Scott Wiener; Weird Comix; Water Rights: Member Newsletter May 8, 2023

Ezra Klein of the New York Times is widely and rightly regarded as a preeminent Washington insider, but he is also very much a California boy. Born and raised in Irvine, schooled at UC Santa Cruz and UCLA, he has called San Francisco home for a number of years. As he gets ready to move to New York City, he is taking a last long look at his home state.

Below I preview and briefly excerpt a wide-ranging conversation between Klein and California state Sen. Scott Wiener, the firebrand who recently announced a possible run for US Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s seat. While their talk centers on the limits of classical liberal politics, the two Californians touch briefly and smartly on our state’s cultural legacy.

Wiener, a native of New Jersey, moved as a young man to San Francisco’s Castro District having grown up closeted in a hostile environment. “Something inside told me to go to San Francisco, like generations of queer people have gone to San Francisco,” he recalls.

Wiener was not surprised when the tech boom that transformed his adopted city economically did not change much politically. He says of the armies of workers that bus in and out of SF every day: “They could work in tech in a lot of places, and they chose San Francisco because of what it represents.”

“People come to California for freedom, and one of those freedoms is the freedom to draw. Our state’s central place in the wave of adult, autobiographical and underground comics can’t be overstated—especially in the unrestrained exuberance of cartooning’s heyday, roughly 1967 to 1993.”

According to a California law passed in 2012, “it is the established policy of the state that every human being has the right to safe, clean, affordable, and accessible water adequate for human consumption, cooking, and sanitary purposes.” For almost a million Californians, that right is being violated.