Thursday, Mar. 17, 2022
This week our contributors saddle up to explore varied terrain—what we can learn from the tragic heroes of the Western's frontier, why a Republican might be best suited in Sacramento's State Controller office, and how the men in Pelican Bay State Prison connect to one another and the outside community (the first in a Zócalo/California Wellness Foundation Inquiry on prison towns). Read more below and register for our upcoming events!
The Zócalo staff
|
|
Photo by Kirsty Griffin/Netflix. |
|
ESSAY
From The Searchers to The Power of the Dog, Troubled Protagonists Offer an American Vision of Death and Defeat
by GLENN FRANKEL
Now, I’m not arguing that British-born Benedict Cumberbatch is cut from the same rugged denim as Wayne (though he sure knows how to fake it). Nor would I suggest that Campion, a high-octane, highly cerebral New Zealander, is anything like the dour, hard-drinking, Irish-American Ford. But what I am saying is that The Searchers and The Power of the Dog have a lot in common, boast some of the same striking visual and narrative elements—and center around two powerful but deeply troubled protagonists.
|
|
EVENT: STREAMING LIVE ONLINE
Survey after survey suggests Americans strongly support immigration. Yet fear dominates the politics of immigration. What makes this fear-mongering so effective, and is there any way to fight it? How have communities, organizations, and governments successfully reconciled differing views on immigration over the past few years? National Immigration Forum president/CEO and ASU Social Transformation Lab fellow Ali Noorani, author of Crossing Borders: The Reconciliation of a Nation of Immigrants, visits Zócalo to examine how new policies, stories, and responses to immigration can be used to build a more cohesive and welcoming nation. Moderated by New York Times correspondent Miriam Jordan.
|
|
ESSAY
How the Men in Pelican State Prison Impact the Community Outside, One Another, and Inmates Across California
by PAUL CRITZ
This essay is the first of a Zócalo/California Wellness Foundation Inquiry, What Would the End of Mass Incarceration mean for Prison Towns? Register for the live in-person/streaming event below.
David was the first prisoner I ever spoke to inside Pelican Bay—at a performance and art show put on by two Arts in Corrections classes in the B-Yard gym. I had just been hired to teach a new class, audio journalism, which would produce a podcast with the prisoners of Pelican Bay. It was my first time inside a maximum-security prison. As I stood under the basketball hoop taking it all in—the guards, the cage suspended from the ceiling, the rundown middle school feel of the gymnasium—an inmate with a pen and notebook stepped out of the middle distance and introduced himself.
|
|
EVENT: SUSANVILLE IN-PERSON | STREAMING ONLINE
A Zócalo/California Wellness Foundation Event
Moderated by Keri Blakinger, Staff Writer, Marshall Project
After generations of opening prisons and increasing the number of inmates inside them, the California state government is planning to close a number of institutions. But Newsom's announcement to close the California Correctional Center in Susanville this year has sparked fears that shutting the prison could badly damage the Lassen County community. Lassen Community College president Trevor Albertson, Parlier mayor and retired correctional officer Alma Beltran, and University of Wisconsin sociologist John M. Eason, author of Big House on the Prairie: Rise of the Rural Ghetto and Prison Proliferation, visit Zócalo to discuss what the end of prisons will mean for neighboring communities.
|
|
CONNECTING CALIFORNIA
A Controller From the Minority Party Could Provide a Crucial Check on a State Government Suffering from Political Monoculture
by JOE MATHEWS
But here’s a secret that California’s ruling elites don’t want you to know: the controller’s office has vast and often untapped powers to oversee, audit, and prod California’s dysfunctional government. Which is why public employee unions and other interest groups have long worked to ensure that a reliable ally wins the job. The controller, however, could become a major force for turning California’s aspirations into effective programs. It requires someone smart, responsible, dogged—and resolutely independent of the Democratic power structure.
|
|
FROM THE ARCHIVES
How Czars, Nuked-Up Commissars, and a Certain Vladimir Became Our Enduring Nemesis
A Zócalo Inquiry
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
