THE BELL CURVE:Earthly paradise lost to the heat

As I sit here in my home office with the air-conditioner whirring a kind of climatic death rattle and a large electric fan blowing hot air at my back, it’s impossible to write anything without starting with the heat. For more than a week now, it has been unrelenting, turning every effort at expending energy for normal tasks into a sweat-soaked endurance race.

When this heat wave hit us, I hoped and expected to be able to deal better with it than native Californians because I am one of the handful of people still around who remembers life before air-conditioning. After all, I spent some 40 summers in the American Midwest, where pre-air-conditioned summer temperatures in the 90s and 110% ? maybe it was 150% ? humidity were normal and which no amount of complaining or preparation would alleviate. So we lived with these numbers, along with mosquitoes with the size and air power of F-18s.

Admittedly that was a long time ago, but having endured it, it seems logical that I would roll with this California mini-heat wave, Well, I haven’t. I’ve suffered along with the natives ? and maybe a little bit extra because I feel betrayed. I moved to Newport Beach 45 years ago with the promise that I was leaving winter behind forever and that summer paradise was a given, a kind of throw-in. I was assured that I could expect eternal summer that would require neither the heavy duty heating systems that got us through Midwestern winters nor air-conditioning in the summer, when coastal breezes would keep us cool. And I believed.

So our air-conditioning consists of a wall unit in my office that has struggled valiantly this past week just to keep the temperature marginally tolerable for working, while an army of electric fans fights a losing battle inside the house. When we renovated our house 10 years ago, we added a second-floor master bedroom that sucks in all the heat in the neighborhood if we open our windows and all the heat from our downstairs if we don’t.

I read in the Los Angeles Times the other day that these abnormal heat levels are expected to remain until October. I choose to refuse to believe that weather can be predicted that far in advance. Meanwhile, I plan to continue exploring my suspicion that this is all being caused by the Bush administration’s myopia about global warming. It may be too early to make that case, but somebody has to take the rap it if we don’t cool down soon.

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I had the pleasure of lunching with several dozen politically involved local women (I was one of two men present) who periodically invite candidates for state and local public office to discuss issues and answer questions from the floor, then help elect moderate, pro-choice women who share their convictions. The bi-partisan group is called Women in Leadership, and there is only one pre-requisite for membership or appearing at the WIL lectern: both members and speakers have to be committed to reproductive freedom of choice. I didn’t ask about journalists, but I would have qualified.

On the day I visited, the speaker was Debra Bowen, for the past eight years a state Senator representing the South Bay area of Los Angeles County. Bowen will be running as a Democrat for the office of Secretary of State in November, and her long record of leadership in consumer protection and privacy rights guaranteed her a friendly audience. Bowen’s topic was how the built-in bugs in our voting machinery (“we do a better job of regulating slot machines than voting machines”) impacts women more than men ? and what could and should be done about it. Along the way, she got in some zingers on the lack of basic knowledge about the social and political contributions of women in our society.

Costa Mesa City Councilwoman Katrina Foley was there (she is also a member of the WIL board of directors) and so was Barbara Venezia, who is trying to unseat Leslie Daigle, currently representing my Santa Ana Heights neighborhood. I was told that former Pilot columnist Fred Martin used to check in with WIL regularly, but things have been pretty quiet since he departed the Pilot. Martin is a tough act to follow, but I’ll try to keep my eye on the action at WIL in this election year.

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The current turmoil in Santa Barbara is worth attention at every community newspaper ? including this one. There, nine editors, columnists and reporters from the Santa Barbara News-Press walked off their jobs to protest interference by the owner and publisher and her minions in the objective, professional reporting of the news. Specifically, the publisher ordered several articles killed or rewritten, including one about the sentencing for drunk driving of the man she later made her acting publisher and put in charge of the news pages.

Meanwhile, the replacement editors didn’t run a story about the protest and the issues involved in their own shop until nine days after the first defection. Now, Santa Barbara residents want their newspaper back. Some 500 locals turned out last Tuesday at a 45-minute rally to demand it back and to register their support of the protesting journalists.

The Executive Director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press told rally participants that “local news is the news that the public is most connected to. At least 40% of the public reads a newspaper on a typical day. And if you’re focusing on local community news, a newspaper plays an even more dominating role.”

That’s why trust in the journalistic professionalism of a local newspaper is vital. And why we should all applaud the defection of the News-Press staffers who refused to go along when the owners violated that professionalism.