It’s a New Year and you can count the herculean resolutions of all San Franciscans from Mayor-Elect Daniel Lurie to your humble but not always pleasing scribe. Remember that a New Year’s resolution is something that goes in one year and out the other!
Mark Twain once explained to readers in the 19th century: “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”
Many readers will be inoculated by this column’s volubility, and many will explore it for blunders which render my observations and information subject to judgment and even criticism. It has been observed that criticism from a friend is better than flattery from an enemy. I bear no malice because the person who is not criticized isn’t breathing. You might avoid criticism by saying nothing, doing nothing and being nothing.
It was Adlai E. (for Ewing) Stevenson, then-governor of Illinois and the Democratic Party candidate for president of the U.S.A. for a second time who spoke via radio and television on election eve (Nov. 8, 1956) thusly: “Looking back, I am content. Win or lose, I have told you the truth as I see it. I have said what I meant and meant what I have said. I have not done as well as I should like to have done, but I have done my best, frankly and forthrightly; no man can do more, and you are entitled to no less.”
I don’t know at present whether we can apply that axiom to any of the five major candidates for mayor, but we’ve got irritating practitioners of guile and political pap at City Hall, and I don’t mean Assessor Joaquin Torres, District Attorney Brooke Jenkins – who is a breath of fresh prosecutorial air of the criminal courthouse, 850 Bryant St. – Director John Arntz of the Election Department, Board of Supervisor’s Clerk Angela Cavallo, Controller Greg Wagner and Budget Analyst Fred Broussard, a worthy successor to Harvey M. Rose who has retired but still attends every Board of Supervisors meeting.
Honoré de Balzac aptly proclaimed in 1901 in “The Works of Honoré de Balzac”: “And thus bureaucracy, the giant power wielded by pygmies, came into the world.” And, with approximately 38,000 employees, do we have such preponderant dynasticism at City Hall and elsewhere in our 49 square miles, plus SFO and other lands and buildings which teem with such regimens.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, while still New York state’s governor in 1932, warned: “Any government, like any family, can for a year spend a little more than it earns. But you and I know that a continuation of that habit means the poorhouse.”
The Ides of March is behind us (March 15), plus the 15th day of May, July and October, await under the ancient Roman calendar, so we can relax, think about the Giants’ opening day on April 5 at Oracle Park and Earth Day and Passover on April 22.
The late great U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once observed: “The only title in our democracy superior to that of president is the title of citizen.”
“Far more important to me is, that I should be loyal to what I regard as the law of my political belief, which is this: A belief that a country is best governed, which is least governed.” On June 19, 1972, one George Hoadley so declared at the Ohio Constitutional Convention, the third Constitutional Convention in Ohio’s history as a state.
Chief Justice Earl Warren of the United States Supreme Court in the 1950s and ‘60s (who swore me in as a lawyer entitled to practice law in the U.S. Supreme Court, which I never did!), when governor of California, began a political address thusly: “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m pleased to see the dense crowd here tonight.” A voice from the back shouted: “Don’t be too pleased. We ain’t all dense!”
Words of wisdom include the observation that a criminal doesn’t care who makes the laws of this country so long as they are not enforced.
President Woodrow Wilson, also former president of Princeton University and governor of New Jersey, a Democrat, once observed: “The history of liberty is the history of the limitations on the power of government.” And the provenance of government usually expands on federal, state and local levels.
On April 19, 1972, John B. Connally, Jr., then-U.S. secretary of the treasury, declared at the American Society of Newspaper Editors meeting in Washington, D.C.: “A democracy unsatisfied (by support of the people] cannot long survive…. We live in )robably the most turbulent and tormented times in the history of this nation. Criticize … disagree, yes, but also we have as leaders an obligation to be fair and keep in perspective what we are and what we hope to be.”
It has been a new year at City Hall where Supervisor Aaron Peskin from Telegraph Hill was elected president after 11 roll call votes by our district heroes, almost tying Congressman Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield for roll call votes. This columnist wishes President Peskin two years of leadership achievement. My hero, U.S. President Harry Truman, once reminded Americans: “America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, imagination and all the unbeatable determination to do the job at hand.”
