Mendocino County Today: Saturday, March 20, 2021

Off/On | 7 New Cases | AV Vaccinations | Big Wave | Surge Protection | Yorkville BBQ | Doohan Doo-Dah | Paris Barricade | Ricky del Fiorentino | Corporate Cannabis | Russian Gulch | Stabber Arrested | 1975 A's | Ed Notes | Cleone Grocery | Panhorst Bridge | Streetscape Update | Duckhorn IPO | Yesterday's Catch | SF Art | Snyder Version | Water Wise | Marilize Legajuana | Dem Russians | Curry Jukes | Poets Echo | Hugh Thompson | Travel Lit | Capitalism's Flower | Biden Putin | Dream Gig | Fruit Blossoms | PA Agenda | Marco Radio | Protoplanet Vesta | Asteroid Flyby

SCATTERED SHOWERS will gradually diminish later today and tonight, with clouds scattering for sunshine at the coast and through the inland valleys. After a frosty start, high pressure will bring dry, sunny and breezy conditions for Sunday, before a weak front brings a few showers to northern portions of our region on Monday. (NWS)

7 NEW COVID CASES reported in Mendocino County yesterday afternoon.

FROM THE AV HEALTH CENTER:

The county is moving towards a more liberal distribution of the covid vaccine. If you live or work in Anderson Valley, AVHC needs to hear from you. If you have NOT gotten the vaccine and are over 16, please sign up on our JOTform, even if you are our patient. For those people you know, who do not have internet access, please have them call our office and we will sign them up. This will help us align our vaccine requests with the need in the valley. Thank you! We are striving to get our valley full access to a safe and effective Covid vaccine! form.jotform.com/210206442361139

GIANT SURF

CORONAVIRUS IN THE U.S.: WHERE CASES ARE GROWING AND DECLINING

Overall, cases in the United States are falling, but not quite as steeply as hoped. And spikes in several states have experts concerned another surge may be on the way.

nationalgeographic.com/science/graphics/graphic-tracking-coronavirus-infections-us

SATURDAY BBQ 3/20 AT THE YORKVILLE MARKET

Happy Spring! This Saturday Amy and I will BBQing Texas style Brisket with baked beans, pickles and a side of greens. We will be serving from 12:30ish-4:30ish or until sold out. Price per plate is $15.00 and you are welcome to eat here on our patio or take the meal to go.

We also have Chicken Marsala and mashed potato dinners for two as our Take-and Bake this week.

See you soon!

Best,

Lisa

HEALTH OFFICER LOVE-FEST

Mendocino County Deputy Health Officer To Advise State Of California On Health Equity

Post Date: 03/19/2021 3:30 PM

Mendocino County is pleased to announce that County Deputy Health Officer, Dr. Noemi Doohan, has been appointed as co-chair of the Health Equity Committee for the California Conference of Local Health Officers (CCLHO).

The CCLHO advises the California Department of Public Health, as well as other state health entities on all public health matters.

“I am delighted and honored to be appointed to such an important committee,” says Dr. Doohan. “It is my goal to ensure that health equity is strongly represented in state public health policies.”

“To have someone who has Mendocino County’s best interests at heart in this role gives our county a special opportunity to have our voice heard at the state level,” says Health Officer Dr. Andy Coren. “Moreover, Dr. Doohan's strong commitment to equity, proven here in Mendocino County, will now benefit all of California.”

Through this new appointment, Dr. Doohan will be able bring the needs and perspectives of rural counties forward. She will continue her long standing advocacy and support of health equity throughout California with an awareness for the diversity of needs of counties such as Mendocino. Additionally, she will share these differences with state health officials; which ultimately can affect each and every resident of rural counties throughout the state in supporting access to medical care.

CHRIS CALDER REMEMBERS DEPUTY DEL FIORENTINO

Ricky del Fiorentino was killed in the line of duty seven years ago today. You can't really describe what that event did to Fort Bragg. It's still happening.

Ricky del Fiorentino was gunned down by a literally crazed individual who drove down from Southern Oregon with a car-full of automatic weapons, terrorizing people along the way. I am not making this up.

He pulled a rifle on the couple who were running the Confusion Hill roadside attraction on Highway 101 at the time. They ran him off and called 911. He drove south, sometimes at to 100 mph, in his hot little Mercedes coupe (again, not making this up) on Highway 1 to Cleone, where he hid on a side street about half a mile from where I live now.

Ricky del Fiorentino was a sheriff's deputy on duty that day. He heard the radio report of a crazed gunman driving south toward Fort Bragg.

Fort Bragg was not Ricky del Fiorentino's home town - he went to high school and won football and wrestling championships in Napa - but he made it more than his home town here. He was a law enforcement officer like everybody wants. He was loved. He didn't seem to see what kind of shoes you wore, or anything else about you except the look in your eye. This sounds hokey but it's true. He took joy in helping people. He protected the weak. He gave a lot of people a break. I never heard anybody say he was a bully (and I'm one of the ones people would have told here in the 90s). Never once.

Ricky del Fiorentino drove north on March 19, 2014 to meet the man who was waving automatic weapons around and driving his Mercedes 100 mph. Just that in itself, I think, should make you respect any cop. Putting yourself in the position of being asked to do something like that, just by showing up to work, deserves respect.

Del Fiorentino drove north to Cleone, looked around on the side streets, a residential neighborhood, mostly old people. He found the man parked in his Mercedes. The man got out with an automatic rifle and killed Del Fiorentino with it.

John Naulty, who is police chief in Fort Bragg now, arrived a few minutes later, saw what had happened, and when the man raised his rifle, Naulty killed him with his service revolver.

I relate these brutal details because I think of this every time I criticize police officers. This is the nightmare. It almost never happens, thank God, but the possibility of it happening is at the start of every cop's shift. Every day.

I'm going to be making myself a pain in the a** to John Naulty soon, because I think, given what happened with the Eureka Police Department, we need proof that our local law enforcement does not have streaks of sadism and racism running through it, like the EPD does. It is a sad state of affairs.

I trust John Naulty. I trust him to be a good cop. Good cops protect us, no matter who we are. They also protect their own, no matter what. That is why it can't be John Naulty's job to root out racism and unaccountable violence in American law enforcement. It's our job.

Seven years ago, Ricky del Fiorentino gave his life for his neighbors. That is something we never want to happen. It is also true heroism. It is the hardest and highest job we give our law enforcement officers. It causes the terrible pressure they work under. That, and seeing the worst of us, every day. It's why we have to worry about and keep an eye on how they are doing. Because we are the ones they serve, and the responsibility for what they do is ultimately ours.

Thank you, Ricky del Fiorentino. Truly, we will never forget.

DON'T DO IT, MENDO!

Open Letter To The Mendocino County Planning Commission, which will meet at 10:00 am on 3/19/2021. They are considering allowing “Rangeland” to become “Ag-Land” which will result in large tracts of land in Mendocino County becoming corporate cannabis fields. We are facing a drought, wells in rural Mendocino County are already drying up (in March!) and four members of our Board of Supervisors have voted to allow this zoning change to occur. Third District Supervisor John Haschak had the courage to say “No” but we need the other members to join him. 

March 19, 2021

Dear Honorable Planning Commissioners:

Regarding the proposed change to the county zoning, which would allow rangeland to become weedland, I strongly request that you reject such a proposal. We have strived to keep a balance in Mendocino County, and now that balance is being swayed by corporate greed.

Can any single person convince us that there isn’t already enough land to cultivate cannabis in Mendocino County? 

Of course not. There are tens of thousands of acres available but corporate-America wants to suck up large tracts of rangeland and thumb their nose at what we have done to protect the integrity of our county. 

Can any single person convince us that there is a danger of a cannabis shortage because of the lack of land to cultivate in Mendocino County (or any county in California)? 

Of course not. There is a glut of cannabis and the price continues to plummet. The black market is now dominating the price of cannabis and encouraging growth on rangeland will only allow the dominance to continue.

Please understand your role as a planning commissioner. Your role is to maintain the integrity of the zoning ordinance(s) and prevent history from looking back and showing where the integrity was lost. We must not allow our generation to be the loose cannon that didn’t think a solution through. 

Please send a convincing signal to the Board of Supervisors, reminding them that they should not be loyal to the large cannabis corporations who want to dominate the cannabis market. Their (our) loyalty should be at the feet of our ancestors who worked hard to protect our range land and open fields for generations to come, not at the feet of corporations who want to turn millions into billions. 

If there is ever a cannabis shortage in the future, maybe that would be the time to reevaluate but we all know that time will never arrive. 

Tom Allman

Resident of the Third District

Sheriff, Retired

ASSAULT AT THE POMO PUMP

On Wednesday, March 17, 2021, at approximately 1:15 PM, Lake County Sheriff’s Deputies were dispatched to the Pomo Pump Gas Station located in Upper Lake for a reported stabbing that had just occurred. When deputies arrived they found a victim with a stab wound. The victim was transported to Sutter Lakeside hospital where he was later flown to an out of county hospital for treatment of non-life threatening injuries.

During the investigation deputies learned that the victim was an employee at the gas station. The suspects, who were identified as Jerrica Marie Reeves, 31, of Nice and Moses Filburn James Reeves, 34, of Nice, came to the gas station and started a verbal argument with the victim. 

The argument turned physical and Jerrica Reeves began assaulting the victim. Moses Reeves exited his vehicle and also began physically assaulting the victim. The victim attempted to retreat into the gas station and when he did he felt a pain in his back. The victim was able to enter the gas station while the suspects fled the area in their vehicle. Major Crimes Detectives responded to assist with the investigation. Detectives were able to determine that Moses Reeves was responsible for stabbing the victim. 

Deputies were able to locate the suspect’s vehicle at a residence on East Robinson Road in Upper Lake. Deputies were able to contact the owners of the residence who were not home. The owners gave deputies permission to search the residence and surrounding area for the suspects, but they were not able to locate them. At this time the motive for the assault is still under investigation.

At approximately 9:30 PM, deputies patrolling in the Upper Lake area stopped a vehicle for a mechanical violation. During the stop the deputies recognized Jerrica Reeves as a passenger in the vehicle and she was taken into custody without incident. She was later booked at the Lake County Jail on charges of Accessary to a Crime and Battery. Due to $0 bail rules that are in effect she was released after booking. Moses Reeves was not located and anyone with information related to his location was asked to contact the Sheriff’s Office at 707-263-2690. Anyone who may have witnessed the assault or who has additional information related to the investigation is asked to contact Detective Dean Preader at 707-262-4231 or dean.preader@lakecountyca.gov.

---

Update:

On Thursday, March 18, 2021 Moses Reeves was arrested in Mendocino County for Public Intoxication by the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office. At approximately 8 PM, Reeves was released from the Mendocino County Jail and placed under arrest by a Lake County Sheriff’s Deputy for the assault that occurred on March 17 at the Pomo Pumps Gas Station. Reeves was transported to the Lake County Jail where he was booked into custody for the charges of Assault with a Deadly Weapon and Battery. He remains in custody with bail set at $25,000.

ED NOTES

CHRIS ISBELL suffered a terrible, seemingly fatal stroke three weeks ago, but Chris has survived and he's out of ICU and talking and eating a little despite his paralyized right side. 

Chris is in for a long, painful rehab, but he's obviously a fighter and we expect him to eventually return to the woods and streams of his old home in Navarro.

NAMED for the Emerald Triangle marijuana-growing region of Northern California’s Mendocino, Humboldt and Trinity counties, the Emerald Cup is a community celebration that has grown to become a global movement honoring the year’s finest organic cannabis harvest, striving to highlight the diversity in cannabis through its participants, expert judges, and featured panelists.

THE ABOVE CHARACTERIZATION of the now famous pot contest that began humbly just north of Laytonville, is not widely shared by Mendo growers who commented on-line:

(1) I remember those posers when they started blasting out their egos at the old Czech Lodge. Blow it up, make lots of noise and bring a quick end to our scene. THANKS! Nobody I knew in the hills ever brought anything to their blingetty-bling showcase and we still don’t. But yeah - claim it all you greenrushing latecomers! $$$ and EGO and call it whatever you want… We know who you really are: carpetbaggers and sellouts

(2) They are allowing indoor this year. I think that’s wrong.

(3) The emerald cup is a total joke. Way to exploit the entire community for your own gain. They stole the emerald triangle’s namesake and are using it to shamelessly self promote themselves and their own friends. The entire cup is rigged and the same friends of theirs are always winning, I put no legitimacy into these lame contests and refuse to enter into any competition like this. The only reason they are going to a TV show format is to continue to self promote and sell out to a larger audience.

(4) Tim [Blake, founder of the Cup] lost any credibility he ever hoped to have when the emerald cup moved to Sonoma so they could reach a “bigger audience.” I’m from Laytonville and personally know him & the johnny come lately crew. Some are good, some are bad. But no denying they all came here after 215 to capitalize.

WHAT? White House press secretary Jen Psaki has confirmed that five White House staffers have been fired for disclosures of past marijuana use. On Thursday, The Daily Beast reported that dozens of young staffers for the new Biden administration had been suspended, asked to resign, or placed in a remote work program due to prior pot use. In a tweet posted Friday morning, Psaki said the White House was working on an updated policy to “ensure that past marijuana use wouldn’t automatically disqualify staff from serving in the White House.” She added: “As a result, more people will serve who would not have in the past with the same level of recent drug use. The bottom line is this: of the hundreds of people hired, only five people who had started working at the White House are no longer employed as a result of this policy.” (Daily Beast)

FEAR. Marilyn Davin's excellent piece on her recent experience with Mendocino County's “cultural services,” library division, is the very tip of the FEAR iceberg. It characterizes American life, maybe always has, and definitely paralyzes a broad swathe of this county's population. If I had a nickel etc. for every time someone said, “Please don't quote me,” as if his or her life were in danger if his or her's non-life-threatening mundanity would earn them an immediate bullet to the head, I might plausibly claim to live “in the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

COUPLA recent cases in point: A Coast woman I've known for years, not well but a long time, wrote a long, single-spaced denunciation of me apparently for my opinion on an animal matter. And all this time I thought my opinions on the four-footed community were so highly evolved, so absolutely cutting edge that this was one area of local public life that put me beyond criticism. Nope, not to my critic. I'd not only betrayed her but the animal kingdom. But here's the kicker, and I'm still kicking myself for honoring her request to “not publish this letter.” Why? Because she knew it was false, factually and emotionally incorrect, and by publishing it she would be revealed as the liar and bully she is, at least where I'm concerned, although I wouldn't trust her to feed my gold fish.

THEN THERE'S THE MORE AGGRESSIVE of the passive-aggressives who don't confine their “Please don't print this” to their written assessments of my admittedly numerous character defects, (punctuality is my sole remaining virtue), but begin by saying, “You've hurt a lot of really, really good people,” like I did a drive-by of Oprah Night at their book club. I know lots of “really good people” who are good without publicizing the fact, but when someone writes in to say, “Don't use my name, but you've hurt a lot of really good people,” I want the names so I can kick them again.

CHRIS CALDER:

New from the Cleone Grocery: an exciting line of refrigerator magnets and keychains. Sasquatch, Smokey, the redwoods. It's all there. Fidget spinner keychains.

The Cleone Grocery tends to feature things like food and what you can wear, plus beer, cigs and lotto tickets, of course. Proprietor Roger Larson insists on keeping his prices as low as Safeway's, when he could gouge us, his friends and neighbors too lazy to drive into town, to his heart's content. Therefore the lack of Sasquatch refrigerator magnets has been overlooked.

Fast forward to 2021. Oh...we were already here. But you're never really there yet, at the Cleone Grocery! It is its own little wrinkle in time, so to speak, and it does what it wants. And what Roger and merchandising 007 wants right now is for you to get your bored butts on down and check out the new bling!!!!

Plus of course, the frozen bait squid that can also be used for calamari in a pinch, and the Wall o' Candy, that's around the corner from the other Wall o' Candy, that's across from the Counters o' Candy. So much candy. And ice cream. Sweat shirts...oh wait, they did have magnets already. But they're hidden in the back. And why are they next to the little individually wrapped bundles of matches? Why...? There is a reason at the Cleone Grocery. But probably better just to buy your sh*t and keep moving. It's busy. Even when it doesn't look like it's busy.

UKIAH STREETSCAPE PROJECT CONSTRUCTION UPDATE - MARCH 19

It’s official—from Mill Street to Henry Street, all of the water and sewer infrastructure beneath State Street has been totally replaced. This includes the main lines in the street and all the laterals to the buildings. Remember—some of this stuff was nearly 100 years old! 

Random project info: In the final stages of this project, new traffic signals will be installed at the intersections of Standley, Perkins, and Mill Streets. What will be different about these signals? Instead of being on timers like the old ones, these will have built-in sensors that “read” the traffic demand in all directions. Therefore, on State Street, the lights will remain green until there is cross traffic…so no more sitting at red lights when there isn’t another car in sight! 

Construction Overview, Week of March 22 

Wahlund Construction (West Clay Street): 

Monday-Friday: Sewer work will occur on West Clay Street between State and School Streets. This process can be noisy and a bit messy, and will include trenching and other underground work. 

Access to driveways in the 100 block of West Clay Street will likely be blocked during parts of this construction. During those times, employees and visitors to those businesses may park at the Ukiah Civic Center, 300 Seminary Avenue. 

Construction hours: 7am – 5pm 

Ghilotti Construction (Henry – Mill): Continued work on the east side of State Street between Perkins and Mill Streets, including excavating, forming and pouring new curbs, gutters, and bioretention facilities. Pouring of new sidewalks will begin mid-week. 

Monday/Tuesday: Prepping for new sidewalks between Church and Perkins. 

Tuesday/Wednesday-Friday: Begin pouring sidewalks between Clay and Perkins Street, beginning in front of Steve’s Auto and working north, roughly half a block per day. Also, crews will begin grading and prepping for new sidewalks between Clay and Mill, starting at Clay and moving south. 

East Stephensen Street will be closed to through traffic for the next few weeks – Community Care and The Maple will have access to their parking lots from Main Street. 

East Church will be closed intermittently during this phase. 

Construction hours: 7am – 5pm 

North State Street between Perkins and Henry: In between their work on other parts of the project, contractors will continue working on North State Street on the decorative brick band and landscaping areas. 

Have a great weekend!

Thanks,

Shannon Riley, Deputy City Manager, City of Ukiah, w: (707) 467-5793

DUCKHORN PORTFOLIO STOCK rises in NYSE debut by Napa Valley wine company. The trends panel includes Alex Ryan of Duckhorn Wine Co., Corey Beck of The Family Coppola and Dan Baker of Korbel. They met at the North Bay Business Journal's Wine Industry Conference in the Sonoma State University Student Center on Thursday, April 18, 2019. 

The Duckhorn Portfolio Inc., which owns Sebastopol’s Kosta Browne and Mendocino County’s Goldeneye wineries in Anderson Valley, began trading in the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday.

The St. Helena wine company offered 20 million shares at $15 per share in its initial public offering. Its stock, which trades under the ticker symbol “NAPA,” closed at $17.18 per share Thursday.

The IPO will raise $300 million for Duckhorn and its investors. The company is owned by private equity group TSG Consumer Partners, which expects to control almost 78% of the overall stock after the initial offering, according to documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The trading was the first notable IPO for an American wine company in about 20 years and will be followed another one in May by Vintage Wine Estates of Santa Rosa. Analysts note that the companies are looking to use the new capital to fund more acquisitions as the sector undergoes consolidation.

(Santa Rosa Press Democrat)

CATCH OF THE DAY, March 19, 2021

CHRISTOPHER CARTER, Covelo. Probation revocation.

DARRYL CARTER, Rancho Cucamonga/Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

BABRIEL DIXON, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

MICHAEL DOMANOWSKI, Ukiah. Contempt of court, vandalism.

JOSE FELIX, Redwood Valley. DUI.

JAVIER GARCIA, Willits. County parole violation.

RICARDO GARCIA, Ukiah. Assault withi deadly weapon not a gun. 

JOSEPH GRANT, Ukiah. Failure to appear.

SEAN HAMMON, Ukiah. County parole violation. *background

JODY MCCOY, Ukiah. Suspended license. 

CHARLES RAINES, Fort Bragg. Probation revocation.

JEREMIAH RAY, Covelo. DUI.

MOSES REEVES, Nice/Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

KELLY STANTON, Ukiah. Concealed dirk-dagger.

JENNIFER YONKERS, Deerfield, Illinois/Ukiah. Criminal threat.

ART & POLITICS IN SAN FRANCISCO, 2021

Portraits of a City in Upheaval, Again

by Jonah Raskin

Murals by Miranda Bergman.

Bay Area artist and teacher, Miranda Bergman, knows by heart the most famous lines in The Tempest. She ought to. Her Old Left parents named her after Shakespeare’s feisty heroine who exclaims, “How amazing! How many wonderful creatures there are here! Mankind is so beautiful! Oh, what a wonderful new world that has such people in it!”

Bergman doesn’t just recite the lines. She also endorses that Shakespearean sentiment, though she finds it more challenging to do so now than at any other time in recent memory. “We’re living in a dire moment,” she tells me. “Pathologically powerful people and social classes, plus patriarchy, hold sway in many parts of the world. Globally, with COVID-19 and climate change, only world-wide cooperation will meet the challenge.”

Miranda carries on now as she has carried on over the past half-century. “Culture Contains the Seed of Resistance which Blossoms into the Flower of Liberation,” she tells me. Those words come from an often-quoted talk by the African anti-colonialist, poet and intellectual, Amilcar Cabral, who was assassinated in 1973, shortly before he reached the age of fifty. In San Francisco today his words are still inspiring to activists and artists, poets and writers.

A muralist in a city known for its extraordinary murals, Miranda Bergman has extended and reinvented the tradition initiated by Mexican artist, Diego Rivera, and developed and refined by Anton Refregier and Arnautoff, both of them Russian-born American lefties. Miranda has created about 35 murals, many of them works of beauty. San Francisco has had a long love-hate relationship with its murals. Some citizens revere them, others want to remove them from view and destroy them.

For the past seventy-five years or so, the 49-square miles of San Francisco have been a battleground in which the sides have been sharply drawn between the lovers and the haters of art and poetry, and between capital and labor, African-Americans and racist cops, reactionaries and liberals, the counterculture and conservatism and between the LGBT community and the forces that would repress sex, sexuality and the human body.

No wonder that author Rebecca Solnit has written two books about San Francisco, one of them titled Hollow City, which depicts the gangly metropolis as the home of monopoly capitalism, the other titled Infinite City which presents the alternatives to that same global system.

Perched on the edge of the continent, San Francisco has provided artists and writers with a unique vantage point to look back in time and space and see the distance the nation and its inhabitants have traveled from colonial outpost to republic and to empire, and from the Puritans and the abolitionists to the robber barons and the bohemians, to name some of its more colorful figures. Bergman knows the contours of American history, plus the shape of Third World liberation struggles which influenced radicals in the Sixties and that still move Bay Area radicals today.

Bergman recently completed (at the start of 2021) a powerful work of art that’s titled, “We Still Charge Genocide” which has not yet been exhibited. It depicts a portion of the globe, the symbol of the UN, the red petals of a flower, three young, jubilant children, a raised fist and an image of singer, actor and U.S. Communist Party member, Paul Robeson who holds a petition in his right hand that reads, “We still charge genocide.”

“We Still Charge Genocide” by Miranda Bergman.

The text in Bergman’s 2021 mural contains some of the language from the original 1951 petition, “We Charge Genocide,” which Robeson and fellow CP member, William Patterson, presented to the United Nations to alert the world to the “mass slayings” of Black people. In her mural, Miranda has included the names of 42 African-Americans who were killed by the police in 2020.

In fact, as she knows, more than 100 African-Americans were killed by the police in 2020. Some, like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, will be familiar to anyone who has followed the Black Lives Matter movement. Others, such as Sincere Pierce, Dijon Kizzie and Priscilla Slater, are less well known, though their names are etched in the hearts of family members and friends who remember their lives and their deaths.

“I like to hold up a lamp and make visible the invisible,” Miranda tells me. Sometimes that means holding up a lamp to genocide. Not surprisingly, it was a European Jew named Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959)— who experienced Fascism first hand in World War II—who coined the word “genocide.” Then he tried to own it.

In 1951, when William Patterson and Robeson brought their petition to the UN, Lemkin accused them of serving as agents for the Soviet Union. He insisted that the treatment of Blacks didn’t qualify as “genocide.” Lempkin also called upon the UN to find the Soviet Union “guilty of genocide.” Again, not surprisingly, the word still generates fierce debate today.

Miranda begs to disagree with Lempkin about the treatment of Blacks in the U.S. So does her godson, Tongo Eisen-Martin, a native of San Francisco, and the city’s current poet laureate whose most recent book, Heaven is All Goodbyes, is published by City Lights, the original paperback bookstore that Lawrence Ferlinghetti founded in the early 1950s and that promptly became a beacon for freedom, literacy and insurrection of the sort that art inspires.

Eisen-Martin has a white Jewish mother who lives in San Francisco, and a Black father who is no longer alive. He was named after Josiah Tongogara, a commander of the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army who died in 1979 in an automobile accident, or so Wikipedia says. Eisen-Martin insists that Tongogara was assassinated.

His mother, Arlene Eisen, a New Leftist who edited and wrote for the Sixties underground newspaper, The Movement, is also the author of the landmark book, Women of Vietnam (1974), published by People’s Press of San Francisco. Eisen raised Tongo and his brother, Biko, now an actor on stage and on TV and in film. Both brothers have an awareness of the national liberation struggles that rocked the world in the aftermath of World War II and that led to the break-up of European empires.

In 2013, in conjunction with the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM), Arlene Eisen wrote a report titled “Operation Ghetto Storm” that detailed the “extrajudicial killings of 313 Black people by police, security guards and vigilantes” in 2012. She dedicated the work “to the mothers whose children have been killed” and who have turned their “pain into a struggle for justice and liberation.”

She also dedicated it to her sons “who so far have survived ‘Operation Ghetto Storm’ and my chronic anxiety that they come home safely.” Mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles of young Black men in America share those sentiments now, as always.

Tongo Eisen-Martin, Miranda Bergman’s godson, was born in 1980, just in time for the “Reagan Revolution,” though he is clearly a child of the Sixties. “In 1968, it looked like a victory of the proletariat was possible,” Tongo tells me. “The late 1960s are a preoccupation of mine.”

My conversations with him, and my reading of his poetry, tell me that he’s imbued with some of the hopefulness of Sixties folk who wanted to change the world, and also with some of the glumness that hit some of the same people in the Eighties when the empire struck back.

The poems in Tongo’s award-winning book, Heaven is All Goodbyes, oscillate between a world of genocide on the one hand and a world of resistance on the other. They do not whitewash crimes against humanity and the systemic violence perpetrated against people of color. On the contrary, they rub the face of the reader in images of lynching, barbed wire and prisons, as though to provoke defiance.

“Faceless,” the first poem in the book, offers these five lines: “The start of mass destruction/ Begins and ends/ In restaurant bathrooms/ That some people use/ And other people clean.” The last poem in the volume, “The Oldest Then the Youngest,” begins, “Grandmother, why don’t you ever talk about your children who the first world murdered?” The grandmother replies, “Because, son, I haven’t run out of knife handles.”

Sometimes there is gallows humor, as in the poem, “we may all refuse to die at the same time.” (Eisen-Martin doesn’t capitalize that title). A bit further on he writes, “They lynched his car too. Strung it up right next to him.” The poems move from the intimate and the conversational to the provocative and the defiant as in “I Almost Go Away,” which begins, “Sorry I’m late, dear,” and ends, “I am a proletariat-folding-chair class victim.”

Nearly all the poems are difficult. Indeed, they resist easy interpretations, invite rereading and nearly all get into the head and under the skin of the reader. Tongo Eisen-Martin tends to emphasize the bleak side. As a boy and as a young man, he grew up on the streets of San Francisco, which felt like home. More recently, he has experienced the city as a kind of no man’s land, hospitable to no one. San Francisco, he observes, is a “dystopia where even the wealthy are incarcerated.”

An anti-racist curriculum he created nearly a decade before the murder of George Floyd and the advent of Black Lives Matter, is titled “We Charge Genocide Again.” It was inspired by the petition that Robeson and Patterson brought to the UN in 1951, and also by his mother’s booklet, “Every 28 Hours.” In the Introduction to “We Charge Genocide Again, Eisen-Martin writes, “In 2012, police summarily executed more than 313 Black people—one every 28 hours.” He adds, “The use of deadly force against Black people is standard practice in the U.S.—woven into the very fabric of society.”

Dana Smith, a San Francisco artist, activist and photographer, takes the long view of society and change. Right now she’s working on an historical project that will combine words and images in an expansive collage that will tell an epic tale about her family and U.S. history.

Smith’s great-great-grandfather, William (Will) Garrett Fisher—a foe of slavery, an American patriot and a soldier in the Union Army—fought at Gettysburg and took part in General William Tecumseh Sherman’s March to the Sea and the Siege of Atlanta. Fisher wrote over 150 letters to family members, including his mother, that describe his experiences on bloody battlefields. In one letter he writes with excitement about seeing President Lincoln. Perhaps one day, Fisher will be at the center of a mural.

“We never really ended the Civil War,” Smith tells me. “The invasion of the U.S. Capitol and Black Lives Matter are an echo of ancestral trauma that resonate today.” When Smith arrived in San Francisco in 1982 at the age of 23, portions of the city were in ruins. Financial institutions were on the ropes. “It’s starting to feel like that again,” Smith says. “Over the last few decades, people have been evicted from homes so the tech companies could move in. Now the tech companies are abandoning the city. They’re not loyal to the place or to its citizens.”

In 1984 Smith protested with many others at the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. A punk rocker, she attended concerts such as “Rock Against Reagan” and “Rock Against Rent.” When Dianne Feinstein ran for mayor after the assassinations in 1978 of supervisor and gay activist, Harvey Milk, and Mayor George Moscone, she and some friends made a poster that read “Re-elect Frankenstein.” It depicted the candidate with a “Bride of Frankenstein” hairdo. During the decade of the 1980s, many of the people Smith knew and loved died of AIDS.

Still, despite that tragedy Smith tends to see human beings as “endless entertaining, endlessly fungible and endlessly loveable.” Against nearly all the odds, she believes in social amelioration. “In 1860, many Americans didn’t see chattel slavery as wrong,” she tells me. “Now, most do. As a species we are slowly making progress, though we’re still coming to terms with wage slavery.” 

Like Miranda Bergman and like Tongo Eisen-Martin, Smith makes art that’s public and that communicates across the divides that keep people at war with one another and with themselves. Miranda Bergman, Eisen-Martin and Dana Smith are each, in their own ways, San Franciscans who have been shaped by the city and its struggles to find itself and its underlying humanity. They all mean to bind wounds, heal and nurture.

Bergman calls herself “a transformer.” Perhaps that word also applies to Smith and Tongo Eisen-Martin, who both take something that’s often called “reality,” and, through the alchemy of art, transform it into something that offers beauty and truth. Whether they call what they long for “liberation,” “resistance” or “progress,” they exemplify the best of the city that sits at a crossroads of the world and that looks to Asia, Europe, Africa and South America, all of them places that also turn to San Francisco for inspiration and consolation.

(Jonah Raskin is the author of For The Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman and American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ and the Making of the Beat Generation.)

“It’s nice to see a cut of ‘Emily In Paris’ the way that Zack Snyder intended it to be seen.”

IF THE APOCALYPSE had three horsemen, I'd vote for drought, fire and plague. That would suit this post.

We're in a nasty drought. Reservoirs, snow pack, precipitation and likely precip are all way down. There are literally scores of numbers to count to come up with a crude, “general” number, but we're short by more than a half.

I know--[yawn]--but as the year rolls on, these will be headlines. I worry about fire. Our forests are mutilated, but they're still combustible as hell. Our fisheries, forests, winefarms and wells are all sticking out their dry tongues.

DID YOU KNOW? California makes mountains of rice. 

Is that stupid? I think so. We have a chronic shortage of water these years, and we pour FIVE FEET of it on a field to grow rice. Part of that runs back into reservoirs, rivers and groundwater, but three-fifths of it is gone gone gone. 

We don't grow rice around here (officially, the North Coast Region), but all Californians need at least a rough idea of these things. Our rice producers should have been encouraged to change, decades ago. The Sacramento Valley will grow PROFITABLY practically anything.

SO: There should be, I think it's 300 feet, around your house and outbuildings that won't catch fire. I'm a long way from that. I have trees brushing my house. I promise--I PROMISE--I'm going to cut 'em down ($$$). I don't want to roast. The fate of the City of Paradise ("Paradise"!) is the stuff of nightmares, skeletons driving burnt cars.

Anyway, word to the wise. Fix that drip. And, by the way, the swimming pools and golf courses are flagrant water users, true, but agriculture dwarfs all other consumers by a mile.

If energy were as cheap as it should be, we'd be converting the Pacific Ocean to fresh water--problem solved--but we have to keep our oil industry rich as Saudis, don't we?

(Mitch Clogg)

ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

The Dems are at it again, attacking the Russians for every evil on earth. They should be looking in a mirror to discover the real source of evil.

What exactly has Russia done to the US in the last ten years to warrant all the hatred the Dems are directing toward them. Why the heck do they think that China is so benevolent and Russia is so bad.

China. Largely expanding its military, destroying Hong Kong’s democracy, threatening Taiwan, again, aiding North Korea in its insanity, building islands to claim illegal sovereignty in the South China Sea, selling fentanyl to the dopeheads in America through the cartels and causing more death and destruction than Covid, slowly destroying America’s manufacturing base. And the worst part of it is that the Democrats in the US support it all.

Now, please put down all the similar things that Russia has done to warrant the ire of the Dems?

THE UNSPIN ROOM: MOVING FORWARD TO THE BEAT OF A NEW POET

by Dalton Delan

In the hard road this century, one of the few safe harbors I have found has been in the poetry my mother recited to me, from “The Highwayman” of Alfred Noyes, which Phil Ochs set to music, to the lyrical yearnings of Edna St. Vincent Millay, a bohemian whose Greenwich Village home was a scant nine-and-a-half feet across, a tight fit for one who wrote of a world standing out on either side “no wider than the heart is wide” — words which opened mine.

But such lyricism is long gone from the vernacular.

At the inauguration of the restorative presidency, we drank in the words from our national youth poet laureate that came with a cup of Joe. Breathing hip-hop rhythms and hopeful purpose, we were reminded of the power of poem to find something deeper in ourselves, something we had forgotten was there.

“Before we do it somehow we knew it,” recited Amanda Gorman, her simple rhyme calling up for me the Bob Dylan of a similar age when he teased, “I’m a poet and I know it, hope I don’t blow it.” He went on to be the first songwriter to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. May Gorman rise to similar heights, as she raises our spirits.

A half-century ago, for this student of literature, the dean of living poets was the bohemian writer Lawrence Ferlinghetti, largely mistaken for one of the Beats since he took up a publisher’s press and challenged the courts and the nation to come to grips with the raw writing of Allen Ginsberg in “Howl,” whose first lines ripped asunder the complacency of the Eisenhower years: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.” Ginsberg set the tone for the ‘60s, and Ferlinghetti lit the paper fire.

Twenty years later, I brought Ferlinghetti to read at my university, and at dinner determined to strive to be the sort of gentleman and scholar he was. The copy of his “A Coney Island of the Mind” that he inscribed to me became the cornerstone of my library, now overflowing with the inked inscriptions of so many more heroes and heterodox literary figures whose volumes stand as tombstones to their lives and minds. Bodies gone, their words live on.

Cheek-to-cheek with those pictures of a gone world of Ferlinghetti, who passed on last month at the wondrous age of 101, is the poetry anthology I published a few years after meeting and being inspired by him. Similarly sized to Ferlinghetti’s book, my “Positively Prince Street” gathered the work of poets I had persuaded to read at the bookstore next to where I lived on Prince Street in Old Town, Alexandria.

The proprietor of that magic crossroads of aspiring poets was Irene Rouse, who became a second mother to me during those years. They were the waning days in which it was possible to seek literary renown as a poet.

Irene is now buried nearby in Virginia, and her husband Bill died last year of COVID-19, breaking the last shards of that part of my heart shattered when she departed. Now, when I pick up our little anthology, I think back to when it was published and the very first call I made to distribute it; it was, of course, to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, in his office atop City Lights Books in San Francisco. I reminded him of our dinner and his inspiration, and he not only took a healthy order of books, he managed to sell them. Trading on its presence in City Lights, I talked Gotham Book Mart in New York into doing likewise, and the anthology sold, as I touted, coast to coast.

Of course, soon after, the poetry of rock eclipsed the spoken word, and the closest we came to song as literature was Dylan and his few heirs such as Canadian poet-turned-songwriter Leonard Cohen and the “new Dylan” Bruce Springsteen, whose “madmen drummers bummers and Indians in the summer” recalled Ginsberg’s rolling thunder. Books of poetry no longer sold to the masses as “Howl” and “Coney Island” had done. My poet friends felt left behind on Robert Frost’s road less traveled by.

My other mother Irene had written in my favorite of her own poems, “Tricky Heart,” that the continuing cadence of her pulse reminded her “I’m living, I’m living still.” While she is gone, and Ferlinghetti now, too, along with all the jewels and detritus of my youthful ambitions, the sounds of the streets of America resound in Amanda Gorman, and once again the heart of who we are and can be comes from those to whom we provide the least — a young person, a Black woman, who dares to bring hip-hop fully into the literary mainstream. I hear it now, echoing still.

TODAY IS THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY of the My Lai Massacre, when US soldiers raped and murdered 500 Vietnamese civilians and burned their homes. Only one man resisted, Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, leading his flight crew he stopped the massacre by blocking the American soldiers, turning rifles on them and threatening to kill them, which saved countless lives. 

He later testified against the murderers. For this, he was denounced as a traitor, and spent much of his life suffering from depression, PTSD, and nightmares. He died in 2006. Today, he represents the importance of disobeying orders and enduring the hate of the public for doing what’s right. I wish we had more of him.

TRAVELERS, SOUR & SENTIMENTAL

by David Yearsley

“I hate traveling and explorers.”

—Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques (1955)

Texas loosens, Italy locks down. With the skies mostly still clear and quiet, one can hear the collective champing at the bit before the gates open and vacationers charge into their first getaway in more than year. As Airbnb bookings surge, it’s worth asking what the mood will be among holiday makers. Will all be grateful for release from quarantine, thrilled to be out among the galloping herds, radiant with good feeling and even better manners?

Already in 1778 Thomas Boswell related that Samuel Johnson detected a “strange turn in travelers to be displeased.” The eighteenth century was the golden age of the Grand Tour, when extended journeys on the European continent were made not only by royals and aristocrats, whose families had for generations taken long trips abroad, but also by large numbers of middle-class travelers. The period also spawned a huge travel literature, much of it in unpublished journals, like those of Thomas Boswell and Edward Gibbon. Books flooded the market, too, from personal accounts such as Joseph Addison’s Remarks on Several Parts of Italy to general travel guides, like Thomas Nugent’s four-volume The Grand Tour. These books were reprinted continuously in the course of the eighteenth century to feed the appetites both of those intent on touring themselves and those stay-at-homes eager to experience travel vicariously.

No traveler was more acid than the Scottish physician turned man of letters, Tobias Smollett. Published in 1766, his Travels through France and Italy remains an immensely readable and fascinating look at the curse and, less frequently, the consolations of travel. The book chronicles the author’s two years on the continent, which began in June of 1763, just months after the signing of the Treaty of Paris. The agreement brought the Seven Years’ War to a close and ushered in period of intense international travel. Smollett was one of the first down the jet-way.

Like many travelers, Smollett was driven abroad by health and sorrow. He fled damp and depressing British Isles in search of Mediterranean air for his tubercular lunges and in the hopes of overcoming at least part of the grief at the loss of his only daughter. Because of these travails we can forgive Smollett his relentless petulance.

Distrustful and resentful of foreigners, Smollett has plenty of invective for the English tourist, too. His grievances begin already on the road to the Channel: “I need not tell you this is the worst road in England, with respect to the conveniences of traveling. The chambers are in general cold and comfortless, the beds paltry, the cookery execrable, the wine poison, the attendance [i.e., service] bad, the publicans insolent, and the bills extortion; there is not a drop of tolerable malt liquor to be had from London to Dover.”

Smollett’s protracted outburst in a town in Provence where he believes himself cheated over dinner and then is refused a departing coach by postilions in cahoots with the scheming landlord outdoes any EasyJet freak-out I’ve yet seen. Smollett eventually ferrets out the consul but this venal official provides no help to the traveler who, with the entire town watching, is finally forced to acquiesce to what he sees as robbery. Mortified and exhausted, Smollett slumps into the coach and makes his ignominious exit.

Such encounters only abet Smollett’s general disgust with the French. His must be the most resilient strain of that peculiar British Francophobia that thrived before Brexit and even more virulently after it: “If a Frenchman is capable of real friendship, it must certainly be the most disagreeable present he can possibly make to a man of true English character.” It’s no surprise, then, that the dyspeptic Smollett hates French food and the “garlick” that contaminates all the horrid ragouts inflicted upon him.

Smollett loathes not only French cuisine, but the love they lavish on it: “If there were five hundred dishes at table, a Frenchman will eat of all of them, and then complain he has no appetite.” French foppery is even worse: “the French have a most ridiculous fondness for their hair. A Frenchman will sooner part with his religion than with his hair.”

Appearance and appetite reveal still darker motivations: “If a Frenchman is admitted into your family, and distinguished by repeated marks of your friendship and regard, the first return he makes for your civilities is to make love to your wife, if she is handsome; if not, to your sister, or daughter, or niece. If he suffers a repulse from you wife, or attempts in vain to debauch your sister, or your daughter, of your niece, he will make addresses to your grandmother.”

There are select moments in Smollett’s Travels that are full of wonder at the beauty of the places visited. Prescient passages decry the squalor of life among the lowers classes under the tottering ancien régime. Smollett also mounts forceful critiques of backward of European customs like dueling, cultural practices tenaciously holding on in the supposedly Enlightened century. Hugely popular and influential in its day, the book provides the rhetorical compass by which so many disagreeable travelers have since navigated and complained their way through their homelands and into foreign territory.

Soon after the appearance of the Travels, Smollett was sent-up as the “learned Smelfungus” by his acquaintance Laurence Sterne’s novel, A Sentimental Journey, which came out in 1768, just two years after Smollett’s book. Smollett/Smelfungus is a bumbling boor whose description of the Pantheon in Rome seems infinitely more absurd under Sterne’s comic treatment: “’Tis nothing but a huge cock pit,” bellows the belligerent Brit.

Sterne’s novel makes fun both of the effusions of gung-ho travelers and the grumblings of Smollett and his ilk. When the characters in A Sentimental Journal exude enthusiasm they are treated to Sterne’s parodying wit: “I declare, ” exclaims the narrator Yorick, slapping his hands cheerily together, “that was I in a desert, I would find out wherewith in it to call forth my affections.” Yorick is the greatest cheerleader of tourism there ever was or will be. He always finds something to look at, to be cheered and edified by. Complainers lack the spirit of discovery: “I pity the man who can travel from Dan to Beersheba, and cry, ‘Tis all barren—and so it is; and so is all the world to him who will not cultivate the fruits it offers.”

What of the role of music in all this? Smollett by contrast never lets his dark moods be lightened by song or dance. Only once does he pause to remark on what he sees as the contradiction between the lively and ingenious conversational style of the French and their musical tastes: “With all their volatility, prattle, and fondness for bon mots, the French delight in a species of drawling, melancholy church music.”

Sterne’s Yorick is a man of feeling and so must make a trip to the Opéra comique in Paris, where the action among the audience in the theatre is more entertaining than that on the stage. In Burgundy Yorick enjoys the rural music accompanying the grape harvest, and later makes a charming comparison between the spread of knowledge and song in the Italian street, “whereof those may partake, who pay nothing.”

That same joyful sentiment motivated the greatest musical traveler of the great age of travel: Charles Burney, who knew both Smollett and Sterne and their books. Just a few years after their volumes appeared, he produced the first musical travelogue.

Burney set out for six-month tour France and Italy in June of 1770, and published his account of the journey the following year. A second trip to northern Europe followed in 1772 and brought forth two, more detailed volumes.

Burney’s books are imbued with far more of Sterne’s sentimentality than Smollett’s sourness. Burney but does shares with Smollett a penchant for hammering the French, though he does lighten his blows now and again. Like most Englishman, especially those addicted to Italian opera, Burney rails against the stultifying conservatism of French musical culture. For him that nation’s subservience to dead musical heroes mirrored its acceptance of political absolutism. Burney would level the same critique at Prussia when he arrived there two years later. In Berlin he was denied an audience with the great musician-king, Frederick the Great. Personal affronts invariably colored this greatest of musical travelers’ observations.

In Italy Burney seems almost to welcome the political chaos—though he is glad not to have to live under it all the time—because the patchwork of courts and ecclesiastical institutions yields a sumptuous surplus of music, some of it great, some of it shambolic, but all of it exciting. Burney is not only interested in the opera and in services in glorious churches, but also in the music of the street: from the exotic songs and instruments of Naples to the menacing military marches of parading German soldiers. Because there is always something new to hear and something interesting to be found even in the most flawed performances, Burney’s three travel books on the Present State of Music in Europe are filled with memorable portraits and brisk opinion. Without his colorful picture of the continent, our view of the period would be monochrome.

When Burney hears music the troubles of his journey disappear—from the battering coach ride over the Apennines that run down center of Italian Peninsula, to a bivouac in German fields, to the harrowing raft trip down the Danube to Vienna. The succession of departures and arrivals, the flow of inconvenience and anticipation, the boredom and dread of travel are forgotten as soon as the opera house curtain rises are the buskers start up.

When the travel craze cranks up again in the months ahead, there will be millions of Smolletts and Sternes on tour. Indeed, we are all a mixture of both.

Burney had no Spotify and iPhone in the bumpy coach, no live stream from the Teatro di San Carlo to be taken in on his small screen. Soon earbudded tourists will be once again on the move through the world. There is pace is far quicker than Burney’s, and many will be accompanied by their own private audiotopias. Burney’s mode of travel did not depend on having a perpetual soundtrack in tow. Instead, he sought out music in its own place and time, and in his gracious prose it comes alive again.

(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest book is Sex, Death, and Minuets: Anna Magdalena Bach and Her Musical Notebooks. He can be reached at dgyearsley@gmail.com.)

PUTIN AIN’T NO CORN POP

by James Kunstler

I wasn’t being a wise guy. I was alone with him in his office, that’s how it came about,” Biden continued. “It was when President Bush had said, ‘I’ve looked in his eyes and saw his soul.’ I said, ‘I looked in your eyes, and I don’t think you have a soul.’ He looked back and he said, ‘We understand each other.’ ”

— ABC News, Joe Biden with George Stephanopoulos on V. Putin of Russia

Somehow, I don’t think Joe Biden understood what he thought Vladimir Putin understood about what they mutually understood. If I had to guess, I’d say that Mr. Putin understood Joe Biden to be the most pathetic blustering schlemiel he’d ever encountered on the international scene. But that must have been before Mr. B was installed in the White House by powers and persons unseen because it’s evident now that his handlers do not allow him to talk to foreign leaders, not even on the phone. Ms. Harris does that.

The alleged president went on to tell Mr. Stephanopoulos that Mr. Putin was “a killer” who would “soon pay a price” for interfering in the 2020 election. In turn, Mr. Putin promptly called the Russian ambassador back home “for consultations,” which is generally what happens when one country makes warlike noises to another country.

Mr. Putin added a tantalizing taunt days later, saying. “I’ve just thought of this now,” he said. “I want to propose to President Biden to continue our discussion, but on the condition that we do it basically live, as it’s called. Without any delays and directly in an open, direct discussion. It seems to me that would be interesting for the people of Russia and for the people of the United States. “I don’t want to put this off for long. I want to go the taiga this weekend to relax a little,” Mr. Putin went on. “So, we could do it tomorrow or Monday. We are ready at any time convenient for the American side.”

Do you suppose Vladimir Putin is having some sport with Mr. Biden, this lightweight even among US politicians, with brain-rot to boot? Pretty soon, the president’s handlers will have to forbid him to open his pie-hole in public altogether. No more one-on-one interviews even with slow-pitch party shills like Mr. Stephanopoulos. They’ll just wheel him into the rose garden periodically like a cigar store Indian for proof-of-life demonstrations and leave the management of the nation… to others.

And how’s that going after a couple of months? Apparently, economic collapse is not enough for the party in charge of things now. They’re strangely compelled to seek every possible opportunity to insult the public’s intelligence while destroying what’s left of American culture. Case in point out of Nancy Pelosi’s Congress: HR1, the so-called “For the People Act,” institutionalizing ballot fraud in US elections. The law would make permanent the Covid-19 emergency mail-in voting system, over-riding whatever each state’s election law says — which makes the act appear patently unconstitutional — plus permitting same-day motor-voter registration of any live body, citizen or not, plus removing all voter ID requirements, and much more to ensure the country is never again threatened by a fair election.

Next up: HR5, the so-called “Equality Act,” institutionalizing the notion that categories of “male” and “female” are mere cultural constructs and must in no way be allowed to order any cultural activity from school to work to leisure. The bill was initially conceived to harden into law President Obama’s EO expanding the Department of Education’s Title IX rules on school sports — which eventuated in “trans women” disrupting girls’ sports. Now, men pretending to be women (and vice-versa) will be allowed to disrupt everything else in American life, especially the civil courts, with frivolous lawsuits.

Also in the pipeline: HR6, the so-called “American Dream and Promise Act” and its Senate companion, S264, the plain “Dream Act, that will grant permanent residency and then citizenship to currently “undocumented” people who snuck into the USA as children. The dreams and promises have already been delivered, even before the final passage of any new act, with an unprecedented flood of unaccompanied migrant children crashing the border, as well as a surge of adults fleeing Mexico and Central America. Apparently, the thinking in Washington these days is that we don’t have enough poor people in America, that their lives are not difficult enough. The message couldn’t be clearer to millions outside the United States: by all means, cross the border and we will do nothing about it. And so, with the border reduced to just another cultural construct, Mr. Biden himself took the extraordinary action of telling them on TV, “Don’t Come!” I guess that’ll do the trick.

Do you have any idea how pissed-off a clear majority of the American public will be after a few more months of this?

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

DREAM GIG

Good Worker Needed Now!

I am in need of a GREAT WORKER for burning brush, splitting wood, hauling and burning brush, and other land work. Please be a Hard, strong worker. 1 or 2 days a week, for 4-6 hours per day, but this is flexible. You must have transportation and a good work ethic.

I live up a dirt road between Pt. Arena and Anchor Bay, CA. Gas is very expensive, so please live in my area.

LAND LINE ONLY so please PHONE ME at 707-884-4703, and let it ring five times.

Thank you for any leads. Good pay for Good Work.

DJ Sister Yasmin <sisteryasmin@hotmail.com>

PINT ARENA MATTERS

March 23, 2021 Point Arena City Council Agenda

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wLRMSR7xbY3WP1ARU3EoQ0E-SgVqMbmf/view?usp=sharing

MEMO OF THE AIR: GOOD NIGHT RADIO ALL NIGHT FRIDAY NIGHT!

Hi. Marco here. Deadline to email your writing for tonight's (Friday night's) MOTA show is around 7pm. After that, send it whenever it's ready, up to 6pm Friday next week, and I'll take care of it then. There's always another time. There's no pressure.

I'm doing this show from Juanita's, not from Franklin Street; I won't be taking calls this time. But I /will/ be on Friday, March 26 because I'll be in Fort Bragg then, where the nice antique phone thing is that makes you sound resonant and self-confident like Orson Welles, so write the number down in case you want to call then: 707 962-3022. (If you're a woman it makes you sound like Lauren Bacall or Julie London, depending on your natural pitch.) 

Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio is every Friday, 9pm to 5am on 107.7fm, KNYO-LP Fort Bragg as well as anywhere else via http://airtime.knyo.org:8040/128 (That's the regular link to hear what's on KNYO in real time, any time.)

You can always go to https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com and hear last week's MOTA show. By Saturday night the recording of tonight's show will also be there, in the latest post, right on top.

Also, at https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com there's a sparkling pool of educational amusements for you to dive into and splash around in until showtime, not to mention between shows, such as:

Boojie woojie. Big smile, now. https://www.bitsandpieces.us/2021/03/13/top-5-girl-boogie-woogie/

Nuns with knees. Knee nuns. http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2007/04/lovely-ladies-of-yesteryear-in-b.html

And all about what those in the film industry call Shithole Color Grading. https://boingboing.net/2021/03/18/how-color-correction-in-movies-reinforces-racial-stereotypes.html

Marco McClean, memo@mcn.org, https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com

THE LARGEST ASTEROID OF THE YEAR WILL SWING BY EARTH ON SUNDAY. But don't worry.

The largest asteroid to come near our planet this year will swing by Sunday (March 21), giving astronomers a rare opportunity to glimpse a remnant from the birth of our solar system, astronomers say.

livescience.com/largest-asteroid-swing-by-earth-march-21.html