Late Saturday night on the eve of Super Bowl Sunday, I drove the streets of the South of Market district in San Francisco, my usual route to get to the freeway that takes me back home to Oakland. While waiting for the light to change on Division Street — a four-lane thoroughfare under Highway 101 North to Golden Gate Bridge — a long line of homeless men were huddled next to pillars, readying themselves to sleep on the Division Street meridian for the night.

A generous young couple braced themselves, looking left and right as they completed a dangerous walk across aggressive traffic, bringing with them their camper tent for a few of the homeless under the freeway. One, maybe two, people could sleep in it comfortably.

Undoubtedly, there would be more crammed in there. In February, San Francisco gets cold at night.

As I turned the corner, a long line of young people four-deep waited outside a local nightclub. The line snaked around the block. Double-parked in front of the club, a young man was texting — unaware that he was taking up two lanes while lines of cars wormed their way around him to get home. I honked him into awareness and he pulled over. Similar scenes were happening all along that same street, clubs filled with partiers taking Saturday night long into early Super Bowl Sunday morning.

I knew from my friends who work in SF County Jail that during the two weeks prior to Super Bowl weekend, the police jailed most of the homeless. Keeping them out of sight from the two massive development areas — Justin Hermann Plaza and Moscone Center — was a priority for the NFL’s Super Bowl Host Committee’s designated pre-game celebrations.

It was surprising to see more homeless underneath the freeway last Saturday, but that might have been due to the additional pressure of one million additional people coming to party or go to the game Super Bowl weekend. The hotels wanted to keep the downtown tourist areas free of poor people. And the jails were probably at capacity.

The pressure on public services, plus street and commuter traffic, was enormous — cutting off major in-city commuter arteries to set up what amounted to a Football Disneylandia at the Embarcadero (our trendy bay side neighborhood called Super Bowl City.) 500,000 people came to watch continuous free concert performances from local artists and Grammy award-winning musicians over the weekend. Throughout the week, demonstrators lined the block where Super Bowl City was set.

In December of last year, the police shot and killed a young black man named Mario Woods in the Bayview Hunter’s Point area — one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. He was unarmed. It was caught on cellphone video.

Adding Wood’s death to the long long list of grievances already caused by the Dot-Com Boom 2 and the ensuing development driving working-class families out of the city due to astronomically high rents, the city had more than enough on their hands in keeping demonstrations contained. Mayor Ed Lee — who, throughout his first term oversaw the accelerated gentrification of the city by the tech industry — continues to face hostile demonstrations at City Hall and elsewhere. The Super Bowl is just one more of the thousand cuts that’s pushed long-time residents and the working class of the city to the edge.

It’s over. Three long years of planning with the National Football League and a large cluster of corporate sponsors produced the empire’s annual spectacle for the plebs — locally, and nationally on television. The NFL took over an entire region — the western Bay Area with its six million people — for the 50th Super Bowl, also known as SB50 for short.

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It takes much in resources from an area to produce these games, which are in essence the amusements of empire: the gladiators; the bread and circus; the sweeping under the carpet of human misery so as not bring a downer onto the people who can afford jacked-up hotel prices and Super Bowl tickets. This is what we expect of Rome. Looking at the sponsors for these various events this last week, you can see what this empire is made of.

Fortunately we are still, last time I checked, a first-world country, and our region is even more first world than others. So we can take this on, economically. But there remains the social cost. Long-term problems like homelessness, police brutality, and the pressure of gentrification fester hotter underneath, and are ready to explode because of this. Working-class people — the very people who like the game — are being forced out the city they live in. Forget that they could ever even afford an NFL season ticket, let alone admission to the Super Bowl.

All empires have to do to keep us in line and not complain is to create temporary distraction. With its glorification of American machismo and the passion it generates — real and manufactured — the NFL is corporate Rome’s greatest distraction machine.

With each and every empire throughout history, the disruption of human lives remains the regrettable price of spectacle. I wish for my town that the money they spent on public services and safety — garbage collection, street cleaning, traffic control — could have gone to homeless shelters, or better yet, actual housing for people who need it. It pisses me and a lot of people off that the Big Football Show came here. We can’t afford to be distracted when — amidst the revelry, the partying and the crowds — so many of us are about to be crushed.

At last and alas, the primary season looms before us. As is customary for me, I always pay attention when my friend, political consultant Richard (Dick) Bell, posts an article in the public interest on Facebook.

Dick was one of my mentors when I was involved with the Kerry campaign in 2003-04 as a blogger and blog moderator. I have always relied on and trusted his take on the complexities of political campaigns and DC politics in general. He is always spot-on.

So I took notice when he posted this Politico article,”The One Weird Trait that Predicts Whether You’re a Trump Supporter,” written by longtime Democratic pollster Matt MacWilliams. It describes in depth what we here at Planet Waves have guessed all along: Trump triggers the mystic yearning for a strong man — the one who an authoritarian type will obey.

MacWilliams writes:

“My finding is the result of a national poll I conducted in the last five days of December under the auspices of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, sampling 1,800 registered voters across the country and the political spectrum. Running a standard statistical analysis, I found that education, income, gender, age, ideology and religiosity had no significant bearing on a Republican voter’s preferred candidate. Only two of the variables I looked at were statistically significant: authoritarianism, followed by fear of terrorism, though the former was far more significant than the latter.

Authoritarianism is not a new, untested concept in the American electorate. Since the rise of Nazi Germany, it has been one of the most widely studied ideas in social science. While its causes are still debated, the political behavior of authoritarians is not. Authoritarians obey. They rally to and follow strong leaders. And they respond aggressively to outsiders, especially when they feel threatened. From pledging to “make America great again” by building a wall on the border to promising to close mosques and ban Muslims from visiting the United States, Trump is playing directly to authoritarian inclinations.

…

So, those who say a Trump presidency “can’t happen here” should check their conventional wisdom at the door. The candidate has confounded conventional expectations this primary season because those expectations are based on an oversimplified caricature of the electorate in general and his supporters in particular. Conditions are ripe for an authoritarian leader to emerge. Trump is seizing the opportunity. And the institutions — from the Republican Party to the press — that are supposed to guard against what James Madison called “the infection of violent passions” among the people have either been cowed by Trump’s bluster or are asleep on the job.

The US primary season kicks off Feb. 1 with the Iowa caucuses. Already people have formed their opinions on the candidates, and it’s probably easier to find more now who made their decisions than back in September.

I am not saying you should be alarmed. I am suggesting you be aware. There are many people from both sides of the social, political and cultural fence who feel disoriented by the number of changes that have taken place in the US these last seven years.

We elected an African-American President. Twice. The Supreme Court has legalized gay marriage. Marijuana is legal in three states, and though the movement has been slowed or resisted in some states, the interest remains in other states to pursue legalization. California already legalized medical marijuana and should have gone for the full ball of wax years ago. And, even with all its flaws and an uncertain future, people have access to (relatively) affordable health care.

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These are such new and distressing concepts to many people — those who are fixated on ‘the way things were’ — that going backwards in time through the promises of a bombastic strongman seems comfortable and right. Even though we know, especially in the case of Trump’s foreign policy and immigration proposals, that they’re neither.

As the article implies, this is what fear of uncertainty and change will create: the white-knuckled hold on a past that is slipping away, and along with it a shift in power. We’re moving from male-dominated to female-included, and from a white majority to a growing multi-ethnic one.

But we cannot hold onto time through our inner tyrants and their outer representations. It’s useless to be afraid of what we’ll lose if we do change. We’ve already changed. We are different, still feeling out who we are and where we’re going.

This primary season is the starting point of where we go as a country; who we want to be in the world and to each other, inside and out of our borders. Let us prove to ourselves how much we’ve grown.

“If you’re ever sad, just remember the world is 4.543 billion years old and you somehow managed to exist at the same time as David Bowie.” — Tweeted by @JeSuisDean

As he always was known to do — Major Tom, the androgynous Ziggy Stardust, the Thin White Duke, the Man Who Fell to Earth — has made his next transition, this time journeying from life as a human artist on our planet. The earthbound Capricorn child who artistically personified chameleon-like change passed away on Sunday after battling cancer, and will be missed around the world.

You never knew what to expect of Bowie’s music. It was rock and roll. It was soul. It was jazz. It was electronic. It was disco.

It was ethereal, otherworldly, soulful and grounded, accessible to the body and the heart as well as the mind. His music went wherever he did, fearlessly exploring new expressions. As a child of nine, it was dance that awakened his artistic yearning.

Coming from the impulses of the body he experienced while dancing, he was drawn to the power of music. It was from there that he found his source, where it was developed at the Bromley Technical High School, whose brief description reads like something crafted by J.K. Rowling. Bowie biographer Christopher Sanford, author of the 2003 book Bowie — Loving the Alien wrote:

Despite its status it was, by the time David arrived in 1958, as rich in arcane ritual as any [English] public school. There were houses, named after eighteenth-century statesmen like (William) “Pitt” and (William) “Wilberforce.” There was a uniform, and an elaborate system of rewards and punishments. There was also an accent on languages, science and particularly design, where a collegiate atmosphere flourished under the tutorship of Owen Frampton.

In David’s account, Frampton led through force of personality, not intellect; his colleagues at Bromley Tech were famous for neither, and yielded the school’s most gifted pupils to the arts, a regime so liberal that Frampton actively encouraged his own son, Peter, to pursue a musical career with David, a partnership briefly intact thirty years later.

Bowie also collaborated with 20th-century rock star paragons such as Iggy Pop, Brian Eno, Lou Reed, John Lennon, Queen, Nine-Inch Nails, Mick Jagger and Tina Turner. His lyrics were catchy, clear, in almost all cases the poetry of the eternal. They were iconic in popular culture, and quoted in various ways across the spectrum of human life from the arts, to film, and even to sports. If there was anyone who could movingly express living on Earth from the vantage point zero to 100,000 feet, it was Bowie.

As the great Joni Mitchell once wrote: “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til its gone.” This morning in America, in the aftermath of the news of Bowie’s death, radio stations from rock, pop, soul, jazz and even sport stations had snippets of his music to play, reminding us of what his contributions were and what they mean to us still.

David Buckley, author of Bowie’s 2006 biography Strange Fascination, wrote: “He was a child destined to be an artist whose influence altered more lives than any comparable figure.”

That is quite true. At the news of his death, this planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing left to do but remember. Remember him with the impulse we feel to dance, groove and travel through time and space as the opening chords of his music come over our airwaves. We feel him even more than ever now that he’s gone.

Today, I am doing double-duty: writing a column and reviewing a film. This is something I rarely do here at Fe 9-11. I try to keep popular culture in its place, since most expressions of popular culture — especially film — exist to present a genre; or, in more plain terms, a product.

But since returning home from watching the new film Spotlight,  I have to comment.

For those who haven’t seen the movie, the film is based on the true story of the Boston Globe‘s investigative journalism column, called “Spotlight,” which researches and exposes stories of crime and local corruption for the benefit of public interest. From 2001-02, at the request of the Globe‘s new editor Marty Baron, the Spotlight team took on the story of a pedophile priest in a local parish. But in the hands of an investigative journalism team used to digging deep, the story did not begin and end with the culpability of one priest, but of several — and over decades.

As their research advanced, everyone from victims and their lawyers to Archdiocese Cardinal Bernard Law were interviewed. First acting instinctively, then on fact, the Spotlight team discover and expose the size and scope of the cover-up of priests’ abuse of children. It is massive.

Lawyers were hired so often to negotiate victim’s hush money that it became a cottage industry. The Catholic Church and its leaders were highly respected members of Boston’s elite society and employed these connections to protect their priests from the police, the legal system and the press.

These realities kept hitting the team over the head incessantly like a foam rubber bat — registering only by repetition. But that repetition was not comic. It was sickening. Prior to Spotlight’s coverage, story after story of priests’ sexual abuse of minors were put out to journalistic pasture and left to die. Even the Globe had to admit it had published a story on a pedophile priest a decade before that ended up shunting the topic to the back pages.

We know how this story ends in real life. In January of 2002, the Globe‘s “Spotlight” column went on to publish the expose that would ultimately place Cardinal Law and the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston at the center of the cover-up, forcing his resignation later that year. The Globe went on to win a Pulitzer Prize for this coverage.

Like many who have seen the film and reviewed it, I felt a longing bordering on nostalgia for that level of journalistic investigation, the type that sees the tail of the monster and bravely feels its way through the dark to find its head and kill it. The Woodward-Bernstein team did it with Watergate, and the Spotlight team with the Catholic Church. Given the state of our world right now we need this type of journalism, period. But not only by the pros at the Globe or the Washington Post.

We are in a phase of history where the answers to our economic, environmental and social problems center on the unequal distribution of wealth. This has been going on for longer than this new century. Because people are making money at such grander economic and technological scales nowadays, the problem is much larger.

Those of us who aren’t as fortunate are feeling it more. The once-vibrant American middle class has shrunk. The discontent is more aggressive. The response to contain it is both divisive and oppressive. These are the symptoms of the world in an uproar, in this country and elsewhere. Yet the crime at the upper echelon that’s causing it still continues.

Through the lens of my experience of watching government at work from within the belly of the beast, I would feel my way through the political thought going on behind the story. Sometimes there is little of it. Other times, the thought behind the deeds seems so transparent and predictable that we already know the answer.

Even though I will never be at the caliber of Washington Post‘s or the Globe‘s investigative journalism, I try to give our readers good information. Watching Spotlight made me feel happy and proud of what I do here.

The moral of Spotlight‘s story is not to award or congratulate the Globe‘s reporters who unearthed the truth. It was the decades-long effort from the victims to bring this story to light, telling their stories often enough to bring it to the Globe‘s attention, giving them room to finally crack and break open the wall hiding the criminals.

It is also so today. We’re still struggling to make the story happen — from eyewitnesses recording incidents on their cellphones, to blogging and tweeting. We all collectively make our way to the truth. How else can we all know if we stay silent?

Before I actually had my own logo and byline, I often approached Eric with an idea of what I wanted to write. He responded with this question, no matter what the subject: “What’s the angle?” Meaning, where does this story take us? Why is it important to Planet Waves? In this case, it is because each of us has a story in common to share. And as the world becomes more enmeshed, there are more of us sharing the same story.

When you see the depth and scope of the aftermath caused by Spotlight‘s expose at the end of the film, you realize how important just one human story becomes. And story after story, we realize we aren’t isolated after all. We are in this together, even more so now than before. We will always make the story, because our lives here on this blue ball called Earth are the story. Come share your story with us.