Bob Balmanno- Writer and Activist

I’ve worked in the Sunnyvale Library since I graduated from high school in 1985, and over the years I’ve noticed that many of my coworkers are aspiring writers, musicians, and artists.  One of those coworkers has been working especially hard at writing novels and organizing his coworkers into an effective union.  Two years ago, Bob Balmanno published September Snow, a wonderful science fiction book that combines the qualities that I admire in Bob as a person:  a strong sense of storytelling and a passionate social conscience.

September Snow takes place in the year 2051 A.D.  The world has been devastated by a long war that wrecked havoc on the Earth’s ecosystem, and a new religion called Gaia is being used by a malovent government to manipulate its citizens.   Our main character, Tom Novak, remembers a time before the society had transformed itself, a time when people could go outside without suffering solar radiation and poisoning and citizens could think for themselves and read what they want.  Tom is one of the last people to have these memories, and the independence of thought that it gives him makes him a threat to the powers that be.   He eventually discovers an insurgency of people intent on overthrowing the Gaia system, and he falls in love with their leader, September Snow.

September Snow works on 2 levels.  On one level, it’s an exciting science fiction adventure, filled with grand heroics as Tom, September, and a small band of insurgents battle against overwhelming odds to defeat an overarching government.  On another level, September Snow is a strong indictment of the path our environmental degradation is taking our society and our planet.  It talks about the depletion of the ozone layer and the destruction of various ecosystems and it’s a very timely story.   I enjoyed the book on both levels.

This book reflects the heavy strain of social conscience that can be found in all aspects of Bob Balmanno’s life.  In reading the bio of the book, I found out that Bob was in the Peace Corps as a young man, herding cattle in Africa.  Bob was instrumental in organizing part time workers in the city of Sunnyvale to form a union and be a part of SEIU.  I was secretary for 3 years for our chapter in the late 1990s, and I grew to respect the passion of Bob,and the other leaders of the group to help workers with their grievances and work out equitable and fair solutions.  I didn’t do much as secretary but take notes of the meetings, but I was able to observe Bob and the other 4 leaders of the union make sure that the members were informed of the issues so that they were knowleadgable enough to make up their minds before voting.   When our group negotiated with the city for a contract, I noted the amicable and businesslike way in which the union and the city negotiated.  It took away a stereotype that many people have told me about unions, that they were always antagonistic towards managemen and didn’t take into mind the bigger picture.  I found the exact opposite was true.

Bob typifies the intersection of literature and activism that I respect.  He’s in a line with such writers as Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, Grace Paley, and Doris Lessing, writers who engage in the problems of the society around them through their writings.   It’s a tradition in literature that goes back to Steinbeck and Tolstoy and Voltaire. 

Protests and the Olympic Relay

Sunnyvale is a mid sized city in the San Francisco Bay Area, about 50 miles from San Francisco.    We have  our high tech firms and a diverse ethnic population that has worked hard and achieved a lot of things in many fields, but “The City”, as we call San Franscisco, still holds a large place in our hearts.  Last week, at my work in the Sunnyvale Public Library, all the talk was about the Olympic relay event in San Francisco and the protests that accompanied the relays.  On Thursday, coworkers would stop each other to see the latest news and to pipe in on their opinions of the rightness or wrongness of the demonstrations.   The consensus of the opinions that I heard was that my coworkers had mixed feelings about the protests.  On the one hand,  they felt that the Tibetans had every right to protest.  On the other hand, the protesters shouldn’t be physically manhandling the Olympic relay runners, who had nothing to do with China’s record of human rights abuses, and that the Olympics in general should stay away from politics.

I don’t totally agree, but I can see their point.  In all the talk about the protests and the Olympic relays, no mention was made about the 40 years of Chinese occupation of Tibet, Chinese human rights abuses within its own country and its toleration of human rights abuses in countries that it has an influence over.  I personally think the protesters should demonstrate during these Olympic relays, but how they demonstrate is just as important as the cause in which they demonstrate about.   The whole purpose of these demonstrations should be to highlight the abuses of the Chinese government, to enlighten people of the totalitarian nature of the host nation of the Olympics and its enabling of the genocide in Darfur..  Protests that divert attention to their cause and instead bring sympathy to a Communist China that doesn’t deserve it are counterproductive in my mind.

I think any Tibetan who cares about their country and is dismayed by the occupation of their country by China should protest these Olympic relays.  They have an opportunity to do something that their counterparts in their country can’t do because of suppression by Communist authorities:  voice their displeasure at the way their country is being run.  China now has occuppied Tibet for 40 years, and in those 40 years,  peaceful negotiations and diplomatic overtures have had little effect in changing Chinese policies.  In America, we have a tradition of protest and grassroots actions affecting change in our government and society.  The great Civil Rights protests of the 1960s, the Freedom Rides and the Sit-Ins, highlighted the unfairness of segregation laws and the prejudice that African Americans faced to a nation that had ignored these injustices previously.    Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and the women’s suffragists protested and demonstrated for the right of women to vote.   History has shown that governments do not change unless they are pressured by mass movements.   Some have criticized the Tibetans and activists for protesting during the Olympic ceremonies, but if they cannot  practice their right to freely assemble and voice their opinions here in the U.S., what does that say about our faith in democratic ideals?

Scott Herhold, an editor for the San Jose Mercury News, wrote a good article the day after the Olympic relays went through San Franicisco.  Herhold wrote:

“The Olympic Games and the torch relay have been about politics for decades. 

So there was nothing wrong when thousands of protesters showed up Wednesday to protest the Chinese government’s policies in Darfur, Tibet and Myanmar.

In fact, there was a lot right.  In the absence of the flame, the protesters- and the pro-Chinese demonstrators who arrived to counter them- came closer to dialogue than warfare…

But anyone who things that all messiness- all passions- can be avoided in discussing issues like Tibet or Darfur is unrealistic at best and repressive at worst.

A little history lesson is in order:  The modern torch relay got its start in 1936 as a propoganda stunt for the Nazis, who saw a torch run from Greece to Berlin as a way of building interest in the Games and burnishing Hitler’s regime. 

Leni Riefenstahl filmed it.  Joseph Goebbels used it.  And the Olympic movement , which was never as much about peace and harmony as people think, embraced it.

Are the Olympics really just about sports?  …In truth, governments, corporations and protesters know the Olympics are a stage to be seized.”

Perhaps the protesters should have found a different way to voice their grievances against the Chinese government than to try to douse the Olympic torch.  But they had every right to be present and to exercise their right to protest that the Chinese government does not give them in China or in Tibet.   Dissent is important, to point out inconvenient facts that society would otherwise rather ignore.  Cass R. Sunstein wrote in his book Why Societies Need Dissent:

“The problem is that widespread conformity deprives the public of information that it need to have.  Conformists follow others and silence themselves, without disclosing knowledge from which others would benefit.  This was the problem with the invasion of the Bay of Pigs;  it also produces large losses for member of investment clubs.  Hans Christian Andersen’s fable ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ is an ingenious illustration;  because everyone follows everyone else, people do not reveal what their eyes plainly perceive.  We shall shortly see that ordinary people in scientific experiments behave like the adults in Andersen’s tale.  When injustice, oppression, and mass violence are able to continue, it is almost always because good people are holding their tongues….

There is an ironic point here, one that I shall stress throughout.  Conformists are often thought to be protective of social interests, keeping quiet of the sake of the group.  By contrast, dissenters tend to be seen as selfish individualists, embarking on projects of their own.  But in an important sense, the opposite is closer to the truth.  Much of the time, dissenters benefit others, while conformists benefit themselves.”

Camille Rose Garcia and Her Tragic Kingdom

In September of last year, I went to the San Jose Museum of Art and saw a wonderful exhibit of eery cartoony art.  The art exhibit was called “Tragic Kingdom:  The Art of Camille Rose Garcia” and it featured a style of artwork that was seemingly influenced by 1930s Disney cartoons as seen through the eyes of the Addams Family (http://www.sjmusart.org/content/exhibitions/current/exhibition_info.phtml?itemID=328).  This exhibit was Garcia’s first exhibit outside of Southern California, where she emerged from a thriving Los Angeles underground scene called “Pop Surrealism”.  What I like about her art is the combination of a dark Grimm’s Brother fairy tale feel with a strong political consciousness.

Camille Rose Garcia has two overarching goals with her art:  to appeal to a broad spectrum of people, and to make some comments on today’s world.  In an interview, she said, “I always wanted to do art that people could relate to, but also carry some social relevance.  Like in art school it wasnt’ really about commentary, or if it was, it was really boring, so I really just wanted to create art that was not only super fun to look at, and if ou’re five or fifteen and hated art, you still could like and relate to it…”   I think Garcia more than lives up to her ambitions.  Her paintings range in size from medium size paintings to mural size paintings, and they are filled with gothic images in these drip like backgrounds.  The colors are very bright, yet the images are still very dark.  Garcia incorporates ideas from her favorite authors, writers like Philip K. Dick and William Burroughs.   She is very much against the policies of George Bush, and her paintings are frequently critiques against rampant militarism, environmental degradation, and the corporate culture.

One of my favorite Garcia paintings is Orphaned Nihilist Escape Ship (http://www.sjmusart.org/content/exhibitions/exhibition_infoDetail.phtml?itemID=6019&pastEventImages=no&eventID=328).  It’ has these cute bambi type creatures being taken ashore from a sail ship by a morose female figure.  It’s a scary world, with drips coming from the sky like teardrops, and menacing pointed head figures looming above the bambi creatures.  This painting was part of a series of paintings in her “Plan B” series.  It was created in response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster.  Camille Rose Garcia elaborated on her thinking process.  “I was already deep into thinking about the collapse of society, the degradation of the environment, and military catastrophes;  and it became all too apparent during Katrina that disorder would quickly ensue.  ‘Plan B’ suggests an alternative couse of action, a fanciful reaction to the current state of world affairs.”

More Blood for the Castle is part of her Ultraviolenceland series, showing these sad witchlike figures carrying a beheaded bambi figure (http://www.sjmusart.org/content/exhibitions/exhibition_infoDetail.phtml?itemID=6019&pastEventImages=no&eventID=328).  On the written page, it seems like a sick image, but when I look at the actual painting, I feel more a sense of melancholy.  Camille Rose Garcia was commenting on the loss of sensitivity when bombarded by an overload of violence.  In the free San Jose Museum handout, Camille Rose Garcia wrote:  “I was so tired of the general state of things in America at this point.  The war machine was still going strong, pictures of beheadings were a daily occurence, yet it still seemed like we were all trapped in some kind of weird fantasy-world of denial.  The word ‘ultraviolence’ is from the movie and book A Clockwork Orange, and is used to describe recreational violence, which is exactly what ‘Shock and Awe’ (the bombing campaign that started the invasion of Iraq) was all about.”

It’s been over a half a year since I’ve seen Tragic Kingdom, and the images and ideas of the show still are in my head.  Camille Rose Garcia has created great paintings that really take a skewer to the America of the past 8 years.   She is performing a vital duty that artists of the past like Goya, George Grosz, or Daumier, did for their society, which is hold up a mirror to faults of that society.   Garcia is performing the role that Howard Zinn writes about in his book Artists in Times of War:  “So the word transcendent comes to mind when I think of the role of the artist in dealing with the issues of he day.  I use that word to suggest that the role of the artist is to transcend conventional wisdom, to transcend the word of the establishment, to transcend the word of the establishment, to transcend the orthodoxy, to go beyond and escape what is handed down by the government or what is said in the media.”

Doonesbury and Bloom County

I’m not sure what it says about a person whose politics is shaped by a comic strip.   The first political influence in my life was during my Junior High years, when I first started reading Doonesbury.   Doonesbury, and later Bloom County, made me laugh at the politics of the time, and it gave me my first exposure to alternative views of the world other than those of the front pages of the newspaper.

I’m not sure why I started reading Doonesbury.  My family subscribed to the San Jose Mercury, and Doonesbury and Peanuts were separated from the rest of the comics pages, near Ann Landers and Art Buchwald.  It was different from anything else that was running at that time, and I think I secretly liked the sophisticated nature of the strip.  I was one of those intellectual wannabees, someone who thought he was smarter than he actually was, and reading Doonesbury was the perfect comic to read.  I started reading the latest news so I could understand what was going on and I started feeling sophisticated because I actually understood some of the comic’s humor.  At the time I started reading Doonesbury, the main character Mike Doonesbury was campaigning for John Anderson for the Presidency, and I remember representing John Anderson in a mock debate in our 8th grade Social Studies class.    I remember Zonker, who at the time was the reigning sun tanning champion of the world.  B.D., who was gloating to his friends about Reagan winning the elections.   An odd character named Duke was the 51st Iranian hostage, and he seemed to be some unscrupulous publicity hound who sort of was like Forest Gump in that he always seemed to be in the center of some important event.   My favorite strips were Mike’s first fumbling dates with J.J., where he typed out a schedule of what to do in their first outings together.

And there were Doonesbury’s forays into politics.  My favorite foray was a report by Doonesbury newscaster Roland Hedley on Reagan’s brain.  During the time I was reading Doonesbury, Gary Trudeau was skewering Conservative politics, the exploitation of the Iranian Hostage crisis, U.S. military adventures in Afganistan and El Salvadore, and James Watt’s environmental record.    It skewered these subjects with a gentle sort of humor.  People were foolish, but also lovable, and even the worst characters, like Duke, were appealing in a roguish sort of way.

In the early 1980s, Gary Trudeau took a sabattical from doing his comic strip, and I started reading Berke Breathed’s Bloom County.  At first Bloom County seemed like a second rate version of Doonesbury.  As the strip progressed, though, it took on a life of its own.  In many ways, it started resembling Doonesbury less and it started reading more like Mad Magazine or the Marx Brothers.  I loved all the characters, especially Opus, Steve Dallas, and Bill the Cat.  With Doonesbury I smiled, with Bloom County I just laughed out loud.   My favorite episode was when Opus announced he was engaged (newspaper headlines read: “Millions of single women distraught- threaten violent, gory suicide- Diane Sawyer shaves head”).   I loved the strips where Steve Dallas gets punched out trying to take a photo of Sean Penn.   If things ever got boring, Bill the Cat was always around to cough up fur balls.

Bloom County was more laugh out loud funny than Doonesbury, but Doonesbury was more insightful of politics.  When Berke Breathed tackled a political subject, he never really went too deep into the subject, preferring the easy laugh instead.  What he did better that Trudeau was make fun of American pop culture.   What made Bloom County so popular was its dead on send ups of Hollywood and celebrity excess, our trends and lifestyles.  While I think Bloom County deserved its Pulitzer Prize in the late 1980s, it deserved it as a social satire and not so much as a political satire.

When Gary Trudeau returned from his sabattical, I didn’t return to regularly reading Doonesbury.  It was a different strip when he returned.  It was drawn in a different  style than before.  And the humor seemed more strained to me.  By the time Doonesbury returned to the newspaper in the mid 1980s, I had started following Bloom County, Calvin and Hobbes, and The Far Side.    After Berke Breathed retired Bloom County, I didn’t follow Breathed’s later comic strips with Opus.  I still remember those two strips with fondness.  A month ago, I bought from Leigh’s Bookstore, a wonderful used bookstore in Sunnyvale, Doonesbury Dossier:  The Reagan Years.  I smiled when I read those old strips and felt nostalgic for a time when Doonesbury really had an affect on the how I saw politics.  Perhaps it is shallow to have one’s political views shaped by a comic strip.  I’m glad though to have been able to laugh at the inanities of a scary political time and to make a little sense of the world thanks to a comic.