Rain
and a salute to the Woman in the Arena
Friends - very nice to hear from some of you after my year-end post.
Rehab proceeds, as does preparation for the semester ahead. Strategy for the Networked Economy starts January 17!
Saturday night we had the third peak of the rain we’ve had since late December, with still more predicted for January 9-10. As the National Weather Service put it, the hits keep coming in California. Terms like “hydrologic outlook” grow all the more familiar.
Our power did finally go out after a gusty Saturday night, but was restored late morning Sunday. The sun meant solar could replenish the backup batteries that did their job during the grid outage.
We took advantage of the lull in the rain. The trails in Marin were glorious. This overspill was the loudest I’ve ever heard it.
Remember me?
Still, the news from Sacramento to Santa Cruz to Sonoma has been stark (WaPo gift link). I’ll focus mainly on Sonoma here as an area particularly dear to us. Low-lying areas along the Russian River area from Healdsburg to Jenner - a long stretch - received an evacuation order. Guerneville and Sebastopol were both the scene of flooding in 2019.
Sonoma is part of the nine-county Bay Area but in a so-near-yet-so-far sort of way. (I suppose this also could be said about Santa Cruz County.) West County, reachable by an hour from the Golden Gate Bridge, is remote and austere; the Russian River band across the middle is simultaneously beautiful and a bit, well, unfinished raw; East Sonoma (Forestville and Healdsburg) is probably the most Napa-like, in multiple senses, as we discussed in Clusters class. The sheer expanse and topology that makes it beautiful also makes both infrastructures and public services challenging to deploy. And we are not through this yet.
On the bright side, snowpack in the Sierras is well ahead of normal levels for this date.
And Lake Shasta, very low when I last saw it in 2020, is going in the right direction.
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I want to shift gears a moment.
As has been well-reported, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke to the US Congress on December 21.
the long-time Atlantic correspondent and himself a former presidential speechwriter, published two posts that are worth a read - first, on the speech itself; and the second, an exchange with a member of Zelensky’s staff on the process involved in preparing the speech.As 24-year resident of the Bay Area, and a former resident (14 years) of the city of San Francisco, there was another tableau to Zelensky’s address that motivated a screen capture as I watched the speech on C-SPAN tape delay - seeing two representatives of San Francisco behind the dais: Vice President Harris, once upon a time, District Attorney for San Francisco; and, of course, Madame Speaker, now Speaker Emerita and representative for what’s now California District 11 (after redistricting in 2021): Nancy Pelosi, now in her 18th term on Congress. The photo below is one I took (with a PowerShot, no less) of then-District Attorney Harris in the Mission in San Francisco in November 2008.
DA Harris, circa 2008
Fast-forward 14 years. DA Harris became AG Harris became Senator Harris became VP Harris. All the while, Nancy Pelosi was in her San Francisco seat in the House, either as Speaker of the House or Minority Leader. Both of our kids were born in San Francisco during her first run as Speaker. (Correction: one was born during her initial stint at Minority Leader; the other during her first stint as Speaker.) We’ve talked about how their local Congresswoman who is the same age as grandparents also happens to be someone uniquely historic.
There are about 20 minutes in the recording prior to Zelensky’s remarks during which members filed in and milled about. Madame Speaker, erect behind the dais, wielded the gavel….both restlessly and comfortably. Which was a reminder that she would be surrendering the gavel soon. Hence the screen capture and this post.
I try to talk about policy, not politics, in this newsletter, but in the end it is elected officials who are tasked with implementing policy. You can present this as a 2x2 matrix - either you get elected, or you don’t; and either you get legislation passed, or you don’t. On both axes, great can be the enemy of good.
In our system, Congress holds the power of the purse. And thus, it seemed wholly appropriate that for her walk-off as Madame Speaker, two days after Zelensky’s speech, the House passed a $1.7 trillion budget, including $45 billion in funding for Ukraine. Here’s the tally.
After Zelensky’s speech (and the House passing the budget), I looked up the famous Teddy Roosevelt speech, on Citizenship in a Republic. It is better known today as the Man in the Arena speech. It was given in Paris in April 1910. It is very much of the era of frontier expansion in the US. The quote that is remembered is here:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
Then there are those who stand in the arena and get the votes counted. So here’s to the Woman in the Arena, the Speaker Emerita, who has taken countless slings and arrows over her long career, but even in her walk-off act, showed us that while speeches can motivate, in the end votes need to be counted for policies to be implemented and dollars to flow.
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I should add this post was in the works prior to the saga we witnessed in the House this past week, but if anything, what we saw last week affirmed that we had been watching someone truly historic.