Mendocino County Today: Tuesday, March 22, 2022

Warming | 11 Cases/1 Death | Odesa Airstrikes | Drought Funding | 2022 Fair Dates | Officer Mezzanato | Opioid ODs | Museum Courtyard | Soil Needed | Ed Notes | Library Sale | Macdonald Book | Nesting Dove | Coast Rentals | Log Load | Kirov Square | Preschool Openings | Thirsty Grapes | Herman Fayal | Mental Health | Relax | Spicer Drama | Yesterday's Catch | Doubiago 1993 | Previous Man | Cyclists | Revoked Licenses | Eroding Church | Civil War | The Drift | Two Dads | Pomo Rally | Mehditorial | Choco Bunnies | SF Standup | Video Mag | Croc Tears | 1912 Girls

WARM TEMPERATURES will occur across much of northwest California this afternoon, particularly across the lower valleys of Lake and Mendocino Counties. Otherwise, temperatures will trend cooler during mid to late week, and periods of fog and stratus will be likely along the coast. In addition, rain chances will increase this weekend into early next week. (NWS)

11 NEW COVID CASES (since last Friday) and another death reported in Mendocino County yesterday afternoon.

UKRAINE SAYS IT WILL NEVER SURRENDER its cities as Odesa reports airstrikes on flats

Russia accused of striking residential areas in what would be first attack on Black Sea port

by Jon Henley and Isobel Koshiw, in Kyiv

Ukraine has said it will never bow to ultimatums to surrender its cities, including devastated Mariupol, as authorities in Odesa accused Russian forces of striking residential areas in their first attack on the vital Black Sea port.

After his government rejected out of hand a 5am Monday deadline to cease fighting for Mariupol, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said the country would no more give up the besieged southern city than it would Kyiv or Kharkiv.

“We have an ultimatum with points in it – ‘Follow it, and then we will end the war’,” Zelenskiy said in an interview with a Ukrainian broadcaster. “Ukraine cannot fulfil that ultimatum.” The country would never accept Russian occupation, he said.

Zelenskiy also said that any peace settlement with Russia would have to be submitted to a referendum in Ukraine. “The people will have to weigh in on certain kinds of compromise,” Zelensky told Suspilne, an internet news site.

Odesa authorities said on Monday that airstrikes had hit apartment blocks in the city’s outskirts, causing no casualties but starting a fire. Overnight shelling in the capital, Kyiv, reduced a large shopping mall to rubble and killed at least eight people.

(theguardian.com)

SUPERVISOR WILLIAMS: “Thank you Ryan Rhoades and Senator Mike McGuire! This is a critical project for the town of Mendocino and region.”

MENDOCINO COUNTY FAIR Dates for 2022

September 23, 24 & 25, 2022. We are busy making plans for a GREAT 2022 FAIR!

MENDOCINO COUNTY’S NEWEST PROBATION OFFICER: 

Drake Mezzanato is a graduate of AVHS, class of 2013.

A RASH OF OPIOID OVERDOSES IN ROUND VALLEY RAISES ALARM

Valerie Moore, Program Director of Round Valley’s Center of Healing Hearts, is concerned about a marked rise in overdoses since the year began. In a recent two-week period, Moore became alarmed when Round Valley saw five overdoses, all the victims under the age of 26.

kymkemp.com/2022/03/22/a-rash-of-opioid-overdoses-in-round-valley-raises-alarm/

MIKE GENIELLA: Spring has sprung in the Evert Person Courtyard at the Grace Hudson Museum in Ukiah. Native landscape guru Andrea Davis and others are doing a fabulous job of letting nature take center stage. Thank you.

BETH SWEHLA: 

The AVHS Ag Dept could use your help.

"How can I help?", you say.

The students are installing raised garden beds. We have a BIG pile of compost soil we made and will use to fill the beds, but it is not enough.

We need soil for the raised beds.

Today, Monday, I was a Costco and they had 50 quart (1.6 cu ft) bags of organic soil on sale until April 3rd. I bought my membership 10 bag limit.

If you are a Costco member, would you buy bags of soil for us? I estimate we could use another 50 bags. You can be reimbursed for the purchase with a receipt. If you would like to donate we will write you a donation letter. Again, the last day of the sale is April 3rd.

Thank you for considering!

ED NOTES

OF ALL THE BLOVIATING farces and straight-up insults we endure as Americans, Senate confirmation hearings are right up there with the most offensive. There they were Monday morning in all their stumbling splendor, corporate libs on one predictable side, neo-fascists on the other, the whole dreary gang assembled for a week of pure posturing as Ketanji Brown Jackson is confirmed as a Supreme Court judge. The neo-fascisti will say she's soft on crime because she once worked as a public defender as they pretend not to be automatically opposed to her because she's a smart, fair black woman. The corporate libs will say stuff like not only is the appointee “a woman of color” as they patronize Ms. Jackson like she's a kind of fluke given her gender and color, they will thunder on about how the Supreme Court needs to “truly reflect the American color scheme,” without of course mentioning that half the people in that color scheme are either impoverished or headed there. The Trump Cult will slobber on about how Ms. J seems to be one-a them mollycoddlin' libruls. After a week of this embarrassing jive Ms. Brown will be confirmed because the libruls have the votes to confirm her. Meanwhile, a whole week of breathless babble from NPR about how exciting all this is. And her appointment makes no diff whatsoever. The Trump Cult outnumbers the libs on the Court. Wake me when it's over.

SOUTH CAROLINA'S announcement that it will execute killers by firing squads instead of the midnight needle is actually a step forward in death penalty methods. A firing squad is at least a dignified end for people who largely don't deserve any consideration at all, but hauling people out of their cells in the middle of the night and dispatching them via tortuous chemicals, that final shot often botched by the authorities and their medical advisors, is grotesque and negates any possible message that murder will get the murderer murdered by the state. What's the lesson supposedly taught to the rest of us? None, and even if the execution were carried out at Super Bowl half-time, murderers would continue to murder. Capital punishment is not a deterrent. 

TRADITIONALLY, at least in some of the executions of political people, the condemned got to make a little speech and was offered a last cigarette while the firing squad waited patiently to put a bullet in him or, rarely, her. (In Stalinist Russia you got a bullet in the back of the head in some anonymous police basement. Ditto for fascist governments ever since everywhere.) Firing squads, incidentally, spare most of the riflemen the specific knowledge that it was their bullet that killed a stranger to them. Only one or two fire live rounds, the rest fire blanks. I think Gary Gilmore of Utah is the last American executed by firing squad, and that was at his request. (Norman Mailer's brilliant book on Gilmore, a low down punk if there ever was one, and there are at least several million, certainly had it coming. ‘The Executioner's Song’ should be required reading.)

HANGINGS are unpleasant affairs — very popular with the public audiences who used to be allowed to watch them. But, like the midnight needle, they are also often botched because the rope is either too short or too long, and the condemned slowly chokes to death, or doesn't die and has to be re-hung per adjusted rope specs.

THE SOLUTION, as all humane people know and agitate for, is life without parole. Vengeance isn't a desirable social encouragement, nor is giving the government the right to kill a good idea in highly political times because you just might get a midnight needle yourself.

MALCOLM MACDONALD:

My new book, Mendocino History Exposed, is now up on the gallerybookshop.com website. Of course, you can also order by phone at 707-937-2665.

Mendocino History Exposed tells twenty-two tales from around the county, ranging from the 1820s to World War II. You don't have to be from this locale to appreciate Mendocino's connection to Moby Dick or the Pig War, let alone the exploits of Eliza Bowman and Anna Morrison Reed. Shootouts, stagecoach holdups (with a twist), an Alfred Hitchcock sighting, and the bloodiest feud of the Old West. Who doesn't love a good feud! You get all that and more in Mendocino History Exposed.

THIS SPHINX-LIKE DOVE built her nest in my fuchsia basket outside our front door. 

Despite everything, Spring somehow arrives...

Marilyn Davin

MOST VACATION RENTALS IN MENDOCINO COUNTY ARE IN THE COASTAL ZONE.

This is a significant factor in how they can be regulated and limited by the County. If Vacation Rentals and their impact on housing concerns you, consider joining a special opportunity provided by our League of Women Voters to meet with Donne Brownsey, Chair of the California Coastal Commission as she helps us to better understand the Commission's role.

Tomorrow, Tuesday March 22 at 4:00

To attend, use this recurring monthly link.

MENDOCINO COUNTY SUPERVISOR Johnny Pinches watching one of the last loads of logs being shipped out of Island Mountain, just south of Cain Rock.

QUAIL HOLLOW PRE-SCHOOL

Hello families! We have two spots open at Quail Hollow preschool. 

This is a Waldorf inspired, play based preschool in downtown Boonville. We have a waiting list for the fall but have had a couple of rare openings mid year. We take children 2 1/2 to kindergarten age and children must be potty trained (with some exceptions made for kids who are almost there). If you are considering preschool for next September I have a waiting list so signing up now will ensure your child’s spot for next year as well. Program runs Monday through Thursday 9 AM to 1 PM with an option of aftercare until 5 PM. Send me a message for more info and to schedule a tour

WATER WASTERS

Editor: 

Water, a precious commodity, is already being rationed to people who live, work and play in northern Sonoma County. They are on the west side of the river, in Cloverdale. On the east side of the river, thousands of acres of vineyards are irrigated by sprinklers, many hours per day, while local homeowners’ wells run dry. Maybe some sensible regulation of aquifers should also be considered. Maybe vineyards aren’t meant to be irrigated in the hills that feed our aquifers. The old immigrants knew dry farming of grapes was possible, and it still is.

Terry Hampton

Cloverdale

THE WALKING WOUNDED, an on-line comment: 

Mental health clinician is my career for many moons. I've watched lots of exhausted, broken hearted family members attempt to house, provide for, their loved ones, only to be "outmatched" by a chronic mental illness or addiction. Sure, finances is a definite issue, but not the biggest one I've seen. Paranoia, danger to family members, pets, neighbors, suicide attempts, repeated 1 night stays in the ER or Crisis, multiple law enforcement contacts, non medication compliance are a few examples. With addiction, frequently lying, manipulation, theft, criminal activity, and much of the above I mentioned are crushing. I invite folks to attend a NAMI meeting or CO dependents Anon mtg to hear how families suffer and cope, and of course if anyone needs support themselves. I think we need a total systems overall and big money for state of the art facilities. I think Denmark and Portugal have different and successful systems? Don't quote me on that, I'm tired. lol.

SPICER’S CRAZY ATTACK

On the evening of March 19th, 2022 at about 9:30pm, Willits Police Department (WPD) Officers were dispatched to a residence in the 100 block of Barbara Lane, for a reported assault with a deadly weapon and criminal threats. The suspect, identified as Robert Spicer, 35 years of age from Willits, confronted family members with a knife and told them he was going to kill them. 

Fearing for their safety, Spicer’s family members fled the residence and contacted law enforcement. Spicer subsequently locked them out of the residence. A family member (brother) attempted to regain entry into the residence but Spicer confronted the brother and tried to stab him. The brother was able to use a metal rod to push Spicer back into the residence. 

Spicer is known to WPD Officers due to several recent calls involving him and his behavior toward his family. Spicer believes he is the sole owner of the residence and claims his family members who live with him are strangers. 

In January and early March of 2022, WPD responded to address issues between Spicer and his family at the residence. In both instances, it was decided by family members that it would be addressed via working with mental health and going through the civil eviction process. Throughout all these incidents, Spicer’s family has remained committed to helping him seek the help he needs. 

Given Spicer’s penchant for exhibiting escalating violent behavior, his actions this night, and his family’s feeling of being at risk, WPD Officers requested assistance from the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO). An arrest Warrant was requested and approved by an on-call judge after being briefed on the incident and history. The WPD Officers and MCSO Deputies formulated a plan of action, which included one of the MCSO Deputy’s K9.

Family members provided WPD and MCSO with keys to the residence and they gained entry after announcing themselves numerous times. Spicer was contacted on the second floor and ordered to come out of his bedroom and submit to arrest. Spicer refused and forced entry was made into his bedroom. Spicer was observed sitting on his bed with a 4in double-bladed throwing knife next to him. 

Spicer was uncooperative and continually refused officers’ commands. At one point during their interaction he managed to slam the door to his bedroom shut. The door was pushed open immediately and officers observed Spicer back on the mattress and reaching for his knife before the K9 was deployed. The WPD Officers and MCSO Deputies entered the room where Spicer fought with the Officers and Deputies before being placed in handcuffs. The knife was recovered under Spicer. 

Spicer was taken to Howard Memorial Hospital where he was medically treated for injuries incurred from his forceful resistance prior to being booked for 245(a)(1) PC (Assault with a Deadly Weapon), 69 PC (Resisting Arrest with Violence), 422 PC (Criminal Threats), and 417(a)(1) PC (Brandishing a Weapon Other Than a Firearm). 

The Willits Police Department would like to thank the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office for their valuable assistance and support in this case. 

CATCH OF THE DAY, March 21, 2022

JOHN BILLS, Fort Bragg. Domestic battery, felon-addict with firearm, protective order violation.

JESSICA ESCOBEDO-FERNANDEZ, Ukiah. Disobeying court order, failure to appear.

CORINNA FAHEY, Manchester. Failure to appear.

THOMAS LANGENDERFER, Albion. Petty theft, probation revocation.

JOSHUA MEDINA, Fort Bragg. Battery with serious injury, criminal threats, protective order violation, probation revocation.

MAYA WINEBRENNER, Ukiah. Domestic battery, protective order violation.

THE DEFINING MOMENT last week in America's ongoing mental health crisis was U-Penn swimmer Lia Thomas's record-setting win in the NCAA women's 500-yard freestyle championship race. It was celebrated in the sports news as a thing — that is, an alleged feature of reality. Lia Thomas began "transitioning" in 2019 when "she" was a full-grown male human being, otherwise known as a "man," and was already competing in men's NCAA swimming events. One thing you can conclude from this is that the board of the NCAA is insane.

— James Kunstler

ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

Years and years of training, education, and experience, not to mention the costs of becoming a “Psychiatrist”, and then he [Doctor Goodwin, a Mendo practitioner] assaults, rapes and makes use of Ketamine to traumatize his patients…

He should get a prison sentence to go with that licence revocation…

There are many Doctors with drug problems, mental health issues and aberrant behavior…

Check out your provider, and it’s pretty scary how many employers engaged his services…

Remember, no matter what they have done, they may well go to another state and be re-instated… Happens all the time…

I worked at one Hospital where they were considering hiring a Doctor who had sexually assaulted children, and then they did hire a doctor who had “sold” prescription drugs… Both of these guys were license-revoked and then re-instated in a different state.

Another facility I worked within, had a “traveler” doc who was addicted to Amphetamines, who took drugs from the pharmacy, and who failed to keep his patient encounter notes for 11 months…

I couldn’t make up stuff like this. Be careful when consuming medical care…

A LOSE-LOSE WAR

Dear Editor,

With the horrible ongoing Russian attempted takeover of Ukraine now nearly a month long, several observations are clear. The Kremlin, led by President Vladimir Putin, is blindly pursuing a ruinous course. Somewhat like the South in our Civil War, Russia is stuck in a suicidal mindset of mistaken myths and beliefs.

President Putin rose to power driven-in part at least by his own mind equating himself to Adolph Hitler, Josef Stalin-even, according to some, Peter the Great. Coming up through the ranks of his nation’s secret service, the KGB, simultaneously, the USSR fell apart. As Putin replaced others as President, his fear of a possible attack by NATO rose. Long forgotten by Moscow and Putin’s Kremlin is NATO’s founders’ concept that Russia might develop its industries into being a partner nation, not an adversary.

Now, like the Confederacy did in 1861 at the start of the Civil War, Russia is fooled. It will be a long-lasting war of attrition on both sides in which they fight a series of pointless and costly battles. Before Russia wins any sort of victory, it stands to lose far more than it can ever gain.

Frank H. Baumgardner

Santa Rosa

A BOLD LITERARY JOURNAL Rises On the Left, Led by Women. 

The lit mag of the moment, founded by two women in their 20s, isn’t afraid to say what’s on its mind.

"In founding a journal of ideas, they had joined a long tradition in which young, ambitious, argumentative writers decide that, in order to be heard, they must start a publication. The Drift’s predecessors include, among many others, Partisan Review, The Paris Review, Commentary and Dissent, whose co-founder Irving Howe once said, 'When intellectuals can do nothing else, they start a magazine.'”

(NYtimes.com)

ONLINE COMMENT:

Jesus had two dads and he turned out fine!

WORLD’S DULLEST EDITORIAL LAUNCHES PANIC

In an inane sequel to the Harper’s Letter fiasco, a New York Times editorial ignites a fury proving its anodyne thesis

by Matt Taibbi

The New York Times ran a tepid house editorial in favor of free speech last week. A sober reaction with Tom Watson saying: “Arguably the worst day in the history of the New York Times.”

One might think running botched WMD reports that got us into the Iraq war or getting a Pulitzer for lauding Stalin’s liquidation of five million kulaks might have constituted worse days — who knew? Pundits, academics, and politicians across the cultural mainstream seemed to agree with Watson, plunging into a days-long freakout over a meh editorial that shows little sign of abating. 

“Appalling,” barked J-school professor Jeff Jarvis. “By the time the Times finally realizes what side it’s on, it may be too late,” screeched Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch. “The board should retract and resign,” said journalist and former Planet Money of NPR fame founder Adam Davidson. “Toxic, brain-deadening bothsidesism,” railed Dan Froomkin of Press Watch, who went on to demand a retraction and a “mass resignation.” The aforementioned Watson agreed, saying “the NYT should retract this insanity, and replace the entire editorial board.” Not terribly relevant, but amusing still, was the reaction of actor George Takei, who said, “It’s like Bill Maher is now on the New York Times Editorial board.”

The main objection of most of the pilers-on involved the lede of the Times piece, which really was a maladroit piece of writing:

“For all the tolerance and enlightenment that modern society claims, Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.”

There’s obviously no legal right in America to voice an opinion without being criticized, so this line is indeed an error and an embarrassing one, for a labored-over first line of a major New York Times editorial. On the other hand, a lot of great liberal thinkers decried shaming tactics as utterly opposite to the spirit of free speech, with John Stuart Mill’s warning of a “social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression” being just one example. So, while the Times technically screwed up, cheering shaming and shunning as normal and healthy elements of life in free societies is a pretty weird gotcha. In any case, this bollocksed lede introduced a piece that had been in the works for a while, and came complete with a poll the paper commissioned in conjunction with Siena College. 

Its premise, tied to the uncontroversial observation that America has become dangerously polarized, is that “the political left and the right are caught in a destructive loop of condemnation and recrimination.” Citing a poll that 84% of Americans (including 84% of black Americans) who said it was either a “very serious” or “somewhat serious” problem that people are now afraid to voice opinions out of fear of “retaliation or harsh criticism,” the Times said “when speech is stifled or when dissenters are shut out,” that “a society also loses its ability to resolve conflict, and… faces the risk of political violence.”

The Times piece is pretty transparently a marketing ploy, designed to regain a foothold with the slew of demographics lost to the paper in recent years. It’s a campaign that deserves to fail if it somehow doesn’t. The internal Times debate over whether or not to broaden its ideological horizons has for years run along humorously obnoxious lines, like “Should we hire one never-Trump Republican columnist, or none?” Even this latest offering wringing hands about America’s lack of ideological tolerance doesn’t wonder at the paper’s own near-total absence of columnists and reporters positively disposed (or even just indifferent) to Bernie Sanders, or really any political viewpoint outside the two dominant theologies. 

Still, the Times was careful — conspicuously, agonizingly, excessively careful — to point out that the speech issue was not exclusive to one political side or another. They wrote that Republicans, “for all their braying about cancel culture, have embraced an even more extreme version of censoriousness” in the form of official bans on certain books or classroom ideas. Their approach here was similar to the now-infamous open letter in support of free speech in Harper’s from two summers ago, in which a handful of academics, authors, artists, and journalists, including Noam Chomsky, Salman Rushdie, J.K. Rowling, Wynton Marsalis, and others decried “a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity.”

In an effort to head off blowback, the Harper’s letter authors went to absurd lengths to create the most inoffensive conceivable statement in support of free expression, to the point where more than a dozen mainstream outlets ranging from The Daily Beast to the Washington Post to The New Yorker and beyond (as well as at least one of the signatories) used the term “anodyne” to describe it. 

“We went through dozens and dozens of drafts with a lot of input from various signatories to strike as nuanced a balance as possible,” says Thomas Chatterton Williams, one of the authors of the “Harper’s letter.” This was done, he said, “to make it clear that it wasn’t a one-sided attack on the left but an attempt to call attention to a problem that transcends the political binary.”

The caution not only didn’t help, but made things worse. The letter stimulated a host of bizarre controversies, including complaints from Vox staffers that kinda-sorta led to the exit of signatory/co-founder Matt Yglesias, whose crime was co-appearing on the Harper’s letter with people whose views on trans issues were deemed objectionable. Several signatories withdrew when they found out who else was signing (seeming to defeat the purpose of making a statement in favor of tolerating differing views, as signatories like Malcolm Gladwell pointed out). There were so many freakouts in the letter’s wake that Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland commented it “might be a rare example of the reaction to a text making the text’s case rather better than the text itself.”

This Times editorial is watered down almost the level of a public service announcement written for the Cartoon Network, or maybe a fortune cookie (“Free speech is a process, not a destination. Winning numbers 4, 9, 11, 32, 46…”). It made the Harper’s letter read like a bin Laden fatwa, but it’s somehow arousing a bigger panic. Its critics view the mention of Republican legislative bans in conjunction with canceling as a monstrous affront, a felony case of both-sidesism. Obviously any implication that there’s any moral comparison between Republicans banning speech by law and Democrats doing it by way of informal backroom deals with unaccountable tech monopolies is unacceptable. Beyond that now, much of the commentariat seems to believe the op-ed page has outlived its usefulness unless it’s engaged in fulsome denunciations of correct targets:

Adam Davidson: “Dear The NYT, This is how you do it. How you speak truth to power. How you avoid false both-sidism. How you use the best of journalism to make clear what is at stake in our country. How you show responsible outrage at outrageous thing.”

“We need more shaming and shunning, not less,” is how Froomkin put it, putting the names of opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury and deputy opinion editor Patrick Healy up near the top of his piece “for the record,” in case anyone wanted to know who needs teeing up for the next #FireARandomPerson campaign.

It would be ironic if Kingsbury were forced out for running a lukewarm editorial in support of free speech, since she replaced the last Times opinion editor beheaded in the wake of a social media and staff meltdown, James Bennet. The latter’s offense two years ago was running an editorial by Republican Senator Tom Cotton that called for invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy troops during the George Floyd protests. 

When I asked Froomkin if the idea was to keep cycling through Times opinion editors “until you get one who’s appropriately focused in the direction you like,” he replied: “Yes, I would like them replaced with people who stake out bold, defensible, not-brainless positions, while publishing a very wide range of perspectives from others.” He then linked to an essay of his arguing that publishing “wide perspectives” would essentially entail coating any articles with which the “bold” op-ed board disagreed all over with warnings pointing out where they’re wrong, arguing in bad faith, or are “morally abhorrent.” (This incidentally is how the Cotton piece looks online now, a 970-word op-ed preceded by a 300-word Editor’s Note explaining why it sucks and shouldn’t have been published). 

This is the same terror of uncontextualized thought that’s spurred everything from the campaigns to place more controls on Joe Rogan to the mountains of flags and warning labels platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube pile on all kinds of content now (“Are you sure you want to read this debunked wrongthinker? Click yes/no”) to the bizarre new “fact-checking” movement that takes factually true statements and objects to them at length for “missing context.”

The underlying premise of all these formats is the conviction that the ordinary schlub media consumer will make the wrong decision if the correct message isn’t hammered out everywhere for him or her in all caps by mental superiors. This idea isn’t just insulting but usually incorrect, like thinking Lord Haw Haw broadcasts would make English soldiers bayonet each other rather than laugh or fight harder. Even just on the level of commercial self-preservation, one would think media people would eventually realize there’s a limit to how many times you can tell people they’re too dumb to be trusted with controversial ideas, and still keep any audience. But they never do. 

There may be plenty of reasons to roll eyes at the Times piece, but the poll numbers in there speak to this exhaustion, with what Chatterton Williams calls the “consensus enforcers who feverishly insist there’s no problem, and the fact that you disagree is evidence that you should resign your position.” It was crazy enough when jobs were lost over the Harper’s letter. But calling for firings over this? An editorial that drives two miles an hour down the middle of the middle of the middle of the road? If this is anybody’s idea of a taboo, we really have lost it.

DEEP HANGING OUT: DAN HOYLE AS THE BOMBS FALL

by Jonah Raskin

In Ukraine, bombs are falling, civilians and soldiers are dying, and talk of nuclear war sizzles. Meanwhile, in San Francisco three nights a week actor, Dan Hoyle, performs his latest production, “Talk to Your People,” on the stage of the Marsh Theater. He has performed there many times before over the past decade and it feels like home. What appeals to Hoyle, as an observer, writer and actor, he explains, is “the conjunction between global events and everyday lived experiences.” There’s plenty of that to go around.

These days, when Hoyle isn’t at the Marsh, or in his studio—a converted garage behind his house in ungentrified Oakland—he’s out and about talking with and listening to people. Call it “deep hanging out” and “deep listening.” The anthropologist, Clifford Geetz, coined the term, “deep hanging out” which he practiced with gangs and tribes around the world. The Bay Area author, Malcolm Margolin, who founded Heyday Press and who has published a great deal about California Indians, is a master of deep hanging out. His new book is titled Deep Hanging Out: Wanderings and Wonderment in Native California (2021). Like Margolin, Hoyle knows the thrill of wonderment.

“It’s an extraordinary time for cross-cultural connections,” Hoyle tells me on St. Patrick’s Day, which has made converts to the Irish and their causes around the globe for more than 100 years. Sometimes, the words and expressions that Hoyle hears on the streets of his own neighborhood, and in “old school working class bars,” as he calls them, make their way through the creative process to the monologues he delivers to audiences who come, he says, for “comedy and catharsis.” An habitual traveler, Dan has left comfortable niches and wandered far afield—to Canada, Mexico, Nigeria and the South Bronx— his ears to the ground, his eyes searching for the telling detail.

On stage, his characters include a biracial working class kid, a neo-hippie, a disillusioned academic, a CEO who wants to do social justice work, an Argentinian-born Marxist techie and more. Listen to them and you feel you hear America talking. The actor’s facial expressions, body language and tone of voice animate the characters he plays.

Hoyle’s fans have been coming to the Marsh year after year, beginning nearly two decades ago when he went on stage with “Florida 2004: The Big Bummer.” After that production, Hoyle delivered again and again, big time with “Tings Dey Happen” (2007), “The Real Americans” (2010), “Each and Every Thing” (2014) and most recently “Border People” (2019). One might say incisively that all of the characters that Hoyle creates are based on or inspired by real Americans from various social classes, ethnic groups and genders.

They are also based on and inspired by people who have escaped from boxes, transcended walls and broken out of what the poet anarchist William Blake called “mind-forg’d manacles.” Internal boundaries are as much Hoyle’s concern as external boundaries. Sometimes, Hoyle’s fictional characters seem to leave the stage at the Marsh, sit in the audience and watch a performance. In fact, some of the people who have told Hoyle their stories, see themselves transformed and then depicted on stage. In turn, they’ve been inspired to do their own creative work.

Ukraine, Kyiv and Odyesa have not yet made their way into Hoyle’s monologues, either directly or indirectly, but you can be sure they will, much as George Floyd and Black Lives Matter have already infused his art.

In 2020, the Black theater director, Tamilla Woodard, who signed “We See You White America”— a document that condemned racism past and present—approached Hoyle and said, “Why don’t you do a show about liberal white people who are dealing with race, power, privilege and masculinity.”

At first, he didn’t like the idea, perhaps because liberal white people didn’t seem to deserve that much attention. Hoyle would rather give voice to those whose voices are rarely if ever heard, not members of the white middle class. “I’m 100% in support of hearing stories from people of color and from marginalized communities,” he says. “And I’ve always been welcomed in communities of color. It’s a two-way street. I learn from them and they learn from me.”

Dan Hoyle learned a great deal from his mother, Mary Winegarden, who was a longtime teacher and an activist, and also from his father, Geoff, a veteran actor on stage and in film. Mary Winegarden gave birth to Dan on the island of Malta where her husband had a part in Robert Altman’s Popeye. Born in 1980, and a Reagan baby, Dan absorbed Marxism from his father.

“It’s impossible to see the world without the lens of Marxism,” he says, though he satirizes the son of a Marxist in “Talk to Your People.” Audiences are appreciative of the fact that he can laugh at himself, or rather his many selves.

From George Orwell, he says, he learned the power of “incisiveness, fearlessness and close observation.” At Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois, Dan studied with the ethnographer Dwight Conquergood who enjoyed deep hanging among the Hmong, later with refugees from Southeast Asia, and also members of Chicago gangs. Dan found Evanston, Illinois boring. He would take the train to Chicago and play basketball with a bunch of Black guys. Usually, he was the only white guy on the court. He was teased, called names like “Dan Aykroyd,” but he passed the rites of initiation and was accepted into the group.

Some of Dan’s fans would like him to go beyond the boundaries of empathy and encourage audiences to take action. Right now he’s not ready to do that. Agit-prop isn’t his thing.

He and his father, Geoff, are working on a show they plan to do together, titled “Dads.” With a wife and two children of his own, Dan can draw on his own experiences as a husband and a parent, and also look back at his childhood and youth with his mother and father. Dan and Geoff might tip the comedy meter, boost the applause level and persuade audiences to practice deep hanging out and deep listening, which can be as radical as walking a picket line or staging a sit-down.

Dan Hoyle, “Talk to Your People.” The Marsh, 1062 Valencia Street, San Francisco, until April 16, 2022. Tickets $15-$100. (415) 282-3055; themarsh.org

THE LIE OF AMERICAN INNOCENCE

by Chris Hedges

The branding of Vladimir Putin as a war criminal by Joe Biden, who lobbied for the Iraq war and staunchly supported the 20 years of carnage in the Middle East, is one more example of the hypocritical moral posturing sweeping across the United States. It is unclear how anyone would try Putin for war crimes since Russia, like the United States, does not recognize the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court in The Hague. But justice is not the point. Politicians like Biden, who do not accept responsibility for our well-documented war crimes, bolster their moral credentials by demonizing their adversaries. They know the chance of Putin facing justice is zero. And they know their chance of facing justice is the same.

We know who our most recent war criminals are, among others: George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, General Ricardo Sanchez, former CIA Director George Tenet, former Asst. Atty. Gen. Jay Bybee, former Dep. Asst. Atty. Gen. John Yoo, who set up the legal framework to authorize torture; the helicopter pilots who gunned down civilians, including two Reuters journalists, in the “Collateral Murder” video released by WikiLeaks. We have evidence of the crimes they committed.

But, like Putin’s Russia, those who expose these crimes are silenced and persecuted. Julian Assange, even though he is not a US citizen and his WikiLeaks site is not a US-based publication, is charged under the US Espionage Act for making public numerous US war crimes. Assange, currently housed in a high security prison in London, is fighting a losing battle in the British courts to block his extradition to the United States, where he faces 175 years in prison. One set of rules for Russia, another set of rules for the United States. Weeping crocodile tears for the Russian media, which is being heavily censored by Putin, while ignoring the plight of the most important publisher of our generation speaks volumes about how much the ruling class cares about press freedom and truth.

If we demand justice for Ukrainians, as we should, we must also demand justice for the one million people killed — 400,000 of whom were noncombatants — by our invasions, occupations and aerial assaults in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan. We must demand justice for those who were wounded, became sick or died because we destroyed hospitals and infrastructure. We must demand justice for the thousands of soldiers and marines who were killed, and many more who were wounded and are living with lifelong disabilities, in wars launched and sustained on lies. We must demand justice for the 38 million people who have been displaced or become refugees in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Libya, and Syria, a number that exceeds the total of all those displaced in all wars since 1900, apart from World War II, according to the Watson Institute for International & Public Affairs at Brown University. Tens of millions of people, who had no connection with the attacks of 9/11, were killed, wounded, lost their homes, and saw their lives and their families destroyed because of our war crimes. Who will cry out for them?

Every effort to hold our war criminals accountable has been rebuffed by Congress, by the courts, by the media and by the two ruling political parties. The Center for Constitutional Rights, blocked from bringing cases in US courts against the architects of these preemptive wars, which are defined by post-Nuremberg laws as “criminal wars of aggression,” filed motions in German courts to hold US leaders to account for gross violations of the Geneva Convention, including the sanctioning of torture in black sites such as Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib.

Those who have the power to enforce the rule of law, to hold our war criminals to account, to atone for our war crimes, direct their moral outrage exclusively at Putin’s Russia. “Intentionally targeting civilians is a war crime,” Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said, condemning Russia for attacking civilian sites, including a hospital, three schools and a boarding school for visually impaired children in the Luhansk region of Ukraine. “These incidents join a long list of attacks on civilian, not military locations, across Ukraine,” he said. Beth Van Schaack, an ambassador-at-large for global criminal justice, will direct the effort at the State Department, Blinkin said, to “help international efforts to investigate war crimes and hold those responsible accountable.”

This collective hypocrisy, based on the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves, is accompanied by massive arms shipments to Ukraine. Fueling proxy wars was a specialty of the Cold War. We have returned to the script. If Ukrainians are heroic resistance fighters, what about Iraqis and Afghans, who fought as valiantly and as doggedly against a foreign power that was every bit as savage as Russia? Why weren’t they lionized? Why weren’t sanctions imposed on the United States? Why weren’t those who defended their countries from foreign invasion in the Middle East, including Palestinians under Israeli occupation, also provided with thousands of anti-tank weapons, anti-armor weapons, anti-aircraft weapons, helicopters, Switchblade or “Kamikaze” drones, hundreds of Stinger anti-aircraft systems, Javelin anti-tank missiles, machine guns and millions of rounds of ammunition? Why didn’t Congress rush through a $13.6 billion package to provide military and humanitarian assistance, on top of the $1.2 billion already provided to the Ukrainian military, for them?

Well, we know why. Our war crimes don’t count, and neither do the victims of our war crimes. And this hypocrisy makes a rules-based world, one that abides by international law, impossible.

This hypocrisy is not new. There is no moral difference between the saturation bombing the US carried out on civilian populations since World War II, including in Vietnam and Iraq, and the targeting of urban centers by Russia in Ukraine or the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Mass death and fireballs on a city skyline are the calling cards we have left across the globe for decades. Our adversaries do the same.

The deliberate targeting of civilians, whether in Baghdad, Kyiv, Gaza, or New York City, are all war crimes. The killing of at least 112 Ukranian children, as of March 19, is an atrocity, but so is the killing of 551 Palestinian children during Israel’s 2014 military assault on Gaza. So is the killing of 230,000 people over the past seven years in Yemen from Saudi bombing campaigns and blocades that have resulted in mass starvation and cholera epidemics. Where were the calls for a no-fly zone over Gaza and Yemen? Imagine how many lives could have been saved.

War crimes demand the same moral judgment and accountability. But they don’t get them. And they don’t get them because we have one set of standards for white Europeans, and another for non-white people around the globe. The western media has turned European and American volunteers flocking to fight in Ukraine into heroes, while Mulsims in the west who join resistance groups battling foreign occupiers in the Middle East are criminlized as terrorists. Putin has been ruthless with the press. But so has our ally the de facto Saudi ruler Mohammed bin Salman, who ordered the murder and dismemberment of my friend and collague Jamal Khashoggi, and who this month oversaw a mass execution of 81 people conivicted of criminal offenses. The coverage of Ukraine, especially after spending seven years reporting on Israel’s murderous assaults against the Palestinians, is another example of the racist divide that defines most of the western media.

World War II began with an understanding, at least by the allies, that employing industrial weapons against civilian populations was a war crime. But within 18 months of the start of the war, the Germans, Americans and British were relentlessly bombing cities. By the end of the war, one-fifth of German homes had been destroyed. One million German civilians were killed or wounded in bombing raids. Seven-and-a-half million Germans were made homeless. The tactic of saturation bombing, or area bombing, which included the firebombing of Dresden, Hamburg and Tokyo, which killed more than 90,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo and left a million people homeless, and the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which took the lives of between 129,000 and 226,000 people, most of whom were civilians, had the sole purpose of breaking the morale of the population through mass death and terror. Cities such as Leningrad, Stalingrad, Warsaw, Coventry, Royan, Nanjing and Rotterdam were obliterated.

It turned the architects of modern war, all of them, into war criminals.

Civilians in every war since have been considered legitimate targets. In the summer of 1965, then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara called the bombing raids north of Saigon that left hundreds of thousands of dead an effective means of communication with the government in Hanoi. McNamara, six years before he died, unlike most war criminals, had the capacity for self-reflection. Interviewed in the documentary, “The Fog of War,” he was repentant, not only about targeting Vietnamese civilians but about the aerial targeting of civilians in Japan in World War II, overseen by Air Force General Curtis LeMay.

“LeMay said if we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals,” McNamara said in the film. “And I think he’s right…LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose, and not immoral if you win?”

LeMay, later head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, would go on to drop tons of napalm and firebombs on civilian targets in Korea which, by his own estimate, killed 20 percent of the population over a three-year period.

Industrial killing defines modern warfare. It is impersonal mass slaughter. It is administered by vast bureaucratic structures that perpetuate the killing over months and years. It is sustained by heavy industry that produces a steady flow of weapons, munitions, tanks, planes, helicopters, battleships, submarines, missiles, and mass-produced supplies, along with mechanized transports that ferry troops and armaments by rail, ship, cargo planes and trucks to the battlefield. It mobilizes industrial, governmental and organization structures for total war. It centralizes systems of information and internal control. It is rationalized for the public by specialists and experts, drawn from the military establishment, along with pliant academics and the media.

Industrial war destroys existing value systems that protect and nurture life, replacing them with fear, hatred, and a dehumanization of those who we are made to believe deserve to be exterminated. It is driven by emotions, not truth or fact. It obliterates nuance, replacing it with an infantile binary universe of us and them. It drives competing narratives, ideas and values underground and vilifies all who do not speak in the national cant that replaces civil discourse and debate. It is touted as an example of the inevitable march of human progress, when in fact it brings us closer and closer to mass obliteration in a nuclear holocaust. It mocks the concept of individual heroism, despite the feverish efforts of the military and the mass media to sell this myth to naïve young recruits and a gullible public. It is the Frankenstein of industrialized societies. War, as Alfred Kazin warned, is “the ultimate purpose of technological society.” Our real enemy is within.

Historically, those who are prosecuted for war crimes, whether the Nazi hierarchy at Nuremberg or the leaders of Liberia, Chad, Serbia, and Bosnia, are prosecuted because they lost the war and because they are adversaries of the United States.

There will be no prosecution of Saudi Arabian rulers for the war crimes committed in Yemen or for the US military and political leadership for the war crimes they carried out in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, or a generation earlier in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. The atrocities we commit, such as My Lai, where 500 unarmed Vietnamese civilians were gunned down by US soldiers, which are made public, are dealt with by finding a scapegoat, usually a low-ranking officer who is given a symbolic sentence. Lt. William Calley served three years under house arrest for the killings at My Lai. Eleven US soldiers, none of whom were officers, were convicted of torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. But the architects and overlords of our industrial slaughter, including Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Gen. Curtis LeMay, Harry S. Truman, Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Lyndon Johnson, Gen. William Westmoreland, George W. Bush, Gen. David Petraeus, Barack Obama and Joe Biden are never held to account. They leave power to become venerated elder statesmen.

The mass slaughter of industrial warfare, the failure to hold ourselves to account, to see our own face in the war criminals we condemn, will have ominous consequences. Author and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi understood that the annihilation of the humanity of others is prerequisite for their physical annihilation. We have become captives to our machines of industrial death. Politicians and generals wield their destructive fury as if they were toys. Those who decry the madness, who demand the rule of law, are attacked and condemned. These industrial weapons systems are our modern idols. We worship their deadly prowess. But all idols, the Bible tells us, begin by demanding the sacrifice of others and end in apocalyptic self-sacrifice.

(chrishedges.substack.com)