• Mid-November, 1976 — At Shangri La studios in Malibu, which was once the setting for “Mr. Ed,” a TV show about a talking horse, the Band begins rehearsing with some of the musicians they’ve invited to join them for Thanksgiving in San Francisco. At the same time, they’re racing to finish a sixth and final record for Capitol. By fulfilling this contractual obligation they’ll prevent the record company from claiming a piece of The Last Waltz action.

Incredible physical stamina and a coke-supplying entourage help them pull it off. On Sunday, November 21, the Band’s unofficial manager, Larry Samuels, declares the Capitol album “finished” and everyone heads for the Miyako Hotel in San Francisco’s Japantown

• The wee, small hours of Tuesday morning — On stage at Winterland, the Band is soaring through “Who Do You Love?” behind Paul Butterfield’s harmonica. Film director Martin Scorsese is changing his mind about where one of his crew’s seven cameras should be placed. He is a small, bearded, very intense man in a black coat that comes almost to the floor. Looks like he stepped out of Dostoevsky.

Scorsese had been an assistant on the Woodstock film in 1966. He has taken time off from editing “New York, New York” because he and executive producer Jonathan Taplin think they can make “the best rock and roll movie ever” (Taplin’s phrase). Certainly the most thorough. Each of the seven camera operators has a script with the lyrics to every song, annotated line-by-line as to who will be soloing and what to shoot.

Bill Graham, looking relaxed strolls around with a clipboard, checking details, discussing logistics with Scorsese, rapping with aides and co-workers. In the course of an hour he confirms arrangements to repair a chipped statue (one of the props rented from the San Francisco Opera Company); provide music so that people arriving early Thursday don’t get too bored waiting outside; distribute posters at the end of the event; put up more bunting; obtain several full-length mirrors.

The impresario heads for a room backstage he calls “the Cocteau room” in honor of Robbie Robertson’s favorite filmmaker. Graham wants to make the room look “more surrealistic.” He had it painted stark white but that’s not enough. Now he’s got it: “Noses! I want noses sticking out from the wall. Lots of them. Nothing but noses.”

An aide nods as if this is a simple instruction, and heads off.

• Wednesday night — At Winterland, a final run-through for everybody except Bob Dylan. Joni Mitchell looks bored and asks, “What’s happening? Anybody having a party?” Nobody seems to know.

Emmett Grogan, a leader of the Diggers a decade earlier, has been busy lining up San Francisco poets to read their work at intermission. An acquaintance from the ‘60s gives Grogan some copies of a political newspaper. Grogan looks at the yellowed newsprint and asks, “This isn’t gonna bring me down, is it?”

Jonathan Taplin explains Last Waltz finances. He was the Band’s road manager, 1968-71, then produced “Mean Streets, “ Scorsese’s breakthrough film. Taplin says The Band has put up $300,000 of its own money to shoot the raw footage. “Ordinarily you would try to get a studio to front the money,” he says. “But in this case everyone is confident that the concert’s going to be sensational and that studio financing can be obtained on more favorable terms afterwards.” None of the musicians have been promised anything at this point. They’re involved because they like and respect the Band; their lives have intertwined.

The concert is a separate event, financially, bankrolled by Bill Graham. He is going into the red — even with tickets at $25 — because the production is so lavish. It will include a catered turkey dinner with a special spread available for vegetarians.

In Malibu, Bob Dylan’s film-making friends are worried that The Last Waltz film might somehow compete or conflict with a film version of The Rolling Thunder Revue. Dylan withholds permission for Scorsese to film him at Winterland. This is all very amicable, done through lawyers. In fact, Dylan’s lawyer and the Band’s lawyer are one and the same: David Braun, esq.

The night of the concert Dylan makes a last-minute decision to allow himself to be filmed, signaling Taplin with a nod just before taking the stage. But he wants to look at the footage of his performance before deciding whether it can or can’t be used.

So immediately after the concert David Braun walks into the film crew’s trailer and requests that the Dylan tapes be given him forthwith. What would happen, a crew member wonders, if Dylan ultimately decides he doesn’t want to appear in the Last Waltz film? Will David Braun call himself on the phone on behalf of his Band clients and yell, “Give us back those fucking tapes!”

• Winter ’76-’77 — The Band heads unobtrusively back to the recording studio to put the finishing touches on their finished record, “Islands,” for Capitol. They are perfectionists. “Can’t tolerate no slack,” as Levon Helm puts it.

United Artists outbids Warner Bros. for the rights to distribute The Last Waltz film. UA reimburses the Band for their original outlay and leases production facilities from MGM (now primarily a hotel company). Arrangements are made whereby all the performers will get equal shares of the film’s earnings. Bill Graham will get some points, too.

Robbie Robertson, who intends to get into filmmaking and wants to learn everything he can about the business, is sharing the producer’s job with Jonathan Taplin. They and Scorsese decide they want to make “more than a concert movie” (Taplin’s phrase). Taplin is frank about his motivation: “There seems to be a limit to what a concert film can gross these days. No more than five million.”

Scorsese takes time off from directing “Shine It On” to shoot seven “bridging scenes” in which the Band members reminisce about their 16 years on the road. The prospect of competing concert films recedes as Dylan augments his Rolling Thunder footage with diary-note scenes dealing with his disintegrating marriage.

• Summer ’77 — The other Band members are leaving decisions about The Last Waltz to Robertson. Levon Helm has been splitting his time between Woodstock and Santa Monica, cutting a record with Butterfield, Mac Rebinak (Dr. John), Fred Carter, Booker T., and “a few other people I’ve always wanted to work with.” It will be out this fall, probably with the title “Levon Helm and the RCO All-Stars.” Helm pronounces “our” as “R” and “CO” stands for “company.’

Helm says his life hasn’t changed that much since the Band said its goodbye to the road. He wants to tour this fall with the RCO All-Stars. “My life’s the same, it’s about the same. Playing music.” He says his goals in life are “gold and platinum records. Preferably platinum. And to keep playing.”

Rick Danko has a record coming out on Artists, to be called “What a Town” or “Rick Danko.” All the tunes are his own. Emmett Grogan wrote the lyrics on a few.

Garth Hudson is living on a farm in the hills above Malibu, writing music and designing new instruments. He has built a kind of piccolo/organ with a remarkable range. Yamaha has used some of his idea for their new organs and synthesizers.

Richard Manuel is living in Malibu, writing. “I hope he really gets back into it,” says John Simon, the arranger who served as “musical supervisor” for the Last Waltz. “Richard used to write beautiful songs in the early days. I wouldn’t say he was intimidated out of writing, but there was a dynamic to their personalities that resulted in Robbie writing moreand more of the Band’s material.” It follows that Robertson made the most money. “But don’t get the idea that anybody’s suffering,” Simon says. “They all have property in Woodstock, L.A., and Canada, and ownerships shares in recording studios in all those places.”

Coda: Levon Helm

Although best known as a drummer (and mandolin player), Levon Helm was also a terrific singer. His voice was both forceful and wry. He sang lead on the Band’s most southern-sounding songs — “Up on Cripple Creek,” “The Weight,” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” When Helm was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1998, he opted for removal of the tumor from his vocal cords and extensive radiation treatments, instead of surgery to remove his larynx.

In 2004, recovering his health but faced with devastating medical bills, he began staging “Midnight Rambles” — high-end jam sessions — at his barn in Woodstock, to which he invited the neighbors. They brought food and drink to share, and the income helped him hang onto his property. Word of the Rambles quickly spread, and musicians from New York City and beyond began making the scene. When Helm died last week, my friend Dave Berger sent this recollection:

Helm’s barn is a large, modern stone and wooden multi-level structure that’s equipped with recording facilities, a stage, balconies, and lounge areas. There were about 150 paying guests. Guests bring their own food and drink to share. Folding chairs are set up for the audience, but many sit on the floors, lean against walls, or stand for most of the evening.

Alexis P. Suter and her group and Little Sammy Davis and his group performed the night we went, for about an hour each. As I recall, Levon’s band consisted of 3 or 4 horns, 2 or 3 guitars, a keyboardist, a bassist and 3 or 4 backup singers. Many of the musicians were regulars in Conan O’Brien’s band. The house drummer played on the first couple of tunes, and then Levon Helm was introduced.

It was an incredible, nonstop, two-hour performance. Levon sang and played drums throughout, except for one or two tunes when he played mandolin. There was never a dull moment. As a drummer, he reminded me of the late Gary Chester: you always knew he was there. His playing was intentional, from the deep, full sound of his always-steady bass drum, to his subtle open fills, he was the constant that drove the rest of the music. Watching him play that evening, gloves on, was a joy.

In jazz, musicians who have never played together before and who may not speak the same language, are able to play and sound good together because they share a musical vocabulary. They know the chord changes to the blues and to a set of standards, and they’ve heard the classic versions of those tunes. That night at the Ramble you could see that a similar set of rules and understandings are shared by rock n’ roll musicians. The music was spontaneous, unique, and energizing.

And he would know — Brautigan went from shy, impoverished, unknown struggling writer to world-renowned wealthy counter-cultural icon and back in little more than a decade, and the “grubs and bugs” that came along with fame and fortune were his downfall. But for a time he was the most widely-read and beloved San Francisco author, a veritable literary rock star.

Many Brautigan readers have been waiting a long time for this biography — it’s been 28 years since his suicide in West Marin, and the book has been almost as long in the making. Brautigan fans should not be disappointed, as this is and will remain the definitive retelling of a writer whose storied and troubled life partly defined an era, for better and worse. With caveats, this book was still worth the wait.

“Jubilee Hitchhiker” is a massive work — over 800 pages of small print. Therein lies both the tome’s strengths and weaknesses. To get the latter out of the way first: Does Brautigan’s life warrant a biography longer than that of, say, his literary hero Ernest Hemingway? For some diehard Brautigan fans, yes. But Brautigan’s own books were brief, and his life was shorter and far less adventuresome and eventful than Hemingway’s. This means the attention to detail here must be extreme, and so it is. Hjortsberg, a writer who knew Brautigan and refers to himself in the third person here, interviewed over 150 people, read seemingly everything ever written about and by Brautigan, including much unpublished work and voluminous letters. He apparently found almost anybody who ever encountered Brautigan, and included most everything they told them in his manuscript — which he has said was twice as long as this hefty published volume. It’s hard to imagine what was omitted.

Putting everybody’s memories into a mostly chronological life story is a huge and worthy reconstructive effort, but could have benefitted from yet more attention and editing. Endless street addresses, flight numbers, dollar amounts, and retellings of extraneous events and details could well have been omitted. For example, recounting in detail the legendary Six Gallery poetry reading where Allen Ginsberg debuted Howl seems superfluous when that has been done so many times — especially as Brautigan had not even arrived in San Francisco yet. And so on.

Of course, as Hjortsberg admits, sometimes “the mists of time draw a confused curtain across the memories” of people who knew Brautigan — perhaps doubly so in the era and cohort this book chronicles. Minor errors like repeatedly referring to Ken Kesey as “Captain Trips” — that was Jerry Garcia, and the Dead’s famed communal Haight house was not at 810 Ashbury, either — or spelling Big Sur’s storied hangout Nepenthe “Nepenthy” or making simple geographical and spelling errors can be excused — but might throw question the accuracy of other elements herein. A more serious problem is that Hjortsberg was infected with the modern tendency for authors to project themselves into their subject’s minds, recreating thoughts and actions nobody else actually witnessed. Finally, there is also some cringingly dramatic writing; hoping to re-contact Brautigan’s biological father, he writes “I might as well have been a paving contractor on the highway to hell.”

But enough nitpicking, as Hjorstberg did find and interview that father, something nobody had ever done — Brautigan himself never knew him. Likewise for many others from Brautigan’s life. So once one gets past the needlessly lurid opening reconstruction of Brautigan’s body decaying for weeks, maggots, flies and all, his life story unfolds as a tragicomedy, and the book vividly evokes the heady 1960s and 1970s, especially in the Bay Area, as lived by a “deeply strange” literary icon.

Born in 1935, Brautigan endured a transient, lonely, impoverished Washington state childhood in a “uniquely unsentimental” family, producing an “extremely troubled young man” and culminating in a bout of primitive electroshock therapy. In 1956 he “completely turned his back on his own past” and escaped to San Francisco in time to catch both the fabled Beat and Hippie eras. He was not truly part of either, although he did run with the fabled Diggers in the Haight. For years, he’d already worked hard at writing with little success at publishing, other than poems in literary journals. But in San Francisco he continued working on his novels. With the completion of his fourth, The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966, he’d “capped one of the most remarkable creative streaks in American literature. Four utterly unique books (previous titles were A Confederate General from Big Sur, Trout Fishing in America, and In Watermelon Sugar—the latter glaringly missing from otherwise extensive bibliography) together with innumerable poems and a distinguished group of short stories.”

Then, he “did not write another novel for eight years.” But during those years, while he sold his blood to eat, his books found publishers, became best-sellers, and brought him fame and fortune. John Lennon was a big fan; Jack Nicholson wanted to make a film from his writing. Astronauts named a moon crater after a Brautigan character. Kurt Vonnegut called him a “hippie writer” who was “creating a cult of his own” and he drew large crowds to readings as his readership and income exploded. His books were both taught and banned in schools. He wrote more books in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but his work, which had always received widely divided opinions, increasingly fell from grace with both critics and readers. From this retelling, the money, groupies, failed obsessive relationships, and renown — he was featured in LIFE and People magazines, and hung out with film and literary stars — coupled with his alcoholism, derailed his fragile and insecure psyche and left him isolated and suicidal. It’s not a pretty story, especially once he moves to Montana and the drinking truly amplifies his insecurities, sexism, and even violent tendencies. It was very sad on many levels, as the last book he published in his lifetime, So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away, showed he still had his singular skills. But then he couldn’t even find a publisher for his next one. He was lost again, as in his childhood; “My life would be easier if I knew where I really lived,” he lamented late in his life. “Without knowing it, Brautigan had begun a long spiral into the vortex of oblivion,” Hjortsberg writes. His tragic end as told here appears almost preordained.

But fortunately, and most important, Brautigan left behind his unique body of whimsically humorous but often ominous writing, deceptively simple, infused by singular genius, lasting in allure for those who loved his work then or discover it now. So here, grubs, sow bugs, and all, is his story.

Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan, by William Hjortsberg. Counterpoint; 852 pages; $42.50.

The song is “Shepherds Of The Nation,” from a messy concept album the Kinks released way back in 1974 – the big year of Watergate, coincidentally or not. The album apparently did not do very well – it was melodramatic and out of step with the times. But I recall hearing this song as a teen and being a bit embarrassed by the words. And now, wow, the lyrics of the song are just uncannily spot-on.

The song itself can be heard online on youtube, just search for The Kinks and the title. But the full lyrics are below as well.

Listening to the song or reading the lyrics, it’s all too easy to imagine them being spoken by, say Rick Santorum. But not just him – any number of prominent candidates, feeling pressured to be the most “conservative” and taking pledges against abortion, taxes, contraception, science, “liberalism,” or what have you, thus relieving them of the need to think about complex issues and, they hope, winning votes from those also so inclined. Candidates Romney and Gingrich preach – boy, do they preach – about many things but “small government” is their main creed – unless they disagree with something you’re doing, in which case, watch out. Regarding Romney, I don’t know how tolerant mainstream Mormons are of the wide variety of American faiths, let alone sexual or other private proclivities, but I have my doubts, based at least part on some long-ago experiences being beat up in Utah for having long-ish hair. Does anybody really believe Newt Gingrich really believes anything other than what might get him another vote? Irrelevant crank Ron Paul, busted for racist and antisemitic statements in his past, adhering to Neanderthalian economic “theory,” and still anti-choice regarding abortion, has similar inconsistencies, but he doesn’t really matter in any way other than he might take some single-issue voters away from other hopeful candidates.

But Santorum, even as he falls by the wayside this campaign, will likely be back and is a symptom of something scary, and thus is likely the prime candidate for this theme song. He exhibits the hallmark of the fundamentalist, pronouncing others, such as Obama, as not “Christian” enough and excluding women from discussions of things affecting them. Being “holier than thou” is a Taliban hallmark. He feels he is waging “a spiritual war” to save our nation and that “Satan has his sights on the United States of America… Satan is attacking the great institutions of America, using those great vices of pride, vanity and sensuality as the root to attack all of the strong plants that has so deeply rooted in the American tradition.” Now, substitute “America” for “Satan” and call the USA any Islamic nation and put those words into the mouths of fundamentalist Islamic figures, such as those in the Taliban, and voila – New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd is proven correct when she labels Santorum a “small-town mullah” (and, he was called “Senator Sanitarium” on The Sopranos – no wonder that show was so revered). He cultivates a blue-collar persona, affecting cowboy boots, and says “with me, what you see is what you get” – while enjoying a seven-figure income, and preaching “buy American” while driving an Audi. And he earned his notorious Google search problem by having a filthy mind, comparing homosexuality to bestiality. All the hypocrisy there is just too thick; such “Christians” seem too comfortable cherry-picking their Biblical references, conveniently ignoring such fundamentals as “Judge not” (or, for that matter, “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God”).

Remember the “American Taliban” – the befuddled Marin youngster who got caught up in crazy ideology and thus big trouble? He’s a poor piker compared to these politicos, who are no less ideologically-bound but want to rule the nation, maybe the world, with their own version of “The Truth.”

So here is their theme song – it proves that Kinks headman Ray Davies is, or at least was, indeed some sort of prescient genius, as many have held for decades but I did not quite realize until now. I wouldn’t really recommend the whole album – they had a string of true classics before that one. But warning, this tune may stick in your head – although hopefully not in our laws:

Ray Davies and The Kinks, 1974

Shepherds of the Nation

by Steve Heilig

We are the new centurians.

 Shepherds of the Nation.

 We’ll keep on our guard

 For sin and degradation.

 We are the national guard

 Against filth and depravity,

 Perversion and vulgarity,

 Homosexuality.

 Keep it clean.

Down with nudity,

 Breasts that are bare and pubic hair.

 We are here to cleanse humanity

 From the man in the raincoat’s

Pale faced glare.

 So sodomites beware.

We are the new centurians,

 Shepherds of the Nation.

 We’ll keep on our guard 

For sin and degradation.

 We are the national, guard 

Against filth and depravity,

 Perversion and vulgarity,

 Homosexuality.

 Keep it clean.

I visualize a day when people will be free

 From evils like perversion and pornography.

 We’ll cast out Satan and we’ll set the sinners free,

 So people of the nation unite.

 Put all the pervs in jail,

 Bring back the birch, and the cat of nine tails.

Bring back corporal punishment

 Bring back the stocks

 And the axeman’s block.

 Let righteousness prevail.

 Down with nudity and hard core magazines.

 We’ll bring religion back

 And keep our country clean.

 Keep it clean.

Down with sex and sin,

 Down with pot, heroin.

 Down with pornography,

 Down with lust.

 Down with vice lechery and debauchery.

We are the new centurians

Shepherds of the Nation.

 We’ll keep on our guard

 For sin and degradation.

 We are the national guard

 Against filth and depravity.

 Perversion and vulgarity,

 Homosexuality.

 Keep it clean.

National Public Radio.

National Pay or Play Radio.

Spring Pledge Drive, 2012.

Hosts beg and cajole on air hour after hour, day after day for money.

They creatively and with cool music in the background alternately shame and praise listeners to pony up part of the paycheck.

And promise membership cards, mugs, and messenger bags in return.

NPR is your radio station.

Send money; get “unbiased” reporting.

Send money; hear the views “of all sides.”

According to Gabriel Spitzer.

And Melba Lara.

And Scott Simon. Host of Weekend Edition. Saturday.

Simon supported the war in Afghanistan.

Simon: “It seems to me that in confronting the forces that attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, American pacifists have no sane alternative now but to support the war. I don’t consider this reprisal or revenge, but self-defense: protecting the world from further attacks by destroying those who would launch them.”

Simon says. Sir, yes, sir.

Simon’s salary: $300,648.

Biased.

Steve Inskeep. “My job is to bring an unvarnished view of what’s happening around the world every day…”

The tone of Inskeep’s voice changes when he interviews Palestinians, Pakistanis, and Iranians vs. Israelis, Saudi’s, CEOs, and US government officials.

Hostile, disbelieving, aggressive for the former.

Cordial, obsequious, passive for the latter.

Inskeep’s salary: $331,241.

Biased.

I admit I listen and I don’t pay.

Because NPR doesn’t air the views of all sides.

All things are not considered.

The so-called “experts” NPR interviews are pro-government, pro-war, and promote the ideas of right-wing think tanks. A faction of former national security advisors, defense department officials, ambassadors, ex-pentagon generals, and military commanders.

Inside the DC beltway.

The government to K-street, to think tank, to NPR pipeline.

Those are the opinions and views heard in the vast majority of stories.

I know because after stories air, I google the website the expert represents.

The websites use words like: nonpartisan, principled, independent, strong, pragmatic, quality, benchmarking, innovative, strategic, impact.

Distinguished, deep thinkers thinking about good governance, rule of law, nuclear proliferation, counterterrorism, cybersecurity, 21st century defense, metrics, kinetics, energy security, failed states, nation building, geoeconomics, transparency, emerging markets, saving behavior, managing global order.

Like the Brookings Institution.

An NPR story titled: Technological Innovations Help Dictators See All.

Weekend Edition host Rachel Martin. Sunday. She interviewed an expert.

John Villasenor. Senior Fellow.

Brookings Institution.

Martin asks: “Give us some real-world examples. How could this play out in a country like Syria?”

Villasenor: “Well, in countries like Syria, there’s no reason to expect that governments won’t take advantage of every possible technological tool at their disposal to monitor their citizenry. Smartphones, and the apps that run on smartphones, very often track location in an authoritarian country.”

C’mon Rachel! Syria?

How many Syrians do you think own Smartphones?

How many Americans do you think own Smartphones?

The American surveillance state intercepts and stores 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications every day!

Why not talk about that?

They didn’t talk about that.

An NPR story titled: As Drones Evolve, More Countries Want Their Own.

Talk of the Nation host Neal Conan interviewed an expert.

John Villasenor.

The Brookings Institution Senior Fellow:

“And so, you know, unfortunately we have a long history of machines essentially engaging in killing, and so I think when people are designing – figuring out how to use drones, we have to keep in mind that, you know, there’s already been a precedent of these things and try to improve upon that.”

You lost me. Precedent? Improve on what?

Villasenor didn’t mention that American drones have killed hundreds of civilians in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Conan doesn’t ask.

For experts like Villasenor, civilian deaths are unfortunate but inevitable collateral damage in the war on terror.

I think they’re crimes against humanity.

Drone attacks are remote control terrorism.

That is my opinion.

But I’m no expert.

And NPR doesn’t want to hear my side.

Council on Foreign Relations.

An NPR story titled: Obama sends 30,000 More Troops to Afghanistan.

All Things Considered host Michele Norris interviewed an expert.

Max Boot is the “Jeane  J. Kirkpatrick” Senior Fellow for

National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Norris: “…based on what you heard tonight, do you think the president went far enough?”

Boot: “I mean, the parts that I really liked and I thought were terrific were when he talked about that we have a vital national interest in Afghanistan. We have to be there to prevent a cancer from, once again, spreading throughout that country.”

The US military counterinsurgency won’t let cancer metastasize in Afghanistan.

But the troops can’t save everyone. Millions of Afghans are at the end stage.

Of the “Great Game.”

There is no morphine to kill the pain.

An article by Max Boot on the recent clashes in Afghanistan over the burning of Qurans.

Title: Afghans Don’t Hate Americans.

The Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow:

“Many Americans seem to be saying that if the Afghan people don’t want us there, why should we stay? That’s dubious logic because we are not in Afghanistan as a favor to the Afghan people. We are there to protect our own self-interest in not having their territory once again become a haven for al-Qaida.”

I think the American people are right.

The US military shouldn’t stay in Afghanistan.

That’s not dubious logic.

It’s smart logic.

I think Afghans hate the troops for occupying their country and killing their people.

I can understand that. I would, too.

I don’t believe Afghans hate all Americans.

Just some.

Like Max Boot and other Senior Fellows at right-wing think tanks.

Who want to continue the war, occupation, targeted assassinations, sanctions, night raids, kill-capture operations, and drone strikes.

But I’m no expert. Nor are the American people.

And NPR doesn’t want to hear our views.

We didn’t write two books about war like Boot did:

War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today.

The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power.

Check out the search engine for stories at NPR’s website.

Search for the following: American Enterprise Institute, Brookings Institution, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Center for a New American Security, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Council on Foreign Relations, Royal United Services Institute.

A ton of hits.

A ton of expert opinion and analysis of the world.

You’ll be amazed.

Or maybe you won’t.

NPR.

The voices and views of one side.

Biased.

I listen, but I won’t pay.

Helen Redmond is an independent journalist. She writes about health care and the international war on drugs. She can be reached at redmondmadrid@yahoo.com.

“Conservatives” seized on the issue as a good wedge to attack Obama on many fronts, and hoped that it would somehow awaken some version of a moral majority to political action. Yet almost all women, including Catholics, ignore their putative religious leaders on this issue, and always have — when they have a choice. In letters and online comments, the most incisive perspectives seem to come mostly from women — political leaders, doctors, nurses, social workers, and just plain folks. The New York Times editors noted that Catholic authorities were trying to have it both ways, claiming all the special financial privileges of a church but wanting to ignore any strings that might be attached, however compassionate those might be. Others observed that behind this debate was specter of abortion politics — even though the one proven way to reduce abortions is to make contraception as easily available as possible.

Amongst politicos, the gender split seemed to hold true as well. Three female senators wrote to the Wall Street Journal defending the contraceptive mandate. Some female politicians even felt compelled to boycott the male-dominated House hearing on the topic. In the GOP candidate’s race, Romney sought whatever position he could sell to the most people, Santorum at least already opposes contraception, not surprising for a guy who thinks women working is a radical feminist plot. Irrelevant crank Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich were aptly ignored. Kris Long, a nurse writing in the New York Times perhaps had it best: “As a former employee of a Catholic-run hospital, I find it appalling that the party of ‘individual rights’ would stand up for a religious bias rather than for the non-Catholic employees who are deprived of the right to choose health insurance commensurate with the private needs and beliefs. Why should I not be allowed birth control through my insurance because my boss has a problem with it?”

Strangely enough, organized medical voices have been muted in this heated debate, other than some letters from doctors mostly in support of a mandate. But the idea for a contraceptive mandate did not spring anew out of the nefarious White House health reform plan. It is an old idea, long supported among health care policy wonks and, last summer, given strong endorsement by the highest medical authority in the land, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. Their report, “Clinical Preventive Services for Women: Closing the Gaps,” focused on preventive care for women, including but not limited to contraception. In medical circles it was hardly controversial and seemed to be greeted in the clinical trenches with an “OK, now make it happen” sentiment, as is often the case with rational, evidence-based medical recommendations.

Given that, and sensing that the IOM recommendations might be more controversial in non-scientific arenas, I thought it might be good to have a strong statement of support from the medical organizations I work with, and drafted the statement below for the San Francisco Medical Society’s policymaking body:

CONTRACEPTION AS A FULLY-COVERED HEALTH INSURANCE BENEFIT

San Francisco Medical Society

Whereas, the United States Institute of Medicine in July 2011 strongly recommended that “the full range of FDA-approved contraceptive methods, sterilization procedures, and patient education and counseling for all women with reproductive capacity” be a fully covered benefit of all health insurance plans; and

Whereas, the costs of contraception have long been identified as a barrier to many women’s optimal use of contraception, with negative impacts on their health and in terms of unwanted pregnancies, as well as discriminatory implications; and

Whereas, The Federal administration has just mandated that contraception be a covered benefit, but health insurance industry representatives have voiced their opposition to this measure and might try to repeal it; now be it

RESOLVED: That the CMA supports the coverage, without co-payments, of all FDA-approved contraception methods as a mandated health benefit of all health plans.

True to form, this statement was noncontroversial among the 20-plus physicians of various specialties who reviewed it and three physicians signed on as co-authors — all of them women (I am omitting their names here to protect them from the scary minority), but we could have added men as well. The statement then went to the annual policy-making meeting of the California Medical Association — a much larger and often more conservative bunch, made up of hundreds of doctors from all over the state. We thought there might be some opposition, but no, in the open debate, the CMA physicians even strengthened the final statement to include voluntary sterilization. Thus, here is the nation’s largest state medical association’s concise position on this matter:

RESOLVED: That the California Medical Association supports the coverage, without co-payments, of all FDA-approved contraception methods and sterilization as a mandated health benefit of all health plans.

— Simple, direct, and medically correct, regarding a private medical matter between women and their physicians. As for the rest of those pundits weighing in, mostly male and including religious figures and politicians, I can’t help but be again reminded of what pioneering lawyer and yes, feminist Florynce Kennedy once quipped, “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.”

I also can’t help but note that around the same time as all this hoopla, a report from the widely-respected group Save the Children confirmed what has long been known — one out of four children already here on this planet are malnourished, and many of them are starving to death around the world, at a rate of one every five minutes. The two issues are related, most would agree. I respectfully wonder if the church and political leaders opposed to contraception could meditate on that ongoing tragedy for a moment, and instead of fulminating against one of the only solutions we have, devote their time and energy towards alleviating this ongoing tragedy of suffering in the world. And perhaps they could listen to what doctors think as well. I won’t hold my breath.

It is important to have a general familiarity with mortgage securitization in order to understand the foreclosure process. Securitization involves a series of conveyances of the note evidencing the residential loan and assignment of the mortgage or trust deed securing it. Therefore, chain of title and beneficial interest issues frequently turn on the securitization trajectories.

Securitization is the process pooling loans into “mortgage-backed securities” or “MBS” for sale to investors. MBS is an investment instrument backed by an undivided interest in a pool of mortgages or trust deeds. Income from the underlying mortgages is used to pay interest and principal on the securities. Figure A below is a simplified schematic depicting the general securitization process and some of the parties involved.

The process begins with Originators, which are the lenders (such as banks or finance companies) that initially make the loans to homeowners. Sponsor/Sellers (or “sponsors”) purchase these loans from one or more Originators to form the pool of assets to be securitized. (Most large financial institutions are both Originators and Sponsor/Sellers.) A Depositor creates a Securitization Trust, a special-purpose entity, for the securitized transaction. The depositor acquires the pooled assets from the Sponsor/Seller and in turn deposits them into the Securitization Trust. An Issuer acquires the Securitization Trust and issues certificates to eventually be sold to investors. However, the Issuer does not directly offer the certificates for sale to the investors. Instead, the Issuer conveys the certificate to the Depositor in exchange for the pooled assets. An Underwriter, usually an investment bank, purchases all of the certificates from the Depositor with the responsibility of offering to them for sale to the ultimate investors.

What is first important to understand is that to effect the securitization process both the note and trust deed (the security interest) must be assigned from the Originator to the Sponsor/Seller, then from the Sponsor/Seller to the Depositor and, finally, from the Depositor to the Securitization Trust. Each assignee, up until it makes an assignment to the next party along the chain of title, is the beneficiary under the trust deed. There is a break in this chain of title where an assignment is not made or is otherwise invalid.

Also worth noting is that almost all Securitization Trusts elect to be treated as “Real Estate Mortgage Investment Trusts” or “REMICS” pursuant to the rules and regulations of Sections 860A-F of the Internal Revenue Code (“IRC”). Consequently, a Securitization Trust must adhere to certain strict and absolute requirements involving transfers of assets into the trust. The IRC 860 outlines these requirements, which include a condition that all loans that are stated to be in the REMIC trust must be acquired on the startup day of the trust or within three months thereafter. Any other contributions to the REMIC after the startup date or the subsequent 90-day window are treated as a “prohibited transaction.” A prohibited transaction is catastrophic to a Securitization Trust as it subjects the entire cash flows of the trust to a minimum 100% tax. For this reason, all parties to a Securitization Trust must strictly adhere to the rules of the trust’s Pooling and Servicing Agreement and the Mortgage Loan Purchase Agreement, especially the guidelines regarding conveyances (and assignments) of the assets.

Politically correct language is not always what it purports to be. “Retarded” becomes “mentally challenged,” “crippled” becomes “differently abled.” From a purely linguistic viewpoint, this is awkward, as well as disingenuous. One might easily picture some smirking wise guy: “The kid was, uh, mentally challenged. Just sayin’.” My first exposure to political correctness was in Nashville, where a babysitter declared that she preferred the term “small persons” to “children” or “kids.”

“America’s Cup.” It has an odd ring to it. It’s not a familiar sports appellation like the World Series of baseball, the Superbowl of football, World Cup of soccer, or even the Stanley Cup of hockey. That’s because “America’s Cup” is a trophy passed back and forth between private yacht clubs inhabited by wealthy people. The Cup originated in an 1851 race staged by English blue bloods and American robber barons who belonged to exclusive all-white yacht clubs. The yacht clubs became the enabling organizations for the wealthy to race their boat toys against each other. Naturally, as a class that relies on the hard work of others to produce wealth for itself, the hard work of the actual racing of the boat toys was done by hired hands. No one expected Lord Bob or Mister Monopoly to get out there on the deck and take in sail.

From the very beginning, America’s Cup was inextricably tied to that rogues gallery of sociopaths who amassed vast fortunes from the exploitation of workers and resources while enjoying the protection of the politicians they bought and sold like stocks. JP Morgan. Vanderbilt. Rockefeller. Names that live in infamy in the memory of anyone with a conscience. The tricked-out sailing vessels they commissioned were merely extensions of their insatiable egos. They also collected racehorses, governors, and mansions (one of Vanderbilt’s was aptly called “Idle Hours”), as their wives collected furs, servants and diamond-studded collars for their dogs. Mark Twain dubbed the period the “Gilded Age,” because its thin veneer of plating was not thick enough to conceal the prevalence of avarice and corruption underneath.

By the end of the 20th century, the Cup races, which had stumbled through the century with as much as 18-year gaps between events, suddenly expanded into regular matches and rematches between the ever-private yacht clubs (most of the clubs are still called the “royal” this or that) and added venues like San Diego, Auckland and Valencia. With the phenomenal growth of cable television and its voracious need for 24 hours of sports, even rich people’s sail boats attracted an audience, but it was still nowhere near a Sunday morning NFL game. The game changer happened when Larry Ellison, a billionaire poster boy for the One Percenters, sponsored a team that won the 33rd Cup in Valencia.

Flush from his victory, Ellison called up San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and said something like: “I’m the sixth-richest man in the world. I’ll fix up some of your piers, race my boats, and when the race is over, I’ll keep some of the waterfront. Sound like a deal?” (Actually, the proposal was similar to the late Warren Hellman’s music festival deal in which the City gave him Golden Gate Park to indulge his banjo-playing hobby. The big difference is that Hellman didn’t get to keep part of the Park at the end of his festival.)

In his waning months as mayor, Newsom — ever the errand boy for the super rich — cobbled together a committee to facilitate corporate funding for the project and move the sweetheart agreement along. The America’s Cup Organizing Committee (ACOC) included all the Usual Suspects in the City’s power elite: vulture capitalists like Tom Perkins and Hellman; denizens of the Downtown Gang like real estate predator Tom Coates, who had contributed $1 million to the statewide initiative to eliminate rent control; the Pacific Heights layabout, Dede Wilsey, who ironically coughed up five grand to help pass Newsom’s anti-homeless no-sitting/no-laying on the sidewalk ordinance; Old Retainers like George Shultz, whose questionable achievements include Bechtel, the Iran-Contra scandal, and the discredited Committee for the Liberation of Iraq; Bob Fisher, whose retail giant GAP was built on sweatshop sweat, and reps from super corps like Wells Fargo and AT&T.

Honorary political seats were given to perennial incumbents Dianne Feinstein and Nancy Pelosi, whose accomplishments include enriching themselves in office, which is a common activity in Washington. For Ellison, Feinstein delivered the America’s Cup Act of 2011 — signed last November by President Obama — which waived laws which prohibited foreign vessels to operate in American waters. Pelosi, who was Speaker of the House during the Great Wall Street Bailout, is no stranger to privatizing property that belongs to the public. She participated in the process that gave away San Francisco’s Presidio several years ago.

So, what does the non-profit (ha-ha-ha up your sleeve) ACOC do with the funding it raises? Well, it funnels it to Larry Ellison’s private management team, the America’s Cup Event Authority. The ACEA is the vehicle through which the One Percenters pocket financial rights to a large chunk of San Francisco’s extremely lucrative waterfront properties. In return for Ellison’s chump-change makeover of some of the waterfront for his event, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, the latest version of the Host City Agreement gives the ACEA Seawall Lot 330 and “the rights to leases of at least 10 years and rent credit on four piers depending on the money it spends improving port infrastructure.” For a minimum $55 million infrastructure investment by the ACEA, Ellison gets development rights and a 66-year-rent-free lease on Piers 30-32, and if he spends a little more pocket change, he gets reimbursement “in the form of bond proceeds, then credit to lease Piers 26, 28, and, ultimately, 29, according to a draft of the deal.”

Already, the vultures are descending. Last month, JPMorgan Asset Management (sound familiar?) gobbled up a 902,000 square foot complex in China Basin Landing for $415 million. (Those taxpayer-funded bailouts came in handy in the world of the idle rich.)

Oh, but America’s Cup will provide jobs, the hucksters proclaim loudly. And tourists! Well, we’ve all heard that one before. What’s new is the hilarious claim that San Francisco needs an obscure boat race to attract tourists during the summer.

The Panama Pacific Exposition of 1915 also promised “thousands” of jobs in San Francisco, some of which actually materialized. For those workers who were left out of this capitalist bonanza, Joe Hill, the immortal IWW songwriter, penned these words to the tune of “It’s A Long Way To Tipperary.”

Bill Brown came a thousand miles to work on Frisco Fair.

All the papers said a million men were wanted there.

Bill Brown hung around and asked for work three times a day,

Til finally he went busted flat, then he did sadly say,

It’s a long way down to the soupline,

It’s a long way to go.

It’s a long way down to the soupline

. And the soup is weak I know.

Goodbye, good old pork chops,

Farewell beefsteak rare,

It’s a long way down to the soupline,

But my soup is there.

As the recession deepens for the 99%, the souplines are growing longer in the City of Saint Francis. The Human Services Agency reports that 33,798 residents receive food stamps, up 61% from two years ago. Housing foreclosures are averaging 3,000 a year over the past four years according to Realtytrac, and there are nearly 7,000 homeless men, women and children living in the city. San Francisco’s ratio of homeless people to the general population is higher than that of New York or Chicago. (Don’t worry, America’s Cup patrons, the SFPD will sweep those bothersome people away before your boat toys arrive, just like they did for Mayor Feinstein for her party’s national convention in 1984.)

In the City of Saint Francis, over 100,000 people live in the government’s definition of poverty, which is a basic subsistence level living. According to the Center for Community Economic Development, “to meet the basic expenses for a family of three, one would need to work more than 3 full-time minimum wage jobs.” I suppose the whole family could work full time bussing tables at minimum wage for the gentry eating $25 sandwiches on Ellison’s pretty new waterfront and maybe the child — school? what school? — could do a little overtime to meet the extra expenses.

So, San Francisco’s inestimably expensive waterfront is up for sale cheap to the One Percenters, yet another welfare program for the super rich. What do the people of San Francisco get? Not a single buck in the deal for the 99%. Not even four-bits for affordable housing. Not even two-bits for schools or libraries. Not even a dime for healthcare. Not even a nickel for someone living on the streets.

This is the waterfront of the legendary 1934 Strike which changed American labor history. This was the Strike where workers bravely stood up to the One Percent’s strike-breakers, who were backed up by the police and the National Guard. This was the Strike that became the General Strike after the SFPD shot to death two strikers, Nick Bordoise and Howard Sperry. This was the Strike that brought decent wages and working conditions to millions of workers over the following half century.

If logic prevailed, the proper site for America’s Cup would be the Cayman Islands, where the idle rich hide their money to avoid taxes. Switzerland would be another likely candidate, but, unfortunately, it doesn’t have a coastline. So, the boat toys of the One Percenters will probably sail in San Francisco Bay because the local political spine usually withers when it comes face to face with Big Money. And, at that point, the One Percenters can say about the rest of us, “let them eat yachts.”

Don Santina is a cultural historian whose grandfather, Humphrey O’Leary, was a participant in the 1934 General Strike. He can be reached at lindey89@aol.com.

But the national sport of New Zealand is rugby, and the Super Bowl is not an event that many locals make bowls of guacamole and invite friends over for. It sounds like football fans in Kiwi land could be hard-pressed to find venues showing the match. In the seaside town of Kaikoura, one bartender told me he didn’t air the game and said I probably was the only person in town looking to watch the Super Bowl. The bar manager at Strawberry Tree, a worn and salty old watering hole on Kaikoura’s main and only drag, said that American football is too slow-paced to watch on TV.

“Rugby is 80 minutes nonstop,” said Stephen Horton, who also plays lock and open-side on Kaikoura’s regional team. “And in football, you have two lines of players that switch at every play, right?”

Right — defense and offense. So, what are you saying, I asked Stephen — that football players are padded, coddled softies? Do you think they’re less durable than rugby players?

“Oh, yeah!” he laughed. “Those guys wouldn’t last 80 minutes in a rugby match!”

Andrew and I raised our beers to that, noting to Stephen that the big-bellied beasts called linemen who may, by some stroke of chance, find the ball in their hands and run it in for an 80-yard touchdown can require oxygen masks in order to recover. This got Stephen and another Kiwi at the bar laughing — and certainly didn’t win toughness points for American footballers.

And so our conversation quickly took the form of one of the endless topics in sports talk: Are rugby players as tough as football players? Consider this quote I found recently on an online discussion: “NFL players are bigger, stonger (sic), faster. Almost all of them have college educations. The average NFL player could pick up the average Super 14 player, turn him upside down, and shake him like a piggy bank.”

But Stephen, like many New Zealanders, feels otherwise. “I definitely think rugby is harder,” he said, “but football looks more fun. You wear all that padding and can hit each other as hard as you want. You get hurt in rugby. I’ve had three broken collar bones and been knocked out three times.”

Rugby players are trained gentlemen, too. In New Zealand, they start playing at as young as four years of age, and even in adult leagues, swearing is forbidden during practice and “joking around,” Stephen explained, is curtailed by the coaches. Nor do players perform sometimes classless celebrations after scores or victories, as we see in the NFL.

Later in the week, in Blenheim, I stopped at the Moa Brewing Company for a beer — and to egg on more conversation. Here I met Michael Miller, an American living in New Zealand and working with the brewery. In eight months here Michael has picked up on the subtleties of rugby that American football lacks. “I don’t mean to be derogatory toward anyone, but rugby is more intellectual,” he said, explaining that, since they lack protective gear, the players must combat each other with exceptional technique. He likens the sport to “guerrilla warfare,” whereas the face-off-and-charge approach of the NFL is more “like Civil War” battle style. “Rugby can also be quite brutal,” Michael said, “but it’s also more beautiful and elegant.” He noted that rugby players must be skilled in tackling, running and handling the ball — all aspects of the game — whereas football players are specialized to certain techniques, making them less rounded as tactical athletes.

Having seen both games up close, Michael also feels that American football, much more than rugby, “has been evolved for commercialization and television.” Which explains the three-hour games, endless breaks and timeouts and the huge advertising campaigns that climax on Super Bowl day.

Congratulations to Coach John Toohey and his team. They finished second in the league standings by a heartbeat to a fine Point Arena team. The highest awards went to the champs, the fog eaters. MVP Defense: linebacker Dylan Johnson; MVP Offense: running back Harlan Bailey.

Coach Toohey’s Panther team had the best passing attack I have seen in the league in a long time. Mezzanatto was an excellent passer and all ‘round quarterback, but the top players are all “saying goodbye” senior players.

But, Pop Warner Coach Tony Pardini is doing a fine job coaching the local Pop Warner kids. He not only teaches his new players the basics of playing football, but also to enjoy the game, so it will be fun to see the Panthers in the 2012 Season.

NFL 49ers & MVP Awards. 

SF 49er’s Head Coach Jim Harbaugh won the Coach of the Year in his first season in the NFL. Quarterback Alex Smith accepted the award for him February 4th in Indianapolis and said in part, “Coach would say he doesn’t deserve this award. But, I have had one or two of them (coaches) and I can tell you he does deserve it” — to applause and knowing laughter in the audience.

Harbaugh clearly deserved the award. He turned a dispirited team that lacked confidence into the fastest all ‘round team in the NFL with the best defense and the finest special teams in pro football. Plus, they are young and will become younger still in the upcoming draft of college players. I hope they draft a top wide receiver and also bring in a wide receiver as a free agent.

The NFL is no longer loaded with super teams. They are all flawed. Witness the Sunday Super Bowl game won by the New York Giants over the New England Patriots 21-17.

It was a good game, but, both teams were very vulnerable in the defensive backfield and in tackling.

Aaron Rogers, quarterback of the Green Bay Packers, won the MVP of the NFL. Rogers is from Chico, California, and went to the NFL after playing quarterback at Cal Berkeley.

Added note: I am old enough to recall when the late Al Davis of the Oakland Raiders was great. Now, I believe that his son Mark Davis will give Raider fans hope because he hired Reggie Mackenzie from the Packers to run the on-field play and player acquisitions for the Raiders.

A photo exhibit by Charles Givens of seven historical railroad logging operations, along with text panels and accompanying memorabilia, is now on display at the Mendocino County Museum in Willits. It offers a rich glimpse into the “movers and shakers,” both mechanical and human, that formed the stories, highways and byways of Mendocino, Lake, and Humboldt Counties. The exhibit is part of the Redwood Empire Railroad History Project, a collaboration between the Mendocino County Museum and Roots of Motive Power, Inc. Roots of Motive Power, a volunteer organization devoted to steam power and logging history, has a rich collection of train and timber equipment large and small, including tools, models, and photographs.

Our era is not the only one that has undergone rapid technological and cultural change. The invention of the steam engine in the early 18th century ushered in forces of radical transformation throughout the land, as railroads crisscrossed the country and people and goods began to move about more rapidly. The logging trade and the railroads that arose to transport the downed trees to lumber mills were an essential part of the economy and history of rural Northern California. The show documents a near-bygone era when steam trains chuffed up the Willits Grade with the aid of helper engines, steam blew out of ingeniously designed whistles, crossing signals clanked, and passengers warmed their hands over pungent coal stoves.

Charles Givens had his eye on this catalyst of change from a young age. Born in San Jose, he took his first photo of a steam train in 1947 and quickly became an aficionado. After a long stint working at a San Jose paper, he went on to publish model railroad magazines and run a hobby shop, all the time traveling extensively throughout California and the Northwest to document the railroads that fascinated him. Givens photographed seven logging railroad operations in Mendocino, Humboldt and Lake Counties: the Bear Harbor & Eel River Railroad, the California Western Railroad (also known as the Skunk Train), the Caspar, South Fork & Eastern Railroad, the L. E. White Lumber Company (in the Elk/Greenwood area), the Mendocino Lumber Company, the Pacific Lumber Company, and Lake County Lumber and Box (the only railroad ever to operate in Lake County).

Givens’ photos, in both color and black and white, manage to be artistic and educational at the same time. Along with the text panels, one for each of the seven railroad companies, an informative view is offered into a crucial arc of history, roughly spanning the mid-19th through the entire 20th century. This era saw extensive logging of redwoods and other forests as well as expanded European settlement and economic development. The railroads carried these changes as surely as they carried lumber and human passengers. Many of the highways and byways that we presently travel were initiated by railroad logging operations, including Route 20 that presently runs between Willits and Fort Bragg.

The Caspar Lumber Company operated from 1861 to 1955, except for the Great Depression years of 1931-34. Givens’ photos of the mill it operated are among his most evocative, even giving rise to comparisons to Dutch painters. Gears gleam, wooden surfaces take on a burnished glow and machine wheels seem to turn before our eyes. A 1956 photo taken just after the mill’s closure, “South Fork and Eastern Locomotive #4 a Week Before Scrapping,” captures the poignancy of decline: a detached rail car sits in a yard among wood scraps, tarnished yet still somehow proud.

Northwestern Pacific Railroad, an amalgamation of as many as 60 different railroad companies, operated from 1907 to 2007. The railroad extended from Larkspur in Marin County all the way up to Eureka and employed several different types of narrow gauge lines in addition to standard gauge. Trains initially were steam-powered, assisted sometimes by mules and oxen, until the 1950s when the company switched to diesel electric propulsion. Helper locomotives were employed to lug trains over the Ridge Summit between Ukiah and Willits. The latter was a transfer point where crews changed. With the decline of the logging business, the company sold the north end of the railroad in 1984 to Eureka Southern Railroad. Passenger service ended in 1971 with the advent of Amtrak, although short passenger routes have remained in scenic areas such as the Eel River Canyon.

The Skunk Train, also known as California Western Railroad, transported its first redwood logs from Fort Bragg to Willits on July 4, 1912. Its name was derived from the fulsome emissions emanating from gas outlets used to run the train, as well as from coal stoves passengers used to keep warm. As redwood freight declined in the 1980s, the company shifted to providing passenger service. The only railroad of the seven still in operation, it traverses 40 miles, crosses 30 bridges, and burrows through two mountain tunnels as it connects the coast and the county’s interior.

A number of artifacts from railroad days gone by round out the exhibit. They include a yellowed railroad schedule, a lovingly preserved conductor’s shirt and cap, and a gleaming, table-lamp-size copper whistle. Whistles operated by forcing steam through a constricted orifice and passing it by a sharp edge. Fashioned of various shapes and sizes, whistles were used to issue warnings, mark time, and send out orders.

The most user-friendly artifact is no doubt the “magnetic wig-wag,” an electric crossing signal that will ring bells, literally, for those of a certain age. Consisting of a swinging black and white circle with a red dot in the middle mounted on a steel crane, it once was a common sight at railroad crossings. Today fewer than 90 are still in use. Visitors are able to push a button and set the mechanism in motion, initiating a satisfying clanking that echoes through the museum.

In this era it seems that rapid change is our only constant. It is good, then, to look back at another time when the natural and cultural landscape was equally transformed by our human invention, before we uncover where we can travel next.

Kyle Williams and Michael Crabtree of the 49ers were horrid in the win over the New Orleans Saints in the first playoff win. The 49ers won despite their bad play when those receivers were the focal point of the play. Kyle Williams fumbled a surprise end around play behind the line of scrimmage because he was looking for a place to run rather than catching the lateral from Smith and then finding a gap to run through, while Michael Crabtree dropped the first three balls when the football was passed to him for easy receptions. Clearly, the moment was too big for them to be competent. Yet, both of them blocked well in the game.

In the NFC Championship game Michael Crabtree had one reception on a third down and five yards to go for a first down. Crabtree went three yards and turned for the reception and was tackled two yards short of the first down marker. Crabtree was given a big cushion by his defender so he could have gone the full five yards before he turned for the reception to make the first down.

Kyle Williams, of course, muffed a punt in which the football bounced into his knee. Rather than trying to recover the muffed punt, he pretended not to realize the football touched his knee. And, later in overtime, Williams was stripped of a punt reception deep into Giant’s territory. The Giants kicked an easy 31 yard field goal to win the game 20-17.

The 49ers were better than the Giants in every aspect of a football team except wide receiver and quarterback. If Smith were throwing to Giant wide-outs Hakeem Nicks and Victor Cruz, and Manning was throwing to Williams and Crabtree, the team with Nicks and Hernandez would have won.

The 49ers’ spirit, camaraderie and effort was beautiful this season. Defensive end Justin Smith, at 34, had an engine that never stopped. Ray McDonald at the other defensive end got stronger as the season went on. At nose guard, Isaac Sopoaga made us forget about the release of Aubrayo Franklin.

At linebacker, Patrick Willis and second year linebacker Navarro Bowman helped to form the fastest and toughest linebacking crew in the NFL.

Strong Safety Whitner teamed with Free Safety Dashon Goldson to form a tough. sure tackling duo. Carlos Rogers was a good cornerback during the regular season. But they could use more depth at cornerback.

The Offensive line was beautiful all season. Frank Gore started slow but picked up steam in the last half of the season. Gore is a quiet, strong leader on the team. And, over the years, Alex Smith has gotten some “gravel in his gizzard” and is a leader too.

Smith’s quarterback rating when throwing to Vernon Davis is a huge l51%. Vernon’s talent is undeniable but his personality is too erratic to be a true leader.

The 49er coaching staff led by Jim Harbaugh was excellent.

I could nitpick about their play selection in overtime when they got the ball on the 49ers’ end of the gridiron. I thought they would work their way down the field and use a pass at an unexpected time. But, they threw long bombs to Vernon Davis and the Giants were all over him.

Still, this season’s surge deep into the playoffs was a success for this team. They now need to get a fast, sure-handed receiver in the draft or via a trade and add depth at key positions.

And, remember Ted Guinn is always going to be injured. They should use first-year running back Michael Hunter (a real talent) as the punt returner.

I am looking forward to the NFL draft of college players this April. Remember that next year’s USC Trojans will be the #1 college team in the football rankings at the end of next season’s bowl games.

Drug abuse has been called the United States’ worst public health problem, and our government has waged a “war on drugs” for decades with decidedly mixed results. Drugs, especially tobacco and alcohol, sicken and kill millions of Americans, and the list of illegal drugs is long, with drug users filling our prisons.

What might it mean, then, when one of the world’s most renowned religious scholars writes in his new book, “Cleansing the Doors of Perception,” that some select illegal drugs hold the potential for humans to realize their highest spiritual potential, and that use of these drugs might even be part of the very origin of man’s greatest aspirations and faiths?

Longtime Berkeley resident Huston Smith is no dope fiend. He’s not even another Timothy Leary, thank goodness. Like Leary, Smith has taught at some of the nation’s leading universities, but he’s never left one in disgrace nor become a would-be “guru”, preaching turning on or dropping out or whatever. He holds 11 honorary degrees and has authored 11 books, including “The World’s Religions,” the most widely used text on comparative religion, selling over 2 million copies in the past 40 years. He has produced a number of television series and was himself the subject of a Bill Moyers PBS series, titled “The Wisdom of Faith With Huston Smith.”

With his book “Cleansing the Door of Perception”, Smith “came out” about his drug experimentation and what it all might mean. While teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1960, Smith encountered a small circle of already or soon-to-be (in)famous scholars who were looking into the psychological and spiritual potential of drugs such as psilocybin mushrooms, peyote, mescaline and LSD. Famed English author Aldous Huxley was visiting MIT and had already “come out” as a self- experimenter in his classic “The Doors of Perception.” Across town, Leary and Richard Alpert (who renamed himself Ram Dass) were embarking on the “research” that would get them fired from Harvard and put them in the public eye as both gurus and scourges.

Smith, however, took a much quieter route. “I am more philosopher than activist,” he notes. And thus he tried various drugs only a few times and for a short period, expressly with the purpose of exploring “drug-induced religious experiences on the grounds that they come up with the same basic claims about reality that religions always do.”

His book is a collection of essays on that question, including updated versions of papers published in academic journals decades ago but still absorbing and timely today. The only real shortcoming of these landmark writings is that a broader range of mind-altering chemicals, either manufactured ones such as MDMA, known as Ecstasy, or indigenous concoctions such as ayahuasca from the Amazonian basin, have become increasingly common in recent years, with attendant risks and potentials.

Smith holds that true seekers do not use entheogens, which he defines as “virtually nonaddictive drugs that seem to harbor spiritual potentials,” just for kicks. “Emotionally the drug experience can be like having forty-foot waves crash over you for several hours while you cling desperately to a life raft which may be swept from under you at any moment,” he reports. In other words, for a seeker, entheogens are likely to be more challenging than thrilling, but with the potential to make “epochal” changes in one’s view of the meaning of life.

As for any connection of drugs with authentic religion, Smith laments that “it is next to impossible to speak of it in the West today without being misunderstood.”-In other words, without being labeled “pro-drug.” But he feels so strongly that the a link exists that he likens our cultural denial of it to earlier refusals to accept that the Earth rotates around the sun. “When drugs can trigger religious experiences becomes incontrovertible,” he notes hopefully, “discussion will move to the more difficult question of how this fact is to be interpreted.”

Ever scholarly, Smith’s admittedly tentative attempts at this interpretation are replete with fascinating historical references and quotes from thinkers ranging from Plato to Jung to William James. He looks back at ancient India, where entire sects used psychoactive mushrooms until the “quality” of religiously based drug use declined: “Three thousand years in advance of our times, India may have found herself on the brink of a psychedelic mess like the one America created in the 1960s.”

The resulting repression of drug use by the ruling class may have resulted in more of the kind of sloppy illicit drug use (and abuse), where “it is impossible to determine whether sattva (illumination) or tamas (sloth) predominates.” In other words, some things don’t change, or, as Smith puts it, “One man’s meaning is another man’s mush.”

There are also fascinating quotes from American Indians who have long used peyote as “medicine” to commune with their spirits and, ironically, to “cure” themselves of alcoholism. The use of drugs for spiritual purposes is really nothing new, and Smith even raises the possibility that some religious traditions have in fact developed out of primal drug experiences long forgotten in history.

Seemingly aware of the risks of overstating his case, Smith notes that drug-induced “theophanies,” or religious revelations, are often not lasting, and that “[o]pening the gates of heaven at the start, there comes a time — I can attest to this myself — when they begin to open either onto less and less or onto the demonic.” The dreaded bad trip, then, is a hazard for the true seeker.

Among the often-startling footnotes here is the revelation that Bill Wilson, revered founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, told Smith that he had tried LSD and “counted his entheogen experience as equal in the conviction it engendered to the conversion exper-ience that led him to his founding of Alcoholics Anonymous.” Equally startling to many will be the mention of experiments with cancer and other severely ill patients who had their pain, both physical and emo-tional, greatly helped with the use of entheogenic drugs.

Smith’s language and thinking do venture into arcane regions. But after all its deep inquiry into matters metaphysical and pharmacological, “Cleansing the Doors of Perception” closes with a crucial real-world policy question: “Can a way be found to legitimize, as the Greeks did, the constructive, life-giving use of entheogenic heaven-and-hell drugs without aggravating our serious drug problem?”

Smith does not propose to answer that riddle. What he does do in this brilliant, challenging, warmly written and courageous book is provide the strongest case yet for why that very question might be so important.

Such big numbers are an abstraction, but every person has a life story. Lisa Gray-Garcia recounts hers in her memoir “Criminal of Poverty: Growing Up Homeless in America,” and how we react to it may tell more about the reader than the author.

Born the daughter of a successful but “very odd” surfer-psychiatrist who abandons his family in Los Angeles when she is four years old, Gray-Garcia recalls this period as the end of a “mini-chapter of privilege, comfort and security” for her mother, whose own mother struggled with a lifetime of poverty, and writes that “at four years old I wasn’t really sure what happened, I just wanted my mama to stop crying.”

Thus begins their saga of scrabbling to keep any kind of home, moving to Fresno, Mexico, back to Los Angeles and then up to the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1980s. Lisa and her mother attempt businesses such as making and selling clothes, to stores and on the street, with marginal success but are beset by constant setbacks from borderline slumlords, overdue bills, police, broken cars, illness without health insurance and various human predators, “crisis building upon crisis,” as she summarizes the vicious circle.

Lisa skips a whole year of school to bring in money, resorts to shoplifting and gets busted, and learns many ways of hustling for survival short of actual prostitution. In fact, she avoids any sort of entanglements with men. Hearing the voices of schoolgirls, she recalls longing “to worry about my clothes, homework, boys. … The desperate bone-aching desire to be normal, to go back to school, to have friends, and to not have to worry about money ever again.”

Instead, she keeps working at selling T-shirts (illegally), eventually on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, where she again gets arrested for overdue parking and “fix-it” tickets, or DWP — “driving while poor.” She dreams of suicide and violence, and, when she is called “trash” by a landlord, “I just cringed, agreeing with his assessment as most beaten down people do, loathing myself and my mother for our poverty even more than he did.”

After yet another eviction, one she calls illegal, Lisa and her mother decided to move into places “without paying any money at all. I later found out this was called ‘squatting,’ and it had been done successfully by other very low-income families and later transformed through several forms of resistance into something called ‘homesteading.’ “

From her now-politicized language, this might be seen as a turning point for Lisa. Although she has always worked hard to support her dysfunctional mother, they both begin to see their struggle in a broader context, via courses they visit at local colleges and “personal-as-political” art projects they mount in their storefront living spaces. Financial survival remains a constant strain, but a chance meeting with a sympathetic public-interest attorney allows her to write her way out of some community service and of her “trash” self-image. “Without Osha Neumann’s innovative advocacy, I would never have had the privilege to write, to think, my vocation as a writer would never have occurred to me; and this is why I always refer to his help as the first intervention, or in some circles, the first miracle.”

Encouraged, radicalized, emboldened, Lisa has some of her essays published, founds the innovative San Francisco magazine Poor, obtains grant funding for projects, teaches others about poverty issues and achieves a degree of renown as an activist and example of perseverance. Not that this resolves her financial problems. She is still poor, she must lie to get her aching teeth treated at UCSF, her mother’s physical and mental health declines, and “nothing had really changed and yet everything had changed” as she continues to sell T-shirts on the street to keep them housed in a Tenderloin apartment.

Gray-Garcia tells her multigenerational story of poverty in unpolished prose, but it all rings even truer for that. Her nascent political analysis of why she and so many others become homeless might seem shallow and replete with stock slogans too some, but that isn’t the point. Some readers might agree with an editor who rejected one of Gray-Garcia’s stories because of “too much misery”; her book conveys a sense of hopelessness. As a San Francisco friend admitted with some shame after yet another encounter with a homeless person, “my compassion ran out years ago.” The problem is just too big, and usually, impersonal. But every person has a story, and this one is ample evidence that not all, or even most, homeless people somehow earned their fate via drinking, drugs, or sloth.

Billionaire Warren Buffett has admitted that “class warfare” does exist in the United States but that “it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” Here’s one story from the losing side. Contrary to some enduring American mythologies, Gray-Garcia shows that it is possible to be smart, work hard, avoid the perils of addiction, violence, HIV and so many other afflictions that beset the poor, and still get stuck in a lifetime of poverty.

Criminal of Poverty: Growing Up Homeless in America by Tiny, aka Lisa Gray-Garcia, CITY LIGHTS; 287 Pages; $15.95 paperback.

Still, what sweet redemption for the 49ers and particularly Alex Smith, the beleaguered 49er quarterback. Jim Harbaugh, a 15-year NFL quarterback who played for four NFL teams, then won two championships coaching San Diego State and moved on to Stanford propelling that fine University’s football program to national recognition.

Now, Coach Harbaugh and his staff have made the 49ers into a fine team with playoff expectations in future years, always in the Superbowl hunt.

The 49ers needed a head coach with compassion and emotional intelligence to get rid of the smell of coaches Mike Nolan and Mike Singletary who always deflected blame for their own failures onto the team or QB Smith.

I was really happy that Alex Smith stayed with the 49ers so he could play for coaches who would give him intelligent offensive schemes and treat him fairly. Coach Harbaugh gave Smith a fair shot at winning NFL football games and didn’t massacre him publicly if the team lost. To me, in prior years, it was like Alex Smith was a rookie rather than a six year pro. He will only be 28 years old next season, so he has at least five or six prime years left in his body. But he has to learn when to get out of the pocket and run for yardage rather than allowing himself to drown beneath the up-the-middle pass rush.

Smith threw the football well in the first game against the Giants in the tenth week of the season in a 27-20 win in San Francisco last year. And he threw freely with a pronated wrist and a flick to spiral that pigskin where he wanted it to go.

In the playoff game against the New Orleans Saints the 49er coaches and Smith were at the top of their games. The team was at third down and eight years to go for a must have drive. Offensive coordinator Greg Roman believed that Smith should run the ball on a naked roll-out. Harbaugh was unsure but Smith talked him into the important call. Harbaugh listened to his quarterback and okayed the play call. Smith ran for 28 yards and a touchdown behind beautiful cut blocks by slot receiver Kyle Williams and left tackle Joe Staley.

Soon after that running touchdown by Smith he threw a long and spot-on touchdown pass to Vernon Davis, taking the team to last Sunday’s NFC championship game with the winning New York Giants.

Aldon Smith, the 49ers extraordinary pass rusher, was a great pick out of the 2011 draft. Donte Whitner was also a great acquisition. Justin Smith and Navarro Bowman were great all year, as were Patrick Willis and Frank Gore who have been great players for years.

To have a Superbowl team next year, the 49ers need an excellent wide receiver who is fast and has good hands with acute moves to get clear of defenders for long yardage gains. Their current wide receiver Crabtree is a position receiver who has disappointed in the playoffs.

But like San Francisco’s baseball Giants of two seasons ago, the 49ers made me wish the next season would hurry up and start. This year’s 49ers made me hope that the 2012 regular season would start quickly because the team and their audience know their coaching staff will give them a real opportunity to win.

“American classical music audiences are half asleep,” the unusual prodigy said in a recent interview, adding that it is the performer’s obligation to wake them up.

From the time Hahn-bin dramatically threw off the black silk veil which concealed his face as he advanced toward the stage, there were no naps to be had.

Half geisha, half mime, half Mick Jagger, half Vladimir Horowitz, tiny Hahn-bin’s enormous stage persona consumed the room.

That adds up to four halves, which is about right.

The test of a classical musician, to me, is his or her ability to suppress the hacks and wheezes of audience members in the late stages of tuberculosis who drag themselves to the concert hoping to be healed.

Hahn-bin waved his bow like a wand over the January crowd and healed the sick. As he stretched thin the most quiet, yearning phrases, not a creature stirred, not even the uncomprehending infants brought by doting parents to absorb Hahn-bin’s genius by osmosis.

Classical concerts in this country are stiff, high-church affairs. People forget that 200 years ago, classical music was the rock music and audiences came to have a good time.

A common source of discomfort for all present is the constant anxiety over when it is appropriate to applaud.

No matter how stirring a movement, according to etiquette you aren’t supposed to clap until the third movement has concluded.

But at many concerts, some hick from the sticks who somehow made it through the screening process feels moved by the first movement and innocently starts to clap.

Other rubes follow, and soon a smattering of applause threatens to shatter the dignity of the occasion.

The snoots, who are too busy being snoots to actually hear the music, glare at the the rubes and stare them into silence. Snoots live for such delicious moments of superiority.

It is class warfare, and it has divided our country for decades.

Well, Hahn-bin had an announcement made before the event: The right time to applaud is when you feel like it.

You could sense the relief in the room, at least amongst we rubes.

But the stress level soon rose again as Hahn-bin’s pianist approached the stage dressed head-to-toe in black leather and sporting a theatrical feather mask.

It got higher as the be-veiled Hahn-bin himself swooped in with an exaggerated sense of drama.

Good grief, I thought. He’s going to have to be pretty good to pull this off.

But pull it off he did.

First, Hahn-bin pulled off his veil, revealing stunning theatrical make-up that made the audience gasp.

Then he pulled it off with energetic and inspired playing that turbo-charged the difficult but familiar classical pieces on the program.

My suspicion that Hahn-bin took inspiration from Mick Jagger was confirmed when his second costume change featured a shirt printed with dozens of Rolling Stones logos.

Sometimes Hahn-bin laid on the floor. Other times he stomped on the floor to accent a phrase. Sometimes he sat in a cushy chair. And one time he ended up standing atop the piano.

I checked the piano afterwards. Hahn-bin’s big boots made tiny scratches in the finish. You don’t stand on a piano without making scratches, I discovered once in my own home after some dinner guests left.

But Hahn-bin probably will be allowed to leave scratches wherever he wishes. Maybe they’ll have him autograph the scratches with permanent marker.

Classical music concerts can be trying. Usually, given the difficulty hearing unamplified instruments from a distance, it is best just to stay home and listen to a recording.

But at the old wooden museum, Hahn-bin’s rich tone flowed over the small but capacity crowd like melted butter.

Hahn-bin is only starting his career. He recently debuted at Carnegie Hall and showed up on the Today Show.

The chance to hear his talents in a small venue will soon vanish.

Hahn-bin’s next trip through Grand Forks will probably bring him to the big auditorium with cushy, sound-absorbent chairs where I once strained to hear his great teacher, Itzhak Perlman play.

More seats, more money, less reward.

Those of us in the crowd last Sunday were lucky indeed. We saw a rising star up, close and more personal than we would have at Carnegie Hall.

Welcome to the mob.

When I picked up my press credential at St. Anselm’s College in Manchester, New Hampshire for the ABC News Republican Primary Debate on a clear Saturday night in January, I expected to be steered to a press gallery close to the stage in a musky debate hall. But there were more than 600 journalists on the campaign trail in New Hampshire in 2012. So we were stationed in a nearby basketball gym, in long rows of tables facing two large projection screens showing the television broadcast. We would be watching the debate the same way most baseball broadcasters watch the ballgame nowadays, on television. But the real-time color commentary would be via twitter, and our press box felt as big as an airport hangar. I grabbed a folding chair on the side between a Norwegian journalist and a nattily dressed Romney national finance chair whom had escaped the packed green room to enjoy the relative roominess of our cavernous press lounge, and because “the food is better.”

I shouldn’t have expected anything less than a sprawling media corps, but the image of a salty fraternity of wise-cracking journos in fedoras dies hard I guess, as do all sentimental tropes of American culture. Shoot, there are upstreamers to accommodate now. Guys like Phil Anderson, a cheery, red-cheeked student and Occupy affiliate up from Boston. He roamed the press hangar in a black peacoat, holding a flip video camera and camping headlamp rigged to a tripod pole by an L bracket and Velcro. He was narrating the proceedings to 15 or 20 people watching his live stream online, pointing his camera at whatever they asked him to via the onscreen chat feed. If that sounds a little technical, just picture a college student walking around with a phone-sized camera strapped to a pole seemingly talking to himself like a schizophrenic, but possibly representing the future of media.

It was an exceptionally punchless debate, full of eye-rolling platitudes and few direct attacks on Mitt Romney, the frontrunner. A local TV cameraman explained that the League of Women voters used to run the debates, but when ABC News took over, it changed from “a news event covered by the news to an entertainment event produced by Disney (ABC’s parent company).” The press stars were there too of course, and mostly bored: Mark Shields, the Washington Post columnist and liberal commentator, shuffling around the food table and hawing in his Boston accent, “No more cookies?” Don Gonyea, NPR’s chief political correspondent, tut-tutting and oohing over such wondrous statements like Rick Santorum’s disdainful retort that, “there are no classes in America.”

When the debate mercifully ended, we all scuttled to a smaller gym next door that served as the official spin room. Amid half a dozen constantly forming and disintegrating press scrums you could make out craggy veteran politicians making a play for a possible cabinet post down the road by talking up the talking points of the candidate they’d chosen to latch onto. Hello Tom Ridge, former homeland security chief, coming out of the woodworks to do a little spin service for Jon Huntsman. Hello Nikki Haley, late Tea-Party sweetheart turned embattled South Carolina governor, stumping and preening for Mitt Romney in a long fringe silver dress. There were the candidates’ spokespeople as well, gamely running out their best lines. Take R.C. Hammond, Newt Gingrich’s spokesperson: “Gingrich walked like a president, talked like a president, must be a president.”

As always, there were the oddballs that our national political carnival attracts, such as Craig “Tax Freeze” Freis, who’d flown out from California to challenge President Obama in the Democratic primary. He handed me about 30 photocopied documents including the official Democratic ballot and a newspaper article about a lawsuit he had won against the Democrat Party in Southern California. I told him to call me if he had an official campaign event, but I later realized that I had probably unknowingly participated in the only type he could afford.

Over the next couple days, I attended the campaign events of all five candidates actively campaigning in New Hampshire. In many ways they are homey events, in rustic town halls, small manufacturing plants, conference rooms of woodsy resort hotels. They range from the booster-club pageantry of bunting, pom-poms, and confetti guns at a Jon Huntsman pep rally to the long-winded bloviations of a Newt Gingrich lecture in a hot and steamy high school gymnasium. They can seem dingy, or at least provincial at the time. But when you watch the clips on television news or see the photos in the paper, they gain an aura of authority.

Ron Paul’s events are the most fun in the aggregate, as you can’t avoid appreciating this wiley, frumpy, 76 year old doctor from southeast Texas who has inspired young people across the country to become constitution-waving enthusiasts. They feel the media constantly portrays them as being crazy, which they are not. They just quote policy specifics with a Star Trek convention-goer’s fluidity, and possess the zeal of a true believer, and so your average non-believer never knows quite where to file them. Barbara, 50, a paraprofessional from Meredith, NH, who didn’t want to give her last name, was unwavering in her support for Paul’s plan to eliminate the Department of Education, even though she might lose her job in education. “If that would happen, I’d find jobs elsewhere,” said the former Democrat turned Republican.

The Ron Paul organization that garnered an impressive 23% of New Hamphire’s vote seemed a winning mix of rollicking misfit party bus and cagey professionalism. My humble Red Roof Inn in Loudon, NH, was the home to 90 Youth for Ron Paul volunteers who’d come from out of town, and whenever I came home at night they’d be roaming the hallways like a college dorm. One night they had set up chairs in a circle in the lobby of the hotel and three black jean and jacket rockers were jamming on acoustic guitars. The next morning I found myself making coffee in the hotel breakfast nook next to a young man wearing a suit with a piece of duct tape on the back that said “Statistician.” I asked him if he was the statistician for Ron Paul, and could I get a quote, and he shot me a look: How did I know? When I explained, he was still reluctant to give anything more than the perfunctory “it was a great experience.” James Padilioni, 25, a student from Westchester, PA who was filling out a grad school application on a laptop plastered with stickers for various causes (“Yes We Cannabis,” “SchoolsNotPrisons.com,” “Students for Liberty”) stopped himself when I asked him to describe his election day activities. “Our organization is our secret weapon, nobody else has what we have,” he said. “Why give away your secret recipe?”

Barring political catastrophe, Romney will be the Republican nominee, and his campaign clearly boasts the top talent and money. His events are by far the best produced and tightly scripted, with former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty serving as the curtain-raiser hypeman, and Kid Rock’s “Born Free” accompanying his entrances and exits. (Sample lyric: “free, like an untamed stallion.”) Romney’s desire to be liked has an earnest, almost frantic quality. After introducing his wife and splendid family (the best advertisement for the Mormon church in America right now has to be the gorgeous tableaus of the Romney and Huntsman families), he moved to the side of the stage, and stood with his hands tucked in his pockets, stock-still, seemingly determined to never stop smiling. He fools few people with lines like, “A chance to run for President, wow, I never thought I’d do it,” or the Obama-esque riff, “I was just a high school kid with skinny legs.” Left out is that his father was Governor of Michigan and served in the Nixon administration when he was loping around on his skinny legs.

His ad-libs are pricelessly awkward, such as this opening line at the Rochester Opera House, “I can feel the warmth in this room, not just temperature-wise but emotional-wise.” And his stump speech seems written by an algorithm devised to appeal to all parts of a skeptical Republican base. He has a moment where he asks, “Are there any veterans here? Please raise your hands… thank you,” leading to sustained applause. He admits that his father was born in Mexico, hastily adding, “to American parents living there,” as if to snuff out any potential Birther elements, even though it’s only his father. He closes by quoting from “America the Beautiful,” joking, “I said in Iowa that corn counts as amber waves of grain.” He makes no mention of his Mormon heritage and religion, though his campaign slogan “Believe in America” seems a sly reference to his hope that voters will see past his much maligned religion.

There was short-lived hope among reporters on the trail that Huntsman might make it a close race in New Hampshire. The horse race approach to campaign coverage is, for better or worse, what people want to read about most. Why get bogged down in policy comparisons when politics can become a thrilling sporting event? And at the Jon Huntsman voting night party at The Black Brimmer bar in downtown Manchester, the place was packed with the sort of unlikely supporters reminiscent of Obama’s insurgent 2008 campaign. Jon C. Hopwood, 52, a boisterous progressive who’d previously never voted Republican in his life, had battled through the physical sickness he felt when he was given the Republican ballot at the polling place and cast for Jon Huntsman. “How could he be more conservative than Obama?” Hopwood asked, “Obama cut my mom’s food stamps, he cut my home heating oil. I voted for Obama ‘cause my friends told me he was a progressive, but we got a center-right Republican. Maybe with Huntsman we’ll get an Earl Warren.” Elisabeth Langby, 54, a writer and academic of Swedish birth said, “Huntsman is the best presidential candidate since I became a citizen in 1990.”

But even though Romney is a French-speaking millionaire from liberal Massachusetts, he has run the best campaign so far, and, perhaps by process of elimination, seems to have won the blessing of the Republican establishment as the best chance to defeat Obama in a general election. The parallels to Sen. John Kerry are striking, though he never served in the military, so he will not be swiftboated the way Kerry was in 2004.

The journalists on the trail even seemed ready for Romney to secure a win in South Carolina and deliver what would seem a knockout blow to the rest of the field. All the press photographers I talked to admitted they were addicted to the adrenaline rush of campaign reporting, no matter how brutal the press scrum, and how long the days. But as they pulled out their laptops to download their pictures and send them to their editors around the world, the fatigue was evident. One veteran CNN cameraman talked about how the explosion of independent media has made for press scrums with more amateurs who block shots without getting good ones of their own. But generally the press are a welcoming tribe, willing to share a joke or a cigarette with whoever happens to be with them in the trenches that day.

There is an inevitable insularity on the campaign trail, as journalists spend 16 hours a day covering events, tweeting and writing stories, and reading each other’s coverage of the campaign. As most journalists must file immediately for the digital edition, and instantly on twitter, sometimes they can’t even see the candidate when he gives his stump speech, but just hear him through the speakers and are ready to tweet and then file a story about any flub he makes. It seems a bizarre world, until you join it. Then it’s hard to pull yourself away. Thus I found myself watching Jon Huntsman’s speech at 2am in my hotel room, the same speech I had seen live several hours earlier. I had to talk myself into turning off the television, and even then the images of American flags, of perfectly coiffed candidate hair, of the crush and click of hundreds of camera-laden photographers swirled in my head.

Jim won’t be there but Ray and Robbie will be. Manzarek and Krieger, of the Doors. Jim won’t be and neither will drummer John Densmore.

I sided with John Densmore — his lawsuit against Ray and Robbie: no, you cannot use the name Doors, not without Jim’s permission. We agreed. John Densmore wouldn’t let them and they finally had to give in on appeal to the tune of, well, we will leave that to them.

To the tune of “LA Woman” on the dash CD, I’m heading south from Sacramento to finally bend, to finally see Ray and Robbie. To hear them live. I never have. It’s the 40th anniversary of LA woman. One of America’s classics, and not just in rock ‘n roll.

Got to go. Who knows? Pacific amphitheater, Costa Mesa, California.

Having never seen them, even having grown up with them, but one night on VH1 without Jim I finally heard them, John Densmore still on drums. Holy fuckin’ shit! I had no fuckin’ idea how great they were. I’ve written at length. To sum up here, I made it out to the Badlands of Dakota to listen, to make sure. I recently met John Densmore in LA after his world jazz group performed in a small club on Sunset.

Down there to LA is 99 South again. And not during LA’s Carmageddon (which of course never happened, like Y2K).

“Driving down your freeways/midnight alleys roam…”

It’s August, everything sunburned to a brown crisp. At least there can be everything on 99. I-5 South is Lawrence of Dullrabia.

Expecting to stop in Keene. Cesar Chavez is buried there. And agriculture is to the Central Valley as theatre is to Manhattan. A rather scathing article about Chavez by a Catalin Flanagan in the Atlantic, a first, got my attention. For some reason now I need to stop.

“Cops in cars/the topless bars…”

99 South is local bars, used cars, take out and local clubs, cows, railyards, funeral homes, vegetables, crop dusters, dust, trestles, silos, water towers. If 99 was 66. If six was nine — as Jimi Hendrix said.

“I see your hair is burning/hills are filled with fire/if they say I never loved you/you know they are a liar…”

Can’t say America loves 99 the way it does 66, but the north-south fix of six hours works some magic.

A few hours in, coming up on Livingston, California. Headquarters of Foster’s Farms chicken. Hot and dry, time for breakfast. A close friend from Livingston, her family, but just now just the off-ramp to a sparkling clean McDonald’s. Sausage and egg biscuit breakfast. Hustle down the road breakfast, reserved just for the hustling. And what, Salinas and Steinbeck, do you know, an art gallery to the athletic Wolves of Livingston High School, hung on the walls of the McDonald’s like family portraits, young and immaculate, ladies and gentlemen, golf, baseball and cheering, football, etc.

It’s all very touching, touching me where it counts, in small town America amounts, Salinas and Steinbeck.

99 South amounts to patience and sports talk radio and Rush Limbaugh — Comedy Central.

South past Wasco where once again, once every trip, Route 46 takes James Dean to legendary death. Like magic.

Three hours in and about three hours left.

Stopping for road lunch (did you know that it’s legal to eat roadkill in West Virginia?) At the base of the “Grapevine” at a gourmet Jack in the Box. I forgot Cesar Chavez. Must have been Rush Limbaugh.

Ultimate cheeseburgers and flotilla coke. Just on the road, mind you. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

El Tejon Pass,where you can look back on the green brown desert, orange air pollution and the dust of long-haul bedouins on I-5.

These hills are alive with the 40th reunion of Buffalo Springfield. They’re wonderful, Stephen and Richie and Neil, even though they sound a bit 45 rpm when it should be 78.

Burnt brown all around. We cut through the hills and mountains, no problem. Nothing can stand its ground against us.

The spines of towers and roller coasters like stranded bones of dinosaurs. Six Flags over California. Why, when there is a beach at Santa Monica?

405 South to Santa Monica is fine, always partially bumper-to-bumper, with no remnants of carmageddon.

Turning off above the Getty Center for the Skirball Museum. A Wal-Mart daughter, worth about $29 billion, is building a new Museum of American Art, the Bridges Museum, in Bentonville, Arkansas, home of Wal-Mart and Senator Thomas Hart Benton of a past America that the New Yorker says takes something from the Skirball.

The Skirball is too much concrete in a dappled setting. That said, in and out of the parking lot and onto Santa Monica.

Santa Monica Blvd leads to the ocean, all the way from the beaches of Long Island, my homestead.

I’ve actually found a parking meter to feed for two hours.

It’s a summer Thursday so the beach is populated but not crowded, the world’s least expensive shrink.

Sounds from the jaunty peer, lifeguard whistles, and the cold surf, the couch in the shrink’s.

Riding the waves, hot, dusty inland doesn’t seem possible, stretched out in the Brian Wilson sun, even a slight tan for this Celtic visitor seems possible.

Just a day at the beach before the remnant of The Doors tomorrow. My usual motel in the Fairfax district, Jewish being the vibe like life around New York City’s now former Ratner’s?

Canter’s Jewish Deli here still very much in business, chicken soup for the soul, corned beef, pastrami on rye, mustard splattered. I’m from Long Island so I’m technically Jewish. You know what Lenny Bruce says: “If you’re from the five boroughs and you are not Jewish, you are. But if you are from Utica and you are Jewish, you’re not.”

Ahh, contented. Now to ruin the evening. Cowboys and Aliens, but at the Arclight on Hollywood and Vine. Fifteen bucks with validated parking. A Disney ride for the 10 minutes the movie was worth it. Then all garbage. Keep ‘em coming, I guess. Pay for the independent banquet.

Sleep, sunburn and sand and surf, Kramer’s fragrance taking over.

The sun never sets in California. In the morning a short jaunt down 405 somewhat almost near the coast, past Anaheim, after Howard Hughes and so forth, Jennifer Aniston, almost totally naked, on a giant billboard for $10 water. Somebody help me! With the recent sale of her $45 million homestead.

Glimpses of the Ocean, about 90 degrees in the later morning.

South to 55 South to Costa Mesa/Newport, California.

Can’t check in at the Motel 6 — $100 until 2pm. So let’s see, the beach at Newport Beach, California. Sunburn browning in so, of course, let’s go down through the stores and shops, sort of a surfing Cape Cod, California.

Hoping for a ham and egger near the beach and sure enough (I can’t remember the name) tables with omelettes and scrambled outside along the sidewalk, sort of Carmely nearby, but the breakfast and a sensuous servers were, “dude, awesome.”

It’s real quiet compared to Santa Monica, smaller, with a short pier, just as cold in the surf, the waves far out, got to swim out to reach them.

Nothing to do but soak up the environment. Palos Verdes cliffs, I guess, down the sand like bookends to a SoCal journal.

Sun and soak, my freckles like a freckle army — armada.

What to do for a few hours? I’ve got it. Why not try the US Open surfing championship in Huntington Beach, California?

Correctamundo. Wrongamundo, taking the PCH (Pacific Coast Highway for those of you who don’t watch Two and a Half Men). Bumper to Mercedes, to Land Rover, to VW van in a crawl, the wide open expanse of Huntington’s beaches, preserved wetland marshes, red lights and honking horns, asking two young girls crawling along beside me if I’m headed to the US Open surfing championship. Without looking up from their texting, they answer in the affirmative. “Main Street,” they tell me.

Slowly, slowly, always surf alongside, when slowly but surely the light beer banners, bleachers and murals of the pro-surfers appear. There’s no way I’m going in. Traffic, crowds, traffic, as the beach bathing beauties start to appear in the dozens, the hundreds, and at the Main Street crossing in the thousands.

I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. The sun tan beauty so overwhelming, high schools and colleges are emptied. Bless the two-piece anatomy.

I have never seen a rodeo of such luscious, gorgeous, so out of reach proportions. I can’t stop. I can’t get out. I have to roll along slowly and absorb it. You can’t imagine. It’s like Gidget on Steroids. Girls Gone Wild with some of their clothes on. I am forever overwhelmed by such a gathering of so much beauty in one location. Woodstock of the Surf, I guess. But really there is nothing to compare it to.

Finally an illegal U-turn with about 12 other cars, traffic at ease on the other side heading back to Newport Beach and Costa Mesa.

Running the gauntlet of statutory hands-off-ness, but good God almighty girls. This is America in recession? Not too shabby.

Okay, I’ve made it back to find the fairgrounds, the Pacific amphitheater for the remains of the band originally from Venice Beach, California.

Got some time for a little Costa Mesa Public Library, checking a roadmap. I’m thinking about doing Death Valley on the way back from San Diego.

Back at the 6, nappy time, with some home-grown that made even Cowboys and Aliens.

Ferris wheel permanent fairgrounds, vast parking. Now remember where you parked with a toke of the homey bowl full.

Folks strolling up, Jim’s famous face in evidence on t-shirts, handbags and other vestments.

I’m in for $45. Nothing special, a sloping outdoor theater with a lawn up above, stage below, ageless rock ‘n roll.

I’m ready to not care at all. Just give me Ray and Robbie solos.

Crowd flies in, young and mostly older, young Chicano/Latinos in the seats in front of me.

Some local legend DJ, skinny, black jacket, leather, thinning orange-tinged hair thrown over his head in Tom Wolfe’s “George McGovern alpine rope throw.” Who cares?

On with the show! Uh-oh! A Christ image appears on a back screen. I’m ready to leave. The image remains as the band comes on stage in the concert darkness.

It begins with Ray Manzarek asking Orange County, “Are you ready to rock ‘n roll?” I’m ready to leave. “Republican base camp, are you ready to rock ‘n roll?”

I think they start in with “Back Door Man,” the singer, John Brock? Doing a real good not-Jim, almost looking the part, hair and dark clothes, no leather pants, moving in a Mo Jo.

That Christ image finally disappears. Everyone stands up. Not me. So I’m peeking in between bodies to get my first, yes, live look at Robby Krieger.

He’s effortless on guitar, the sounds of The Doors from days gone by. With his gray hair and skinny little body he looks a bit like John McEnroe. Doesn’t Johnny Mac wish?

I’d stand up if Jim was here.

Ray’s got the glasses. He is again yelling, “Orange County are you ready?” Agent Orange County maybe. I’m ready to leave again but the songs from the great LA Woman begin.

They do “Hyasenth House” from LA woman. It’s so rare a song Jim’s almost not missing.

And on it goes, in and out of LA and the songbook, the original group so American, so us, so able to go off where they wanted to, needed to, all this so what, with moments to cherish, almost.

Almost worth it as the encore, of course, is Ray and Robbie and their solos on “Light My Fire.”

So I can close the book and introduce my one-man show: Jim — get him out of Paris and bring him on home.

Home to the 6, after not being able to find my car until I realized it wasn’t where I was searching. “Before you slipped into unconsciousness.”

It’s sunny and 80 degrees again in the morning and now a stretch on old US 1, Dana Point and Doheny, the Coastliner train swooshing by, the Pacific stretching out to China.

Stopping at Mission San Juan Capistrano, just to circle the swallows, the miniature downtown around the Spanish and brick and adobe like a stagecoach stop from One-Eyed Jacks.

Back on I-5 to zoom into San Diego, Pendleton, Oceanside, Torrey Pines, La Jolla, brown hills awaiting vacaros, compact skyline, old town San Diego, the ocean, the ocean, Myrtle Avenue stop.

Big brunch at the Big Kitchen, one of the great ham and eggers, well worn in, earthy and authentic.

Cocktails on Nancy’s back porch, San Diego in silence.

Brew pub in an old Wonder Bread brick downtown building near the baseball stadium, San Diego, the patron saint of cities beside an ocean.

Big burgers at Ho-Dad’s inland from their ocean beach location, comrades, former New Yorkers, wisecracks and laughter in extra large proportions.

Sleep like an air mattress afloat on the calm sea.

Breakfast in a local, again, well used, simple yet stylish, out at a sidewalk table, the San Diego so few will ever visit.

On to the Mission Beach Boardwalk without any boards, cement, roller coaster, corn dog on a stick, sun, surf, sand — but we wanted that wooden walk.

And the highlights of a Sunday in Balboa Park, Spanish art, Dali to El Greco, and the overwhelming surprise of Spaniard Sorello. Who the hell was he, letting in all that light? So unlike his famous predecessors.

Up and around the golf course and it’s well rubbed in clubhouse and restaurant with the course and the park and the city beyond basked in its one and only glow.

Then in the evening a crab shack bar against the beach, Ocean Beach, California, cold beer and dep fried shrimp in a seaside town that is “Hair,” still, if you could afford a production of such on your own.

All in all, just might be paradise on earth but surely not the long haul home, minus Death Valley but a 99 north of sorts.

Turns out, showing a person the sole of your shoe and making the “it’s-all-good” sign (which was originally coined as sign language by SCUBA divers) are both grave insults in Turkey. It’s a miracle I wasn’t thrown to the bears. It was only weeks later that I learned what a klutz I’d been. I was reviewing a website on faux pas commonly made by travelers, and idle amusement quickly turned to mortification as I recognized descriptions of my own misdeeds. There is nothing to do now but laugh at how many blunders I’ve unknowingly committed through years of visiting strange lands. Anyway, as global travel increasingly links cultures around the world, people everywhere may be growing more accepting of know-nothing travelers like me — and perhaps today the idea of the clueless foreigner is more charmingly comic than it is gravely offensive.

Nonetheless, there are a few things best not to do when traveling — and this list is a start:

1) In Japan, accepting a business card from a Japanese person without using two hands or acting like you are sublimely honored. Because a Japanese person isn’t fooling when he or she hands you a business card. In addition to receiving it with two hands, one is supposed to bow deferentially. Forbes.com addressed precisely this matter, with no intention of parody, in a 2005 article on etiquette pointers for the traveling businessperson. It makes that scene from American Psycho seem not so ludicrous after all.

2) In Georgia, drinking at the table while another is making a toast. Toasts in this former Soviet nation come many times per meal and may last as long as five or 10 minutes. They are sometimes almost hilariously theatrical until one realizes that Georgians are totally serious when they raise their wine glasses and begin speaking. If a guest is present, especially, the melodrama gets thick as the speaker praises the two represented nations, the honor of playing host to a foreigner, the guest’s good fortune as he or she continues their journey, ancestors, God and so on and so forth — though not always in a single toast. I spent some time in Georgia in 2010. Even at such informal sites as the side of the road, men drinking wine sometimes called me over, filled me a glass and embarked on lengthy verbal voyages. It’s a wonder, looking back, that we ever managed to squeeze in a drink.

3) In most of the Middle and Far East, walking into a home with one’s shoes on. Been there, done that — and with gunky fig jam caked to the soles of my cycling shoes, to boot. Yes, I was a walking disaster in Turkey, day after day committing insults so dreadful it’s fortunate I didn’t make the old ladies faint — or the young men call for their weapons.

4) In the Hindu and Muslim world, greeting a person or eating with your left hand. I cannot begin to imagine how many times I have absentmindedly done this in Turkey. Locals, it turns out, traditionally wipe themselves with the left hand. A tad bit presumptuous, isn’t it, for them to assume that I do, too?

5) Also in the Muslim world, eating during daylight hours during the holy month of Ramadan. Being the old hand at social blunders that I am, I’ve committed this crime many times. I was in Turkey during Ramadan in August 2010, and when I caught myself and sheepishly apologized, the folks around me said I had done nothing wrong. I have never known if they were simply being polite. Because in Dubai, anyway, foreigners seen eating during the Ramadan fasting hours can face jail time.

6) In Hawaii, refusing a lei. Don’t feel like wearing a rosary of tropical blossoms round your neck? Tough luck. Put the lei over your head, offer a generous hug in return and consider yourself formally welcomed to the islands. If you really can’t stand the thing, Hawaiian culture considers it acceptable for one to re-gift the lei to one’s spouse — but not, heaven forbid, if she’s a pregnant woman! Tread carefully. Stay vigilant.

7) In Russia, refusing vodka when offered, and sipping it once your glass is filled. Instead, you must gregariously chug your shot glass of Eurasia’s favorite booze. What’s more, having three drinks is sometimes obligatory at an event for one to demonstrate a baseline level of friendliness and social prowess. Meanwhile, women in Russia might do wisely, as custom sometimes demands, to leave the vodka to the men and drink wine instead.

And this one may come as a surprise: In Germany, discussing sports. So I read in this Vagabondish post from Amy Baker, who says German people may think someone “uneducated” if he or she is heard discussing a sporting match.

9) In the United Kingdom, holding up your index and middle finger with the back of your hand facing outward. Britons: Please don’t laugh. Because in America, most people are unaware that this is the equivalent of giving someone the middle finger — and please understand that it’s a mistake if someone makes this sign while ordering two beers across a noisy pub.

10) Finally, in the United States, relieving oneself in public. That’s right, all you gentlemen from France, Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic: Turning your back on a person or a crowd and emptying your bladder may be business as usual where you come from, but in my culture, many people consider it dirty and disrespectful. Why, I have friends and relatives who would keel over dead if they saw such an act in public. Me? I’ll forgive you.

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