Hopeful Warnings

...The characters serve as entry points to pierce the veneer of "normalcy" in a middle-sized American town...

...In fact, Bardacke discovers that "so much water has been pumped and the level of the water so reduced that rather than fresh water flowing into the sea, the sea is 'intruding' into fresh water...

...He becomes suspicious when Richard Shaw starts "an organization called THANKS (Together Helping Americans Nationwide Keep Strong...

...Yet "much of the water and many of the birds remain...

...And working people become the main victims of these human-made alterations of nature, their struggle against capital taking place in opposition to the demands of environment rather than in harmony with the land and resources...

...Bardacke argues that local action still matters, but in addition, he proposes that labor from one area link up with comrades elsewhere...

...Working people have changed nature from the days of primitive agriculture to the age of industrial farming to modern chemical agribusiness...

...Explore all avenues, he pleads, before making moves that will mean that "there may come a day in the lifetime of my students when people will not understand why this was ever called Pajaro Valley...

...Their argument stresses the "need to put low-income housing somewhere...

...Popular religion, access to water, picking strawberries, apples, and lettuce, and celebrating Cinco de Mayo make up the substance of the daily life of Watsonville...

...The traveler might even become reac-quainted with the country—and with a learning process...

...His argument resonates in thousands of American communities...

...or a future filled with leashed lap dogs, whose owners must follow them around with bags and sticks to clean their doo-doo off the sidewalks...

...Moved by the utter splendor of this creature, Bardacke demonstrates how his revolutionary fire can merge with conservative—or conservationist—impulses...

...By recounting, in Good Liberals and Great Blue Herons, a series of anecdotes about relatively undramatic events and ordinary people, he explores the Pajaro Valley of California's Central Coast...

...Unlike the vanishing peasants in John Berger's stories, en route to their ugly transformation into urbanites, Bardacke's fruit pickers and food-processing workers are still in transition...

...What Bardacke offers in each essay is an implicit set of standards to judge the issues that arise in this community...

...Watsonville's economy is part of a global dynamic in which 400 people laid off "at our local Green Giant plant is a result of three major trends in world capitalism...

...Saul Landau (Saul Landau is a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D. C, and at the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam...

...Bardacke finds that in contemporary America the "market and the bottom line decide the difference between right and wrong...

...Agribusiness imposes its own idiom, in which "things are not generally understood as simultaneously 'unreasonable' and 'highly profitable.' " Therefore, in the 1990s, as these mammoth, intercontinental enterprises dominate the world economy, Think Globally, Act Locally no longer serves as shorthand to guide thought and action...

...Shaw, a local frozen-food-factory owner with Nineteenth Century notions of labor relations, promotes his own food sales through a campaign to Buy American and keep cheap, contaminated Mexican frozen food out...

...To make his points, Bardacke draws portraits of townspeople and even his own dog...

...In 1990, several food-processing plants moved to Mexico, leaving Watsonville's predominantly Mexican work force jobless and desperate...

...He does so by recounting everyday stories and then drawing political lessons from them...

...But not for long...

...Frank Bardacke's essays should serve as a genuine traveler's guide...

...Bardacke's credentials as political-social tour guide derive from three decades of activism...

...Third World debt, the internationalization of the food supply, and leveraged buyouts have rendered obsolete the famous Green slogan...

...Bardacke's essays prepare the reader with a method for travel throughout the United States...

...Bardacke argues that the changing nature of production relations presents not only a scenario of despair, but also one of hope—he sees the potential for a political marriage of working-class struggles with those to preserve a livable environment...

...He returns to Nietzsche's challenge, upon the philosopher's declaration of God's death, "to construct our own moralities and then try to live by them, without the aid of an external, other-worldly authority...

...By accepting the dictates of "development" and thus the need to import water, "the Pajaro Valley will become a cog, a unit, an element in a giant matrix of inputs and outputs where everything is decided by expert calculus of the bottom line...

...By drawing the contours of class and ethnic struggle in one city in the age of information highways and TV uniformity, Bardacke has written a guide that AAA and Mobil ought to publish—or commission his next book...

...Each anecdote opens the door to the nature of the system that dictates unjust social arrangements in housing, access to water, and the right to use precious land for a corporate airport rather than low-cost housing, for bedroom-community condos rather than productive farmland...

...He finds a word in a local Water Management Agency brochure, which calls on the agency to "create new sources of water...

...But Bardacke demonstrates that Shaw actually imports the very Mexican produce he pretends to abhor and, worse, sells it as U.S.-grown...

...Bardacke dramatizes the limits of liberalism in the last essay when he and another Watsonville teacher lead a field trip to Elkhorn Slough, an area victimized by "200 years of systematic draining, pumping, and filling of the wetlands...

...The bored high-school students, accustomed to the eye-boggling speed of MTV, are snapped out of their ennui by the sight of a great blue heron that "swooped effortlessly across the water, his white and black head folded back against his shoulders, his long orange/yellow legs trailing behind...

...By the time he died, Moss was already too big for my part of town...

...Such a guide would rescue travel from tourism, refocus attention on what is happening to people and their culture, a bit more captivating than judging the relative advantages of five-star motels located off superhighways...

...After the author first exposes Shaw—Watsonville's "Man of the Year" and "Salvation Army bell ringer"—Shaw's lawyers threaten to take Bardacke to court...

...Four centuries after Mexico's patron saint was first sighted, the Virgin of Guadalupe appears in Watsonville...

...Major developments are planned and "many of the people who are making the decisions to allow this to happen are reasonable liberals...

...Some progressives would compromise and allow some units to be built...

...During the prolonged strike that preceded the corporate exodus, some of the workers find renewed labor militancy in "the miracle of Our Lady of Live Oak...

...His stories have the flavor of character sketches in Thornton Wilder's Our Town, except Bardacke uses the anecdotes to offer suggestions to the poor and to despondent organizers that action can make a difference, that the bad guys don't always win— lessons to re-cement the fractured working class in the late Twentieth Century...

...The careful reader will discern that Watsonville, the urban center of the region and Bardacke's home for more than two decades, might be Winesburg, Ohio—Anytown, U.S.A., in the 1990s...

...Bardacke dug a dog grave on a piece of land that he says will determine the future of Watsonville...

...The author, an "atheist to the very depths of my shallow soul," picks up on the local oak-tree miracle to elaborate on how religion—especially liberation theology—bonds the moral order in the absence of secular morality...

...Imported water will take us to our final destination: We will become a no place...

...One woman who sees the "miracle" at a tree insists that "Our Lady" appeared for the purpose of confirming a wildcat strike against a canning company...

...Too many houses, too many cars...

...Good Liberals pierces the membranes of class and ethnic relations in a city facing impending environmental crisis and the loss of its industrial base...

...Those engaged in the politics of community-saving could benefit from Bardacke's analysis and the narrative method he employs to teach political issues in language of conventional morality—right versus wrong...

...160 pp...

...So Bardacke produces photographs of Shaw's vegetable box labels, with Imported from Mexico written on them...

...Just as he tried to bully the workers," Bardacke concludes, he tried to bully us "out of our right to tell our view of his dirty public history...

...Bardacke is the town's labor and environmental trouble shooter, with a reporter's nose for sniffing out fraud and corruption...

...Bardacke interweaves the burial of his old dog with frightening descriptions of growth patterns in the once-sleepy agricultural town...

...A future where we still have farm dogs running free...

...Bardacke says that, by making Watsonville into a bedroom community for the Silicon Valley, the developers will displace Mexican workers and convert arable land into yuppie dwellings...

...The argument stinks," Bardacke says...

...From the time he left Berkeley and the days of student and antiwar organizing, Bardacke has thinned lettuce with a short-handled hoe, worked in a food-processing factory, as an organizer for Teamsters for a Democratic Union, and as a bilingual educator...

...By linking workplace battles with efforts to impose limits on the abuse of nature, Bardacke sees a future of real community...

...The word "create," for Bardacke, "signals Watsonville's entry into modern madness, where technicians make promises traditionally reserved for the gods...

...The petty Watsonville villains in Good Liberals, like Shaw or the sleazy slum lords, corrupt politicians, and rigid bureaucrats, correspond to types found almost anywhere, just as the events that occur in Watsonville resonate universally...

...Nature can be pushed only so far...

...Bardacke implores his community members not to "ignore the limits put by local water on local life...

...Behind each current ecological nightmare lies a history, Bardacke shows...

...Yeah, and a few acres of wetlands are gone here, and a few gone there, and no more birds...

...Good Liberals shows the limits of ethnic politics in a story of Watsonville's Mexican-American mayor siding with propertied interests over those of poor Mexicans—even though his campaign emphasized ethnic solidarity...

...10.95, paper...

...He holds out the hope that by joining with labor and environmental struggles of communities elsewhere, the poor can win battles, rights, justice...