In June 2009 The City Image Press is publishing Urban Worrier: Making Politics Personal, a collection of some of my “What I Say” columns that were published originally in The Lookout News. The collection starts just before the 2000 election, when I began writing the column, and continues until just before the 2004 election.
Pre-publication reaction to the book has been good. Ben Joravsky, the Chicago Reader columnist who wrote Hoop Dreams, read the manuscript and gave me the following blurb: “A delightful read, and not just because I agree with much of what Frank Gruber has to say. This book gets to the heart of how local governments work.”
Rick Cole, the City Manager of Ventura who is also a well-known writer on urban issues, read an early copy and posted the following on Facebook about the book: “a remarkable collection of commentary, common sense and uncommon insight.”
Urban Worrier is not a typical book, being a collection of columns about various usually unrelated subjects, all connected in one way or another to one town: Santa Monica, California. The fact is that there are very few books about local life and politics. Most people when they read the newspaper or watch or listen to the news, pay more attention to national and international news than what’s going on locally. But they are directly affected by local decisions and, what’s more, attitudes about local government and policies have a large impact on political attitudes.
Santa Monica is a small city in a beautiful spot, but it has the full run of urban issues: homelessness, gangs, school issues, land-use issues. And it’s got many interesting personalities who become involved with them. Santa Monica is world famous with a definite “image” known throughout the world. I try to both articulate what the image is about and show where it’s only an image.
The time period the book covers, 2000 to 2004, was also a particularly historic time in America. In the book, historic events at the beginning of the century—the Florida recount, Sept. 11, the invasion of Iraq—interact with life in a town that has its own tragedies: killings of and by local youth, and the death of ten people when an elderly man drove his car through a farmers market.
I like to think that the book takes what were current events and turns them into recent history.
To give a further idea of what the book is about, here is the Introduction that I wrote for it:
Introduction
I love cities, and I love local politics, and I love Santa Monica, the blesséd little city that sits inside the western edge of the megalopolis of “L.A.” into which I casually moved almost twenty-five years ago. I didn’t know then that ten years later I would be spending much of my life fretting about my new town and arguing for its future and about its past with others who thought they loved Santa Monica even more than I did. I found myself defending urbanness, defending the meaning of one of those threatened, if resilient, places we call cities. I became an urban worrier. “All politics is local,” in the late House Speaker Tip O’Neill’s famous words. But not unless you want to read about it. Of all the political books published each year, few pay any attention to what matters most to Americans on a day-in, day-out basis. The same goes for the columns that fill the opinion pages and for radio and television commentary. It is as if the average American cares more about who is the president of France than who is on the school board—a farfetched notion. On a regional level, newspapers and local television cannot cover all the local political news for every city or town. Nor are many readers and viewers interested in the news in someone else’s town. To sell papers and attract viewers, regional news outlets cover negative stories about politics gone wrong, or crime stories that have always been the bread and butter of tabloids and TV news. Little coverage can be given to the long-term stories in every jurisdiction about land use and zoning or school funding or capital improvements that have a sustained impact on the way people live and their attitudes toward government—attitudes that ultimately affect how they vote in statewide and national elections. The job of reporting these stories has fallen on the least heralded, but perhaps hardest working, of all journalists—those who work for the various local papers, many of them throwaway advertisers and the like, that nearly every town has. They cover the city council and planning commission and school board meetings, not to mention local sports and spelling bees. In so doing, they provide the fodder for millions of conversations every day that take place while parents wait to pick their kids up at school, in the supermarket parking lot, or at the park while watching a soccer or little league game. Recently, with the rise of the Internet, there are new outlets for local news—news websites that focus on particular localities or particular stories. I was lucky to start writing for one of the first. But before that I had to become involved.
* * *
In the early 1990s I was an ordinary resident of Santa Monica. Then a local development issue—plans to rebuild our Civic Center—caught my attention. I wrote a memo suggesting how the City might plan a better Civic Center. The memo circulated, I attended some meetings, and, what do you know, I became an activist. I joined the local neighborhood association and ultimately became the treasurer of a successful campaign to get voter approval, against no-growth opposition, for the new Civic Center plan. I came to know members of our city council, and the council appointed me to the Planning Commission in 1995. But later, after four years on the commission, when the slate I backed in a city council election lost, the new council declined to reappoint me, and I suddenly became a “former planning commissioner.” I was out of the “corridors of power,” but I wanted to stay involved. Fortunately for me, in 1999 I met some people who were interested in the same topics I was, although for different reasons. The Outlook, the newspaper that had covered Santa Monica for 123 years—since the birth of the city—ended its publication in 1998, but reporters there were concerned that the city no longer had a paper, and they decided to try to keep the residents informed. The Lookout News was born. Accessed through www.surfsantamonica.com, the news website was a pioneer: the first local media outlet not affiliated with an existing print media publication. It was homegrown and optimistic. I met the two main partners, publisher Jorge Casuso and technologist Iris Oliveras. Jorge had been an investigative reporter for the Outlook and former West Coast bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune. Iris had recently completed her master’s degree at MIT, where she had researched visualization technologies and virtual environments as public tools for community involvement in the design and planning process. I approached them about writing a weekly opinion column for the Lookout about Santa Monica and its politics. They bought into the idea—provided that I would first read a collection of columns by Mike Royko (Jorge worships Royko). Just before the 2000 election I began writing a column we called “What I Say.” More than eight years later, I have written over 400 columns, and with the support of Jorge and Iris, and with help from the Lookout’s great staff, I am still doing it. My purpose in writing “What I Say” was to treat the politics of Santa Monica and the issues that confronted Santa Monica with the same seriousness that the Paul Krugmans and Thomas Friedmans of the world applied to national and international news. I brought to the subject the knowledge I had gained from community service, a cosmopolitan outlook derived from a career outside politics (as an entertainment lawyer and erstwhile movie producer), a sense of humor and a love for my subject—Santa Monica. Santa Monica is a writer’s dream: a fascinating microcosm of the twenty-first century, post-sprawl, American city, with a lot of ideological politics thrown in. The “Peoples’ Republic of Santa Monica” is a place famous for both its beaches and its political scene. But Santa Monica is not what people think it is. It’s not a rich suburb of Los Angeles, a “Brentwood West” or Beverly Hills, and it’s not a sleepy beach town or resort either. While it has always had elements of both suburb and tourist trap, for most of the twentieth century Santa Monica was a blue-collar industrial town famous for building Douglas aircraft like the DC-3. It had a large minority population, although much of it had to disperse when a freeway ripped the town in half in the ’60s. Urban renewal followed that, and by the ’70s, the city was in bad shape. Santa Monica revived, however, and not coincidentally because after decades of being run by a close-knit group of local power brokers, politics in Santa Monica got “hot” when left-wing idealists found a pocketbook issue—rent control—and took over. Ultimately, what I have tried to do with “What I Say” is write about civic virtue in the modern age; about what it means to be a good citizen; about how one struggles to juggle compassion and pragmatism; about what liberalism means and what it doesn’t mean. I have tried to take local issues and use them to shine a light on national issues and, above all, human issues. I have hoped that my passionate involvement in one local community could be an example not only of something that is very American, recalling our oldest traditions, but also of something that people today tend to forget or, worse, disparage as meaningless in a complicated and connected world. When you read these columns, I hope they give you a good picture of Santa Monica. But even more, I hope they give you a lens for observing your own city, town, or neighborhood.
I hope that all this encourages you to buy the book and read it, and to let me know what you think.
