Making some amends - Chris Brown & Rihanna

Stumbling home from an after-hours party one night, I noticed a neat row of jackets hanging just inside of the open door of Engine Company No. 3 of the Boston Fire Department. I always thought those jackets with the bold yellow stripes and the giant "BFD" across the back were pretty cool, and I decided this was my golden opportunity to own one.

I turned my Stanford Cardinal hat around backward, crept in, and eased the nearest jacket off its hook and onto my back. As I snuck out, I heard someone yell, "Hey!" So I ran. What you don't know about firefighters' jackets until you wear one is they're heavy, their buckles are noisy, their stripes and letters are reflective, and they're fitted for the firefighter who wears them. This one practically dragged on the ground as I flew up Wareham Street with one of Boston's bravest in pursuit. I tried to jump a fence, but was surprised when I wasn't my usual nimble self. Something was weighing me down. I decided to dump the jacket and split, figuring the chase would be over once they had it back.

A few minutes later, a Boston police cruiser rolled up on me. The firefighter who ran after me couldn't provide a positive ID because all he saw was "a black kid in a red hat," but that was enough to get me placed under arrest. I was 19. Luckily, that momentary lapse in judgment didn't come to define the rest of my life — and I don't think 19-year-old Chris Brown's momentary lapse in judgment should become the defining event of his life, either.

Brown was recently booked on suspicion of making criminal threats in connection with an incident with his girlfriend, R&B superstar Rihanna, that left her battered and beaten. More charges could be filed against him, but I doubt that will happen for a number of reasons. First, she probably won't want to press charges or won't cooperate with D.A. Steve Cooley if he decides to pursue felony counts of domestic violence and assault. Especially since she reportedly went to see Chris after she was discharged from Cedars-Sinai, has apparently been in contact with him, and has been quoted as saying she "still loves him."

Then there's the Harvey Levin effect. Levin's gossip-as-news Web site, TMZ, obtained the official LAPD photo of Rihanna's face (taken at the time of the incident) and posted it online. Other Web sites and legitimate news services picked it up and have run it all over the world. When contrasted with the angelic visage people are used to seeing, the image of her bruised face, bloodied nose, and split lip is so grossly prejudicial to potential jurors that on the off-chance this gets into a courtroom, there will literally be no way to seat an impartial panel. With the only witness to the alleged crimes most likely refusing to cooperate, Brown's attorney, Mark Geragos, will easily get the charges dismissed.

But the case of Chris Brown (teen heartthrob) vs. Chris Brown (abuser) is already being tried in the court of public opinion. Gossip monger Perez Hilton wants a full boycott, on-air personalities (like Ryan Seacrest) are discussing the topic ad nauseam, celebrities with a connection to the couple (like Jay-Z and Kanye West) are weighing in with statements, and even people who have nothing to do with Chris or Rihanna and are in no position to judge other peoples' relationships (like Jessica Simpson) are suddenly sharing their opinions on domestic violence. Outside of the "Thirty-Mile-Zone," at least two radio stations have stopped playing his songs, Wrigley pulled his Doublemint Gum ads, and his "Got Milk?" campaign isn't being renewed. Corporate America seems to have already decided that Chris Brown is a bad guy and Madison Avenue appears to no longer believe in his marketability.

Luckily for him, he still has millions of fans who are his age or younger; so they're less judgmental and more likely to forgive him than people who are older and more set in their ways. That means there is still a chance for him to restore his image and save his career. But he has to go public. Sitting around for a week, then releasing two sentences of contrition isn't going to be good enough.

He needs to make a statement about his anger management issues and his intent to seek counseling for them. Then he should become a major donor to and poster-boy for an organization that provides services to women and children who are survivors of domestic abuse. If Rihanna does still love him, perhaps she'll forgive him and be by his side through it all. Then maybe they, as a couple, can parlay their public foibles into increased awareness about the very common danger of domestic abuse. The world won't see her as a victim, won't see him as a monster, and they just might help some people in the process.

Governor needs to use his muscle - Schwarzenegger and the California budget crisis

Sacramento was the place to be this past weekend. Lance Armstrong was in town for time trials in the Tour of California, Gov. Schwarzenegger was in his office trying to get his fellow Republicans in the Assembly and the Senate in line behind his budget, and some 2,500 high school students had descended upon our state capital for the 61st California Youth & Government Model Legislature and Court.

While I'm happy to report that the Y&G delegates (especially the two dozen or so members of the Santa Monica delegation) handled themselves and their business in a manner that makes me optimistic about the future, the other two came out of the weekend looking like bumbling idiots.

Lance left his one-of-a-kind $10,000 bike in a truck parked behind his hotel on Saturday night and woke up to find it gone on Sunday morning, and Arnold had his bluff called by Republican Sen. Dave Cox of Fair Oaks and now has to either fire 10-20,000 state workers (many of whom live in Cox's district) or go hat-in-hand to Sen. Abel Maldonado of Santa Maria to secure his vote. For Schwarzenegger, who has achieved most things in his life through the force of his will, to be punked like this has got to be personally and professionally humiliating — and it's time for him to fight back.

It will only take three Republicans in the Assembly and three Republicans in the Senate to pass this budget (and all three Assembly votes as well as two Senate votes are in place), so it shouldn't be this hard to make a deal. Despite the fact that the bill contains about $14 billion in tax increases (and most GOP lawmakers have taken an anti-tax pledge), Schwarzenegger and the Republican leadership merely need one of their members in the Senate to come along with them to avoid economic seppoku. That should be Cox, who on Saturday said, "We cannot close this budget gap with cuts alone. Now, more than ever, we must … not shy away from making the tough, but necessary, choices to balance the budget."

If you don't speak politician, when the 70-year-old, term-limited Cox refers to "tough but necessary choices," he's talking to his Republican colleagues and saying we can't simply borrow and cut our way out of this mess. He's saying Republicans will have to recognize that their pledge not to increase taxes may be popular with the right-wing talk radio crowd, but isn't workable in the real world. It's clear that on some level, he understands the problem and the solution. What is less certain is what it's going to take to get him on board — and it's Gov. Schwarzenegger's job to find out, then make a deal to secure Cox's vote. Arnold's legacy in California and his political future, whatever it may be, depend on it.

The alternative to Cox is Sen. Maldonado, though they are both ideologues in similar ways. Cox, who wouldn't vote for the bill, but was frustrated by inaction in a Senate session Sunday night, seems to be illogically ambivalent.

The 42-year-old Maldonado, who has been involved in electoral politics from the tender age of 26, imagines himself as a crusader for Latinos. This wouldn't be as much of a problem as Cox's waffling on the tax issue if not for the fact that the Santa Maria senator sought Schwarzenegger's endorsement when he ran for state controller in the 2006 GOP primary and didn't get it.

He's had his proverbial panties in a bunch ever since. In a slightly-veiled reference to the fact that he voted for the governor's minimum wage increase earlier that year, Maldonado talked after his primary loss about a "lack of respect" saying, "Our governor cares about one thing only, and that's Arnold Schwarzenegger. When he needs Latinos, Latinos are always there for him. When Latinos need him, the answer's been 'no.'"

Though Maldonado later apologized, it was easy for him to vote against this budget when he found out that it contained $1 million for new furniture in the state controller's office. At the end of the day, however, the man is a strawberry farmer turned legislator representing about 2 percent of California from his Central Valley district. I'm not saying he shouldn't be taken seriously, but I am saying the governor shouldn't let him stand in the way of a budget being passed.

It's time for the governor to use the power of his office to shame Cox and/or Maldonado into abandoning their ideologies and grudges and doing the right thing for California. After all, if he's going to blow off his ceremonial duty to meet with the 61st Youth Governor so he can get a budget passed, Arnold had better do his actual duty and get his fellow Republicans in line.

Council should call for a special election - Democracy for Santa Monica

It's been said that many a truth has been spoken in jest. Last year, I wrote an April Fool's column in which I pretended to announce my candidacy for a seat on the Santa Monica City Council because I believed that it needed "an injection of energy, youth, style, soul, and sex appeal."

Maybe the council doesn't really need sex appeal, but I stand by the rest of the statement. With the dearly departed Herb Katz's seat now open, Santa Monica has an opportunity to look toward the future and make our representative government more closely resemble our residents. The best way to do that would be for the Santa Monica City Council to refrain from appointing someone to serve out the rest of the late Mr. Katz's term at their meeting on the 24th of this month and to hold a special election.

Every time I look at the current make-up of our City Council, I keep coming back to one word: homogenous. Of the six, there are five white men and one white woman — all middle-aged or older. In the last 10 years, the only seat which has turned over is occupied by Robert Sargent Shriver III. He's a good guy who has helped a lot of people through his DATA and (PRODUCT)RED programs, but he's a Kennedy, a venture capitalist, and a friend of Bono. I've got nothing against him and I'm sure he tries, but to me his demographic profile doesn't exactly say "I can relate to the needs of ordinary Santa Monicans."

The rest of the council has been working together since at least 1999 and I don't care who you are or what you do, when you spend a decade around the same people, you will develop patterns of behavior. It's just human nature. If you don't believe me, just think back to this past holiday season and tell me your Thanksgiving or Christmas or Chanukah didn't include at least one tired, old family dispute or ritualized tradition that never seems to go away no matter how bad you wish it would.

One thing we should have learned from the events of recent years is that elections are good things. Not too long ago the field of candidates vying for the top job in our federal government was bigger and deeper than the Lakers' roster. After an insufferably long primary and exhaustive general election campaign, we now have the best person for the job sitting in the Oval Office. We need the same kind of process here. The winner of the special election would have to run again when Herb Katz's term expires in 2010, and I think it's safe to say that two elections in two years would ensure that we also end up with the best person for the job occupying the seat. It's a classic win/win for us.

The alternative would be to allow our City Council, Santa Monica's ultimate political insider's club (which has had less than 75 members in 50 years), to name its next member. Does anyone really believe they will look very far outside their immediate circle? I don't. And that would be tragic for Santa Monica's future because these seven people will be instrumental in developing the Land Use and Circulation Element (LUCE) strategy, the long-term plan to "preserve our city's character, enhance transportation systems, expand healthcare services, maintain our quality of life, encourage creative arts and small businesses, increase mobility for all who live, work and visit here and ensure the long-term social, economic and environmental sustainability."

These are the people who will be making crucial decisions about development, neighborhood conservation and historic preservation, traffic reduction, zoning and planning, and the best way to use the Exposition Light Rail service to connect Downtown Santa Monica to Downtown Los Angeles. LUCE is an outgrowth of the city's General Plan, which hasn't been officially updated since 1984, and should be developed with a focus on what the place we all call home might look and feel like in 2034. I would like to see at least one person in city government who doesn't see things through the prism of the 1940's, 50's, or 60's and I think we have a much better chance of finding that person through the electoral process than by appointment.

If nothing else, it will serve as a real-life civics lesson for the students at Santa Monica HIgh School, St. Monica, and Santa Monica College. Since all politics is local, we have the opportunity to show the real future of this city, our young people, how important it is that they are informed and involved in their government. And it would be a fitting tribute to a man who lived and died for Santa Monica, the late, great Herb Katz.

Sports make monkeys out of us all - Super Bowl 2009

The highest-rated Super Bowl ever was last year's game between the New England Patriots and the New York Giants in Phoenix. The Pats were attempting to become the first-ever 19-0 champions of pro football and almost 100 million people tuned it to watch, most hoping they would lose. I, a life-long Pats fan, was in the employ of a former NFL player at the time and spent most of that Super Bowl week with him in Arizona. By the time I drove us back to Santa Monica the next day, I truly understood what Dickens meant when he wrote, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."

I was allowed behind the closed doors of the NFL and looking back, I wish it had never happened because I'll never see pro football the same way again. The fact that these men are held in such high esteem that people will not only spend ridiculous amounts of money to watch them play, but will also pay through the nose just to be around them says that our societal priorities are so far out of whack that we've barely evolved beyond primates. And it's long past the time when we should re-examine a culture that celebrates grown men who play children's games for a living and ignores the obscenity of the financial scale of the enterprise.

Like a lot of kids, I grew up playing sports. But unlike a lot of kids with my demographic profile (poor, black, and raised in the inner-city), I never focused on sports as some kind of "way out." Maybe it was the fact that I went to school in a small Boston suburb where good grades, not good 40-yard dash times, were seen as the key to getting into college. Weston, Mass. produced more than its fair share of great athletes, but sports were more about teaching important life lessons to young people about teamwork, preparation, doing your best, sportsmanship, and handling disappointment than anything else.

That's what sports should be about, but that's a far cry from what we see every year on Super Bowl Sunday. The week of parties leading up to game day, the hours and hours of pre-game blather, the musical performances, military fly-overs, ceremonial coin tosses, halftime shows, and endless post-game analysis all turn 60 minutes of athletic competition into a colossal waste of time and, in this economy, an unconscionable waste of money.

A big part of the problem is how we, as humans, are wired. In a study conducted at Duke University, a group of rhesus macaques were trained to regard squirts of cherry juice as currency — or "monkey money." It turns out that they would voluntarily accept smaller amounts of juice (spend monkey money) if they could look at pictures of the dominant males, even less juice (spend more monkey money) if they could look at female genitalia, and would have to be given more juice than usual (be paid monkey money) to look at pictures of subordinate males. To me, this study helps explain why we spend $20 billion per year on porn and how the NFL has become an $8 billion per year industry. And it makes me wonder if or when we, as a society, are ever going to evolve?

Because there is something as immoral about professional sports-entertainment as a multi-billion dollar industry as there was about the Romans feeding Christians to the lions in their coliseum. Just look at the story of former Houston Oilers running back Earl Campbell. After four years of playing for a scholarship at the University of Texas, he played eight professional seasons in the NFL. Now, at the age of 53, the Hall of Famer and Heisman trophy winner has severe arthritis in both knees, suffers from chronic back pain, and can barely move around on his own. My former employer, 20 years Campbell's junior, now suffers physical problems of his own. At a recent worker's compensation hearing to determine if the four teams he played for between 1997-2006 should continue to provide his medical care, was asked humiliating questions like, "do you dance?" and "do you drink alcohol?" and "are there stairs in your house?" Essentially, the best lawyers money could buy tried to attribute his ailments to something he did off-the-field and not the 10 years he spent crashing into large men at top speed in an NFL uniform. That's just wrong.

To me, the solution is simple: nationalize our professional sports leagues. When the principal product is a television broadcast utilizing public airwaves, and that broadcast would be impossible without tens of thousands of people buying tickets to see hundreds and hundreds of athletes perform "for the love of the game," there is no good reason why the benefit should enrich only a few dozen super-wealthy families and mega-corporations. It works in Green Bay where the Packers are a "community project, intended to promote community welfare" for "exclusively charitable" purposes, and it can work everywhere a NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL team plays. If only we, as a society, would start thinking like rational human beings and stop acting like monkeys.