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A COLD FRONT will move through the region late today and into Sunday, bringing light rain and mountain snow back to Northwest California. Additional precipitation will be possible through late in the upcoming week, with the heaviest amounts across Del Norte and northern Humboldt counties. (NWS)
THIS MORNING'S LOWS: Boonville 32°, Yorkville 28°
10 NEW COVID CASES reported in Mendocino County yesterday afternoon.
KYIV, ALONE, WITH NOTHING BUT THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS: Ukraine's president has warned that the Russians intend to take Kyiv overnight, as he urged his countrymen to resist the expected onslaught as the Russian invaders surround the city. Volodymyr Zelensky, addressing the nation from a secret location in the capital, had a dire warning for his embattled and defiant people on Friday night. "Russia will try to break our resistance with all its might," he said, in a video posted to social media. “Tonight the enemy will begin storming us. We need to withstand them!” Zelensky said that Chernihiv, Symy, Kharkiv, Donbas, and the south could also come under attack. Vitali Klitschko, the former world champion heavyweight boxer who is now the mayor of Kyiv, said his city faces a "difficult night". The British Ministry of Defence said they believe Kyiv, home to 1.4 million people, is close to being encircled as the Russians advance from all sides.
RED BEARD GETS 25 TO LIFE
Serial Coastal Thief Guilty Of Assault On A Sheriff’s Deputy With A Firearm; Will Receive Three Strikes Life Sentence.
Defendant William Allan Evers, age 40, most recently a coastal transient, admitted Friday morning in the Mendocino County Superior Court that he assaulted a Sheriff’s deputy with a firearm in the Elk area of Mendocino County back in May 2021 while fleeing from a home burglary in that area.
The defendant also admitted as true sentencing allegations that he has suffered two prior felony convictions that brought him within the meaning and spirit of California’s voter-modified Three Strikes law.
The defendant was convicted of his second Strike — a felony violation of Penal Code section 422, Criminal Threats — in the Shasta County Superior Court in October 2014.
The defendant was convicted of his first Strike – a felony violation of Penal Code sections 459 and 460(a), Residential Burglary – in the Humboldt County Superior Court in 2007.
The defendant also admitted when asked by the judge that he was on state parole at the time of his crime spree and that he had failed to comply with the terms of his parole, particularly the term requiring the defendant to obey all laws.
As part of the negotiated disposition, the defendant stipulated to the only Three Strike sentence authorized by law in this case given the guilty plea and admissions – 25 years to life in state prison.
While also charged with multiple burglaries, those charges were dismissed with the understanding that the defendant will be ordered to pay restitution to the many victims out of his prison wages, if any, during his lengthy incarceration.
The conviction and admissions were referred to the Mendocino Adult Probation Department for a background investigation and sentencing report, as required by law. This report assists the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation during its intake procedures and prison facility assignment process.
The law enforcement agency that spearheaded the investigation of and developed the evidence underlying today’s conviction was the District Attorney’s Bureau of Investigations.
The Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office spearheaded the investigations of the many burglaries.
The attorney handling the case for DA Eyster is coastal Deputy District Attorney Eloise Kelsey.
Mendocino County Superior Court Superior Court Judge Keith Faulder accepted today’s guilty plea and admissions. Judge Faulder will also preside over the sentencing hearing and impose the life sentence on March 24, 2022 at 9 o’clock in the morning in Department A in the Ukiah courthouse.
(DA presser)
UKRAINE’S CAPITAL UNDER THREAT AS RUSSIA PRESSES INVASION
by Yuras Karmanau, Jim Heintz, Vladimir Isachenkov & Dasha Litvinova
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) Friday, night — Russian troops stormed toward Ukraine’s capital early Saturday as explosions reverberated through the city and the president urged the country to “stand firm” against the siege that could determine its future. He vowed to stay: “The fight is here.”
Hundreds of casualties were reported in the fighting, which included shelling that sliced through a Kyiv apartment building and pummeled bridges and schools. There also were growing signs that Russia may be seeking to overthrow Ukraine’s government, which U.S. officials have described as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ultimate objective.
The assault represented Putin’s boldest effort yet to redraw the world map and revive Moscow’s Cold War-era influence. It triggered new international efforts to end the invasion, including direct sanctions on President Vladimir Putin.
As his country fended off explosions and gunfire, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy appealed for a cease-fire and warned in a bleak statement that multiple cities were under attack.
“This night we have to stand firm,” he said. “The fate of Ukraine is being decided right now.”
For their part, U.S. defense officials believe the Russian offensive has encountered considerable resistance and is proceeding slower than Moscow had envisioned, though that could change quickly.
The Kremlin accepted Kyiv’s offer to hold talks, but it appeared to be an effort to squeeze concessions out of the embattled Zelenskyy instead of a gesture toward a diplomatic solution.
The Russian military continued its advance, laying claim Friday to the southern Ukraine city of Melitopol. Still, it was unclear in the fog of war how much of Ukraine is still under Ukrainian control and how much or little Russian forces have seized.
As fighting persisted, Ukraine’s military reported shooting down an II-76 Russian transport plane carrying paratroopers near Vasylkiv, a city 25 miles (40 kilometers) south of Kyiv, an account confirmed by a senior American intelligence official. It was unclear how many were on board. Transport planes can carry up to 125 paratroopers.
The U.S. and other global powers slapped ever-tougher sanctions on Russia as the invasion reverberated through the world’s economy and energy supplies, threatening to further hit ordinary households. U.N. officials said millions could flee Ukraine. Sports leagues moved to punish Russia and even the popular Eurovision song contest banned it from the May finals in Italy.
Through it all, Russia remained unbowed, vetoing a U.N. Security Council resolution demanding that it stop attacking Ukraine and withdraw troops immediately. The veto was expected, but the U.S. and its supporters argued that the effort would highlight Moscow’s international isolation. The 11-1 vote, with China, India and the United Arab Emirates abstaining, showed significant but not total opposition to Russia’s invasion of its smaller, militarily weaker neighbor.
The meeting exposed Russia-Ukraine frictions, including when Ukrainian Ambassador Sergiy Kyslytsya requested a moment of silence to pray for those killed and asked Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia to pray “for salvation.” Nebenzia retorted that the remembrance should include people who have died in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region. Pro-Russian separatists there have been fighting the Ukrainian government, which Russia accuses of abuses. A moment of tense silence did ensue.
NATO, meanwhile, decided to send parts of the alliance’s response force to help protect its member nations in the east for the first time. NATO did not say how many troops would be deployed but added that it would involve land, sea and air power.
Day Two of Russia’s invasion, the largest ground war in Europe since World War II, focused on the Ukrainian capital, where Associated Press reporters heard explosions starting before dawn. Gunfire was reported in several areas.
A large boom was heard in the evening near Maidan Nezalezhnosti, the square in central Kyiv that was the heart of protests which led to the 2014 ouster of a Kremlin-friendly president. The cause was not immediately known.
Five explosions struck near a major power plant on Kyiv’s eastern outskirts, said Mayor Vitaly Klitschko. There was no information on what caused them, and no electrical outages were immediately reported.
It was unclear how many people overall had died. Ukrainian officials reported at least 137 deaths on their side from the first full day of fighting and claimed hundreds on the Russian one. Russian authorities released no casualty figures.
U.N. officials reported 25 civilian deaths, mostly from shelling and airstrikes, and said that 100,000 people were believed to have left their homes. They estimate that up to 4 million could flee if the fighting escalates.
Zelenskyy tweeted that he and U.S. President Joe Biden spoke by phone and discussed “strengthening sanctions, concrete defense assistance and an antiwar coalition.”
His whereabouts were kept secret after Zelenskyy told European leaders in a call Thursday that he was Russia’s No. 1 target — and that they might not see him again alive. His office later released a video of him standing with senior aides outside the presidential office and saying that he and other government officials would stay in the capital.
Zelenskyy earlier offered to negotiate on a key Putin demand: that Ukraine declare itself neutral and abandon its ambition of joining NATO. The Kremlin said Kyiv initially agreed to have talks in Minsk, then said it would prefer Warsaw and later halted communications. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said later that Kyiv would discuss prospects for talks on Saturday.
The assault was anticipated for weeks by the U.S. and Western allies and denied to be in the works just as long by Putin. He argued the West left him with no other choice by refusing to negotiate Russia’s security demands.
In a window into how the increasingly isolated Putin views Ukraine and its leadership, he urged Ukraine’s military to surrender, saying: “We would find it easier to agree with you than with that gang of drug addicts and neo-Nazis who have holed up in Kyiv and have taken the entire Ukrainian people hostage.”
Playing on Russian nostalgia for World War II heroism, the Kremlin equates members of Ukrainian right-wing groups with neo-Nazis. Zelenskyy, who is Jewish, angrily dismisses those claims.
Putin has not disclosed his ultimate plans for Ukraine. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov gave a hint, saying, “We want to allow the Ukrainian people to determine its own fate.” Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia recognizes Zelenskyy as the president, but would not say how long the Russian military operation could last.
Ukrainians abruptly adjusted to life under fire, after Russian forces invaded the country from three sides as they massed an estimated 150,000 troops nearby.
Residents of a Kyiv apartment building woke to screaming, smoke and flying dust. What the mayor identified as Russian shelling tore off part of the building and ignited a fire.
“What are you doing? What is this?” resident Yurii Zhyhanov asked Russian forces. Like countless other Ukrainians, he grabbed what belongings he could, took his mother, and fled, car alarms wailing behind him.
Elsewhere in Kyiv, the body of a dead soldier lay near an underpass. Fragments of a downed aircraft smoked amid the brick homes of a residential area. Black plastic was draped over body parts found beside them. People climbed out of bomb shelters, basements and subways to face another day of upheaval.
“We’re all scared and worried. We don’t know what to do then, what’s going to happen in a few days,” said Lucy Vashaka, 20, a worker at a small Kyiv hotel.
At the Pentagon, press secretary John Kirby said the U.S. believes the offensive, including its advance on Kiev, has gone more slowly than Moscow had planned, noting that Ukraine forces have been fighting back. But he also said the military campaign is in an early stage and circumstances can change rapidly.
The Biden administration said Friday that it would move to freeze the assets of Putin and Lavrov, following the European Union and Britain in directly sanctioning top Russian leadership.
Zakharova, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, called the sanctions against Putin and Lavrov “an example and a demonstration of a total helplessness” of the West.
(Isachenkov and Litvinova reported from Moscow. Francesca Ebel, Josef Federman and Andrew Drake in Kyiv; Angela Charlton in Paris; Geir Moulson and Frank Jordans in Berlin; Raf Casert and Lorne Cook in Brussels; Nic Dumitrache in Mariupol, Ukraine; Matt Sedensky in New York; Jennifer Peltz at the United Nations; James LaPorta in Boca Raton, Fla., and Robert Burns, Matthew Lee, Aamer Madhani, Eric Tucker, Nomaan Merchant, Ellen Knickmeyer, Zeke Miller, Chris Megerian and Darlene Superville in Washington contributed. (AP).)
MASTERS OF WAR
Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build the big bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks
You that never done nothin’
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it’s your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly
Like Judas of old
You lie and deceive
A world war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain
You fasten the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion
As young people’s blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud
You’ve thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain’t worth the blood
That runs in your veins
How much do I know
To talk out of turn
You might say that I’m young
You might say I’m unlearned
But there’s one thing I know
Though I’m younger than you
Even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do
Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul
And I hope that you die
And your death’ll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I’ll watch while you’re lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I’ll stand o’er your grave
’Til I’m sure that you’re dead
— Bob Dylan (1963)
I’M GLAD TO BE HOME, and guilty to be home. I think perhaps the best way to imagine what Ukrainians are going through is not to try too hard to project your thoughts onto a place you’ve probably never been but to think about the familiar small routines of your own day and how they’d be affected by an invasion. Are you or your family sitting by the window? Mightn’t it shatter in an explosion? Are you seriously going to drop your child off at school with missiles falling? You were going to have coffee with a friend, but it says on Facebook there’s a gun battle going on near the place you were supposed to meet up. You pop into the Co-op for groceries, but they’re only taking cash, and there’s a line around the block for the ATM. Your covid test comes out positive, but you live alone, and there’s nobody out there to deliver food to you. Among all the awful aspects of what’s going on, Russia invaded Ukraine while both countries’ heavily unvaccinated populations are still enduring a harsh phase of the pandemic. On just the day it began killing Ukrainians, and its own young soldiers, Russia lost 762 people to Covid.
— James Meek (London Review of Books)
JENNY’S GIANT BURGER Is A Tiny, Old-School Spot That’s One Of The Best Kept Secrets In Northern California
by Emerson
California Highway 1 is perhaps best known as Pacific Coast Highway, but it turns into Shoreline Highway as you continue north of San Francisco. Stretching from the Golden Gate Bridge to Fort Bragg, Shoreline Highway weaves along the rugged NorCal coast through idyllic small towns and stretches of stunning oceanfront beauty. It’s along this scenic highway that you’ll find one of the best-kept secrets in all of NorCal – at least when it comes to burgers. Jenny’s Giant Burger is an old-school, walk-up burger joint that you have to stop at when you find yourself driving past. It may be small, but the burgers are more than mighty!
Jenny's Giant Burger is a longtime favorite among Fort Bragg locals. Serving up large and tasty burgers for over 30 years, it's considered a must-stop when you find yourself passing through this small coastal community.
Jenny's is a quaint walk-up burger joint with a delightfully retro vibe. From the outside, it doesn't look like it's changed much over the years! And that's just fine because it's the amazing burgers that speak for themselves.
If you're in the mood for a good old-fashioned quality burger, you've come to exactly the right place. Jenny's keeps it simple by only serving burgers...with fries, of course!
The Giant Cheeseburger is a classic, 1/3-pound burger patty with American cheese, lettuce, tomato, and red onion. If the Giant Burger isn't big enough for you, you can make it a double or even a triple. Burgers sans cheese and garden burgers are also available.
After ordering your burger, you can enjoy it either on-site in the small but cozy dining area or outside at one of the picnic tables. There's nothing better than a classic burger with fries (and maybe a shake) after a day of exploring the NorCal coast.
Jenny's may be no-frills, but you don't need all of the extras when you've got the basics down pat. The popular burger spot prides itself in using never-frozen beef and freshly-prepared produce. You can taste the love in every juicy, cheesy bite.
You simply can't pass through Fort Bragg without stopping for a giant burger at Jenny's. Check out Jenny's Giant Burger's official Facebook page to keep up with this local burger joint and learn more.
Have you been to this old-school burger walk-up? We love finding hidden gem burger joints like this one during our adventures. Shout out your favorite burger spot in NorCal in the comments below!
Address: Jenny's Giant Burger, 940 N Main St, Fort Bragg, CA 95437.
(courtesy OnlyInYourState.com)
SUPERVISOR WILLIAMS’ CYNICAL HOUSING POLL
by Mark Scaramella
Close political observers know what a “push poll” is. A politician hires a pr firm to design a questionnaire not to garner the opinions of a sampling of voters, but to deliver a message. For example, if a Republican gubernatorial candidate wanted to do a push poll about Gavin Newsom he or she would ask a question like, “Do you approve of Governor Newsom having fancy expensive dinners with his wealthy political cronies without masks during a time when he was ordering Californians to wear masks to protect them from covid?” Obviously, the results of such polls are irrelevant, the purpose is to tell the pollees that the poller a) is just as bothered by the situation as the pollee is and b) hammer home the point that is built into the question.
Mendo hasn’t seen many push polls lately because local political races are shallow popularity/personality contests which assume that most local voters either don’t follow the issues or don’t particularly care.
So when Supervisor Ted Williams conducted his own un-publicized on-line housing poll late last year, nobody, including Supervisor Williams, paid much attention to it.
He introduced the poll as: “Mendocino County Housing Survey to guide Supervisor Ted Williams in advocating for public interest. I'd like to understand where and how you want housing development to change.”
In January, Supervisor Williams released the “results” of his poll, demonstrating that it had nothing to do with Supervisor Williams wanting to know what his constituents thought about Mendo’s chronic housing shortage, but instead to signal to the few people who responded that he really really cares about Mendo's ever-growing housing problem — even though he has no idea what to do about it.
Question 1 from the Supervisor’s poll was: “Does Mendocino County need more housing?”
The Supervisor really needs to ask his constituents this question? Result: An astonishing 15 of the 326 responders actually said, “No.” (Since it was an on-line anonymous poll, perhaps 15 people from Norway voted. Or maybe Deerwood. We don’t know.)
Williams said, “The Regional Housing Needs Assessment for 2019-2027 estimates the number of new units required to meet demand: 9 in Point Arena, 137 in Fort Bragg, 111 in Willits, 239 in Ukiah and 1349 in Unincorporated (outside of the four cities). How many of these (total) units would you support being developed within your zip code?”
No results were provided for this irrelevant question. There will never be anything close to 1349 [sic] new housing units in the unincorporated areas of Mendocino County.
For the next question Williams blandly noted, “Housing unit costs are largely beyond the control of local government,” trying to claim that he and his colleagues are “largely” off the hook.
Maybe the Supervisor hasn’t applied for a construction permit lately. Mendo permits are not only exorbitantly expensive, but they involve reams of contradictory paperwork, nit-picky delays and extra construction requirements that are “largely” within the “control of local government.”
Williams went on to tell poll takers that “California Building Code requirements, labor and materials are significant factors beyond our control. One variable we can control is land use. Higher density developments can be constructed at a lower unit cost than custom homes, often leveraging shared infrastructure. Do you support higher density through small parcel subdivisions within your zip code?”
First, Williams only mentioned “land use” as something “we can control.” Because in reality, No “we” can’t. Plus, he left out several other “variables.” (See below.) As if whether anyone “supports” higher density has anything to do with local housing stock. Of course most responders (80%) did support it. Duh.
Next Williams asked, “Single Family Homes have been the thrust of our housing unit strategy, especially in the unincorporated. Do you support multi-family residential alternatives to single family homes within your zip code?”
Please. Mendo has no “housing unit strategy,” much less any “thrust.” (More like parry.) Again, most responders “support” multi-family alternatives — although a better question might be, “Would you live in one?”
Williams then asked, “Water is a growing concern throughout the county. Without new reservoirs and water systems, do you support additional housing units within your zip code?”
Of course, Williams and the rest of the Board have no idea, much less interest in, what to do about “new reservoirs or water systems,” despite the ongoing “extreme drought.” Nevertheless, over 60% of responders optimistically said, “Yes.”
Williams finally got around to a good question, not that the answer will have any effect on the Supervisor: “Many believe the conversion of housing stock to vacation home rentals has impacted the availability of workforce housing. I sit on a newly formed ad-hoc committee with Supervisor Gjerde to review and propose changes. I recognize stricter regulation of vacation homes alone will not solve our housing shortage, but it could help. Do you support limiting vacation rentals to resident-occupied parcels, effectively preventing companies from converting housing stock to lodging units?”
I.e., like Sonoma County already does? Golly, how many responders would be against this? Turns out 65 were, probably the people who own non-resident-occupied parcels.
Also, by asking about “stricter regulation,” Williams implies that there is already some “strict” regulation. We are not aware of any regulation, much less “strict” regulation.
Supervisor Williams wanted to know what people thought about the 10% bed tax, but he asked it in a way that distorts the question: “The Transient Occupancy Tax (bed tax) is currently 10%. Would you support a greater levy on vacation rentals to disincentivize?”
Even so, more than 60% favored “a greater levy” as long it’s on those those “transient occupiers,” and not on them.
“Market rate housing units are built by private industry,” Williams boldly declared, continuing, “Developers cease new construction when local wages are insufficient to support return on investment. Do you believe our housing shortage is the result of a low wage crisis?”
We only know of one project in the history of Mendocino County where a developer “ceased construction” on a housing project, and that one, Garden’s Gate, south of Ukiah, after originally being first proposed in 2005, was finally “ceased” in 2009 because Mendo took years and years to process the required traffic study (among many others) and by the time it was done, the market had collapsed and the developer, Chris Stone, gave up after spending over $200,000 on permits and EIR requirements, and moved to Brazil.
The still pending north-Ukiah Lovers Lane project for another couple hundred cookie cutter market-rate mid-priced homes proposed by Chico Developer Douglas Guillon in 2019 is also in Mendo-Limbo. (Last we heard there were unaddressed water quantity problems.) This question obviously confused responders because about 43% said “Yes,” and 57% said “No.”
Williams wrapped up his poll by asking, “Which best describes your preference for growth within your zip code?
“Maintain character / limit growth (22%)
Or
“Re-envision / facilitate housing needs”(78%)
That was the end of the poll. Clearly, respondents want the Supervisor to get busy “re-envisioning and facilitating,” but so far since the big reveal of the poll results in January, we haven’t seen any re-envisioning, facilitating, wondering, considering, dreaming, musing, wishing, hoping, praying, thinking or anything else from his and Supervisor Gjerde’s ad hoc housing committee or the Board. By the way, that presumably important ad hoc Committee was appointed on November 17, 2021, more than four months ago. Nothing so far, poll or no poll. But the committee’s assignment was only to “work on” the “housing crisis,” not to propose anything. And, as usual, no report back dates were mentioned in the committee’s formation order.
If Williams really cared about Mendo’s housing shortage he’d immediately ask for an inventory of empty buildings in Mendocino County by zip code (like Fort Bragg recently did) with an assessment of what it might take to house people in them; order County Counsel to propose a version of Sonoma County’s existing corporate airBnB restrictions for immediate implementation, look into obstacles and locations for trailer parks, especially on county-owned land, and ask their nearly dormant “drought task force” to get off their asses and develop some near term water supply and storage projects, especially for Williams’ Fifth District constituents.
DIRECT YOUR EMAILS TO AGENDA ONLY, PLEASE
Changes to Board of Supervisors Digital Correspondence Processing
Post Date: 02/25/2022 10:46 AM
Community Partners, Colleagues, and Interested Parties:
Please be advised that emails sent to bos@mendocinocounty.org will no longer be manually uploaded to the agenda as correspondence for Board of Supervisors Meetings.
All written correspondence should instead be submitted online via eComment by clicking the blue hyperlinked “eComment” button next to the published agenda for which you are wishing to submit comment here: https://mendocino.legistar.com/Calendar.aspx
Once posted, your comments will be made available to the Board of Supervisors, Staff, and the General Public immediately.
Please contact Clerk of the Board at (707) 463-4441 if you have any questions regarding this message.
Thank you,
Mendocino County Board of Supervisors and Executive Office
CATCH OF THE DAY, FEBRUARY 25, 2022
IVAN GONZALEZ-RIVERA, Calpella. Domestic battery.
CORTEZ LITTLE, Arcata/Ukiah. Reckless evasion.
NATALIE MENDEZ, Ukiah. Narcotics-controlled substance for sale, conspiracy.
SHANE MILLER JR., Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.
BURT SLOAN, Hopland. Assault with deadly weapon not a gun.
JOSHUA WEBB, Laytonville. Mandatory supervision sentencing, resisting.
THOMAS WILLIAMS, Redwood Valley. DUI-alcohol&drugs, concealed weapon, felon-addict with firearm, loaded firearm while prohibited based on prior felonies, paraphernalia, large capacity magazine.
MEMORY LOSS
Review of “Loss of Memory is Only Temporary.” By Johanna Kaplan. Ecco Press, HarperCollins. New York, 2022. 248 pp. $16.99.
by Larry Bensky
Mental Health, its circumstances, its manageable and unmanageable characteristics, its treatments, its colossal direct and indirect monetary impacts, its role in determining the fate of nations and our planet, all rumble along as codas in our symphonies of life.
In so-called “advanced” (i.e. industrialized, monetarized) cultures, almost everyone knows someone on a fluid spectrum between “weird” and “nuts.”
And a big percentage of us live in cultures whose direction has been and continues to be orchestrated by forces well out of anything that can be called healthy. Familiarity with history is hardly reassuring.
Sometimes an ethnicity defines, or seems to define, who “we” are. And when that ethnicity contains “race“ or “religion” based strictures we are cruising in often dangerous water.
Johanna Kaplan, the 80-year old author of well received short stories and novels about Jews and Jewishness seems indigenous to such climes.
Kaplan “broke through” the genre of ethnic fiction to become heir to a tradition that included Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Bernard Malamud. But even when her stories and books began to be published after World War II, she benefitted via what had transpired as she was growing up. Fascism in Europe. Intellectual justification for exclusion and mass murder of Jews. People who bought, inherited, or built publishing empires, different from the publishing empires that evolved over decades.
Jews had a head start in the creation of such empires. Knopf, Cerf, Stein, and Straus created a penumbra apart from Harper, Scribner, McGraw and their ilk.
Moreover,” if you were a “brain” (later known as ‘nerds) you started young studying centuries of texts, which no “layman” could ever read, understand, and retain. Many tried. But their efforts were stymied by a rigorous institutional sexism. Women were excluded from places (synagogues, schools) where texts were taught.
As I was growing up and penetrating the nearly total taboo on in depth discussion of Jews and their fate the silence was deafening. We had few politicians who braved the silence, since getting elected meant keeping silent, even in “Jew York.” Even when the second most powerful political person in the United States, Eleanor Roosevelt, did what she could, she failed. Her husband, the otherwise estimable FDR, listened to her and then did very little of what he could have done to restrain the exterminist insanity disgracing Germany, Poland, Hungary and elsewhere.
In the streets of New York, where I grew up, and where Kaplan migrated as a young woman, one could see “crazy” people everywhere. Some, although they didn’t have to, wore gold stars, identifying themselves as Jews. Some begged in the streets, or knocked on doors, or tried to find anonymity in parks. They were sorry spectacles that other Jews tried to disavow, or chase away. My mother, who early on joined Jewish solidarity groups whose sole purpose was to establish a Jewish state in the Middle East, knew that even if she and every Jewish woman she knew in Brooklyn protested the derangement of a small number of Jews, nothing would change. Not until an activist women, Elizabeth Holzman, defeated a long-time Jewish Congressman, Emannuel Celler in a 1972 primary did the Jewish establishment began to flinch.)
The most listened to radio program in the United States was a weekly harangue by a Michigan religious figure (Father Coughlin) who preached hatred. “The Eagle,” the most widely circulated weekly newspaper in my Brooklyn home district population , was a bigoted screed, professionally written and edited by identifiable Christian extremists. Only Catholics bought it.
The effect of such an unmelted melting pot on Jews is the constant referent in Johanna Kaplan’s latest novel, “Loss of Memory is Only Temporary.”
In their “professional development” for fields like psychiatry or psychology Jews in her academic experience produced written studies for each other to ponder. One imaginary professor’s product, , deliciously created by Kaplan, is “…the Psychoanalytic Ego and Mechanisms of Defense…Psychoanalytic Concepts and the Structural Theory, Wayward Youth Searchlights on Delinquency …the Psychoanalytic Study of the Child…Men Under Stress, Patterns of Mothering Modern Clinical Psychiatry, Dreams and the Uses of Regression.”
Pasting these abstruse categories onto real people with symptoms is a recipe for confusion to replace complexity. Children, for whom a certain amount of seeking is part of growth, get even more lost and confused. The grown-ups get more frustrated that their kids aren’t “normal.”
On and on.
Every Jewish kid knew someone who wore long sleeves to hide their tattooed concentration camp numbers. Kids, nevertheless, exchanged information about the long-sleeved and made fun of its bearer.
The adults all knew someone like those who Tadeusz Borowski describes in his iconic 1959 epic, “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen.” The narrator has a job helping to unload exhausted deportees at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp, where most were killed within minutes of their arrival.
“I seize a corpse at the unloading dock the fingers close tightly around mine. I pull back with a shriek and stagger away. My heart pounds, jumps up in my throat. I can no longer control the nausea. Hunched under the train I begin to vomit. Then, like a drunk, I weave over to the stack of rails…Suddenly I see the
Camp as a haven of peace. It is true, others may be dying, but one is somehow still alive, one has enough food, enough strength to work…
“The lights on the ramp flicker with a spectral glow, the wave of people –feverish, agitated stupefied people ---flows on and on, endlessly. They think that now they will have to face a new life in the camp, and they prepare themselves emotionally for the hard struggle ahead. They do not know that in just a few moments they will die, that the gold, money, and diamonds which they have so prudently hidden in their clothing and on their bodies are now useless to them. Experienced professionals will probe into every recess of their flesh, will pull the gold from under the tongue and the diamonds from the uterus and the colon….”
What ruminative writers like Kaplan (and there are very few) bring to fiction isn’t all that impossible to identify. It’s accessibility.
First Kaplan has observed decades of human behavior radiating from her Jewish identity. Every ethnicity has its eccentrics and crazies. Many families recapitulate these in micro. But if we’re lucky, we get to develop our insights into these from not just observation and interaction, but from knowledge. No such activity was possible until the inventions of the 19th Century which led to “media.” There were only so many hand-copied religious texts that could be hand copied. But then there was an increasingly rapid proliferation, an infinite number of texts that could be reproduced with moveable type replacing hand copying.
Content became uncontrollable. Religious control escaped the agency of faith. Faith became divorced from provable facts. Imagination was given license.
None of this meant, or means, that the activities of people and animals can be limited to “scientific” analysis. Or that so limiting it makes it more engaging. Or funny. Kaplan’s genius had me laughing all the time.
Humor in fiction is either one-liners or endless prose/imagination construction. “Loss of Memory is Only Temporary” is almost impossible to extract, so long are such constructions in the hands of Kaplan. She has pitch-perfection in character delineation, as in describing a contemporary who has “gone native” in the midwestern woods.
“No matter what your eye hit, - her Laplanders boots, wool Scottish plaid slacks, long Mexican serape pushed over a turtleneck Irish fisherman’s sweater, a child’s bright red furry earmuffs half covered by a multicolored flower-filled East European peasant kerchief, Rebecca looked like a package that had been sent on from one wrong foreign address to another, receiving at each mistaken customs office its country’s distinctive stamp.”
Cheap, poorly designed and built apartments were where ghetto Jews lied, in distant parts of New York boroughs Brooklyn and the Bronx. “..the awful clang of the plumbing that went on constantly, vibrating through many apartments when it was used, The awful noises neighbors made, like the neighbor next door to Louise. Every night he yelled the same wild karate commands and apparently knocked over large pieces of furniture. He kept it up for a long time and when the throwing and yelling part was over, he laughed in a loud, stupid, braying voice. Beside it you could hear a girl’s voice giggling and shrieking, high pitched and equally stupid.
Do you. Want to imagine yourself in such places? Should you read “Loss of Memory is Only Temporary?”
Even if you’re long past such age, adolescence is a guarantee that awkward , painful scenes will occur. That uninformed decisions will be made. That hormones are mysterious.
Ah, Johanna Kaplan! A guarantee you will be sucked into her tale, of these decisions unfolding, so well does she weave it, how curious is its “denouement” immersing in the narrative will probably ruin whatever spoilers you thought might be coming.
For me, it’s already among major choice for novel of the year. And the year still has ten months to go!
(Larry Bensky can be reached at LBensky@igc.org.)
A RESOUNDING ‘YES!’
Editor:
Joe Gaffney’s letter concerning California’s proposed single-payer health plan contained several misunderstandings. The benefits of single-payer are far superior to the best private health insurance plans, with no co-pays or deductibles. Everyone is covered, and no one can opt out. Not only can you keep your doctor, but you can access any doctor or hospital, unlike the current system.
From 2008 to 2018, employees’ share of premiums for employer-sponsored health insurance rose from an average of $3,394 a year to $5,431. And employers’ share for individual employees rose from $12,298 to $19,565 during that same time period.
In 2020, prior to COVID, 24% of non-elderly adults had problems paying medical bills, 21% failed to fill prescriptions, and 15% skipped needed medical care due to cost, all according to the Commonwealth Fund. The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services report that cutting cost-sharing for 41.5 million people living below the poverty line would lift 8 million out of poverty.
Gaffney posed the question, “Is it worth trashing our entire health insurance system?” The answer is a resounding yes. We need to remake the most dysfunctional health care system in the developed world.
Dr. Nick Anton
Santa Rosa
L - R: Brook Ellen Forsythe, unidentified, Autumn Joy Faber, Camalla ?, Kishy Bear
THE JOHN DURHAM SPECIAL COUNSEL OPERATION gains more disturbing visibility each week. The public has been informed by his court filings that there is no longer any question as to who set the Russian Collusion game in motion (Hillary Clinton), how the FBI, DOJ, and the news media were enlisted to play their roles in it, and how the whole thing amounted to a seditious conspiracy to overthrow the chief executive. It is extremely serious stuff, the worst scandal and the grossest institutional failure in our history. There will be prosecutions and punishments, and half of America will have to process their own guilt in swallowing the story and going along with it.
— James Kunstler
THERE’S MORE OPPOSITION on the streets of Moscow to the Russian invasion of Ukraine than there was in the US over the regime change operation in Libya or the bombings of Syria or Somalia or the proxy war on Yemen or wars in Afghanistan and Iraq at any time under Obama or Trump, which tells you something about the Russian character. And our own.
— Jeff St Clair
WHEN IT CAN BE SAID by any country in the world, my poor are happy, neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them, my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars, the aged are not in want, the taxes are not oppressive, the rational world is my friend because I am the friend of happiness. When these things can be said, then may that country boast its constitution and government. Independence is my happiness, the world is my country and my religion is to do good.
– Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man
WHEN BASEBALL PLAYERS FORMED THEIR OWN LEAGUE
An interview with Robert B. Ross by Michael Arria
Major League Baseball is mired in a lockout, as team owners refuse to budge just weeks before Opening Day. It’s a perfect time to look back at when the players revolted against the owners and started their own league: the 1890 Players’ League.
Just weeks away from Opening Day, the 2022 Major League Baseball (MLB) season is still in limbo. The players’ union and team owners continued talks this week, with both sides offering proposals and neither willing to budge. Tuesday’s meeting lasted a mere hour. MLB says a deal must be reached by February 28, or regular-season games will begin to be canceled. “The deadline is the deadline,” a league spokesman said. “Missed games are missed games, and salary will not be paid for those games.”
While the negotiations are complicated (involving everything from a “competitive balance tax” to a “pre-arbitration bonus pool”), the fundamental situation is not. As baseball writer Jay Jaffe recently summarized:
This is a lockout, not a strike. It is entirely of the owners’ doing — you could say they own it — and entirely unnecessary, because the 2022 season could be played under the terms of the previous [collective bargaining agreement] until a new one is in place.
The owners have been trying to claw back power from the players since 1975, when St. Louis Cardinals center fielder Curt Flood — backed by the Players Association and its leader, Marvin Miller — successfully challenged the reserve clause. That rule, which was developed back in 1879, effectively bound players to a team for their entire careers. They could be sold, released, reassigned, or kept in the minor leagues without any say in the matter.
“After twelve years in the major leagues,” Flood wrote to MLB commissioner Bowie Kuhn in 1969 after being traded against his wishes,
I do not feel I am a piece of property to be bought and sold irrespective of my wishes. I believe that any system which produces that result violates my basic rights as a citizen and is inconsistent with the laws of the United States and of the several States.
One crucial, if often overlooked, forerunner to Flood’s fight was an upstart league founded in 1889. That year, fed up with the amount of control the owners had over their lives, a large swath of players broke away and created a renegade league. Their goal was to set up an organization where the players would share the profits and help control the teams. It was called the Players’ League. It was immensely popular. But it was dead within a year.
In 2016, scholar Robert B. Ross published the definitive book on the subject, The Great Baseball Revolt: The Rise and Fall of the 1890 Players League. Jacobin contributor Michael Arria spoke to Ross about the league’s rise and fall, the century-long struggle between owners and players, and what the Players’ League can teach us about baseball’s ongoing lockout.
MA: What did professional baseball look like in the late nineteenth century? How popular was it, and what kind of money were the players making?
RBR: By many accounts, it was the most popular sport in America. Horse racing and boxing were up there as well, but baseball was reaching new peaks of popularity, especially after the National League was formed in 1876.
The players were making middle-class salaries for the most part, with some making quite a bit more. In 1899, there was a salary cap of $25,000, about $75,000 in today’s money. So, they were making a living, but they weren’t wealthy by any standard. There wasn’t a minor league system like there is today, but there were other leagues that players would play in before they went to the National League. The players in those lower leagues were making peanuts. Even the lesser players in the National League needed to have second jobs.
MA: What motivated the players to create their own league?
RBR: The National League’s profitability in the 1880s was enabled by two things. One, they created territorial monopolies around each city where there was a team: they were the only league that could have baseball in Philadelphia or Chicago, for instance. That cut down any competition.
Then, they had the reserve rule, which was gradually rolled out across the 1880s. First, it was just a couple players, then four or five, and then eventually the whole roster was bound to a team for life unless they were sold by that team. Players couldn’t negotiate for a better contract. They had no mobility. Once you were signed by, say, the New York Giants, you were a New York Giant and had no control over that.
Players knew they were the reason the league was so profitable. No one paid the admission fee to watch the owner sit in his box.
This enabled owners to keep salaries down. At a moment’s notice, players would be told, “You’re not playing in Philadelphia anymore, you’re playing in Chicago, so you and your family have to move there.” The players found that dehumanizing.
Then, in 1889, John Brush, the owner of the National League club in Indianapolis, developed a new scheme where every player would be graded A through E — not just by their play, but on their character and off-the-field habits. So, if they were going out to saloons or were in the press because they got in a fight, that could put them in a lower class. Their class would determine how much money they would make, and the maximum was going to be $25,000.
In 1885, the players had organized their first union, the Brotherhood of Professional Baseball Players. The National League refused to recognize them and refused to meet with them.
So, by 1889, you had the Brush classification scheme, the salary cap, the buying and selling of players, the fact that the league was not going to meet with the union, and the fact that players knew they were the reason the league was so profitable. They were the talent. No one paid the 50 cents admission fee to watch the owner sit in his box — they paid to see these gifted athletes play this sport. So, the players said, “Screw it. We’re going to form our own league.”
MA: The Players’ League only lasted one season, so there might be an assumption that it failed to generate an audience. However, you write that the league was extremely popular — that’s not at all why it fell apart.
RBR: It’s so fascinating and depressing at the same time. They created eight new teams in the off-season with investors who seemed sympathetic to the players’ cause. Players could be part owners of the club. They built new ballparks that were nicer than the National League ballparks by all accounts. If any still existed today, they would be among those Field of Dreams pilgrimage sites. The Players’ League actually built the Polo Grounds [the legendary Manhattan ballpark], where Willie Mays would play years later.
So, they had better parks and were playing in a lot of the same cities that the National League teams played in, with far better players. Something like 85 percent of the National League players from 1889 ended up playing in the Players’ League in 1890. There was a great pennant race between Boston and Chicago. There was the first-ever no-hitter in which the team who threw the no-hitter lost the game. There was great hitting, great defense.
By all accounts, the Players’ League was drawing more fans than the National League.
By the end of the year, the players were celebrating — and not just Boston, who ended up winning the championship. By all accounts, the Players’ League was drawing more fans than the National League.
However, behind their backs, the nonplaying investors were colluding with the National League owners and trying to find a way to consolidate ownership of the clubs. There were even a couple player spies who were feeding the National League owners with information.
Things fell apart very quickly. These investors, who had pledged their economic and ideological support, joined forces with the National League and essentially said, “We want to make more money.” They wanted to go back to a monopoly system where there was only one league operating in each city. It was a big betrayal. The league was really taken down by greedy investors who wanted more money.
Most of the investors were real estate investors or connected to railway lines. It was in their best interest to build ballparks strategically. They’d build them at the edge of a city, and that could justify a railway line being built there or people buying property around the ballparks.
So, the investors had an interest in making money off baseball, but also using baseball to grow their other businesses.
MA: I wanted to talk about John Montgomery Ward a little. He was a Hall of Fame player who had over two thousand hits and managed some teams, but his crucial role in the Players’ League isn’t even mentioned on his Hall of Fame plaque. Who was he, and what was his legacy?
RBR: He was such an interesting guy. He was from Bellefonte, Pennsylvania. He went to Penn State and was expelled for stealing chickens.
Like many baseball players, he began playing for small clubs and getting off-season jobs. When he was playing in New York, he went to Columbia Law School. He dated and married a very famous Broadway actress named Helen Dauvray. So, he was in with the New York theater crowd, he had this intellectual life, and he really spearheaded the founding of the Brotherhood of Professional Baseball Players.
He was great as an organizer because it was easy for him to convince players to join the Players’ League and impossible for the National League to hurt him in the press because he was so respected and knew the law better than most of the owners. Creating the Players’ League was the highlight of his career, which is why it was so upsetting to him when it failed. He was just totally despondent. He went on to play longer and live a happy life, but the Players’ League was his pinnacle.
MA: What impact did the Players’ League have on the owners and players and on labor relations between the two sides going forward?
RBR: My impression, based on the testimony of players, is that it was exhausting to create the Players’ League and demoralizing to see it fall apart. No one wanted to go through all that again, because it was such an expenditure of energy and money. I think that explains why players from that generation didn’t attempt it again. Beyond that generation, the Players’ League was really written out of baseball’s history. It would be interesting to know whether the players who organized the Major League Baseball Players Association [in the 1960s] had even heard of the Players’ League.
I think it set a precedent on two levels. One, if the players revolt, then the dominant league is going to pull out all the stops to keep it from succeeding. It also alerted the National League that creating another league was not difficult. The American League was created about a decade after the Players’ League.
It’s also worth noting that the structure that Ward and the Players’ League created is similar to current free agency. They were looking for the ability to move from team to team. They were looking for multiyear contracts. In that sense, what Curt Flood, Marvin Miller, and the Players Association created, by abolishing the reserve clause in 1975, was very much how the Players’ League envisioned themselves. The obvious difference is that players today don’t have shared governance of the league and they don’t share directly in the profits of the league, even if collective bargaining has enabled the players to reap some of those benefits.
MA: What do you think current players can glean from the Players’ League? Is there anything from that fight we could apply to present-day labor disputes, whether it’s the ongoing lockout or the poor labor conditions of minor league baseball players?
RBR: I started researching this book in grad school — it was my dissertation. I was a big baseball fan, so when I heard about the Players’ League, I thought it was a really interesting way to use a Marxist framework to understand how this part of capitalism works.
I think the Players’ League shows that workers create the value of the commodity they are producing. As the creators of that value they should have, at the very least, a big share of it, if not total control of it. The Players’ League wasn’t using that language, and they weren’t remotely Marxist, but they were making these arguments. They were saying, “We are the ones making this beautiful product, why shouldn’t we have more control over it?”
I wish more professional athletes today would connect their labor struggles with other labor struggles, especially the ones directly connected to their industry.
I hope my book could be instructive to any worker. We are the ones who create value, and it’s up to us to struggle to capture more of that value. The Players’ League had that class consciousness, but they failed to include the off-the-field workers. There was no mention of the carpenters and bricklayers who built the stadiums, or the ticket-takers, or the other workers who should have shared the profits of the game.
I think that’s a big lesson. I wish more professional athletes today would connect their labor struggles with other labor struggles, especially the ones that are directly connected to their industry. Concession salespeople, ushers, the people who make the merchandise — I think there’s an opportunity to use the spotlight of baseball, and the billions it generates, to draw attention to these workers. They’re part of the production process as well.
Writing this book, I also thought a lot about college athletes, who are generating millions for their schools and not getting paid for it. Minor league baseball players are making pennies on the dollar, compared to Major League players. All these struggles are relevant to the Players’ League. The players, but also all these other workers, are the folks who create the value, and they should control more of that value.
I support the players’ union, and I hope they get the best deal they can possibly get, but I hope they don’t make the same mistake that the Players’ League did and see themselves in a tunnel. They’re connected to all these other labor struggles.
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 6 or 7pm. After that, send it whenever it's ready and I'll read it on the radio /next/ week.
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 listen to KNYO in real time.)
Any day or night you can 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.
Also there you'll find tidbits of knowledge to occupy your fingers and forebrain until showtime, or any time, such as:
If you want to be able to claim that your bones vibrate and you taste metal when a satellite goes overhead with its cell-phone antenna's surveilling rays razzing through you, you'll need to memorize exactly when that is so you can get the full nocebo effect. Here are some tools to obsess:
https://www.makeuseof.com/ways-to-track-starlink-satellites/
Á tool to type a word or phrase with Spanish accents or upside-down characters and then paste it where you want it in your document. ¿Also do you have a question? ¡Or perhaps you are in especial earnest, sahib or madam!
https://studyspanish.com/typing-spanish-accents
Rerun: Tango (1981). "And two hard-boiled eggs."
IN OTHER NEWS: My dreams from Monday and Tuesday, Feb. 21 and 22:
https://tinyurl.com/MarcoDreams2022-02-22
Marco McClean, memo@mcn.org, https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com
PRICED OUT OF THE MARKET AND OTHER HOUSING WOES
by Eve Ottenberg
If you’re a person of average means, you may have noticed the disappearance of affordable housing. It was bad before covid, when a person earning minimum wage couldn’t rent a one-bedroom apartment in any city in the U.S. But what about middle-income people, home-buyers? Well, melancholy news for them since the pandemic hit, as mega-firms like Black Rock grab houses across the nation. This includes, indeed focuses on, affordable houses, which are good investments, since they’re supposedly undervalued, meaning investors can get away with jacking up the price. Pretty soon most Americans won’t be able to achieve the American dream of home ownership. This means, at the low end of the income scale, that the multitudes of homeless people will swell. Those less desperate might want to tell their kids that renting, renting and more renting lies in their future. Welcome to 21st century serfdom.
You think serfdom’s too harsh a term? Well, rents in the U.S. have skyrocketed, as hikes “average up to 40 percent in some cities,” the Guardian reported February 16. And according to Zerohedge — recently and preposterously smeared as a Russian propaganda outlet by American so-called intelligence — on February 20, “rent increases put the Consumer Price Index to shame, soaring an average of 13.5 percent.” In Phoenix, rents jumped 25.3 percent, while numerous other Sunbelt cities exceeded 20 percent. That means all those would-be homebuyers, priced out of the market, now bleed their paychecks to predatory landlords. Lucky them.
Meanwhile, the same publication noted earlier, on Feb. 15, that on-time rent collections have hit an historic low, 92 percent. That’s because people are broke. No more stimulus checks. Rents exploding through the roof. Inflation. Oh, and those jobs the bipartisan Scrooges want folks to grovel back to? Surprise! They don’t pay enough to live on. Who ever woulda thunk it? So when it’s time to cut down to blood and bone, people cut rent, not food.
This latest spasm of housing investment greed dates back to the first lockdown, when anyone who had the cash fled cities and purchased homes outside them. Big Money caught on quick. It scented blood in the air, a financial killing to be made. According to Slate back on June 19, “corporate investors snapped up 15 percent of U.S. homes for sale,” in the first quarter of 2021. In Conroe, Texas, “an investment firm won a bidding war to purchase an entire neighborhood worth of single-family homes.” These investors don’t buy just any houses. They zero in on “inexpensive single-family homes built since the 1970s in growing metro areas.”
As always in the grim and decayed landscape of hyper-capitalism, corporations prey on a captive audience: ordinary people scrabbling for a foothold on the economic precipice, people without lots of options. Investors know which cities (Atlanta, Charlotte, Phoenix) offer younger, working- and middle-class people good-paying jobs, Slate argues, and they scour those markets. They look for “rent growth potential.” Because leasing homes or apartments at exorbitant rates is the preferred corporate method of draining every last cent out of slender pocketbooks.
Investors can siphon off high rents because they’ve boosted prices in the home purchasing market, blocking that avenue of escape from serfdom. “Last year, investors bought nearly one in seven homes in America’s top metropolitan areas,” the Washington Post reported February 16. That was “the most in at least two decades.” These investors do two things: “flip homes to new buyers, while others rent them out.” According to the Post, “neighborhoods where a majority of residents are Black have been heavily targeted.”
Last year, 30 percent of home sales in majority Black neighborhoods, went to investors, compared with 12 percent in other zip codes.” This is not good.
Meanwhile on February 17, again according to Zerohedge, over the last five years “cities where homes cost an average of $1 million or more have doubled.” These astronomical prices hold true in 481 U.S. cities. Citing Bloomberg, the article reports that 49 more cities are on track this year to bust past the $1 million home price average.
This trend has gathered force for some time, but now, coupled with inflation, it’s expanding, and that bodes very poorly for middle-income Americans. It doesn’t take a shrewd prognosticator to foresee a time, in the not-too-distant future, where multimillion-dollar homes abound nationwide, and million-dollar ones are the norm, squeezing the more modestly priced market down to a skimpy skeleton of its former self. As that market shrivels, the vast majority of Americans not rolling in dough will sweat just to make the rent. Indeed, the Apartment List National Rent Report this month announced that that ugly future is on our doorstep. Over the last year, “rent growth currently stands at a record-setting 17.8 percent.” And this ain’t just happening in the U.S. It’s global.
According to UN News last October, “among the rights at risk from increased speculation in the financial markets by hedge funds and other investment funds are “adequate housing.” A former Special Rapporteur on adequate housing observed that in the Global South, “informal settlements in Southern cities are regularly demolished for luxury housing and commercial development.” That’s been going on since before most of us were born, but, to understate matters, it accelerated lately. Take Edinburgh Scotland, where rents zoomed up to warp speed. Edinburgh’s not even in the Global South. But according to Roaming Charges in last week’s CounterPunch, 15 “super landlords” own 10 percent of that city’s rentals.
Back in the U.S., we’ve recently seen headlines like “Rental Bidding Wars Heat Up as Economy Improves in a Hot Housing Market,” “Showdown Shapes Up in California Over Growing Housing Crisis,” and “A Lot of Buyers Have Had Enough: Bidding Wars for Homes Fall to Lowest Level Since 2020.” It doesn’t take a genius to see where this is heading for ordinary people trying to make ends meet.
What doesn’t make headlines is that some people fight back. A year and a half ago, the Debt Collective battled evictions in Los Angeles with actions to blockade the courts. That was at the start of the pandemic. It’s not too much to say that such high-profile struggles helped bring about the eviction moratorium, something pretty much unprecedented in U.S. history. But that’s gone now, and as Jacobin headlined in September, “America’s Housing Crisis Is About to Get Much, Much Worse.”
Why is that? Because five months ago the supreme court, too lofty to bother with the money-matters of little people, sided “with landlords over the millions of renters on the edge of eviction.” Eight million Americans, to be exact. That’s how many, behind on rent, lost their case before the court. According to Jacobin, 3.5 million of them reported facing eviction post-September. You can assume a good number had no plans besides pitching a tent under the local overpass.
Just because they don’t make headlines now, doesn’t mean those millions of people weren’t booted out on the street. The reporters and the cameras went away, but so did those renters’ homes. That’s not news. It happens every day in America, where housing courts exist to rubber stamp evictions. This lesson impressed itself on me long ago as the lone representative of the press for a couple of years in New York City’s Housing Court. Everything was against the tenants, but most notably, the judges, some of whom, in their ferocious pro-landlord anti-communism, were quite insane. They ran their courts like circuses, and one compelled the luckless tenants to prove their fealty to American capitalism by reciting the pledge of allegiance. Real estate developers, landlords, were treated like pashas. That the whole game was fixed was and remains incontrovertible. The proof is in who has lawyers. The landlords do. The tenants don’t. If a tenant appears in housing court with an attorney, that’s practically a show-stopper.
With no access to justice, tenants know the system is rigged against them. It always has been. That’s because in the U.S., to state the obvious, housing isn’t a human right, it’s a commodity. And the U.S. exports this crass, malignant ideology all over the world, often at gunpoint. No wonder there’s no affordable housing for first-time home-buyers. The miracle is that there ever was any to begin with.
(Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest book is ‘Birdbrain.’ She can be reached at her website. Courtesy, CounterPunch.org)
ON UKRAINE
Dear Editor,
Days ago Russia’s President Vladamir Putin began the long-anticipated and feared invasion of Russia’s neighboring nation Ukraine.
Since November, the West has watched while Russian military units, men, tanks, missiles, aircraft, and ships massed around Ukraine on three sides.
During the past three months Putin and Russian diplomats kept up a constant stream of denials that Russia would attack Ukraine, Using the argument that Russia only meant to defend the “independence” of two eastern Ukrainian regions, Putin defended his massing of Russian forces as “military exercises.”
Russia has killed about 200, shelled numerous cities and towns and has captured Chernobyl on the outskirts of Kiev, a capital city of over 4 million. Putin has demanded Ukrainians lay down their weapons; it appears they will fight as long as they are able.
There is no doubt the American efforts to find a so-called “off ramp” to this invasion have miserably failed. Sanctions are now set down, with little or no effect upon Putin’s plans. Sanctions have never done anything but increase the popular support for autocrats and dictators, whether it be Kaiser Whilhelm, Hitler, General Tojo, Mussolini, or, in this latest case, Vladimir Putin.
Frank Baumgardner
Santa Rosa
HISTORIC FIRST
President Biden has nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman to be elevated by a President to join the Supreme Court of the United States. Of the 115 Justices that have served on the Supreme Court since 1789, only five have been women and only one has been a woman of color. Representation matters and that has been especially true in our nation’s legal system, which has disproportionately impacted and Black and Brown communities. The Mendocino women's Political Coalition applauds President Biden’s ongoing efforts to diversify the judiciary.
“Being the first is never easy and Judge Jackson is doing what so many women have done before her, breaking not just barriers, but blockades, to ensure that she is not the last. President Biden could not have chosen a more stellar candidate for the job,” said MWPC Chair, Val Muchowski. ”We celebrate this historic nomination and look forward to advocating for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation in the confirmation process.”
We call on the U.S. Senate to deliver a speedy confirmation to the United States Supreme Court.
Val Muchowski
Philo
WHAT HEROISM SOUNDS LIKE
Ukrainian soldiers on a small island in the Black Sea had scathing last words before being bombed by a Russian warship on Thursday: "Go fuck yourself."
Thirteen border guards were stationed on Snake Island, owned by Ukraine and roughly 30 miles off the coast from the country, when a Russian warship asked them to surrender or be bombed, according to a tweet from the Ukrainian Embassy in Georgia.
Ukrainian official Anton Gerashchenko posted audio of the incident to Telegram, an instant messaging service, that went viral on social media.
Here's the link to the audio:
A Russian officer can be heard telling the Ukraine soldiers to surrender to "avoid bloodshed and unjustified deaths."
A Ukrainian soldier responded with the expletive and all 13 soldiers were killed, Ukrainian officials announced.
“All border guards died heroically. They did not give up,” Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a press briefing.
“All of them will be posthumously awarded the title of Hero of Ukraine. Eternal memory to those who gave their lives for Ukraine rather than surrender.”
— John Sakowicz
GEORGE MOSCONE, DAN WHITE, ANIMAL HEADS & HANDGUN
by Kim Nicolini
(This is Part 3 of a serial memoir. You can read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.)
Let us not sit upon the ground
and tell sad stories
of the death of sanity.
Two humans made of flesh
are meshed in death
and no more need be said.
It is pure vanity
to think that all humanity
be bathed in red
because one young mad man
one so bad man
lost his head.
̶ From Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “An Elegy to Dispel Gloom” (1978)
NOVEMBER 1978
“He trained me, ya know?”
I wasn’t sure El Dorado was talking to me. His face was stricken and gray. His mouth opened and closed, but the words were stuck. He was trying to answer a riddle that had no answer.
His face had dissolved into a pall of indescribable, immeasurable pain. The expression terrified me. I wanted to bolt and put as much distance as possible between me and whatever it was that made El Dorado look that way. I preferred the other El Dorado – the one who dumped caution at the door and his daily catch on the coffee table. That wasn’t happening on this night.
***
When I had called El Dorado earlier, he asked me to come over. I decided to walk from the Tenderloin to Pacific Heights. At the intersection of Polk and Geary, I ran into an impenetrable mass of people surging down Polk. There was no getting across the street. One foot off the curb, and I was swept into a sea of bodies.
I was caught in a surging black wave that seemed to stretch for miles. So very dark. Human beings and night sky bled into an ink black swell. I don’t know if the black was from the night, from the black clothes everyone seemed to be wearing, or from the shroud of darkness that had settled over the city at 11:30 that morning.
Flickering candlelight dimly illuminated downcast eyes, faces turned toward the ground. All around me, thousands of feet moved toward the city’s center.
I tried to weave my way through and out of the mass, so I could head up the hill instead of down. It was impossible. I stopped trying and became part it.
“What’s going on?” I asked a group of men.
“The murders,” one man moved his face close to mine, his eyes bulging in disbelief at my lack of knowledge.
“Murders?”
I soon learned that earlier that day there had been a double assassination. City supervisor Dan White, a former San Francisco cop, had climbed through a basement window at City Hall, hunted down two city officials, and killed them in cold blood.
With a Smith & Wesson .38 service revolver in his holster and 21 bullets in his pocket, White went straight to George Moscone’s office and put two bullets in the mayor’s chest and abdomen. After a brief pause, he fired two more at close range into the side of Moscone’s head.
White left Moscone’s office, stopped to reload his pistol, and then gunned down Supervisor Harvey Milk. This time he fired five rounds – three in Milk’s chest and abdomen followed by two at close range into the back of Milk’s head.
If White hadn’t decided to put those extra bullets in their heads, Moscone and Milk most likely would have lived.
Polk Street: an end-of-the-line stop for people who are running from pieces of the past. It is a cradle of rebirth, for some, and a gutter for most. It is a place of sex and drugs – of love, and things that feel like it. It is a nest for runaways, lost children, drag queens, ministers, strippers, hustlers, druggies, artists, queers, and Others who dream of freedom and dancing, of new lives with new pasts. But for all its inhabitants, for better or worse – Polk Street is home.
By T. Chase Meacham
Based on “Polk Street Stories” by Joey Plaster
At the time of the killings, I thought Polk Street was San Francisco’s only gay neighborhood. Polk Gulch was the city’s first gayborhood. It grew into existence a time in the city’s history when being gay was not constricted by the Castro model of white men of economic privilege. Polk Street gays were less about status and more about transgression, and they cut across the boundaries of race and economics.
From the moment I observed gay men congregating on Polk and spotted young male hustlers leaning against buildings and roaming the street in skintight jeans and bare torsos, I felt a deep connection, as a sexual outsider and as a prostitute, to the neighborhood and the people in it.
Polk also was home to working class punk kids who hailed from the streets and not the Art Institute. Kids just like me. We were punks fighting for our survival in a world ready to eat us alive. Punk gave voice to the reality we knew. That voice solidified our experiences of being sexually and economically cannibalized by a society that saw us as disposable . . . when and if they saw us at all.
I discovered punk when the woman whose kids I babysat smuggled me in into a show at the Mabuhay Gardens in 1977. It was one of the first punk shows. The music and the spirit behind it grabbed me. I never let go.
The Mabuhay was my one consistent safe space, never faltering as my personal oasis in a landscape full of cannibals and cons. I saw my reflection inside the haunted faces of young punk hustlers turning tricks on Polk during daylight hours.
We were an unwritten chapter of San Francisco’s history. Our stories are rarely, if ever, told. Art school punks living on trust funds and privilege wrote songs railing against politicians. Working class street punks lived the life behind the songs. Savaged by politicians who bought our bodies, used us, and tossed us into history’s trash heap, we were the embodiment of political corruption, our bodies the physical evidence of its human cost.
Being in the presence of other causalities like me, connected through our mutual Otherness, I felt less alone. At nights, we erased ourselves in the oblivion of punk at the Mabuhay. During the day, we walked the streets, our young faces wiped to white in the harsh dirty light of Tenderloin sun. We were no ones who were everywhere but who no one saw.
Being molested by five different family members for nearly fifteen years of my young life left me broken and irreparable. Forced to prostitute myself to survive at age fifteen, I lost any chance of a “normal” sexual life. Permanently awkward, uncomfortable, and sexually wrong, I sought comfort in witnessing Polk Street’s community of queers even if I couldn’t find a place within it for my particular queerness.
I had no idea that there was another gay neighborhood in San Francisco – the same neighborhood where I lived less than a year earlier. April 1978, I was living on 16th and Market, right in the middle of the Castro district, but had no idea that I was living in the city’s new gayborhood or that it was called the Castro. I thought it was part of the Mission district, a neighborhood my family had occupied for generations.
* * *
The night of the assassinations, 30,000 people marched from the Castro to City Hall where they merged with the mourners from Polk. Together, the two groups became a singular, astronomically large body – the living totality of a city ruptured by violence and reeling with shock.
And I was right in the middle of it. A 16-year old prostitute who never who never heard of Harvey Milk before November 27, 1978, I was living in the middle San Francisco’s explosive history as it unfolded, but I was too young to understand that I was part of it.
I wasn’t entirely clueless, however. San Francisco’s history was hardwired into my unconscious and my life. As a third generation San Francisco native whose Italian American father and grandfather served on the SFPD, I knew George Moscone was mayor just as I knew Alioto was mayor before him. I was the descendant of Italian American men who literally built the city and the women they married, fucked, and beat. Not necessarily in that order.
The Italian American mayors were common topics of conversation for my family. Joe Alioto even visited my grandmother’s house once or twice.
The city’s legacy of corruption was tightly knit into my family’s genetic code and stitched inside every broken bone and broken heart. It could be heard could between words during kitchen table arguments. It was stirred into every pot of red sauce simmering on the stove. It was strung between every bead on every rosary hanging from on my grandmother’s dresser mirror.
My family left me exiled in the same city where they lived and worked. I was a kid living on the streets of the city my family called home, where three generations of their history were written on the skyline, yet no one tried to find me. No one tried to help me. No one came looking.
I became no one, a Jane Doe walking the streets while my stepfather pulled iron just a few blocks away, and my grandparents slept in the safety of their homes on the other side of the city.
I clung to any scraps of my identity I could find to help solidify my existence and stop me from disappearing entirely.
I absorbed Moscone’s murder as if part of me died with him. His death gut punched me with heart shattering loss. I felt like I lost yet another layer of me when they put the mayor in the ground.
Over forty years after his assassination while researching to write these very words, I discovered that Moscone was closer to me than I ever would have guessed. He was buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Colma, the same place my grandfather Alvin J. Nicolini, a retired SFPD lieutenant, the one with the legendary glass eye and temper, had been buried two years before Moscone was killed. By the end of the 20th century, my entire Nicolini family was keeping Moscone company from the family grave in Colma.
Moscone attended St. Ignatius High School, the same school my father Al and his best friend (my future stepfather) Carl attended. Moscone was four years older, their time at St. Ignatius overlapped and through that connection left a trace memory of Moscone on my historic DNA.
Just up the street from City Hall, Moscone and Milk’s bodies would lay in wait for a memorial service at the new St. Mary’s Cathedral on Gough. Moscone’s funeral would be held in the same controversial and ugly catholic church, the architectural abomination that my stepfather Carl helped construct. His team of ironworkers put the finishing touches on the building when they installed the interior’s decorative ironwork in 1971.
Carl took photos during its construction and showed me the cathedral in its making, from its infancy as a skeleton composed of iron rods to its completion when it was rechristened “Our Lady of Maytag” because its roof looked like a washing machine agitator.
An ugly church for an ugly time, The Church of Agitation seemed the perfect place to memorialize the two men whose assassinations ruptured the city.
… the world really did seem to spin out of control when Dan White murdered Mayor Moscone and Harvey Milk in City Hall. Dianne Feinstein, the rich matron politician who had come in a dismal third in the 1975 mayoral contest and was considered to be finished politically, was president of the Board of Supervisors, and thus ascended to the now vacant mayor’s office. Her regime quickly changed directions from Moscone’s liberalism. Feinstein wasted no time in shifting mayoral support to downtown interests, opposing renter protections, and supporting a new office building boom.
̶ from “When Punk Mattered: At the Dawn of the Neoliberal City” by Chris Carlsson
On November 27, 1978, Dan White obliterated two men and forever changed the city’s history. When Supervisor Dianne Feinstein stepped in for Moscone, she sent much of San Francisco’s cultural history to the grave with the mayor she replaced.
I may not have had much of a formal education, but one look at Feinstein and my instincts told me loud and clear that Feinstein was bad news.
It didn’t take me long to see Feinstein as a thief. She stole the city my family built and robbed me of my heritage, my sense of identity, and the parts of the city that brought me comfort.
Feinstein moved into the mayor’s office and took up arms, wielding her giant bottle of Windex to wipe the “cultural dirt” off the city’s surface and sweep away all she deemed undesirable (eg. punk rockers who she detested and condemned as deranged perversions driving down real estate values).
Feinstein’s sterilization efforts wiped out enormous cross-sections of the city’s population and history, eliminating the elements that did not jive with her view of prosperity.
Over forty years later, and I still can’t escape her mug. Feinstein’s face continues to be a stain in the news and the country’s socio-political landscape. She’s the Evil Windex Wielder who never dies.
***
It’s not unusual to be loved by anyone
It’s not unusual to have fun with anyone
But when I see you hanging about with anyone
It’s not unusual to see me cry
I wanna die
̶ From “It’s Not Unusual” (Tom Jones, 1965)
El dorado paced back and forth in front of the wall of windows. Down at the marina, all the sailboats were docked and dark. The bay stretched out in a shimmering sheet of opaque black without a boat in sight.
El Dorado eventually stopped long enough to open a box on the coffee table and pull out a baggie of weed and some rolling papers. His fingers fumbled three or four times before he successfully rolled a joint.
He sucked down a long deep hit and a exhaled stream of smoke, dislodging his words.
“It’s too bad what happened,” El Dorado shook his head. “How could Dan do it? Just snap like that? I don’t get it. He trained me. He’s a good cop.”
He took another hit from the joint and exhaled in silence, seeming to forget I was in the room. He lifted his eyes and stared right through me.
“Dan White trained me,” El Dorado emphasized and repeated in disbelief.
“And just like that he snaps and kills two people? I don’t get it.”
The next inhale is so deep and long that El Dorado about kills the joint.
“He’s a good guy. A clean guy. A family man.”
El Dorado stopped to reflect on his reflection staring back at him from the window.
“What about the kids? His wife and kids? He’s a family man. Dan.”
Silence.
Then, “He trained me, you know?”
By this time, I was sure he wasn’t really asking me a question.
After a brief pause, he remembered something important. “That’s right! He went to my wedding!”
He snapped his fingers, ran into the bedroom, and returned holding a photo album as if it were a rare prize.
“My trip to Hawaii,” El Dorado sat on the sofa and patted the cushion for me to sit next to him. He still hadn’t offered me a hit of the joint.
When he first opened the album, there were no photographs to see. The first page had a single piece of paper with some fancy handwriting and a seal on it.
CERTIFICATE OF MARRIAGE.
El Dorado pointed to the words and explained. “My honeymoon.”
His first mention of his wedding was still reverberating off the walls inside my head. When I saw the marriage certificate, the significance of Dan White attending El Dorado’s wedding hit me.
El Dorado had a wedding!
My eyes bulged with panic. I whipped my head around and inventoried the penthouse apartment, looking for a wife ready to jump me and slit my throat.
“Divorce!” El Dorado bellowed, a stream of laughter leaking from his tight chest and loosening him up.
He held his hand up in peace. “We were divorced over a year ago,” he assured me.
His eyes were still far away but beginning to glaze over with bliss as he flipped through pages of photos and reminisced about his Hawaii Honeymoon.
I wasn’t feeling bliss at that moment. I was still trying to digest this new information.
El Dorado was married and had a honeymoon! So what if he was divorced. Doesn’t mean that he didn’t once have a marriage. A wife. A family.
El Dorado loved someone! He had things I would never have. This knowledge shook me to the core. I was terribly upset and heartsick with a deep dark sad. When El Dorado opened that album, I lost something that would never return to me.
Looking back now, I understand that I was feeling robbed. Cheated. I never once pictured my heroin-sniffing, quaalude-popping bad cop living a normal life with normal things like a wedding, a beautiful bride, and a honeymoon in a tropical paradise.
I believe I was also more than a little jealous. And resentful. And angry. None of it was good.
The El Dorado Placebo Effect for Al the missing father was fading.
Loss, anger, injustice, and jealousy surged through me and grew with each new photograph.
The photos were less about Hawaii and more about El Dorado being naked in Hawaii.
He was particularly smitten with one photo. “Hawaiian shower,” he pointed fondly to a photo of himself standing naked under the gushing stream of a tropical waterfall. Water bounced off his naked body catching pieces of sunlight and turning him into a bronzed angel. This was really more than I could bear.
But there was more. El Dorado sunning his perfect naked body on the beach. First on his back. Then on his stomach. El Dorado naked kayaking. Naked snorkeling. Naked eating and drinking. El Dorado naked. In Hawaii.
It was like Hawaii Five O meets Fantasy Island starring El Dorado, and it was real as TV to me.
Another reality began to seep in. Who was taking the photos of El Dorado naked in Hawaii? El Dorado was naked with someone else!
A grown woman.
One he married.
His beautiful bride.
More jealousy. More anger. More injustice.
Loss for things I never would have consumed me. I wanted to kill the wife or myself or both. I did neither. Instead, I remembered something else that helped deflate the emotions that were strangling the life out of me.
The photo of El Dorado standing naked under a waterfall reminded me of a photo of Tom Jones that Omar, the desk clerk at the Geary Hotel, had shown me recently.
Omar liked me, or at least he liked to talk to me. He was from Brazil and gushed about the beauty of his home. He claimed to come from a very wealthy family who lived on acres of paradise and owned many large houses.
Omar pledged to take me to Brazil someday and insisted that I experience Carnival. When he showed me photos of the fabulous women, gloriously adorned in glitter and flesh, I looked down at my adolescent flat chest and choked on suffocating anxiety and overwhelming worthlessness. I wasn’t remotely close to looking like them. Not only did I lack breasts or any other notable curves, I couldn’t even walk in a pair of high heel shoes.
“Hey, I have something to show you. You got to see this.” Omar beckoned to me nearly every night as I inched my way across the lobby, trying to reach the stairs before he spotted me.
I’d turn my head, and inevitably Omar would ask the question. “Have you seen my picture of Tom Jones taking a leak?”
“Pretty sure I did,” I’d tell him when I was grumpy.
“No! Lemme see!” I’d humor him when I was in decent spirits.
Whatever I answered didn’t matter. Omar never failed to pull the photo from his wallet, unfold it, and show it to me, his face beaming with delight.
Creased and cracked from overhandling, the image in the photo was still clear enough to see Tom Jones standing in front of a redwood tree. His head tilted back gazing up at the branches while he held his dick and released a stream of piss in a glittering arc.
“We were camping. Tom got so drunk,” Omar would laugh and laugh, thoroughly amused as he told me what good friends he and Tom Jones were and how much Tom Jones loved to go camping.
“He just loves to go camping,” Omar gushed. How could I doubt him?
With these photos, Tom Jones and El Dorado merged into a single body made of two men.
It was the trees and the way the men stood under them. It was the solitary vulnerability of their exposed bodies and the singularity of the men within the frame of each photo. It was the twinkling light catching on the edge of streaming water. It was all these things and some I can’t name that will forever connect Tom Jones taking a leak on a redwood tree to El Dorado taking a naked shower under a Hawaiian waterfall.
* * *
Across the city in my grandmother’s house on Athens Street, Al Nicolini’s hunting trophies were still watching over me from a distance.
Heads of deer, elk, and antelope were mounted on the back wall of the closet in Al’s old bedroom. Full bodies of raccoons and jack rabbits perched on the floor in a corner. I don’t know what happened to the remainder of the bodies of the large animals, but my mother insisted she ate them. Every night. Day in. Day out. That’s how she “lost her taste for game meat.”
Glistening with light even when there was none, wide open and ready to pounce, the eyes of Al’s hunting trophies glowed from the back seat of every car I climbed into, watched through the window of every hotel room I entered, and stared through the grating of every sewer I stepped over.
Knowing those eyes were just a bus ride away comforted me in some sense, but they also made me feel entirely alone and forgotten. No matter where I was in the city, who I was with, or what I was doing, the heads were with me, but Al never was and never would be.
When I stared into the eyes long enough, I could catch a lingering memory of Al pulling the trigger. If I closed my eyes and concentrated really hard, I could feel the pull of animal bodies hanging from the ceiling in the garage right below me. I could hear Al’s heavy breath seep through the floorboards as he sliced open their bellies, gutted, and stuffed them, just a few feet away from where he opened and gutted me when I was a baby.
As a kid, I’d spent so many afternoons in the dark recesses of that closet trying to get closer to the father I’d never know.
The animals didn’t sleep. They held guard over Al’s racks of rifles and cases of pistols — the same weapons that took their lives. Funny this tendency to love most those which love us least…
A small dresser leaned against the back wall. I left it alone until I was ten. Then curiosity got the best of me.
Inhaling deep and holding my breath tight in my lungs, I slid the top drawer open and found just one thing inside. A wooden box with a brass latch.
I flipped the latch, slowly lifted the lid, and rested it on the back wall.
Shiny black metal resting on a bed of red velvet. Wooden handle. Round cylinder. Worn trigger. Fancy letters engraved on the side in what looked like a W over an S.
Sliding my finger over the sleek barrel, I traced the words Smith and Wesson.
Al’s police revolver. How long had it been sleeping in that box?
I lifted its cold body and contemplated the heft of the weapon. Just over two pounds, the handgun felt like it weighed a ton. So much weight. I felt like I found God and the Devil together.
Six years later, Dan White would carry a .38 caliber just like Al’s when he climbed through the basement window at City Hall and rupture the city.
* * *
Turn the calendar back a decade or more, and you’ll find Al and my mom down the hall. My mom’s sitting in a chair at the dining room table. Her face is pulled into an expression that’s either a cry or a laugh or both. I can’t quite figure what it’s trying to tell me. A scratchy squeaky whine rises from her throat in ear piercing volume.
Al is laughing. And he’s spinning.
Holding a handgun to the side of my mother’s head, he presses his finger to the barrel and gives it a good hard spin. Round and round it goes. Where it stops nobody knows.
Al and my mom are playing a game. One of Al’s favorites. Russian roulette with his police revolver. My mom told me the stories many times, always with a curious combination of repulsion, wonder, and lust.
I never quite understood on which side of love and hate my mom resided when it came to Al. When all you know of love is a broken spine and the bathtub and fist that gave it to you, what are you going to do?
I looked down at the gun in my hand. This was it. The one that knew the feel of my mother’s temple.
Holding that Smith & Wesson felt like holding hands with death.
I stared into the impenetrable blackness of its barrel and remembered the stories my grandmother and mother told me about the wife Al married after my mom.
Al was going hunting, and she didn’t want him to go. She begged him to stay. She told him that if he left, she would do something terrible, maybe kill herself.
Al went anyway, but he didn’t take his service revolver with him.
He found her body when he returned from his hunting trip three days later. Apparently, she kept her promise. The gun left her brains in a puddle on the dining room rug when it blasted the life right out of her.
Does drawing the losing bullet during a game of Russian Roulette count as suicide?
(Kim Nicolini is an artist, poet and cultural critic living in Tucson, Arizona. Her writing has appeared in Bad Subjects, Punk Planet, Souciant, La Furia Umana, and The Berkeley Poetry Review. She recently completed a book of her artwork on Dead Rock Stars which will was featured in a solo show at Beyond Baroque in Venice, CA. She is also completing a book of herDirt Yards at Night photography project. Her first art book Mapping the Inside Out is available upon request. She can be reached at knicolini@gmail.com.)
Re UFO meme and point about worst quality camera, here’s a widely examined clip from a drone camera doing landscape shots for 2 documentary filmakers a few years ago…..showing a cylindrical tic tac type at very high speed. CGI has since been ruled out:
https://youtu.be/cE-Yrv1-chI
Insects are often a good bet for identifying fast moving objects on suggested ufo film. Here, the gyrfalcon, a known bird residing in this area, may be what is filmed. That bird can travel 70 mph.
Members of Congress with certain committee assignments have been briefed and shown stunning video with no ambiguity. May we all see the same soon! (Source Lue Elizondo and Chris Mellon)
There are some good film viewable from civilians also, both recent and historical, but famous hoaxes have clouded the picture so much that skepticism is high re pictures.
Was the video produced in a Hollywood studio? Tell me why ET always is sneaking around rather than making formal contact. My answer is because it isn’t happening. I’ve been hearing this shit since I was a kid. Video tech has improved, but it’s the same old dullard types peddling the stories.
I hit the wrong “reply” button. Musta been ET’s fault, the little bastard!
“Morse Dial”
The US really got into propaganda (and imprisoning or deporting those who failed to fall for it) back then. It’s even worse now, and more sophisticated, thanks to the Skinner box crowd. They’ve convinced us that all our wars based on lies were great, but if the Russians do it, it’s a crime. Such a sorry, pathetic, gullible bunch of fools are we.
Was the video produced in a Hollywood studio? Tell me why ET always is sneaking around rather than making formal contact. My answer is because it isn’t happening. I’ve been hearing this shit since I was a kid. Video tech has improved, but it’s the same old dullards peddling the stories.
See below….reply misplaced
RE: the Woodbridge Metcalf photographs. Woodbridge Metcalf was a renowned forestry lecturer at U.C. Berkeley. He also competed in the 1932 Olympics in “star class” sailing. He volunteered at 4-H Camp in Mendocino Woodlands – I think he led nature walks – in the early 1960s, where I met him.
Formal contact would in effect be a cultural colonization but as we further expand our reach into space may someday be naturally appropriate, IF we have grown up somewhat from our reactive and aggressive ways. It appears that their presence here is related to creative projects using our resources and observing to study our developments. The best vetted cases of close encounters of the third kind suggest that.
I don’t know what’s in that particular video above. It was picked up by a drone camera taking landscape shots for two documentary makers. Could be a falcon that can go 70mph. It superficially at least does look like a cylinder shape.
Always excuses. Never facts. Until there are facts (and glitches in military electronics don’t count) you ET freaks are nuts in my humble opinion.
Reports of close encounters of the third kind by credible people (well vetted) and multiple witnesses in incidents with documented physical traces and biological effects can be said to represent “facts”.
The military signature data revealing a technology at play here that exhibits capacities far beyond human development currently also represents “facts”.
The military are almost as big a bunch of liars as politicians. Gonna have to do better than that. Same goes for so-called “credible” people. More like delusional people who see things they can’t understand and too lazy to figure out the real cause for the phenomenon. Or those who just want attention, which the ET crowd is always ready and eager to provide.
If a bunch of beings had the technology for interstellar travel, they would NOT come here to play hide and seek.
Enjoy your dream world. I’ll stick to reality, as screwed up as it may be these days.
Funny that Dan White’s name comes up today, to be measured up against that of William Evers.
Throw in a little Kafka to complete my feeling of unease at Redbeard’s strange hearing yesterday.
Concepts such as “to avoid 300 years in prison” and “exchange of gunfire” don’t seem real.
Someone, perhaps Eyster, needs to write a book about the last half century of the Mendocino DA’s office.
Funny how we’re so concerned about borders being invaded on the far side of the Earth, while we invite unlimited millions to invade our own borders.
Makes perfect sense to me, I’ll say anything to burnish my woke credentials.
Millions, George?
Yes, unlimited MILLIONS.
I’ll provide objective evidence — if [IF] you won’t ban it as “racist.”
Millions of people are coming across the southern border. Lay it on me, George, the evidence, I mean. BTW, much appreciated your standing on banning artificial turf in the NFL. I know you’ve been hurt by the stuff a couple of times. Real grass now! It’s not like the NFL owners can’t afford it.
As you know, the US Census Bureau is increasingly woke, meaning that such an important & basic statistic as “immigrant percentage of US population” is no longer easy to find.
And anyone who dares report on such matters is cynically branded as “racist” blah-blah-blah’s. If you do allow this source, try not to shoot the messenger, but rather the message — if you can:
“Immigrant Population Hits Record 46.2 Million in November 2021”
(by Steven A. Camarota & Karen Zeigler, December 20, 2021):
— [ https://cis.org/Camarota/Immigrant-Population-Hits-Record-462-Million-November-2021 ]
“As you know….” I know no such thing. More nonsense. “46.2 million” what? Who? Where are they all?
Bruce,
At your request, I provided detailed, rational evidence by serious demographers.
Flailing your arms in feigned ignorance does not become you.