Mendocino County Today: Wednesday, March 10, 2021

Showers | 9 New Cases | Czaress Nevedal | Zoomnuts | CDC Recommendations | Art War | Harry Swets | Redwood Caspar | Weerdness | Call Boxes | Doesn't Matter | Supes Briefs | Create Something | Gray Mystery | Moves Out | Pull Over | Ford House | Ed Notes | Rube Test | Help | Yesterday's Catch | Nervous Witch | Ignorant Bliss | Peace Plaque | Dem Swag | Tango Zoom | Thought Police | Gurri Book | Shipping Terminal

WIDESPREAD SHOWER ACTIVITY will continue across northwest California today, slowly diminishing from north to south through this evening. Drier weather is expected Thursday through Saturday, with chilly overnight lows becoming the primary weather concern. (NWS)

9 NEW COVID CASES reported in Mendocino County yesterday afternoon.

JUST IN, from Supervisor Williams:

Kristin Nevedal appointed next Mendocino County Cannabis Program Manager

I'm pleased by the unanimous Board of Supervisors support for hiring Kristin Nevedal as our next Mendocino County Cannabis Program Manager. Eyes wide open for recruitment, I spotted her engagement at a state-level committee meeting. In subsequent conversation, I gained confidence from Kristin's sagacious awareness of our local ordinance challenges coupled with vast state policy literacy. She will join us as a direct report to the Board of Supervisors, a somewhat unorthodox arrangement, but suited given the eventuality of the program. The dual and largely disjointed state license / county permit dynamic is one of the most complex technical problems the county faces. Kristin joins as the looming State sunset of (temporary) provisional licenses jeopardizes $5.5M annual county revenue, environmental and neighborhood protection. I expect she will hit the ground running and accelerate both application processing and expectation-setting outreach. Subset of Kristin's pertinent background:

Governor Appointee, Bureau of Cannabis Control, Cannabis Advisory Committee
  - Chairperson for the Subcommittee on Cultivation
  - Chairperson for the Subcommittee on Laboratory Testing
  - Member of the Microbusiness Subcommittee
  - Member of the Year End Report Subcommittee

Board Member, California Cannabis Industry Association

Co-Founder & Executive Director, International Cannabis Farmers Association

Director Of Education, The Emerald Cup

Co-Founder & Vice President, Humboldt Growers Association

Board Member, Interim Executive Director & Senior Advisor, Coalition for
Cannabis Policy Reform

“Good morning, everyone. I brought doughnuts.”

NEW CDC RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FULLY VACCINATED PERSONS

by William Miller, MD; Chief of Staff at Adventist Health – Mendocino Coast Hospital

On Monday, March 8^th, the CDC announced new recommendations for fully vaccinated persons. These recommendations loosen some of the restrictions for mask wearing, physical distancing and indoor visiting if a person is fully vaccinated against COVID. This is an exciting first step towards helping the country return towards normalcy. Here is what you should know.

First, the definition of “fully vaccinated” means that a person is two weeks or more out from receiving the second dose of either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine or is two weeks or more out from receiving the single dose of the Janssen (Johnson & Johnson) vaccine.

Second, these recommendations have not yet been adopted by the California Department of Public Health or our own county health department as there has not been enough time for them to review and incorporate them as of this writing. However, it is reasonable to expect that they will be broadly adopted. Also, these recommendations do not apply to healthcare settings or the workplace, at least not yet.

Third, the scientific evidence is very strong that all three vaccines provide substantial protection against developing both mild and severe COVID, the illness caused by the virus SARS-CoV-2. Further, this protection also substantially reduces the risk of transmission of the virus if a vaccinated person develops infection regardless of whether they develop symptoms or not. 

Fourth, it is recognized that vaccines and other prevention strategies minimize risk, but that there is no strategy that gives a 100% guarantee, short of having no contact with others what-so-ever. In light of that, the low risks involved in these recommendations are balanced against the risks of maintaining the current restrictions which include individual and societal costs related to impact on personal relationships with loved ones and family, psychological effects, impositions created by physical distancing, impact on jobs due to quarantine, school and business closures, and restriction of other important social activities.

So here is what you can safely do if you are fully vaccinated:

• Visit with other fully vaccinated people indoors without wearing masks or physical distancing,
• Visit with unvaccinated people from a single household who are at low risk for severe COVID indoors without wearing masks or physical distancing,
• Not have to quarantine or get testing following a known exposure as long as you remain without symptoms (this part will be subject to adoption by the county health officer).

Here is what you should continue to do regardless of vaccination:

• Wear a mask and physically distance when in public places,
• Wear a mask, wash hands and physically distance when visiting with unvaccinated people who may be at high risk from severe COVID. The main high-risk factors include diabetes, obesity, heart disease and age over 65.
• Wear a mask and physically distance when visiting with small groups of unvaccinated people who are from different households.
• Avoid medium and large sized in-person gatherings, such as sporting events, concerts, festivals, conferences, parades, or weddings.
• Still get COVID tested if you develop COVID symptoms.
• Follow the specific requirements of your employer and of the county and state health departments.

As the number of people who are vaccinated increases and the amount of new COVID cases decreases, we can expect further relaxation of guidelines. In California, part of this is dictated by the California Department of Public Health’s county tier system which is based on case rates and testing rates, under which currently restricted businesses and other social activities can resume. We should expect that increased vaccination rates will mean eventually opening up such things as nursing homes and hospitals to visitation. I think that the CDC is to be commended for balancing the need for public health protections while at the same time listening to the call to return to “normalcy” as soon as possible. Hopefully, the state health department will do the same.

The specific recommendations from the CDC can be found at: cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/fully-vaccinated-guidance.html

And the science supporting these recommendations is discussed at: cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/more/fully-vaccinated-people.html

Please, check out next week’s column of the Miller Report in which I will discuss why Mendocino County is still stuck in the purple tier. 

(The views shared in this weekly column are those of the author, Dr. William Miller, and do not necessarily represent those of the publisher or of Adventist Health.)

“WHAT DO YOU THINK an artist is? ...he is a political being, constantly aware of the heart breaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.” 

― Pablo Picasso

HARRY HOOKS

(Marco McClean here. My friend Tim Falconer from the Community School, housemate for a little while in the mid-'80s (when we tried to put up a real radio station in Caspar but lost out when the FCC granted the frequency to KSAY), just sent me the following obit, including a couple of links to pertinent info. I'm also forwarding this to the AVA with Tim's permission.)

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Tim Falconer wrote:

Harry Swets, sometimes known as "Harry Hooks", died Saturday 3/6/2021. He had lost much of his mental faculties to dementia of some sort over the last decade, and had been checked into a nursing home a couple of years ago, in the Santa Rosa area I think. From there he went to the hospital a couple of days ago, one or two days before he died.

Harry was my mother's common-law husband and my late sister Shiloh's father. He had one or maybe two other daughters. Shiloh was born on 12/12/1972 and I think the hang gliding accident that cost Harry his hands was in the spring or summer of 1973. He missed his planned landing field and crashed into some power lines, the high voltage coursing through the aluminum frame of the hang glider and through his hands and arms. His hands were amputated a few days later in Denver.

Lots of people thought Harry had lost his hands in Viet Nam. He was a Viet Nam vet, but got home without a scratch. He had spent his time in Viet Nam doing logistics and taking advantage of the trust and lack of accounting in the Marines in the late 60's, stealing entire truckloads of goods from the Armed Services and selling them on the black market, according to one of the stories he told me.

I don't know how old I was when he started dating my mother, but it was well before Shiloh was born, a few weeks after my ninth birthday. We lived in a few places in the Aspen Valley, Colorado: first in a trailer in El Jebel, then in the mountains above Basalt, and then at the Midnight Mine, on the west face of Aspen Mountain at close to 10 thousand feet. I have some idyllic memories of living at the mine. There was a whole gang of crazy hippie outlaw types living on the mountain, and we had a small community of about 6 or 8 adults, my mom's four kids (before Shiloh was born) and one other kid. At that point, Harry and his friends were smuggling marijuana from Mexico. Early on, in accordance with their Marine training, they ran across the border with huge duffle bags; this also according to very amusing stories that Harry told me once and I imagine also told others on occasion. Later, they developed a way of compressing the weed into bricks weighing about a kilo each that they wrapped in red and blue cellophane. One summer I helped unload a camper-shell that had been filled completely with these bricks; the bricks then completely filled the sauna that they had built in the garage/warehouse that was the only modern structure at the Midnight Mine.

Then Shiloh was born, quite prematurely, and for her health we had to move into town, and ended up spending the winter in Mexico, then moving into the Silver King Apartments in Aspen, which were fairly new at the time. Harry signed up for John Totman's hang gliding school, which was called Get High Inc. He worked for John too, but I can't remember if that was before or after "The Accident."

After the accident, Harry moved into cocaine sales, and eventually got busted by undercover DEA agents, in a scene that my friend Brad loves to recount. He says I told him the story, and I believe him because he has a great memory, but I don't remember it at all. The story goes that Harry ran away from the scene of the bust, and when the agents caught him, screamed that he was being robbed, and got away when some locals came to his rescue. But of course he was not able to run far before they caught up with him. He spent a year or two in a Federal minimum security penitentiary somewhere. He wrote a fantastical sci-fi novel while he was in the pen, long hand with no hands, so long hook if you will, and sent chapters to me in bulging envelopes when we lived on Larkin Road. After prison he came to Mendocino and ended up staying to be close to Shiloh. He was often a guest in my mom's house - they had broken up either before or after the bust - and told me stories about life in the minimum security pen.

In Mendocino he took up painting and various people from the Aspen scene came and mixed with the Mendo scene in various configurations. My friend Albert had a few rough experiences with Harry that don't show him in a good light at all. I visited Albert at Ingebor's house in Laytonville last night and Albert told me some Harry stories this morning. I'm not going to repeat them here, but be assured they would make your skin crawl.

At various times our whole family moved out of the Mendocino coast. Maybe I was the first, after living with you (Marco) in Caspar and then moving briefly to Oregon before landing in SF. Harry eventually followed Shiloh to Oakland and got a gig with KGO as a reporter on homelessness, fashioning himself "Harry the homeless homeless advocate". The ABC news magazine show Prime Time included a segment on Harry and his work with the homeless that made him out to be a saint. I think I still have it on VHS somewhere. It's amazing what they can do with studio lights and careful editing.

https://coveringthecity.com/san-francisco-homeless-reporter-harry-swets-hooks-kgo/ (includes the PrimeTime Live segment)

Harry eventually got a house in Oakland and lived there for a bunch of years. Sometimes Shiloh lived with him, and sometimes Shiloh's son Andy lived there. Harry by this time was deeply addicted to pain killers, and probably had been for 20 years, since his hang gliding accident. I saw him a few times in those years and I felt like very little of the old Harry was there. When I was a kid he had been a great storyteller, and from what I've pieced together was a drug dealer and a con man for all of that time. He was always kind to me but I never had any money that he could talk me out of. He had tried to introduce me as his son, since my own father was never a part of my life, but I just found it embarrassing, and since he and my mother were never legally married, I didn't even think he should be considered my step-father. I guess I had seen so much of the outlaw life growing up that it gave me something to rebel against, and so I've been a working stiff my whole life, since moving to San Francisco and getting my first real full-time job in about 1984.

Shiloh died of a heroin overdose on 11/10/2015 after getting busted for possession and intent to distribute a couple of years earlier in Nevada City. By then I had not spoken with Harry in several years.

At some point Harry had been in the care of the VA Medical Center, and then in March of 2017 they apparently decided to discharge him and put him on a VA bus that dropped him off in Fort Bragg.

https://www.advocate-news.com/2017/03/08/double-amputee-vet-left-on-fort-bragg-sidewalk/

It's really incredible the way the VA found to rid themselves of him. The things the VA PR guy says in the article are idiotic. Harry's dementia was already so bad at that point that he did not recognize his grandson, Andy, who lived with him for years. He called Andy by my name and when Andy tried to correct him, Harry just seemed confused. Gilly did get Harry into a nursing home. I had thought to visit him before the Pandemic, but never got around to asking Gilly for the details. Once the pandemic started, of course, I could not have gone to his nursing home if I had wanted to, and I didn't want to. Gilly told me on Saturday that Harry had been transferred to a hospital, maybe on Thursday or Friday.

So that's the story. Harry's being cremated and his remains will be sent to Gilly, who now lives in Colorado. I've been in touch with Andy, who says he'll come over, and we'll raise glass to Harry's memory.

Tim Z Falconer

MEMO OF THE WEEK

ED NOTE: This dispute has become even weirder. To summarize: The DA and the Probation Chief are convinced that the Auditor mis-allocated over $661k plus $28k in interest. Both of them appeared at the Supervisors meeting to repeat their request that the money be re-allocated to them, where it is supposed to go. But the Supervisors apparently believed it was being worked out and said nothing. We had assumed that the Auditor wouldn’t re-allocate money on his own and had done it at the CEO’s behest. The DA said Tuesday that CEO Angelo asked Auditor Weer to re-allocate the funding as the DA and Probation demand, but Mr. Weer has so far refused without giving a reason for his refusal. The March 5 deadline in the DA’s letter has already passed without a written response from Mr. Weer. We have an email request in to Mr. Weer asking why he shifted the money the way he did and if he’s going to respond to the DA. (To be continued.) 

CHRIS CALDER:

Jay McMartin-Rosenquist, Mendocino County 4th District: “Anyone know how to get the call boxes working on Highway 20 between Fort Bragg and Willits? I have tried to use them before and they do not work. No one answers them.”

This is true. Most of the emergency call boxes between Willits and Fort Bragg on Highway 20 do not work. But they're still there, making everybody think they have a way to call for help. A Caltrans guy told me a couple of years ago they're too expensive to fix and everybody has cell phones so they're rarely used. Yeah. Until cell phones don't work (which they don't, on many parts of 20) and we actually need them in an emergency.

SUPES BRIEFS, for Tuesday, March 9 meeting.

THAT CONTROVERSIAL PROPOSAL to purchase 18 parcels on Parducci Road north of Ukiah was removed from consideration Tuesday when County Counsel Christian Curtis reported out of the Supes Closed Session that the property was “no longer for sale.” Hmmm. We suspect the reason had more to do with the increasing level of public scrutiny the proposal was getting.

CEO ANGELO, knowing that her very vague and ill-prepared presentation on what to do with the nearly $23 million in PG&E settlement funds was weak and ill-conceived (despite having months to prepare it), told the Board that it was just a starting point for discussion, no need for everyone to get upset about it’s many flaws and omissions. Lots of written public comment noted correctly that Potter Valley and Redwood Valley which were the areas most affected by the 2017 wildfires which precipitated the PG&E settlement so they should get priority attention. Several other commenters said they supported using the funding for satellite imaging to aid in marijuana enforcement. Supervisor Maureen Mulheren quickly volunteered to hold several town hall meetings in Redwood Valley and Potter Valley to solicit input from the most affected areas which her colleagues supported. Supervisor Glenn McGourty agreed to help. Interim Planning Director Nash Gonzalez asked for almost $3 million in “planning department enhancements” and additional staffing, adding that he thought a satellite imaging program might cost an additional $3 million or so. Supervisor Ted Williams, always on the alert for calling for “Plans” with a capital P, thought the County should first finish the nebulous “strategic plan” before allocating any money. Mulheren said, Maybe, but there are immediate needs in Potter Valley and Redwood Valley that shouldn’t have to wait months or years while the Supes try to come up with a “strategic plan.” (History shows that the County as an organization is simply incapable of any kind of large scale planning over more than a month or two and has never generated anything significant with real planning value.) Supervisor Williams thought some money should be invested in the Emergency Medical Response in the County and propose some ideas along that line. Transportation Director Howard Dashiell said there were some road projects in the Redwood/Potter Valley area that could use some funding. CEO Angelo agreed to come back to the Board next month with something along the lines discussed.

OUR FAVORITE MOMENT (a minor one, admittedly, but indicative of Mendo’s budgeting process) was when the Board was discussing covid reimbursements which are still quite fluid and unclear. Apparently the feds will not reimburse for regular budgeted hours spent on covid but will only reimburse covid-related overtime. Also, many of the county’s departments that are over-budget are saying the main reason was unbudgeted overtime. Accordingly, Supervisor Williams asked the CEO for a report of overtime by department showing each department’s budgeted and actual overtime. CEO Angelo promised that staff wouild prepare such a report without mentioning a deadline. Of course, this will never happen, especially not in a public meeting. But we’ll stay on top of it and will gladly report it if it does.

(Mark Scaramella)

I BELIEVE IN WORK. If somebody doesn't create something, however small it may be, he gets sick. An awful lot of people feel that they're treading water -- that if they vanished in smoke, it wouldn't mean anything at all in this world. And that's a despairing and destructive feeling. It'll kill you.

— Arthur Miller

TRACKING DANA GRAY, AN UPDATE

The February 24, 2021 AVA featured an article by Marilyn Davin on the derivations of various Mendocino County place names. The author was puzzled by the source of the name for Dana Gray Elementary School in Fort Bragg. The answer was on the internet, but it took some digging.

The Gray family was a prominent one in Fort Bragg in the late 19th and early 20th century. Mark Dana Gray (1844-1923) and Mark Dana Gray II (1879-1947) were close associates of Charles R. Johnson, the founder of Union Lumber Company and his son and successor, Otis R. Johnson. References in various trade publications of the time suggest Mark Dana Gray was a prominent member of Union Lumber Company's management. The Gray family had a home on Fir Street in Fort Bragg called "Gray View." Kelley House Museum has a photograph of the Gray family and others at a picnic on the Albion River in 1889 and another of the family at "Gray View" in 1919. A 1921 photograph titled "Particular Fluted Growth on a Redwood Stump at Camp 21, Union Lumber Company" shows a person next to the stump and identifies him as "Dana Gray, Assistant Logging Superintendent." Clearly this is Mark Dana Gray II and shows he (and probably his father also) was known by that name. Mystery solved!

This 1921 photograph was taken by Woodbridge (Woody) Metcalf (1888-1972), a longtime (and well-known) Forestry Professor at University of California at Berkeley. Coincidentally, I met Woody Metcalf while attending 4-H camp at Mendocino Woodlands as a kid in the early 1960s. It is a small world.

Best,

Marshall Newman

ON THE ROAD. A Reader Writes: 

To the gentleman (or lady) that I followed into boonville, from pretty much Flynn Creek; 1. I'm sorry you were so mad you gave me the "not" boont salute. And 2. There are MANY pull outs along the way, and if you need to go below the speed limit, that is TOTALLY cool; these roads are a little bit of a challenge for some (used to be for me). Please, though, pull over so that others can drive and get where they need to go. I'm not the only one that needed to "go," following behind you. You were passed as well. I unfortunately drive a box with no power to giddy up and go around you. 

I'm sorry that you were upset, but please be mindful of others. 

Thank you! 

Cheers.

Rose

ED NOTES

THE JUNE RANCH

Harwood James June owned and managed the H. J. June Ranch with his son Jack as assistant until Harwood died in 1967. Jack was expected to be the next manager when Harwood could no longer function. 

Alas, the estate trustee immediately attempted to solely operate the working part of the farm. In 1978 after years of steady decline, and deeply in debt, the working part of the ranch (farm) ceased to operate and was listed for sale. The timberland (827 acres) was reserved from the 950 acres when sold. 

The timberland remains in female hands, mostly family ownership today. 

When researching June Ranch property deeds it was discovered the ranch originally consisted of many separate parcels, some less than an acre. The first recorded deed was dated January 12, 1878 with J. J. Smalley deeding land to J. D. Ball; another parcel from J. J. Smalley to Joseph Rawles; two separate parcels recorded in 1889 from William Fry to Ida F. Ham (aka Ham Canyon). 

Some of the names on deeds, also included Quit Claim boundary adjustments are noted Anderson Valley pioneer families: J. J. Smalley, J. D. Ball, Joseph Rawles, Mary Jane Fry, Ida F. Ham, S. M. Ornbaun, Mary Estes, Henry Wightman, George Jeans, and Clarence L. St. John, plus other deeds from timber companies. (A few years ago, the original deeds were donated to the Anderson Valley Museum.)

The parcels that became the June Ranch, were individually purchased by Harwood and his wife Blossom through a five-year payback loan from John Edward Singley (Fly). 

Shortly before the five-year loan term was up John Edward Singley cancelled the last few payments remaining on the loan, Harwood and Blossom then owned all the parcels, free from debt; the combined acreage officially became H. J. June Ranch. It was a prosperous enterprise for many years and employed many local people during the summer months. 

The main ranch property in Boonville was sold to pay off debts incurred through the years after Harwood’s death. The working ranch land consisted of an estimated 120 plus or minus acres of mixed agriculture land, orchards, alfalfa pasture, large garden area, four homes, a large modern cold storage building that housed a packing facility, barn, old motel building, hop kiln dryer, farming equipment: tractors, loaders, hay bailer, and many other farm implements. Local Wasson family members currently own and operate the lower farm part of the ranch.

With the sale of the farm property, H. J. June Ranch legally ceased to be, its labeling rights were included in the sale. 

(History via Joan Burroughs)

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JUDGE BRENNAN has recused himself from the Caspar dog shooter case. Judge Moorman is now in charge of the grisly matter that managed to outrage the animal lovers as far away as England. Brennan has apparently succumbed to both community outrage and the wrath of his long-time nemisis, DA Eyster, and stepped aside. Judge Moorman has taken over. 

HERE'S the background:

If you came in late, real late, a Caspar woman named Katie Smith became regionally infamous not long ago when, instead of taking the dog she no longer wanted to the Coast Animal Shelter in nearby Fort Bragg, she took him out into some nearby woods and shot him several times, having intended to kill him, but only wounding the otherwise healthy animal.

DUBBED ‘Thunder the Wonder Dog’ by the woman who found him and nursed him back to health, Ms. Smith was soon identified as Thunder's would-be assassin. Animal people and non-animal people alike were shocked and dismayed at Ms. Smith's callousness, but even if she'd neatly dispatched the poor beast with a single well-placed shot, one has to wonder at her sloth in not simply driving her dog a few miles north to the shelter to give him a chance at life with a new family.

MEANWHILE, at the DA's lair behind the office's junta-like one-way glass at the County Courthouse in Ukiah and undoubtedly besieged by outraged animal lovers, the DA charged Smith with serious, jail-quality felonies that Ten Mile Court Judge Clay Brennan subsequently bundled up into a misdemeanor and no jail time. The judge did impose several years of probation with the usual restrictions and conditions.

DA EYSTER was so unhappy at Brennan's… Well, you could call Brennan's decision way too soft or you could call his decision simple humanity, a recognition that Ms. Smith, rightly denounced far and wide for her unintended cruelty — she wanted to kill her dog, not maim it — had already made herself a pariah in her community.

HAD THE JUDGE thought she'd suffered enough? Whatever Judge Brennan thought, DA Eyster, never too keen on Brennan in the first place, denounced the judge and vowed to avoid bringing cases before him. Everyone thought that was the end of it.

BUT THEN the DA had his forces of law and order visit Ms. Smith's Caspar home to see if she'd violated the terms of her probation, the primary one being that she could not own animals, not even the six chickens the probation search revealed happily scratching away in their pen on Ms. Smith's place.

Gotcha! Judge Brennan. Gotcha again, Ms. Smith. Those six chickens will force the Judge to put you in jail.

DA EYSTER would have his pound of flesh after all — several pounds — if you think the DA has temporarily lost his sense of proportion.

IN A CAESAR-LIKE blast out of his Ukiah bunker, the DA thundered, “If I conclude that the animals found today constitute a failure by the defendant to obey all laws, specifically a failure by her to obey the statutory prohibition that she cannot be around animals, we will initiate proceedings to violate her probation.”

IF THIS DOUBLE PURSUIT of Judge Brennan and the Coast pariah, Ms. Smith, is concluded according to the DA's apparent desire for twofer vengeance, Ms. Smith will be packed off for a year in County Jail for violation of the no-animals condition of her probation, and Judge Brennan will absorb another big Gotcha lobbed at him by the DA.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING: The BBC crime and cop series, Happy Valley. I've watched it on KQED Television, of all places, surprised that the purple positives would go for something this strong. I tuned in following a promo for "Benise, man of strings," Yanni with a guitar. Happy Valley's acting is beyond good, as is the writing by Sally Wainright and the superb performances by Sarah Lancashire, James Norton, and Siobhan Finneran. 

HOW TO SAVE YOUR HOME

Hi everyone. The Housing Action Team of the Northern Mendocino Coast is very pleased to let you know of a resource document (in English and Spanish) for people who are struggling to stay in their home due to economic pressures. The team did the research and designed the documents to provide concrete ideas on how to help people stay in their homes. The PDF (attached and via link to the Housing Team's website) covers the areas of help paying rent or mortgage; assistance for food and nutrition resources; income resources; and assistance with utilities. 

Here is the website where you can find the PDF in English and Spanish: www.hatmendocoast.org

The Housing Action Team's mission is to advocate for and work on having decent housing for every north coast resident and address serious and chronic housing challenges. Many people have chronic struggles with their housing; with the pandemic those challenges have increased. We hope that these resources might lessen the burden. 

Please feel free to share the document and the link with other organizations, agencies, people you know, clients, etc. 

We also designed a small postcard-style paper that can be printed and distributed to connect people to this new resource. 

For more information about the Housing Action Team or comments about these documents, please be in touch at HATmendocoast@gmail.com. 

 Best regards, 

Linda Jo

Linda Jo Stern, MPH Coordinator - Coastal Street Medicine Member - Housing Action Team lindajostern@gmail.com sternlj@ah.org 617-435-8412 (mobile)

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If you are struggling to pay your rent or mortgage you may qualify for community or government assistance. This document contains resources that can help if you’re concerned about being evicted, having housing legal problems or need help paying your rent, mortgage, or utilities. It also provides sources for income assistance and ways to spend less on food.

EVICTION PROTECTION & LEGAL SERVICES

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has stopped evictions for nonpayment of rent. Multiple conditions must be met and renters must download a form, complete it and give it to the person who wants to evict them. Contact: www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/downloads/EvictionDeclare_d508.pdf

Information regarding evictions, housing voucher denials, and more. Contact: Legal Services of Northern California, 707-462-1471, www.lsnc.net/#cat-anchor-5

Tenant, homeowner and landlord protection for anyone with a COVID-19 hardship, such as lost income.

Prevents you from being evicted. Contact: Housing is Key 833-422-4255, www.landlordtenant.dre.ca.gov/

RENT AND MORTGAGE ASSISTANCE

CalWORKs Housing Programs for temporary and permanent housing assistance for CalWORKS families at riskof homelessness. Those impacted by COVID-19 may receive additional assistance.

Contact: 707-962-1000, 707-467-5535, 877-327-1677;

www.cdss.ca.gov/inforesources/cdss-programs/housing-programs/calworks-housing-support-program

Property Tax Postponement for senior, blind, or disabled homeowners. Defers current-year property taxes on their principal residence if they meet certain criteria. Apply by June 1, 2021. Contact: California State Controller, 800-952-5661; www.sco.ca.gov/ardtax_prop_tax_postponement.html email postponement@sco.ca.gov

Assistance with paying your rent. Contact: Safe Passage Family Resource Center - 707-961-1100; 325 E. Redwood, Fort Bragg

UTILITY ASSISTANCE

Low Income Home Energy Assistance Programs (LIHEAP) help low-income households with their utilities.

Includes: Energy Crisis Intervention (ECIP) for households in crisis, Weatherization (WAP) to make your home more energy efficient, CARE for a PG&E discount and Home Energy Assistance (HEAP) for onetime energy financial assistance. Contact: North Coast Energy Services 800-233- 4480, 707-463-0303, www.nces.org/index-4.html; 

Safe Passage Family Resource Center 707-961-1100, 325 E. Redwood, Fort Bragg or PG&E 866-743-2273 www.pge.com Help for Customers During Pandemic / CARE/FERA

INCOME ASSISTANCE

CalWORKs and Cash Aid CalWORKs for financial and housing support as well as childcare assistance to families. Current recipients should contact their worker for additional support due to Covid-19.

Contact: New applicants call 707-962-1000 or 877-327-1677, www.c4yourself.com

People Helping People provides funds for a food or housing crisis due to Covid-19. Contact: North Coast Opportunities, 707-467-3200 x0, www.ncoinc.org/disaster-recovery/people-helping-people/

CARES program supports and funds housing costs, food, childcare and other necessities for individuals with disabilities and their families. Contact: Disability Services and Legal Center, 707-636-3062; www.mydslc.org/dslc-cares/

Unemployment Insurance Benefits Contact: https://edd.ca.gov/

o Workers who are temporarily unemployed or have reduced hours due to COVID-19 and parents who have to miss work to care for their children can apply for unemployment through EDD.

o Paid Family Leave & Disability Insurance provided to workers who are unable to work because they have been exposed to COVID-19, are sick with the virus, or are unable to work because they are caring for an ill or quarantined family member.

o Pandemic Unemployment for Self-Employed Workers (PAU)- an unemployment benefit for those that don’t qualify for traditional unemployment benefits (like the self-employed)

Contact: https://edd.ca.gov/about_edd/coronavirus-2019/pandemic-unemployment-assistance.htm

FOOD AND NUTRITION ASSISTANCE

Fort Bragg Food Bank, 910 N. Franklin St,M-F, 10-11:30; 12 - 3 pm. Wednesdays 4:30-5:30.

Contact: 707-964-9404; www.fortbraggfoodbank.org

Fort Bragg Farmers Market – 400 N Franklin St, Wednesdays 2-4pm, all year. Accepts WIC and doubles EBT & P-EBT. Contact: https://mcfarm.org/farmers-markets/fort-bragg-farmers-market

Mendocino Presbyterian Church, 44831 Main St., Tues. 2pm Box Lunch; Thur. 2pm Food Pantry

Contact: 707-937-5441

CalFresh provides nutrition assistance for low-income individuals and families. May be eligible if lost income due to pandemic. Contact: 707-961-1100, Safe Passage Family Resource Center, 325 E. Redwood or Contact: www.getCalFresh.org

WIC - Women Infants and Children program offers nutritional benefits to low-income pregnant and breastfeeding women and households with children under 5. 

Contact: 707-964-7106; https://www.mendocinocounty.org/government/health-and-human-services-agency/public-health-nursing/women-infants-children-wic

Great Plates for free meals delivered to seniors 65+ and individuals 60-64 affected by the pandemic.

Contact: 707-463-7900 or 877-327-1799 www.mendocinocounty.org/greatplates

School Meals for Fort Bragg: pick up food for any child under 18, Wednesdays. Contact: 707-961-3521, https://sites.google.com/fbusd.us/nutrition or email pgray@fbusd.us

School Meals for Mendocino: pick up food for any child under 18, M, W, F. Contact: 707-957-0515, www.mendocinousd.org

Pandemic EBT (P-EBT) gives families eligible for free or reduced-price meals at school extra benefits for food when schools are closed due to COVID-19. Contact: https://www.cdss.ca.gov/home/pandemic-ebt

This list was created on 2/25/2021. We will update it as programs and contacts change. Your feedback about the list would be very helpful. hatmendocoast@gmail.com

CATCH OF THE DAY, March 9, 2021

LUIS AYALA-ORTIZ, Ukiah. Ex-felon with unlawful possession or use of tear gas weapon, probation revocation.

MICHAEL BEERS, Ukiah. Failure to appear, probation revocation.

SALVADOR O. GOMEZ, Ukiah. “Miscellaneous” misdemeanor. (“Dispo in error”). 

VINCENT HERNANDEZ, Ukiah. County parole violation.

HARMONY HUTCHINS, Redwood Valley. Disobeying court order.

STEVEN LAWSON, Willits. Parole violation.

SHERRY LINDSLEY, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

ORLANDO MUNOZ, Ukiah. Probation revocation.

WILLIAM OWENS, Ukiah. Vandalism.

BIANCA SCHOFIELD, Gualala. Failure to appear.

ERYCKA SMITH, Willits. Petty theft-merchandise with priors, probation revocation. (Frequent flyer.)

LACRETIA TADEO, Ukiah. Toluene or similar, disorderly conduct-alcohol, probation revocation.

HECTOR VELASQUEZ, Fort Bragg. Protective order violation.

TIMOTHY WILEY, Clear Lake/Willits. Petty theft-merchandise with priors.

ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

“Pay close attention to events unspooling. Get ready for trouble. It’s coming every which way…”

It’s hard to pay attention to anything when one is oxygen-deprived from wearing pieces of cloth over one’s breathing holes for the last 12 months while looking down at the little black box of joy and ecstasy with mesmerizing pixels while bobbing one’s head to-and-fro to degrading noise and dissonant racket coming from ear buds while masquerading as today’s modern musical soundtrack of personal, moral, and social degradation.

Add to that the contemporary standard of losing our ability of any kind of reasonable attention span beyond seven seconds before one’s cognition begins to fully shut down and dissipate into nothingness. 

Close Attention gives way to Ignorant Bliss… the soundtrack of our times.

PRESENTING THE VETERANS FOR PEACE PLAQUE TO LAWRENCE, April 1, 2013

Left to Right: Michael Wong (US Army veteran, vice president of Veterans for Peace, SF Chapter 69), Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Nadya Williams (VFP Associate Member, SF), Ron Dickerson (veteran, member VFP SF), Italian woman writing a biography on Ferlinghetti

— Nadya (Williams)

Nadya Marina Connolly Williams, Director of Communications, Veterans For Peace, San Francisco Chapter 69; and Board Member, VFP Viet Nam Ch. 160

www.vfp160.org 

1436 Grant Avenue, Apt. 10; San Francisco, CA 94133 

Cell: (415) 845-9492; Home: (415) 362-0162; 

LOS TANGUEROS DEL OESTE

In a sparkling season finale on Sunday, April 18th, at 2:00 pm, the Ukiah Community Concert Association presents an exciting online performance by Los Tangueros del Oeste, joined by world class Argentine Tango dancers. Los Tangueros del Oeste is the latest project by bassist/composer Sascha Jacobsen. It draws on his love of Argentine Tango music and dance with elements of Flamenco, Electronica and Jazz. With five generations of musicians in his lineage leading back to the Moscow Opera, Sasha Jacobsen has delighted UCCA audiences with his other groups, the Musical Art Quintet and Trio Garufa.

He returns this time with his nuevo tango troupe of stellar musicians and dancers steeped in the fusion styles of Astor Piazzolla, Gotan Project, and Bajo Fondo. Join us April 18 at 2:00 p.m. for this vibrant finale to our virtual concert season. 

Dance partner optional, concert viewers need only a reliably strong internet connection and an email address to which UCCA can send the Zoom link. After the performance, the program will be loaded onto UCCA’s very own YouTube channel and available to subscribers and single-event ticket buyers for 30 days. Tickets for non-season subscribers are $15 and available online at www.ukiahconcerts.org. 

UCCA offers free access to Mendocino College students who request in advance as part of our continuing educational outreach program. For more information, please call 707-463-2738, or send an email through our website: www.ukiahconcerts.org. Visit us there, and Like us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. The Ukiah Community Concert Association has been presenting internationally acclaimed talent since 1947. This all-volunteer nonprofit’s mission is to build and maintain an enthusiastic concert audience by presenting stellar and enticing live performances. It is also our goal to encourage and develop music appreciation in the schools because Live Music makes Life Better! UCCA thanks our members for their continued support as well as our sponsors Schat's Bakery, Black Oak Coffee, and Rivino Winery and W/E Flowers. Special thanks to the Mendocino Arts Club and Mendocino College Recording Arts & Technology club for their ongoing support and collaboration. 

Thank you! 

Ukiah Community Concert Association

PO Box 844, Ukiah, CA 95482

THE PROPHET OF THE TRUMP ERA

Review of Martin Gurri's "The Revolt of the Public," the book that called both an uprising and a reaction

by Matt Taibbi

I entered Martin Gurri’s world on August 1, 2015. Though I hadn’t read The Revolt of the Public, at the time a little-known book by the former CIA analyst of open news sources, I hit a disorienting moment of a type he’d described in his opening chapter. There are times, he wrote, “when tomorrow no longer resembles yesterday… the compass cracks, by which we navigate existence. We are lost at sea.”

Gurri’s book is about how popular uprisings are triggered by collapses of faith in traditional hierarchies of power. I felt such a collapse that day in Waterloo, Iowa, covering the Republican presidential primary. The first debate was five days away and the man expected to occupy center stage, Donald Trump, held a seemingly inexplicable six-point lead.

Two weeks before, on July 18th, Trump lashed out against former Republican nominee John McCain. Even McCain’s critics considered his physical and mental scars from years as a Vietnam war prisoner to be unassailable proofs of his patriotic gravitas, but the service-evading Trump was having none of it. “I don’t like losers,” he said, adding, “He’s only a war hero because he was captured.” It was the universal belief among colleagues in campaign journalism that this was an unsurvivable gaffe, a “Dean scream” moment. We expected him to apologize and wash out. Instead, he called McCain a “dummy” and kept a firm grasp on the lead. 

A different candidate, New Jersey governor Chris Christie, was in Waterloo. Two years before, Time all but dubbed Christie the favorite for 2016 with a silhouette cover portrait, over the nastily shallow (but publicity-generating) double-entendre headline, THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM. Christie was every Washington consultant’s idea of a “crossover” superstar. I’d describe the concept in Rolling Stone as someone “mean enough for the right-wing, but also knows a gay person or once read a French novel.” 

Christie parked himself in the middle of Waterloo’s annual “Irish fest” street fair, waiting for an Iowan to ask for a souvenir campaign handshake. He had his hand out and thumb stuck upwards, like an Iguanodon. Nobody came. Kids ran around him like he was a shrubbery. Two young women, giggling about something that clearly had nothing to do with him, walked his way, separated just long enough to avoid hitting him, then linked up again a few yards down. He eventually posed with a few passersby, but the rubbernecking that usually attends the arrival of any “famous politician” was conspicuously absent.

Later, I sat in the park discussing Trump’s stubborn grasp on the lead with another reporter, an Iowan. “It’s amazing,” he said, shaking his head. “We’re beating the shit out of the guy, and he just won’t die.” He compared it to a nightmare, where you stab an attacking monster over and over, and nothing happens.

Elections in the pre-Trump era had been stale rituals. As recently as 2013, Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post called them “remarkably scripted and controlled.” Donors, party chiefs, and pundits could concoct contenders through sheer alchemy, mesmerizing the public with incantations like “electability.” But in Iowa that summer, one “electable” Republican candidate after another — from Jeb Bush to Scott Walker to Marco Rubio — flopped in public appearances, savaged as phonies on social media. Walker, the betting favorite among reporters, saw his campaign deflated when his online strategist, Liz Muir, started tweeting her real feelings about Iowa (including the classic, “#agsubsidies #ethanol #brainless”). 

I’d spent weeks crisscrossing the state in search of even one piece of evidence that conventional wisdom still had predictive power in Republican politics, finding none. Now, here was Christie, reduced from being lionized in a Time cover story as a favorite and a “guy who loves his mother and gets it done,” to being nobody at all, a clown standing alone in a park. The realization that no one was in control of the campaign show anymore was jarring even to me, a critic of the old gatekeeping ritual.

In the introduction to The Revolt of the Public, Arnold Kling speaks of a different “Gurri moment”: when Dan Rather’s 2004 expose about George W. Bush’s military service was blown up by an amateur blogging under the name “Bucklehead.” In the past, a media titan like CBS could only be second-guessed by another major institutional power. In “Rathergate,” both the network and one of its most iconic celebrities were humiliated by a single individual, a preview of the coming disorientation. 

The thesis of The Revolt of the Public is that traditional centralized powers are losing — have lost — authority, in large part because of the demystifying effect of the Internet. The information explosion undermined the elite monopoly on truth, exposing long-concealed flaws. Many analysts had noted the disruptive power of the Internet, but what made Gurri unique is that he also predicted with depressingly humorous accuracy how traditional hierarchies would respond to this challenge: in a delusional, ham-fisted, authoritarian manner that would only confirm the worst suspicions of the public, accelerating the inevitable throw-the-bums-out campaigns. This assessment of the motive for rising public intransigence was not exactly welcomed, but either way, as Kling wrote, “Martin Gurri saw it coming.”

Gurri also noted that public revolts would likely arrive unattached to coherent plans, pushing society into interminable cycles of zero-sum clashes between myopic authorities and their increasingly furious subjects. He called this a “paralysis of distrust,” where outsiders can “neutralize but not replace the center” and “networks can protest and overthrow, but never govern.” With a nod to Yeats, Gurri summed up: “The center cannot hold, and the border has no clue what to do about it.”

The Revolt of the Public became a cult classic in the Trump years for a variety of reasons, resonating with audiences spanning the political spectrum, from left to right to in between, everywhere except the traditional media consensus. It describes a basic problem of authority in the digital age and for that reason will continue to have relevance into the future. But its most striking feature is how completely it nailed the coming Trump era. 

Published in 2014, The Revolt of the Public may be alone among the countless books about the Trump years to correctly peg its core destabilizing problem. While conventional pundits blame everyone from Russians to white nationalists to “fake news” for all that currently ails us, Gurri focused on the inherent problem of authority in the digital age. If you follow his thinking, the specific forms that recent revolts have taken — Brexit, Trump, etc. — have been far less important than what he describes as the “nihilist impulse” behind them, “the wish to smash down whatever stands.” In America, this impulse found Trump, not the other way around. It also could have (and has, in other countries) come from the left instead of the right. The relentless focus on Trump as the center of all evil on earth has mostly served to deflect from a broader narrative about distrust of institutional authority that far pre-dates Trump. 

Through a series of case studies ranging from Egypt to Tunisia to Italy to the campaign of Barack Obama, Gurri lays out how snowballing disgust with the blundering arrogance of ruling parties was everywhere leading to upheavals. In the Italian general elections of February 2013, a new party called the “Five Star” movement won 25% of the vote. Inspired by a comedian-blogger named Beppe Grillo, named after the Jiminy Cricket character in Pinocchio, the party, Gurri wrote, “lacked a coherent program. The single unifying principle was a deep loathing of the Italian political establishment.”

Gurri saw such outbursts everywhere, even in the election of Barack Obama, since “the U.S. presidential elections of 2008 [were] an early instance of the public on the move against the established order.” The political scientists and pundits who puzzle over the fact that a great many people voted for both Obama and Trump, shouldn’t. Both men positioned themselves as outsiders, both were aided by a lack of a track record and a deliberately vague platform, making both effective vehicles for expressing popular discontent.

Even Obama’s much-criticized background as a “community organizer,” Gurri notes, was actually a plus with many voters, as it placed him in the realm of somebody protesting against something, allowing him to run, as Trump later would, as society’s “chief accuser.” That Obama became a quasi-reactionary steward of the forces he ran against is also addressed by Gurri, but the book stresses that he first rode into power amid a massive urge to negate the system.

Gurri predicted throughout that entrenched authorities would be unable to distinguish between legitimate criticism and illegitimate rebellion. Once they lost control “over the story told about their performance,” they’d denounce clearly factual evidence of public discontent as lies. Gurri would later talk about centralized authority being “institutionally unable to grasp that it has lost its monopoly over political reality.” This in turn would stimulate even more “distrust and loss of legitimacy.” 

This is exactly what happened with Trump. His dominance in primary polls was simply disbelieved by politicians and elite press outlets, who were all — not some, but all — certain that he could never win, not even the nomination.

They believed as a matter of religious tenet that this belching phantasm of a candidate had to falter because, as the New York Timesput it, “elite support” was “necessary” for victory. There was no such thing as a candidate winning the presidency without elite permission: it was a logical impossibility.

The other clear subtext of the Trump phenomenon, that he owed support to a generation of failed governance and post-2008 suspicions about a “rigged” economy, was initially permitted in coverage of the 2015-2016 campaign. However, this was later excised from analyses of Trump’s win as surely as Lev Trotsky’s face disappeared from Stalinist accounts of the revolution. It became increasingly mandatory to believe that Russians were to blame for 2016, and increasingly taboo to describe Trump as, say, the lucky beneficiary of a long-developing global trend toward rejection of political insiders. This was a manifestation of what Gurri would later call a “massive reaction… against electoral results dictated by the public.”

Trump was eventually ousted, as much by his own mouth as by the persuasive power of his opposition, but the basic contradictions of power in the modern age remain. Hierarchies depend on secrecy and scarcity of information to preserve the illusion of authority, but digital networks make information so accessible that any amateur can see straight through the old myths. We saw this in the GameStop phenomenon a few weeks back, when a Reddit board full of amateur investors, armed with the same analytic tools once only available to credentialed finance professionals, were able to topple a billion-dollar hedge fund.

Belief in the infallibility of experts is evaporating. Today neither the CEO of an investment bank, nor the Pulitzer winner, nor the four-term Senator is assumed to live in a sanctified higher tier. To anyone with a phone, they’re just equals and competitors, and often not terribly competent ones. It’s “no man is a hero to his valet,” expanded to a global scale: we simply have too much information about our leaders to revere them in the old way.

Contrast this with the example Gurri cites of John Kennedy’s handling of the Bay of Pigs disaster in 1961, when the Arthur of the American Camelot went on television and credited “Cuban patriots” with the effort to overthrow Fidel Castro, denying all American involvement. This was a “bald untruth” as absurd as Donald Trump’s insistence that “I didn’t call [McCain] a loser,” yet Kennedy was mostly able to get away with it. “No member of the White House press corps mocked the fiction of non-intervention,” Gurri wrote. “No secret documents were published exposing the depth of CIA involvement in the Cuba operation.” Bush and Obama were not as lucky.

The new digital networks that rose up in the eighties, nineties, and 2000s were by nature hostile to the concept of central authority. Gurri notes this was reflected even in the “self-mocking” names of the companies that would dominate our world: Yahoo!, Google, Twitter, Reddit, Flickr, Photobucket. These choices were meant to puncture the “formal stiffness of the established order,” which is why, say, Google, “never contemplated naming their company ‘National Search Engine Corporation.’”

The new corporate titans were organized instead around the concept that interconnectivity unlocked the power of the many to make their way without the direction of the centralized few. For this reason, Gurri notes, digital networks are often “egalitarian to the point of dysfunction. Most would rather fail as an enterprise than acknowledge rank or leaders of any sort.” The problem is, networks need an organizing point of reference to thrive, which in the absence of leaders has often meant focusing on opposing something, “being against.”

Gurri makes the interesting observation that the movie V for Vendetta, whose telltale Guy Fawkes mask has become the symbol of oppositional movements everywhere, “ended with the demolition of the old regime. The rest would take care of itself.” Whether consciously or unconsciously, the movie became a template for how modern protest movements imagined themselves, singularly directed toward a final, orgasmic negation, with the flames of righteousness shooting out of Big Ben.

On both the left and the right, movements began to form that rejected the idea of plans for governance as a matter of principle, believing they distracted from the more important goal of gathering movement energy. Occupy Wall Street refused to issue demands for this reason, because “the movement is an assertive process.” If there were rallying cries at all, they were more likely to be something like the slogan of the hacker collective Anonymous: “We do it for the lulz.” We’d see the same nihilistic urge in the slogans of the Trump movement, e.g. “Trump 2020: Because Fuck Your Feelings.”

Thus we end up with two casts of characters popping up everywhere: irrepressible networks of amateurs organizing with furious speed to oppose something, usually the “incumbent structure”; and decaying, centralized authorities, who are “painfully deliberate in action, process-obsessed, mesmerized by grand strategies and five-year plans, respectful of rank and order but contemptuous of the outsider.”

Look at almost any recent cultural development through the Gurri lens, and things make sense. Even in the most traditionally hierarchical organizations, leaders now seem desperate to avoid exercising authority, and organizations have begun taking on the qualities of oppositional networks. The crisis of authority is everywhere.

At the New York Times, once the most intractable, pig-headed hierarchy in the media business, editors are terrified of making decisions, and the organization has reinvented itself as a kind of giant Slack chat, taking aim at this and that, with lines blurring even between subscribers and staff. 

In a new chapter written during the Trump years, Gurri noted that once-staid news media organizations like the Times were now mimicking the tone of the social media networks that had everywhere been challenging them as “fake news media” symbols of the “lamestream” establishment. They took the style of their critics and applied it to coverage of the Trump administration. “The rage that was once the monopoly of online politics — and poisons so much of [Trump’s] own rhetoric — now poured out of the inky pages of old-fashioned newsprint,” Gurri wrote. 

All of this leads Gurri in the book to worry a lot about the future of all kinds of institutions. “You can pick examples at random,” he says. “The daily newspaper, the political party, even modern government… they seem to lack vital signs, and can only stagger, zombie-like, from crisis to crisis.” Among his worries is representative democracy itself, wondering if it’s a “body without a soul”: alive, but lacking a story that commands public belief. Can it survive in a world that is not only technologically expert at stimulating nihilism and mass discontent, but no longer even teaches the concept of leadership? 

When I asked Gurri about this, he talked about the lack of a pipeline for developing leaders. We develop hot-takers and critics at light speed, and the dominant theologies on both the left and right stress the tearing down/opting out of hegemonies — from “dismantling the patriarchy” to “taking the red pill.” Where, even in theory, are people being taught to hold things together? “Outside of the military, which still demands a code of conduct from its members,” he says, “I don’t see where people are trained to govern today.”

Gurri throughout his book insists he’s “rejected prophetic analysis,” but The Revolt of the Public is the closest thing in print to a blueprint for understanding what he calls the “long, foul rant that is our moment in history.” To future generations, the question he poses — how does a society whose old system of governance has lost legitimacy, but hasn’t yet imagined a replacement, survive? — might seem obvious. However, it’s just as obvious that we’re nowhere near an answer yet, in part because the question is still taboo. 

Gurri points out that for all the catastrophic rhetoric of recent times, our government managed to survive even the Trump years with “remarkably little violence,” suggesting that we might be hardier than believed. But until we face our crisis of legitimacy, and admit we need something stronger than negation to build on, we’ll all continue to be lost at sea.

(https://taibbi.substack.com)