as the prosecutor who slowly realizes what happened and is ultimately driven to seek justice against the wrongdoers.

In the film, a key scene takes place in front of the venue where Lambrakis is scheduled to give his speech. Many supporters have gathered to welcome him, but others in the crowd are demonstrators opposed to him and what he stands for. The local police are seen clubbing a few of the demonstrators. But it’s clear that the demonstrators are the bad guys–street toughs paid off by those in power to harm Lambrakis.

So it’s not the police who represent oppression here. Rather, it’s the demonstrators, one of whom strikes Lambrakis in the head. He’s stunned but goes ahead to give his speech. When leaving the venue, he’s struck once again, causing him to die later in the film.

Before he’s struck, Lambrakis asks, “Why do the ideas we stand for incite such violence?” Costa-Gavras’s answer: It’s all about power. Those in power will do anything to stay in power, and here that included the assassination of a political opponent.

Post-1963, Greek politics remained chaotic, and a 1967 coup by the military led to their control of the Greek government until their regime finally collapsed and democratic government was essentially restored in 1973.

I first saw “Z” at the Cinema movie theater in Chicago on New Year’s Day 1970.   The Cinema was an art-film theater located on Chicago Avenue near Michigan Avenue, and I saw many “art flicks” there when I was younger.  It’s long-gone, demolished and replaced by a high-rise building that includes a Neiman Marcus store.

I was a young lawyer working in an office that brought test cases on behalf of the poor.  I’d recently completed a clerkship with Judge Julius J. Hoffman, the judge who presided over “the Chicago 7 trial” (also called “the Chicago conspiracy trial”) that got underway in the fall of 1969 and was still ongoing in early 1970.  The trial stemmed from the turmoil engulfing the Democratic convention held in Chicago in 1968. (Happily, I never had to work on that trial. My clerkship was ending, and my co-clerk was assigned to that task.)

[FYI: I will discuss my tenure with Judge Hoffman in an upcoming post.]

I read about “Z” in Roger Ebert’s review in the Chicago Sun-Times in late December. Ebert was an unusually young and thoughtful movie critic, close to my own age, and I was a great fan of his reviews. This review, which called “Z” the best film of 1969, highlighted the political backdrop of corruption, and I was eager to see it.  I’d just said goodbye to a man I’d been dating—he was a bit too boring to abide any longer—and I set out on a cold and gray New Year’s Day to see the movie by myself. (As luck would have it, I met my adored and never-boring husband when I moved to sunny California a few months later.)

The film more than lived up to my expectations.  But what was especially striking about being in the audience that day was that, in the crowd waiting to enter the theater, was one of the “Chicago 7” defendants, Abbie Hoffman (no relation to Judge Hoffman).  In that era, Abbie Hoffman was a major figure in the protest movement opposing the government. All seven of the Chicago defendants were protesters indicted by “Tricky Dick” Nixon’s administration.

I didn’t agree with everything that Abbie Hoffman and his cohorts stood for, and I didn’t endorse their misconduct during the trial itself.  But I was opposed to the Vietnam War, sympathetic to other elements of the protest movement, and horrified later that year by events like the killings at Kent State.

As I watched “Z,” knowing that Abbie Hoffman was watching it at the very same time, I couldn’t help thinking of the parallels with Chicago.  Fortunately, our government (unlike the powerful right wing in Greece) didn’t promote assassination.

But there were parallels.  The attitude of local officials, including Mayor Richard J. Daley, toward the protesters who came to Chicago led to an overreaction by the Chicago police. Their violent conduct toward the protesters became obvious to everyone watching TV coverage of the Democratic convention. The U.S. Justice Department went on to indict Abbie Hoffman and the other defendants on charges brought under a law many viewed as unconstitutional.

But there was one sharp contrast between Chicago and Greece: the prosecutors.

I’d fallen halfway in love with Jean-Louis Trintignant when he starred in “A Man and a Woman,” a 1967 French film. Now, in “Z,” he portrayed a fair-minded prosecutor who becomes determined to hold the powerful to account. And he succeeds in indicting not only the two toughs who committed the murder but also the high-ranking military officers who supported them.

(The real-life prosecutor, Christos Sartzetakis, was twice arrested and imprisoned but triumphed after democracy was restored and was elected by the Greek parliament to serve as the country’s president from 1985 to 1990.)

By contrast, the prosecutors representing the Nixon administration in Chicago were politically ambitious and far from fair-minded. They were determined to convict the seven defendants, including Abbie Hoffman, whose protests during the convention had been largely peaceful. They secured as the trial judge a man whose usual bent was to rule in favor of the federal prosecutors who appeared before him, and he treated this trial like any other.

No one was killed in Chicago. And although the trial defendants were convicted, they were convicted only of contempt, and these convictions were mostly reversed by other courts. But the parallels between what transpired in Chicago and the story told in “Z” remain.

46 years later, “Z” is still a powerful film. And January 1, 1970, endures in my memory as a day that underscored the ugliness of political oppression both in Greece and in my own country.

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Posted in 1960s, 1969 movies, anniversaries, Chicago, Greece, lawyers, legal assistance to the poor, movie stars, movies, Nixon administration, politics

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What Women Need to Do

Posted on September 12, 2014 | 2 comments

The fall midterm elections are approaching. What are you doing about it?

If you’re a man, you may be thinking about the candidates and their positions on the issues. The outcome may have some bearing on your future, but it most likely won’t have a huge impact on your daily life.

If you’re a woman, the outcome is much more important, and you should be paying a lot of attention to what the candidates are saying. You should scrutinize their rhetoric and try to determine whether their conduct aligns with their words. And once you discover which candidates stand for the positions you endorse, you should get behind those candidates and give them your support.

Unfortunately, I question how many women follow this route. Polls show that women tend to support the positions endorsed by most Democratic rather than Republican candidates and incumbents. Politico magazine recently reported that two major Republican groups have jointly issued a detailed report concluding that women view the GOP as “intolerant” and “stuck in the past” and that women are “barely receptive” to Republican policies. But how many women reach for their wallets to lend financial support to Democratic or independent candidates? How many are willing to give up one or two days this fall to work on behalf of the candidates they prefer? And most important: How many women will turn up at the polls to vote for these candidates in November?

The truth is that many women focus more on superficial concerns like their appearance and their apparel than on their ability to impact who will make the decisions that affect their daily lives and the lives of their families. They may be unhappy about earning less money than a man doing the same job. But have they urged members of Congress to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act? They may be concerned about losing their right to a potentially needed abortion. But are they supporting candidates who consistently support that right? They may be aware that many of the world’s children, including American children, are going hungry, or that two-thirds of minimum-wage earners in the U.S. are women. But what are they doing about it?

Where Democrats are in the majority, there’s hope for change. Governor Jerry Brown just signed legislation requiring that most California employers give their workers three paid sick days a year. This will allow the 40 percent of the workforce who have never had paid sick leave a chance to stay home when they or their children are sick. Businesses fought this legislation tooth and nail, but the Democratic-majority state legislature passed the bill later signed by a Democratic governor. This demonstrates how candidates who advocate women-friendly outcomes can make a real difference.

Let’s be honest. Many women can afford to give financial support—in the form of cold hard cash—to candidates who stand for the positions important to them. But are they? I’m constantly reminded that women spend large sums of money on frivolous items instead. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that women are spending thousands of dollars on trendy handbags made of fur. Even the Journal conceded that a fur handbag costing from $1,150 for a clutch to $6,500 for a tote is a “let-them-eat-cake extravagance,” but it noted that designers are competing to outdo each other, and stores are stocked with furry bags from Valentino, Burberry, and Fendi. “Let them eat cake” also applies elsewhere in the fashion industry, where the Journal noted that “fashion brands” report “their most expensive products sell out first.”

A brand-new brochure featuring “hot” items from Bloomingdale’s included an ordinary-looking Salvatore Ferragamo leather handbag for $2,950. Even Nordstrom, a somewhat less indulgent source for women’s apparel and accessories, highlighted items like these in a recent catalog: a wool/rayon cardigan sweater for $995 (the matching tee is $295); a wool/leather/rayon jacket for $1,495; and a status-brand tote bag for $625.

Last month the San Francisco Chronicle featured a new nail “lacquer” from Christian Louboutin costing $50 (at $50 a pop, it’s no longer just plain nail polish). According to the Chronicle, the polish “floats in a faceted bottle” meant to resemble “a drop of color encased in a block of crystal.” Seriously?

Instead of buying expensive and unnecessary items like these, women should consider donating money to political candidates who deserve their support–candidates and incumbents who support women on the issues that matter to them. They should be aware that, as the Chronicle reported earlier this year, enormous sums of money are flowing from hedge funds and big corporations to GOP candidates. Because these donors don’t look out for women’s interests, it’s crucial that women attempt to counter their influence.

How about putting money to use other ways? Women who can afford it should also consider supporting charitable causes they want to foster. Entities working towards a healthier environment, for example, or those seeking funds for medical research. Charities that provide food to the hungry both here and abroad, or those that help women establish small businesses so they can provide for their families without being dependent on others.

Do you remember Anita Hill? If you were old enough to watch the 1991 Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on the nomination of Clarence Thomas to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, you remember Anita Hill. She gave dramatic testimony before the Senate committee, bravely describing Thomas’s sexual harassment when she worked for him at the EEOC. Hill’s credibility was attacked and her testimony disparaged by members of the all-male committee (the entire Senate included only two women at the time). Thomas assumed a seat on the Court, where he has served without distinction.

Hill, who’s now a professor at Brandeis University, recently visited San Francisco, speaking to a group called Equal Rights Advocates, and I was in the audience. She wanted everyone to know she didn’t regret coming forward to testify about Thomas because of the positive change that happened after she testified. It was vital to her to reveal how he, like many male employers, treated women in the workplace. She also spoke up because she believed in the integrity of the Supreme Court.

“The political effort to silence us” didn’t work, she said. Her testimony in fact led to increased awareness of sexual harassment and a spike in the number of women running for–and winning–public office. Hill made clear that she continues to work to effect change for girls and women. She concluded by encouraging women to be more courageous, to work for change, and to vote. As she noted, voting is especially important in determining who sits on the Supreme Court.

So what do women need to do? Above all, TO VOTE. Some pundits are predicting that GOP voters will come out to the polls this November while Democrats will not. Dan Balz just wrote in the Washington Post that even though the “national mood” favors the Republicans, and Democrats historically don’t turn out for midterm elections, many races are too close to call, and it’s too early to predict exactly what will happen.

Women must change history this fall. Even if they choose to buy $50 nail polish and splurge on tote bags costing more than minimum-wage workers earn in a week, even if they do nothing else to support women-friendly candidates, they must go to the polls in November and vote for those candidates who support women’s interests.

That’s what women need to do.

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Posted in politics, women, women"s interests

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What Shall We Do About Plastic Bags?

Posted on April 30, 2014 | 1 comment

The fate of plastic bags is up in the air. While we ponder their future, they’re accumulating by the millions in countless landfills (or worse, in our oceans).

Before plastic bags existed, people wrapped things in paper bags (generally brown ones). My mother stuffed our sandwiches into waxed paper bags (which didn’t work very well to keep them fresh). Retail stores offered their own paper bags featuring stores’ logos. And the paper shopping bag eventually made its appearance.

When plastic bags first came on the scene in a big way in the 1960s, they were a revelation. They were lightweight and could be folded inside your purse or briefcase, allowing you to reuse them. They kept wet things from getting everything else wet. They were useful for wrapping smelly garbage (and, eventually, smelly diapers).

Once I discovered the virtues of plastic bags, I began saving them, and saving them, and saving them. I still do. My deplorable status as a “saver” has led to a huge stash of colorful plastic bags. I justify it by constantly reusing them.

Despite their many virtues, plastic bags have become a menace, and the movement to ban plastic bags is gaining steam. San Francisco led the way in 2007 as the first city to ban them. Initially banning them at chain grocery stores and drugstores, SF extended the ban to all retail stores and restaurants in 2012.

Since 2007, plastic bags have been banned in nearly 100 municipalities in the state of California, and right now Los Angeles is the largest city in the country to enforce the ban. According a recent article in The New York Times, more than 150 communities across the U.S. have embraced some sort of bag ordinance. These include cities like Honolulu, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.

Even New York City is moving—slowly–towards a ban. In March the city council introduced legislation that would charge customers a fee for both plastic and paper bags at most city stores.

Wherever plastic bags are currently banned, paper bags are available for a small fee. (Most retailers in San Francisco now charge 10 cents.) So here in SF, we rely more and more on paper bags. And that’s OK. They tend to be biodegradable and recyclable, and many San Franciscans use them to store items destined for recycling until we can get to a bin.

We also use even sturdier reusable tote bags in bright patterns and colors. My favorites are large tote bags made from recycled plastic bottles, like those featuring color reproductions of classic Audubon prints, available for a donation to the National Audubon Society.

But plastic bags still offer some distinct advantages. They’re great repositories of smelly wet garbage, they don’t fall apart in the rain, and they can be repurposed as trash-can liners and lunch bags. Banning them completely would mean saying goodbye to all that.

But the winds of social change are blowing through California, where some legislators are now vigorously proposing a total ban on single-use plastic bags throughout the state. A similar statewide ban has been proposed before. But the plastics industry, with millions of dollars to spend on lobbying lawmakers, has so far succeeded in quashing these efforts.

The Times reports that one of the largest manufacturers of plastic bags, Hilex Poly, spent more than $1 million in California lobbying against a 2010 effort that, not surprisingly, failed. According to The Times, this South Carolina firm later donated to every Democrat in the California Senate who joined Republicans to defeat another bill proposed in 2013.

This year support for a statewide ban has new momentum. The Los Angeles Times has endorsed it, and several legislators who opposed the bill last year have made a U-turn and announced their support.

Another manufacturer has even jumped on the bandwagon. Command Packaging has started increasing its production of heavy-duty reusable bags, made from recycled agricultural plastic, and now supports the current bill. The California bill would allow stores to offer these more durable plastic bags—for a fee–alongside paper ones.

Not surprisingly, environmental groups are in hot pursuit of the ban. The California League of Conservation Voters recently recited the grim statistics: Californians still use an astonishing 20 billion plastic bags every year. Because they aren’t usually recycled, they contribute to marine pollution as well as urban pollution. California has a long coastline, and many of its rivers and streams lead right into bays like San Francisco Bay and the ocean. CLCV estimates that most plastic bags ultimately end up in the ocean, where 60 to 80% of all marine debris is plastic. Captain Paul Watson, executive director of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, estimates that 7 million tons of plastic are currently floating in our oceans.

The result is horrific. Birds, fish, and animals like sea otters drown, suffocate, or are strangled by plastic bags. Sea turtles, whose diet is largely made of up jellyfish, frequently mistake plastic bags for their favorite food and die when they consume them.

The long-term solution to plastic bags may lie in composting. In San Francisco, where composting of food scraps and items like food-soiled paper plates and cups has been mandatory since 2009, we can purchase biodegradable plastic bags in which to stuff our compost. As the rest of the country moves toward composting, this kind of bag will become more readily available, and the problem of non-biodegradable plastic bags will largely disappear. Unfortunately, the increasing use of composting won’t happen very soon.

I strongly support the proposed statewide ban in California–although I admit it’s easy for me to support it, thanks to the immense supply of plastic bags lurking in my closet. Because of the new momentum favoring a ban, plastic bags appear to be on the endangered list, at least in California. And let’s face it, once it happens in California, it will begin to happen elsewhere in the U.S. Someday our great-grandchildren will gaze in wonder at the colorful plastic bags displayed for their amusement in the museums of the future.

But in the meantime, are there are any new uses for plastic bags that would justify their continued existence?

A Nigerian artist has come up with one. Ifeoma Anyeaji, a Nigerian artist visiting at the Godown Art Centre in Nairobi, Kenya, was the focus of a profile in the Daily Nation last September. (The Daily Nation is an independent and influential Kenyan newspaper headquartered in Nairobi.) According to a Lonely Planet publication on Kenya, the Godown Art Centre is “a hub for Nairobi’s burgeoning arts scene.”

Once she arrived there, Anyeaji (known as Ify) began collecting discarded plastic bags. As a visual artist, she could use commonly used media like oil and acrylic. But she chose to work with plastic bags and bottles to promote the reusability of discarded materials. She sees plastic bags as “a global issue,” polluting the environment, “and so I thought of a way to make use of them.” Her technique? Threading and weaving the bags, ultimately creating colorful structures. This technique resembles the traditional hair-braiding and fabric warp-weft weaving popular in Nigeria. As a little girl, Ify was good at threading, the art of weaving hair with threads, “and this is the technique I wanted to incorporate into my work.”

Preparing the bags isn’t simple. After collecting the bags, Ify cleans and shreds them. Then she wraps them into strings, like ropes, and works them into intricate patterns. The patterns are then shaped into structures, including furniture, some of which is functional as well as works of art.

Ify sees herself in a broader context, noting that the world is mainly composed of recycled ideas, where one concept is borrowed and then embellished to be used elsewhere. Her view of the art world, and of herself as part of it, may have been influenced by her time studying in the U.S. After receiving her degree in painting at the University of Benin in Nigeria, she studied art at Washington University in St. Louis, receiving a graduate degree in environmental sculpture.

So…until we see the total demise of the single-use plastic bag, we can treasure creative people like Ify and hope that these bags will be repurposed, becoming useful and perhaps even beautiful objects. Unfortunately, Ify will almost certainly have an ample supply for many years to come.

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Posted in environment, opinion pieces, politics, San Francisco

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“Paper or…?” Drying your hands has unexpected consequences

Posted on October 8, 2013 | Leave a comment

We’re all familiar with the following question:  Paper or plastic?

For decades, every purchase in a supermarket or drugstore has led to this question.  And for decades, many of us have wondered:  Is it better—for the environment, for my pocketbook, for my overall well-being—to request paper or plastic?  The answer hasn’t always been clear.

Never mind.  Today, in San Francisco and an increasing number of other cities, the question is moot.  Local ordinances ban plastic bags and require customers to pay for paper ones, thus encouraging shoppers to carry their own reusable bags.  The “paper or plastic” question is fast disappearing.

But now we’re confronted with a new but even more troubling question:  When we use a restroom in a public place and we wash our hands (as we’re repeatedly urged to do), should we use paper towels or an air blower?

In this case, we usually don’t have a choice.  Restaurants, stores, theaters, museums, and other institutions with restrooms for their patrons generally confront us with only one way to dry our hands:  paper towels OR air blowers.  A few establishments offer both, thereby giving us a choice, but most do not.

I’m a strong proponent of paper towels, and my position recently garnered support from an epidemiologist at the Mayo Clinic, Rodney Lee Thompson.

According to a story in the Wall Street Journal last December, the Mayo Clinic has published a comprehensive study of every known hand-washing study done since 1970.  The conclusion?  Drying one’s skin is essential to staving off bacteria, and paper towels are better at doing that than air blowers.

Why?  According to this study, paper towels are more efficient, they don’t splatter germs, they won’t dry out your skin, and most people prefer them (and therefore are more likely to wash their hands in the first place).

Thompson’s own study was one of those included in the overall study, and he concurs with its conclusions.  He observed people washing their hands at places like sports stadiums.  “The trouble with blowers,” he says, is that “they take so long.”  Most people dry their hands for a short time, then “wipe them on their dirty jeans, or open the door with their still-wet hands.”

Besides being time-consuming, most blowers are extremely noisy.  Their decibel level often strikes me as deafening.  Like Thompson, I think these noisy and inefficient blowers “turn people off.”

But, he adds, there’s “no downside to the paper towel,” either psychologically or environmentally.  Thompson states that electric blowers use more energy than producing a paper towel, so they don’t appear to benefit the environment either.

The air-blower industry argues that blowers reduce bacterial transmission, but studies show that the opposite is true.  Much to my surprise, these studies found that blowers tend to spread bacteria from 3 to 6 feet.  To keep bacteria from spreading, Thompson urges using a paper towel to dry your hands, opening the restroom door with it, then throwing it into the trash.

A recent episode of the popular TV series “Mythbusters” has provided new evidence to support Thompson’s conclusions.  The results of tests conducted on this program, aired in June 2013, demonstrated that paper towels are more effective at removing bacteria from one’s hands and that air blowers spread more bacteria around the blower area.

In San Francisco, many restrooms have posted signs stating that they’re composting paper towels to reduce waste.  Because San Francisco has embarked on an ambitious composting scheme, we’re not even adding paper towels to our landfills or recycling bins.  Other cities may already be doing the same, and still others (like New York City, where composting has already been proposed) will undoubtedly follow.

I strongly advocate replacing air blowers with paper towels in public restrooms.  Political leaders, including those who’ve already compelled their constituents to abandon plastic bags for the sake of the environment, should carefully review this issue as well.  If they conclude, as overwhelming evidence suggests, that paper towels are better both for our health and for the environment, they should enact local ordinances requiring that public restrooms use paper towels.

Paper or…?  The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.  The answer is blowin’ in the wind.

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Posted in environment, health, opinion pieces, politics, San Francisco

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The Politicization of Christmas Trees

Posted on December 17, 2012 | Leave a comment

I’m not planning to buy a Christmas tree this year.  I didn’t buy one last year either.  But as a consumer who’s interested in American retailing, I was disturbed to learn what happened in the Christmas tree industry in 2011.

According to a report that appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, Christmas tree farmers were (and undoubtedly still are) struggling to compete with artificial-tree producers, who spend millions of dollars each year persuading shoppers to buy fake trees instead of real ones.  In an effort to improve their own sales, tree farmers united behind a program that promised to be helpful.  They petitioned the U.S. Department of Agriculture to administer a fund they would pay for themselves, and the USDA agreed to do it.

The growers wanted to contribute 15 cents—15 cents—from the sale of each real tree.  This tiny amount would have created a Christmas Tree Promotion Board that would remind shoppers of the delights of a real tree.

What happened?  The politicization that has infected so much of our public life suddenly spread to the very non-political world of Christmas trees.  Although the USDA has overseen at least 20 of these kinds of programs for many different types of farmers during the past 45 years (including the popular “Got Milk?” program for the dairy industry), some conservative commentators got wind of the tree farmers’ plan and decided to make it a political football.

Suddenly critics became incensed by the idea that shoppers would have to pay an additional 15 cents for each tree purchased.  They decided to dub this miniscule amount as a “tax,” even though it was nothing of the kind.  The 15 cents was to be paid by the farmers, who hoped the new Board would persuade shoppers to return to putting real trees in their living rooms.

But instead, these critics seized on the fact that the USDA, as part of the Obama administration, would administer this program.  President Obama became the target.  He was described by one U.S. Senator as the Grinch who stole Christmas and likened to Scrooge in “A Christmas Carol.”   A member of the U.S. House called the 15-cent amount a “new tax” that was “a smack in the face to each and every American who celebrates Christmas.”  Huh?

As criticism became more heated, the Obama administration backed off and pulled its support for the program.  The whole scenario baffled the tree farmers.  They were disillusioned by the critics on the right, who described the farmers’ contribution as a tax and skewered the President for supporting it.  But they were also disheartened by the President’s staff, which buckled under what one farmer called “misinformed pressure.”

This farmer noted that “unlike artificial trees exported from foreign countries, ours are from America and create jobs for Americans.”  Unfortunately, knee-jerk politics got in the way and stopped a valuable program in its tracks.

As Christmas nears, tree buyers are once again considering their options. But whether or not we plan to buy a Christmas tree this year, all of us should reflect on what happened last year.  Should we allow American farmers to spend their own money to promote their products?  Or should we let dysfunctional political leaders shut them down in order to gain a cheap political advantage?

[A version of this commentary previously appeared as an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle.]

 

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