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Religión, radicalismo y fantasía
Full text linkFil: Taylor, Barbara. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras; Argentina
Taylor, Barbara: Open door policy
No full textBarbara Taylor: Well, when I first came to City Hall to work, it was when George Moscone was first mayor. And I was a newbie, I wasn\u27t a very experienced reporter and being able to sit down and talk to a mayor was quite an experience for me. I was very young at the time and one of the things that struck me about him was his informality with reporters, how open he was. He had practically an open door policy, that I would be able to call, you know, just pick up the phone and call the press secretary. It was either Mel Wax(?) or Corey Bush or, you know, someone in in the press office and ask if I could come down and have a couple of minutes with mayor Moscone to talk about this or that, whatever the burning issue was at the moment. And invariably, they would say, ‘oh sure come on down’ and five minutes later I would be sitting down in the mayor\u27s office talking to him. If you want to, you know, roll forward about twenty five years, the chances of doing that with literally any of the preceding mayors, although Dianne Feinstein was pretty good, it was just, you know, it was just something you didn\u27t do. So he had this amazing open door policy. He was friendly, he was the kind of guy who didn\u27t, he didn\u27t have airs, he didn\u27t act like he was the mayor and so everybody should bow down to him and that he should be treated with a certain amount of decorum. He just acted like a normal person. And that was my beginning experience of having, you know, a personal encounter with the mayor so I just assumed that was how mayors were. Well, of course, over the years I came to find out that he was the exception, not the rule and that most of them were pretty standoffish. They didn\u27t have open door policies and they considered their time a heck of a lot more valuable than, you know, wasting it on a reporter who wanted a couple of quotes or to ask a couple of questions
Taylor, Barbara: Moscone and culturally diverse communities
No full textBarbara Taylor: And when you think of George Moscone, George Moscone was a liberal Democrat. He was also an Italian and the city had a very, very large Italian-American community that was politically very powerful. In fact, I would say, that the two most powerful communities where the Irish and the Italians. You know, now a lot of people might say it\u27s the gay community and it\u27s the Asian-American community, the Pacific Rim community, but that is so different than it was when George Moscone was mayor. And so the interesting thing is that he was an Italian-American, and a very proud one, and he was very involved in his community. And what a lot of people might not know is that most of the Italian-Americans were Republicans, and that it stood out, the fact that he was a Democrat. Most of his relatives were Republicans, but he was that, you know, the Democrat Moscone in the Moscone family in San Francisco. So, you know, he had those Italian ties and he had a lot of that support, but at the same time he was very interested in diversity in integrating the police department, integrating the fire department, and bringing other groups you know culturally and ethnically into these different aspects of city government where they had very little representation
Taylor, Barbara: Dan White\u27s Resignation
No full textBarbara Taylor: My recollection is the reason that Dan White resigned the Board of Supervisors was because at that time, there were two key things that are different than the way the board is run today. Well first, he was a firefighter and he had to quit his job so he lost his salary. The Board of Supervisors salary was what, seven thousand, nine thousand dollars a year? It was basically a stipend and even back in the late seventies, I don\u27t think you could raise a family on you about nine thousand dollars a year. So he was broke, he was under pressure, he\u27d had to give up his job as a firefighter, and at the same time he didn\u27t have good relations with the other members of the Board of Supervisors. He seemed to—it was like he ran for office, he\u27d never run for office before, he hadn\u27t really been involved in city hall politics. He might have been involved in neighborhood politics, but I don\u27t know the Dan White had ever shown his face in city hall before he walked in the door for his swearing in after he was elected. So he was very naïve, he was a Pollyanna, and I think it probably came as a shock to him how the how the world worked at city hall, and you didn\u27t just walk in and everybody do what you want. And instead I think that Dan White found himself at odds with the board over a number of key issues. Whether it was that the consent decree, or whether it was that the youth facility out in his neighborhood. There were a number of things that he just knocked heads with other board members and then that coupled with the fact that he was broke, and under stress, and under pressure, family pressure, financial pressure, he decided to resign
Taylor, Barbara: Moscone\u27s power as mayor
No full textBarbara Taylor: I felt that he was a pretty strong mayor. He did stand up to the Board of Supervisors on a lot of issues and that was why he had so much conflict with the Board of Supervisors. Now he also came from Sacramento, so he came from a very different environment. And I think it\u27s difficult for someone whose history has been as a legislator, even if originally they began their career at the Board of Supervisors, if they went to Sacramento and then they came back and they had to run a city that it would be kind of a rude awakening. It\u27s not the same being an executive and running a city than it is just introducing legislation and working it through committees and try to round up your votes. That is not, most of the time, at least what running a city is about. I mean ultimately, you have to have six votes on board supervisors if you\u27re going to do business. Eight votes if you\u27re going to pass a budget. Most of the time it\u27s just nuts and bolts of running a city and he seemed to be pretty competent at doing that. You know, he wasn\u27t in office that long, so I think, in that respect, the verdict is still out. He didn\u27t really have time to leave behind a legacy like the one that I think Willie Brown left behind, Dianne Feinstein left behind, by just certain things that they did. Also, and I think this is an important point, when he was mayor, the mayor was much stronger. There have been major charter changes since then that have deluded the power of the mayor\u27s office significantly. When he was mayor, there was no, for example, health commission. He and the chief administrative officer basically made decisions about the health department. Government has been entirely reorganized. Today on a lot of the big city commissions, half of the members are appointed by the mayor, the other half by the Board of Supervisors. That was simply unheard of when George Moscone was mayor. He was very, very powerful
Taylor, Barbara: Moscone\u27s unfortunate legacy
No full textBarbara Taylor: Well, of course, people will always remember him for the way for the way he died and I think that that\u27s very unfortunate. I do think that he tried to be a mayor for all the people, which I don\u27t think previous mayors necessarily had done. That he was the first mayor of who extensively reached out to all the communities in the city. He truly cared about diversity, he truly cared about how about bringing in minorities who had not been a part of city government previously, or if they had it been a very, very token way. And I think he was the first mayor of San Francisco that you could say he represented all elements of the community, you know, not just the ones that had traditionally been in power
Taylor, Barbara: Diversity of the police force
No full textBarbara Taylor: Well, you know, for the most part when George Moscone became mayor, the police department was truly in, you know, in the old sense the world, a ‘good old boy’ network. It was made up of Irish cops, Italian cops, not very many black cops, not very many women police officers; it was it was not diverse. And the black officers for justice filed a federal lawsuit that went on for a number of years and ultimately there was a decision that there had to be very active measures taken to integrate the police department. And that came along during George Moscone’s watch and resulted in new testing procedures, different promotion procedures, the city being put under this federal consent decree with an overseer who had to, you know, make sure that this was being done. And it caused a lot of dissension and you know even in the world, the cultural world and the diversity of San Francisco, and the power structure of San Francisco was very, very different then than it is now
Taylor, Barbara: Judging Moscone\u27s legacy
No full textBarbara Taylor: If you\u27re talking about the days after Dan White\u27s resignation that led up to the assassination of George Moscone, that was a terrible time in the city\u27s history. And I personally think that it\u27s really wrong, a mistake to take away anything, in terms of making a judgment about what kind of a person George Moscone was. I think that was entirely irrelevant that, you know, he has to be looked at in terms of his long political career, his personal life, what kind of a husband he was, what kind of a friend he was, and you know, what kind of a politician he was at City Hall. And what happened to him was so totally unexpected and, you know, no reasonable person would ever expect something like that. And in fact after working at City Hall as many years as I have, I look at what occurred during that meeting that George Moscone had with Dan White whatever happened, whatever was said, and it\u27s something that, in fact, happens around City Hall all the time. Not maybe every day of the week, but it happens frequently where politicians say one thing and do something else or intimate that they\u27re going to do one thing and then do something else. That is not unusual, that\u27s politics. And if anything, I think it says something—It says more about Dan White, that he would put whatever interpretation he did on whatever words were said and then draw a conclusion from that. Because anyone who is politically astute, and knows the way City Hall politics works, knows that people change their mind. They say one thing, they do something else. And you just take a couple weeks ago, we have a new mayor, Ed Lee. He is the mayor because one member of the Board of Supervisors, at the last minute, did something that he said he wasn\u27t going to do. He voted for Ed Lee instead of Michael Hennessey. It happens. You know, so I just, I\u27m getting a bit off touch, but I just think it\u27s such a bad thing to try to draw any conclusions about mayor Moscone’s character from that incident. You know, you just have to look at a much, much larger picture
Taylor, Barbara: Moscone administration and Dan White
No full textBarbara Taylor: In a nut shell, George Moscone and his administration handled Dan White\u27s resignation very poorly. After Dan White resigned, he had a change of heart, he wanted his job back, and went again, perhaps very naively, went to mayor Moscone and ask the mayor to give him his job back. We, of course, don\u27t know exactly what words were exchanged, but it appears that Dan White, for whatever reason, left that meeting thinking that he was going to get his job back, when in fact that wasn’t the case. And that led to the, you know, to the chain of events, the horrible chain of events that followed
Inspiring learning in galleries 02: enquire about learning in galleries
No full textThis publication summarises research into the learning benefits to children and young people of engaging with galleries, contemporary art and artists, carried out by galleries in partnership with universities since 2004 and is a valuable resource to inform practice and for advocacy
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