A Los Angeles Harbor Area muckraker, onetime City Council candidate and president of the Central San Pedro Neighborhood Council addresses the Orange County chapter of Americans United for Separation of Church and State on Saturday.
James Preston Allen, founding publisher of Random Lengths News, speaks on “What Does It Mean to Be a Patriot in the 21st Century?” The meeting is free to attend but seating is first come, first served.
Allen is a CityWatch Los Angeles contributor, California Courts Monitor guest columnist and author of Silence is Not Democracy: Don’t listen to that man with the white cap—he might say something that you agree with! He has been engaged in civic affairs for more than 35 years, having founded Random Lengths News in 1979 “as a counterbalance to the conservative, corporate-owned daily paper.” The name refers to the lumber that used to run through the port having come in “random lengths and widths.”
Allen says his paper is the only one that covers the racially diverse area where the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach come together, but he has not confined his reporting to strictly local issues. Here is what he wrote in “Across the Divide: The 2016 Presidential Race: A Choice of Democratic Socialism vs. Corporate Capitalism:”
Sadly, this is not the first time this country has faced off with its own nativist form of fascism. The American author Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) wrote It Can’t Happen Here in 1935, a novel about the election of a fascist to the American presidency. This was a controversial book at the time of its printing and was a cautionary tale in light of what was rising up in Germany and Italy at the time. It was a thinly veiled critique of American politics of the Depression era. It should be used today by history and English professors to explain Trump’s rise as a populist.
Doors to the Orange County chapter of Americans United for Separation of Church and State meeting open at 1:15 p.m. for socializing and snacks, with the program beginning a half hour later. It’s in the Community Room of the Irvine Ranch Water District—which does not support or endorse the cause, it only books the venue as a community service—at 15500 Sand Canyon Ave, Irvine. For more information, visit www.au-oc.org, call 714.299.4551 or email ma**@au***.org.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.