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CONDITIONS in the northern areas are expected to deteriorate this weekend before a short spurt of wetting rainfalls arrives Sunday night into Monday. Southern areas will cool off but are not expected to experience any meaningful precipitation at this time. Next week, temperatures will soar to well above average from the interior to the coast, possibly reaching over 100F in some places. (NWS)
STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): On the coast this Saturday morning I have 49F under clear skies. This weekend is looking mostly sunny with a light breezes. An increasing chance for rain on Monday morning, go figure ? Clear skies the rest of next week.
Our rainfall totals:
2023: Oct 1.82” Nov 3.24” Dec 7.73”
2024: Jan 10.22” Feb 14.40” Mar 10.04” April 1.98” May 1.77”
YTD: 51.20”
COUNTY AGENDA NOTES
by Mark Scaramella
ITEM 4b on next Tuesday’s Supervisors agenda is:
“Discussion and Possible Action Including Ratification of Motion to Waive Rule #27 of the Rules of Procedures to Reconsider Agenda Item 4i from the May 7, 2024, Board of Supervisor’s Meeting; and Discussion and Possible Action Including Adoption of Resolution Amending the Position Allocation Table as Follows: Budget Unit 4050, Add 1.0FTE Director of Health Services, Salary Range $162,593.60- $197,620.80/Annually and Delete 1.0 FTE Director Behavioral Health, PN 4472; Budget Unit 4010, Delete 1.0 FTE Director Public Health, PN 4567. (Sponsor: Human Resources)”
This is agenda-speak for reconsideration of the appointment of Dr. Jenine Miller as boss of “Health Services,” a combination of Mental Health and Public Health. The item is in response to Jim Shields Brown Act complaint filed a couple of weeks ago after Supervisor Maureen Mulheren tried to improperly reconsider the item after it had been when a controversial letter in support of Dr. Miller’s appointment to the position signed by most of her employees was belatedly introduced.
The attached summary blandly adds: “This item is an administrative clean up as the classification was established on December 19, 2023 and approved by the Board of Supervisor’s but was not added to the Position Allocation Table due to an error in the resolution. In order to correct the failure to add the classification to the Position Allocation Table, Human Resources is asking to add the position to the allocation table, establish the salary based on the three comparator counties, Humboldt, Lake and Sonoma and in addition, delete 1.0 FTE, Director Behavioral Health and delete 1.0 FTE, Director Public Health.”
(Sonoma County has a “Director of Health Services.” Humboldt County has a “Department of Health & Human Services.” Until last February, Lake County had a “Health Services Director,” a Mr. Jonathan Portney. However, Mr. Portney was fired by the Lake County Board of Supervisors in February after a truncated “turbulent tenure,” clashing with other Lake County officials as senior staffers resigned in protest. At that same meeting, former Mendo Health Officer Noemi Doohan was hired as Lake County’s Public Health Officer.)
At the May 7 Board meeting, Supervisors Williams and McGourty said they wanted to see a “comprehensive plan” for the Health Services consolidation before they voted on creating the “Director of Health Services” position. On May 21 Dr. Miller described some administrative efficiencies she has already implemented, but no consolidation plan, comprehensive or not. Will Williams and McGourty follow-up on their request for a plan? Or will they give up, as seems likely, and approve the new consolidation despite the controversy and absence of a plan?
Item 4d next Tuesday is the Budget Hearing for next fiscal year (July 2024 to June 2025):
“Noticed Public Hearing - Discussion and Possible Action Including Approval of the Mendocino County Proposed Budget for Fiscal Year (FY) 2024-25, Including All Recommended Actions and Adjustments and Possible Continuation to June 5, 2024, at 9:00 A.M., If Necessary (Sponsors: Executive Office and Auditor-Controller).”
The attached “Budget Deficit Turnaround Plan” mostly the same bland list of budget topics (without specific proposals). However, there’s a newly revised topic called “Expense Management” which discusses: “use of the retirement reserve,” “real estate/consolidations,” “GSA reorganization,” “business license evaluation,” “hiring freeze,” and, more ominously, “Funding Behavioral Health Wing.”
The use of the retirement reserve to help close the budget deficit and business license evaluation are not “expense management” items. And since there are no specifics about the real estate consolidations, that doesn’t sound like expense management either.
There’s nothing in the “Budget Deficit Turnaround Plan” about staff cuts even though all five supervisors have insisted that cuts must be made in prior meetings.
Under “Funding Behavioral Health Wing” the summary explains: “Secure a $7M loan from Measure B for the Behavioral Health Wing at the County Correctional Facility: Strategically utilize Measure B funding to invest in the Behavioral Health Wing, addressing critical facility needs and enhancing mental health services.”
Again, what this funding shift has to do with “expense management” escapes us. We also don’t know what they mean by “strategically utilize Measure B funding,” other than the ill-advised, previously approved “loan” from the Measure B fund with no payback plan and no estimate of how much will be borrowed. (It apparently depends on how much the PHF ends up costing which depends on how big the pending construction bids are and whether the County is reimbursed for upwards of $9.3 million from the state.)
Again this month, there’s nothing in the “Budget Deficit Turnaround Plan” about lagging tax collection or any other revenue enhancements.
On the positive side, albeit irrelevant to the budget gap, Supervisor Maureen Mulheren is sponsoring an uplifting collection of consent calendar proclamations: “June 2024 as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer+ (LGBTQ+) Pride Month in Mendocino County”; “June 14, 2024, as ‘Wear Blue Day’ in Mendocino County”; and “Recognition of the First Poet Laureate of Mendocino County” (Devreaux Baker). Further, the Social Services Department proposes a proclamation “Recognizing June 2024, as Elder and Dependent Adult Abuse Awareness Month in Mendocino County.”
On a sad note, the consent calendar proposes: “Disbandment of the Transient Occupancy Tax (TOT) Ad Hoc Committee Comprised of Supervisors Haschak and Williams.”
This was Supervisor John Haschak’s pet proposal from last year. Haschak wanted to increase the TOT to pay for In Home Support Services pay raises or reduce the deficit in some way. The Lodging Community rejected the proposal saying it would reduce tourism, and his own fellow ad-hoccer Supervisor Williams pointed out that a small TOT increase wouldn’t raise near enough to bring IHSS workers to the state’s minimum wage. Haschak will now fold his proverbial tent, having paid no campground TOT for it himself because his proposal, not to mention his metaphorical tent, fell flat.
Buried deep in the agenda for the second day of budget hearings on Wednesday is a table of “CEO Budget Adjustments” to departmental budget requests. All the “adjustments” are reductions. The largest reduction recommendations are in law enforcement, heretofore exempt from budget cuts by frequent declarations of the Board. The CEO proposes a $1.7 million cut in the Sheriff’s requested budget, the majority of which is equipment including a microwave system expense. The CEO recommends the DA’s budget be cut by over $1.8 million; the majority of the CEO’s DA’s office cuts are listed as “regular employees,” which might prompt some pushback from the DA, although the DA — like most departments — has been carrying a significant number of vacant positions of late. Smaller reductions are proposed for all the other general fund departments totaling about $13 million which represents about 15% of the General Fund. But none of the other recommended cuts are near as large as the CEO’s recommended cuts to the Sheriff and DA.
Supervisor Williams should be pleased that for the first time in months there are no retroactive items on the consent agenda for the Board to rubberstamp.
Item 5a on Wednesday’s closed session agenda proposes that the Board discuss “initiation of litigation” for an unprecedented 18 (!) cases. No details are provided.
UKIAH VAGRANT WATCH
I am resharing this deleted post because someone related to the individual came in after seeing the original post and asked me to contact them should he return. They reported he is mentally ill with autism and left their number for us to call should he return. After I agreed to delete the post the individual wrote disparaging remarks about me in a comment. Upon returning to our business this evening he was back, sleeping in front of the building. I want to be clear to anyone who is critical of these posts that my intention is to both protect our peace and security as well as those who are living in these conditions by exposing the failure of our county and city to act. For those of you who have accused me of not having “compassion” or “empathy” for these lost souls, I submit you are the ones without compassion because what kind of person would want to enable anyone to live like this? You think you are helping with your empty compassion? You are only trapping them further. In the end we have to protect our property and our persons first. It is shameful to create a comfortable life for these suffering individuals to live outdoors among drugs, violence, and more. By the way, according to his sister Angel, this individual reportedly has an apartment yet chooses to trespass on private property when he is off his meds. (Ken McCormick)
HELLO UKIAH. IT’S THE MO YOU KNOW. I was just at the re-entry collaborative and it’s so wonderful that there are so many organizations that are talking to folks about their opportunities [unintelligible] for incarceration so that was met for people that are criminal justice involved whether they’re currently on the outs or they have friends or family members that can help them connect to resources which is very important. So a lot of providers were there, it was fantastic. Behavioral Health, Social Services, Public Health, MCAVN. I have a whole list! I’m gonna just read the list because I think it’s really important that we talk about who provides services to folks. [Unintelligible], Adventist Health, Ford Street Project, MCAVN, MCOE, Behavioral Health and Recovery Services, Career Points, Social Services, Ukiah Adult School, Department of Rehab, Legal Services, Narcotics Anonymous, Child Support Services, the Chaplain, New Life Clinic, MCHC, Pinoleville, NCO, Headstart and RCS are all there to tell you about opportunities they have to help you.
— Supervisor Mulheren, facebook video
Supervisor Mulheren was talking about a May 30 event called the “Reentry Resource Fair” at the Ukiah Veterans Hall from 11am to 3pm. “Free Raffle and Pizza.” “This event is open to justice-involved youth and adults, families with incarcerated loves ones, crime survivors, non-profit providers, advocates, volunteers working with incarcerated individuals, law enforcement professionals, probation and corrections staff, victim services, educational institutions, religioius and social organizations, health services, housing providers, second chance employers, and legal rights organizations. Contact Buffey Bourassa for more information at 707 234-2136 or bourassab@mendocinosheriff.org.”
GROUNDWATER FEES PUBLIC HEARING
The Ukiah Valley Basin Groundwater Sustainability Agency (GSA) is considering adopting a resolution establishing a groundwater sustainability fee to fund local sustainable groundwater management.
The fee resolution will be considered by the GSA Board during a public hearing on Thursday, June 13th at 10 a.m. at the County Board of Supervisors Chambers (501 Lower Gap Road).
The meeting agenda, draft resolution, draft Rate & Fee Study, and additional information is posted at www.ukiahvalleygroundwater.org. Comments or questions about the Public Hearing or Fee Study may be sent to staff@ukiahvalleygroundwater.org.
UKIAH VALLEY GROUND WATER BASIN FACES NEW GROUNDWATER FEES
by Monica Huettl
New fees for water use are coming from the Ukiah Valley Basin Groundwater Sustainability Agency.
For those who haven’t been following the news about groundwater in California, here is the situation in a nutshell: Because the groundwater in California’s Central Valley has been drastically overdrawn, leading to land subsidence and wells running dry, and because of multi-year droughts that may occur again, the State of California decided to pro-actively monitor the groundwater not only in the Central Valley, but throughout the rest of the state.…
mendofever.com/2024/05/31/ukiah-valley-ground-water-basin-faces-new-groundwater-fees
REINTERPRETATION = EXPANSION
Editor,
County Cannabis Ordinance “re-interpreted”?
Three weeks ago at a meeting of the County’s General Government Committee (Supervisors Haschak and McGourty), the County’s Cannabis Department told the two Supervisors that the Department and County Counsel had “re-interpreted” certain sections of the County Cannabis Ordinance and the Department would now be allowing a doubling of the size of cultivation areas.
The two Supervisors expressed concern about changing the rules now while the Cannabis Department is finally making headway on processing cultivation applications, and the State is gearing up to issue annual licenses to local growers. Staff responded by saying that they weren’t “changing” anything, just “re-interpreting” the meaning of the ordinance. Furthermore, staff said the report to the Committee was simply informational, and the decision had been made.
Wow! Since when does staff make policy, and then tell the Supervisors what to do? (Who did initiate this “re-interpretation”? It clearly wasn’t the General Government Committee, or the Board of Supervisors. Was it a private citizen with big cannabis dreams and privileged access to County Counsel?)
Less than two years ago, 100 citizen volunteers gathered over 6,000 signatures in only 30 days on petitions saying they did not support expanding cultivation areas beyond the current maximum of 10,000 sq. ft. per parcel. The Supervisors heard that message loud and clear and rescinded a then recently passed cannabis expansion ordinance. They need to act similarly now.
We have asked the Supervisors to tell staff to cease implementing this “re-interpretation” immediately. If any person has applied under this “re-interpretation” the application should be returned along with any fees paid.
We feel confident that this “re-interpretation” violates the language and the intent of the County’s cannabis ordinance. Our confidence is based on a careful reading of the relevant sections of the ordinance, and on the clear intent and understanding of the lawmakers and the public as recorded in numerous meetings, discussions and amendments over the last seven years.
Can an ordinance be changed? Yes, but there must be due process. The issue must be agendized at multiple Supervisors’ meetings where the Supervisors publicly discuss the issue and take comment from the public. In addition, if the proposal might result in unwanted environmental or human impacts, that potential must be fully examined and mitigated.
Join us. Please contact your Supervisor and ask him/her to reject this back-room re-write of the County’s cannabis rules.
—Ellen Drell and Kirk Lumpkin, Board Members, Willits Environmental Center
FEEL LIKE DANCING? BOONFIRE will ignite the Arena Theater stage on Saturday night, June 1 at 8pm!
Boonfire’s playlist of originals and covers features a blend of reggae, rock, and everything in between. The entire band grew up with Jamaican music, 90s Seattle grunge, and old school hip-hop, giving their original compositions a unique musical perspective that is sure to excite fans of multiple genres.
Having just released a new album, “Complexity,” fans can expect many new songs in addition to known favorites at the Arena Theater concert.
“Complexity,” released in April of this year, seamlessly blurs the lines between reggae, rock, and everything in between.
Made up of Anderson Valley and North Coast locals, the band members came together in Boonville and have played NorCal rock & reggae since 2016, having performed at many venues throughout Northern California, such as the prestigious Sierra Nevada World Music Festival in 2017, sharing the stage with the likes of Steel Pulse, The Skints, and Nattali Rize. Point Arena fans also enjoyed them at Point Arena Cove Street Fair in 2023 during the Independence Day weekend.
Boonfire@Arena
Tickets: $20 general, $10 youth (18 and under)
Saturday, June 1, Doors open at 7:30pm, Show at 8pm
The Arena Theater Bar and snack stand will be open.
MARSHALL NEWMAN: An old image of the Navarro Mill.
MARILYN MOTHERBEAR SCOTT:
Really Mind-Blowing! This is the last weekend.
Mendocino Theatre Company’s current production, BORN WITH TEETH by award-winning playwright Liz Duffy-Adams, and directed by MTC’S Artistic Director Elizabeth Craven, is am amazing journey into two of the most beloved writers of elizabethan times. Christopher Marlow and William Shakespeare, known in the play as Kit and Will. It is a a non-stop 90 minutes by these two amazing and gifted actors.
I would love to tell you more, and I will; however, it might be too late by then for you to see the play. Google the actors to see their bios. They bring incredible talent to the MTC stage.
For a ticket information go to ((707) 937-4477 or box office@ mendocinotheatre.org
FROM THE NYT:
The Gualala River pronounced (“wa-LAL-la”) marks the border between Sonoma and Mendocino counties in Northern California. Its sinuous form cuts a lazy path through ancient redwood groves to ultimately form an estuary beneath windswept coastal bluffs. Just inland, the river is breathlessly still, wrapping itself around Gualala River Redwood Park to form one of the best campground and swimming hole combinations in the state. A lacquered boom gate divides this sleepy campground from the outside world. There is no day use allowed, so you must be a registered camper or their guest to enter. Beneath the dense canopy, much of the property sits in a permanent twilight. The forest trails are dusted with soft redwood branchlets and needles, campsites are divided by wild sorrel and ferns. The silence here is so complete that it becomes addictive. It spreads across the forest like freshly fallen snow, distorting our sense of time. For once, my wife and I sleep like two people who are not living in an RV with a toddler.
The most coveted spots overlook the river, whose current carves deep green pools as it arcs around the pebble beach (a river-view campsite is $90 a night). As the fog retreats, sunlight pierces the impossibly clear water and warms the dark sand below. People dive in with whoops of delight. Native coho salmon and steelhead trout glide in the shadowy depths, seemingly unfazed by the commotion. Lost among the trees, Gualala feels like an outlier, setting its own rhythms and casting a spell on all who visit.
ED NOTES
THE MOST CONVINCING BOOK on the infamous Zodiac killer is Robert Graysmith’s ‘Zodiac.’ The author makes it clear that it was the failure of non-cooperating police jurisdictions that allowed a psychotic Vallejo man by the name of Arthur Leigh Allen to go on killing and killing up through the early 1980's, although the cops knew early in 1969 that Allen was almost certainly the Zodiac.
ZODIAC, we won't be surprised to learn, often visited Mendocino County where he hunted, fished and dove for abalone. Presumably, Zodiac's Mendo expeditions did not include human hunts, his favorite form of outdoor recreation, but I've heard rumors for years of a Comptche cabin with Zodiac's infamous symbol painted on an outside wall, discovered when Z first became news.
THE BIG Z also lived in a Santa Rosa trailer park for extended periods of time from where he sallied forth to murder women he picked up as hitchhikers. The Santa Rosa cops visited him often because they, like every other cop who dealt with the guy, knew he was probably the brazen maniac who was knocking people off then bragging in the SF Chronicle about it.
ZODIAC was a formidably intelligent maniac, however, and Graysmith reveals that the cops were even more terrified of him than the general public because they knew their guy was also a weapons expert, a crack shot, and physically as strong as three men. Although he was mostly a career student, finally getting a diploma in biology from Sonoma State and an employee of no questions asked hardware stores and service stations; earlier in life Leigh-Zodiac had been an All-American junior college diver.
AMONG the book's many eerie passages — and you'll be looking over your shoulder and checking door locks if you read it at night — was an account by a passerby who told the Vallejo police he'd just seen a hugely fat white guy do a fancy triple-flip midnight high dive into a remote reservoir in the hills above Vallejo. Zodiac enjoyed his late night dips, it seems, and was often seen lumbering purposefully along country roads on full moon nights.
NEITHER THE CIA nor the FBI's cryptographers could crack Zodiac's coded messages; it took a Salinas school teacher to do that after a public appeal for amateurs to have a go at the Zodiac-messages. It took the FBI about half an hour to decode the Unabomber's diaries, if you're interested in comparing lunatic ability levels. Big Z was a lot better at crank messaging than Ted the K.
WHAT'S DISMAYING about Graysmith's account of the Zodiac murders is the departmental police rivalries that got in the way of Zodiac's early arrest. Everyone who knew the guy was saying, “Hey. This Leigh Allen guy is seriously off the hook. I'm pretty sure he's the Zodiac.” The cops would look and agree, but then Zodiac would kill someone in another area and the cops either didn't make the connection with their guy or dragged their feet in info-sharing because they didn't like the lawmen from another town or county.
ALLEN'S sister-in-law, for instance, was on to Big Z early on. She told the cops they'd better take a close look at her coo-coo brother-in-law way, way back, even if her husband was slow to concede the obvious. She thought it peculiar that her relative collected chipmunk hearts in his freezer, flipped out a lot and just happened to have been visiting places where Zodiac had killed someone. Lots of people besides his sister-in-law came forward to ID Mr. Allen.
GRAYSMITH'S RIVETING update of his earlier Zodiac book has been made possible by Allen's death in 1992. Zodiac died of natural causes in the mega-weird basement apartment of the Vallejo house he'd grown up in. When police arrived to retrieve his remains and have a look around, they found a mini-museum's worth of documents, tapes, videos, and newspaper stories celebrating Allen's career as a mass murderer.
JEFF BURROUGHS: Mendocino County Fair and Apple Show
In the year 1936 horse racing was legalized in the state of California making way for the much needed funding for the fair to continue. The area for the 1st race track was located just west of the junction of highway 253 and highway 128, just south of Boonville. Consisting of about 5 + acres the land had been donated to the Fair and Apple Show by Mr. Edward Singley, a long time resident of Bell Valley. The horse races were actually sponsored by the State of California in the early years of the apple show that created a great deal of excitement for the residents of Anderson Valley. At one of these races a young man by the name of Delmar June entered his horse, much to the delight of the locals of Boonville. Delmar's horse was as fast as greased lighting but it seems that it had been deemed an outlaw and too wild to ride. The horse had gotten this reputation because of an incident at one of the race tracks in the Bay Area where the wild horse had killed the jockey. The horse had been sold and put out to pasture at Mr. Hotel's ranch just south of Boonville where Delmar June saw the horse streaking through the brushy meadows faster than anything that had ever run at the race track. Delmar begged and pleaded with his father, Harwood June, to buy the horse and after some time Harwood finally relented and paid the $25 for the wild horse.
Delmar was just a little too big to ride against the other, smaller and light jockeys so Delmar enlisted the help of a young black man (probably Albert or George Jeans) who was the right size and weight to ride the horse. The first day of racing at the track was on a Saturday and as Delmar and the young jockey readied their horse for the first race, into the arena came the most beautiful, slim legged and obviously well trained horses ever seen at the Boonville race track.
All day Saturday Delmar, his wild horse and timed young jockey were beaten soundly in every race and by the time Sunday rolled around, the odds on Delmar’s horse had risen to 100 to 1. Deciding that the jockey wasn’t using the horse to its full potential, young Delmar June saddled his horse with a big heavy high horned saddle and climbed up on it himself. The professional riders snickered at the young inexperienced Delmar as they all lined up at the starting gate.
A member of the Rawles family, having been up most of the night and still a little high, plopped down $5 dollars on Delmar and his so called wild horse. Holding a drink in one hand,and a hearty "thumbs up" with the other, the bell chimed and they were off. Delmar’s horse spooked and made a few circles in the dust before he could get it going down the track. To this day, people say there had never been so much screaming at the race track as when Delmar and his $25 wild horse rounded the first turn he had already caught up to the pack, and by the time they had reached the second turn Delmar was quickly gaining ground, weaving through the pack of well groomed and expensive horses. Then down the stretch they all came, the crowd yelling louder and louder, the horses going faster and faster but as the checkered flag waved over the finish line, it was Delmar and his $25 horse that had won by a good 4 or 5 lengths! The crowd went wild and Mr. Rawles collected the largest amount of winnings ever recorded at the race track in Boonville.
CATCH OF THE DAY, Friday, May 31, 2024
MICHAEL BLAHUT, Ukiah. Vandalism.
VICTORIA LADD, Clearlake/Ukiah. County parole violation.
RYAN LOOMIS, Ukiah. Probation revocation.
VICTOR MARTINEZ, Arbuckle/Ukiah. DUI, resisting.
TREVOR RAYMOND, Willits. County parole violation.
JUAN RIVERA, Ukiah. DUI with priors.
DONALD SPENCER, Ukiah. Criminal threats.
MEMO OF THE AIR: Live on KNYO from Franklin St. in Fort Bragg all night Friday night!
Marco here. Deadline to email your writing for tonight's (Friday night's) MOTA show is 5:30. Or, if the time comes and goes, send it whenever it's done and I'll read it on the radio next week. There's no pressure.
I'm in town for this one. I'll be in the cluttered but well-lighted back room of KNYO's 325 N. Franklin studio. If you want to come in and show off, that's good if you're in good health. but wait till after 10pm, though, because I expect a call early from Midwestern science-fiction powerhouse Stuart Hardwick. To call and read your work in your own voice on the air, the number is 707-962-3022, also after 10pm, please.
Wherever I'm doing it from, Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio is every Friday, 9pm to 5am on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg as well as everywhere else via KNYO.org. Also the schedule is there for KNYO's many other terrific shows. Just the first hour of the show is also on KAKX 89.3fm Student Powered Radio in Mendocino now and for the foreseeable future.
As always, at https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com you'll find educational/musical/artistic/ironic amusements to absorb and wick away your nervous energy until showtime, or any time, such as:
Bifurcated girls. “Santal-midy is the Standard remedy for Gleet, Gonorrhoea and Runnings, in 48 hours. Cures Kidney and Bladder Troubles.” (Gleet! You sure don't want that to get a foothold in your early 20th century privates.) (via NagOnTheLake) https://flashbak.com/vanity-fairs-bifurcated-girls-the-article-that-introduced-america-to-girlie-magazines-1903-467971
Pretty College of RKO Radio Pictures, where girls are trained to be a Hollywood star. It's about posture, mostly, and being a good sport. https://www.vintag.es/2024/05/rko-starlets.html
And Led Zeppelin live on Danish teevee in 1969. https://laughingsquid.com/led-zeppelin-danmarks-radio-1969
Marco McClean, memo@mcn.org, https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com
MAUREEN CALLAHAN:
Trump lost. So has America.
Not that you would know it from most of yesterday's news coverage, so-called reporters and journalists practically levitating over 34 guilty verdicts in a trial that was nothing but a political hit job.
You can dislike Donald Trump, as I and so many others do, and still find yourself outraged.
This case — which the feds declined to prosecute — was falsely, flimsily predicated on 'election interference'.
Want to talk election interference? How about keeping the GOP nominee for president off the campaign trail for nearly two months? Or scheduling his sentencing just four days before the Republican convention?
To all the progressives who are gloating and cheering — well, live it up now, because you've probably just handed Trump another four years.
America is diminished by this. We are becoming smaller and pettier with no reversal in sight.
This is a loss beyond legality. It's hard to take pride in a nation that not only abides this but revels in it.
Not for nothing did Trump's website crash yesterday. Working people, struggling in this economy that Biden insists is gangbusters, are donating in outrage. Trump's campaign raised a mind-blowing $34.8 million within hours of the verdict.…
MARIE TOBIAS:
Trump is just the most egregious example of an American Privileged class who has every reason to believe that laws and social contracts don't apply to them. As long as you can afford a stable of top legal talent, you can indeed shoot someone in the middle of 5th Avenue in broad daylight and walk away without so much as a wrist-slap. OJ proved that to everyone.
We've spent the last 60 years allowing the wealthy to hijack our democracy, and transform it into the dystopia we celebrate today. With Democracy dangling by a fraying thread and billionaires dumping hundreds of millions into black money political pools, try with all their might to break that final strand.
Donald is their boy, he's one of them, he's got their back (for a price), and they know they can rely on him to sell the nation off piecemeal as long as he get's top dollar personally (I mean the man's a Real Estate guy, what part of this doesn't make sense.) So felon, child rapist, beastiality afficianado, necrophile? None of that matters. Traitor, imbecile, goose stepping neo nazi? It's moot. He's a blunt instrument. The big ugly orange haired stick that will smack the pinata hard enough to knock the candy out.
The worst part, is that about a third of the society lives in abject superstition, spoon fed to them by the likes of Rupert Murdoch and friends… Q-Anon rubes voting for their own extinction, in the belief they have some access to magical truths obscured by the all mighty and bestowed upon them by devine grace pouring from the lips of the Cynical Men and Women who trade in lies for political power.
We need to declare a National Emergency. Stop the normal governing process for 6 months as we reform our Government. We need to Create a Nonpartisan Reparative Body, who's job is to go from Government Branch to Branch, transparently in the face of the nation and with the public scrutiny of every American, and root out the rot, person by person. Clean up each public institution including and especially regarding anything that goes bang and makes live people into dead people. Re-Centering the public sector as focused purely on service, and social contribution. People looking to take from society need to be expunged. People looking to turn government into a means from controlling and bleeding the masses need to be sent packing, preferably to an institution of criminal confinement.
Every child needs to be taught what our government is, how it became, who it belongs to, and how we are each of us responsible for it. That we don't all agree, have never all agreed, and that is not only fine, but an essential aspect of of a diverse plurality, and the key is how we embrace one another’s disagreements. And still find a way to bang out a consensus, a path towards a world that serve everyone, top to bottom.
THE ACTOR NEVER KNEW they would use a real horse’s head. This was May 1971 and John Marley was preparing to perform in the most iconic scene in ‘The Godfather,’ playing the corrupt movie producer who wakes up to find a horse’s head in his bed. Reportedly, Marley assumed this would just be a plastic prop. But the director, Francis Ford Coppola, had other ideas. In a note to himself, Coppola observed, “If the audience does not jump out of their seats on this one, you have failed.” So he quietly sent an assistant to a dogfood factory to pick up a genuine head, newly hewn from the shoulders of a racehorse. She brought the stinking object back in a freezer box and it was slipped into the bed with Marley for maximum authenticity. At one point, the story goes, the actor’s bare toe nudged against the bloody head, and he lost control: by that account, his screams of horror are real. (The blood was fake.)
GLOAT WHILE YOU STILL CAN
by James Kunstler
“The hour is much later than you think…on multiple fronts: Financial, political, medical and geopolitical.” — Edward Dowd
In the pre-gloat hours before the verdict in Judge Juan Merchan’s courtroom, Lawfare caporegime Andrew Weissmann (“Mueller’s Pitbull”) confessed Valley Girl style from his MSNBC clubhouse perch, “…I mean, I am, like, now I have a man-crush on him, he is such a great judge!” Bromance on, looks like! If the two happen to frequent the same athletic club in downtown Manhattan, Judge Merchan better be careful in the post-workout shower when he bends over to pick up the soap. The Pitbull cometh!
Of course, the Alvin Bragg victory in the artfully constructed “Stormy Daniels Payoff Case” decided late Thursday calls to question how come the Mueller Special Counsel Probe into 2016 election interference (actually run by Mr. Weissmann, due to Mr. Mueller’s declining cognitive ability) failed to spot the same web of evidence — hard as they toiled, and they had a good two years and millions of taxpayer dollars to git’er done?
My guess: too many white lawyers on the Mueller staff. Everybody knows now from watching the latest crop of television commercials that white people are unusually stupid and helpless and cannot cope with common problems without assistance from helpful people of color (POCs). So, God bless Alvin Bragg for finally fixing what Bob Mueller’s fifteen bloodhounds led by a pitbull somehow botched.
The former president is now convicted on thirty-four counts of book-keeping errors in furtherance of an alleged 2016 federal election violation that the Federal Election Commission declined to charge — that is, paying a porn star to sign a non-disclosure agreement about a sexual liaison — because it is not a crime under federal election law, and about which the head of the FEC, James E. “Trey” Trainor III, was barred by Judge Merchan from testifying on during the course of the trial for reasons yet unknown.
Of course, that is but one of a great many points of law that will merit appeal in what everybody — even some white people (people of non-color, PONCs) — knows was a case so crookedly contrived that it is fated to get tossed in the higher courts, and probably with harsh remonstrance to the degenerate officers of the court who brought it and adjudicated it. But you will have to wait on that because the mills of the law grind slowly.
Now, in the radiance of the full Woke gloat, we await Judge Merchan’s sentence, to be announced a mere few days before the Republican Convention in Milwaukee in early July. Jail time at Rikers? Home confinement (with ankle bracelet)? Severe travel restrictions? Reporting to a parole officer? Drug tests? Hey, No one is above the law! It is hard to imagine that the judge will demur from inflicting maximum humiliation on this wanton repeat violator (thirty-four times!) of book-keeping errors. It would tend to interfere with the presidential candidate’s campaign schedule, but so what? Where does it say in the Constitution that an election must be fair?
Or Judge Merchan could suspend all that pending appeal and just allow Mr. Trump to go about his election business free on bail. But why would he? After all the trouble he went to. And all the glory he’s reaping for it. “Joe Biden’s” party has Mr. Trump exactly where they want him, they think: pinned down like a moth in a shadow-box, inert and pathetic. (But, in reality, more like King Kong, chained in the rank basement below the stage of a Broadway theater before busting loose in midtown and upending subway cars so as to devour the little humans tumbling out like so many tic-tacs.)
Expect Mr. Trump’s lawyers to file writs to the SCOTUS requesting expedited attention to the denial of due process issues and the election interference question. The situation is comparable to the year 2000 presidential race, where the SCOTUS stepped in on probable cause that the lower court (in Florida that time) had violated the Equal Protection clause of the constitution.
In the meantime, through the luminescent fog of gloat, perhaps you did not notice that “Joe Biden” took a giant step yesterday toward commencing World War Three. The move was framed as the US gives Ukraine permission to use American missiles to strike deep within Russia. That was a bit disingenuous, you see, because Ukraine’s military lacks the know-how to actually launch the missiles, so American military “advisors” will have to be on hand to do it, meaning US military personnel will commit an act of aggression upon Russia.
Voila! That world war you’ve all been clamoring for…? The perfect climax to “Joe Biden’s” catastrophic, fraudulently-acquired term in office. I scent the acrid, burnt-flesh odor of miscalculation here, as of a bunch of American cities get turned into radioactive bonfires that will blot out that sublime luminosity of gloat.
Apparently, the “Joe Biden” team has never seen a Clint Eastwood movie — too lowbrow, I’m sure — and they don’t grok the role of the underdog in the American psyche. They have succeeded in making Donald Trump the greatest underdog in US history under the direst circumstances the nation may have ever faced — worse than Valley Forge, Bull Run, or the Ardennes Forest. Sinister forces are driving the country straight into a communo-fascist despotism alien to our nation’s very soul, demonic forces bent on depriving Americans of their rights, their property, and their liberty. This is the “all-is-lost” moment in that movie. This is where the hero comes back from the edge of eternal darkness, raging like Kali the Destroyer to smite the cowards arrayed against him, against the country’s honor, against the people. You asked for it. Now you’re going to get it.
WHO BY FIRE? THE BURNING OF RAFAH’S TENT PEOPLE
by Jeffrey St. Clair
“Oh hell, what do mine eyes with grief behold?”
– John Milton, Paradise Lost
People were saying their evening prayers when the IDF attacked the refuge camp at Tel al-Sultan in southern Gaza, where thousands had fled from the Israeli invasion of Rafah. They were told by the Israelis this was a safe zone, a secure place to shelter their children and grandparents.
“For your safety, the Israeli Defense Force is asking you to leave these areas immediately and to go to known shelters in Deir el Balah or the humanitarian area in Tel al-Sultan through Beach Road,” read one of the leaflets dropped in Rafah a few days before. “Don’t blame us after we warned you.”
The safe zone was a tent city amid the dunes–one of dozens scattered along more than 16 kilometers up the Gaza coast. The tents were made of plastic, which whipped and frayed in the coastal winds–a thin layer of protection against the sun and sand that soon turned into a death trap.
The lure of safety was the only thing Tel al-Sultan had going for it. The conditions in the camp were wretched. Thousands of starving people crammed together with little fresh water, meager rations, few toilets and nothing much to do except scavenge the beach for scraps of food, dig pit toilets in the sand and pray that someone will intervene to put an end to the war.
When the Israeli bombs strafed the safe zone, the plastic tents caught fire, sending flames leaping two meters high, before the melting, blazing structures collapsed on the people inside, many of them children who’d just been tucked in for the evening.
There was no water to put the flames out. No firetrucks to stop the inferno. No ambulances to rush the wounded to the hospital. No functioning hospital to treat the burned and the maimed.
At least 45 people, most of them women and children, were killed and nearly 300 injured with shrapnel wounds, burns, fractures and traumatic brain injuries.
“No single health facility in Gaza can handle a mass casualty event such as this one,” said Samuel Johann of Médecins Sans Frontières. “The health system has been decimated and cannot cope any longer.”
The attack came two days after the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to halt its military operations in Gaza, open the border crossings so food, water and medicine could reach the starving Palestinians and allow human rights investigators into the Strip. This malicious act of defiance against the edicts of international law occurred on the same day Israeli tanks entered the central region of Rafah in what the Israelis had basely billed as a “limited military operation.” In the first 48 hours after the ICJ ruling, Israel bombed Rafah at least 60 times.
Tel al-Sultan in western Rafah is an official displacement camp, so designated by the Israelis. The Israelis called it: “Block 2371.” It is located next to UN aid warehouses. Desperate Palestinian families were told they would be safe here. Then the Israelis set it on fire, claiming they were targeting two Hamas operatives. The IDF said it didn’t think civilians would be harmed when it bombed the refuge camp it had told civilians to flee to.
Disingenuousness is the IDF’s calling card these days. Yet after one massacre after another, perhaps only the Biden administration believes it. Most Israelis don’t. Some prominent Israelis cheered the burning of civilians. The Israeli TV journalist and newspaper columnist Yinon Magal posted a video of the burning refugee camp with the caption: “The central bonfire this year in Rafah”–a reference to the traditional bonfires for the Jewish holiday of Lag Ba’Ome.
“I lost five family members,” said Majed al-Attar of the “bonfire.” “We were sitting in tents when suddenly the camp was bombed. I lost five family members, all burned completely. Among the victims were pregnant women. They kept telling us this area was safe until we were bombed.”
Israel said its targets were two Hamas operatives: Khaled al-Najjar and Yassin Abu Rabia. Al-Najjar was said to be a “senior staff officer.” Abu Rabia, the Israelis claimed, was Hamas’ West Bank staff commander. Were they really part of Hamas’ leadership? Who’s to say? It is known that both men had been released from Israeli prisons in 2011 by Netanyahu in the prisoner swap that freed captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. Both men were also originally from the West Bank and had been expelled by the Israelis to Gaza. How long had Abu Rabia and al-Najjar been on the IDF’s so-called “target bank,” a hit list of Palestinians the Israeli army and intelligence can kill at will for acts committed years in the past?
“Bombing a tent camp full of displaced people is a clear-cut, full-on war crime,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, former head of disaster relief for US AID. “Even if Hamas troops were present, that does not absolve the IDF of the obligation to protect civilians. It does not turn a tent camp into a free fire zone.”
Who picked the targets? Who tracked them to the tent camp? Who okayed the airstrike? Was it the Israelis’ Lavender AI software program, which permits 20 “uninvolved civilians” to be killed for each targeted junior member of Hamas and 100 civilians to be killed “in exchange” for a senior member?
“We were sitting safely and suddenly we find bodies thrown on the ground, blood splattered on the ground — heads cut off, hands cut off,” said Malak Filfel. “This is not a life. There is no safety. We’re not getting out. No matter where we go, we will die here.”
Video of the attack showed babies thrashing in pain, women with their skin blackened to a crisp, men with their faces melted to the skull, a decapitated child, parents clutching the bodies of their burned children in their arms, a boy screaming in anguish as he watches his father being burned alive inside a flaming tent. “We pulled out children who were in pieces,” Mohammed Abuassa told the Associated Press. “We pulled out young and elderly people. The fire in the camp was unreal.”
Israel defended itself by saying the murderous attack stayed within the boundaries Biden and Blinken had outlined for such massacres. They used small bombs (smaller at 250 pounds than the 2000-pound blockbusters Biden briefly decried to CNN, anyway) that were precision-guided to their target (a refugee camp in the humanitarian zone they had designated).
And so they did. The GBU-39 bombs that burned the Rafah tent camp were made in the US by Boeing (a company the Portland State students targeted in their occupation of the campus). Biden has sold Israel more than 1,000 of these incendiary weapons since October. “They send us chickpeas,” one Palestinian said. “And to the Israelis they send weapons.”
Still, days after CNN and the New York Times confirmed that Israel bombed the tent camp with US-made weapons, the Biden administration refused to cop to it, claiming ignorance. The State Department’s hapless PR flack Vedant Patel was sent out to try, ineptly, to deflect attention from Israel’s use of a bomb made and designed in the US which the Biden administration has repeatedly urged the Israelis to use more frequently in its war on Gaza–a bomb designed to spray shrapnel fragments as far as 2,000 feet.
Reporter: Do you have any comment on CNN and NYT’s reports that the Israelis used US weapons in the Rafah attack?
Patel: I’m gonna let the IDF speak to their investigation…
Reporter: I’m asking you, was this a US weapon?
Patel: It’s not for us to speak to. We can’t speak to individual weapons load-outs to individual Israeli aircraft. So I will let the IDF speak to their investigation’s findings and indicate anything they have to share about what weapons were used.
The US largely stands mute as Israel turns evacuation zones into zones of extermination. Instead, Biden continues to repeat discredited stories of Israeli children burned in ovens or decapitated by Hamas, while saying nothing about actual Palestinian children decapitated and burned alive by US-made weapons.
After the images of burning tents and charred bodies spread across the world igniting a new round of global indignation and disgust, Netanyahu made a rare, if half-hearted, attempt at damage control, calling the bombing a “tragic mistake.” Once is a mistake, twice a “tragic mistake.” 15,000 times is a genocide.
In eight months of war, Israel has killed thirty times more children in Gaza than Russia has killed Ukrainian children in two years and years months of war. Gaza’s population is just 1/18th the size of Ukraine’s. But instead of sanctioning Israel, Biden and Blinken have threatened to sanction the one agency that’s tried to hold it accountable: the ICJ. Every atrocity Israel gets away with encourages it to do something even more grotesque.
Two days after the firebombing of Tel al-Sultan, Israel attacked another tent encampment for displaced Palestinians, this time in Al-Mawasi, a Bedouin village in a coastal area on the outskirts of Rafah. Like Tel al-Sultan, Al-Mawasi was a designated humanitarian zone, packed with families, when it was struck by at least four Israeli tank shells, probably the highly destructive 120 mm shells supplied by the Biden administration. At least 21 Palestinians were killed in the shelling inside what Israel has designated a civilian evacuation zone and another 65 were injured, 10 of them critically. Twelve of the dead were women.
Biden’s National Security Advisor John Kirby said there was nothing in the massacres on Sunday or Tuesday that would prompt the United States to rethink its military aid to Israel.
Reporter: How does this not violate the red line the President laid out?
John Kirby: We don’t want to see a major ground operation in Rafah and we haven’t seen one.
Reporter: How many more charred corpses does he have to see before the President considers a change in policy?
John Kirby: I take offense at the question…
Typically, Kirby took offense at the question, but not the children carbonized by US-made bombs.
Biden has voluntarily tied himself to a regime that burns children to death as they sleep in tents they were forced to move into by the people who incinerated them. His red lines are drawn in the blood of Palestinian babies.
(Jeffrey St. Clair is editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book is An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (with Alexander Cockburn). He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net or on Twitter @JeffreyStClair3.)
HUBERT SUMLIN
“Wolf and I had some tremendous fights. He knocked my teeth out, and I knocked his out.” Hubert Sumlin.
Few musical marriages have been so magical, so intuitively right, as that of the great blues singer Howlin’ Wolf and his guitarist, Hubert Sumlin. From the time he joined the blues legend’s band in 1954 until Wolf’s death in 1976.
When I first got with Wolf, he told me that I wasn’t ready to play his music, so I should go home and think about it for a day, a week, a month or a year, whatever it took. “Come back when you’re ready,” he said. “When you figure out how to play my stuff, then you’re hired.” I went home and prayed and slept with my guitar under my pillow trying to figure something out, because I knew that this man was serious. Wolf did not bullshit.
I had played with a pick for eight or nine years, and I couldn’t put it down. Then I woke up one morning and started playing without a pick, and the first thing I thought of was “Smokestack Lightnin.’ ” I played it better than I ever had and realized, I don’t need no pick. I don’t need anything but my fingers. And that was it.
Sumlin played a central role in crafting some of the century’s most memorable and influential American roots music. His economical, stinging fills, unusual rhythmic approach and perfectly placed bent notes are as integral as Wolf’s growl to the blues power of classics like “Spoonful,” “Smokestack Lightnin’,” “Killing Floor” and “The Red Rooster.”
Sumlin backed Howlin’ Wolf for 23 years, a stretch broken only by six months in 1956 when he worked for Wolf’s arch rival, Muddy Waters. After Wolf’s death, Sumlin launched his long-delayed solo career, becoming a Chicago blues club fixture and making occasional festival appearances.
HERE IS BETTE DAVIS WITH HATTIE MCDANIEL
During WW2, Hattie was the Chairman of a troupe she had formed that supported the black servicemen. Bette was the only white participant who supported and performed for the black troops.
ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
People are still going to Hawaii for two week vacations, still buying $800,000 single family homes and still driving around in luxury Chevy pickup trucks that cost $110,000. Things are still great and hunky-dory in America. Why should they not vote for “Joe Biden.” Nobody will give a shit until they lose their debt laden never to be paid off lifestyle. As long as the credit continues to flow they will continue to vote the same way they always have.
IRISH AMERICAN PUNK MUSICIAN MAT CALLAHAN TAKES DEEP DIVE INTO BLACK AMERICAN MUSIC AND SONG
by Jonah Raskin
I’m a white guy and so is my friend and comrade, Mat Callahan, both of us reinventing ourselves in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter movement, like other white guys who have wanted to stay relevant. Callahan and I both grew up in lefty families listening to Paul Robeson, Odetta and Leadbelly and learning about labor, anti-slavery and abolitionist history. The Callahans were Irish Catholics and didn’t attend a church. The Raskins were Russian Jews and didn’t attend a synagogue. I was born in New York in ’42, Mat in San Francisco in ’51.
The nine year separation, along with the continental divide made a big difference especially when the Sixties shook up the US. I went to college and became a prof. Callihan bought a guitar and played in a rock ‘n’ roll band. In the punk era one of his bands was called “The Looters.” The name, “The Looters,” came from Bob Marley and the Wailers’ song “Burnin’ and Lootin’.” The Looters boosted two white members and two Black members. “Not everyone in the Looters was a revolutionary,” Callahan explains. “But the idea behind it was liberation.” Liberation was behind much of what I wrote about in books such as The Mythology of Imperialism and Out of the Whale, an autobiography. In the aftermath of the Sixties and more recently in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement we’ve both foregrounded race, racism and anti-racist protests in our own work.
I caught up with Callahan who lives in Geneva, Switzerland on a recent visit he made to San Francisco, his hometown where he talked about his new book, Songs of Slavery and Emancipation, his two CDs that feature some of those songs and the movie he made that celebrates the long and sometimes buried history of African American resistance to bondage and the centuries long struggles for liberty. Callahan could not have written that book and made the movie if it were not for the help he received from Black institutions, Black scholars and Black activists. For them it was no problem that he was a white guy; I have had much the same experience. No Black person has ever told me “go away,” “get outta here” or “stay in your place, whitey,” not in the Sixties in New York or today in San Francisco. If you’re an anti-racist you’re welcome no matter what the color of your skin or your ethnicity.
Callahan’s book, which is published by the University of Mississippi Press in the Margaret Walker Anderson Series in African American Studies, belongs on the same shelf with Eric Foner’s Gateway to Freedom, Robin D. G. Kelley’s Race Rebels and Manisha Sinha’s The Slave’s Cause. The cover illustration features a 1961 charcoal and carbon pencil drawing titled “Move On Up a Little Higher” by the esteemed African American artist Charles White, well known to Callahan, his parents and their San Francisco friends and comrades.
Publication of Songs of Slavery and Emancipation, along with the release of Callahan’s two CDs and the screening of his film come at an opportune moment when racists in state houses, state capitals, and in the streets of Washington, D.C. and Charleston, South Carolina, for example , along with the authors of noxious text books, are reviving hoary lies and falsehoods about the enslavement of African Americans.
Also, when African Americans and their friends and allies around the world are battling those lies and falsehoods and offering counter narratives in The 1619 Project from The New York Times Magazine and in novels such as Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Percival Everett’s James, which reimagines and recreates Mark Twain’s story about Jim, an enslaved runaway who goes down the Mississippi with a white boy named Huck. Indeed, now perhaps more than any time since the Sixties is the moment to reimagine, recreate, and to foreground the roles of African Americans in American history and their place in American literature.
Callahan grew up listening to Paul Robeson singing “Go Down Moses,” and other spirituals—and heard his parents praise the achievements of Harriet Tubman and the underground railroad, Frederick Douglass, the abolitionists’ cause and W. E. B. Du Bois, the author of The Souls of Black Folk and one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)— but he didn’t know much in detail about the efforts of African Americans to break the chains that defined them as chattel and property. Nor did he know much about the vital role that music and song played in the anti-slavery cause. Few Americans did. But he suspected that, like his own Irish ancestors, Blacks had to have had rebel songs, even though they had not been publicized by historians in part because they were part of an oral tradition and not written down.
The name of Callahan’s punk band, the Looters, came from Bob Marley and the Wailers’ song “Burnin’ and Lootin’.” The integrated Looters boosted two white members and two Black members. “Not everyone in the Looters was a revolutionary,” Callahan explains. “But the idea behind it was liberation.”
Callahan’s life changed radically on the day he walked into a San Francisco bookstore, bought and immediately read “a dog-eared pamphlet,” as he calls it, titled “Negro Slave Revolts in the United States, 1526-1860” written by the white Marxist and communist historian Herbert Aptheker and published in 1939. Aptheker would go on to write and publish American Negro Slave Revolts (1943), a classic in the field, and to compile the seven volume Documentary History of the Negro People (1951–1994) The 1939 pamphlet persuaded Callahan to think deeply about the origins and the evolution of African American rebellions and insurrections which preceded and followed 1619, the year usually heralded as the beginning of the African American experience in the “New World.” The history of the anti-slavery cause went back further in time than credited in conventional narratives he concluded.
Aptheker’s pamphlet sent Callahan on a long and winding road that took him from Geneva, Switzerland to the Deep South in the US, to Berea College in Kentucky, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., to scholars such as Foner, Kelley, Eileen Southern and Josephine Wright as well as to activists and organizers, including Kali Akuno, the executive director of Cooperation Jackson, based in Mississippi.
By the end of his nine-year journey, Callahan published his book, Songs of Slavery and Emancipation, the companion CDs and a movie that features on-camera interviews with notables such as Akuno, and with the jubilant faces of students at Berea College in Kentucky singing in harmony and with their hearts. Found in 1855, Berea is a minor miracle in the academic world. The first college in the American South to be coeducational, ethnically diverse and integrated, it now offers work study grants and a diverse curriculum to young working class men and women from Appalachia and around the world.
Berea provided Callahan with real financial support, essential cooperation for his project and a solid endorsement. From his home in Mississippi, Kali Akuno contributed an impassioned essay about the “contemporary relevance of songs of slavery and emancipations.” That essay is published as the afterword to Callahan’s book. “Songs like ‘Nat Turner,’ and ‘Hymn of Freedom,’ bring inspiration and revolutionary clarity to contemporary struggles,” Akuno writes.
UCLA Professor Robin D. G. Kelley, in his comprehensive, scholarly introduction to the book, explains that “America’s modern freedom songs can be traced directly to enslaved Africans and the men and women dedicated to destroying human bondage.” Kelley adds that our folk music “was forged in the crucible of slavery.” Whether you call it folk music or people’s music it led to the blues, to jazz, to rock ‘n’ roll, to musicals and opera. Indeed, Black culture lies at the heart of much of American culture from Charles “Buddy” Bolden to Bessie Smith, and from Duke Ellington to Motown and to rap and hip hop.
Songs of Bondage and Emancipation reprints Aptheker’s 1939 pamphlet that sent Callahan on the road to the past. It offers the lyrics to 14 abolitionist songs, such as “Flight of the Bondman” from 1848, and 15 “slave songs,” including “The Dirge of St. Malo,” from 1784, which includes lines that anticipate “Strange Fruit,” Billie Holiday’s blues masterpiece. The harrowing words to the 1784 song read, “They hauled him from the cypress swamp,” “on the Levee he was hung,” and “they left his body swinging there.” It was originally published in 1886 in the Century Magazine.
In Chapter One, “Finding the Songs” Callahan describes his own detective work that led him to uncover lost, forgotten and little- known historical documents that told him that “slaves gathering in insurrections or caught planning one were also observed singing,” and that “at certain times and places, drumming was forbidden.” He concluded, as others before him have done, that the myth of happy slaves laughing and dancing was created by white plantation owners and their apologists to conceal the real stories of oppression, along with narratives of resistance and rebellion by the likes of Nat Turner and others, that were fueled by words and music.
In Songs of Bondage and Emancipation Callahan provides an eye-opening list of dozens of slave revolts beginning in 1526 in South Carolina, and ending with one in 1826 in Mississippi. He adds, “There were also scores of revolts in slave ships, both domestic and foreign.”
In San Francisco, after he and his partner, Yvonne Moore, sang freedom songs on stage and before a live audience, Callahan said, “In times of crisis, reactionaries emerge to justify injustices. That, too, is a part of American history that I have known about since my boyhood. Knowing that history was and still is both a burden and a responsibility.” Callahan’s own story tells me in part that we need more, not fewer white men and women to lend their voices to the latest iteration of the centuries-long struggles against racism and capitalism, imperialism and white supremacy. One might say, “Let all our people go from bondage.” Callahan and his work are an inspiration to me. They tell me what Bobby Seale and Elaine Brown of the Black Panthers would say to me: “Keep on keeping on.”
(Jonah Raskin is the author of Beat Blues, San Francisco, 1955.)
TOWER OF POWER
by David Yearsley
Johann Sebastian Bach’s last pupil, Johann Gottfried Müthel (1728–88) spent the final two decades of his life as a church organist in the Baltic city of Riga, far to the northeast of the three central German cities (Erfurt, Gotha, and Leipzig in the Lutheran—and Bach family—heartland) and two Bavarian ones (bi-confessional Augsburg and Catholic Munich) brought to sounding life in Tanya Kevorkian’s vigorously researched, resonantly detailed, and often tuneful book, Music and Urban Life in Baroque Germany. The organ that Müthel presided over in Riga’s Petruskirche rose some three stories up the west wall and was an orchestra unto itself. Kevorkian’s previous book, Baroque Piety: Religion, Society, and Music in Leipzig, 1650–1750 (Routledge, 2016) was animated by the sometimes unruly churchgoing practices and behaviors of Bach’s time; in the present book, she confirms that, whatever the artistic imperatives of the organist, his main purpose was to bring order to full-throated and often chaotic congregational singing. To fulfill this task, his instrument had to be loud. But, as Kevorkian also shows, it was not just the organ that organized people: a multi-layered “mix”—as modern sound designers might say—shaped temporal, social, and political structures, sonically enmeshing people from different classes, neighborhoods, professions, and religious persuasions.
Müthel was also a renowned player of the clavichord, hailed by its devotees as the most expressive keyboard. It was also the quietest. Intent on having his ruminative fantasies undisturbed by the clattering of carts over cobblestones and kindred urban annoyances, Müthel refused to play his clavichord for friends except when snow blanketed the city. The blaring of trumpets and tolling of bells would also likely have perturbed Riga’s resident keyboard genius when sharing his intimate musical secrets. Other musicians and townsfolk less eccentric, or perhaps just less egotistical than Müthel also knew how boisterous the baroque city could be. Those moderns who yearn for the imagined calm of urban life in the Age of Bach, will be sonorously disabused of this notion by Kevorkian’s often entertaining and always thought-provoking study.
Even the snowstorms wished for by Müthel couldn’t mute the trumpet-playing tower guards (Türmer). From the balconies of church towers, these municipal musicians provided unobstructed aerial accompaniment for processions, announced the approach of a monarch’s carriage, cheered the arrival of holidays, and provided the essential quotidian service of, in Kevorkian’s apt phrase, “marking collective time” The Erfurt tower guards also blew a simpler horn than a trumpet every quarter of an hour, and these smaller brass instruments were used in the other cities too. A Munich tower guard instruction from 1650 described this operative’s main duty as “herald[ing] the day with trumpeting.” In Leipzig, and elsewhere, that day apparently started with a Lutheran chorale at either 2 or 3 a.m., though for some the tune merely bifurcated the night. Either way, the music provided a kind of city-wide alarm clock jingle heard by all residents. Sunset and the mid-morning height of the business day in mercantile Leipzig were also heralded. These hymns heard from on high not only divided the day into its constituent parts but reminded all that they lived in a theocracy, even as encroaching modernity and the joys of consumption—including music—inexorably eroded church control.
Kevorkian is keenly attentive to the demands of musical work and is adept at placing us in these musicians’ buckled shoes. The snow yearned for by some clavichordists would require the Türmer to blow from church towers high above the city in bitingly cold weather, making it painfully difficult for the him to “shape his lips.” Whatever the climatic conditions, tower guards may have played “relatively simple tunes,” but, writes Kevorkian, “the stakes were high” (63). All in town could—indeed, should—hear these chorales that were known by heart by almost everyone.
In Leipzig, some of the closest ears belonged to the city music director, Johann Sebastian Bach, and his wife, the talented professional singer, Anna Magdalena. Their apartment was next to the tower of St. Thomas Church. Anna Magdalena’s father and her three brothers were all trumpeters. Her husband also counted tower guards on his side of the family tree. In one of many memorable scenes, Kevorkian’s first page conjures Anna Magdalena listening discerningly to the nearby trumpeter delivering his evening chorale. Augsburg employed one Catholic and one Lutheran tower guard, each playing for the weddings and other occasions of those of their own confession. Only when two trumpets were called for did they join in a harmonious duet.
The lives of these many, indefatigable laborers are evoked not just with archival rigor but with human feeling. The Augsburg trumpeters petitioned the city council to allow them to have their wives join them in their tower rooms, thus allowing the men to fulfill, as the 1549 document cited by Kevorkian puts it, their “marital duty.” The council granted the request, but just once a month. By 1749 their successors were permitted to descend from their posts and go home between 7 and 9 p.m. each day. Slow was the progress of musical labor rights.
Down on the streets, watchmen called out the half-hour through the night by singing out the time, blowing a horn, or sounding a noisemaker. Complaints were inevitable, and protocols enjoined these mobile timekeepers and proto-policemen to make their voices as pleasing as possible. During the day, shoppers jangled coins and haggled with vendors, hawkers shouted and sang; the cacophony reached a crescendo during trade fairs. Some of these tunes, like those of a certain scissor sharpener, made their way into picturesque compositions like one by Sebastian Knüpfer, a predecessor of Bach as director of music in Leipzig.
As these cities got richer after the devastations of the Thirty Years’ War, more and more forms of leisure spread into the night; with the increase of musical entertainments in coffee houses and taverns, the sounds of people and song not only filled these interiors but spilled out onto the street. In other civic and domestic spaces, we encounter celebrations intimate and outsized: weddings (a major source of income for municipal musicians) and the ensuing afternoon feasts; town council investitures; grand commemorations lofted to the autocrats of the age. The middle of the eighteenth century also saw the rise of what would become the public concert, most prominently in Leipzig, and Kevorkian suggests that, as musical sound was increasingly transformed into an art to be revered, its “proper” place became the concert hall. Music faded from squares and towers.
Even during the heyday—and night—of baroque civic music, concerted works in church and elsewhere, including organ music and the more elaborate ensemble pieces presented by city musicians from the balcony of townhalls, were forbidden during the official periods of mourning that followed the death of monarchs. Bells, too, could project public joy or dolor. Silence enforced awed reverence for the departed but also cleared sonic space so that celebratory music for the new ruler could resound all the more triumphantly when it came at last. Yet, if music could be both an expression of, and salve for, sadness, then denying ears and souls this balm strikes one now—and perhaps more than a few then—as cruel.
Music performed from the church tower was usually relatively simple stuff. Far more involved were some of those works heard down below, especially come Sunday morning. As Kevorkian demonstrates, J. S. Bach cannily deployed Leipzig’s Town Musicians (Stadtpfeifer) not just for musical reasons but also in support of his political and personal maneuverings. She draws our attention to a series of concerted vocal works (“concerted” meaning a choir and/or soloists heard along with independent instrumental parts) from 1730, a fraught period for the director of music. Bach was then at odds with some members of the city council, and his job hung in the balance. Purposefully deploying the full might of the civic musicians in complex music from his pen gave sounding force to his artistic skill and professional prerogatives. After performing a demanding brass part in Bach’s cantata, Preise dein Glücke, gesegnetes Sachsen (BWV 215), the Leipzig trumpeter Gottfried Reiche succumbed to the smoke from festive torches lighting the nocturnal celebration put on in the town square for the new Saxon elector, Frederick Augustus III on 6 October 1734. Sound could not only uplift and energize but also, as now, harm.
Kevorkian tells us that the decline of urban music began with the ravages of the Seven Years’ War in the middle of the eighteenth century and continued apace under the forced economies of the Napoleonic Era. Industrialization and mechanization finished off the tower guards. An attempt to collect the last of their tunes was made in the early twentieth century, but the project was abandoned with the outbreak of World War I. Kevorkian notes that in a few German towns of the present reenactors serve up a tiny, tepid taste of the baroque urban symphony—just not at 3 a.m.
(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest book is Sex, Death, and Minuets: Anna Magdalena Bach and Her Musical Notebooks. He can be reached at dgyearsley@gmail.com.)
WHY WE NEED ‘RHAPSODY IN BLUE’ MORE THAN EVER NOW
by Gustavo Arellano
I’m not sure when I first listened to George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” which premiered 100 years ago this week, from start to finish.
Snippets had played throughout the soundtrack of my life as a child and teen — the opening ceremony of the 1984 Olympics at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum, random cartoons, commercials for United Airlines, cameos in Disney productions. It’s one of those classical pieces, like Beethoven’s Fifth and Ninth symphonies and Bach’s spooky Toccata and Fugue in D minor, that long ago left orchestra halls to entrench themselves in the American psyche.
When I finally got through “Rhapsody in Blue” in its entirety, it was the aural equivalent of the Big Bang.
The wailing, breathless clarinet solo that kicks things off. The wry tubas and trombones that accentuate the opening section. The thunderous drums and cymbals that announce the beginning and end of movements. Elegant violins. Piano chords that jaunt along during solos and rise above the swirling, clashing chaos, demanding to be acknowledged.
The composition was a revelation. It swaggered and stomped and skipped. It was unpretentious and rollicking — nothing that I had known classical music to be — and sparked an admiration for Gershwin’s creation that grows the more I learn about him and his times.
As orchestras around the country celebrate “Rhapsody in Blue” throughout 2024, it’s important to think of the piece as more than just music. In a year when Americans are fretting about our democracy in ways we haven’t for decades, it tells the saga of this nation — and offers a way forward.
As Gershwin often recounted, he wrote “Rhapsody in Blue” in a rush after reading a newspaper article reminding him of his promise to debut a new concerto mixing classical music with the jazz that was riveting the nation’s cool set at the time. Looking for a muse, the 26-year-old found one in the clangs, hisses and whistles of a train trip to Boston. That base allowed Gershwin to construct “a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America, of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our metropolitan madness,” he told a music critic in 1931.
His final product nailed it, both musically and thematically. Hints of Cuban clave rhythms, Tin Pan Alley harmonies, Jewish melodies and piano licks swim through its overarching Romantic theme. The messy pace — alternately defiant, maudlin, weepy and bombastic — sounds like a country that was working things out within itself but nevertheless remained optimistic and confident about its future.
There was no better person to envision this sonic tribute to the United States than Gershwin. He never attributed any explicit political significance to “Rhapsody in Blue,” because he didn’t have to. He was the child of working-class Jewish immigrants who fled the tyranny of the Russian Empire for a chance at a better life in New York. His work wrestled with the questions that every second-generation American faces. Do you maintain the customs of the old country, reject them completely to fully assimilate into mainstream society, or do you grab the best of the two and mix it with what you pick up from other cultures?
Like many second-generation kids, he chose the latter scenario and lived it with gusto.
Gershwin made his decision in a city teeming with people from around the world, in a nation that saw the influx of foreigners as alien and threatening. Three months after the debut of “Rhapsody in Blue,” President Coolidge signed the Johnson-Reed Act. It severely curtailed immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe and created the Border Patrol to keep out Asians and Mexicans — the antithesis of everything that Gershwin’s ode to America celebrated.
“Rhapsody in Blue” is most identified with New York, as it should be — Gershwin was a Gothamite, he debuted it in Manhattan, and the best recording of it remains Leonard Bernstein conducting the Columbia Symphony in 1959 while playing the piano (too bad Bradley Cooper didn’t re-create the scene in his recent Bernstein biopic, “Maestro”). Yet we in Los Angeles should also claim a part of Gershwin and his genius. He decamped to Southern California with his brother Ira to plug away in Hollywood, seeing better times in Los Angeles instead of the East Coast. But George’s career was cut tragically short when he died in 1937, at just 38, after surgery to remove a brain tumor.
One could only imagine what Southern California, gateway to Latin America and Asia, might have taught Gershwin had he lived.
His tour de force is aspirational, inspirational and offers lessons for all of us. Yet there’s always been pushback against the brilliance of “Rhapsody in Blue.” Leonard Bernstein once told the Atlantic that it was “a string of separate paragraphs stuck together with a thin paste of flour and water” and “not a real composition,” even as he described Gershwin as “my idol.” In recent decades, scholars have accused Gershwin of cultural appropriation for daring to be a Jewish man who fused his love of Black music with classical music — a fusion that reached its apogee with the opera “Porgy and Bess.”
Recently, composer Ethan Iverson wrote in the New York Times that “Rhapsody in Blue” was “the worst masterpiece” in the classical canon, describing it as “Caucasian,” whatever the hell that means. To think of it as corny and antiquated and “white” misses its revolutionary potential. Thank God the public has understood its truth all along.
There’s a reason why it’s a standard that symphonies trot out whenever they need a sellout (the Los Angeles Philharmonic will play it at the Hollywood Bowl this summer, site of many iconic performances featuring Gershwin’s oeuvre). Why eyes glisten as people rise from their seats when the orchestra reaches the rousing conclusion.
It’s unabashedly hopeful and proud of this country’s mess. It dares you to feel the same. It’s America at its best.
(Gustavo Arellano is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, covering Southern California everything and a bunch of the West and beyond. He previously worked at OC Weekly, where he was an investigative reporter for 15 years and editor for six, wrote a column called ¡Ask a Mexican! and is the author of “Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America.” He’s the child of two Mexican immigrants, one of whom came to this country in the trunk of a Chevy.)
Sorry Jeff, those are not Naked Ladies. Probably Watsonia.
Nice picture though.
Definitely Watsonia.
Yes, those are Watsonia and they’re growing profusely along Rt 1 South of Mendocino.
Didn’t Michael Cohen do two years for being the bag man for Trump, delivering the payoff to Stormy Daniels? If I have that right, then Trump not getting prison time would be like a hit man doing time for a contract murder and the guy who hired him remaining free.
Michael Cohen did time for lying to Congress about building a Trump Tower in Moscow. Being a bag man is in question. Trump appears to have always had a cadre of want-to-be lowlifes. Of course the same could be said about Joe Biden.
I also checked Goerge. You are correct. However, if you search, the first thing that shows up is from CNN. They say Cohen was Trump’s bag man in the Stormy Daniels mess…There is nothing obvious… from CNN about the guy lying to Congress.
And CNN claims they are “The Most Trusted Name in the News.”……
Be careful.
Laz
Sorry guys, but there is nothing here about lying to congress: https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/michael-cohen-pleads-guilty-manhattan-federal-court-eight-counts-including-criminal-tax
Norm, here it is:
https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-crime-new-york-manhattan-campaigns-3a0413202e80ab99c9f6377f97d07c04#:~:text=Cohen%20was%20sentenced%20to%20prison,further%20reduced%20through%20good%20behavior.
What the AP failed to clarify was that the offense of lying to congress was a separate charge, levied by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. However, CNN had a more detailed analysis, in which the sentencing recommendation from Mueller was that any jail time for lying to congress be served concurrently with the sentence for the other charges (i.e. no additional jail time). https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5453426-USA-v-Cohen-Nysdce-18-00850-0015-0
https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/07/politics/cohen-sentencing-memos/index.html
https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-crime-new-york-manhattan-campaigns-3a0413202e80ab99c9f6377f97d07c04#:~:text=Cohen%20was%20sentenced%20to%20prison,further%20reduced%20through%20good%20behavior.
“Cohen was sentenced to prison in December 2018 after pleading guilty to campaign finance charges and lying to Congress, among other crimes. In all, he spent about 13 1/2 months behind prison walls and a year and a half in home confinement. His time was further reduced through good behavior.
From the AP
Be well,
Laz
“No one is above the law.” Not really. Few get arrested for having over an ounce of pot in their possession, or brass knuckles tucked away in a drawer at home. For these offenses, and many others, most people are above the law. When was the last time someone was sited for not having their lights on when their windshield wipers were operating? But if law enforcement, or the DA, or both are out after someone, suddenly any law that is broken, or there is a hint it was broken, justifies an arrest, and prosecution. This is the way it has always been. Judges, and juries can be a party to this game as well. In New York, where many are above the law for violent crimes that would put a person in prison elsewhere, being Donald Trump means you are not above the law, for anything. Also, stay away from New York, unless you want to steal, riot, or physically assault someone.
George: I know this is supposed to be an open forum, but your contributions have become intolerable. This comment is ok, but your article above is disgusting swill.
How about a voluntary vacation before all the rest of us demand it of Bruce and Mark.
Very sorry about that. I meant to be addressing James Kuntzler, not George Hollister.
Take a long break James.
LOL. I agree with your original comment. I have never seen a comment from Kuntzler, and I do not read his trash.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Ukraine for the first time has begun using long-range ballistic missiles provided secretly by the United States, bombing a Russian military airfield in Crimea last week and Russian forces in another occupied area overnight, American officials said Wednesday.
That’s all he said.
Jes’ keep prodding the bear…and the morons, along with the rest of us, will die in a nuclear holocaust.
There’s a thing I read about crime and dangerous driving: When you get stopped and cited for something, statistically that’s the 400th time you did it. That’s just the time there was a cop there to see you and not otherwise occupied. That’s just the time you got caught.
I would question the 400th time cited by something. But I was stopped for speeding 40 + years ago driving a Dodge small size pickup with a diesel engine. That was a great truck, with great gas milage. It was 4:00 on a Sunday morning on 101 South of Rohnert Park. I was unaware I was going about 75, maybe 80, but the one other car on the road was a CHP, and he noticed. That lead to being stopped and cited, then waiting in a very long line to see a judge in Sonoma County, and going to traffic school in Ukiah. The whole process was an eye opening experience. Most of those before the judge gave time consuming excuses, primarily for missing court dates, but for everything else as well. The judge had heard all of it before. I said I was guilty, how do I go to traffic school in Ukiah to avoid having a speeding ticket on my record, the end.
Traffic School was interesting as well. There was a small, friendly to me, group that sat next to me in attendance that had it out for the cops, and made that clear to everyone, including the CHP instructor. At the first break, I moved to another spot in the room. From listening to private conversations during breaks, something that became apparent was the Ukiah Police Department appeared to have a policy of harassing people they did not want in town, bikers to be specific. They knew who these people were, and would regularly stop, and cite them for any traffic violation, regardless of how minor. That was over 40 years ago, so I suspect the UPD has gone through many people and changes since then. I am not likely offending anyone. Most people driving 38 MPH in the 35 MPH zone by the Fair Grounds were above the law, not so for targeted members of the biker crowd.
Good gas mileage with a diesel?
CNN Senior Legal Analyst Describes How The Trump Conviction Was A Political Hit Job
-“The judge donated money… in plain violation of a rule prohibiting New York judges from making political donations—to a pro-Biden, anti-Trump political operation.”
-Alvin Bragg boasted on the campaign trail in an overwhelmingly Democrat county, “It is a fact that I have sued Trump over 100 times.”
-“Most importantly, the DA’s charges against Trump push the outer boundaries of the law and due process.”
-“The charges against Trump are obscure, and nearly entirely unprecedented. In fact, no state prosecutor — in New York, or Wyoming, or anywhere — has ever charged federal election laws as a direct or predicate state crime, against anyone, for anything. None. Ever.”
-The DA inflated misdemeanors past the statute of limitations and “electroshocked them back to life” by alleging the falsification of business records was committed ‘with intent to commit another crime.’
-“Inexcusably, the DA refused to specify what those unlawful means actually were — and the judge declined to force them to pony up — until right before closing arguments. So much for the constitutional obligation to provide notice to the defendant of the accusations against him in advance of trial.”
-“In these key respects, the charges against Trump aren’t just unusual. They’re bespoke, seemingly crafted individually for the former president and nobody else.”
-“The Manhattan DA’s employees reportedly have called this the “Zombie Case” because of various legal infirmities, including its bizarre charging mechanism. But it’s better characterized as the Frankenstein Case, cobbled together with ill-fitting parts into an ugly, awkward, but more-or-less functioning contraption that just might ultimately turn on its creator.”
MAGA Marmon
I see the Dem’s are running scared now, trying to justify what happened. Yes, you caught the car, now what? Within 24 hours Trump received 54 million dollars for his campaign, and the GOP received over 350 million.
MAGA Marmon
Yes, because GOP supporters are that misguided. Their current leaders have no respect for the Constitution or our system of justice unless it benefits them.
Ken, you nailed it. Enabling. Ignoring. Cutting down those that try to do the right thing. Passive aggressive reverse discrimination against men. Constant complaining, whining, and anger? Some subjects people don’t like hearing about but are going to get an earful from me until attitudes improve.
Running for President from prison has been done in the past. Many AVA readers and writers may already know the story. The case of Eugene Debs sure looks familiar.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/running-us-president-prison-eugene-debs-century-ago-110718053
Except Debs was a human, not a brainless mutant.
Re….. vagrancy page…..
….. it is not against the law to exist in public. no matter ones circumstances. If people are breaking the law LE has no problem arresting them. If in fact this man is Autistic how fucking scary for the police to show up. He is currently sleeping under a bush in a corner behind Chevron! People with Autism process and comprehend things differently. It really matters not whatever the condition is, drugs, MI, or Autism how we respond is what is important. I am curious to how many phone calls have been made to UPD by him and his business? How does UPD feel about having to show up for these situations that go nowhere and are frustrating cause they do not know what to do and can only ask them to move? Is this worth a police response?! As I suggested to Ken the better response would be utilizing the Dual Crisis Response and some de escalation training but he did not find that an acceptable way to change the situation.
mm 💕
Jonah Raskin
“Callahan’s book, which is published by the University of Mississippi Press in the Margaret Walker Anderson Series in African American Studies…”
What? Bruce’s grandmother? OMG!
No, big disappointment. The name is Alexander, Margaret W. Alexander.