ONE YEAR, I CELEBRATED Martin Luther King’s birthday by paying HBO $46 on a Saturday night to watch Mike Tyson knockout Francois Botha. I’d better say here that I think it’s way past time to either ban boxing or require that the pros wear protective headgear like the amateurs are required to do. Anyone who can look at what boxing did to great athletes like Mohammed Ali and Sugar Ray Robinson, not to mention the hundreds of lesser known pugs like the tragic Jerry Quarry and Tommy ‘Hurricane’ Jackson and still defend boxing as a sport would seem to be deficient in the humanity department. But the Tyson-Botha undercard was pretty good, too.
MIKE TYSON is probably a better gauge of the state of race relations in the country than the innumerable, rote MLK memorials underway across the country. The local remembrances seem to me to miss most of what the man stood for, consisting of a lot of weepy declarations of brotherhood — not that they can hurt — and Family of Man-quality rhetoric. Now that all white people are liberals on race — even Strom Thurmond — at least in public, there’s a widespread tendency to ignore the ongoing class and economic realities of this country, a basic fact of American life Martin Luther King seldom failed to point out and probably gave up his life for saying; he persisted in demanding that wealth be fairly apportioned among all citizens. He emphasized that a country as rich as this one should not tolerate deprivation whatever the color of the people going without. The primacy of economics in King’s vision of a color blind society is left out of the celebrations of his remarkable, short life.
IT ISN’T HARD to imagine what King would have thought and said about contemporary economic and social policies, but I won't forget Maya Angelou claiming on national television that Bill Clinton, acclaimed as a surrogate black person, was being lynched over his Lewinski interlude. Lynched? I still don’t think that’s the word we wanted here, Ms. Angelou.
THE TWO PARTY stranglehold on a majority of people in this country, whatever their race, is a much more effective enemy of black people than Bull Connor ever was, and working people of the racial rainbow haven’t had more relentless adversaries in the White House since Calvin Coolidge.
WHAT WE get in the Martin Luther King memorials is a lot of slobbery rhetoric of the Love-One-Another-Or-Die with an emphasis to keep the dissent “non-violent.”
MOST OF US would settle for simple ethnic tolerance without the appended admonition to love one another. And some of us are also aware from bitter personal experience that the bigoted personality type is as plentiful among liberals as it is among conservatives.
BUT RACE RELATIONS are the one area of American life where progress is a matter of verifiable, objective fact. Race relations are better — a lot better — in America these days and getting better all the time, not that you’d know it from the rhetoric of the professional racialists.
SO THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS and government take another paid day off, which is about all Martin Luther King’s life means these days just as a solid 40% of the population slides into a kind of permanent hopelessness. Now that black heroes like King have been co-opted into the great consensus, the great fight for equality of opportunity is over.
THAT SATURDAY NIGHT the ringside crowd included a delighted old lady who seemed to be with her daughter and her granddaughter. Three incongruous lookalikes sitting side by side. The old lady’s attentions were riveted on the ring action; she looked like she knew her boxing. Daughter and granddaughter’s attentions seemed to wander to movie stars seated nearby. The three of them looked like money, but then again maybe the grandam had put aside a little out of her social security checks to treat the family to a night of vicarious mayhem.
AMERICA is wonderful in its unmatched variousnesses. Also at ringside was a little Chinese girl of 9 or 10 or so. She was seated next to her mother, I assumed, and later in the evening sat in mom’s lap when dad showed up to take the kid’s seat. At one point early on in the first of three fights on the evening’s card, the child spotted the television camera on her and jumped up out of her chair to wave and mug at it. Mom pulled the kid emphatically back into her seat. A fully assimilated American child would have been allowed to perform endlessly, probably with mom and pop elbowing her out of the way to get their pusses into range of the magic eye.
THE FIXED camera angles made these intriguing people unavoidable on-screen, so we saw a lot of them and wondered about them. Everyone else looked like the kind of people you’d expect to see close up at a retro bloodsport, complete with girls in bikinis strutting around the ring holding up round cards while men wolf-whistled at them. I hadn’t heard a live wolf-whistle since the last time I watched a fight on TV, and I haven’t heard one in person since about 1955.
THE REFEREE for the Tyson-Botha fight was roundly booed when he was introduced because he has a reputation for stopping fights short of death. The ref smiled at the boos. An ironist. Botha, who looked exactly like my late friend Ted Bertsch of Ukiah but twice Bertsch’s size, was introduced as the “White Buffalo.” For being a white guy willing to be knocked out by a black guy he picked up $1.5 mil.
TYSON, for serving so well as white America’s worst black nightmare, picked up $10 mil without breaking a sweat. The announcer described Botha accurately if unkindly as “a morass of flesh,” while Tyson was described accurately as “sculpted.” I couldn’t make out Botha’s tattoos but Tyson’s are Chairman Mao on one arm and Malcolm X on the other, which may make sense to him, but don’t quite mesh in any socio-political historical sense I’m aware of.
THE CHAMP came into the ring wearing a T-shirt inscribed “Be Real,” another psychological tipoff to the man’s preoccupations, and further evidence of an integrity superior to most of the people writing about him. As the Tyson entourage made its way to the ring, some kind of kill-’em-all rap music filled the auditorium.
THE WHITE BUFFALO entered the ring to cowboy music. The first round had the mob on its feet because Buff and Mike continued to punch each over after the bell ending the first round. But a few minutes later, in round five, the inevitable happened. The morass of flesh — not much more skilled as a fighter than the big guy at the end of the bar in Anywhere USA — went down in a heap when he walked straight into a Tyson right that Tyson seemed to bring all the way up from the floor, and had pivoted into with all his strength directly onto the White Buffalo’s fully exposed chin.
BUFF went down like he’d been poleaxed, which he had, and when he tried to get up he fell through the ropes. Tyson hustled over to help Buff regain his feet, then gave him a big hug and told the announcers he admired Buff’s heart. Then Mike said a big hello to the Brooklyn gangsters.
EARLIER IN THE TELECAST, perfectly organized into a three-hour program with Mike and Buff preceded by two prelims guaranteed to each last 12 rounds because none of the four fighters had ever been knocked out and only rarely knocked off their feet, Tyson talked about how he’d just learned that Cus d’Amato, the only person in his life who liked Tyson for himself, had put away money for him in a secret account only recently revealed, but now worth $200,000. d’Amato was the last person in Tyson's life with the authority to pull him back into his seat, and Mike has been in trouble ever since he left the old man's home.
BY THE TIME King was murdered in Memphis, the mass media had turned against him big time and had never been too keen on him in the first place because he was connecting too many social-economic dots for too many people. He was aggressively opposed to the war on Vietnam, pointing out it was the latest chapter in a long history of imperial murder of non-white peoples and he was for democratic socialism, and had even gone so far as to speak the forbidden S-word on national television. So long as he stuck to preaching racial harmony, even the closet Klan types of the rightwing of the Republican Party couldn’t denounce King who, after all, was certainly preferable to the scowling leather lungs in dark glasses who were thrilling the white suburbs with a lot of wild talk about how, with a few photogenic bad boys out front, 12% of the population was going to off the national pig.
AS GREAT WAVES of pure bullshit rolled over America in 1968, Martin Luther King was calmly pointing out that a few fundamental social guarantees would make America a much less violent place and a far more ethnically harmonious country. If people were guaranteed food, shelter, work, health care, and education they would be less inclined to harm other persons. Once achieved, social and economic justice would cool everyone out. It would, too, and Martin Luther King was murdered for preaching it, not that much of anybody seems to remember the most important two-thirds of King’s message.
YOU’LL never hear it said by the kind of weepy liberals who dominate the national and local media but it was Jock World and the Armed Services where the greatest advances in race relations were made in this country. It was at the ball game and in boot camp where lasting and loyal cross-ethnic friendships were first made in a mass way in this country. Since, as a trip to any downtown area in any town in America makes obvious, millions of Americans of all races enjoy loyal and affectionate relations where virtually none existed in 1950.
WATER WARS lurch into a cease fire abeyance as soon as it rains. No talk of drought these days. Every week when I drive south marveling at the massive new construction from Healdsburg through Petaluma, I think back to 2000, when the governor said no dice to any reduction of Eel River flow via the Potter Valley diversion down into the Russian River and on into Sonoma County where it waters the frightening expansion of ever-northward urbanization. Senator Feinstein said, essentially, that the Eel can remain fish-free forever so far as she and the great eco-patriots of the Democratic Party were concerned. The talk now is a restoration of a free-flowing Eel and a diversion, the vaunted two-basin solution.
SONOMA COUNTY has always told Mendo County it has no intention of giving up so much as a drop of the water it owns backed up behind Coyote Dam just north of Ukiah, much of which comes from the diverted Eel. Mendo voted 80 years ago not to help fund very much of the dam that brought Lake Mendocino into being, thereby ensuring that Sonoma County, who paid for most of the dam and the lake behind it, that they own most of the diverted Eel and upper Russian River water in perpetuity.
BECAUSE developers and the welfare grape growers who draw on the now scarce Eel-Russian flow decide these matters through the elected reps they fund, arguments about who gets how much of a finite resource will always be contested because the forces of greed want it both ways — more development, more grapes and more free or next-to-free cheap water for all of it.
THE MERE MENTION of Juan Creek makes me cloud up and rain. Jeff Goll's perfectly evocative photo of that bleak stretch of Highway One north of Westport recalls, in me, the terribly sad murder that took place there in the summer of '87.
“ON AUGUST 1, 1987, the body of Harlan Tod Sutherland, 24, of Berkeley, was found on the beach near Juan Creek, Westport. It was initially thought that Sutherland, who was doing Master’s degree work in Geology, was an accident victim who fell from the cliffs. During the autopsy, however, it was learned that Sutherland had been shot in the head. It was also learned that Sutherland had been the victim of theft of his personal property. “Numerous witnesses were interviewed over the years but none supplied any information regarding any suspects in this case. It was later determined that the suspect was possibly one Robert Sutton. Sutton died while in custody in March of 1991 while incarcerated for an unrelated crime. “Witnesses were re-interviewed and admitted to knowing that Sutton was responsible for robbing and murdering Sutherland. Based on the witness statements and the totality of the evidence, the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office believes Sutton was responsible for the death of Harlan Tod Sutherland.”
SUTHERLAND was a graduate student in geology at U.C. Berkeley. He was exploring rock formations at Juan Creek when Sutton, an ex-con who'd been stealing from campers in the area for some time, shot Sutherland for Sutherland's camera. Because it took a few years to identify Sutton as Sutherland's killer, the victim’s parents, retired academics, were often in Mendocino County seeking information about their only child's death. A random encounter on the remote beach at Juan Creek meant death for a promising young man, and sorrow beyond sorrow for his parents.
IS TRUMP A FASCIST? Say what you will about Hitler and Mussolini, the two fascists who set the standard, they were intelligent and disciplined. Trump is unintelligent and undisciplined, but millions of everyday Joes and Janes delude themselves in thinking he represents their plainly legitimate beefs; Hitler's and Mussolini's followers were similarly deluded. There’s always been a fascist streak in the American population. Hell, you don't think all those slave holders and Indian killers were liberal Democrats, do you? And FDR, not long after our bloody beginnings, rightly regarded Lindbergh as a straight-up Nazi. If Lindy had kept his admiration for Hitler to himself he probably would have been president. He was that popular. Orange Man seems from here more of a crypto-fascist, with all the bad instincts of the real deal but incapable of taking the hardcore goose steppers over the top, although he has managed to set the table for a serious fascist movement, and 2024 will probably be the showdown year when we go one way or the other or, as is more likely, we lurch into absolute chaos after a total clown show of a presidential election.
A READER WRITES: “So a friend has loaned me his copy of ‘Luna and Me.’ I’m starting to think Julia Butterfly is a nut case. Her stories of love and her personal courage don’t preclude that. As you know, Judi Bari made a living as an intellectual schizophrenic, praising the working class but abusing her fellow workers no end. Enormous, sky-high egos seem to go with the rhetoric. I think Julia has the biggest ego of anybody I’ve ever met. First impression of her book: Hallmark trash. If you flip the pages, the word ‘Love’ just jumps off them. Reminds me of that wretched single from the early 70s, the Desiderata. She’s totally retro. Before Mars & Venus men and women, there was Robert Bly and his revival of maleness. That followed the Goddess archetypes, which followed pop psychology books. And before them there were these putrid tracts on love and compassion…”
AS SOON as movie stars started climbing up that tree to visit Julia I knew the kid was going to be a millionaire. And by the time large groups of druid-oriented tree worshippers were gathering at the foot of the tree waving their hands in the air and chanting, “Woo-woo-woo,” Julia had become a growth industry.
TEN YEARS before the national implosion of '67, I took my high school girlfriend, head majorette of the school's marching band, a beauty named Judy Scott, to dinner at Grotto #9. Ms. Scott, much in demand, maintained several other relationships, not that I recall any mental upset at her romantic treachery because I kept a few babes in reserve myself.
I THOUGHT I'd impress the lass by taking her to a place where I thought I was known because I played on the baseball team sponsored by Grotto #9. We were high school all-stars, famous only among ourselves, who played year-round, one summer even traveling all the way north to play a three-game series against the Loggers of Fort Bragg. We were kids, Fort Bragg fielded a team laden with ex-pros but, as I recall, we held our own before large crowds. Baseball was big in Fort Bragg at the time.
I BORROWED a sport jacket and a clip-on tie, and off we went, she, always a dazzler, in a prom dress and corsage I bought on the street from the Gypsies ubiquitous in those days in the tourist areas of the city. My date would surely be wowed when the maître 'd instantly recognized me as he escorted us to our table at a view window, delivering some chummy remarks about what an awesome ballplayer I was and how lucky the Grotto was to have me on its team.
SO I SAID to the dapper Italiano of a maître 'd, “I play ball for you guys.” He seemed not to hear me as he led us briskly to a table directly at the busy, noisy door to the kitchen. The waitress was nice, though. She knew we were just kids and seemed to go out of her way to be indulgent, even after I somehow managed to shoot a line of lemon juice into Judy's eye. “God damn!” she yelled. “Watch it!” The place went quiet, the maître 'd glowered, the waitress hurried over to console the vic.
I STILL cringe a little at the memory. But the majorette continued our relationship until high school ended, and the day after graduation I flew off to San Diego where the boot camp sadists from the Marine Corps were laying in wait.
THE ABOVE PHOTO of Fisherman’s Grotto Number Nine was accompanied by this caption: “In times long gone, the art of dressing for dinner was a mark of refinement and tradition. Gentlemen would meticulously don (sic) coats, often tailored to perfection, embodying a sophisticated charm. Women would grace the dinner setting in formal wear, donning exquisite dresses that accentuated grace and femininity. This was that time.”
I FIND JUDGE FAULDER'S ruling that there isn't enough evidence that DA Eyster is biased against Chamise Cubbison in defiance of the obvious. The defiance of the obvious, unsurprisingly, is echoed by the per diem hustlers at the state's Attorney General's office, all of it your basic standing of reality on its head. I'll spare you the re-hash, but anybody following the case via Mike Geniella's scrupulous reporting knows that Eyster has been after Cubbison since the very day she challenged his reimburseables.
BESIDE THE POINT, but doesn't it frost you that highly paid civil servants like Eyster chisel small amounts of public money for stuff they should be paying for out of their own comfortable incomes? You want to buy your County pals, all of them also nicely compensated, steak dinners and drinks at the Broiler Steak House and call it a “training” that the taxpayers should reimburse you for? When Ms. Cubbison says No, you then use your position as Mendo's top law enforcement officer to get Ms. Cubbison unanimously fired by the five cringing incompetents dysfunctioning as supervisors, her ruination occurring outside even the pretense of due process and no charges having been filed against her. Where the hell are we, Ecuador?
ODD that Eyster, who has always been an effective, honest DA in that he's generally fair and proportional in who he prosecutes, by which I mean he doesn't overcharge the defenseless, and except for this Cubbison departure from an otherwise rational and honorable career, the guy suddenly veers off into a totally irrational vendetta he's not only going to lose but a vendetta that's going to cost our broke ass county a ton of money.
I'VE HOPED from the beginning of this fiasco that Cubbison would sue the supervisors as individuals. Without their craven capitulation to Eyster's irrational wrath, Cubbison would at least have had the protection of that vaunted American guarantee, the presumption of innocence.
ANYTHING that makes the Trumpers crazier deserves high marks, so when a Bay Area assemblyman, Alex Lee, proposed a one percent yearly tax rate on individuals with a net worth of more than $50 million, and a 1.5 percent rate on Californians with a net worth of over $1 billion, a great keening went up from the media defenders of billionaires who, collectively, own America's legislative bodies up to and including Congress. “My god! 1.5 percent? We'll be selling apples on the street.” You'd have thought Lenin himself had just appeared in Sacramento. Assemblyman Lee deserves major attaboys from the millions out there living paycheck to paycheck. (Our alleged reps, McGuire and Wood, are probably still hiding under their beds.)
THE ANNOUNCEMENT that the Mateel Community Center will revive Reggae on the River this summer of 2024 inspired this comment:
“Naloxone-On-The-River”, the most remarkable little money grab festival on the North Coast, where you can do drugs for nearly a solid week while listening to anachronistic music while located nearly in the center of absolute nowhere but close to a deceased town-like place that has a great pharmacy, a moribund hospital and even an Ambulance or two… Whatever you do, remember that somebody stole the proceeds a few years ago, and the crime was never solved, so don’t pay the Mateel in cash! It IS a fundraiser, I suppose, but all around it’s just a leftover, a previous part of a colorful time in history… Do Gen Z’rs like Reggae? Does anyone? 10,000 COVID deaths last month. $299 for a ticket? Go down to Dolores Park, any sunny weekend, and see a better show… It’s pretty difficult to believe that the Mateel can revive the Frankenstein Festival at all, or get the permits…
THE GALLUP POLL claimed earlier this year that “96% of Americans say they believe in God.” Seems high to me even given the willingness of most people to say whatever they think will please the pollster. I loved the defiant remarks of Charlie Orr, 85, at the recent national convention of American Atheists Inc. at the San Francisco Airport Hotel in Millbrae: “I’ll show ‘em how a real atheist dies,” Orr said. “I’ll look the Grim Reaper in the eye and spit in his face. I’m not going to hell, because there is no hell.”
AMERICAN ATHEISTS INC. aren't against other people practicing whatever religion they like, the Atheists just don’t want to pay for it. Churches are already tax exempt, schools are beginning to teach the wildly implausible myths of creationism, the Ten Commandments are going up on the wall in schools all over the place, and the federal government is funneling public money to alleged church charities, portions of which are used to proselytize.
THE FAITH in the efficacy in the Ten Commandments is especially baffling, given the social and economic organization of this country. If killing were outlawed the Pentagon would be out of business ,and if usury were banned business would be out of business. The rest of the strictures are mostly practiced by most of us anyway because if we didn’t practice them we’d all have to do our grocery shopping in Humvees.
WORLDWIDE MEDITATION FOR PEACE
Every Friday, 11:30-noon, California Time.
(American Veterans For Peace, via Katy Tahja, for Korean War Vet Neil ‘Eric’ Erickson, former Mendocino Coast Resident. Eric sends greetings to friends in the County and offers this way to work towards world peace.)
ON-LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK
[1] Most people are too busy working three jobs so they can pay their taxes, doing drugs, drinking alcohol, downloading porn, getting tattoos, coloring their hair blue or obsessing over the NFL playoffs to notice or care. Or they woke up one morning and realized that they are nothing more than a slave to a system they had no say in instituting. A slave to a system foisted upon them by their unknowing patriotic parents. A system they would love to be rid of but don’t know what to do about it or how to get out of it. Yep, this second paragraph is an apt description of myself. I’ve known for 3 decades this Country is not what we were taught to believe it was and that I am a slave to a few elites who control everything. It’s a pretty hollow feeling when one finally figures it out.
[2] When you are young, taking and making a stand at your peak athleticism to explore a fork in the road makes perfect sense if the status quo and the trajectory thereof are unacceptable. I believe that some on this board cannot fathom it. They spent the first 60 or 70 years in Rome. Troubles for the people in Judea or Viet Nam were … no biggie. Distant. I believe that some on this board will never understand the internal rage of a 15 y.o. who sees his favorite big cousin ripped to shreds by a bomb.
[3] Big money owns America. Always has. During the 1950s thru the early 1960s, it was most advantageous for big money that middle America should do better. That was a unique era. That era ended as the Europe, especially Germany, and Japan got on their feet and began to outcompete the US–with the tacit approval of the US government (controlled by big money); it ended as the costs of the Vietnam War led to inflation and deficits (both enriched big money, so they wanted that), and the energy crisis. Since then, the size of total pie (per person) has remained remarkable STAGNANT. Big money’s share of the pie has continued to grow, which means everyone else’s has declined, though not evenly. Some Americans had held their share, maybe a wee bit more. But most have lost share. COVID, the war in the Ukraine, and the war on war on Palestinians all enrich big money. The big question is, to me, is: Does big money own and control China? Is BRICS and the Chinese-led “non-West” really like a WWF professional wrestling match, where big money owns both.
[4] When I think that I have been paying taxes for this shit for forty plus years, I get nauseous. Funding some deviants who never gave a damn about me or anybody or anything getting rich off the backs of the people of this country. They are not smarter than me or you, they are just at the front of the line so they can tell you they are fresh out. They manipulate the markets, so you pay more for stocks. real estate, education, health care, everything. And your savings, investments and retirement are used to fund them also, because they or their family members are at the head of those funds, banks, drug companies, MSM, etc. I am beginning to see, if we don’t get rid of central banks and the military industrial complex, I might as well go tell my grandkids to practice picking cotton.
[5] This country needs some tough love right now! Most people are comfortable with their lifestyle and could care less about world affairs and government shortcomings. Although we don’t need any more tragedy, maybe a few hits in this Country by a terrorist organization is the tough love we need to get everyone off their cell phones and back on getting this Country on track. Maybe a few days without Facebook and all the other worthless social media will get somebody’s attention. When the lights go out don’t complain. At this point we don’t have the luxury of being a victim. We can’t complain, we caused this mess!
[6] You think Israel should relocate? Maybe so, but it’s really too late, from their perspective, I think. I believe their outlook is and will be: “This is our ship; we go down with it or stay afloat.” And, I think it's at least an understandable position. It’s nearly a 100-year investment in that place now, and the world now has 8 billion people, not the 2B of 1945. There are no great geographical alternatives for them.
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