Election Eve

One day to go until the city election. We'll be back this evening with another trip to the mailbag.

In the meantime, we've been reflecting on the nature of blogging, the nature of news and the nature of memory. Certainly, traditional media performs a crucial function in a modern democracy. After all, bloggers like ourselves are hardly trained media professionals. But we do think that traditional media has, without meaning to, allowed the information they relay to become out of balance with the reality of the actual facts.

As we have seen in Claremont's recent history, when one side controls so many of the levers of power, controls the access to traditional media, creates a self-mythology--a narrative, those with no access must seek out alternative means of getting their interpretation of events out.

Where local institutions like the Claremont Courier or the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin fail is that they assume that the truth lies exactly in the middle of the two narratives. They don't take into account that in Claremont, the Preserve Claremont/Claremont 400 group has had near total control of city commissions, the city council, the school board, and such institutions as the Claremont Community Foundation, the League of Women Voters, the Chamber of Commerce, and others.

That control, coupled with a former city manager, Glenn Southard, who used press releases and city meetings as a kind of propaganda, allowed no room for alternate ideas to take root and flourish. This total information control translated roughly to total memory control. One group controlled what information was released and broadcast; that same group wrote the town's history (see Judy Wright's Claremont, A Pictorial History).

We think there is a need for an alternative narrative, one that gives voice to all those other views that have been too long ignored. We believe there is a market for those alternate views and that the "consensus"--those 5-0 council votes--really means an exclusion of dissent that in the past moved the council farther and farther out of step with the larger community, and farther out of touch with reality.

We believe the past few city council elections and the change in city management has been an inevitable reaction to the negative side of that "consensus" and that a dissent is a good and positive thing (see "Negative Capability*").

Claremont 400 candidates Linda Elderkin and Sam Pedroza have both indicated this is a "pivotal" election. The problem is they want to pivot 360 degrees back to the Southard days, to undo all the positive changes that our community has accomplished in the last two elections. That 71% vote for Measure S, for example, never would have taken place if the Claremont 400 had that yearned-for "consensus" on council. Dissent made Measure S a possibility. We believe pivoting back five years would be a tragic mistake.

Today, tomorrow, and in the future all we ask is that our town remember and honor the past--all of sides of it. Whatever the outcome of the election, the need for the rest of the story--the non-Claremont 400 story--will continue, and we will bring that to you.