Cognitive Dissonance—the Not-silent Killer of Young Kids

Mark Russell is a political satirist who, from his long-time vantage in Washington, D.C., has been well-known for his equal-opportunity spoofing of a variety of office-holders, ideologues, and demagogues throughout the wide-ranging panoply of political persuasions. Nattily attired—sporting his trademark bow tie and horn-rimmed glasses, and standing beside his star-spangled piano, intermittently turning to it to punctuate his jokes with a musical parody he would employ for further comedic jabs—he appeared for nearly 30 years on PBS television in a series of one-man comedy specials, which began in the mid 1970s.

In one of these shows, he appropriates the King James Bible’s version of the invocatory words for calling upon God—which are found in two of the Christian Gospels [

*36] [

*39]—in the opening of what is traditionally referred to as the Lord’s Prayer:

He thus parodies this ever so precious view within the liberal elite that Palo Alto is not just the citadel of the Western-Civilization power structure but is also its Mt. Olympus—their ideal home of the divine.

Palo Alto was established by Leland Stanford, one of the Big 4 (who preferred to call themselves the Associates), having made their hugest fortunes as railroad tycoons who controlled construction of the western portion of North America’s first transcontinental railroad. He founded it to be the hometown for a university that he and his wife started as a commemoration for their only child, who had recently died of typhoid fever. They built Leland Stanford Junior University on their country farm there (the school is still often referred to as “the farm”). [

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He’d likely chosen the spot largely because of its climate. (Another town close to it has large arches over some of the roads entering into it that read “Climate Best by Government Test”—a boast about a survey done many decades ago by the US Weather Bureau that found this to be the most temperate climate of any location in America.) The Coast Range is a key attribute that shelters this stretch along the San Francisco Bay from the Pacific Ocean and particularly from the summer fog that chills the City (and other towns on the coast side of the hills). And this low-lying mountain range lets just enough high cloud cover to pass over during the early hours of so many of those summer mornings to ward off the blazing temperatures that most of the nearby South Bay and East Bay suffer through.

Covering an entire tenth as much area as the rest of the town, it is 1,400 acres in size (400 acres bigger than Golden Gate Park in San Francisco [

*36] and over 550 acres larger than New York City’s Central Park [

*64]). For more than half a century since it opened, only those who live in Palo Alto were allowed to go into it—proof of residence would have to be shown to get in, with it even having been made a misdemeanor for anyone else to enter—and it was only when the ACLU recently sued the town (aiding the NAACP in claiming that this is unconstitutional) that Palo Alto ended this ban one month ago today [

*36], so as to quiet such a tawdry dinning fuss by those obstreperous underling malcontents.

Over the decades, there had been occasional efforts by groups of Palo Alto residents to end this exclusionary practice, but the scions of this highly cultured, sophisticated, and societally superior enclave always made certain that the ban on having to share the park with the inferior low-lifes from any other towns was strictly maintained. It was the only public park anywhere in California with this kind of restriction [

*36], but that had always made perfect sense to these aristocrats, because after all, this is the most patrician of communities anywhere on the planet.

Coming down those slopes of the Coast Range, San Francisquito Creek flows from southwest to northeast alongside the town and demarks its boundary to the west and the north. In the luxuriantly verdant environs across it to the west and northwest, lie some of the other communites that join Palo Alto in comprising Northern California’s wealthiest towns—Portola Valley, Woodside, Atherton.

There is a street going up the hill by this creek between Palo Alto and Menlo Park that has lent its name to an industry. Just as there is a street in New York City named Madison Avenue, where many agencies have traditionally been situated that are part of Madison Avenue, which has long been metonymical for the advertising industry, or as Savile Row is the street in London on which can be found many shops that are part of Savile Row, an age-old metonym for the men’s upscale tailoring industry, so too, on that street that runs along San Francisquito Creek and goes by the name of Sand Hill Road, are located many firms that are part of Sand Hill Road, a term of long standing for the high-tech venture capital and private equity industry. (It’s been noted that by the late 1990s, commercial real estate on Sand Hill Road was among the most expensive anywhere in the world, and that just in this last decade, it has remained the very most expensive in the US—higher even than on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue. [

*7])

Bucolically quaint pedestrian and bicycle bridges allow for strolling and riding across the lushly woodsy ravine that widens as San Francisquito Creek continues coursing further on between the residential neighborhoods of the similarly wooded Palo Alto and those of Menlo Park on the other side. The creek then wends to the east as it completes its way to the marshy sloughs and the waters of the bay.

The “murder capital” of the USA is a phrase that, by the late 1980s, had become a common moniker for the nation’s capital city—Washington, D.C. This distinction continued into the early ’90s—along with inner city blight, widespread collapse of a healthy middle class economy, pervasive gang activity, and rampant drug abuse, including among prominent city officials. [

*34]

Then in the early ’90s, Washington’s deadly distinction was surpassed by another community. To the north of Palo Alto, just across San Francisquito Creek’s final path to the Bay, sits East Palo Alto, a town with a long history of deep impoverishment. By 1992, with the nation’s highest per capita murder rate, it had now become the “murder capital” of America, similarly accompanied—or exacerbated—by increasing drug abuse, violent crime, and gang violence, and by rampant corruption within and misconduct by the Police Department that—as the County Board of Supervisors reports—has been well-documented. [

*16]