Well, kooky Californian spiritualists are at it again.
Today, while reviewing the Feb. 5 California sample ballot, I noticed, at the very bottom of the list of referenda and propositions, the short and sweet sentence that is Proposition C: Shall it be City policy that the City should explore and facilitate the acquisition of Alcatraz Island from the United States government to transform it into a Global Peace Center?
My first response — no surprise to anyone who has read the Clog before — was to cry bullshit. My second response was an internal lamentation: anyone in California with a pair of cojones, a web site, and a knack for “getting the message out” can waste the time of over 400,000 registered City voters with soft-poo tripe like a Global Peace Center.
Who is the author of this misguided waste of time? One Da Vid, M.D., Director of the Global Peace Foundation and Founder of — get this — the Light Party, A Wholistic New Political Paradigm Party. Da Vid apparently has grown up in a world where a Synergistic Seven-Point Platform consisting of Artainment and the Gaia/Solaris Consortium is perfectly reasonable. His utopian politics — which strangely mix the dangerous (“eliminate the need for a standing army”) with the fantastic (“generate unprecedented prosperity through the creation of millions of new jobs”) — are rife with every cliche you would associate with the sunny-faced hippie who has a soft-science degree and some command of electronic media.
It would be easy to say that Da Vid has lost his mind, but he’s clearly too together for this to be true. He knows how to create a political party (or the shell of one) that revolves around his incredibly specific form of activism. He knows how to turn that activism into a seemingly legitimate proposition on a voter’s ballot. He knows how to state his proposition in the simplest terms, so that all the underlying fluff, liberalomics, spiritualism, and cutopian hemp sciences are lost in translation. No, Da Vid has not lost his mind. In fact, he’s turned the power of political deception on its ear by using it to move his ass from the fringes into the mainstream.
I’d compare Vid to Sun Myung Moon, but everybody knows Moon and few outside the Fey Area, I suspect, have ever heard of the good doctor.*
*Speaking of those medical credentials, Da Vid lists himself as a physician at the San Francisco Medical Research Foundation, Inc., which is actually located in Mill Valley (that explains a lot if you subscribe to sweeping generalizations about the politics and progressive social agenda of your average Mill Valley resident). From their vision statement: It is the philosophy of the Foundation that aging and degeneration are processes which through knowledge may be understood, controlled and reversed. I rest my case.