Berkeley Reporter

by Steed Dropout
Dec. 9, 2014

2 NIGHTS OF VIOLENCE REDRESSED BY CAL

Photo by Ted Friedman.

“The whole system is corrupt; shut it down”–a popular protest chant

Moni Law, a Berkeley activist/attorney, spoke at the start of the first night of a three-night [Update: four night] protest against questionable police tactics exonerated by grand juries.
Continue reading “3rd Time Was The Best Time: Berkeley 4-Days of Protest” »

by Steed Dropout
Oct. 26, 2014

For the last several years, I have told people that I will be buried at Lincoln’s Tomb. This is not much of an exaggeration when my burial plot is just around the corner from Lincoln’s. “I’ll post a sign: drop in in nearby to visit Dropout,” I have boasted.

My apartment on Berkeley’s South side is far from Lincoln’s Tomb, at Oak Ridge Cemetery on the Northern outskirts of Springfield, Illinois.

I recall the tomb from four-score childhood visits with the Boy Scouts. Illinois license plates advertise, “Land of Lincoln;” Lincoln’s hometown vacated downtown Springfield to make room for a Lincoln presidential library, even though Lincoln left few papers.

Lincoln's Tomb.

Continue reading “Bury My Heart at Lincoln’s Tomb” »

by Steed Dropout
Sept. 29, 2014

A NEW AGE OF CONSENT

Consent at Cal/Berkeley. Photo by Ted Friedman.

The standards for consensual college sex have tightened, according to media accounts of Gov. Jerry Brown’s signing a stricter date-rape law, recently. Under the new regulations, both sex-partners will have to continue to verbalize consent throughout the sex act.

Dorms across the state will ring out with, “I consent. I still consent. (groaning) I’m consenting.”

It remains to be seen whether such scenes of fevered consent can be articulated in an orderly way. A dialogue director might be required to pace the consents so that consenters don’t step on each others’ consents.

“Honey, I consent. I’m Still consenting. Still consenting here.” The two competing blurts could meet in the night, bouncing off each other.

It may only be a matter of time before civil libertarians complain that big government has invaded their bed-rooms.
Continue reading “50 Years After Student Revolt, Cal Students Shift to Consent” »

by Steed Dropout
June 13, 2014

DYSPHORIA FOR THE REST OF US

Dysphoria. Photo by Ted Friedman.

When Maureen Dowd, a star New York Times reporter, screwed up with a pot-club marijuana edible in Colorado, recently, she faced a reporter’s dilemma. Should she write a tell-all or wait to be scooped on her own life?

Her tell-all was a public service spot, with Dowd telling us, essentially, “kids, don’t try this at home,” while filling us in on how to use edible THC.

Her editors must have been weak-kneed with delight. There’s just something sort of pro-pot about the Times but I can’t prove it. I suspected this when the Times ran a news obit a few years ago on Berkeley’s most famous pot Doc., Psychiatrist, Tod H. Mikuriya.

Mikuriya was a pioneer advocate (and user of) medical marijuana. You could feel between the lines the Times dug his message.

Continue reading “Dowd’s Downer” »

by Steed Dropout
May, 23, 2014

Bob Harris, one of my editors, slapped a pile of clippings on my desk. “Re-write these,” he instructed me. It was 1958, my first summer on my hometown newspaper.

The clippings were fresh from our afternoon paper. We were the morning paper. We were owned by the same company. We stole from ourselves.

My first reaction was astonishment that they would repeat themselves. I worried that I was writing stories I knew nothing about. Maybe this is what my journalism professors meant when thy told me, “you’re working for one of the worst newspapers in the state of Illinois.”

I owe this worst newspaper the best training I ever got. I learned to write, unflinchingly, about that of which I knew nothing and, perhaps better, I learned newspaper form from the thousands of stories I re-wrote. I could write like a reporter but didn’t have a clue how to be one. I learned, as well, to be able to re-write anything in ten minutes or less.

Continue reading “The Best Journalism Assignment I Ever Had” »

by Steed Dropout
Mar. 21, 2014

After Rand Paul’s Don’t Spy on Me Tour in the belly of Berkeley’s radical beast, Wednesday …. Let’s sort this out together.

Paul, leading polls as the Republican presidential candidate, spoke a half-mile from Ho-Chi-Minh park. Next-door to a million dollar tree-sit demo that lasted more than two years. Nestled in the lower Berkeley hills, which were under FBI surveillance 55 years ago. A stone’s throw from Berkeley’s People’s Park.

Two blocks from Sproul Plaza, with its plaque commemorating Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement. Is this belly of the beast enough?

Rand Paul, right. Photo by Ted Friedman.

Continue reading “People’s Republic of Berkeley a Republican State” »

by Steed Dropout
March 19, 2014
Berkeley, CA

Amid tight security, Rand Paul, who has made it a point to take on liberals on their own ground told 500 of his faithful Wednesday at U.C. Berkeley’s International House that the government was spying on him, you, and me.

Photo by Ted Friedman.

Continue reading “Rand Paul to Berkeley: “They’re Spying on Us”” »

by Steed Dropout
Feb. 24, 2014

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS–CHAMPAGNE–SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM, 1959-61

“If you want freedom of the press,” our journalism professors told us,”own your own paper.” That alone was worth the price of admission and admission was cheap.

Soon they were requiring mastering the letter-press, and the Speed Graphlex larger-than-a-bread-box view camera. They offered a course in smoke signals and tom-tom telegraphy, but those were optional.

A fellow journ student distinguished himself by eating toilet paper, then regurgitating the pulp and making news print. Our professors’ idea was to force us back to Franklin, if not Neanderthals and cold meat.

Continue reading “Learning Journalism in the 1950’s” »

by Steed Dropout
Feb. 21, 2014

JOURNALISTS–OR PAPARAZZI ?–AT UCB MEMORIAL FOR DEAD FOOTBALL HERO

A U.C. Berkeley football team trainer caught me at the steps to the team’s meeting room, where I was lurking, unauthorized, to get a shot of the team emerge for a memorial to a dead comrade. Tears streamed down his cheeks. “Don’t target the team,” he cried.

“What a shot he would make,” I thought.

When I resumed my place scrunched between several photographers, I was told by a Cal athletic official, that unless I was press, I couldn’t shoot. I carried no press I.D. I was shooting with a peanut camera. I talked my way out of the official’s constraints. I had, almost accidentally, signed up with the event media co-ordinator.

Respectful distance. Photo by Ted Friedman.

Continue reading “Fallen Football Hero: Behind a Shoot” »

by Steed Dropout
Jan. 10, 2014

CHEAP EATS

Let’s say you eat on Telegraph for the same reason you live in a nearby cheap student apartment. But let’s say you’re still a foodie (on the cheap, of course) and you find yourself an economic captive in the student ghetto and that you sometimes worry about how your life (on the cheap, of course) has turned out–that you’ve been spoiled by your forty-year extended student sojourn and that you may awake some morning when the good cheap food goes away, like Buddy Holly. You still have Holden Caulfield, though, and Dustin Hoffman playing an “outside agitator” in “The Graduate.” You recall how you first identified with “The Graduate,” especially when you lived in rooming houses near campus. The outside agitator meme could only take you so far. You are maybe agitated but you’re no agitator. You know real agitators. You love these agitators, but you are not like them, preferring self-absorption. You long ago ran ran out of excuses for living here, entrapped. Only the mirror can undo you, revealing that you are an old perv. But then you live among pervs and their one underlying principle is opposition. If you have oppositional tendencies in youth (I did), you cannot expect to just grow out of it, although oppositional personality disorder applies mostly to adolescents. What happens when these oppositionals grow up? They move to Berkeley where oppositional personality disorder is a Berkeley trope and you die an old hippy.

These views may be catching, but they are mine alone.