Mendocino County Today: Sunday, June 18, 2023

Cooling Trend | Willits Cows | Earthquake | Watershed Cleanup | Parlin Tables | Teacher Gordon | Civil Service | Vicious Bull | Mockstep Endorsement | Pet Valley | Benefit Concert | 1953 Ukiah | More Parties | Fern | Ed Notes | Noyo Boats | Sheriff Byrnes | Old Leaf | Braxton Bragg | Yesterday's Catch | Absolutely Nothing | Diminishing Chihuahuas | Dystopian Trends | Tres Gabachos | Marco Radio | Alcoholic Preferences | Gut Sense | Ukraine | Solar Gig | JFK & Che | Colonel Walken | Ellsberg Interview | Thatcherism Reeks

COOLER TEMPERATURES and light precipitation will be ushered in by an upstream disturbance, which could also bring lightning to the area early in the week. Frost is likely in some of the colder interior valleys Monday and Tuesday morning. More interior showers are possible on Thursday as a low pressure trough lingers over the area. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): 50F under clear skies this Father's Day morning on the coast. Breezy & sunny are our weather words today & going into the new week. I expect the fog will return later in the week, but you just never know.

SOUTHERN MENDO WAS SHAKEN by a 4.4 magnitude earthquake around 8:44pm Saturday night. The epicenter was reported to be about midway between Ukiah and Hopland east of Highway 101. Lots of people in the area reported feeling the mild shaker, including the AVA staff as they prepared the daily website collection.

WATERSHED WARRIORS - NAVARRO RIVER REDWOODS CLEANUP DAY

June 18, 2023, 10-2 pm

In celebration of California State Parks Week, this event focusses on Caring for our Shared Lands. “Watershed Warriors” is the first of many volunteer opportunities open to members of the community, who are willing to volunteer for the day. In order to promote health and biodiversity of impacted ecosystems, we aim to help stop litter from entering the watershed. Help us as we fan out along the 11 mile stretch of Navarro River Redwoods State Park, collecting what litter we can find and identifying locations where illegal dumping has occurred. As they say, “many hands make for lite work,” and by working alongside others who care for our planet, we build a sense of community. 

You will check in with California State Parks staff at the large pullout located at mile marker 10.77 on Highway 128. After a short orientation and a safety briefing, you will be assigned to a team and a location to work. Safety vests, gloves, trash-pickers, bags and buckets will be provided for use during the event. As a team you will carpool to the designated pullouts where you are assigned to work. Your team will safely make your way throughout work area collecting any garbage found and compiling it into bags that will be staged for pick up. Large and hazardous items should not be handled or lifted, instead their location should be reported to team leaders and event staff. Once your team has completed its work area, you may then return to the check-in location to see if other work areas need help, or you may return your equipment and call it a day. 

We hope that by volunteering your time to care for our shared lands, you will gain a sense of pride and stewardship for this amazing forest and watershed!

RSVP with State Park Interpreter I, Steve Jahelka, at (707)309-4222, or steve.jahelka@parks.ca.gov

ANDERSON VALLEY RECREATION DEPARTMENT received a few of these beautiful custom-built picnic tables made at Parlin Fork Camp for our local community park in Boonville. 

A special thank you to Captain Kevin Hadrich for overseeing the milling, building, and helping us get these tables! CALFIRE has helped serve the Anderson Valley FD in regular emergency response for years, and this unique program falls in that same category of continuing that local community support. Come down to the park soon and enjoy these new tables!

MICHAEL BRANNON: I was able to spend a few hours with Mr. Fritz Gordon this week in Poulsbo, Washington. Fritz was the shop teacher for many years there and supported the automotive and aviation programs at AV High School. He sends his greetings to everyone.

SUPERVISOR WILLIAMS: 

Tuesday, BOS, June 20, item 4h: Discussion and Possible Action Including Direction to Staff to Prepare an Evaluation of the County's Civil Service Outcomes and Present Draft Civil Service Reform Ideas as Necessary to Address Obstacles Preventing High Performance, and to Modernize Principles and Methods of Human Resources Management (Sponsor: Supervisor Williams) Summary Of Request: Mendocino County must strive to find the happy medium between protecting the job holder, such as tenure, and pure subjective meritocracy. Our particular Civil Service model is outdated and overdue for review and potential refinement to ensure the county gets on track to generate high performance outcomes while rewarding public servants with stability.

THE SUPERVISORS' LOCKSTEP MOCKEL ENDORSEMENT

(Mockel who? Mockel being shoved down our throats by the Democrat's Northcoast machine.)

by Mark Scaramella

Last month, at the time I filed my Brown Act complaint to ferret out the Supervisors unanimous, simultaneous endorsement of recently declared candidate Trevor Mockel to replace Glenn McGourty as First District Supervisor, I also filed a Public Records Act request for all correspondence between Mockel, state senator Mike McGuire and the Supervisors in 2023. Somewhat surprisingly, after a couple of routine delays, on Friday we received what the County said was the relevant correspondence responsive to our request.

The correspondence, mainly text messages over County cellphones, shows that Mockel simply fired off casual requests for endorsements and all five Supervisors snapped to attention and immediately, unquestioningly, provided them. 

The correspondence does not include any messages from Supervisor Williams, but at a couple of points while lobbying for endorsements from Supervisors Haschak and Mulheren, Mockel notes that Williams had already endorsed him the prior week. Presumably, Williams didn’t use his county phone to converse with Mockel, but both boys are clearly on the same team.

The endorsement exchanges with the Supervisors were primarily about timing and questions of who would do what and when. At no time did any Supervisor ask Mockel about his qualifications or experience as it relates to the position of Supervisor for the First District. Nor did Mockel offer anything besides his info-free generic candidacy announcement. 

Supervisor Dan Gjerde was the last Supervisor to fork over a blurb after being peppered with several requests from Mockel. Gjerde’s response sounds like he just wanted to make Mockel go away: “If the County is to improve services, we need to effectively maximize use of State and Federal dollars. Trevor understands this and will leverage scarce local funds with outside resources. — Dan Gjerde.” But there’s nothing in the exchange about the subject of improving services nor how Mockel, an invisible low-level aide to McGuire, would somehow “leverage” local funds.

In the exchange with Haschak, Haschak first asks, “Are there themes you’d like me to cover?” Later Haschak finally provides a generic blurb, but puppy dog like, he adds, “Edit as needed.”

Rather than ask Mockel about the First District and what he sees as important local issues, Supervisor McGourty jokingly asked: “You don't have any dark secrets I should know about? Illegitimate children, scorned women, drunken brawls with local police, etc…? Just asking!”

Mockel replied: “I've never even gotten a speeding ticket. I'm pretty boring and SMM [Senator Mike McGuire’s] office kept me so busy I haven't even been dating. Honestly, the only thing I'm embarrassed about in my past would be busting my shoulder before I could even attempt OCS for the Marines. When I was younger I made it a huge part of my personality, and failing was a very humbling experience. Apart from that I might rely a little too much on my personality and extroverted nature to get me through professional situations. I probably should have more attention to detail. I try to surround myself with people who counter my deficits if possible.”

There were a number of unrelated emails to the Supervisors from the time Mockel briefly worked as a “Field Representative” for State Senator Mike McGuire or as a Ukiah city staffer/gofer, which are not relevant to the task of Supervisor or the endorsements. Mockel's duties included arrangements for zoom meetings, forwarding of routine emails from others, common notifications of humdrum matters, copies of State Senate press releases, etc.

For the record, there’s no indication that the Board members conversed with each other about the endorsements in a way which might have technically violated the Brown Act. But it’s damn close to a violation, so close that they should know better than to risk it. 

The closest they got to a Brown Act violation was when Mockel asked Haschak: “Wondering if you think it would be better to have the individual supervisors write an endorsement or just state that I have the full endorsement of the Board?”

Haschak replied: “I would think individual statements. Later you can tout the entire Board's support.”

Haschak didn't seem to realize that “touting the entire Board’s support,” would be a clear Brown Act violation as he casually suggests that Mockel do just that.

To summarize, all five Supervisors endorsed Mockel at the same time, in very friendly terms, with one Supervisor giving Mockel permission to “edit as needed,” before the filing deadline had even expired, without asking a single substantive question about his experience or abilities or knowledge of the issues in the First District or the County. Mockel has not attended any Supervisors meetings, has written nothing and said nothing about the issues in the First District other than claiming to care about the drought, wildfires, education and local business, as if no one else does.

Based on these exchanges, one can only conclude that our current Supervisors don’t really care who is Supervisor, or what their abilities or experience might be, as long as they have had some casual, trivial contact and the prospective candidate simply asked for an endorsement. The fact that Mockel once worked for Democratic Senator McGuire for a short time and is presumed to be a loyal young Democrat Party team player, ready to do the Democrats’ bidding was all the Supervisors really needed to know.

UKIAH SHELTER PET OF THE WEEK

Valley entered the shelter as a stray, and it looks like she recently had a litter of pups. 

Valley can be a little shy when first meeting people, but warms up with some treats — and she loves her treats! Valley walks well on leash and does not pull. She would benefit from taking a fun basic training course, to help build up her confidence. Valley is very mellow indoors. Dobermans are wonderful companions — beautiful, athletic, very smart, loyal, with a great sense of humor. They're velcro dogs and want to be right next to you at all times — a Doberman needs to be a member of the family. You will never be lonely with a Doberman! Ms V is 2 years old and weighs a svelte 80 pounds. Arf! For more about Valley, head to mendoanimalshelter.com. You can begin the adoption process on our website. For information about adoptions, please call 707-467-6453. Our new facebook page is up and running, take a peek at facebook.com/profile.php?id=100093510460862

BENEFIT CONCERT FOR NOYO CENTER FOR MARINE SCIENCE

Listen to music among the beautiful redwoods and support the Noyo Center for Marine Science Education programs on Thursday, June 22 starting at 4 pm. Music will be Moon Rabbit, Aaron Ford and Laualee Brown. Festive taco dinner (vegan option and gluten free) is included in the ticket price with beer and wine or sparkling water available for purchase. There will also be a silent auction with some fantastic art pieces among other items. The concert is open seating, bring your own lawn chairs and blankets. Providing your own water helps reduce the use of single use plastics.

Purchase your tickets here: noyocenter.org/music-in-the-redwoods

Tickets are $35 on line and $40 at the door. When you purchase online you will get directions and additional information and ensure we have plenty of beer for all!

25209 N. Highway 1 at Charlene Lane (past the Cleone grocery store) between mile marker 65.5 and 66. Look for signs to get to property.

This should be a fun night and for a great cause.

If you'd like more information contact wendi@noyocenter.org

RENA ESTES: I am researching my Carner family and ran across this newspaper article “Ukiah News, 04 Jun 1953, Thu · Page 7” that lists the Pardini family in detail in reference to Sabatina Pardini's death. Alvy Price, Ernest, Donald, Robert and Eva Pardini of Boonville, etc., are all mentioned. Thought the Pardini family would like to have this information if they don't already have it.

R.D. BEACON:

Observations from the top of the mountain,

Every week on Fridays and Saturdays people come in to have a little correct some list a girlfriend or wife, or just an acquaintance said that along the way,

You hear the talk about their jobs far and wide a good bartender listens to the problems of the customers, like being a psychiatrist in your neighborhood preacher at the same time, you're asked to weigh in on a comment to have to be careful you never know what the road will lead or the past that leads away from you if you'll ever see them again, over the years many of the customers of combat many many times to the top of the mountain to hear words may be of a little wisdom is just a friendly how do you do,

I have made many good friends of my customers could keep returning,

But I have pretty much the same conversation with somebody I was talking a few months ago to some people who live in the neighborhood, about how we don't honor people while there's still a lot of, we wait until it pass away have a big dinner and talk of the old days when they were around, but the benefit of them being here has disappeared there gone from our site for the rest of our lives, and they should be honored Weiler here.after they're gone, have appropriate, or just a big feast involving a community honoring the older crowd is still around and reflect back generations before, we should not wait until our neighbors pass away to thank them for what they've done for community good bad or indifferent, waiting till her after thoughts and disappeared in the no longer here to defend themselves if they get roasted at the goodbye parties, when people get married there's always a party it's an embrace of things to come when they get a divorce there is no party just sadness and a little anger, when a baby is born there's usually at least congratulations and remembrances for all, yet when somebody passes away sometimes the family just doesn't do anything nobody gets to say goodbye, why is it somebody moves out of town to a far distant place we don't hold a gathering to tell them congratulations you're moving on, so little we thank our neighbors and friends for knowing shouldn't week while, were alive and reasonably healthy prayer to say goodbye or even hello to people that are leaving the neighborhood moving into the neighborhood, in many large cities they would have what they call the welcome wagon just a group of people, it would go route in a vehicle to welcome neighbors into a neighborhood why not have a goodbye wagon as well although the cities of gotten so big, the turnover of people even greater than that so we can see where that all went disappeared into the sunset never to be seen again, but here in the countryside maybe we need to bring those things back, for isn't it nice if you get to meet your new neighbor you may be entering into a phase of your life that you want to meet more people and share what you know or is that what life is about sharing a history, of the neighborhood and its people,

As we draw into the summer and as many of us will go on Asian we can only hope that the garbage that the politicians are throwing it the nation's capital will slow down, we can hope when we come back their vacation from things will be quieter and more even doubt, so my word for this year is remember your friends and neighbors before they pass away, more parties are a good thing.

ED NOTES

THE REDLEG BOOGIE BLUES, a memoir of the sixties which, in the author’s view, ended in 1973, is the late Jeff Costello’s vivid account of the unique waterborne hippie houseboat and rock and roll community of the Sausalito waterfront, circa 1968. Costello was also Howard Belkamp, his pseudonymn when he was a regular contributor to the Boonville weekly. Why the late Costello thought he needed a pseudonym is not known, but there was always a strong paranoid streak among the ground floor hippies, of which Costello, also a talented musician, was a member, and he was central to the Redlegs, a precursor and now mythical band, some people thought was much superior to the Grateful Dead who followed the Redlegs. Costello’s stories are about rock and roll when rock and roll was real, a people’s music, you could say.

Are these stories any good? Well, I liked it very much and I never was a hippie, never paid any attention to rock and roll, would rather go to jail than a rock concert, and hadn’t been to the Sausalito houseboats since about 1963 when Juanita’s Galley was still going full blast. I’d gone to high school just down the road in Mill Valley. 

Juanita was an uber beatnik whose legendary restaurant on an old ferry boat a’mouldering in the Bay tidelands of Sausalito, and was the late-night venue for many a varied and memorable, uh, interface between Juanita and her customers. Jeff’s account of the houseboat scene before it fell to the yuppie plague not only held my interest, it often made me laugh out loud, and how often do you read anything that makes you laugh? If you were a Bay Area hippie in 1968 you will want to read Redleg Boogie Blues. If you lived in Marin county at the time you will want to read Redleg Boogie Blues. If you’re merely interested in social pathologies of the more benign type you’ll want to read Redleg Boogie Blues. If you’re an old hippie now holed up in the hills of the Northcoast, you’ll want to read Redleg Boogie Blues. If you simply like to read interesting, funny stuff in a very attractive, fully illustrated, photo-documented special AVA format, you’ll want to read Redleg Boogie Blues.

Now a collector’s item, the saga of the Redlegs is findable, mostly at libraries, but a few copies are available for sale on-line.

The series is also posted on our website at: theava.com/archives/6694

The introduction:

After eight years in rock and roll bands on the east coast, living in motels and doing everything from playing frat parties and low-life bars to backing popular singers and working as a session player in New York recording studios, I went west. Sick and tired of the road, and disillusioned with the music business, I caught a flight to San Francisco, a place which seemed to hold some kind of promise... I was invited to visit someone who lived on a houseboat in Sausalito. It was an unusual and colorful sight, but there was more to the waterfront than met the eye.

“Those people on the Oakland [an old boat resembling a ferry], are definitely on their own trip,” I was told. “There’s a guy there named Captain Garbage who eats seagulls. Shoots them right off the pilings.”

In a short time I was carried by fate into the Oakland scene, the mysterious inner circle inhabited by a group of people who called themselves “Redlegs.”

“Drafted” into the Redlegs’ band (they needed a guitar player), I gradually became part of the larger waterfront scene, learning sailing and seamanship as well other everyday survival skills. Life on the road playing music had taught me nothing like this.

There was no law on the waterfront, and while this was frightening at first, I learned that in a community with real trust, authority in the normal sense was unnecessary, and that the System feared and hated us for it.

Meaning only to be free and have fun, we often took things to extremes, including drugs. This abuse ultimately made us vulnerable to our enemy (authority in the form of police, city and county bureaucracies, and real estate developers), and contributed to the destruction of the band and the dream.

The Redlegs were not about money, or success in the traditional sense. We had a built-in failure factor that kicked in every time we encountered record companies or the “Big Time” in any form. But according to one observer, we were “one of the few real rock and roll bands that ever existed.”

Although the bureaucracy and developers eventually prevailed in Sausalito, the spirit of fun and freedom lived on and stayed with waterfront people--the ones who remained, and the ones who migrated to different places.

In the early ‘70’s, the “magic” and wonder of the 60’s were still at work and the “counter-culture” wasn’t yet out of the honeymoon period. The Redlegs band, part of a larger, controversial social phenomenon, became in one sense wildly successful, and in another were a monumental failure.

The Redlegs had brushes with fame and fortune; there were offers from big record companies, gigs at major "showcase" rooms like Winterland and Keystone Korner, a feature film. Something went wrong every time; we always seemed to walk smack into a psychic brick wall, something phony and weird that was intolerable. The bigger the opportunity, the creepier the feeling, the worse our attitudes, and the more offensive our behavior…

SHERIFF BYRNES MAKES DARING DOUBLE CAPTURE

Fort Bragg Chronicle, November 25, 1913

Like a chapter from the “Old Sleuth” series of dime thrillers or a page from the history of “Doc” Standley, Mendocino County's redoubtable fighting sheriff, reads the story of the latest exploit of Sheriff Ralph Byrnes, when single-handed and unarmed last Sunday he captured two desperate criminals at a lonely mountain cabin deep in the wilds of southeastern Trinity County.

Word had been brought to Covelo by residents of the border land between the two counties of Mendocino and Trinity that two “bad men” had taken possession of an old cabin in the mountains and had entered on a career of thievery that was causing considerable loss to settlers. The men were stealing cattle, burglarizing cabins and killing stock partly for food and partly out of wanton malice. They were said to be well armed and to have made the boast that they would not be captured alive.

One of the settlers who had suffered at their hands came into Covelo the first of last week told of his troubles, and desired the local officers to go out and capture the men. Byrnes heard of it and saying nothing to anyone departed in quest of them. En route he picked up a lad on the Travis ranch and took him along as a guide.

As the two approached the cabin they had to ride down a long hill and the quarry had cognizance of Byrnes' approach long before he was off his mount and on the ground. When Byrnes reached the place he found only one of the men. He then asked if he might stop there for noon and also feed his horses, stating that he was going across the mountains on business. He was told that he might and was shown to the barn. Fearing that if he took his rifle off the saddle he might arouse suspicion, he left the weapon at the barn, trusting that he might by strategy be able to effect the capture of his man. As it turned out, it was lucky that he made no overt move, for, when he went back to the house, the fellow gave a whistle like the call of a quail and his partner came out of the brush where he had been in hiding all the time. He was armed to the teeth with a bowie knife, a rifle and a revolver.

Byrnes and the boy ate dinner with the men and the sheriff engaged them in conversation after the meal. In the course of the conversation Byrnes was handed one man's revolver to examine and after looking at it he laid it on the table.

Whenever one of the men had to go out go get wood or water or for any other reason he took his rifle with him and presently hearing a slight noise at the side of the house where the meat was hanging, one of them got up, taking his rifle, and went out to see what it was. Byrnes followed him out. As the sheriff went out the door he said to the other man, “Lots of deer in those mountains, isn't there? Looks like it ought to be fine hunting.” The fellow followed him out and got to talking about the hunting, leaving his revolver on the table where Byrnes had laid it. The second man then came around the corner of the house from where the meat was hanging and Byrnes asked him what caliber rifle he had. He handed the rifle to the sheriff to examine who thereupon leveled the rifle, covered them, told them who he was and stated that he wanted them both. One made a start for the door, but was promptly notified by Byrnes that he meant business and that there would be no fooling. Thereupon the boy tied the prisoners up and Byrnes straightaway set out for Covelo. He arrived in Ukiah Tuesday evening and landed both men safely in jail. 

Their names are Paul Pfaendtner, alias Jack Wilson, and Albert F. Bayles. A search of the cabin revealed half a dozen rifles, two revolvers and sufficient ammunition to have supplied a regiment of soldiers.

They are held under $2000 bail each, which they are unable to furnish.

Both have signified their intention to plead guilty to burglary and take their medicine and the county therefore will be spared the expense of a trial.

During his trip to Covelo Byrnes also arrested Ed Betz, who was indicted by the Mendocino County grand jury last year and whom Byrnes has had located for several weeks in southwestern Trinity. Betz gave bonds at Covelo in the amount of $500 for his appearance before the Superior Court. 

WHO WAS FORT BRAGG NAMED AFTER? The South’s worst, most hated general.

by Ronald G. Shafer

The enslaving Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg suddenly has become a Republican primary rallying cry, after Fort Bragg in North Carolina was renamed to Fort Liberty earlier this month.

“We will end the political correctness in the hallways of the Pentagon, and North Carolina will once again be home to Fort Bragg,” former vice president Mike Pence told a state GOP convention. “It’s an iconic name and iconic base, and we’re not gonna let political correctness run amok in North Carolina,” vowed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Fort Bragg does have a venerable military history, of course. But its eponym, Gen. Bragg, not so much.

Bragg was a “merciless tyrant” who had an “uncanny ability to turn minor wins and losses into strategic defeat,” wrote Sam Watkins, who served under the man historians call the South’s worst and most hated general.

Bragg, a U.S. Military Academy graduate from North Carolina, first gained fame in the Mexican-American War when artillery troops fired projectiles called “grapeshots,” canvas bags filled with gunpowder and metal balls packed tightly like clusters of grapes. During the 1847 Battle of Buena Vista, Gen. Zachary Taylor rode his horse over to Bragg and supposedly said, “Give them a little more grape, Captain Bragg.” The phrase, a variation of the actual order, became so famous that Taylor used it in his successful 1848 presidential campaign.

But as a company commander, Bragg became known for his ruthless style that didn’t exactly endear him to his troops, such as the time he ordered a soldier to ride into enemy fire to retrieve harnesses on dead artillery horses. One soldier tried to kill Bragg, slipping a 12-pound artillery shell under Bragg’s cot; the shell exploded, destroying the cot, but Bragg was uninjured.

When the Civil War broke out, Confederate President Jefferson Davis called on Bragg to leave his Louisiana sugar plantation and 105 people he enslaved to be a rebel officer. In his first campaign as a full general, in 1862, Bragg brashly invaded Kentucky, figuring he would be welcomed with open arms. He issued a proclamation: “Kentuckians! I have entered your State with the Confederate Army of the West and offer you an opportunity to free yourselves from the tyranny of a despotic ruler” — meaning President Abraham Lincoln.

Bragg’s “insufferable piece of nonsense,” the Louisville Courier responded, “reminds us very much of the song, ‘Will you walk into my parlor, said the spider to the fly.’” Most Kentuckians didn’t rally to Bragg’s call, and he retreated by year’s end.

The day after Christmas, Bragg directed a firing squad to execute a 19-year-old infantryman, Asa Lewis, who had been convicted of desertion after going to the Kentucky home of his widowed mother without permission. When Confederate Gen. John Breckinridge of Kentucky appealed for mercy, Bragg sneered: “You Kentuckians are too independent for the good of the army. I’ll shoot every one of them if I have to.” Lewis’s execution proceeded.

Bragg led his troops the next year into Tennessee, where he suffered a string of losses, leaving Union troops in control of Middle Tennessee. In September, he finally scored a win at the bloody Battle of Chickamauga, in northern Georgia, but fellow officers, including Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, berated him for not pursuing the Union troops to stop them from retreating to nearby Chattanooga, Tenn.

After a personal clash with Bragg, Forrest burst into Bragg’s tent and shouted, “You have played the part of a damned scoundrel, and are a coward, and if you were any part of a man, I would slap your jaws … If you ever again try to interfere with me or cross my path, it will be at the peril of your life,” according to John Wyeth’s 1899 biography of Forrest.

Bragg’s subordinate officers were so upset with the general’s decisions that 12 of them signed and sent a secret petition to Davis urging him to replace Bragg. Davis traveled to the battle site to talk to Bragg but decided to keep him.

Bragg’s failure to destroy the fleeing Union army, though, came back to bite him. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant took command of the Union forces, which in late November proceeded to trounce Bragg’s in the Chattanooga campaign.

Following his humiliating defeat, Bragg offered his resignation to Davis, who accepted it and made the general a military adviser in Richmond. After the war, Bragg worked as a civil engineer in Alabama and Texas, but he left both positions after getting into arguments with his bosses. He died in 1876, at age 59.

The general faded into history thereafter until World War I, when Major Gen. William J. Snow, the Army’s chief of field artillery, began looking for locations to build two new artillery training camps. He settled on one area in Kentucky and another in North Carolina, near Fayetteville.

Snow also was in charge of Camp Zachary Taylor in Kentucky. “The name was so long, and it irritated me to take so much time in frequently writing or speaking about it,” the general wrote in his 1941 memoir. So he decided to name the two new camps after past artillery officers with short names.

He named the Kentucky camp, now Fort Knox, after Henry Knox, chief artillery officer in the American Revolutionary War and the first U.S. war secretary. He named the other camp after Bragg, as a North Carolina native.

Bragg’s biographers refer to his racism, with Earl J. Hess noting that Bragg opposed drafting enslaved people into the Confederate army because “he did not believe they could be made into reliable soldiers.” Such a view might have been no problem to Snow, who in his own book said he refused to accept Black draftees into artillery units because “I could not make field artillerymen of them.”

Camp Bragg opened in 1918 and was upgraded to Fort Bragg in 1922. The post was one of nine Southern army bases named after Confederate leaders being renamed after the 2020 killing of George Floyd. The other bases are being named after individual heroes and heroines, but the Fort Bragg naming committee pressed for the name Liberty as symbolizing the post’s mission.

That’s a far cry from the image of the fort’s original namesake. “Bragg,” Confederate officer William Dudley Hale wrote in a letter after the war, “was obstinate but without firmness, ruthless without enterprise, crafty yet without stratagem, suspicious, envious, jealous, vain, a bantam in success and a dunghill in disaster.”

(washingtonpost.com)

CATCH OF THE DAY, Saturday, June 17, 2023

JOSHUA BONNET, Leggett. DUI with priors, false ID, no license.

ANTHONY GONZALES, Ukiah. Assault with deadly weapon not a gun. 

ANGEL HISTO, Redwood Valley. Controlled substance, registration tampering.

KEITH HOBBS, Alameda/Fort Bragg. Disorderly conduct-alcohol&drugs.

BRAD TAMULEVICH, Ukiah. Elder abuse, battery with serious injury.

CHRISTINA VALDEZ, Nice/Fort Bragg. Domestic abuse, resisting, probation revocation.

DAMIAN VILLEGAS, Willits. DUI, suspended license, misdemeanor hit&run, false reporting of crime/emergency.

MALISSA WARNER, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, county parole violation. (Frequent flyer.)

AHOY!

Mahakali Chalisa: youtube.com/watch?v=BGNWoXAef30

Warmest spiritual greetings, Sitting here at computer #5 at the Ukiah, California Public Library, enjoying the aarti to the Divine Mother Kali, who is the fearsome form of the warrior goddess Durga. As we collectivize to destroy the demonic and return this world to righteousness, please join with me in the tandava dance of destruction. Postmodernism and all of its bizarre materialistic bullshit will be erased from the planet earth. By the way, have you been following the topic of Artificial Intelligence (AI)? Say what??? 

I am doing absolutely nothing of any importance in Mendocino County, USA. The teeth were cleaned yesterday, which leaves the switch out of the pacemaker for an ICD sometime in July. I can leave the Building Bridges Homeless Resource Center at any time. 

Ahoy postmodern America...are you there? 

Craig Louis Stehr

DYSTOPIAN TRENDS

by John Arteaga

The US, Russia and China seem to all be taking part in a contest to see whose particular version an almost sci-fi dystopia will prevail on earth. Each approach the common nightmarish end in completely different ways, but the results seems to be fairly similar; a crushing diminution of the rights and privileges of all but the very most fortunate in each society.

Here in the US, the concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer, richer and richer hands has reached mindnumbing proportions; apparently the three richest Americans now possess as much wealth as the bottom half of the whole population! This must be an unprecedented level of wealth disparity, comparable to the galling gulf in wealth and opportunity that led to the Russian Revolution and Chairman Mao’s Chinese communist insurgency.

It is interesting to recall this country’s roaring 20s, where the stock market kept soaring to new heights, and the Gilded Age of ostentatious opulence was all the rage among the moneyed classes. But at least then the captains of industry, the oligarchs of the rail, steel and oil monopolies, were somewhat constrained by the gnawing awareness that the hard-working millions who made their wealth possible might just rise up and take it back at some point, prompting their enormous philanthropy, the thousands of donated libraries and musea etc.

By contrast, look at today’s oligarchs; with the slow and steady erosion of the very concept of noblesse oblige that had, for so long, been enshrined in our tax system, these arrogant fools, many of them (such as the former president) lulled into this delusional reality where their obscene level of inherited wealth, was not just dumb luck, but in fact, due to their unique brilliance and virtue. LOL!

While Trump has to be the poster boy for this particular mental illness, there are certainly runners up in terms of stupid, arrogant entitlement. Take the case of Elon Musk, who, despite the fact that his world record level wealth was actually earned by his business acumen (in contrast to inheritance leaches like Trump), is, like most of his oligarchic cohort, an absolute tax deadbeat. One can hardly fault him for not paying any more taxes than the law requires (don’t we all?), But the fact that the right wing capitalist gradual takeover of the entire judicial branch of our country has enabled such a grotesque diminution of what, in any other first world democracy, would be considered a fair level of taxation, which should be contributing to the welfare of the entire country, but in this increasingly pathetic and undemocratic oligopoly ends up leaving enormous amounts of capital in the hands of wingnuts like Musk who squander it on ridiculous projects like the gigantic, air polluting rockets, with which he dreams about humans one day foraging on Mars.

No! I’m sorry, but no one in their right mind believes that there could ever be a sustainable human society except here on our planet Earth home. Like other space racing billionaire’s rockets projects, the supreme phallic symbol for those who have more money than imagination, such things are strictly the province of the playthings of the idle rich.

How did we get to this sorry state of social collapse, the richest country in human history, where the relatively lavish social safety net enjoyed by moderate income citizens of other first world democracies are beyond the imagination of Americans? A great deal of the blame must be laid at the feet of the Supreme Court, an institution with neither the power of the sword nor the purse, but whose influence is solely dependent on its credibility to and respect from all of us.

Unfortunately, this once great institution, which in my youth guided us all forward socially with decisions like Brown v Board of Education, going so far as to have national guardsmen escorting young black students into formerly all-white schools, as well as innumerable decisions expanding personal freedom and liberty. By contrast, today’s degraded mockery of the Supreme Court seems to be in the business of taking away rights and freedoms that had largely been regarded as long-settled law. All three of Trump’s Federalist Society appointments perjured themselves about upholding stare decisis, the belief that legal precedents should be upheld, in their appointment hearings.

The original sin of the absolute basement of the court was the Citizens United decision where the court promulgated the absurd notion that since corporations are legally ‘people’, that they had a First Amendment right to free speech that could not be infringed upon in any way. Never mind the fact that their wealth and resources far outstripped those of actual living human beings, thus enabling them to convince a frightening number of our fellows to vote for policies that further enrich the already too rich at the expense of the rest of us.

Some nutcase billionaire just bequeathed his entire $1.6 billion estate to Leonard Leo and his Federalist Society to further tilt the pinball table towards the interests of the fabulously wealthy. Notably, the ethical blindman, Clarence Thomas, and his John Bircher wife Ginny have been enjoying the exceptionally lavish vacation accommodations provided to them by billionaire inheritance prince Harlan Crow. Without ever declaring them on their required tax filings!

Hopefully the news about the Supreme Court striking down the shockingly obvious racial gerrymandering plan in Alabama will establish a high water mark on the Federalist Society’s influence on the court; the Trump appointed right-wing majority may be pampered pets of the deranged right, but, as has happened numerous times in the history of the court, the fact of lifetime appointment may free them from their attachment—at-the-hip to the hard right dogma of ‘give everything to the rich and hope for trickle-down’ and might just retrofit some vestige of a spinal column in some of them. Let us hope.

MEMO OF THE AIR: THE FALL

"Months later as I sat in a juvenile detention center re-reading those poems that had opened up the artist in me, I was blindsided by the raging fist of my incarcerator, who informed me that Walt Whitman's unnatural homoerotic pornographic sentiments were unacceptable and would not be allowed in an institution dedicated to reforming the ill-formed. That Whitman, that great bear of a man, enjoyed the pleasures of other men came as a great surprise to me and made me reconsider the queers that I had previously kicked around." -Chris Stevens

Here's the recording of last night's (2023-06-16) eight-hour-long Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio show on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg (CA) and KNYO.org: tinyurl.com/KNYO-MOTA-0545

Quinn, a little boy at the Albion Whale School in the late 1980s, got to be 38 and fell to his death off a Mendocino Headlands ocean cliff last week. Some of the many people who loved him wrote to say something about that, and those letters are near the start of the show.

Email your written work on any subject and I'll read it on the very next Memo of the Air.

Besides all that, at https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com you'll find a fresh batch of dozens of links to not necessarily radio-useful but nonetheless worthwhile items I set aside for you while gathering the show together. Such as:

Fate Magazine covers. My first idea for these: restaurant wallpaper for the hallway to the bathrooms, for when there's a line.

https://www.vintag.es/2023/06/fate-magazine-covers.html

How a snake can quickly climb a smooth straight tree.

https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2023/06/tweet-of-day_01363488692.html

"But the dykes are too strong for her and eventually she is overpowered."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpUQEJbmxi4

And Peter Pan is actually a demon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRIxelcIb2c

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

ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

Lots of intelligent people live in fear, as they understand what can happen in life. The trick is learning to just be yourself and push ahead, balancing the fear with what you know you are meant to do deep down. In all honesty, trusting the gut is often more effective than thinking too much, as the “gut” is your subconscious making sense of patterns in the plethora of information your senses take in.

UKRAINE, SATURDAY, 17 JUNE

Ukraine's troops are locked in heavy fighting along the southern and eastern front lines Saturday, the military said. Constant Russian shelling around the country has killed at least four people and activated air defenses in the capital of Kyiv.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken heads to China this weekend for a diplomatic visit that will include talks on Ukraine, though officials are setting low expectations.

Ukraine has called for more long-range precision weapons to help it win the war, while Russian President Vladimir Putin tries to deter NATO countries from adding to Kyiv's arsenal.

A delegation of African leaders is calling for peace talks in visits to both Ukraine and Russia, but Kyiv is resisting their call for negotiations without a Russian withdrawal.

JFK & CHE

by Alexander Cockburn (1997)

In the hours after his brother was shot, Bobby Kennedy made one of his first orders of business the securing of the dead President’s personal files. In ‘The Dark Side of Camelot,’ Seymour Hersh describes how, by the dawn of November 23, 1963, the files and White House tape recordings had been moved to “the top secret offices of one of Jack Kennedy’s most cherished units in the government,” the Special Group for Counter-Insurgency, whose mission was intervene in battles during various wars of liberation in Latin America and Southeast Asia. According to Hersh, the Group’s offices on the third floor of the Executive Office Building were “the most secure area of the White House complex, with armed guards on patrol twenty-four hours a day.”

So the nerve-center of the Kennedy bid to destroy Castro’s Cuba and extinguish the revolutionary flame it had ignited became the appropriate sanctuary of the files which contained, among other malodorous details of the president’s life, evidence of his personal direction of efforts to assassinate Fidel going back to 1961. 

As a candidate JFK thundered against the Eisenhower-Nixon administration’s failure to invade Cuba (though well aware of the imminent plans to do just that). As president he unleashed in response to Cuba’s revolution, counter-insurgency in Indo-China and millions died in consequence. For Latin America there was the Alliance for Progress, whose own darker side was the US training programs and subsidies for the generals and their torturers, who brutalized the continent for the next quarter century. 

In my opinion his assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, shot the president because he believed, not without reason, that this deed would help save the Cuban Revolution.

If Cuba was Kennedy’s nemesis and Fidel Castro the prime focus of his obsession, the man who set the course for the Cuban revolution in its crucial phase was Che Guevara, an Argentinian whose physical existence stretched four years beyond Kennedy’s, until he was executed on October 9, 1967 at the age of 39 in the Bolivian hamlet of La Higuera by a Bolivian sergeant, Mario Teran, within earshot of Cuban CIA man, Felix Rodriguez.

Kennedy’s bones lie in Arlington, Guevara’s in an unknown grave next to an airstrip outside the Bolivian town of Villegrande. As symbols of their age, as inspirational leaders, Guevara is surely the worthier and more enduring. It’s instructive to compare the books now appearing about Che — from his own ‘Motorcycle Diaries’ of a couple of years ago, to Jon Lee Anderson’s ‘Che Guevara’ and Jorge Casteneda’s ‘Companero’ to the latest on JFK, Hersh’s ‘Dark Side.’ 

From the sympathetic but far from hagiographic scrutiny of Anderson and Casteneda, Che emerges as a noble soul. From Hersh’s implacable researches Kennedy is convincingly displayed as ignoble in almost every aspect. A generation later Camelot is displayed as a louche Bacchanal-by-the-Potomac, whereas Che’s journey from the overthrow of the Arbenz regime in Guatemala in 1954 to Cuba’s Sierra Maestra, to triumphal entry into Havana in the New Year of 1959, to his fashioning of Cuba’s decisive left turn, to the journeys that took him ultimately to La Higuera is properly inspirational.

The famous image of Che, snapped by Alberto Korda in 1960 the day Cuba’s leaders were publicly mourning those killed in the explosion of a munition ship, survives its immersion in kitsch. He lives in history, just as his image has been brandished at ten thousand rallies, marches and processions, among them Bolivian peasants marching on La Paz in the early 1990s.

There’s a vivid glimpse of Guevara’s personality in a letter written to his mother Celia (and quoted in Anderson’s book) in the summer of 1956, while Che was being held by the Mexican police shortly before he, Fidel, and the others embarked on the Granma and set course for Cuba: “I am not Christ or a philanthropist, old lady, I am all of the contrary of a Christ… I fight for the things I believe in, with all the weapons at my disposal and try to leave the other man dead so that I don’t get nailed to a cross or any other place… What really terrifies me is your lack of comprehension of all this and your advice about moderation, egoism, etc.… That is to say, all of the most execrable qualities an individual can have. Not only am I not a moderate, I shall not try ever to be, and when I recognize that the sacred flame within me has given way to a timid votive light, the least I could do is vomit over my own shit… The stains (on this stationery) are not blood but tomato juice…” 

Che Guevara could be a rough, brutal leader, though both Anderson and Casteneda conclude that the 55 executions he presided over at the La Cabaña fortress in the immediate aftermath of Batista’s ouster were conscientiously, albeit summarily conducted. But it is hard to imagine other revolutionary leaders — let’s say Trotsky, or Ho Chi Minh, let alone St. Just or Robespierre, making Che’s crack about the tomato juice. It was Robespierre who said, back in 1792, something Che would certainly have professed to and agreed with. “The basis of popular government in times of revolution is both virtue and terror: virtue without which terror is murderous, terror without which virtue is powerless.” 

But Che was not bloodthirsty or vindictive. In his command post in Havana after the revolutionary triumph he hired one of Batista’s old administrators because he thought he was honest and good at his job. He sheltered former ideological opponents and others on the outs with Fidel.

The CIA’s overthrow of Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954 was decisive in forming Che’s outlook. From the first days in the Sierra Maestra, long before victorious entry into Havana, Che knew that the United States would always be an implacable foe and that the only path to revolutionary survival lay in the socialist option and alliance with the Soviet Union. He recruited Castro to this view and he was right. There was no other choice.

By the same token one of Guevara’s greatest blunders was his espousal of the Soviet economic model — with the Cuban economy supposedly diversifying from reliance on sugar into a centralized, heavy industry. The Soviets themselves were bewildered by this ruinous strategy. It took many years before Cuba’s strengths were properly harnessed. Today the country has a vibrant, diversified, organic agriculture sector, based on techniques of integrated pest management and control. 

By contrast the oil-based agriculture of California has required a 400% increase in the application of fertilizer in the last decade, plus, of course, deep exploitation of its farm workers.

Again, Guevara had a profound understanding by the late 1950s that the destiny of revolutionary movements lay — whether in Vietnam or Cuba or Latin America — with the peasants. But in his final foray into Bolivia he made terrible, ultimately fatal misjudgments. 

The peasants in the Bolivian south-east, where Guevara sought to establish his foco had been the beneficiaries of Bolivia’s own revolution in the 1950s, which had given them land. Bolivia’s leader, General René Barrientos, spoke Quechua and the army was careful of its relations with the peasants. Debate may rage about who exactly “betrayed” Guevara — perhaps Mario Monje and the Bolivian Communist Party which saw Che’s mission as vain and dangerous, or the Bolivian army’s captives such as Régis Debray. But it was always a doomed enterprise, as Che humorously suggested it might be in his last letter to his parents: “Dear viejos: Once again I feel under my heels the ribs of Rocinante,” who was of course Don Quixote’s steed.

Both Anderson’s and Castaneda’s books have their merits. Anderson had great access to Che’s papers and political record in Cuba and, as a journalist, has written a vivid and detailed narrative. Casteneda, an accomplished writer and academic, offers on occasion broader perspectives on the historical context of the Americas. Neither writer is particularly “leftist,” yet both admire Guevara.

Guevara was profoundly romantic, in that he believed deeply in the possibility of absolute change. The concept of the “new man” in Cuba’s revolution was his, and his was the greatest impatience at the constraints of economic “rationality.” As much as Pope John XXIII, Guevara could claim to be the inspiration of liberation theology as the vital current in radical social action in Latin America.

Che had will, conviction and a saving sense of irony, dark though that sense sometimes was. His asthma was always with him as a reminder of frailty and as a memento mori. The glory of Fidel and of Che and their paramilitary companies in those days in the Sierra Maestra when, 280 fighters with 50 bullets apiece, they faced an advancing army of 10,000, was that they knew the odds yet believed they could win. It was a defining moment in our century, just as Che is one of its defining heroes.

DANIEL ELLSBERG IS DYING. And He Has Some Final Things to Say.

The iconic whistleblower reflects on the urgent need for others to follow in his footsteps.

by Michael Hirsh (June 4, 2023)

Daniel Ellsberg hates the word “legacy.”

“I’m very put off by the word. It always throws me for a loop,” Ellsberg tells me when I ask him recently what he believes his legacy will be as one of America’s most iconic whistleblowers. “I didn’t plan on a legacy. I don’t know what a legacy is.” Ellsberg, who is dying of pancreatic cancer at age 92, says one reason he doesn’t think he’s really leaving any legacy is that the act he is famous for — leaking the Pentagon Papers more than 50 years ago — was highly unusual, if not unique. Despite the government-shaking magnitude of his revelation, he was one of the few whistleblowers who got away with exposing deception and wrongdoing in high places without turning the rest of his life into one long misery.

At the time, Ellsberg says, he expected to spend the rest of his life in prison for handing over copies of the 7,000-page top-secret history of the lies and self-deceit that drew America into the Vietnam War to the New York Times and other newspapers in 1971. “Looking back, the chance that I would get out of 12 felony counts from [President] Richard Nixon was close to zero. It was a miracle,” he says in a Zoom interview from his home near Berkeley, Calif. on May 8. “There was no way to predict that.”

Nor did leaking the Pentagon Papers, by itself, do anything to shorten the war, which was his intention, Ellsberg admits. What did happen is that Nixon erupted in outrage over the leak and created the “Plumbers” unit to discredit Ellsberg. The Plumbers’ first break-in was to the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, but that led later to the Watergate burglary, Nixon’s resignation and the dismissal of all charges against Ellsberg on grounds of “improper government conduct.” Thus, indirectly, Watergate may well have prevented further escalation and shortened the war because it “undermined Nixon’s authority,” as Nixon’s secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, wrote in the first volume of his memoirs, White House Years. Congress cut off aid to South Vietnam in 1975, and the war ended in April of that year with total victory by North Vietnam.

So Ellsberg has some parting advice to future whistleblowers: “Don’t do it under any delusion that you’ll have a high chance of ending up like Daniel Ellsberg.” This is especially true, he says, now the government is zealously prosecuting under the Espionage Act, which was first used in Ellsberg’s case. (Barack Obama later deployed it eight times, more than any other president, despite pledging to run “the most transparent administration in history.”)

Even if they escape prosecution, whistleblowers in high places face long odds against success in changing government policy — and yet at the same time Ellsberg says they are more necessary than ever. “I would caution people against thinking that any revelation by itself, no matter how spectacular — how amazing, how shocking, and extraordinary it is — would necessarily evoke a reaction, from the media or Congress, or that people will react to it,” Ellsberg tells me. “But it can work. My case shows that probably more than any other case.”

Ellsberg, snowy-haired but energetic despite the cancer — renowned for his eloquence, he still speaks in perfect paragraphs — was calm, even jovial, during what his son, Robert Ellsberg, said would be his last interview. Based on his experience in the covert world, Ellsberg sees a direct line between the deceptions and lies that led to the Vietnam War — and 58,000 American deaths — and the deceptions and lies that justified the Iraq war. This high-level deceit, Ellsberg says, extends to America’s current drone war policy around the world, in which the government has allegedly covered up the number of civilian deaths it causes.

“The need for whistleblowing in my area of so-called national security is that we have a secret foreign policy, which has been very successfully kept secret and essentially mythical,” he says. “I’m saying there’s never been more need for whistleblowers … There’s always been a need for many more than we have. At the same time, it’s become more and more dangerous to be a whistleblower. There’s little doubt about that.”

For many whistleblowers and their legal defenders, Ellsberg remains an inspiration, not just because of the Pentagon Papers but for his later actions revealing how nuclear strategy during the Cold War had been secretly based on war plans that would have left hundreds of millions of civilians dead, and how dangerous the nuclear threat remains today.

“For me and my generation, Daniel Ellsberg was the defining whistleblower,” says Scott Horton, a prominent human rights attorney who has defended whistleblowers going back to Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov in the 1970s. “The striking thing about him was that his position within the national security establishment was a prominent one. He realized there was something wrong with the whole way the Vietnam War was being justified, that this process was corrupting the way decisions were being made about national security affairs, and the system was so self-sealing that really the only way you could puncture that was presenting the public with the truth.”

At the same time, Horton believes that Ellsberg, like other whistleblowers, occasionally sees conspiracy and government perfidy when the evidence is scant. During the course of our hour- and-20-minute interview, Ellsberg contended America still runs a “covert empire” around the world, embodied in the U.S. domination of NATO. He believes Washington deliberately provoked Vladimir Putin into invading Ukraine by pushing its seat of power eastward toward Russia’s borders; that the mainstream media is “complicit” in allowing the government to keep secrets it has no right to withhold; and that any notion Americans are ever the “good guys” abroad “has always been false.”

“I think very few Americans are aware of what our actual influence in the former colonial world has been, and that is to keep it colonial,” Ellsberg says. “King Charles III [of Britain] is no longer an emperor, as I understand it, but for all practical purposes Joe Biden is … Here’s a point I haven’t made to anyone but would like to in my last days here. Very simply, how many Americans would know any one of the following cases, let alone three or four of them?” Ellsberg then rattles off a series of U.S. orchestrated coups, most of them fairly well documented, starting with Iran in 1953, and then in Guatemala, Indonesia, Honduras, Dominican Republic, Brazil and Chile.

I respond by saying those were all Cold War policies, if covert ones, and ask him whether he thinks anything has changed since. In announcing the complete U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, for example — as the Taliban effectively chased American troops out of the country — Biden declared that the United States was “ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries.”

Ellsberg doesn’t believe it. “Democrats in this area are as shameless as Republicans,” he says. “Our elections in the realm of foreign policy and defense policy and arms sales, I have come to understand, are essentially between people vying to be manager of the empire.”

Even his most fervent admirers say that sometimes Ellsberg, haunted by his experience in the covert world, occasionally goes too far in seeing dark designs in U.S. policy. “He’s really serious about conspiracy theories,” Horton says. “I would contrast what he did during the Vietnam era to some of the more recent things where he’s really not on the inside anymore and doesn’t have that access to information.”

Christian Appy, a University of Massachusetts historian who is currently working on a book about Ellsberg based largely on his papers, says he doesn’t believe Ellsberg is a conspiracy theorist but adds: “I do think he sometimes speculates on things that I myself think are improbable.”

Even so, Appy says, Ellsberg is not entirely wrong in asserting that since World War II the U.S. has been effectively running an empire. “I think he is more careful than some people. In the last 10 years he has placed more stock on the military-industrial complex underpinnings of U.S. power, that they really do have huge influence on sustaining this huge imperial footprint around the world. And after all, we still have 800 military bases on foreign soil, and we conduct exercises in 25 countries.” (The current number of U.S. bases abroad is closer to 750.)

Louis Clark, the CEO of the Government Accountability Project, a whistleblower legal advocacy organization inspired by Ellsberg, says his influence has been titanic over the decades. “There’s been a tremendous sort of cultural change from the time he came forward, an acceptance of whistleblowing.” Unfortunately, that in turn has incited use of the Espionage Act against whistleblowers, a 1917 law that was intended for use against spies for foreign governments.

“People need to know what they’re getting into, especially with the abuse of the Espionage Act. These people are obviously not spies. There needs to be at a minimum a public interest kind of defense, which you can’t do under the Espionage Act,” says Clark.

In the interview, Ellsberg agrees not all leaks are created equal, and that it’s sometimes difficult to tell a real whistleblower from a fantasist, like the mysterious Q of the QAnon conspiracy, or someone who seems mainly interested in self-promotion. He believes Jack Teixeira, the National Guardsman who recently leaked a raft of classified documents by posting them on a gaming site, fits into the latter category.

“He’s invented a new form of leaking. It is not easy to understand why he thought he would get away with it,” Ellsberg says. “But there’s a big difference between whistleblowing and just leaking. Leaking is part of the way the system works. It has nothing to do with revealing wrongdoing. It’s much more about how great our weapons system is compared to the other one.”

No one ever sets out to become a whistleblower.

Most whistleblowers start out as patriots or devoted company people, often passionate ones. And there is a pattern to their behavior: Most of them try at first to address wrongdoing within the system; going to the media is a last resort. Ellsberg describes himself as a Harvard-educated U.S. Marine who in the beginning completely bought into the Cold War struggle against communism, including the Domino Theory. When he went to work for the Defense Department and Rand Corp., he says, “I very much accepted the idea that we were a force for democracy in the Third World, as in Korea, and the former colonial world, and for self-determination, for sovereignty, for peace. We were the good guys.” Initially, he wanted to divulge the Pentagon Papers to Congress, but few people in Congress seemed interested, he says. Ellsberg only reluctantly agreed to go to the media when he began “hearing from contacts in the Nixon administration that Nixon was planning to escalate the war,” says Robert Ellsberg, who as a 13-year-old helped his father secretly copy the Papers.

In a later era, a number of people who turned into whistleblowers were inspired by 9/11 to help their country. Among them: Ian Fishback, the dedicated U.S. Army captain who revealed that the torture practices at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were systemic, not isolated incidents, only to suffer criticism, mental illness and die years later in a charity hospital; and Reality Winner, who was sentenced to five years in prison for leaking details of Russian infiltration in the 2016 U.S. election. Other whistleblowers who have served time include Chelsea Manning, the former U.S. Army soldier who disclosed military and diplomatic documents to Wikileaks, and Daniel Hale, who is currently imprisoned in Illinois after being convicted of giving classified material about drone operations to the media. Edward Snowden, who leaked massive amounts of information about surveillance by the National Security Agency, is in permanent exile in Russia.

Whistleblowers often end up bitter and incurably self-righteous. Like Ellsberg and Snowden, they are variously called “hero” or “traitor” for the rest of their lives. Or in the case of Frank Serpico, the famous cop, a “rat.” Not long before Ellsberg exposed the Pentagon Papers, Serpico was testifying to the Knapp Commission in 1970 about endemic graft in the New York City Police Department, which later became the subject of a book and a classic film. Like Ellsberg, Serpico tried for years to register his complaints inside the system — in his case the police department and the city government — before finally going to the New York Times in frustration. To this day, Serpico says, he is viewed as an outcast by the NYPD.

“It’s pretty lonely out there,” says Serpico, who is 87 and lives in a wooded tract outside Albany, N.Y. “It doesn’t end. Dan is the unforgiven and I’m the unforgiven.”

Still, in a phone interview in May, Serpico adds: “Whatever you do, no matter how small, it makes a difference … And you have to keep struggling. That’s what whistleblowers are doing: They’re struggling to keep the system from going under.”

Whistleblowers, it must be said, often do seem to be a different breed of human — and more alike than different, no matter what they are exposing. They are motivated by a moral outrage that often leads them to take on an entire system they were once part of and even loved with little hope of changing that system. Nor are they welcomed back into their organizations or industries, much less promoted. Certainly, they get no reward — with the exception of some financial whistleblowers who revealed illegal corporate gains.

“It’s not just a question of awarding an act which from almost every point of view, social and personal, is irrational, in the sense that it’s likely to be extremely personally risky and I think there will be no change to that,” Ellsberg says. “You can’t change the fact that when you tell secrets that your boss or your old area of industry is anxious for you to keep, you can’t escape retribution for that. I was very much an outlier on that. You might almost say Frank Serpico is the other absolute end of that. He got shot in the face.”

In the last half century, Ellsberg amassed a huge amount of hate mail calling him treasonous, Appy said. As Kerry Howley describes it in Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey through the Deep State, her new book about Reality Winner and other whistleblowers, they often just don’t understand why others fail to see the world the way they do, why most people just go along even with what they think is a bad or unjust system. “Most of us are good at not looking,” she writes. “People who feel they must confront the nature of reality, whom we call ‘whistleblowers’ or ‘traitors,’ tend to feel that the rest of us should do the same, which makes those people annoying, because not looking is a skill, and after a while you too might lose the ability not to look.”

As a result, whistleblowers often find each other, forming a loose band of exiled brothers and sisters — or, at the very least, a support group. After hearing about Ellsberg’s diagnosis, Serpico and Ellsberg recently spoke on FaceTime and “reminisced about old times,” as Serpico puts it, “what was going on back then and how both our situations were happening pretty much at the same time.” Serpico refuses most requests to have video conversations though he occasionally makes public appearances to support whistleblowing causes, but he says: “I couldn’t deny Dan. He wanted to see my face.”

And in the end, that is the legacy Ellsberg hopes to impart — the idea that whistleblowers are not alone. They are a team, and they need to become more effective by learning from each other.

“Here’s a very good piece of practical advice, which is don’t go through channels. Don’t go to the Whistleblower Protection Act. Don’t go to the inspector general as Tom Drake did, for example. That only serves to identify you as a troublemaker and someone who’s not with the system, somebody who whines about the fact that we’re killing people,” he says.

In 2005, Thomas Drake was working as a career intelligence official and employee of the National Security Agency when he grew worried that an NSA program code-named Trailblazer had turned into a boondoggle that cost more than a billion dollars and violated U.S. citizens’ privacy rights. Internally, Drake pushed for a more effective alternative program but when he was ignored, first by his superior, then by the NSA and Defense Department inspector generals, and even testified to Congress with no effect, Drake finally leaked to a Baltimore Sun reporter. He became the first official since Ellsberg charged under the Espionage Act and barely managed to avoid prison when he pled guilty to a misdemeanor. But his career was ruined.

Ellsberg also believes whistleblowers should try to remain anonymous if they can. “If you possibly can avoid exposing yourself, do that, don’t reveal yourself as I did, although I felt I had to do it and would do it again under other circumstances. Like Snowden and Chelsea Manning, we always felt we didn’t want other people blamed for what we had done. But if you’re not worried about that, the first thing would be to do it as anonymously as possible. In that respect there has been some improvement: a cipher system so whistleblowers can speak with the press.

“My biggest advice is, don’t do this unless you’re ready to accept the high risk of having your career destroyed and actually going to prison,” Ellsberg says. “Going to prison is a new one, starting under Obama, but it’s there now, very much so. Obviously, that really narrows the number of things worthy of whistleblowing considerably. I wouldn’t do it, for example, just for bribery or cost overruns. That’s not important enough to go to prison.”

“But the final thing I would say is there are lots of things having to do with preserving the Constitution, as in Snowden’s case, or shortening a war, or in stopping a massive assassination program, the drone program, as in Daniel Hale’s case, that do make it indeed quite worthwhile to sacrifice yourself in order to save the lives of lot of people,” Ellsberg says. “I would like to encourage people to ask themselves the question: ‘Am I willing to sacrifice my career, my life, to save these other lives?’ And most people will say no. That’s humanity. That’s the way it is. But definitely, if they ask that question as I was led to ask myself the question, you can very well look at it that way and you can say yes.”

When I asked whether whistleblowing has made government or corporate America any more honest, however, Ellsberg waxes gloomier.

“That’s easy to answer: No. The short answer is no. The long answer is no. It hasn’t changed the desire to keep secrets. People in all governments in all of history have been willing to take all actions necessary…to keep people from knowing what will lead to their being blamed for a mistake, for a lie, or a crime or for their incompetence. Talking about national security: Who exactly has had their career hurt by incompetence? Maybe some Russians have. They have fired some Russians. Walt Rostow [Lyndon Johnson’s hawkish national security advisor] had to go to the University of Texas, instead of back to MIT, for example. So that’s the level of accountability.”

Those aren’t very encouraging words, I reply.

“Despite all those odds there is a chance and that can make it worthwhile,” Ellsberg says. “When everything is at stake — I’m talking about nuclear war implicitly here but climate is the same. When we’re facing a pretty ultimate catastrophe. When we’re on the edge of blowing up the world over Crimea or Taiwan or Bakhmut. … From the point of view of a civilization and the survival of eight or nine billion people, when everything is at stake, can it be worth even a small chance of having a small effect? And the answer is: Of course. Of course, it can be worth that. You can even say it’s obligatory.”

(politico.com)

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GLENDA JACKSON on 10 April 2013, two days after the death of Margaret Thatcher, delivers an explosive speech on how Thatcherism has destroyed Britain: youtube.com/watch?v=BRqdQMlIiYc