This soapbox….
The Jumping Off-Place: Politics, Labor, Culture, San Diego takes its name from Edmund Wilson’s famous essay about San Diego in the early 1930s that gave our fair city that moniker in noting its high suicide rate and observing that:
Here this people, so long told to "go West" to escape from poverty, ill health, maladjustment, industrialism and oppression, discover that, having come West, their problems and diseases still remain and that there is no further to go. Among the sand-colored power plants and hotels, the naval outfitters and waterside cafes, the old spread-roofed California houses with their fine close grain of gray or yellow clapboards—they come to the end of their resources in the empty California sun.
What we share with Wilson is both his attention to the harsher realities beneath the Chamber of Commerce boosterism that built San Diego and continues to dominate our city’s official version of itself, and his sympathy for those suffering from the deep inequities of American life, made harsher by the broken promise of “the empty California sun.” In that spirit, this space will seek to “comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable,” as the journalist Finley Peter Dunne put it.
Our goal is to feature voices intent on challenging the local and national hegemony during a time when market forces are destroying news outlets across the country and here in San Diego. Our politics are generally left, but not driven by sectarian or Democratic Party pieties. We see ourselves as committed to playing a small part in building a more progressive San Diego by supporting the labor, environmental, and other social justice movements of all stripes rather than elected politicians.
We are also interested in featuring the arts at a time when there are fewer venues that promote creative work than ever before. Thus, we aspire to regularly publish short fiction, poetry, book reviews, and writing about all the arts as much as possible and preferably with a San Diego/California focus.
The Jumping Off-Place is an all-volunteer effort that does not claim to play the role of a news outlet but hopes to fill some of the gaps left by the unfortunate decline of our major newspaper and other weekly print outlets. The voices published here are unpaid as are the editors, so whatever money we make from this endeavor will go to continuing to improve and expand our outlet.