MCT: Saturday, May 25, 2019

• Showers Tonight
• Chili Cook-Off
• Amazing Hattie
• Sizzla Dizzled
• Mendoza
• Letters DNA
• Yesterday's Catch
• Real Terrorists
• TS Eliot
• Benchwarmers
• DC Meltdown
• First Amendment
• Shuttling Assange
• Nobody Understands
• Youthful Dementia
• Klickitat
• Lady Shakespeare
• Private Wolf
• Chapman Family
• Moving Day
• Prehistoric Googler
• Marco Radio
• Drunk Again
• Simplicity
• Found Object

MILD AND DRY CONDITIONS are expected during the day today, but showers will move through much of the area tonight through Sunday morning. Most of Sunday will also be dry, but scattered afternoon thunderstorms will be possible across the interior mountains on Memorial Day. Additional opportunities for afternoon thunderstorms in the interior mountains are expected to materialize throughout next week. (National Weather Service)

FLAG DAY CHILI COOK-OFF & FLAG RETIREMENT CEREMONY

Boonville Veterans Memorial Building

Saturday June 15, 2019, 1-4 pm

Sponsored By American Legion Redwood Empire Post 0385

Note: No Super Hot Chili!

• First Prize $200
• Second Prize $100
• Third Prize $50

To Enter as a Contestant Call 707-895-9363 (Ray)

‘NO ROOM FOR HATE AT REGGAE’: Sizzla Performance Canceled

by Ryan Burns

Homophobic dancehall star Sizzla will not be appearing at this year’s Reggae on the River festival after all.

Following the usual community uproar whenever a Murder Music artist gets booked in the region, High Times Productions, which is producing the event for the second year in a row, has pulled the plug.

The email below was sent by John Capetta, High Times’s vice president of content, in response to an email complaining about the booking:

Don’t worry, we’ve immediately cancelled this performance. We were not aware of his history (candidly I don’t know the artist) but as soon as we were alerted to his unfortunate past we immediately pulled the plug.

Sorry for any upset feelings, there is of course no room for hate at Reggae.

Capetta confirmed the cancellation to the Outpost and said via emails that High Times will have a statement shortly.

(Courtesy, LostCoastOutpost.com)

---

Sizzla Item Comment:

While I don't support the stance he once endorsed and that had garnered so much public outcry and protest I question how long the ban goes on. This is the statement he issued back in '05:

“Sizzla Apology, June 10, 2005

Harambee Management Company/ 40 South Monterey Drive/ Kingston 6/ Jamaica/ Official Sizzla Statement/ To whom it may concern/ I have been invited to Europe by many organisations in order to perform at various venues. I have agreed to do this gladly without any animosity towards anyone or any organisation./ I am an artist whose art as transcended boundaries and thus afforded me the opportunity to express my thoughts globally./ I know that in the past some of my material may have seemed to incite violence towards others which was never my intention. However, I will not perform these materials on stage so as not to offend anyone anywhere./ I will however reserve the right as a citizen of earth to express my art in any way I see fit and to say what I feel; this is the right of a free man afforded to me by the almighty. I do however understand that words and music are powerful tools and as such one should be careful in its use./ I wish you all Peace Love and Unity./ Jah Bless./ Miguel Collins A.K.A SIZZLA”

Not exactly an apology. And he has been quoted in 2004 as saying ‘They can't ask me to apologize,’ he said. ‘They've got to apologize to God because they break God's law.’

In the meantime he has won numerous accolades for his music. One of the topper reggae recording artists with 56 albums as of 2018.

I mean how long after and in spite if his semi words of apology (at least assurance he's not advocating violence) does the ban and upset last?

---

The Problem

In his song ‘Pump Up’, Sizzla opens the third verse by saying; “fire fi di man dem weh go ride man behind.” Other lyrics include; “shot batty bwoy my big gun go boom.” (Batty bwoy is a derogatory term for gay men in Jamaican patois.) “Boom boom! Batty Bwoy dem fi dead.” “Mi a go shot batty bwoy dem widdie weapons ya”. These lyrics are not just hate speech, but a call to murder.

This isn't a problem only one artist has either. Many of dancehall’s most prominent figures have equally horrendous lyrics. In Damn, Beenie Man says “I’m dreaming of a new Jamaica, come to execute all the gays.” In ‘A Nuh Fi Wi Fault’, Elephant Man boasts “Battyman fi dead! Please mark we word/Gimme tha tech-nine, shoot dem like bird.” In ‘Boom Bye Bye’, Buju Banton bases the entire chorus of his song on the murder of gay men; “Boom bye bye inna batty bwoy head/rude bwoy no promote no nasty man/dem haffi dead”. To quote but a few….. — Daniel Abreu

MENDOZA (in the County Admin Building)

(Photo by Susie de Castro)

ED GEHRMAN WRITES:

"There are two pieces of evidence that can solve the Bari bombing: the Argus letter and the “you won’t get a second warning” letter. The Argus letter contains information that was know by only a few people including Mike Sweeney. Investigators were able to find and analyze a sample of DNA from that letter. The “You won’t get a second warning letter” was sent to Judi a few weeks before the bombing and was tested for DNA; a sample was also found. These two DNA samples matched one another so they were both deposited by the same person. That person is Mike Sweeney. His DNA will match the DNA found on the two letters. Of course, he could prove me wrong by giving a DNA sample that didn’t match. Why hasn’t he?"

---

ED NOTE: Sweeney claims it would be an invasion of his privacy, as do his defenders who cleared a cool $3.5 million or so pretending he had nothing to do with it.”

CATCH OF THE DAY, MAY 24, 2019

JERRY ENGLAND, Ukiah. DUI.

HANNA FREDRICKSON, Willits. Failure to appear.

MICKEY HILL, Willits. Community supervistion violation.

ANDREW HOLM, Ukiah. Under influence, probation revocation.

JUAN LOPEZ, Willits. Suspended license (for DUI), probation violation.

DEBORAH MCCLOUD, Covelo. Failure to appear, probation revocation.

ANGELA MILLER, Willits. Failure to appear.

JAMES MILLER, Ukiah. Community Supervision violation.

RODNEY PROCTOR, Fort Bragg. Domestic battery, probation revocation.

CINTHIA ROMERO-SERRANO, Fort Bragg. Pot sales, resisting.

CLIFTON THOMPSON, Ukiah. Controlled substance, concealed dirk-dagger, contempt of court.

TS ELIOT

by Eugene Walter

TS Eliot had come to Rome to receive an honor from some university. He was on his honeymoon with that lady who had been his secretary and such a comfort to him after his first wife who'd been slightly demented went totally stark raving mad. The Princess asked me to arrange a party at Palazzo Caetani. They were cousins. He was cousin Tom. Some distant, distant way back when in Boston. And that's when I saw a good side of him. I have the feeling he was somewhat trapped inside 16 locked doors. I thought if I could get enough Jim Beam into him he would really be great. So I made my 23rd Field Artillery Punch. We brought up from the cellars of Palazzo Caetani a huge, magnificent old punch bowl that had not been used since around World War I. I put a block of ice in it. And I made a little hole in the block of ice. I put some sliced oranges and lemons in that hole. And then I poured two bottles of cognac over that. And then I poured two bottles of good white rum over that. And then I poured two bottles of very good English gin over that and then I just filled up the rest of the bowl with cold champagne.

It tastes like the most delicious orange punch. You would never guess there is one drop of anything alcoholic in it. You think it's just this weak little y’all fruit juice. The people who tasted it say, "Oh, you have such sweet oranges." There are millions of punches like that on the Gulf Coast. For Mardi Gras. You know: "Want a little fruit punch, darling, before we set out for the ball?"

It will make a party go. After a while, people achieve a rosy view.

The princess had invited all the literary figures of Rome: Alberto Moravia, Elsa Moravia, Natalia Ginzberg. Writers, writers, writers, writers. She was nervous, since there were two or three famous feuds among the crowd. You know, literary backbiters are the worst. And Italian writers are always feuding with other Italian writers. And there were all kinds of Italian lesser writers begging for Eliot's attention just like the Harvard boys. We forget that ‘The Cocktail Party’ was written God knows when in the 1920s and only got produced in the 1950s in London. That's one of the things that put him on the map all over again.

I was careful to see that all glasses were kept full. Feuds were forgotten and toward the end of the evening Mr. Eliot remembered some football cheers from Midwestern colleges which he had heard in his youth. He had a yellow rose in one hand and a punch cup in the other, wielded like a pom-pom, and my favorite phrase was: Rah rah rah / sis boom sah! / Go to war, Holy Cross! / Bim ‘em, bam ‘em, scam ‘em, / Rip ‘em, ram ‘em, Holy Cross!"

He was doing that cheerleader act after just two glasses of 23rd Field Artillery Punch.

But overall he was rather hoity-toity. I know that if you live in England and you are of the English language, sooner or later you speak English English. There is no way not to because it is something which we just pick up. We can't help it. I would be doing it in 10 minutes if I lived there. But he had a snob accent, not just the English accent. The snob snob accent. It was a kind of artificial snobbism superimposed on artificial Englishness. After all, he was from M’zou. He was born in St. Loo. The hub of the bourgeoisie. Yes, well, the Eliots of Boston. The one ‘l,’ one ‘t’ Eliots of Boston. There are launderesses named Elliot with two ‘t’s and two ‘l’s. But this was a one ‘l,’ one ‘t’ Eliot. You can discard the superfluous at a given moment of greatness. But still he was born in St. Louis, Missouri. We mustn't forget that — M’zou. Born in Missouri. Being born in North Haiti is superior to being born in M’zou.

When he was on his way to speak at the University in Rome, there was a mob of students running along his car and screaming in the street. And there was a piece in the New Yorker about Eliot in Rome by one of our New Yorker girls who's become famous. We published her first short story, "The Statute," in Botteghe Oscure. Jewish girl in New York City. Funny name. Ozick. Cynthia Ozick. And she says that his car as he left for the university was accompanied by these cheering students and what a lift it gave him to feel so acclaimed by the populace.

That wasn't the thing at all. I was there fighting off journalists at the Palazzo Caetani. It was one of those 60s student things and they were screaming for the director of the university to resign. There were a lot of younger students who wanted the University reorganized in a certain way and rather more free. And they were running along his car and Eliot thought they were welcoming him. But they were saying, "Please don't make the speech, you fool." You know: Down with the university.

I've never understood the kind of sourpuss quality he had. He didn't have a little edge of good humor that is basically American which all Americans have. It's very rare that the American doesn't have that little, "Yeah, well, you know" somewhere. Even the crankiest. There is a kind of generosity of spirit which is American. Even with the most closed in or most miserly or whatever. I mean T.S. Eliot was not my idea of fun.

It's all because he became such a cult figure. Just after World War II all those Harvard boys — if you said T.S. Eliot, they got to their knees facing England, you know. They forgave him for being born in M’zou. I think he had too much of that adulation.

But his wife was a charmer. So intelligent, so polite, so humorous, so kind. The Princess asked me to go with her chauffeur to take Mr. Eliot and Madame Valerie to the airport when they were leaving Rome. So we were going to go and he said, "I've never been to the graves of Keats and Shelley." I said, "Yes, we do have time."

Now this is one of those cemeteries where nobody is dead. It's like Pere Lachaise in Paris. One day in Paris I saw this bus that was going to the Pere Lachaise cemetery. So I got on it instead of the bus that I should have gotten on to for school or wherever I was supposed to go that day. I rode right up to the cemetery and wandered through. There was Moliere. There was Abelard. There was Sarah Bernhardt. There was Gertrude Stein. There was Nijinski. There was Oscar Wilde. And I thought: this is not a cemetery. This is a cocktail party. There were no dead people there. So about once a week I went back. I would pack a picnic and just go to a different part each time and sit on somebody's gravestone and communicate. This particular cemetery in Rome was the same way: a great place for a picnic because nobody is dead. Old friends gathered. Keats is there and Shelley is there and a Romanoff princess and other grand Russian refugees.

There are cats that live in the cemetery. There is this little caretaker's cottage and they sit in front of it. Because they've seen so many people go to the grave first of Shelley and then of Keats, they accompany them like guides. And they walk a few steps ahead and look over their shoulders and say, "This way," and then they turn at the right corner and turn at the left corner. So first we went to Shelley and we were taken via a black cat. At the grave of Shelley there was a tabby cat waiting. The cat went back to the caretaker’s. The tabby cat took us to Keats way over in the corner. And it says, "Here lies one whose name was written in the water." And Valerie was busy picking violets off the grave to take back to her garden in England and T.S. Eliot was saying, "I've always thought that inscription was rather supercilious." And she said, "Dammit! Laddered m’nylons!" It's one of my favorite moments. She was a very down-to-earth creature with a great sense of humor. She's cat and monkey. But there was something acid about him which I just couldn't take. And I always disapproved of his poetry because I come from a subtropical country. How could I know melancholy and the sweetness of winter?

(From "Milking the Moon: A Southerner's story of life on this planet")

THE GOLEM STRIKES BACK

by James Kunstler

Not long ago, few Americans of the thinking persuasion might have imagined that such a well-engineered republic, with its exquisite checks and balances, sturdy institutions, and time-tested traditions would end up as so much smoldering goop in a national dumpster fire, but such is the sad state-of-the-union moving into the fateful summer of 2019. The castle of the permanent bureaucracy is about to be torched by an uprising of deplorable peasants led by a Golden Golem made furious by relentless litigation. It’s Game of Thrones meets the Thermidorian Reaction with a Weimar-flavored cherry on top — really one for the ages!

There’s perhaps a lot to dislike about Donald J. Trump, US President No. 45. Despite all the grooming and tailoring, there’s little savoir faire there. He tweets not like a mellifluous songbird, but in snorts like a rooting aardvark. His every predilection is an affront to the refined Washington establishment: his dark business history, his beloved ormolu trappings, his Mickey-D cheeseburgers, the mystifying hair-doo.

Even so, the bad faith of his antagonists exceeds even Mr. Trump’s defects and vices. The plot they concocted to get rid of him failed. And, yes, it was a plot, even a coup. And they fucked it up magnificently, leaving a paper trail as wide as Interstate-95. Now all that paper is about to fall over the District of Columbia like radioactive ash, turning many current and former denizens of rogue agencies into the walking dead as they embark on the dismal journey between the grand juries and the federal prisons.

Hence, the desperate rage of the impeachment faction, in direct proportion to their secret shameful knowledge that the entire RussiaGate melodrama was, in fact, a seditious subterfuge between the Hillary Clinton campaign and a great many key figures in government up-to-and-including former president Barack Obama, who could not have failed to be clued-in on all the action. Even before the declassification order, the true narrative of events has been plainly understood: that the US Intel “community” trafficked in fictitious malarkey supplied by Mrs. Clinton to illegally “meddle” in the 2016 election.

Most of the facts are already documented. Only a few details remain to be confirmed: for instance, whether international man-of-mystery and entrapment artist Josef Mifsud was in the employ of the CIA, and/or Britain’s MI6, and/or Mrs. Clinton’s Fusion GPS contractor (or Christopher Steele’s Orbis Business Intelligence company, a subcontractor to both Fusion GPS and the FBI). Questions will now be asked — though not by The New York Times.

The evidence already public indicates that Robert Mueller must have known as early as the date of his appointment (and likely before) that the predicating evidence for his inquiry was false. After all, his soon-to-be lead prosecutor, Andrew Weissmann, was informed of that in no uncertain terms by his DOJ colleague, Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, in 2016. Justice may seek to know why Mr. Mueller did not inform the target of his inquiry that this was so. The answer to that may be that Mr. Mueller’s true mission was to disable Mr. Trump as long as possible while setting an obstruction of justice trap — which also failed tactically.

Notice that Mr. Mueller declined to testify before the House Judiciary Committee last week. Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) was a fool to invite him. Did he not know that minority members of his committee get to ask questions too?

In an interesting turn of the screw last week, polling showed that a majority of those asked were in favor of investigations into the origin of the RussiaGate story. The FBI, being an agency under the direct supervision of the Attorney General, will be hosed out for sure. The CIA, on the other hand, has a sordid history of acting as a sovereign state within the state — hence the derivation of the Deep State. They are renowned for protecting their own. Remember, the Senate Minority Leader, Mr. Schumer, snidely told the incoming President Trump at the get-go that the Intel community “has six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.” I guess we’ll finally get to see about that because the CIA’s former director, the wicked Mr. Brennan, is grand jury bound. I suspect he will not be protected by his former colleagues. His downfall may presage a more thorough cleanup, and perhaps a major reorganization, of this monstrous agency.

The indictment of Julian Assange adds a big wrinkle to these upcoming proceedings. Apart for what it means to First Amendment protection for a free press (no small matter), Mr. Assange is the one person who actually knows who handed over the “hacked” DNC emails to Wikileaks. Perhaps getting the answer to that question is the real reason that the DOJ is throwing the book at him. The trial of Mr. Assange is sure to be a humdinger.

I’m convinced, personally, that all this melodrama will play out against the background of a cratering global economy, tanking financial markets, and epic disruption of the established international order. Consider laying in some supplies.

(Support Kunstler’s writing by visiting his Patreon Page.)

ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

The American people are capable of much better. But mental fitness comes a lot harder when your information environment plies you with the media equivalent of orange soda and Doritos morning, noon and night.

Re: the fate of Julian Assange, I think there’s room for hope that he won’t face — well, let’s be charitable and call it a “trial” — in the USA. The fact that America is slipping ever further into authoritarianism hasn’t gone completely unnoticed overseas. That, plus the fact that the (likely bogus) sex-assault charges against him in Sweden have been reactivated opens a possible escape hatch. Sweden’s extradition law doesn’t honour requests for what they consider political crimes, and surely that’s how the USA is treating Assange. Should the UK extradite him to Sweden first, rather than the U.S., Sweden may reject extradition for Assange’s inconvenient acts of journalism and pack him off to Russia instead. (They surely won’t want him on their soil any longer than necessary.) It could happen; let’s watch and see.

Whereas if Assange actually gets extradited to the USA it’s game over for press freedom, as the outcome of any proceeding has been predetermined. The First Amendment will join the Fourth in the dead-letter pile.

YOUNG PEOPLE, TOO

Editor,

When I was 11, my father passed away after a long struggle with younger-onset dementia. Watching a parent slowly deteriorate is heartbreaking. My mother was faced with raising three children and being a caregiver to her ailing husband until his passing.

There are more than 5 million Americans with Alzheimer’s, including approximately 200,000 with younger-onset dementia. My father, aunt and grandmother all had younger-onset dementia.

Alzheimer’s is not only the sixth-leading cause of death in the country, it ranks as America’s most expensive disease, with costs projected to surpass $290 billion in 2019. The out-of-pocket costs are estimated to be 80% more than for heart disease or cancer. There are programs in place to help with the costs and care associated with dementia, such as the Older Americans Act, which helps Americans 60 and older by providing services and support.

Unfortunately, this act does not apply to those with younger-onset dementia. Please join me in urging Rep. Mike Thompson to co-sponsor the Younger-Onset Alzheimer’s Disease Act to make individuals with younger-onset dementia eligible for assistance. Please help families like mine have access to these services as they care for their ailing loved ones.

Kate Devine

Santa Rosa

KLICKITAT MAN. Oregon. 1899. Photo by Benjamin A. Gifford.

THE ATLANTIC GOES DEEP

Was Shakespeare A Woman?

theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/06/who-is-shakespeare-emilia-bassano/588076/

‘THE ARMY AIN’T NO PLACE FOR A BLACK MAN’: HOW THE WOLF GOT CAGED

by Jeffrey St. Clair

From his locked room, he could hear the trains rattling up the tracks, one every half hour. They reminded of him of home, back on Dockery Plantation, when he played on the porches of old shacks with Charley Patton, blowing his harmonica to the rhythm of those big wheels rolling along the rails. Those northbound trains were the sound of freedom then.

Now he was in the mad house, where grown men, their minds broken by the carnage of war, wailed and screamed all night long. Most of them were white. Some were strapped to their beds. Others ambled with vacant eyes, lost in the big room. Chester just stood in the corner and watched. He didn’t say much. He didn’t know what to say. Sometimes he looked out the barred window across the misty fields toward the river and the big mountains far beyond, white pyramids rising above the green forests.

The doctors came every day, men in white jackets with clipboards. They showed him drawings. They asked about his family and his dreams. They asked if he’d ever killed anyone—he had but he didn’t want to talk about that. They asked him to read a big block of words to them. But Chester couldn’t read. He’d never been allowed to go to school.

The doctors asked all the white men the same questions. Poked and prodded them the same way. Let them sleep and eat together. Left them to comfort each other in the long nights in the Oregon fog.

Chester would play checkers with the orderlies and sing blues songs, keeping the beat by slapping his huge feet on the cold and gleaming white floor. Men would gather round him, even the boys who seemed really far gone would calm down for a few minutes, listening to Wolf growl out “How Long, How Long Blues” or “High Water Everywhere.” It was odd, but here in the mad house Chester felt like an equal for the first time.

The mental hospital at Camp Adair was located just off of the Pacific Highway on a small rise above the Willamette River in western Oregon, only a few miles south from the infamous Oregon State Hospital, whose brutal methods of mental therapy were exposed by Ken Kesey in One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest. Camp Adair had been built in 1942 as a training ground for the US Infantry and as a base for the 9th Signal Corps. The big hospital was built in 1943. Its rooms were soon overflowing with wounded soldiers from the Pacific theater.

Chester Burnett, by then known throughout the Mississippi Delta as Howlin’ Wolf, had been inducted into the Army in April 1941. Wolf didn’t go willingly. He was tracked down by the agents of the Army and forced into service. Years later, Wolf said that the plantation owners in the Delta had turned him into the military authorities because he refused to work in the fields. Wolf was sent to Pine Bluff, Arkansas for training. He was thirty years old and the transition to the intensely regulated life of the army was jarring.

Soon Wolf was transferred to Camp Blanding in Jacksonville, Florida, where he was assigned to the kitchen patrol. He spent the day peeling potatoes, slopping food onto plates as the enlisted men walked down the lunch line. At night, Wolf would play the blues in the assembly room as the men waited for mail call. Later Wolf was sent to Fort Gordon, a sprawling military base in Georgia named after a Confederate general. Wolf would play his guitar on the steps of the mess hall, which is where the young James Brown, who came to the Fort nearly every day to earn money shining shoes and performing buck dances for the troops, first heard Wolf play. Still it was a boring and tedious existence.

For some reason, the Army detailed the illiterate Howlin’ Wolf to the Signal Corps, responsible for sending and decoding combat communications. When his superiors discovered that Wolf couldn’t read he was sent for tutoring at a facility Camp Murray near Tacoma, Washington. It was Wolf’s first experience inside a school and it proved a brutal one. A vicious drill instructor would beat Wolf with a riding crop when he misread or misspelled a word. The humiliating experience was repeated each day, week after week. The harsher the officer treated Wolf, the more stubborn Wolf became. Finally, the stress became too much for the great man and he collapsed one day on base before heading to class. Wolf suffered episodes of uncontrollable shaking. He was frequently dizzy and disoriented. He fainted a number of times while on duty, once while walking down the hallway.

“The Army is hell!” Wolf said in an interview in the 1970s. “I stayed in the Army for three years. I done all my training, you know? I liked the Army all right, but they put so much on a man, you know what I mean? My nerves couldn’t take it, you know? They drilled me so hard it just naturally give me a nervous breakdown.”

Finally in August 1943, Howlin’ Wolf was transferred to Camp Adair and committed to the Army mental hospital for evaluation. The first notes the shrink scribbled in Wolf’s file expressed awe at the size-16 feet. The other assessments were less impressive, revealing the rank racism that pervaded both the US Army and the psychiatric profession in the 1940s. One doctor speculated that Wolf suffered from schizophrenia induced by syphilis, even though there was no evidence Wolf had ever contracted a venereal disease. Another notation suggested that Wolf was an “hysteric,” a nebulous Freudian term that was usually reserved for women. The diagnosis was commonly applied to blacks by military doctors who viewed them as mentally incapable of handling the regimens of Army life. Another doctor simply wrote Wolf down with casual cruelty as a “mental defective.”

None of the shrinks seemed to take the slightest interest in Chester Burnett’s life, the incredible journey that had taken him from living beneath a rickety house in the Mississippi Delta to the wild juke joints of West Memphis and to an Army base in the Pacific Northwest. None of them seemed to be aware that by 1943, Howlin’ Wolf had already proved himself to be one of the authentic geniuses of American music, a gifted and sensitive songwriter and a performer of unparalleled power, who was the propulsive force behind the creation of the electric blues.

Howlin’ Wolf was locked up for two months in the Army psych ward. He was lashed to his bed, his body parts examined and measured: his head, his hands, his feet, his teeth, his penis. The shrinks wanted to know if he liked to have sex with men, if he tortured animals, if he hated his father. He was beaten, shocked and drugged when he resisted the barbarous treatment by the military doctors. Finally he was cut loose from the Army, discharged as being unfit for duty. He was probably lucky he wasn’t lobotomized or sterilized, as was the cruel fate of so many other encounters with the dehumanizing machinations of governmental psychiatry.

“The Army ain’t no place for a black man,” Wolf recalled years later. “Jus’ couldn’t take all that bossin’ around, I guess. The Wolf’s his own boss.”

(Courtesy, CounterPunch.org)

JACK CHAPMAN AND FAMILY. ca. 1900. Oregon. Photo by Lee Moorhouse. Source: University of Oregon Library.

THE KIDS

I will do my best here. Let's see . . . Moving on Saturday into an old folks home. Fighting with computer all afternoon. In relative quiet after many visitors, some I haven't seen in fifty years almost. At least I am not in the hospital or sleeping in a tent, even if it is from REI.

But helpfulness still reigns on Pearl Street, and I am looking forward to the move. My kids tell me it's handled, but they are impossible to reach by phone and largely out of touch. I have seen none of them in weeks. But I am pretty certain it will happen as scheduled.

If not, I'll make a couple of phone calls, if my phone still has any charge. This is my best example lately of trusting the universe. Oh, yeah. I am dying. Piece by piece by piece. One of my kids has turned-down $1,200 in passes for all four days of Kate Wolf, basically calling me a horrible turd in the bargain. I'd go for a walk, if I could. I guess I'll just complain. I have earned it.

(Bruce Brady)

MEMO OF THE AIR: Good Night Radio

Friday, May 24, from 9pm to 5am read the special Decoration Day Weekend Memo of the Air by live remote from Juanita's apartment, /not/ from the back room of the KNYO performance space at 325 N. Franklin, next door to the Tip Top bar, so consider showing-and-telling at KNYO /next/ week, May 31, when I'll be there rather than here.

Deadline to get your writing on the air is around 7pm. If you're not done then, email it whenever you /are/ and I'll save it and read it on the show next time. Or save it yourself for next time and come in and read it in person.

Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio: Every Friday, 9pm to 5am on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg, and 105.1fm KMEC-LP Ukiah. Also there and anywhere else via http://knyo.org and click on Listen.

And you can always go to https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com and hear last week's show, and shows before that. By Saturday night the recording of tonight's MOTA will be among them but right on top.

Here are a few shiny objects to fiddle with while you wait for showtime:

How to always win a coin toss. It takes ten minutes of practice to learn, and then you've got it for the rest of your life.

How to cheat a coin flip

She bought a 1957 Chevy in 1957 and she's still driving it today. No major work. About 130 or 140 miles a month, average, though once she drove all the way to Alberta and stayed in a hotel. "People ask me what I did to keep it so nice. Oil change every 1,000 miles." Also, drive like you don't have a seatbelt on, because you don't have a seatbelt.

A Woman Shows Off Her 1957 Chevy, The Only Car She’s Driven Since Buying It New in 1957

And lovely little Soviet-era teevees.

https://www.amusingplanet.com/2019/05/soviet-televisions.html

Marco McClean, memo@mcn.org,

https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com

RETURNING FROM A BACK COUNTRY TRIP, I vow to purchase nothing that I don’t really need, give away everything that is excess, refuse all chores that don’t arise from central concerns. The simplicity I seek is not the enforced austerity of the poor. I seek instead the richness of a gathered and deliberate life, which comes from letting one’s belongings and commitments be few in number and high in quality.
— Scott Russell Sanders

FOUND OBJECT