Gettin' grassrootsy, like Tom used to do?

Grand Old Party ditches grand ballroom (OC Reg)

     The above is a link to OC Register columnist Frank Mickadeit’s latest effort. I’m not sure what to make of it. He writes:

     In years past, the Republican Party in Orange County held Election Night in one of Newport's or Irvine's grand hotel ballrooms. Candidates would rent adjacent suites, and politicos and the press would wander around all night, sharing results and gossip.
     Not Tuesday. The county's dominant political party had its event in a 60-foot-by-45-foot room above a bar in Costa Mesa, an old venue with open-beam ceilings and a worn hardwood floor that looked like it hadn't been refinished in 50 years….
. . .
     The party's party was held in this room by design. It represented a semi-public launch of sorts of an attempt to re-energize the grassroots element that was critical during the rise of the party under late Chairman Tom Fuentes.

     OK, so doing away with grand ballrooms in favor of small and non-grand spaces—that’s a return to the Tom Fuentes playbook?
     Tom sure liked MCing those big gatherings in big spaces. But he was also big on “grassroots.” I guess there’s something grassrootsy about leaving the grand ballroom behind in favor of spreading everybody out among lots of ugly little spaces.
     Mickadeit goes on:

     "(The idea of) having Election Night here was spawned at Tom Fuentes' funeral," said Rhonda Rohrabacher, the wife of the congressman and the main engine of the effort. "The idea is to build the party back up the way Tom Fuentes did, from the ground up…."

     Mickadeit goes on to link this “grassroots re-energization” initiative with Fuentes’ infamous war with rich Republicans in the County—who, starting in the 1990s, famously objected to Tom’s seriously right-wing and intolerant ways (you know, bad for business!):

     Fuentes, of course, was sometimes criticized for not giving enough deference to the well-monied country-club Republicans and focusing instead on the grassroots. He'd have rather seen 100 passionate Republicans moved to contribute $5 each than one high-roller write a $500 check just to get Fuentes out of his hair. Under Baugh, the party mended fences with some of those Fuentes had kept at a distance. But conversely, attention to the grassroots did not reach the potential Fuentes had envisioned.

     I don’t know what that last line means. “Conversely”?
     Tom Fuentes was a complex man. Despite his manifest love of High Class Living (think “Balboa Bay Club,” scotch, and cigars; think also of his views about people’s lawns, cars, and driveways) and his endless schmoozing and socializing with the rich and infamous (think Crean, Phillips, Ahmanson, et al.)—and his willingness in his business affairs to contribute mightily to that ugly machine called “the rich get richer” (think of all that “consulting”—i.e., lobbying public entities—he did for Rich Guys from Bein to Lange)—he really did seem bothered by the phenomenon of a few rich guys controlling his beloved Republican Party to pursue their selfish interests. I do believe that, to Tom, that pleaser of Fat Cats, running the party by pleasing the Fat Cats meant betraying conservative values. He was an oddly inconsistent but principled man.
     His was a great but misshapen staunchulosity.
     Strange, isn’t it?
     Mickadeit explains Rhonda Rohrabacher’s gambit:

     Now comes a concerted effort to take the party out to the county's cities through a series of satellite offices. Earlier this year, Rhonda Rohrabacher worked with Baugh and others to open this campaign office above Skosh Monahan's, the Costa Mesa pub owned by local Councilman Gary Monahan.

     According to Mickadeit, Rhonda used her husband’s campaign cash to lease the upstairs of Monahan’s and turn it into a campaign “headquarters.” That space was used to help, not only Rohrabacher, but also the likes of Allan Mansoor.
     Evidently, Mrs. Rohrabacher Republicanized the space with hunting trophies (slain animals) and alcohol. She threw in some tables and maps, too.
     Then she and her pals opened offices of this kind in Huntington Beach and Laguna Beach. They hope to open others.
     The point, apparently, is to blanket “every part of the county…. By tapping into the campaigns of members of Congress, the effort doesn't drain the central party's treasury….”
     OK. So this is a money-saver for the Party. But it’s more than that:

     "People connect with their city, so you do it city by city," [Rhonda Rohrabacher] said. "My goal is to have every precinct covered. It has to be driven around voters, not around the money."

     It’s Tom’s “grassroots” (not Rich Guys!) vision, I guess. But without the big ballrooms.

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     Two points. First, there’s something goofy about this account. Rohrabacher (or Mickadeit?) seems to suggest that this big “ground up” or “grassroots” initiative popped up during Tom’s funeral, which occurred, like, a week ago. But, obviously, setting up those little, grassrootsy places in Costa Mesa, Huntington Beach, and Laguna Beach took months, not weeks.
     Whatever. Maybe I just get confused too easily. Could be.
     Here’s the other thing. The Rich Guys started trying to unseat Fuentes as chair of the County Party in the 90s, owing, in part, to Fuentes’ hatred of moderate Republicans (you know, the guys who are supposed to fit into the GOP's “big tent”). By 2003 or so, the grumbling about Fuentes was pretty widespread, and it wasn’t just coming from the Fat Cats. Among the local pols who complained about Fuentes was—you guessed it, Dana Rohrabacher. In a 2003 Times article (see), he is quoted as saying, “After 20 years of being the diplomat, [Tom]'s lost his patience and he's alienated people who expected to be treated with due respect…."
     I think that’s a reference to Rich Guys, not regular guys. Not sure.
     —I know. That’s Dana, not Rhonda. Whatever. (Surely Dana and Rhonda get together occasionally to get their stories straight.)
     In that article, Dana R. went on to say: "I'm not calling for Tom to step down [as chairman], but even George Washington understood the need for term limits. Maybe there are some new challenges that Tom needs to be looking at."
     Term limits? That’s rich, coming from Dana Rohrabacher, who, early on, supported term limits and then proceeded to run for numerous consecutive terms as a congressman. He's still at it.
     Wadda asshole.
     If I'm right about Fuentes, who concentrated on the grassroots instead of the "well-monied country-club Republicans"—because attention to the latter means betrayal of Republican values—then, of course, Rohrabacher and crew don't want a return to Fuentesism at all. Rather, they want to continue attention to rich Republicans while at the same time, in some sense, attending to the grassroots.
     Why can't these people call a spade a spade?
     (New title: "Grand Old Party ditches Grand Old Fuentes in Fuentes' Name.")

What the hell's goin' on here, Bob?

He was a greatly interesting man

     I’m attempting to spark a dialogue between me ‘n’ the curious Mr. Howard Ahmanson, Jr.—on his blog: here. I’ll let you know how it goes. The more I read about Ahmanson, the more intriguing he becomes.
     I’m actually somewhat serious about my comparison of the late Tom Fuentes with Charles Foster Kane, the fictional enigmatic publisher in the film Citizen Kane. Almost all that I know about Fuentes concerns “the external.” The real man, it seems, was hidden from view, at least to those who did not know him well.
     In a similar way, Fuentes might also be compared with Richard Nixon, Fuentes’ hero, a highly unusual and driven man whose inner nature seemed forever hidden from view.
     But these “externals” are pretty damn fascinating, in my view. Especially in the case of Tom Fuentes, I do think the portrait they paint is underestimated or unappreciated. It is striking, an incredible and bewildering saga.
     I recall a conversation years ago with a colleague in which we both noted the odd circumstance that “we” (denizens of IVC or perhaps denizens of the SOCCCD) seem destined to operate on a stage dominated by spectacularly curious and unique people. As I recall, we were thinking of both Raghu Mathur and Tom Fuentes.
     Unless he gets that County Superintendent gig, Raghu now is merely pathetic, a public failure with an unjustly large bank account and some purloined poinsettias.
     Fuentes, meanwhile, must be seen as an important and influential man, though a defeated one, in important respects. He was a real mover and shaker. He was also a giant (in some spheres) who was brought down.
     It seems that some of our readers fail to understand this about him.
     And he is utterly fascinating. He died leaving several intriguing questions unanswered.
     It shall be my aim in the coming days to present the unappreciated and stunning fact-based portrait of Thomas Alexander Fuentes—from my inevitably external perspective.
     Was he a great man? He was, in my view, a greatly interesting man and, I think, a very strange man.

Hospitals have made him cry,
But there's always a freeway in his eye,
Though his beach just got
too crowded for his stroll.
Roads stretch out like healthy veins,
And wild gift horses strain the reins,
Where even Richard Nixon has got soul.
Even Richard Nixon has got soul.

—From Young's "Campaigner"

Remembering Ray Bradbury

Clarisse: But why do you burn books?

Guy Montag: Books make people unhappy, they make them anti-social.

Clarisse: Do you think I'm anti-social?

Guy Montag: Why do you ask?

Clarisse: Well... I'm a teacher, not quite actually, I'm still on probation. I was called to the administration office today, and I don't think I said the right things. I'm not at all happy about my answers.

Ray Bradbury visited IVC the evening of January 28, 2009,  to be "in conversation" with writer and professor Marjorie Luesebrink, though as Rebel Girl remembers it, it was all Ray Bradbury all the time.

(This post is adapted from one Rebel Girl wrote then.)

The noted author died last night at age 91.  Rebel Girl's little guy, ten years old and already a fan, asked the obvious question: Why did he have to die?

Why indeed. Rebel Girl imagines how Bradbury would laugh at the little boy's question.

Just about everyone in the department of English has their own Ray Bradbury story. This is probably true for every department of English. One IVC professor went on her first date with hubby-to-be at a Ray Bradbury reading in San Diego. They reprised that first date when Bradbury visited.

Rebel Girl fell hard for Bradbury when she was young. The Martian Chronicles. Something Wicked this Way Comes. Dandelion Wine. The Illustrated Man. Fahrenheit 451. And the stories! "The Kilamanjaro Device." "The Garbage Collector." "The Sound of Summer Running."  Those $1.49 paperbacks.  Those sentences.

Bradbury was one of the ones who made her love words and imagination, one who taught her how they could transform the world. Rebel Girl's world then was in dire need of transformation.

Then, it must have been 1978 or '79, she won an award for high school writers and finally got the meet the man himself. It was at a gathering sposnored by the Southwest Manuscripters, the local writers group of the South Bay of Los Angeles  who had read her stories and given her prize money, money that would pay for rent, food, textbooks for El Camino College.

Bradbury talked about writing but he also spoke about how he rode the bus, how he used to feed coins into the rental typewriters at the downtown Los Angeles Library in order to compose his first stories. He talked, in other words, about being without.

It was a story he told often through the years.  Anyone who has heard Bradbury talk has heard some of these details.  (And boy could he talk! It seemed he said yes to every group who asked. He was everywhere, all the time, even putting in a cameo appearance in the early '70s at the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley where Rebel Girl spends her summers. There's a black and white picture of him, smiling, at a party, holding, as someone else in the photo always attested, a joint.) But Bradbury's story is a good story, one that needs telling and hearing, one about hope and persistence, liberation.

Rebel Girl doesn't have the photograph of the famous writer and the high student that was taken that evening. The photo was lost like so much in those days. She lacked the kind of mother or family that provided that service - you know, putting things in scrapbooks or photo albums or special boxes. And she didn't know how to save things for herself.

But she did learn how to write, she thinks now. That's one way to save things and to retrieve what is lost. So, no photograph - but the memory and these words - enough.

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In the Los Angeles Times: Ray Bradbury dies at 91; author lifted fantasy to literary heights

In the New York Times: Ray Bradbury, Master of Science Fiction, Dies at 91

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