Eating lunch down at Duke’s today, I was watching the European soccer matches, this time Spain versus Italy, and I realized we Americans don’t have anything like these national rivalries with long histories to bind us together against “them,” whomever that may be. The closest we come is perhaps the Olympics this summer in Tokyo, but for us most of our sport loyalties are to a city like LA or maybe regional like California, so they don’t serve to bind us as a nation but really tend to split us apart. Sports can provide a good kind of nationalism, crossing all sorts of racial, religious and regional lines. We desperately need a national sports hero who can perhaps bind our country together and, strangely enough, we may have one in the making—and his name is Shohei Ohtani, which you might guess is not very American. In fact, he’s Japanese, born in 1994, 27 years old, 6’4” weighing in at 210—but he looks bigger—and all he’s done so far this season is hit 31 home runs and the season is barely to the one-half way mark. Baseball hasn’t seen a hitting phenomenon like Ohtani in perhaps a century. Then, to complete the picture, he also pitches—and he’s one of the best pitchers in baseball, throwing the ball at 100 miles per hour. The only other person in the entire 150-year history of baseball who could do what Ohtani does was an orphanage-raised kid out of Baltimore by the name of Babe Ruth, who broke into baseball as a star pitcher and then picked up a bat and the rest was history. Hopefully, Ohtani’s ability may help to bind this nation’s wounds.
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We are in an almost historic drought. Water levels are lower than we’ve seen in years and there are genuine fears that we will have another disastrous fire season. Fire season used to start in the mid-fall; today we are already seeing serious fires in Northern California and constant flare-ups here in Southern California. The state, county and local fire departments are pushing for us to clear brush around our homes, get rid of fire dangerous plantings and up our anti-fire game. At the same time this is happening, there are other parts of the state agencies and local government that are going around with their heads in the sand as if the fire risk doesn’t exist. Several years ago the county changed the rules for the Santa Monica Mountains to allow camping in certainly environmentally sensitive areas called ESHAs. Before, no one was allowed to camp in an ESHA because they didn’t want to disturb the habitats of animals and it also presented a major fire danger. Our county supervisor, Sheila Kuehl, introduced a measure to loosen the camping rules in the mountains. This week, the California Coastal Commission is holding a hearing and my guess is, unless they put it off, they will rubber stamp those changes—and this, in the midst of a drought. It’s as if the fire departments, which are scared to death of another major conflagration, and the environmental lobby don’t talk to each other at all. You can imagine people camping at night in the mountains, building a fire to cook or to warm themselves and then a puff of wind and the mountains are on fire. I know it’s something called “cold camping,” which means no fires, but there have to be rangers to enforce the rules or of course there are going to be fires. And what do you do about the homeless? When the County Supervisors talk about camping I’m sure they think of college kids or families enjoying the wild with all sorts of expensive camping equipment—being responsible. They don’t think about booze and roasting marshmallows. Nor do they think about the homeless who are going to go to those campsites, also, and settle in. Are they going to have a test? If you have a home address then you’re a camper and that’s OK. If you don’t have a home address, well then, you’re not a real camper—you’re just homeless and you can’t be here in the mountains. You sometimes get the feeling that the left hand of government doesn’t know what the right hand of government is doing, or if they know they simply don’t care. They all seem to have their own single-issue agendas and damn the consequences.
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Like most of you, I’ve been following the collapse of the condo building in Surfside, Fla., and watching as the death toll rises. I’ve been to West Florida and it’s filled with endless rows of condos on or near the ocean and many now 40 or 50 years old. The ocean’s moisture and salt take a terrible toll on buildings; maintaining your seaside home is an absolute necessity and very expensive, as most of us know. It raises two problems. First the older buildings typically have older owners, many on fixed incomes, many with limited means, and they don’t want to spend anything for maintenance. Often, prior condo boards just kicked the can down the road for later boards to handle. If you’ve ever served on a condo association board, you know that you’re a volunteer and it can be a nightmare if there are problems—and invariably, over time, there are problems as the buildings age. It’s easy to brush this off as a Florida problem but we have the same problem here in Malibu. In the 30-plus years we’ve owned the newspaper, I’ve seen two balcony collapses. The first: 20-plus years ago, a bunch of people were dancing on a balcony when it collapsed, throwing people on to rocks below. There were deaths. I remember going to the scene and seeing the understructure on the two-story building, the supporting metal beams, rotted out. The last incident occurred relatively recently, and fortunately there were no deaths. But these oceanfront buildings have to be checked out by the city or some licensed structural engineer or it’s absolutely predictable there are going to be more collapses as time passes.