Truth is Marching In

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Dear Readers,

On November 4, election eve, musicians in five cities will simultaneously perform Albert Ayler’s song “Truth is Marching In.” Viewers online will be able to switch between live streams of all five renditions. I have the honor of leading the west coast contingent; we’ll be streaming live from the Wende Museum’s new A Frame Theater.

This project was organized by New York saxophonist Jeff Lederer to convene an artistic community at a tense moment. The musicians and listeners will be united by this music and what it represents to us.

This is not quite popular music. Albert Ayler was part of a group of jazz musicians in the 1960s who pushed the music to extremes, chasing their personal visions and expressing the spirit of the times. If you listen to his original recording, you’ll hear that the composed parts are ridiculously simple, built from the major scale and two or three chords, and that they’re played with such intensity that the musicians seem to be trying to blow their instruments apart. It’s no wonder this music appealed to punks a decade later.

This project is at the center of my Venn diagram, intersecting my academic, political, and creative work, but this is the end of the self-promotional part of this essay.

Instead, the theme of this online performance offers an excellent opportunity to discuss the idea of truth. I do not believe you should vote for Kamala, Isaac, Sameen, or any of our other endorsed candidates because they represent the truth, in that everything they say is true, but because they maintain the possibility of truth, that we can understand the universe better through observation, analysis, and criticism. Their conservative opponents seem to believe that they can not only ignore inconvenient truths, but vote them out of existence.

The breakdown of consensus reality and the rise of “alternative facts” and epistemic closure on the right is too large a topic for this space. Kurt Andersen’s Fantasyland is one place to start reading, as are Richard Hofstader’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Uncollected Essays 1956-1965 and, as usual, Rick Perlstein. However, here are two key moments which many of us may recall. 

First, consider Ronald Reagan’s March 4, 1987, speech on the Iran/Contra scandal. It followed the release of the Tower Commission report, which documented that the Reagan administration had violated international and US law by trading weapons to Iran for hostages, transferring them through right-wing rebels in Nicaragua (the Contras) to Israel, who sent them to Iran, while the US was simultaneously selling weapons to Iraq, which was at war with Iran.

In this speech, Reagan argued that, as Truman said, the buck stopped with him as President, while also passing that buck, claiming both to take responsibility and that all the bad things were done by others without his knowledge. The complete text is online, but these two sentences show its contradictions: “A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.” The world was presented exhaustive proof that members of his administration had committed crimes and that these crimes were not incidental errors in the execution of a policy which was otherwise legitimate but that the policy was illegal, yet he could not bring himself to change his “heart” based on the facts and evidence.

Second, on October 17, 2004 the New York Times Magazine published “Faith, Certainty, and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” by Ron Suskind. This may be the essential text of the Bush years. Its most famous passage is:

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

The aide is generally considered to be Karl Rove. He seems to have read Michel Foucault backwards. To severely oversimplify, the unifying theme of Foucault’s major works is that systems of knowledge-production are inseparable from those of social power. While most of Foucault’s readers have applied his work to historicize oppressive systems as a step towards transforming them, recognizing them as human products rather than universal truths, “Rove” has done the reverse. If what a society accepts as true is shaped by who has power, then when his group gets power, they can control reality.

However, accepting that our understanding of the world is socially constructed does not mean that there is no material world behind it, simply that we can only apprehend that world through our consciousness, which is formed by society. Florida’s leaders may have banned discussion of climate change, but the climate doesn’t care.

Suskind’s article opens with a less famous scene, between the 43rd President and the Senator who would become the 46th:

Joe Biden was telling a story, a story about the president. “I was in the Oval Office a few months after we swept into Baghdad,” he began, “and I was telling the president of my many concerns”—concerns about growing problems winning the peace, the explosive mix of Shiite and Sunni, the disbanding of the Iraqi Army and problems securing the oil fields. Bush, Biden recalled, just looked at him, unflappably sure that the United States was on the right course and that all was well. “’Mr. President,’ I finally said, ‘How can you be so sure when you know you don’t know the facts?”’

Biden said that Bush stood up and put his hand on the senator’s shoulder. “My instincts,” he said. “My instincts.”

Biden paused and shook his head, recalling it all as the room grew quiet. “I said, ‘Mr. President, your instincts aren’t good enough!”

Our current situation in Culver City includes all three of these elements: Bush’s naive trust in his “instincts” over others’ expertise, Reagan’s inability to change when faced with overwhelming evidence, and “Rove’s” nihilistic solipsism.

The City just named its second Official Historian. Both holders of this office have been the President of the Historical Society. I have had pleasant acquaintances with both, but neither is a professional historian. That may not be necessary to be either Official Historian or President of the Historical Society, but consider how actual professional historians have been treated by the current conservative City Council majority. 

Culver City resident Kelly Lytle Hernandez is a Professor of History at UCLA with tenure and an endowed chair. She is the author of three books (two from academic presses, one from Norton) and was awarded a MacArthur “genius grant” in 2018. She also created the Million Dollar Hoods Project, which measures the impact of mass incarceration on communities. Assembly Member Isaac Bryan, a Lifetime Member of this club, worked on this project while a UCLA student. Million Dollar Hoods contributed a report to the City’s Public Safety Review. It has been ignored.

Dr. Lytle Hernandez was also part of the Rethinking Public Safety Technical Advisory Committee for the General Plan Update, as were five diverse and accomplished community members and myself. You may consider me historian-adjacent: my doctorate is in American Studies. Last November 13, the conservative City Council majority of Albert Vera Jr, Dan O’Brien, and Göran Eriksson voted to discard the report we and the consultants from Raimi and Associates created without discussing its substance.

The 2020 reckoning around race and equity also included retrospective work. On June 17, 2021, the City Council voted to authorize an official apology for the City’s historic racist practices, to explore possibilities for reparations, and to commission a historical study in which to ground this work. Yasmine-Imani McMorrin, Daniel Lee, and Alex Fisch voted in favor, Vera and Eriksson against. In January 2022 the City Council hired Architectural Resources Group, who have a professional specialty in justice and the history of the built environment; they returned their report this March. It was, however, edited to omit the names of elected officials and City employees responsible for many of the historical wrongs it cataloged and concluded by celebrating police “reforms” which had already been reversed. No Council Member voted against accepting this censored text, but Mayor McMorrin abstained.

Consider also the abuses of truth in the Move Culver City project. The City’s Transportation Department, with multiple groups of consultants, compiled a report on the measurable effects of the city’s first complete street. No one, in or out of office, has seriously challenged its findings or methodology, not even the second group of consultants hired to take a critical look at the study. Instead, opponents asserted, like Reagan, that findings did not match their feelings. The conservative Council majority of Vera, O’Brien, and Eriksson ordered a public opinion poll, then pointed to its results rather than the empirical study to justify voting to remove the protected bike lanes over the evidence-based objections of McMorrin and Puza.

This vote by Vera, O’Brien, and Eriksson then led to the City spending over $200,000 to fight a lawsuit asking for a California Environmental Quality Act report. Agreeing to produce a CEQA report would have been faster and less expensive than going to court. Why fight the suit unless they feared what studying the environmental impact of adding lanes of cars through downtown would show? The conservatives prevailed, then their supporters dishonestly claimed the judge had ruled on the merits of Move rather than on whether reverting a pilot project towards its prior state required a CEQA report.

Because the conservative Council majority partially dismantled Move, LA’s Metro has revoked a grant of nearly $435,000 given Culver City to improve bicycle and pedestrian safety, because Move no longer does that. Vera, O’Brien, and Eriksson ignored Metro’s warnings and now this money will come out of an already short City budget. Metro states unequivocally that:

The removal of the Class IV bikeway, bus-only lanes, and bus boarding islands along Washington Blvd between Landmark and Helms Avenues will decrease the level of protection and space prioritization for active transportation users. The Class IV bikeway provided a fully separated route for bicyclists away from vehicle traffic. The shared bus/bike lane will place bicyclists and buses in the same lane, decreasing the safety of the bicyclists. The removal of the bus boarding islands negatively impacts the level of protection and access provided to transit users and active transportation users.

During Albert Vera Jr’s previous City Council campaigns, a losing one in 2018 and a successful one in 2020, he drew on decades of goodwill, earned through his generosity with his inherited wealth. Any community group who asked would get a check or trays of food then, when he ran for office, those favors were called in. He clearly felt entitled to endorsement and election as his patrimony and resented needing to prove himself. His performance at our 2020 forum showed a lack of curiosity and critical thinking skills—a Bushlike trust in “instinct” over research. He has never won this Club’s endorsement and did not even show up for our forum this year.

“Instincts” and “common sense” almost always mean unexamined beliefs. As in Bush and Biden’s 2003 conversation, they signify that the speaker is done thinking and learning. Compare this to the Western intellectual tradition which runs from “the unexamined life is not worth living” through “a ruthless criticism of everything existing.” Less abstractly, it means that, like Reagan in 1987, the speaker won’t or can’t absorb new information or develop new interpretations.

This is a formally conservative worldview because resisting new input is a barrier to change, but many of us on the left also recognized Vera as ideologically conservative. Many on the right agreed. Organizations such as the Chamber of Commerce, the Police Officers Association, the California Apartment Association, and the Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles endorsed him because they understood that he shared their values.

They, and we, were correct. Culver City residents could maintain their belief in Vera as “a nice guy” with “common sense” rather than a reactionary ideologue until he took office. Now that he is running for re-election, he has a voting record, which an anonymous source (who I assure you is not me) has compiled and documented at albertvera.com. Voters can see for themselves how “nice” and “sensible” he has been.

Every claim on that site is backed up with at least one link to a journalistic or primary source. In contrast, the charges against progressive candidates on the mailers we have received from the Police Officers Association give parenthetical references such as “City Council Minutes 2022-23.” The point of a citation is to allow the reader to verify the author’s claim by directing them to its source. Referring to an entire year of minutes mocks this goal. A reference needs to go to the exact page, not an entire book or library. 

As I’ve written before, the root word of “authority” is “author.” A claim’s authority comes from multiple sources, including the author, the publisher, and the evidence. We have access to the greatest quantity and widest range of quality of information in human history, so critical reading skills are more important than ever. 

Discussions of media literacy often focus on bias more than credibility. Watching both MSNBC and Fox may be ideologically balanced, but one will consistently have more accurate reporting, analysis, and forecasts. Fox will help you know what conservatives are thinking, but that’s about all. As Stephen Colbert said, reality has a liberal bias. Albertvera.com backs up every claim with a link to specific evidence. In contrast, the police not only give insultingly vague references in the campaign literature their PAC paid their consultants to produce but have never provided a bit of evidence or documentation in their endless requests for more money, weapons, technology, and power. When a community member asked former Chief Cid in 2022 about the overwhelming research that militarization erodes public trust in the police and escalates violence, he dismissed it, claiming only police can understand policing. That’s not authority, that’s authoritarianism. 

Vera’s slate-mates Denice Renteria and Jeanine Wisnosky Stehlin have not held elected office, so they don’t have public voting records. However, if their endorsements from the city’s old guard and their funding from landlords, developers, realtors, and police don’t tell the story, their performances at our forums do. 

Renteria skipped our forum this year, but attended during her unsuccessful 2022 campaign. At that forum, each candidate was asked about the City’s public safety review. Renteria declined to answer, claiming she was unfamiliar with the project, which had been the subject of several marathon Council meetings, copious writing, rallies and protests, etc. 

At this year’s forum, each candidate was asked about the texts produced during that process: the Center for Public Safety Management report on police operations, the Solidarity Consulting report on public safety and social justice, the Million Dollar Hoods report, a UCLA Law School Criminal Justice Program study of CCPD pay, and the Rethinking Public Safety General Plan element. Stehlin said she was not aware of any of these documents.

The issue is not simply that these folks did not do the homework, but that they don’t think they need to. It’s not that they have different ideas, it’s that they think they don’t have ideas and don’t need to – that “common sense” and “instincts” are better than expertise and research – and that they are not engaged in the kind of constant reflection, examination, and ruthless criticism necessary to learn and grow. Truth is not possessed but only continuously sought.

That’s what I’ll be playing for on the 4th and hoping for on the 5th. See you on the other side.