Mendocino County Today: Friday 3/22/24

Rainy/Breezy | Torch Lily | Atheists Prayer | Road Work | Navarro Resilience | Barn Cats | Toothwort | County Notes | Scam Alert | Sheriff's News | Domestic Violence | Walton Poem | Blood Drive | Mockel Amazed | Alfonso Story | Homeless America | Ralph Esmay | Ed Notes | Navarro Mill | Sea Story | Yesterday's Catch | Highway Depressions | Bridge Jumpers | Noir Novelist | Times Square | 2024 Election | Parliament | Antisemitism Dodge | Masked | Devil Terms | Spring Training | Last Invocation

A FRONT MOVING ONSHORE this morning will bring rain and gusty winds. There will be a brief break in the weather this afternoon. Showers and isolated thunderstorms are expected this evening and Saturday with snow levels falling to around 4000 feet. Drier weather is expected Sunday with additional wet weather expected next week. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): On the coast this Friday morning I have a cloudy 55F. Rain is forecast today & tomorrow. Sort of some breaks in the rain Sunday thru Tuesday then more rain mid next week.

AN ATHEISTS PRAYER
has been said on the Editor’s behalf.
They are very rare
And thus have extra value.

— Fred Gardner

CALTRANS VALLEY ROAD WORK

Route 253 (1.7/2.5) – Road stabilization work on Highway 253 near Boonville at Bald Hills Ranch will continue. One-way traffic control will be in effect and motorists should anticipate up to 10-minute delays.

Route 253 (15.3/15.5) – Tree work on Highway 253 at Shepherd Lane will occur on Tuesday, March 26. One-way traffic control will be in effect from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. Motorists should expect up to 5-minute delays. 

Emergency work on Highway 128 at Barton Gulch near Navarro continues. One-way traffic control will be in effect from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Motorists should anticipate up to 10-minute delays.

REPORT FROM A SMALL FARM IN BOONVILLE

This is our quiet time of year, but as always, things more painful than the news reports come about to disrupt the peace. Our best ever barn cat, Duster, died recently. What a wonderful critter she was for the 16 years we had her. She was probably at least two when we brought her home from the shelter. Always first to greet customers and entertain kids, she loved to be petted, groomed and to show off, plus she was a superb mouser. She is buried beside her buddy, Custard, who died a few months earlier, in our small, but, sadly, growing pet cemetery which overlooks the whole farm.

Barn cats are essential to a farm (note: our 1 year live rat catch count is 151!) and the feral cat rescue community came to our rescue with two young ones. We know of two local organizations doing the rescues, one in Anderson Valley, Felines of Philo (contact@filinesofphilo.com 707-684-9439), the other in Ft Bragg is the Coast Cat Project (CoastCatProject.org 707.969.7781). They work together but there's a huge difference between them. In Anderson Valley, Jenifer does the catching and neutering at her own expense while Ft Bragg has a city fund from which expenses are paid, although those who foster and find homes for the animals are volunteers. It's a job because there are people who harbor colonies of cats they then allow to breed indiscriminately without any medical care.

It was through this network of good people that we now have two young female barn kitties locked in our garage/barn to acclimate to new surroundings. We've had glimpses of them but no interaction as yet. One is feral and already on the job leaving several dead mice on the barn floor. The other is under a year old and just fixed but we've been told she's people friendly. They will remain in the garage/barn for a month then will be able to roam free. The hope is that by that time they know they're fed and safe here.

We've had great rains with more coming and the fields and orchards are alive with growth and have been fed with a combo of rabbit and chicken poo. The plums and peaches are all blooming or budding.

The only harvesting is for greens and some seed sowing is started. The kitchen crew is working through the backlog of cambros of last year's harvests. We are all preparing for the coming growing season.

Take care, stay well and have a happy spring.

Nikki Ausschnitt and Steve Krieg

Petit Teton Farm, Boonville

COUNTY NOTES

by Mark Scaramella

MENDO’S SUPERVISORS will consider an appeal of a Planning Commission denial of a minor use permit for a large gas station in Redwood Valley next Tuesday. 

Item 4b: “Noticed Public Hearing - Discussion and Possible Action to Consider an Appeal of the Planning Commission’s Denial of Minor Use Permit and Variance to Establish and Operate a Gas Station with Ten (10) Gas Pumps, Two (2) Separate Illuminated Canopies, Twenty-Eight (28) New Parking Spaces, Landscaping, Conversion of Part of an Existing Structure to a Convenience Store, and Concurrent Variance for a Sixty-Five (65) Foot Tall Business Identification Sign, Increase in the Allowable Sign Area, and to Reduce the Front Yard Setback; Located at 9621 and 9601 North State Street, Redwood Valley; which May Include Adoption of a Resolution or Additional Direction to Staff”

According to an attached previous Planning Commission resolution: “The Planning Commission hereby determines that the granting of such Minor Use Permit would constitute a nuisance or be detrimental to the health, safety, peace, morals, comfort, or general welfare of persons residing or working in or passing through the neighborhood of the proposed use and would be detrimental or injurious to property and improvements in the neighborhood.…”

The Appeal filed by Ukiah attorney Brian Momsen for the applicant, Faizan Corp, asserts that the Planning Commission “did not proceed in a manner required by law and its determination was not supported by substantial evidence in the record. There was no evidence (only vague complaints from the public) that the proposed project would be a nuisance or would interfere with an easement.…”

We expect that Redwood Valley residents will show up in subtantial numbers on this one, few of whom support the gas station. 

* * *

Although CEO Darcy Antle’s latest CEO report has a section entitled “Air Quality Management,” there’s nothing in that section about where the AQ office is being moved to in the wake of the Board’s decision last month to move the Veterans Service Office back to their cottage on Observatory Avenue. 

In the CEO report’s “Human Resources” section, there’s nothing about the promises the Board and the Department made in response to last year’s Grand Jury report in which the Board and the Department promised to correct a number of HR problems by the end of 2023. 

Despite the Board’s directive to include a written monthly report in the CEO report about the status of the effort to bring additional unpermitted properities onto the County’s assessment/tax rolls, there is still no such report. 

And just in case you needed a reminder of where Mendo’s true priorities are, Ms. Antle’s CEO report concludes with this photograph: 

SUPERVISOR MAUREEN MULHEREN submitted a 38 page “Supervisors Report” for January of 2024 in the Board packet for next Tuesday’s meeting. There’s the usual pro-forma summary of what the Board discussed in January (the Board minutes are more interesting), but nothing besides routine rubberstamping was actually accomplished. Most of Mulheren’s lengthy report is a re-post of a 2023 Homelessness Continuum of Care report which described the status of homelessness funding in Mendocino County. To judge by the amount of money Mendo spends on homelessness, you might be impressed.

The County’s Continuum of Care concludes: “In the past five years, the County of Mendocino, together with community partners and local agencies, has made significant progress in building collaborative and creative solutions to addressing homelessness in our county. We have much work still ahead. Resolution of homelessness requires commitment, dedication, communication and a willingness to participate from every stakeholder in our community – public, private, faith-based, and individual. The conditions that bring individuals and families to a state of housing instability are numerous and intertwined. Our solutions, in response, must be both complex and creative. We are up to the challenge.”

But if you want to see actual homelessness statistics, the CofC is clearly not “up to the challenge.” Near the end of the Homelessness report there’s a chart from back in 2022 that claims that a few hundred people had “moved into a private rental” in 2022. But there’s nothing about whether those movements had anything to do with the millions they’ve spent or whether any of them stayed in a “private rental” for more than a few months.

WITHOUT BOARD APPROVAL (i.e., retroactive rubberstamping is requested) the County Counsel’s office has has farmed out $10k worth of legal services for “Legal Advice and analysis regarding the negotiation of tax sharing agreements between the County of Mendocino and other local entities” for “the period of March 15, 2024 to July 31 2024.” They don’t share which “local entites” they are so generously “sharing” taxes with. It could be the never-ending tax sharing discussions with the City of Ukiah, but we doubt that because the amount is a comparatively low $10k. The only other “tax sharing” we can think of that this might be for is the millions owed to local fire agencies from the Measure P sales tax that have been accumulated since January of 2023 but have yet to be distributed. Given the duration of this latest handout to private attorneys we now expect more months of delay for the Measure P funds to at least July 31 of 2024. This would indicated that the hold up in distrubuting the long-overdue fire service funds is indeed in the County Counsel’s office, and not, as Supervisor Williams suggested on the radio last week, associated with any kind of request from the fire districts themselves.

RENEE LEE: Scam Alert! A senior brought a fake letter and check to the Senior Center lunch on Thursday. It appears to be a legitimate check from Publisher’s Clearinghouse stating you won a cash prize and this check is an advance to help you pay for the taxes. But the check will bounce and you’re on the hook for it. They will gain access to your banking information and who knows what else. Don’t fall for it. If it sounds too good to be true, it is!

MENDOCINO COUNTY SHERIFF Matt Kendall promoted Stephen Purcell to the position of Corrections Sergeant and Jason Logan to the position of Sheriff's Sergeant on Monday. Both sergeants started their law enforcement careers as corrections deputies in the Mendocino County Corrections Division, Purcell in 2006 and Logan in 2013. Sergeants at the Mendocino Sheriff's Office are first-line supervisors, entrusted with the training, development, and well-being our deputies. Please join the Sheriff’s Office in congratulating Jason Logan and Stephen Purcell as they take on their new duties.

* * *

IN THE COMMUNITY - COVELO

Members of the Sheriff’s Office, last week participated in a job fair at Round Valley High School. The team, made up of deputies from Corrections and Patrol, along with community services officers, got an opportunity to share their experiences with local teens and answer questions about future careers. A big thank you to Round Valley High School for hosting the event.

EXTENSIVE HISTORY OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE PRECEDED COVELO MAN’S ALLEGED SHOTGUN MURDER OF HIS GIRLFRIEND

At 11:45 a.m. on March 20, Johnathon Lee Draughan (age 43) was booked into the Mendocino County Jail on the felony charge of murder and a felony charge for a 10-year enhancement on using a weapon during a crime. The charges stem from the fatal shooting of a Covelo woman early yesterday morning.…

mendofever.com/2024/03/21/extensive-history-of-domestic-violence-preceded-covelo-mans-alleged-shotgun-murder-of-his-girlfriend/

* * *

CHUCK DUNBAR:

This recent murder of the mother of a two year old in Covelo, in the midst of a domestic dispute, is as sad as it gets. Yet another example of a gun in the house, close at hand, so easy in the heat of an argument to grab it, shoot, kill. A poor dead woman, an infant loses his or her mother, a man’s ruined life, off to prison for many years. A tragedy that might have been avoided absent the gun.

* * *

MAZIE MALONE:

There is new info that she had filed a restraining order against him. They were unable to locate him to serve the order. Not likely that would have stopped the guy, especially being way out in Covelo. Tragic. That poor innocent baby!

* * *

SARAH KENNEDY OWEN:

It is true that the restraining order was “terminated ” but only because DA Eyster dismissed the case against the perpetrator in late 2023, deeming there “was not enough evidence” to charge him on domestic violence. Another example in Mendocino County of not believing the victim (or so it seems on the surface, I could have missed something). Also, had there been law enforcement available locally in Covelo, the sheriff’s people could have gotten there sooner and possibly saved her life. Instead, it looks like law enforcement had to come from WIllits. They then tried to use life saving procedures, to no effect. That said, you are right, Mazie Malone, restraining orders are (a) hard to get in time to have any use, and (b) when obtained, may do little to stop whatever is being threatened. And Chuck is right, too, the weapon was in the perp’s hands, and that in itself could be a big part of the problem.

* * *

A READER WRITES: 

The Covelo murderer, if he didn’t have a gun he would have used something else, a knife, his hands, a vehicle, a bat. Once the intent is set, anything will do. Was the gun in the home? Or did he bring it? Bottomline, a woman was horribly murdered, her baby horribly scarred, and the justice system failed all of them. Could it have been prevented if the justice system would have worked differently in the recent past in this case? Or the action just delayed as the murderer would have had more time to stew, blame and justify his actions that he was planning? We will never know. Domestic violence is hideous, on every level. A victim never truly feels safe, even when the threat is removed. It is a curse. So very sad.

SPRING BLOOD DRIVE AT MENDO FIRE

The Mendocino Fire Protection District will be hosting a Spring blood drive at the firehouse at 44700 Little Lake Road on Tuesday, April 9th, from 1:30 to 4:30 pm. There is a continuing severe shortage of blood across the US and donors of all blood types are urgently needed. The blood drive will be managed by Vitalant, a non-profit that supplies blood and special services to patients in about 900 hospitals in the US. Vitalant recommends making an appointment time for your donation to minimize the wait time. You can call them at 877-258-4825 or visit Vitalant.org. We had a great turnout for the drive in December and we’d like to do it again—thanks to all who donated! We hope to see you on April 9th. 

Sandy Schmidt, Administrative Assistant, Mendocino Fire 

TREVOR MOCKEL (March 5):

As the polls close in Mendocino County tonight, I would be remiss to not thank all the the friends and relatives who analyzed and supported Trevor Mockel in his bid to become the next District 1 supervisor for the Board of Supervisors. 

I grew up in the Bay Area where politics were discussed in a rational way. I was amazed that individuals were willing to dismiss a candidate based on the political affiliation (D or R) or who supposed the candidate as opposed to learning more about them. No matter the outcome, tomorrow I know that he will continue be our neighbor, son, brother, grandson, nephew, cousin; Eagle Boy Scout, Order of the Eagle; and occasisional pain in the ass to his father, that we are proud of. 

DOES ANYONE REMEMBER ALFONSO who's store used to be in this space?

He sold tobacco, records, licorice and other odds and ends. I heard a story that pre-internet back in the '70s and '80s he'd somehow hacked into the phone lines in town and used to play music which you could hear over the phone. Does anyone know the full story? Anyway, he (and characters like him) are missed here in Mendocino.

CRAIG STEHR: Rather unlikely that the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas will revert to a mental health facility again. As Bruce Anderson has reported, the Pure Land Buddhist sect purchased it for a pittance, and it is now a major spiritual center complete with schools, retreat facilities which attract the faithful from as far away as Koala Lampur, and a hardcore monastic group. Eminent domain, by the way, is increasingly ineffective due to lawsuits that the U.S. government has lost attempting to steal homeowners property, mostly by energy companies, under the ridiculous assertion that it is necessary for “national defense.” The State of California had a pre-sale opportunity to revitalize the property in Talmage, and declined for the usual obvious reasons, which are 1. Nobody really cares about the mentally ill because it is an expense and, aside from an increase of jobs, is mostly an unproductive situation, and 2. Mental illness is considered a private (id est “family”) affair, even though homeless mentally ill are not living with a nuclear or any other type of family. It all fits seamlessly into the American experiment with freedom and democracy, and will require an act of congress to be changed, which of course, cannot happen. Shelters are a temporary solution, though inadequate, but at least the suffering won’t be eaten by wildlife. Thanks for listening, and enjoy the day.

CHUCK ROSS:

Seventy years ago today my friend Jim Esmay and I were on the tidal rocks under the old wharf at Elk and headed back up the bluff. As we were walking up the span of the high section of the wharf the mill whistle blew. We were puzzled, it was maybe three in the afternoon. And it kept on blowing, a long blast. As we walked through the lumber yard it was apparent something big was going on...

It turned out his father Ralph had been seriously injured at the mill. A heavy slab had kicked back "upstream" out of the edger, caught him in the chest, knocked him over the rollcase and the slab shot through the wall of the mill and ended up outside. The ambulance came from Point Arena and had to take him to Fort Bragg so it was well over an hour before he was properly attended to.

ED NOTES

GRADUALLY, California's power system has been raffled off to private individuals, or syndicates of private individuals, at bargain prices. About 25 years ago now, the process of donating the public power system that gramps and gran built for us was “privatized,” which is quite a nice gift considering that it didn't cost its present owners anything to build. 

THE GIFT gift of our public power system to The Wolves was a bi-partisan effort by the Wes Chesbro-Mike Thompson-Bill Clinton-Nancy Pelosi era political personality type which, for those of you who require further elucidation, is personally ambitious, venal, cynical, and generally sociopathic. In other words, perfect tools for The Wolves whose interests the Chesbro-Thompson-Clinton types faithfully serve. A well person certainly wouldn't pimp his family and endure the range of base humiliations made necessary by the money-perverted, present-day electoral system simply to install him or herself in public office to protect and advance the interests of the people who now control America's collective light switch. Only a fundamentally flawed citizen would thus lower himself, which is why we have the politicians we have and the government we have. We haven't had a first-rate person in the White House since FDR or a first-rate governor since Olson, the progressive from the days when people often got elected to do good, not to get rich. Hell, here in Mendocino County, there's been exactly one (count 'em) progressive to hold elected office — the late Phil Baldwin formerly of the Ukiah City Council. 

AS THE CRISES multiply, there is literally no leadership in place to intelligently, fairly address any of them. And we all know it, don't we? Do you know a single sentient citizen with an income under $75 thou a year who truly believes any of the major probs facing us on the local, state or national level are going to be intelligently resolved? 

I READ HARPER'S MAGAZINE regularly for decades. In all that time, I can't remember reading anything that annoyed me as much as a piece years ago by William Hamilton called “Day of the Locust: A new pest threatens to wipe out the California wine industry.”

HAMILTON was a well-known cartoonist for The New Yorker and the New York Observer. He drew those mostly unamusing, but always admiring, depictions of the wealthy. As most of us know, the wealthy are inherently unamusing unless somebody at the Edith Wharton ability-level has them in her sights. Otherwise, they're as dangerously savage and as unfunny as a full-moon boogie on the Albion Ridge.

ANYWAY, Hamilton is from St. Helena, wine industry ground zero. His Napa County origins seem to explain his drop-fall reverence for the new moguls of jive juice. Read the thing for yourself, of course, it’s probably still on-line, but Hamilton leaves out about half the wine story — Mexican labor. Not a single mention of Mexicans in the entire piece and only two mentions of “monoculture,” neither of them in relation to monoculture's responsibility for vine-vulnerable pests such as the glassy-winged sharpshooter he and his wine industry pals were so worried about at the time.

ACCORDING TO THE HAMILTON-HARPER'S version of NorCal wine history, these really cool people from banking and corporate law, reinforced by a few late arriving show biz and star athlete types, saved Napa's hillsides from being converted into vertical suburbs. Moreover, if it weren't for these really, really cool people from finance and law America would never have produced the wines that beat out the French for best booze back in whenever the hell, thus hastening the vinification of Napa but preserving its hillsides for sterile metal stakes rather than houses for, well, you know, commuters and other undesirables. 

IF YOU DON'T HAVE THE MONEY to buy into Napa, you buy land in Mendocino County, especially Anderson Valley. Here, there are no environmental restrictions or other impediments to people who say things like, “This is my vision” as they help themselves to our streams, poison the land, pipe in NPR, and rip off Mexicans. Labor? Get yourself a B. Traven novel for an update. No, my friends, here in Mendoland, we get the $5 million fortunes and the low-end trust-funders, the latter once known as remittance men. We get the guy who pays a mil for a hunk of undeveloped hillside, pays another mil to build himself and his blank-faced wife a 10,000-square-foot box where there's enough room to keep them both from golden year homicide, invests a big chunk of the rest in a vanity vineyard, then croaks before he can bottle his first jug of Chateau Cancer-Vision.)

HAMILTON'S piece gave us a couple of cookie cutter characterizations of stereotypical enviro-nuts, and even an interlude of wishful thinking, ultra-vi division, when he makes it clear that he hopes a hearing room full of wine execs and vineyard owners will physically assault a Sierra Club couple — non-wackos hated by the Napa vintners for both their effectiveness in checking industry excess and for their intrepid willingness to complain directly in the industry's fat, choleric faces. Hamilton wants it to appear as if the wackies are the only people alarmed at the industry's numerous crimes, although a lot of upscale and self-alleged enviros do in fact look the other way when the chardonnay charlatans do their thing. (Mendocino County's debased public radio station gets lots of wine industry money. In exchange, the industry gets a public radio free pass, as do many lesser local evil-doers.)

AMONG THE MOST OFFENSIVE assumptions of this unrelievedly offensive piece was the assertion we hear more and more here in Mendocino County: If it weren't for the wine industry the hills would be covered with houses. Harper's editors let this one slide? A once golden hillside covered with metal grape stakes is a superior visual to the carport? And either metal grape stakes or the carport is the choice? The only time of the year a vineyard is attractive is two weeks in the fall when the leaves turn, and even then the vista isn't all that attractive in the industrial ag context of thousands of meticulously (and chemically) maintained vineyard marching in perfect formation. 

THE WINE INDUSTRY is a heavily industrialized business wholly dependent on people whose exploitation is as thorough as it was in their native land. Environmentally, the wine industry uses literal tons of annual pesticides whose long-range effect has lead to one self-inflicted industry plague after another, the glassy-winged sharpshooter just one of them. May this much-maligned little beast multiply and prosper! 

* * *

THE SF CHRONICLE once ran a piece about Clint Eastwood getting something like the “Kurosawa Award” for Eastwood's contributions to film art. Kurosawa and Clint Eastwood. Think of it. Hell, go for it, Frisco! The Tchaikovsky Award for musical composition to Eminem. The Frank Lloyd Wright Award for Architecture to Sam Walton. The Tolstoy Award for the Novel to Phillip K. Dick. The Auden Award for Poetry to Rod McKuen. The Sierra Club Award for preservation of the environment to Charles Hurwitz!

* * *

BACK IN 2001 when the Editor and his wife took a week-long trip to the Editor’s mother’s hometown in Illinois, he wrote the following announcement of how things at the paper would be handled in his absence:

“The Editor and Mrs. Editor will be gone for a week as of Tuesday evening, which isn't to say our premises and all the muy cool stuff therein will be left undefended. In our absence, Mr. Chris Jones, Ms. Jackie Potter-Voll, Misses Olga and Augustina Mendoza, and Mrs. Ruth Anderson will remain in vigilant residence. During office hours, the premises will be patrolled by Major Mark Scaramella, a former Air Force commando and author of the definitive military manual on hand-to-hand combat, “How To Kill Quickly And Silently With A Strand Of Piano Wire.” The paper will be produced by the Editor’s son, Zack Anderson, Ms. Potter-Voll, Dandelion Severn-Walsh, and Major Scaramella. If it is noticeably improved in my absence, please let me know and I'll stay permanently in Hillsboro, Illinois, my first destination on this, a rare outing from the often confining confines of Boonville. My second destination is Alton, Illinois, where I plan to honor the memory of the great abolitionist editor, Elijah Lovejoy, whose offices were stormed one grim night in 1837 by an ignoble mob of pro-slavery oafs. (19th century oafs were a lot more active than the lynch mob personality type is these days, tv and cheap beer conspiring to render them mostly housebound and sedentary.) Lovejoy gave a good account of himself before he was hanged by the glorious Sons of the South, managing to shoot several of them, including, I believe, the mayor of Alton. (Always a good idea to take a final shot at the highest-ranking official handy in an objectively hopeless situation.) Having strung up Lovejoy, the mob threw his printing press into the Mississippi River from where it has since been retrieved by a black historical society and made the centerpiece of a small Alton museum dedicated to the memory of this truly great man. I also hope to look around Springfield, not far from my Hillsboro headquarters, where Honest Abe, another great man produced by pre-Lilliput America, made his headquarters for many years.”

JACK SAUNDERS:

This photo is cropped out of a larger original labeled Navarro Mill Co. It was taken on the first mill property, most likely in the 1880s. The mill was built by Henry Baldwin Tichenor and owned by him until his death on 26 Mar 1883 in San Francisco. My grandfather's eldest maternal aunt and her husband lived near Navarro at the time and as a tribute gave the middle name Tichenor to a son born shortly afterward. The mill burned to the ground on 31 Jul 1890 when a fire started in the engine house and quickly spread. A smaller version of the same photo is on the Navarro-By-The-Sea website. 

A FEW YEARS BEFORE THE MAST

by Donald Cruser

The surfers describe it best: They refer to it as “Answering the calling.” I got it from my dad whose family had been in the oyster business in Chesapeake Bay. Then there was Uncle Merrit who as a Marine had gone through five major campaigns in the South Pacific before being wounded. His war story was about how beautiful it was to go out on deck at night with a quiet ocean and watch the flying fish skim over the water in the moonlight. Then there were the classic American authors like London, Steinbeck, Hemingway, etc who shared their love of the ocean. Of great influence was Lenny Bruce who in his autobiography “How to Talk Dirty and Influence People” talked about how it soothed his troubled soul to go out on deck at night.

I tried to get into the US lines and found out that the American seaman’s union would no longer exist if there wasn’t a law that required goods being shipped between US ports had to be shipped on US ships. It was primarily oil from Alaska and the union was overloaded from scaling down after the war in Vietnam. Down at the port on the Sacramento River I ran into an old seaman who understood perfectly that “I wanted to go to sea.” He told me that I could get work with the Scandinavians who had a hiring hall in SF at Pier 37 I think it was. I got a cheap room in a flophouse hotel and showed up at the union hall every morning at 10 when they posted openings. It didn’t take long for me to land a job as a deck hand on a Swedish oil tanker. They flew me into Seattle where the ship was making trips between Arica, Chile to pick up a very high grade of oil and deliver it to the refinery in Anna Cortes, Washington. It was exciting to go through Puget Sound and the store shelves were empty in Chile since the US had engineered an embargo of Chile over the election of Salvador Allende.

The interesting thing about the oil tankers was that they never knew where they were going next. It all depended on where they managed to buy crude. So we went through the Panama Canal and it was quite a thrill to be out on deck handling the ropes and winches on the passage. 

One exchange stood out: We were passing close to a Norwegian ship in the adjacent canal and I expected the Swedes and Norwegians to be glad to see each other. They weren’t, and only two words were disgustingly uttered by the Norsk deckhand: “Javla Swensk” which translates to “Damn Swedish.” It turns out that the Norwegians were (are) still bitter over the fact that neutral Sweden had allowed the Nazis to charge back and forth undeterred across Sweden while so many Norwegians died fighting them in Norway.

We picked up this crude in Venezuela that looked like road tar and had to be heated all the way across the Atlantic so it could be pumped out when we got to Rotterdam. From there we went to Lisbon, Portugal for two weeks in dry dock. I had a good time there. It is a wonderful city – plenty of nightlife, good food, bullfights where they don’t kill the bull, and beautiful women.

Then the worst happened: We headed for the Persian Gulf. All the way down the west coast of Africa, and up the east coast into the Persian Gulf into Karg Island, Iran. They knew better than to allow a bunch of horny seamen around their women so we were restricted to the Seamen’s Club where we could surprisingly get beer. In the heat it was good, but it wasn’t like “going ashore.” There were a number of large pipes about 18 inches in diameter so it took less than 24 hours to fill our small tanker, 50,000 tons as compared to around 200,000 tons for the super tankers. We headed back out of the Gulf and into the Indian Ocean where things got exciting.

The ocean had roughed up considerably and we were headed directly into big waves that were somewhere about 50 feet from trough to peak. Since oil tankers weigh little more than the load they are carrying they ride very low in the water when loaded. Thus when the bow would bury itself into one of those big waves, a big part of the wave would wash totally over the entire foredeck and once in awhile the twin propellers under the back end would lift clear out of the water and the entire ship would rattle like a tin can with rocks in it. I was glad to get around the cape and into the quieter Atlantic. It was six months at sea and I had enough of the seaman’s life for awhile. 

I paid off in Rotterdam, got a room in the seamen’s club and hung around for awhile. The Dutch are really nice people, the cities are beautiful, and they are a model for the world on how residents from all over the world (primarily former colonies) can live in harmony with one another.

However, I needed to get home and the pay on the tanker was very low ($2,000 for nine months). Someone told me that if there was an American seaman who needed to get back and a ship going to the states didn’t have a full crew, then that ship had to hire that seaman. I went to the US embassy and talked to them. Within a few days there was an ocean-going tugboat heading out without a full crew. I went down and talked to the captain and he was relieved that I wasn’t a drunk so I signed on. 

It turned out he was a “coon ass” which is somewhat of a term of endearment for a cajun. The boat and crew had been up in the North Sea helping the Norwegians develop their offshore oil. 

We were headed back to Louisiana and pulling this enormous barge that had been used to ferry parts out to the oil wells. The barge was somewhere around 50 by 100 feet in size and we were pulling it with a cable about an inch and a half in diameter. Things were fine until we crossed the English channel and got into the open Atlantic where it roughed up to about 10 foot waves we were headed into. It was the middle of night when Harry Jackson, the Honduran engine boy, came in and woke me up since he needed help out on deck. He explained that the cable was too short and in the rough seas would break in two from bouncing up and down on the back railing. We were going to let out more cable so that it had more slack and give, then put a chafing board on the cable. The board was a 3-foot long curved sheet of cast iron with two U-bolts that we would tighten down on the cable to hold it in place. The plan was that once in place the cable would be run back to where it would bounce up and down on the cast iron board instead of on the cable. 

Before heading back to do the job Harry showed me a large scar on the side of his neck where the cable had hit once before. It turns out that when the boat is not running it will slowly drift around, building up pressure between the cable and boat, and then the cable will quickly slip with a deadly potential. The correct mode of operation was to crouch down and attach the chafing board while keeping your head below the cable. 

That scar inspired me to do it.

The rest of the trip was largely uneventful. I did two six-hour watches with the captain and he would often go below, get drunk, and fall asleep during the night watch. 

I liked it since with the rough ocean the most comfortable place on the boat was in the captain’s chair. The boat was running on autopilot and all I had to do was watch the radar. Our progress against the waves and Gulf Stream was slow, so we all agreed it was more important to have drinking water than shower. I even got sinister looks for washing up out of a bucket. Luckily, we did hit a heavy rain shower which meant we all ran naked out on deck to scrub down. The barge had a one ton suicide anchor with the plan being that if the barge broke loose and was drifting towards Miami, then the anchor could be dropped to stop the barge before it crashed ashore. Somehow in this rough ocean the anchor broke loose and was hanging down below it. This could definitly be a problem when we wanted to head back into land. 

The captain slowed our boat down, circled around the barge hooking the line of the anchor, and off we went. This allowed our 1.5 inch cable to rub up and down on the anchor cable, and cut it in two. That anchor is still out there. 

The only thing we could get on the short wave radio was Arabic music and long winded fundamentalist preachers. Once we rounded Florida and entered the quiet, warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico we stopped and went swimming. Nothing quite like cool, clear water. 

It was impressive to watch that captain tighten up the cable to maneuver that barge through those narrow channels and into Morgan City. I paid off at $25/day after 26 days at sea. I spent a few days in New Orleans and then headed for home on the dog. Nothing quite like home, sweet home.

When I signed on the oil tanker I became friends with a man from Chile named Ramone. He didn’t like the oil tanker and told me about how nice it was to work on the Royal Viking Line cruise ships. In a glamour port on a regular basis with good food and beautiful Scandinavian women on the crew. I wrote him a letter in English and he got his job with Royal Viking back. That part about working with lovely women made a real impression on me so I went back to the union hall and told the guy in charge I wanted to work for Royal Viking line. He wasn’t too helpful since they had bad experiences hiring Americans on the cruise ships. It was because all too often they were there for the love boat travel experience and didn’t expect the work to be as hard as it was, usually 10 hours a day on a split shift and seven days a week. I was lucky in that another guy agreed to take the job and then changed his mind at the last minute. I was the only guy hanging around. 

The Norwegian took me into the back office, looked me in the eye and said, “Are you sure you want this job? It is washing, washing, washing all day long.” Then he repeated it. I recognized it was my chance to break in so I took it. I went into the pot room (not what you think) where Ausberto and I were going to wash all the pots used to cook the food for about 450 people a day. Ausberto didn’t speak any English, but it didn’t take me long to pick up the pot room vernacular in Spanish. 

I have gone on too long here so I will save the cruise ship stories for another day. They include going all the way around South America, likewise the Mediterranean, into the Baltic including Russia, around the South Pacific, and across the orient and into China while they were still wearing Mao hats. That year I lived in Sweden was a real highlight. And then my attempt to get rich catching salmon… 

It is hard to beat a good sea story.

CATCH OF THE DAY, Thursday, March 21, 2024

LELAND BEAN JR., Willits. Probation revocation.

OSCAR BERNAL, Ukiah. Controlled substance, mandatory supervision violation.

ANDRU CAMPBELL, Ukiah. Parole violation.

SHANNAH GRIFFITH, Ukiah. Vandalism, controlled substance, paraphernalia.

SEAN HAMMON, Ukiah. Trespassing-refusing to leave.

COREY HEINE, Ukiah. Battery.

LATOYA HOAGLEN, Willits. Assault with deadly weapon with great bodily injury, elder abuse resulting in great bodily harm or death, cruelty to child-infliction of injury, suspended license with priors, evasion/wrong way driving.

MARIA RAZO, Ukiah. DUI, suspended license for DUI, probation revocation.

BIANCA SCHOFIELD, Point Arena. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, resisting.

POOR CONDITION

Editor: 

Why is it that major highways I am familiar with in the North Bay have issues that I don’t see in other states and other developed countries that I am familiar with? I find highways that have been rebuilt in recent years have dips seemingly as a result of inadequate road base preparation. To make matters worse, these depressions never seem to be corrected. With a relatively mild climate, is it assumed that good road bases are not essential? From what I see and feel when driving, any such assumption is not correct. Does any entity ever look at how new construction is holding up?

John S. Moore

Petaluma

BILL KIMBERLIN:

Soon you won't be able to jump off here anymore because of the installation of a net to catch you. My solution was a lot cheaper. No one could walk the bridge alone. Not many folks would jump with someone with them. If you arrived alone, you would need to wait for another loner or small group to go with you on your walk. With someone to talk to, there would be at least a chance for a change of mind.

PETER PLATE: SAN FRANCISCO’S NOW NOIR NOVELIST

by Jonah Raskin

Where the hell is Peter Plate? And who the hell is he? His editor, Dan Simon, calls him a “proletarian novelist,” but that doesn’t seem right. The author of ten novels, all of them set in the Mission District in San Francisco and all of them published by Seven Stories Press in New York, Plate was once a visible figure in the San Francisco literary scene. But years ago, he vanished into what his former agent, Elise Capron, calls “the aether.” She adds, “If that’s what he wants, it’s fine with me. I lost track of him about ten years ago.”

Dan Simon at Seven Stories calls Plate a “proletarian novelist,” but that doesn’t seem right. Plate doesn’t write about proletarians. You might call him a novelist of the criminal classes and a neo-Marxist author. Noir is his chosen field.

In Theories of Surplus Value Marx wrote that “a criminal produces crimes, also criminal law, the police and criminal justice, penal code art, belles-lettres, novels.” Marx added “the criminal breaks the monotony of bourgeois life.” Plate would echo that perspective. His criminals produce nearly all of society as he sees it.

He breaks the monotony of bourgeois San Francisco by making the “gutter look like paradise” and by turning poverty into poetry and crime into the sublime. Along the way, he wears the fedora of a romantic.

Capron, his former agent, remembers having dinner with Plate at the home of the Chinese-American best-selling author, Amy Tan who once took him under her wing. Even Plate’s publicist, Eva Sotomayor, at Seven Stories, knows little if anything about him. “I have never met Plate,” she wrote in an email. “All I do know is that he’s based in the San Francisco area and is a bit of a recluse. I believe he doesn’t have a phone or a computer and doesn’t grant many interviews.” In fact, he doesn’t grant any interviews at all.

Plate might have been famous. He might have been the talk of the town, but he turned his back on fame, withdrew from nearly all social life and is holed up in an apartment in San Francisco battling bad health and also writing his eleventh novel, as yet untitled. His editor, publisher and friend, Dan Simon, at Seven Stories doesn’t rendezvous with Plate in person. “Our director of operations, Jon Gilbert, who is based in Oakland, meets with Peter in public spaces that are anonymous,” Simon tells me. “So there’s a lot of intimacy and trust, but yes at the same time everything is essentially done in secret.”

For a time, Plate was not only famous but also infamous. In 1978, he went wild in the streets of San Francisco during the “White Night” riots that followed the dual assassinations of San Francisco’s Mayor George Moscone and gay supervisor Harvey Milk— and the light sentence ( seven years) for the shooter, supervisor Dan White.

That memorable night, at least a dozen police cars were destroyed and eight non-police vehicles were torched. Plate, one of the most visible of protesters, was arrested, charged with “assault and battery on a police officer and burning police cars.” A flyer from that era, now a collector’s item, bears the headline, “Police vs. Plate.” That seems to be the way he views the world; himself versus the cops.

With the help of criminal defense lawyer Doron Weinberg, Plate “beat the rap,” as one of his fictional characters would say. The website, Good Reader, calls him, “Perhaps the most important anarchist prose writer around today.” True, if one associates anarchists with acts of violence.

Meanwhile, in his absence, a cottage industry has sprung up online to keep his memory and his work alive. “Kinky Kevin Federline,” as he calls himself, wrote, “Plate is one of my favorite authors.” Another fan who identifies himself as “the Fake Bruce Forsyth” chimed in with “hasn’t Plate done well without a computer!”

Dana Smith, a successful San Francisco graphic artist, remembered that Plate, an ex-boyfriend, wrote years ago with a pencil. “When I lived with Plate in the ‘80s I bought him an electric typewriter,” she wrote online. “He refused the contraption and it was returned to the store. I think he eventually tackled the typewriter. I say this with love, respect and fond memories.”

Yet another fan wrote online, “He seems to see it [the internet] as a vehicle for police surveillance.” He added, “he isn’t easy to locate and right now doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry.” A man named Dave Kelso-Mitchell accused Plate of “elitism” and “snobbery.”

A longtime friend of Plate’s, a retired public school teacher and a union organizer, who wants only to be known as “KT,” suggests that Plate might be paranoid and rightfully so. Even paranoids have enemies. In Night of the Short Eyes, his most recent book, which boasts autobiographical elements, the narrator says,“I saw fear in my own eyes. Fear of the cops. Fear of getting snitched out. Fear of cracking up. A fear that burned brightest when I was by myself.” Now that he’s living by himself and rarely ventures outside his apartment, that fear burns brighter than ever before, according to KT.

A San Francisco private investigator, who first learned the art of detection 40 years ago by serving an apprenticeship with super sleuth, Hal Lipset, and by studying Hammett’s novels — who wished to remain, anonymous — told me, “I would help you find Plate, but I’ve just been hired by a man with big bucks to learn if his mother is dead or alive. You’d think a man would know if his own mother was dead or alive.” He added, “Looking for someone can be challenging, and then bam? All of a sudden they reach out to you.”

Before his disappearing act, Plate often appeared in the pages of The San Francisco Chronicle. In 2001, while still riding the fame train, he wrote an op-ed piece titled, “A noir author reflects on the Mission [District] as a center of public literary life.” In the photo that accompanies the story, Plate poses in front of the apartment building where Dashiell Hammett, the father of noir, wrote The Maltese Falcon.

In 2004, he described, in another piece for The Chronicle, his Odyssey on foot across San Francisco: from the Ferry Building to the Castro. “The dialectic of Market Street is in the homeless with their shopping carts and the yuppies in their black leather jackets,” Plate wrote. He added, “At the Powell Street cable car turnaround, pickpockets, pizza delivery men, nickel-bag dealers, jugglers, mimes, saxophonists, homeboys, exhausted tourists and office workers mingle.”

In 2006, in Soon the Rest Will Fall, a prophetic novel which traces the fictional decline and near-total collapse of San Francisco, he wrote, “The police doubled their patrols. Christmas shoplifters were pilfering. Holiday customers had been jacked at gunpoint in the underground parking garages.”

 In 2008, in his last piece for The Chronicle, “S.F. Is Crime Central —On the Printed Page,” Plate observed that San Francisco is “a time bomb of poverty and wealth. The perfect canvas for the new noir. For every skyscraper, there’s a tenement. For each yuppie, there’s a wino on Market Street. The contradictions are brutal. You have to write about them.”

After 2008, he continued to write about the contradictions of San Francisco, as he sees them, and he has turned himself into a kind of contradiction: the preeminent bard of the San Francisco barrio, and at the same time the city’s most furtive author. If cities get the writers they deserve and writers get the cities they need, then perhaps San Francisco and Plate form a near-perfect couple.

In his absence, his novels speak volumes for him and about him. They also read like today’s deadline news. In Night of the Short Eyes, his most recent publication, California is on fire, people are testing positive for the virus, patrols of SWAT teams roam the streets.

At 153 pages, with short chapters, and wide margins, Night can be enjoyed in a brief sitting. Plate’s narrator— a bookish sixteen-year-old and the descendant of Russian Jews—says of himself and his friends, “we were on the run from everyone in the world.” That’s pure Plate. Two of the charactershave comic book names: Superman and The Lone Ranger; an alcoholic woman is “Frankenstein.” Yet another character, a bomb maker, is “Putin.”

Angels of Catastrophe—the title is reminiscent of Jack Kerouac’s title for his big Beat novel, Desolation Angels— might be Plate’s best work of fiction. It begins with pizzazz—“A policeman was gunned down by an unknown shooter,” and it also ends with pizzazz. The main character, Ricky Durrutti, Plate writes, “stayed awake through the night and listened to a police car’s siren have a nervous breakdown on Mission Street.”

Earlier in the story, he observes that Durrutti “was at that strangest of all crossroads, having lived long enough to make a lot of mistakes, but not long enough to fix any of them.” That too sounds like pure Plate, who might be compared to J. D. Salinger, the author of The Catcher in the Rye,and the most reclusive of all the major male writers (Norman Mailer, James Jones, William Styron, Nelson Algren and James Baldwin) who emerged in the aftermath of World War II.

Salinger published his own work in The New Yorker and became a best selling writer who decided, decades after Catcher appeared in print, that “publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy.” He stopped publishing and backed away from fame and publicity, though he didn’t hide his whereabouts. In New Hampshire, he paid workmen to build a high fence to protect his privacy. In a way Plate has built a wall around himself.

In an unpublished interview with me which was conducted nearly 20 years ago he wisely observed, “What people are not saying is as important as what they are saying.” What was Plate not saying? Read between the lines of his novels and in the margins and one can get a pretty good idea. In a way, he’s not private at all, but rather hiding in plain sight. As an author with integrity and with a unique moral compass, he deserves to be read by fans of noir, Dashiell Hammett and those who belong to the precariat.

Jonah Raskin is the author of Beat Blues, San Francisco, 1955.

THE 2024 ELECTION

Dear Editor,

Our two-party national system has begun another presidential campaigns. One thing these parties share: each party has a candidate whose been president for a four-year term. Trump from 2017-2020; Biden from 2020-2024.

What is known about each candidate? Mr. Biden sought to become president almost from Jan. 3, 1973, when he first set foot in the US Senate. He tried several times but failed to get his party’s nomination each time. As he was running in 2020, the nation struggled to cope with an unprecedented viral epidemic which killed over 1 million Americans. His administration spent billions to restructure the infrastructure, lower the price of Insulin from $35 to $15, and to aid Ukraine and Israel.

Donald Trump is being sued in different cases, after promulgating the “Big Lie,” that he won the election of 2020. He lost a sexual abuse case leaving him liable to the woman for $84 million. We should be ready for more of his usual bombast, misinformation, and kissing-up to enemy dictators. It’s a maga-menaciter or a statesman.

Frank Baumgardner III

Santa Rosa

APOLOGISTS FOR ISRAEL’S MASS MURDER IN GAZA FALL BACK ON ‘ANTISEMITISM’ CLAIMS

by Norman Solomon

If we condemn Hamas for its October 7 attacks in Israel, we’re not accused of anti-Arab bigotry. Nor should we be. Nothing could possibly justify the atrocities that Hamas committed against hundreds of civilians, who were the majority of the 1,200 people killed as a result of the attacks by Hamas forces. And nothing can justify the taking of civilian hostages.

But if we condemn Israel for its actions since then, we might be accused of antisemitism. Meanwhile, nothing could possibly justify the atrocities by Israel in Gaza, where the death toll is now estimated <https://www.ochaopt.org/> at 32,000, while uncounted thousands of other Palestinian people are buried under rubble Seventy percent of the victims have been children and women.

The U.S. government continues to make the atrocities possible. As retired Israeli Major General Yitzhak Brick said midway through the second month of the war: “All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the U.S.” He added: “Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”

Because of federal laws and minimal decency, the U.S. should have cut off all military aid to Israel long ago. A single standard of human rights should apply. But adhering to that simple, basic precept can provoke the virulent epithet of “antisemitism.”

The gist of the trick is to equate Israel with the Jewish religion -- and then to equate opposition to Israel with antisemitism.

And so, writing in the New York *Daily News* last November, an official at the American Jewish Committee declared that a “virus of antisemitism has spread to the U.S., where college campuses and city streets have been taken over by anti-Israel protesters raging, ‘From the river to the sea!’ -- a call for the mass murder of Israelis, and ‘Globalize the Intifada!’ -- an appeal to kill Jews worldwide.”

As Peter Beinart pointed out in a 2022 essay, “Under the definition of antisemitism promoted by the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee and the State Department, Palestinians become antisemites if they call for replacing a state that favors Jews with one that does not discriminate based on ethnicity or religion.”

While Israel continues to slaughter children, women and men -- no more guilty of anything than a crowd you might see at a local supermarket -- the extreme misuse of the “antisemitism” charge often boils down to: Be quiet. Don’t protest. Don’t even speak up.

Of course antisemitism does exist in the United States and the rest of the world, and it should be condemned. At the same time, to cry wolf -- to misuse the term to try to intimidate people into silence while Israel’s atrocities continue in Gaza -- is an abuse of the word antisemitism and a disservice to everyone who wants a single standard of human rights.

Last week, 17 rabbis and rabbinical students went to Capitol Hill urging a ceasefire and an end to the unconditional U.S. military aid to Israel. Rabbi May Ye said: “We are rabbis representing hundreds of thousands of Jews affiliated with Jewish Voice for Peace Action imploring our leaders to end their complicity in the Israeli military’s genocidal campaign in the name of tzedek (justice) and real safety for all people.”

Are we supposed to believe that those rabbis are antisemitic?

The Jewish American author Anna Baltzer grew up learning about the evils of antisemitism. “Much of my family was killed in the Holocaust,” she wrote. “My grandparents arrived at Ellis Island traumatized by the unfathomable murder of their families in the gas chambers of Auschwitz while the world let it happen.” And she added: “We must get clear that Israel’s wiping out of entire families in Gaza is not simply revenge for October 7; Israel is continuing its long-existing practice of forcing Palestinians out of Palestine and closing the door behind them.”

Do Baltzer’s words make her antisemitic?

In mid-October, 43 Jewish American writers, academics and artists -- including Michael Chabon, Francisco Goldman, Masha Gessen, Judith Butler, Tony Kushner, and V (formerly known as Eve Ensler) -- released an open letter to President Biden saying: “We condemn attacks on Israeli and Palestinian civilians. We believe it is possible and in fact necessary to condemn Hamas’ actions and acknowledge the historical and ongoing oppression of the Palestinians. We believe it is possible and necessary to condemn Hamas’ attack and take a stand against the collective punishment of Gazans that is unfolding and accelerating as we write.”

Along with denouncing Israel’s “war crimes and indefensible actions,” the statement added: “We write to publicly declare our opposition to what the Israeli government is doing with American assistance.”

Do those words mean that the signers of the statement are antisemitic?

Or how about the more than 100 Jewish Americans who signed the statement released this week denouncing AIPAC, the Israel-is-never-wrong lobby?

Ten years ago, 40 Holocaust survivors issued a statement condemning Israel for its “wholesale effort to destroy Gaza.” The statement, also signed by 287 people who were descendants of Holocaust survivors or victims, called for “an end to all forms of racism, including the ongoing genocide of Palestinian people” and decried “the extreme, racist dehumanization of Palestinians in Israeli society, which has reached a fever pitch.”

Were the 327 Jewish signers of the statement antisemitic?

For that matter, when I write here that the Israeli government has been committing mass murder and genocide in Gaza, does that mean I’m antisemitic?

There’s a word for seeing -- and saying -- that Israel is engaged in large-scale crimes against humanity. And that word isn’t “antisemitism.” It’s realism.

(Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of many books including War Made Easy. His latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, was published in 2023 by The New Press.)

DEVIL TERMS

by Arianne Shahvisi

One of my earliest memories is of my terrorist uncle sitting me on the roof of my father’s Volkswagen camper van. I was frightened and told him he was a “naughty boy,” which made the adults laugh. In the eyes of the Iranian government, he was a very naughty boy, having spent years as a guerrilla fighter in Komala, one of several left-wing Kurdish groups in the region that are classified as terrorist organizations. The governments of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey have between them killed hundreds of thousands of Kurds over the last few decades, and have at various points outlawed the use of Kurdish languages.

Having terrorists in the family tends to take the sting out of the word. I hear it as something shifty, puerile, cringeworthy – like “baddie” or “freak” – that reveals more about the moral conformism of those who wield it than the lives of the often desperate and disparate people it is used to denounce. Even proponents of the term must accept a definition that contains its own critique: it describes the violence that isn’t carried out by states. “Legitimate” aggression is hefty, orderly, high-tech, impassive. It looks the part. Everything else is “terrorism,” and the word has a noxious magic that banishes all scruples. Hamas killed more than 1100 people on 7 October, including 36 children. Since then Israel has killed 32,000 people in Gaza, including 13,000 children, and has bombed every single hospital, but that’s OK because there are terrorists to catch.

In his 1961 book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, Robert Jay Lifton described “thought-terminating clichés,” which occur when the most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.

Also known as “curiosity stoppers,” thought-terminating clichés can be subdivided into what the rhetorician Richard Weaver called “God terms” and “Devil terms.” For decades, “terrorist” has been the archetypal Devil term, facilitating state-sanctioned racism in the forms of murder, incarceration and surveillance, with very little public resistance. But even the most effective tools get blunt through overwork, and parliamentary transcripts document the rise in recent years of terrorism’s slyer and more versatile cousin, “extremism.” (Again, the act of defining undercuts the term: extremism is all that is not moderate, while the government gets to define moderation.)

Last week England’s communities secretary, Michael Gove, announced a revision to the definition of “extremism” which extends its purview from action to ideology. Groups defined as “extremist” are to be blacklisted by ministers and civil servants, which means no meetings and no money. The text of the new definition begins with a reference to the “pervasiveness of extremist ideologies in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in Israel on 7 October 2023.”

This sounds very worrying until you remember that Suella Braverman last November described those calling for a ceasefire in Gaza as “hate marchers.” The document goes through the motions of assuring readers that members of far-right groups can also be extremists, but the government seems most troubled by the public’s increasing sympathy with Palestinians. One of the groups rumored to be in the crosshairs of the guidance is Palestine Action, who have targeted arms factories across the UK for supplying Israel with weapons.

The new definition of “extremism” faced an unexpected early challenge when Gove was asked on Sky News whether Frank Hester, the Tories’ most munificent patron in decades, is an extremist. Last week it emerged that during a 2019 meeting at his company headquarters in Leeds, Hester told his employees that seeing Diane Abbott on television made him “want to hate all black women” and that he thought she “should be shot.” In a separate address to his “foreign” staff, the purpose of which was to counter reports of racism from former employees, he joked that the room was so crowded the Indians might prefer to sit on the roof of a nearby train. He also referred to an “Asian corner” of the office, and said he’d like to learn some jokes about Malaysian people.

In his apology, Hester claimed that the remarks he made about Abbott had nothing to do with her “gender nor color of skin.” Gove admitted that the comments were racist but offered “Christian forgiveness,” as white men are apt to do when other white men have erred, which seems very sensible, given that Hester has donated at least £10 million to the Tories in the past two years.

Diane Abbott is the most mistreated member of parliament. A report by Amnesty International in 2018 found that she received nearly half of all the abuse levelled at women politicians. Such blatant misogyny from a prominent Tory donor would have been an open goal for Keir Starmer if he hadn’t already suspended Abbott from the Labour Party last April following her bungled attempt to explain that while some white people face racism – especially Jewish, Irish, and Gypsy, Roma and Traveler people – the racism faced by Black and Brown people, whose racialization is generally more conspicuous, is more pervasive.

The reports of Hester’s obnoxious comments have also drawn attention to the fact that, over the last eight years, he has won government contracts worth £400 million to provide the software for NHS medical records through his single-shareholder company, the Phoenix Partnership. His personal wealth is valued at £415 million, accrued from the difference between the cost of running his databases and the amount he’s got away with charging us. (That’s enough to pay the salaries of 12,000 additional nurses, or to give every NHS midwife a £17,000 bonus.) Is extreme profiteering a form of extremism? Or is it one of those “liberal” values that the new definition of extremism promises to protect?

Gove is said to have a poster of Martin Luther King Jr on the wall of his office. It isn’t clear what we should make of this, but like many King fanboys, Gove would do well to read beyond the single cherry-picked quote about being judged by the content of one’s character. In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” King wrote:

“The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice?”

THE LAST INVOCATION 

by Walt Whitman

At the last, tenderly,
From the walls of the powerful fortress'd house,
From the clasp of the knitted locks, from the keep of the well-closed doors,
Let me be wafted.

Let me glide noiselessly forth;
With the key of softness unlock the locks—with a whisper,
Set ope the doors O soul.

Tenderly—be not impatient,
(Strong is your hold O mortal flesh,
Strong is your hold O love.)