POINT AND COUNTERPOINT

[Note: The following letter, sent from an anonymous email account, was published in the January 16, 2002 issue of Urbanview newspaper. The column that follows was published in the same issue, in answer to this letter.]

Shit for brains claims Danny Wan has "Diarrhea of the Mouth"

Since the first time I read J. Douglas Allen-Taylor's, Oakland Unwrapped and saw that pathetic little profile shot, where he tries to look like Malcolm X but comes off looking more like a guy in a T-shirt smoking a joint; I thought to myself how did this guy get a job?

Was it welfare to work or some special connection that Castlemont High School job placement office has going? Who knows? What is clear is that he is in no place to say that people far his intellectual superior have "Diarrhea Of The Mouth" simply because he can't follow the discussion. Maybe his "fifth-and-sixth grade teacher at Highland Elementary, Mrs. Moore" should have told him "If you canít catch the ball, don't blame the glove".

Mr. Taylor just because you didnít understand Councilmember Wan's explanation doesn't mean that the rest of us didnít. Every week in your rambling column you talk a lot of shit, but lets set the record straight, it is you who have shit for brains and your editor for hiring someone who makes even the Chronicles "Chimp" Johnson appear only half as dumb by comparison.

Your shit talking about Councilmember Wan for not supporting State bill AB1086 but for supporting State bill AB436 is so off the mark that you are left pissing in your own shoes and leaving your readers embarrassed that you keep saying "we" as if "we" have to take some blame for your lack of intelligence. To clarify the matter AB1086 and AB436 were State Bills exempting downtown Oakland developers from carrying out expensive and time consuming environmental impact reports for each and every project that they initiate. Instead everyone in the target area will use one master study. The difference between the bills was how close to Lake Merrit they reached. Councilmember Wan supported AB436 that created a buffer for the lake and opposed the no buffer version. AB436 passed the State and the removal of this bureaucratic, time consuming and expensive hurdle standing in the way of downtown
redevelopment is a good thing for Oakland.

Mr. Taylor's shit for brains argument is that because it's all one earth that the boundary concern differentiating these two bills raised by Councilmember Wan was a pointless concern. Mrs. Moore would have been aghast by Mr. Taylorís inability to understand the difference and then make a fool out of himself by saying that it is Councilmember Wan that doesn't get it.

Mr. Taylor check your own shoes first.

Most people realize that when city government talks about urban environment they mean traffic flow, air quality, visual aesthetics, open space and so on. Mr Taylor thinks it means "rainforests in Brazil" and "nuclear accidents in Chernoby". Taylor's point of departure for shit talking Councilmember Wan is that "you can't do something bad to the environment in one part of the world without affecting the environment in other parts of the world." That a nice idea if we are talking about the Kyoto Protocol but the issue in Council Chambers was about Oakland redevelopment and yes there is a large difference to the urban environment between butting a new Whole Foods on Broadway versus the edge of Lake Merrit.

Mr. Taylor obviously slept through too many of Mrs. Moore's classes.

willweatherstorm@yahoo.com

POINT OF PERSONAL PRIVILEGE

I interviewed a black Stanford hospital worker one time. He told me how he’d gone into the room of an older white woman, and she got on his case because her bed pan needed to be taken out. You know what’s in a hospital bed pan, don’t you? Anyway, the black fellow didn’t say anything, he just smiled and said okay, and got the bed pan and took it out, and on his way out the door, he passed a doctor coming in. And the doctor gave him this strange look…watched him walk all the way down the hall…and then turned around and asked the woman why she’d gotten her brain surgeon to empty her bed pan. Brain surgery, you see, was the job this black fellow did at Stanford Hospital.

But there are some people around, you see, who still think that black folks are too dumb to do certain things. Like understand scientific stuff. Or follow complicated discussions. Or write a newspaper column.

Sorry to surprise you, cap, but after the corn done finished shucking, some of us snucked out the back and was reading in your books by the light of the lamp.

Me, I don’t pretend to know much of nothing. I just walk around the city, listen to folks talking, read the papers, see things going on, and at the end of the week, I write it all down. For whatever reason, the fellow who owns this paper publishes it all in this column, and pays me for the trouble. Dogonned if I can figure out why. But as long as he pays me I’ll keep on writing the column, and I’ll try to do it without calling people out of their names, or using personal attacks, or hiding behind some anonymous email cover. All that ain’t really necessary.

But "willweatherstorm", whoever he (or she) is, wasn’t really talking about me, was he? When he (or she) calls Chip Johnson a "chimp," it takes us back to the days when it was common for some folks—oftentimes public officials—to openly compare black people with monkeys and apes. And when he (or she) says that I must have gotten my job from some welfare-to-work program…well, that was really repeating the line that any black person in a "thinking job" must have gotten it by taking it away from some more qualified (other-kind-of) person.

One important point to make. I have a lot of respect for Councilmember Danny Wan. This is not his style, and I don’t think the "willweatherstorm" email originated with him. I think that if Wan had a beef with the way I wrote my original column, he would have said (or written) it publicly.

That aside, we’ve had some disturbing events take place in Oakland government over the past few months. The weakening of CEQA (the California Environmental Quality Act) in downtown Oakland was one of them. The sale of the Jack London Square properties to private developers was another. These two actions alone reversed decades of public policy with barely an explanation, and no serious public debate at all.

Frankly, I don’t trust either government or private enterprise enough to let them get together in the back room and work out these things on their own. Don’t sign anything unless they give you enough time to read the contract; that’s what my father used to tell me. The Raiders deal…and more recently, the governor’s power contract blowup and the Enron collapse…ought to alert the public that we should be in on the beginning of these arrangements, and know all the facts before the deals are made. It’s all being signed off on in our names, after all, we’re the ones who have to pay the bills.

And if "willweatherstorm" thinks I shouldn’t ask the questions because I’m too dumb to be able to understand the answers… Well, I believe I’ll keep on asking, anyway.