Vidal caught in power play
George Rush and Joanna Rush Molloy Star Talk
Article Last Updated: 07/15/2007 01:49:42 AM PDT
Monterey Herald, Monterey County, California
It's Chinatown, Vidal.
In a scary echo of the classic Roman Polanski film starring Jack Nicholson, L.A. Water & Power is messing with Gore Vidal's life.
The utility has come into the writer's Hollywood Hills home and shut down his solar power, forcing him back onto its electricity.
Vidal, who once called William F. Buckley Jr. a "crypto-Nazi," has never been shy about expressing his feelings, and he was true to form when he talked to Kasia Anderson online at Truthdig.
"They've torn everything up," Vidal said. "They went merrily around ripping wires out of the ground and pulling them out of the walls, without being invited in.
"None of the people they sent over to examine it knew how it worked. The inspectors came, and they didn't know one wire from the other."
What's more, said Vidal, "They tore out my elevator, which gets me up from the downstairs part. I'm a gimp."
Vidal had experts install solar panels on the 1920s-era house after a bad experience last year. "There was a total blackout, and the next thing I know, for eight days we were without power of any kind in the house. I was about to have a stroke; there was no air conditioning or anything else. So I went to a hotel and stayed there at huge expense for 10 days, maybe longer.
"I was, like everybody else, on 'the grid.' I never questioned it, never thought about it."
"They've torn everything up, (claiming) it's 'incorrectly done.'
"We did everything by the book to install, just
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to
transfer over from the grid, which uses up what's left of the oil in
the world, and we went to work to collect as much sunlight as we could."
It worked beautifully for two weeks, he tells Anderson, until Tuesday. "By the time I got up, they'd turned off everything, all the lights. ... I said, 'Why? They're working terribly well!' Well, there was no direct answer to that, except they wanted to!"
California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger might think about putting in a little call to execs at the city agency, who didn't return our calls. The respected Vidal, at 81, doesn't show any signs of keeping mum, and it doesn't bode well for Schwarzenegger's Million Solar Roofs initiative, which seeks to reduce the state's dependency on oil and coal by 2010.
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Following is a great interview which illustrates the problem of Hotlaws perfectly.
- Anderson: "The bottom line seems to be that the whole idea of harnessing the sun comes with red tape."
More on Vidal's ordeal; interview excerpt:
"And
so we tried to, because we were told, after the initial installation
had been made, that we must apply for inspection from the [DWP], which
has invented a lot of rules which don’t exist anywhere in the
Constitution, in the state of California’s laws, in any rulings by the
state Assembly. The whole government has been thrown out by this one
little bureau, sitting—cowering—over there in this great big building,
and legislating our water, our power. “We have our rulings,” they
say. Well, I’m sure you have; I’m sure you make 20 a day! And not
necessarily the rulings of the citizens of the state of California.
We’re not held by your rulings. We can be advised by them. We can be
protected by them, and we know that’s what you care the most about:
the well-being of the citizens of the state. You’re famous all over
the world! California cares. The municipality of California cares!
"Actually,
nobody cares about anything except keeping total control and making
sure that people, outsiders (even though I’ve been an insider in this
state since 1929), are not going to get away with anything. They’re
not going to be independent of the grid. The grid is holy. It drinks
water desperately, like somebody starving in Death Valley. And, I
shouldn’t think we were to be taken seriously on an important matter
like this, which involves everybody! Who owns the sun? Well, I don’t
think a little department strung up in this vast bureaucratic maze of
so many little departments (and big departments) has any particular
rights." - GV
