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Chesa Boudin Recalled in San Francisco
Jun. 8th, 2022 07:29 amWell, of course, my client paid me.
I mean, why wouldn’t my client pay me?
So now I’m gonna have to think up another reason for massive anxiety attacks—like how gypsies are gonna steal my passport and credit cards the minute I set foot in Palermo.
Oh, wait!
I don’t have to worry about getting robbed in Palermo because I’m gonna get my flying dates confused and never actually make it onto the plane!
###
I see San Francisco has recalled Chesa Boudin, its progressive-minded District Attorney.
Chesa Boudin has an interesting pedigree: His parents were both members of the Weather Underground. In 1981, they were driver and lookout for the robbery of a Brinks armored car in Nyack, New York that resulted in the death of two police officers and the Brinks driver.
They didn’t actually fire any guns, but accessory to murder is accessory to murder, and anyway, Mama Boudin acted as decoy. Chesa’s parents’ subsequent lives, thus, were spent in the Big House. Mama Boudin, a Bryn Mawr graduate, published multiple articles in the Harvard Educational Review and won an International Pen prize for her poetry in 1999.
I suppose both parents can be seen as political prisoners although I do not see them that way myself. But enough did so that after Boudin was paroled in 2003, she became an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of Social Work.
She inspired numerous writers. David Mamet wrote The Anarchist based upon Boudin’s life; Philip Roth modeled the character Merry in his bestselling American Pastoral after her.
She also inspired her son Chesa with a passionate desire to reform the criminal justice system. He was a public defender before he was elected DA; in fact, Ichabod shared an office with him when Ichabod was doing an internship with the San Francisco PD office, though I don’t think they became besties or anything.
###
I have no idea whether Chesa Boudin deserved the recall or not.
But the San Francisco Bay Area’s demographics have certainly changed dramatically since I lived there 30 years ago. I was surprised by the number of left-leaning acquaintances who supported the recall—although come to think of it, though these acquaintances continue to support abortion rights and are mostly gay, there’s nothing else to suggest anymore that they’re particularly left-leaning.
Homelessness is an enormous issue in the San Francisco Bay Area, but surely San Francisco voters can’t be dreaming of criminalizing homelessness, can they?
Maybe they are!
Myself, I suspect what brought Chesa down was the rising number of car break-ins plus all those photographs of shoplifting gangs brazenly looting Walmarts up and down Market Street and in the Stonestown Mall.
I suspect those incidents have more to do with cops vowing to wreak revenge on all those Defund the Police activists in the aftermath of the George Floyd shooting than they do with any active or de facto DA policies.
Anyway, Chesa Boudin is out; the SF Bay Area is slowly, creakily, beginning to tilt right (ulp!), and if I were the Democratic Party, I’d be very, very worried about the coming midterm elections.
###
And now, I must get started on my very busy day.
I mean, why wouldn’t my client pay me?
So now I’m gonna have to think up another reason for massive anxiety attacks—like how gypsies are gonna steal my passport and credit cards the minute I set foot in Palermo.
Oh, wait!
I don’t have to worry about getting robbed in Palermo because I’m gonna get my flying dates confused and never actually make it onto the plane!
###
I see San Francisco has recalled Chesa Boudin, its progressive-minded District Attorney.
Chesa Boudin has an interesting pedigree: His parents were both members of the Weather Underground. In 1981, they were driver and lookout for the robbery of a Brinks armored car in Nyack, New York that resulted in the death of two police officers and the Brinks driver.
They didn’t actually fire any guns, but accessory to murder is accessory to murder, and anyway, Mama Boudin acted as decoy. Chesa’s parents’ subsequent lives, thus, were spent in the Big House. Mama Boudin, a Bryn Mawr graduate, published multiple articles in the Harvard Educational Review and won an International Pen prize for her poetry in 1999.
I suppose both parents can be seen as political prisoners although I do not see them that way myself. But enough did so that after Boudin was paroled in 2003, she became an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of Social Work.
She inspired numerous writers. David Mamet wrote The Anarchist based upon Boudin’s life; Philip Roth modeled the character Merry in his bestselling American Pastoral after her.
She also inspired her son Chesa with a passionate desire to reform the criminal justice system. He was a public defender before he was elected DA; in fact, Ichabod shared an office with him when Ichabod was doing an internship with the San Francisco PD office, though I don’t think they became besties or anything.
###
I have no idea whether Chesa Boudin deserved the recall or not.
But the San Francisco Bay Area’s demographics have certainly changed dramatically since I lived there 30 years ago. I was surprised by the number of left-leaning acquaintances who supported the recall—although come to think of it, though these acquaintances continue to support abortion rights and are mostly gay, there’s nothing else to suggest anymore that they’re particularly left-leaning.
Homelessness is an enormous issue in the San Francisco Bay Area, but surely San Francisco voters can’t be dreaming of criminalizing homelessness, can they?
Maybe they are!
Myself, I suspect what brought Chesa down was the rising number of car break-ins plus all those photographs of shoplifting gangs brazenly looting Walmarts up and down Market Street and in the Stonestown Mall.
I suspect those incidents have more to do with cops vowing to wreak revenge on all those Defund the Police activists in the aftermath of the George Floyd shooting than they do with any active or de facto DA policies.
Anyway, Chesa Boudin is out; the SF Bay Area is slowly, creakily, beginning to tilt right (ulp!), and if I were the Democratic Party, I’d be very, very worried about the coming midterm elections.
###
And now, I must get started on my very busy day.
