Memo 17: Loopholes
And we’re back! Yes, I did take some time off from the beginning of the month (read: the entire damn month) to get back into this Substack but didn’t everyone kinda mentally block out the past three weeks? I digress. Here I am!
Over the weekend, I… I am not too sure how to put this without sounding like a complete and utter idiot… but I refound Catalina Island? During a hike, I realized just how large that island is. For context, all of the islands in the Bay Area are relatively small so seeing the true size of Catalina really shocked the hell outta me. And naturally, this spark of interest sent me on a Wikipedia rabbit hole.
During said rabbit hole, I found out about the 1972 occupation of the Brown Berets in Avalon, the incorporated city on Catalina. This was my first time hearing about it, but I’m not an outlier — even the titles of articles about it call it forgotten. In August 1972, Brown Berets camped out on Catalina Island for three weeks, demanding that its almost 42,000 acres of undeveloped land be turned into housing.
As some background on the Brown Berets: this rights group was founded in 1967 by David Sanchez in East LA, as an alternative for young Chicanos who wanted to avoid the prevalent gang lifestyle. It grew over the years until Sanchez went to Catalina and saw how hard it was to live in affordable housing there. Inspired by the Occupation of Alcatraz a few years earlier, Sanchez also used the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo — the treaty that ended the war with Mexico in 1848 and gave the US land in the process — as proof that Catalina should belong to the people. Why? The Treaty never mentioned anything about Catalina Island.
This resulted in 26 Brown Berets camping out on high ground on the island for three weeks until they were escorted off the island by police peacefully, as they practiced nonviolence. While nothing happened to Catalina right afterward, in 1975 then-owner Philip Wrigley gave the Catalina Island Conservancy 90% of the island for nature. I would like to think he was too prideful to anything more revolutionary, but the guilt and truthfulness of the Brown Berets’ efforts got to him.
Calling it a wild, forgotten event is both understated and a disservice to the Brown Berets. On one hand, it’s easily an understatement because it’s a shame that an event like this was thrown out from history books. It does not receive enough attention that any event of its impactful kind should have, let alone it being cast aside because it was from proud Chicanos that disrupted a capitalist agenda. On the other hand, it’s a disservice in a way. Marginalized people have been pushing boundaries and disrupting unjust situations in many ways and many times, so treating this occupation as an unrealistic crazy thing takes away the fact that motivated everyday people, not superheroes or once-in-a-decade stars, can cause change.
But what I can say confidently is that like Sanchez, we should pay more attention to governmental legal documents — or really, just any big document that people rule their lives by¹ —and read them critically. It’s a little bonkers that we know a little to a decent amount about articles that we live under and don’t read the fine print, where most of the best (or worst) realizations are hidden. Sometimes, reading the tiny print doesn’t have to cause anything revolutionary; with some documents, everything we’ve synthesized about it before hits it on the nose. But reading a large work and coming up with your opinions firsthand is a crucial skill.
You may say, Cam! These are all old examples, and now with the internet, most suspicious lines in documents are snuffed out and made accessible for all to judge. To that, I give you a modern example on a silver platter: the Congress relief bill from December.
The Congress relief bill, while it included far less money than the American public should have received, also had a boatload of measures booted into its 5,593 pages. This is not a new practice, as it allows laws to slip into existence through the proverbial back door, but it’s nonetheless troubling. The measures included: illegal streaming of copyrighted material becoming a felony offense punishable by three to ten years in prison, establishing national standards for horse races and imposes anti-doping measures, and the “Clean Up the Code Act of 2019,” which removes criminal penalties for the misuse of certain copyrighted symbols like Smokey the Bear, the 4-H logo, and the coat of arms of the Swiss Confederation.
The craziest measure to me was the measure about the Dalai Lama. Called the Tibetan Policy and Support Act, the act updates its 2002 version and includes some basic-ish items like the State Department denying China any new consulates in the United States until a U.S. Consulate is established in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, and securing water security for Tibet. However, the craziest part comes about the Dalai Lama’s reincarnation, as that is a hot spot for China and Tibet.
Traditionally, the successor to the Dalai Lama is determined by a group of disciples close to the previous holder of the title but the Chinese government has indicated it may name its own Dalai Lama, in hopes of controlling his statements and teachings.² So in order to continue our feud with China, this new act provides sanctions on Chinese Communist Party officials if they attempt to name a successor to the Dalai Lama while urging international coordination to quash recognition of any Dalai Lama picked by China. All in the Congress relief bill.
There’s no simple, easy solution to these loopholes; as soon as one closes, 10 more open behind secret doors. That may sound depressing, but it doesn’t have to be. We may not know how exactly we need to go on to achieve the best parts of our unrealized efforts, but one of the first steps is having more heightened awareness towards yourself, others and loopholes like these. If we don’t find them, who will?
And because there is always more to consume, here are some LINKS from this past week:
The Ongoing Collapse of the World's Aquifers. If I didn’t include some slow-going environmental failing that is ignored, would this really be a Jouissance memo? Anyway, this is an especially important read for those in the LA area as it hits on the San Joaquin aquifer and how it can be infinitely worse on a global scale in the future.
Those Guillotines Are Awfully Close to Your Neck, which is both an alarming and silly little cultural trend! I enjoyed this piece a lot more than I expected, as it went deep into the history of the guillotine for capitalist means. Children played with guillotine toys as early as the 1790s to commemorate the death of Louis XVI? The more you know.
How Rio's Trans Community Defeated Right-Wing Leaders and Saved a Shelter. One of my favorite reads from this weekend! And one that I wish was longer, actually. There’s so much here to go into — from the political to the personal stories of those involved — I wanted more out of this article.
Breathing Life Into the Corpse Flower, an inquiry that combines in-depth scientific botanical knowledge and existentialism (or that was my morose read into it). Learning about how endangered plants are kept alive is something I should have known sooner, and it’s a bit of a kick to read about this plant that sets the bar so damn high for reproducing that it seems it has a death wish.
Here's How Time Works In 2021. When McSweeney’s hits good, it hits perfectly. Especially the line about how “tomorrow will never come” in 2021. Hits too close to home.
A really great example of this is the definition of “hell” in the Bible, as it’s been translated across time and space. One word that “hell” is translated from is Gehenna, which was a literal dumping place outside of Jerusalem. Of course, it is possible to interpret it as a symbolic physical place that also refers to an otherworldly hell, but it’s interesting to know where words in translations come from!
Get this: In 1995, the government kidnapped the second-highest Buddhist spiritual figure, the Panchen Lama, when he was 6. He and his family have not been seen since. (!!!)