Mendocino County Today: Tuesday 6/25/24

Assange Free | Starflower | High Clouds | Ukiah Carjacking | Community Lunch | No Comment | Local Events | Ukiah Softballers | Scharffenberger Hiring | County Audit | Safety Dispatcher | Against Re-Interpretation | International Art | Skatepark Update | Ed Notes | Music Festival | Killing Rats | Yesterday's Catch | Sidewalk Ends | Cloverdale Expansion | Mt Tam | Fantasyland | Embrace | It's Torn | Depression Graph | Birmingham 1967 | Gun Safety | Beating Trump | Beauty Contest | Sexual Gatekeepers | Republic | Cactus | Supreme Cases | Tough Guy | Our Quandary | Bad Actors | Hug | NYT Stories | Comanche Empire | Cultural Zionism | Brook Trout | Despair Song | After Rain

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JEFF BLANKFORT:

A victory! It seems so. NPR reports Julian Assange to accept plea deal with the US and be released to go home to Australia being credited by the US with “time served.”

“WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has entered into a plea deal with the U.S. government, bringing an end to a years-long international saga over his handling of national security secrets.

“Assange is preparing to plead guilty to a single count of conspiring to obtain and disclose information related to the national defense in a U.S. federal court in Saipan, in the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. commonwealth in the Pacific, this week, according to newly filed court papers.

“Under the terms of the agreement, Assange faces a sentence of 62 months, equivalent to the time he has already served at Belmarsh Prison in the United Kingdom while fighting extradition to the United States. He is expected to be released and to return to his home country of Australia following the court proceeding later this week.”

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INTERIOR WARM and dry conditions continue today while marine stratus dampens coastal temperatures. Potential for high-based storms today as mid-level moisture pushes into NorCal. An upper level disturbance mid-week will allow for relatively cooler temperatures through Thursday. Warming trend returns for this weekend into next week. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): 48F with some tropical clouds overhead this Tuesday morning on the coast. Some widespread rain & thunder across the state south of here yesterday sure was not on my radar ? (get it, "radar"?), I digress... High clouds & calm conditions the next couple days then some wind picks up on Thursday.

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CARJACKING INCIDENT INVOLVING KNIFE THREAT

Location: 275 South Orchard Avenue, Ukiah, CA
Suspect: Justin Michael Hietala, 41-year-old-male from Ukiah
Victim: 51-year-old-male from Ukiah
Violations: 215(a) PC – Carjacking (Felony); 422(a) PC – Criminal Threats (Felony)

On 06/24/2024 at approximately 9:51 AM, Ukiah Police Department (UPD) Officers responded to 275 South Orchard Avenue for a report of a subject who held a knife to a taxi driver’s throat and took possession of a silver-colored Toyota Prius taxi. The suspect was later identified as Justin Hietala. Hietala made threats to kill the victim before leaving in the stolen taxi. The victim was able to provide a picture of the subject driving away in the stolen taxi. The picture clearly showed Hietala driving the stolen taxi away from the victim.

UPD Dispatch utilized the FLOCK camera system to obtain the license plate of the stolen taxi and provided it to UPD Officers. UPD Officers checked the surrounding area and a be on the lookout-BOLO was issued to the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) and the California Highway Patrol (CHP).

CHP Officers located the stolen taxi in the area of Southbound Highway 101 at Henry Station Road in Ukiah. CHP advised Hietala was driving the stolen taxi erratically. A CHP Officer used a “Spike Strip” device and was able to disable the vehicles tires. A felony stop was conducted by CHP and Hietala was placed into custody without issue.

The victim was later transported to the location of the traffic stop. The victim positively identified Hietala as the subject who threatened him with a knife and took the Toyota Prius.

The Toyota Prius was turned back over to the taxi company and Hietala was placed under arrest. Hietala was charged with the above-mentioned charges and booked at the Mendocino County Jail.

The Ukiah Police Department would like to thank the California Highway Patrol and the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office for their assistance with this investigation.

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SOME READERS MAY RECALL that about a week ago Supervisor Elect Madeline Cline wrote a letter to the editors of several local outlets entitled: “Don’t Let New Fees Drain Your Wallet-Attend the Groundwater Sustainability Agency Meeting.” In the letter Ms. Cline “encouraged [readers] to get involved. Ask questions of your representatives on the GSA Board. Question the budget and the fees being collected. We should all be asking if what is being done is effective and efficient.”

ON MONDAY, MendoFever reporter Monica Huettl reported: “No Public Comment at Ukiah Valley Basin Groundwater Meeting Finalizing $600K Budget and Fee Structure.

https://mendofever.com/2024/06/24/no-public-comment-at-ukiah-valley-basin-groundwater-meeting-finalizing-600k-budget-and-fee-structure

“The Ukiah Valley Basin Groundwater Sustainability Agency Board meeting was scheduled for three hours, but finished in two, because nobody from the public showed up to comment. This is most likely because the Mendocino County Farm Bureau members already know about the new fees, as there have been several public meetings since January 2024, attended by Farm Bureau members and management.”

Apparently, not even Cline herself commented.

(Mark Scaramella)

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LOCAL EVENTS (this week)

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UKIAH GIRLS recognized for their softball play this past season.

First Team

Aliyah Rosario, Jr., Ukiah
.384 BA, 28 H, 21 RBI, 26 R, .444 OBP / .520 SLG / .965 OPS

Second Team

Kaloni Brown, So., Ukiah
.317 BA, 20 H, 23 RBI, 20 R, .442 OBP / .507 SLG / .950 OPS

Adalei Jacobsen, Fr., Ukiah
.439 BA, 30 H, 26 RBIs, 21 R, .488 OBP / .614 SLG / 1.102 OPS

Honorable Mention

Kyla Cromer, So., Ukiah

(pressdemocrat.com)

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THE STATE LAW THAT MANDATES AN AUDIT OF MENDOCINO COUNTY

SB 164 / Government Code Section 8546.11.

(a) The California State Auditor shall conduct an audit of the County of Mendocino by January 1, 2026, which shall include, but not be limited to, all of the following.

(1) Any potential waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement.

(2) The county’s administration of elections in 2024.

(3) Contracting and procurement.

(b) Notwithstanding Section 10231.5, the California State Auditor shall report their findings to the Legislature, including the Assembly Committee on Budget, the Senate Committee on Budget and Fiscal Review, the Assembly Committee on Local Government, and the Senate Committee on Local Government, by January 1, 2026.

SEC. 60.

The Legislature finds and declares that a special statute is necessary and that a general statute cannot be made applicable within the meaning of Section 16 of Article IV of the California Constitution because of the unique need to ensure proper oversight and avoid abuse and mismanagement in the County of Mendocino.

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NO REINTERPRETATION, AGAIN

Re: Recent Staff Re-interpretation of 10A.17 Pertaining to Cultivation Size Limits

Dear Chair Mulheren and Members of the Board;

At the April 24, 2024 General Government Committee meeting staff informed the Committee members that staff would be implementing a new interpretation of 10A.17 that would allow in some instances doubling the allowable size of cannabis cultivation areas. For example, instead of limiting a large outdoor grow to 10,000 sq ft per parcel, by applying this re-interpretation, a person could increase, even double, the size of the area of cultivation on a single parcel.

Staff based this re-interpretation on what we believe to be a mis-reading of Section 10A.17.070(D), which is the section of the cannabis ordinance that addresses cannabis cultivation business license (CCBL) density, i.e. the number of licenses allowed per parcel - NOT cultivation area size, except to clarify that if license Type 4 (Nursery with a maximum size of 22,000 sq ft) is one of two license types being sought, the nursery footprint must be reduced such that the total square footage of both types does not exceed 22,000 sq ft, AND the cultivation area of the non-nursery license does not exceed the 10,000 sq ft maximum. (Limits to cultivation area size per license type and zoning district are clearly defined in Section 10A.17.060 and in Tables 1 and 2 of Section 20.242 of the County Code.)

This “re-interpretation” turns seven years of understanding on its head and dramatically alters a fundamental tenant of the ordinance and the underlying justifications of its Mitigated Negative Declaration - and all without any public process. Less than two years ago, citizens of Mendocino County mounted a referendum against adopting a new cannabis ordinance that would have allowed just the kind of expansion that this re-interpretation would now make possible. In thirty days (in the midst of COVID) one hundred citizens volunteers gathered over 6,000 signatures from County voters who said loud and clear that they didn’t want expanded grow sites. The Board responded appropriately, respecting the wishes of the public.

Please see the attached legal analysis that details why we believe that staff’s re-interpretation is not supported by the language of the ordinance itself or its intent as laid out in the legislative history, and why such a fundamental change in the interpretation of the ordinance requires environmental analysis and public participation.

We respectfully request that the Board immediately reject this re-interpretation and inform the Mendocino Cannabis Department to immediately withdraw any public notice referring to the re-interpretation. Furthermore, if any person(s) has applied for multiple CCBL’s under this re-interpretation, the Board should direct staff to notify the person(s) that the application will not be processed, and any fees paid to the Department will be returned.

Thank you for acting swiftly so as to avoid renewed confusion and delays, especially when the Mendocino Cannabis Department is making progress on issuing County permits, and the State has just issued its DEIR in preparation to issue annual licenses to hundreds of Mendocino County provisional license holders.

Sincerely,

Kirk Lumpkin, Secretary, Willits Environmental Center Board of Directors

Willits

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AV SKATEPARK PROJECT NEWS & EVENTS

Permitting Application Underway!

We are completing the final steps in preparation for submitting our permitting application in August! The following work is underway:

The wonderful folks over at Frontier Skateparks are finalizing construction plans for the skatepark.

Our wonderful civil engineer Tyler Pearson at Cornerstone Civil Design is finalizing the drainage plan design to fix the park's drainage problems and also accommodate skatepark runoff.

Our wonderful architect Alex Korn is updating our site plan and preparing the permitting application package.

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Students Learn From St. Helena Organizers

In April, AV Service Learning Team students traveled by St. Helena to meet with local skatepark organizers. The St. Helena Department of Parks and Recreation kindly coordinated the visit. It was incredibly helpful to learn from the organizers' wisdom and experience based on years of fundraising for and planning to successfully develop their community skatepark.

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Students Present Tribute To AV School Board

This past March, AV students presented a handmade tribute to the AV School Board, in gratitude for transferring 2.2 acres of school property to the AV Community Services District (for one dollar!) for the explicit purpose of skatepark development. 10th grader Aster Arbanovella wrote: "We are so grateful to the AV School Board for recognizing the importance of this project and for taking this big step to improve our lives and the lives of future AV skaters to come!"

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Fundraising Update

371,000 Raised!

We're on our way! We are very grateful to have received a $250,000 General Fund Specified Grant from the CA legislature (thank you Assemblymember Jim Wood!!), and we are leveraging those funds to elevate our campaign. We are currently in the midst of a study to help hone the scope and timeline of our fundraising effort. Stay tuned! :)

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ED NOTES

HED from this morning's Chron: “Is S.F. the worst-run city in the US? Experts call this analysis ‘misleading’.” No, Ukiah is the worst-run city in the US, adjusted for per capita consideration of course.

THE LAST PUMP that serviced the Vaillancourt Fountain failed about two weeks ago, the city said. Now, the 53-year-old brutalist sculpture must have its mechanical and electrical systems replaced. The cost? Over $3 million.

BULLDOZE IT. It's brutal for sure and has fouled the brutalist Justin-Herman Plaza since the day it was installed.

Frisco got hustled big time when it paid a Canadian “artist” a quarter mil for this eyesore, which is an eyesore even when the pumps were pouring water over it. Hold it! I've got an idea. Make a monkey island out of it like the one out at the Zoo, which would convert this random pile of concrete into a major amusement for adult and child alike.

COMMENT from this morning's ava: “Mulheren is the worst Supervisor in the history of county government.”

MO would probably make the top twenty, for sure, but there are years of competition for worst ever supervisor, a depressing lineage that includes at least three certifiably crazy solons and several straight-up morons.

COLFAX has been the only intellectual to hold down a supe's seat in the long years of elected dull-normals, but “intellectual” in Mendocino County means anyone who wears glasses and can pronounce paradigm, the Khmer Rouge definition of intellectual in other words. And Colfax hustled himself and his colleagues the big raises they didn't and don't deserve for this part-time “work” on what he knew was the cynical basis that big pay would attract better candidates, an obviously false premise. (How many hours a week do you suppose Dan Gjerde puts in “serving” his 4th District constituents?)

CONSIDERED purely on a gender basis, Liz Henry has been the only intelligent, capable female supervisor Mendo has experienced and, the way things are trending, probably the only intelligent female supervisor we'll see in our lifetimes. And she was unmercifully, steadily undermined by the screeching hags sector of Mendolib who, imo, drove her out of Mendo for a new and, I hope, happier life elsewhere.

JOHN McCOWEN was a genuinely conscientious, hard working supervisor with a real commitment to making local government work. He should have run for re-election against the Pom-Pom Girl, but given the way his treacherous colleagues not only refused to support him in his righteous opposition to CEO Angelo's reign of terror — the architect of today’s Mendo mess — but refused to even grant him the pro forma WHEREAS send off even the worst lamebrain supervisors are routinely granted! McCowen left office on a tsunami of Angelo-generated false charges that he had stolen county property, and there he went without so much as an apology from any of his colleagues.

BEFORE THE UNHINGED ANGELO was installed as County CEO, no matter how incompetent the supervisors were there were always smart, capable CEOs like Mike Scannell and Al Beltrami to bail them out, to make sure county employees were reasonably happy as they went about the public's business and that Mendo government didn't become the bad joke it is today. (There was also a smart County Counsel in Peter Klein where today there's a dozen or so faceless drones in that office who farm out a lot of their cases to city lawyers at another huge cost to the county. Not all that long ago the County Counsel was one person who even showed up as legal eagle at school board meetings, the great comic figure of County Counsel Frank Zotter often showing up in Boonville to pull legal opinions out of thin air.)

WHEN ANGELO, a Queeg-like personality type, assumed the county's power chair her remit was to preside over an austere budget, which she attempted to do by not filling vacancies and firing administrators, arbitrary terminations that have cost Mendo literal millions in legal fees.

ANGELO totally intimidated the supervisors, as sad a collection of wusses you'll ever see, as she proceeded to demoralize county workers. And here we are with Angelo's hand-picked successor, Darcy Antle, about to get a big raise from the five wusses although there is zero evidence her job performance warrants the big pay she now gets.

IN THE GRAND SCHEME of things, it doesn't seem a stretch to simply write off Mendo's civic malaise as a local example of The Great Slide, the prevalent chaos, the pure absurdity we see everywhere in the land, local, state and certainly national, the metaphor for where we're at perfectly expressed in Biden-Trump.

HED from the Daily Mail: “Outrage as Taylor Swift shouts ‘F**K the patriarchy’ at sold-out London show.”

Speaking as both a patriarch and grandparent to a confirmed 11-year-old “Swiftie,” I really wish Taylor would set both a better verbal and political example. Shouting obscenities, especially in the context of the retro canard, “the patriarchy,” seems doubly dumb.

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RECOMMENDATIONS FOR RAT EXTERMINATORS

Anna Stockel (Coast Chatline): I put up with rats for far too long because I didn't want to use poison. I tried everything else. Unfortunately, the only thing that worked was poison. Having said that it's pretty safe these days.

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Marco McClean: Marco here. If your neighbors have dogs or cats that are allowed outside, and if the poison is Warfarin (read the label), which causes them to bleed to death internally and out of all their orifices and eyes, or if it's a long chemical name that you look up and it's a military nerve agent, please don't use that, unless you're sure the rats can't go outside while the poison is killing them, and how can you be sure of that, because how did they get in? Pets and wildlife eat a dying or dead rat and get poisoned.

I've long had problems with rats, and I finally settled on the big cheap Victor-type snap traps with flat yellow plastic trigger plates. Tie a little ball of yarn aroud the hook in the center of the plate and smear it with cheap peanut butter. They nibble and lick the peanut butter like delicate little surgeons, but they can't help tugging on the yarn.

And be careful with the trap. Gently hold down the part that snaps, with the trap fully flat on a table or the floor while you're setting it, and take your hand away from the obvious safe direction, in case putting the trap where you choose sets it off. You can cut yourself on the spring ends or damage your spit-valve finger.

I used to use a big wooden box trap that a neighbor boy made for me, and after several days of a rat getting the bait and getting away and shutting it behind them and laughing at me I'd eventually get one when it got lazy, and I'd take drive it down to the ocean and let it out there, but it's just so much trouble, and what if you're away for weeks at a time, and it dies horribly in there of hunger and thirst and loneliness. Better to just kill them, pow.

Although, I have had the experience of a rat getting caught in a snap-trap at just the right angle and not killed, and it's thrashing around for minutes, where you have to consider hitting it with a hammer to put it out of its misery. And a friend wires a trap to furniture or to a screw in the garage wall so the rat can't just steal the whole thing into the Other World and eat it or reverse-engineer it and come back for you with their own infernal machine. This would be a good subject for like the talk at the end of Courtship of Eddie's Father, if you could go back in time and you knew the writers of that show.

What a world. What a world.

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CATCH OF THE DAY, Monday, June 24

FIDEL BARRALES, Ukiah. Concealed dirk-dagger.

GUADALUPE GUTIERREZ, Ukiah. Controlled substance, paraphernalia, failure to appear.

MARIE HANSEN, Redwood Valley. DUI.

JUSTIN HIETALA, Ukiah. Carjacking, criminal threats.

MICHAEL MENDEZ, Ukiah. Probation revocation.

DAVID PHILLIPS, Hopland. DUI with blood-alcohol over 0.15% with priors.

JESSE ROEHL, Redding/Ukiah. Paraphernalia/False ID.

BRYN SPURLIN, Fort Bragg. Domestic battery.

IVY STUBBLEFIELD, Eureka/Fort Bragg. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, resisting.

ERIN WEDDLE, Humboldt, Arizona/Fort Bragg. Domestic abuse, loaded firearm-prohibited possession-not registered owner, felon-addict with firearm.

KRISTOPHER WHITE, Fort Bragg. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

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COULD CLOVERDALE DOUBLE IN SIZE TO PRESERVE OPEN SPACE?

Voters in November will be asked whether the city should update its “urban growth boundary” into the western hills, a first step toward nearly doubling the city’s square area.

by Amie Windsor

Cloverdale voters will determine in November if the city should expand its “urban growth boundary,” a move that, if approved, would be the first step toward doubling the city’s size.

If voters approve the measure, city leaders have no desire to use that bigger footprint for new homes or commercial development. Instead, they say they’d hope to someday annex the land, currently under Sonoma County’s control, to preserve open space.

“This is a win-win for everyone,” Mayor Todd Lands said. “We get to control the hillside. You see the open space that we’re trying to protect and preserve and not let the county or anyone else build in more than we would want.”

The county’s zoning for the land, known as the western hills, allows for 40 differently land uses, including agricultural, residential and recreational. Water availability limits many of those development opportunities, however.

Were the land to turn over to the city, Assistant City Manager Kevin Thompson said the city would rezone the area to rural residential, “which is much more restrictive than what the county currently allows.”

The proposed new boundary would set the stage for 1,329 acres of land to someday be under Cloverdale’s jurisdiction, paving the way for the city to almost double its acreage, should it eventually bring that land into city limits.

For at least a decade, city officials have wanted to control growth in the western hills.

Cloverdale’s city attorney is currently drafting ballot language for the city council to approve at an upcoming council meeting.

Approval of the ballot question wouldn’t trigger immediate annexation. Several steps would have to happen first, including the city working with county officials to expand Cloverdale’s “sphere of influence” — or all the lands it wants for future annexation. Such a move would require county government approval.

The urban growth boundary, a hemline that bleeds past city limits, is drawn by city officials but requires a stamp of approval by voters. Boundaries typically last 20 years, but can be amended early by voter approval.

Cloverdale’s urban growth boundary was first adopted in 2010 and won’t expire until Jan. 1, 2030.

City leaders are going to voters well in advance of that date because Clearwater Ranch Community, an assisted living facility for young adults with disabilities is seeking annexation into Cloverdale. The property, which encompasses 84 acres, sits on the hilly western edge of the city’s border. Annexation into Cloverdale would enable it to potentially go on the city’s sewer and water system.

Rather than attempt to craft a ballot measure around a single property, Cloverdale council members are choosing to envelop the entire western hills into their urban growth boundary zone.

(Santa Rosa Press Democrat)

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PROPERTY INSURANCE CANCELLATIONS PART OF THE PROFIT SHELL GAME

by Barry Phegan

Two close friends recently had their homeowners insurance canceled, one in Berkeley, the other in Rohnert Park. I mentioned this to a Marin friend, who replied that his insurance rates recently tripled. What’s going on?

To understand property insurance cancellations, or any event, step back and look at the situation that caused it. One good starting place is the money trail.

Insurance companies can’t continue paying extraordinary forest-fire-related losses. After all, it’s their corporate responsibility to cut risk and losses. Canceling policies is simpler than increasing rates to unacceptable and politically dangerous levels.

The increasing frequency and intensity of forest fires mostly comes from climate change. Behind that is industrial pollution. This includes manufacturers saving money by dumping, not treating their waste products, and making polluting products, such as gasoline powered cars, that are cheaper to make, sell in higher volumes, and are therefore more profitable. Supporting all this are you and me, the consumers, who prefer the lower-priced item resulting from companies externalizing costs, i.e. dumping.

But it’s a shell game. The expression, “What you lose on the swings you make up on the roundabouts (aka the merry-go-rounds),” we could rewrite as, “What we save with lower priced consumer products, we pay for with higher insurance rates.”

Here is some history: Decades ago, American companies began exporting manufacturing. The reasons were lower labor costs and fewer environmental regulations. We still consume the products, but we pretend the pollution is someone else’s. Globally, the big upside was lifting billions of Asians from poverty into the middle class. Unfortunately, it appears to me that it left many displaced Americans vulnerable to right-wing hucksters.

A similar industry migration happened here at home, when Louisiana defunded the state agency responsible for federal Environmental Protection Agency enforcement. Heavy pollution industries, such as petrochemical, glass and paper, moved in. What were pristine bayous soon became deadly cesspools.

On the Gravenstein Highway connecting Sebastapol to Highway 101 in Sonoma County, I have seen a large hand-painted sign that reads, “We are all downstream.” Translation: No one can avoid the effects of climate change. But in the shell game of avoiding costs and passing cleanup expenses to others, who ends up the winners and losers, and why?

That’s a terribly complex question involving cultural assumptions, beliefs, capitalism, tribalism, human nature, who pays what and when the payments come due.

Right now, the big winners seem to be corporations, as well as those of us whose wealth protects us from more severe climate-related consequences. The big losers are the planet’s defenseless animals and plants, and poorer people and nations, the 95% who can’t afford protection.

It was the ecologist Barry Commoner who included, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch,” in his four laws of ecology. (The other three: everything is connected to everything else; there is no ‘away’/everything must go somewhere; and nature knows best.)

Canceled homeowners insurance is a “first world” homeowner problem. Cancellations are just one of the cascading, expanding and endlessly surprising consequences of corporate cost-cutting (aka dumping) and our enthrallment with unsustainable consumption. Personally, I regularly confuse my wants with real needs.

Though blaming is a national sport, there’s no one to blame for climate change. We are all in this together. Culture comes as whole cloth. Pull on one thread and you find it’s linked to every other thread. It’s all too easy to point our finger at, for example, the oil industry, and ignore our lust for that gas-guzzling SUV, along with a single house on a quarter acre lot in a distant suburb.

The consequences of the pollution that comes with an unsustainable consumer culture is a global issue, and we don’t do global very well. There’s no effective solution. In the short run, adjusting is painful, but in the long run we’ll be long gone, our descendants will adapt to whatever world they inherit, and nonhuman organisms will do what they have always done under assault — survive or die, adapt and, with enough time, evolve.

Though I long for tomorrow to be like yesterday, my reasonable self tells me that’s fantasyland. I’m doing what I can to help the planet and the disadvantaged, but my emotional self expects that free lunch.

(Barry Phegan, of Greenbrae, can be found online at CompanyCulture.com. He is the retired managing partner of a consulting company that specialized in company culture.)

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IT'S TORN

I see you in windows that open so wide
There's nothing beyond them and no one inside
You kick off your sandals and shake out your hair
The salt on your shoulders like sparks in the air
There's silt on your ankles and sand on your feet
The river too shallow, the ocean too deep
You smile at your suffering, the sweetest reprieve
Why did you leave us, why did you leave

You kick off your sandals and shake out your hair
It's torn where you're dancing, it's torn everywhere
It's torn on the right and it's torn on the left
It's torn in the center which few can accept

It's torn where there's beauty, it's torn where there's death
It's torn where there's mercy but torn somewhat less
It's torn in the highest from kingdom to crown
The messages fly but the network is down
Bruised at the shoulder and cut at the wrist
The sea rushes home to its thimble of mist
The opposites falter, the spirals reverse
And Eve must re-enter the sleep of her birth
And up through the system the worlds are withdrawn
From every dominion the mind stood upon
And now that it's over and now that it's done
The name has no number, not even the one

Come gather the pieces all scattered and lost
The lie in what's holy, the light in what's not
The story's been written the letter's been sealed
You gave me a lily but now it's a field

You kick off your sandals and shake out your hair
It's torn where you're dancing, it's torn everywhere

— Leonard Cohen

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REG-GIE! REG-GIE! REG-GIE!

by Dave Zirin

Major League Baseball and their partners at Fox were trying to turn a celebration of the Negro Leagues into a Disneyfied narrative of triumph in the face of “adversity,” which was left vague and undefined. MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred and the geniuses he employs thought that staging a feel-good game at Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Alabama, with little historical context was the best way to commemorate the Black baseball experience.

Fortunately, legendary Hall of Famer, 78-year-old Reggie Jackson was having none of it. One of many Black American baseball veterans in attendance, Jackson was brought onto the MLB on Fox set to talk about his memories as a minor league prospect for the Birmingham A’s. Instead of playing nice, Jackson swung for the fences.

When asked what it was like to play in Alabama in 1967, Jackson said bluntly, “I wouldn't wish it on anyone.” He then spoke for several minutes about being treated like something less than human. “I would never want to do it again,” he said, “I walked into restaurants, and they would point at me and say, ‘That n----- can’t eat here’.”

He recalled his allies on the team. “Fortunately I had a manager, Johnny McNamara. If I couldn’t eat in a place, nobody would eat…. If I couldn’t stay in a hotel, they’d drive to the next hotel and find a place where I could stay,” he said. “Had it not been for Rollie Fingers, Johnny McNamara, Dave Duncan, Joe and Sharon Rudi, I slept on their couch three, four nights a week for about a month and a half. Finally, they were threatened that they would burn our apartment complex down unless I got out.”

He then supplied some context for what it meant to be a young Black man in Birmingham for the Fox audience. “The year I came here, Bull Connor was the sheriff the year before.” He said how just a few years earlier, in 1963 and not far from Rickwood Stadium, the KKK bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church, killing four girls: Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Carol Denise McNair.

“At the same time,” Reggie said, “had it not been for my white friends, had it not been for a white manager, and Rudi, Fingers, and Duncan and Lee Meyers, I would have never made it.”

He also said that as a young man in 1967, he was not ready to turn the other cheek: “I was too physically violent. I was ready to physically fight somebody. I would have got killed here, because I would have beat someone’s ass, and you would’ve saw me [hanging from] an oak tree somewhere.”

Jackson’s breakdown of this history, as the Fox studio hosts stared at him, their jaws agape, matters amid the battle to preserve the history of the Black American ballplayer, not merely the gauzy, palatable one served to us by Manfred. Recognizing Negro League records is a welcome start, but it cannot be the end. Currently the numbers of Black Americans playing Major League Baseball is at a historic low. Manfred seems to think he can solve this crisis in part by presenting a history of triumph and excellence against all odds while ignoring the toll it took on generations of Black American players. Luke Epplin, author of the brilliant book Our Team about the Cleveland Indians of the late 1940s, a squad which included Negro League legend Satchel Paige and trailblazer Larry Doby, said it well:

“I just keep thinking about what Reggie Jackson said last night and how important it was. It cuts against the narrative formed by MLB, which focuses exclusively on Jackie Robinson and makes it seem that he shouldered the burden and then opened the doors [in 1947]. Jackson undercuts that. His amazing impromptu speech positioned racism as ongoing into the late ’60s for Black ballplayers, long beyond the integration era. It wasn't a problem to be solved but a structural reality that plagued players for decades afterward.”

It is important to hear for reasons far greater than baseball. There is a rising Black Republican star, Representative Byron Donalds, who is rewriting history when he waxes nostalgic about the Jim Crow era to please his white benefactors and curry favor with Donald Trump. Hearing Jackson’s lived experiences safeguards what we can quaintly call “the facts.” The facts are that Jim Crow was terrorism; terrorism that in myriad ways shortened the lives of generations of Black families. Byron Donalds is just 45 years old and would do well to listen to some elders about the reality of Jim Crow: elders like the great Reggie Jackson. The tragedy is that it benefits Donalds to close his ears, sneer, and turn away.

But people like Donalds look extremely small when stacked up against Jackson’s testimony of truth. Jackson should be commended for his bravery, telling moving truths the audience was not expecting to hear. After Jackson’s words and after the Fox Crew caught their breath, you could almost hear that chant of the 1970s in the thick, humid Alabama air: “Reg-GIE! Reg-GIE! Reg-GIE!”

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ARE THE HEEDLESS DEMS GIVING TRUMPTY DUMPTY A PATH TO BECOME AMERICA’S FUHRER?

by Ralph Nader

In the last several months, the chips have been falling in Trump’s favor to a level that probably astonishes this convicted felon. Consider the following:

1. Three of the four serious state and federal criminal lawsuits have been delayed by Trump’s lawyers and judges, so it is unlikely there will be trials until after the November election. The one case in New York where the jury pronounced him guilty of 34 felonies is awaiting the presiding judge’s sentence on July 11th. The betting in legal circles is that he won’t even sentence Trump to a short prison term.

At the same time, Trump used his conviction to motivate his loyal supporters to send his campaign over 52 million dollars within 24 hours after the verdict. In his ego driven, long and repetitive speeches, Trump takes no responsibility for his crimes and mocks the rule of law.

2. Month after month, Trump is leading Biden in the six swing states, except Wisconsin. The Biden campaign, still vulnerable to another Electoral College defeat despite winning a majority of votes nationally, is facing the risk of a dangerously large number of voters staying home on election day. Trump attacks Biden daily, slanderously and with the usual nickname “crooked Joe Biden,” repeated and reliably reported by the mass media. Where are the Democrats’ nicknames for Der Führer, the dangerous, unstable, lying, convicted felon a.k.a. Donald Trump? Biden once did use “Sleepy Don” to describe Trump’s drowsy state during the trial in New York.

Joe Biden and Democratic operatives need to re-double their meager efforts in the name game. Trumpty Dumpty gets a free ride: there are no “lock him up” chants at Democratic rallies.

So rare is anyone high on the Democratic Party ladder giving blowhard bully Donald his own medicine that when one politician, Governor of Illinois, J.B. Pritzker, does just that, he is featured in the New York Times as an outspoken maverick. (See New York Times, June 13, 2024, “This Top Democrat Is Leading His Party’s Attack on Trump as a Felon”.)

3. Fox News, which Trump castigated for not being Trumpian enough, has fallen fully back in line. The rest of the mainstream media reports his lies (often corrected to no avail) and repeats his bombastic, delusional self-evaluations and grandiose promises.

The “Trump Media & Technology Group” (DJT stock), which features, Truth Social the social media platform, is listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange. DJT is the ultimate meme stock with tiny revenues, huge debts, propped up by his fan investors, giving him a share value of some 2-4 billion dollars (though restricted for another four months from sale.)

4. Trump pays no political price for his omnicidal “drill baby drill” cry for coal, oil and gas interests to further the present and coming climate violence. He’s gone so far as to ask a group meeting of energy barons for a billion dollars in campaign contributions as a payoff.

5. The labor unions continue, with few exceptions, to lie low, fearing the third of their members who are Trump supporters. The deafening silence of labor leaders continues, not withstanding Trump’s active hatred of labor unions and multiple anti-labor policies as a failed businessman and as president, including freezing the $7.25 per hour federal minimum wage and corporatizing OSHA, the Labor Department and the National Labor Relations Board.

6. Hoping for a repeat of Trump’s 2016 Electoral College presidential campaign victory, several big money contributors from Silicon Valley to Wall Street, including some big bankers are lining up to support Trump. Worse, Trump is picking up small extra percentages in the polls from Black and Hispanic voters who have been devastated by Trump policies and largely excluded from Trump’s government appointments during his tenure as president.

7. Last week insurrectionist Trump returned to Capitol Hill to a triumphant display of obsequious hand-kissing including from Republicans who were stand-offish and sharply critical of the Presidential outlaw and inciting election-denier. Among them were sleazy Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell, and Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.

8. It is worth noting that not all Republican voters are MAGA Trumpsters. A large number are traditional Republicans going back generations who would vote for any Republican nominee, even if he were, as Michael Bloomberg once said, Leon Trotsky. So inbred is their hatred of the Democrats, that, in his worst moments, Trump could not provoke them to defect from the GOP nominee.

9. Despite Trump’s ongoing shafting of all Americans in their roles as workers, consumers, parents, students, patients, children, women, seniors, and targeted voters he wants blocked from voting, Trumpty Dumpty’s base, still in the minority of likely voters nationally, sticks with him, as he adds more new adherents.

When asked why? The answers come fast and furious. “He is a strong leader,” “He’s rich so he can’t be bought,” (but he could be sold) “I like his stand against abortion.” Other conservative voters like his tax cuts for upper income people and big corporations, never mind the massive deficits piling up as a result on their descendants. “He wants to protect our borders from hordes of immigrants.” “He will fight inflation.” Really? According to ProPublica, “The growth in the annual deficit under Trump ranks as the third-biggest increase, relative to the size of the economy, of any U.S. presidential administration, according to a calculation by a leading Washington budget maven, Eugene Steuerle, co-founder of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.”

Have they forgotten his disastrous mocking inaction early in the Covid-19 pandemic that cost over 350,000 American lives?

Women who support Trump forgive or don’t care about his serial abuse of women, his infidelities, or his anti-women economic policies. “I don’t support Trump to learn my family values,” said one fervid woman backer, neglecting to recognize how Trump destroys family values.

Much of the business community likes Trump’s relentless tax-cutting, advantageous to his own family of course, and his radical deregulation of critical consumer, labor and environmental protections. Big Business CEOs want their profits even as more of them experience the ravages of megahurricanes, uncontrollable wildfires, rising sea levels, and unbearable heat waves. They want Trump’s rubber-stamp approval of corporate mergers and they want to “defund” the federal cops on the corporate crime, fraud and abuse beat. They also want to muzzle agencies such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Federal Trade Commission.

Trump boastfully rejects the rule of Law. He repeatedly said, “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as President.” This often-repeated dictatorial declaration doesn’t bother his supporters who say all presidents break the law. Many presidents have broken the law, but none have broken as many laws, including obstruction of justice and defiance of Congressional subpoenas, as often as Trump. And none have been indicted on felony charges for working to overturn the results of a presidential election. Remember, Trump encouraged the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 and tried to block the peaceful transfer of presidential power.

So, it will all come down to two things: One, who gets the most non-voters (there are estimated to be as many as 100 million non-voters this year) to the polls, especially in the six or so swing states and two, who will motivate their voting base to show up in big numbers.

Instead of wasting huge amounts of money on unmemorable TV and radio ads, which net their corporate-conflicted media consultants a rich fifteen percent commission, the Democratic Party leaders would be well advised to read Bishop William Barber’s just published book WHITE POVERTY and learn how his ground game can get out more votes from low-wage workers.

(nader.org)

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ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

My late father always told me that men have a duty to value womanhood and to protect their women but it is women who are the gatekeepers of morality. Why? Because it is usually the women who say “yes” or “no” to the advances of the male. I’m not talking about cases of rape, I’m talking about consensual adult sexual encounters.

Women don’t get pregnant with a kiss. The act takes effort and considerable access for both the man and a woman.

Yes, men shouldn’t be spewing their seed everywhere and then walking away from the consequences. Women, however, shouldn’t be spreading her legs and permitting the man access to the location where he can spew his seed and impregnate her unless the man is her husband and has demonstrated worthiness to do so.

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SHOULDA

Editor:

It’s amazing the amount of money raised, by both parties, to support the process of running for president. All the posturing appears to be nothing more than subterfuge to me. So, a candidate amasses more votes than his opponent, sometimes by a wide margin, and then loses the election, trumped (no pun intended) by the Electoral College. I was under the impression we lived in a democracy, but friends tell me it’s a republic. I should have paid more attention in my civics class.

Richard Cardiff

Sebastopol

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HERE IT COMES

by James Kunstler

“Leftism might actually be noble if their concern for the marginalized wasn’t simply an incidental externality to their seething hatred of the normal and the good.” —David Pivtorak on “X”

Did you entertain feelings of doom during last week’s brain-withering heat-wave? The sheer anxious waiting and wishing for it to end was a nice analog to the stifling psycho-political miasma oppressing this nation — alternately known as the republic (for which we stand) and “our democracy,” as “Joe Biden” likes to style his regime of lawfare, warfare, and garish state-sponsored depravity. Well, rejoice and ring them bells! The political weather is breaking. The week ahead looks like an all-you-can-eat, steam-table banquet of consequence.

The Supreme Court (SCOTUS) teased last week with an opening round of lesser decisions on bump stocks for rifles, abortion pills for women inconvenienced by motherhood, and a few other interesting cases. The court’s term draws to a close with the end of June. Pending are several cases liable to rattle the windows and shake down the walls.

One is the question as to whether the government can use private company proxies to censor constitutionally protected free speech (Murthy v. Missouri). The case has been simmering for years, with lower court actions that took a dim view of the intel blob’s coercive intrusions into social media. Probably the most galling part of the story is that virtually every act of censorship and de-platforming was committed against those telling the truth about some vital public issue, whether it was the danger and ineffectiveness of the Covid vaccines, or the probity of the 2020 elections, or the existence of Hunter Biden’s laptop and its dastardly contents. That is, the government’s actions were entirely in the service of lying to the American people.

This raises a greater question that redounds from the courts onto the November election: just why is the US government so deeply invested in all that lying? The answer is obvious: it has been engaged in nefarious activities that it seeks to hide and deny. And all of that has served to wreck the country. Even worse, the government has gaslit half of the public into cheerleading and rolling over for all that dishonesty, so as to keep them “safe” from hobgoblins such as “misinformation.” Considering “Joe Biden’s” cratering poll numbers, it looks like the public is tired of this incessant lying and is fixing to vote his regime out of office.

We begin to see evidence that even some hardcore regime hacks are breaking out of that consensus trance, for instance, the Cuomo brothers denouncing the lies around lawfare and Covid. Andrew, once the New York state AG himself, told the shocked studio audience on Bill Maher’s HBO gabfest, beloved by Wokesters, that the Alvin Bragg case never should have been brought to trial. His brother Chris has been telling his podcast followers that Covid policy was a fiasco and the vaccines were harmful, and he apologized for his prior shifty reporting on all that when he had a CNN show.

Also upcoming at SCOTUS: Fischer v the United States, as to whether the DOJ tortured a federal statute on shredding financial records to overcharge J-6 rioters. In 2015 the court limited the scope of that law (part of the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act), but Attorney General Merrick Garland used it anyway as an all-purpose dragnet to prosecute hundreds of people who merely paraded through the US Capitol — which provided legal footing for the House J-6 committee to color that event dishonestly as “an insurrection.” A decision against the government should lead to the release of many J-6 prisoners and perhaps lawsuits for malicious prosecution under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA). It would also toss out the pertinent charges in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s DC case against Donald Trump for supposedly fomenting an “insurrection.”

Another biggie case pending (Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo; Relentless v. Department of Commerce) will determine whether executive agencies of the US Government (e.g., the EPA, CDC, Depts. of Energy, Education, Commerce, etc.) can issue regulations as if they have the force of law — that is, push citizens and businesses around by fiat where the law is ambiguous or nonexistent. A lot has changed since SCOTUS initially sought to define the scope of agency authority in their 1984 decision known as Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council. The federal bureaucracy has become an unaccountable behemoth, issuing sometimes arbitrary and capricious regulations that make it increasingly difficult to accomplish anything in our country. It has also enabled much of the government’s monkey business around Covid. This court appears to lean towards overturning Chevron.

Also pending this week: whether SCOTUS will stay Steve Bannon’s four-month jail sentence scheduled to begin July 1 while he appeals to the SCOTUS. Bannon was convicted for contempt of Congress when he refused to testify to the J-6 committee, basing his refusal on executive privilege. Note that SCOTUS did not keep White House advisor Peter Navarro out of prison for exactly the same charge. The DOJ must reply to SCOTUS’s request for “input” on the matter by Wednesday June 26th at 4:00 p.m. At issue is whether the government is interfering in the election by shutting up Bannon during the climax months of the campaign.

Today, Judge Aileen Cannon will ask Special Counsel Jack Smith’s lawyers to do some ‘splainin’ about how come he got to be Special Counsel without being nominated by a president or confirmed by the Senate, which is the lawful procedure. It’s therefore possible that Judge Cannon can determine that Mr. Smith is not operating lawfully. That’s not the only thing that can deflate the so-called Mar-a-Lago Documents case, but it could lead to a determination that this was a malicious political prosecution, with consequences for AG Merrick Garland.

By the way, you know what this case is really about, don’t you? I’ll tell you: the FBI went into Mar-a-Lago looking for Mr. Trump’s binder containing evidence of FBI and DOJ misconduct in the RussiaGate caper. Whether they found it or not, we don’t know, nor do we know if there are other copies of the materials. But you might surmise that a lot of officials in those agencies are a little nervous about their criminal liability, especially with the presidential election poll numbers looking how they do. In other words, the Mar-a-Lago raid was a cover-up operation.

And Thursday, of course, comes the debate to end all debates. Makes you cringe a little just to imagine it.

(kunstler.com)

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“We ate poorly, had very few clothes, and worked too hard. I fed pigs, chopped wood, worked in sugar beet fields, shined shoes in barber shops, helped pitch circus tents and move heavy equipment, and even shovelled dung. But all in all, I don’t regret having grown up that way. It made me tough and well prepared for the life ahead. I was never ill or down with sickness. My body became tough as leather.”

— Jack Dempsey AKA ‘the manassa mauler AKA Kid Blackie’

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ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY, DOS

The longer time passes the more and more people are starting to see the disgusting cancer that is plaguing our nation. I haven’t met a soul that actually believes everything is cool and copacetic in our country these days. Most people, however, don’t know what to do about it. And that is our quandary. We all sense it. We all feel it in our guts.

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BRING BACK CAPITALISM

A new generation of unscrupulous political leaders and Wall Street hucksters have come up with a brilliant plan to outwit the populist revolt: pretending to be critics of capitalism.

by Matt Taibbi

Raise your hand if you saw this headline from the New York Times last week coming:

The name of Bret Stephens may be the one most associated with “markets” in media. Even his struggle-sessionish “I was wrong about climate change” piece in 2022 came with a caveat that witnessing melting glaciers in Greenland just reinforced “my belief that markets, not government, provide the cure.” Seeing an article about capitalism failing the middle class above his byline is like reading “Grammer is Overrayted” by William Safire, or “Globalism: It Doesn’t Float My Plane” by Thomas Friedman. In the end Stephens tried to say something in defense of markets, but in a bizarre reversal from 15 years ago, such protestations now need to be couched as indictments of the profit motive, especially in papers like the Times, whose upscale readers are continuing their preposterous pose of socialist chic.

The mainstream press was once home to reflexive, often hysterical defenses of the free-market system. Op-ed pages saw even the CEOs of firms caught trading against their own clients defended as “wealth creators” who did “God’s work” for a “social purpose.” No more. Now, even the very wealthy give performative speeches about the pitfalls of capitalism, corporate-funded think-tanks routinely decry its failures, and polls on sites like Fast Company even show that 35% of “C-suite executives” react negatively to the word, “capitalism.” What gives? The only headline I recall in recent years that unironically cheered the capitalist idea was a Washington Post op-ed from last summer: “Elon Musk’s Twitter Failure Shows Capitalism is Working.”

I spent a decade covering the corruption, inequities, and excess of the American financial system, with a focus on the 2008 crash. Many of the issues I wrote about (and was ridiculed for covering) are in the Stephens piece. However, the new orthodoxy about capitalism coming into vogue freaks even me out, particularly since the most lurid protestations seem to be coming from Wall Street’s own leaders. If I sound emotional, it’s because I’ve had to listen to a progression of self-congratulation campaigns from this crew, and this one is by far the boldest and most obnoxious.

Seeing Chase CEO Jamie Dimon issue a smiling clarion call in Fortune for higher taxes and massive government intervention via a “Marshall Plan for America” was a major tell that something even worse than what he called “free-for-all capitalism” was being contemplated. Dimon’s pledge was in line with outgoing World Economic Forum chief Klaus Schwab’s “stakeholder capitalism,” which purports to end the idea of corporations existing to “maximize their profits,” and make business leaders “trustees of society,” leading efforts to address “social and environmental challenges.”

For those who aren’t fluent in rich-person bullshit, what Schwab and Dimon (and a long list of others, like Apple CEO Tim Cook and BlackRock’s Larry Fink) were proposing was that we take the same people who spent the last twenty years devouring Fed rescues and converting the savings of the middle class into Jackson Hole villas, and instead of hurling them off cliffs, put them in charge of society. They would additionally like taxpayers to fund a big enough safety net to guarantee the next generation of customers for, say, a depository bank. As in: “We screwed things up so badly, you need to give us even more leeway to make things right.” It’s enough to make the most mild-mannered person reach for something sharp.

Most of the nightmares I covered after 2008 had little to do with true free enterprise. The real story of the bubble era was and is the fusing of state and corporate power. Waves of bailouts created a class of predatory “Too Big To Fail” super-firms that could siphon off massive profits without exposure to market risk, while repaying political partners in both parties with financial backing. The resultant incestuous jumble has been an economy led by a handful of market-immune actors suckling a never-emptying teat of public subsidies, while squeezing an expanding population of everyone else, i.e. the ordinary people and small businesses forced to stare down both barrels of capitalism’s business end.

It’s phony competition, but real profits are extracted. Winners preserve gains under mazes of incomprehensible tax shelters, then retire to wealth archipelagoes in the Hamptons or the Vineyard or Davos or any of a dozen other places where failing schools, immigration, crime, poverty, and other issues make no appearance. It’s infuriating and people absolutely should be outraged, but make no mistake: it isn’t “capitalism,” at least not exactly.

I’ve often been asked what should have been done after the 2008 crash, a question that usually contains the implication that Fed chief Ben Bernanke’s Nobel-winning strategy of cash infusions to the insolvent banks that caused the mess turned out well. It didn’t turn out well. The Bernanke strategy of using the Fed to remove hundreds of billions in terrible investments from the books of key firms excused companies like Citigroup and Bank of America and, yes, JP Morgan Chase (which bought Bear Stearns at a discount after the Fed swallowed billions of its “illiquid” assets) from capitalism’s one functional regulatory mechanism: failure. Selectively removing the fangs of the market made unfairness an indelible feature of American life, and made these companies and their idiot leaders permanent parasites on the neck of society. In hindsight, they needed big, healthy doses of good old-fashioned capitalist failure.

Clogging the toilet of the market to keep those bad actors afloat has had disastrous consequences. Why they need flushing…

racket.news/p/bring-back-capitalism

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TUESDAY'S LEAD STORIES FROM THE NYT

Assange Agrees to Plead Guilty in Exchange for Release, Ending Standoff With U.S.

4 Scenarios for Next Phase in Gaza War, With ‘Intense’ Fighting Set to End

Israel’s Supreme Court Rules the Military Must Draft Ultra-Orthodox Jews

Surgeon General Declares Gun Violence a Public Health Crisis

Judges Block Parts of Biden’s Student Loan Repayment Plan

China Becomes First Country to Retrieve Rocks From the Moon’s Far Side

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IN 1778, BERNARDO DE MIERA Y PACHECO, A SOLDIER AND MAPMAKER SAID THIS OF THE COMANCHE:

“This Nation is very warlike and cruel. They acquired horses and weapons of iron, and they have acquired so much skill in handling both that they surpass all Nations in agility and courage. They have made themselves the Lords of all the buffalo country, seizing it from the Apache Nation, which formally was the most widespread of all known [Native Nations] in America. They have destroyed many nations of them [Apaches], and those [Apaches] which remain they [Comanches] have pushed to the frontiers of our King’s provinces.”

Quote from The Comanche Empire by Pekka Hamalainen

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COLLISION COURSE

by Adam Shatz

“There are decades where nothing happens,” Lenin wrote, “and there are weeks where decades happen.” The last eight months have seen an extraordinary acceleration of Israel’s long war against the Palestinians. Could the history of Zionism have turned out otherwise? Benjamin Netanyahu is a callow man of limited imagination, driven in large part by his appetite for power and his desire to avoid conviction for fraud and bribery. (His trial has been running intermittently since early 2020.) But he is also Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, and his expansionist, racist ideology is the Israeli mainstream. Always an ethnocracy based on Jewish privilege, Israel has, under his watch, become a reactionary nationalist state, a country that now officially belongs exclusively to its Jewish citizens. Or in the words of the nation-state law of 2018, which enshrines Jewish supremacy: “The right to exercise national self-determination in the state of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.”

It’s no wonder Palestinians and their supporters proclaim: “Palestine shall be free from the river to the sea.” What many Zionists hear as a call to ethnic cleansing or genocide is, for most Palestinians, a call for an end to Jewish supremacy over the entirety of the land – an end to conditions of total unfreedom.

It isn’t surprising that on the student left the word “Zionist” has become an epithet for those who oppose equal rights and freedom for Palestinians, or who, even if they claim to endorse the idea of a Palestinian state, persist in thinking that the desires of Israeli Jews, by virtue of their ancestors’ persecution in Europe, outweigh those of Palestine’s indigenous Arabs.

But, as Shlomo Sand reminds us in Deux peuples pour un état?, there was another, dissident Zionism, a “cultural Zionism” that advocated the creation of a binational state based on Arab-Jewish co-operation, one that counted among its members Ahad Ha’am, Judah Magnes, Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt.

In 1907, the cultural Zionist Yitzhak Epstein accused the Zionist movement of having forgotten “one small detail: that there is in our beloved land an entire people that has been attached to it for hundreds of years and has never considered leaving it.”

Epstein and his allies, who founded Brit Shalom, the Alliance for Peace, in 1925, imagined Zion as a place of cultural and spiritual rebirth. Any attempt to create an exclusively Jewish state, they warned, would turn Zionism into a classical colonial movement and result in permanent warfare with the Palestinian Arabs. After the Arab riots of 1929, Brit Shalom’s secretary, Hans Kohn, denounced the official Zionist movement for “adopting the posture of wounded innocents” and for dodging “the least debate with the people who live in this country. We have depended entirely on the force of British power. We have set ourselves goals that were inevitably going to degenerate into conflict.”

But this was no accident: conflict with the Arabs was essential to the Zionist mainstream. For the advocates of “muscular Zionism,” as Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin has argued, the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine would allow Jews not only to achieve the “negation of exile” but also, and paradoxically, to reinvent themselves as citizens of the white West – in Herzl’s words, as a “rampart of Europe against Asia.”

Brit Shalom’s vision of reconciliation and co-operation with the indigenous population was unthinkable to most Zionists, because they regarded the Arabs of Palestine as squatters on sacred Jewish land. And, as Ben-Gurion put it, “we don’t want Israelis to be Arabs. It’s our duty to fight against the Levantine mentality that destroys individuals and societies.”

In 1933, Brit Shalom folded; a year later, Kohn left Palestine in despair, convinced that the Zionist movement was on a collision course with the Palestinians and the region.

(London Review of Books)

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"Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."

— Cormac McCarthy, "The Road"

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THE SONG OF DESPAIR

The memory of you emerges from the night around me.
The river mingles its stubborn lament with the sea.

Deserted like the wharves at dawn.
It is the hour of departure, oh deserted one!

Cold flower heads are raining over my heart.
Oh pit of debris, fierce cave of the shipwrecked.

In you the wars and the flights accumulated.
From you the wings of the song birds rose.

You swallowed everything, like distance.
Like the sea, like time. In you everything sank!

It was the happy hour of assault and the kiss.
The hour of the spell that blazed like a lighthouse.

Pilot’s dread, fury of a blind diver,
turbulent drunkenness of love, in you everything sank!

In the childhood of mist my soul, winged and wounded.
Lost discoverer, in you everything sank!

You girdled sorrow, you clung to desire,
sadness stunned you, in you everything sank!

I made the wall of shadow draw back,
beyond desire and act, I walked on.

Oh flesh, my own flesh, woman whom I loved and lost,
I summon you in the moist hour, I raise my song to you.

Like a jar you housed the infinite tenderness,
and the infinite oblivion shattered you like a jar.

There was the black solitude of the islands,
and there, woman of love, your arms took me in.

There were thirst and hunger, and you were the fruit.
There were grief and the ruins, and you were the miracle.

Ah woman, I do not know how you could contain me
in the earth of your soul, in the cross of your arms!

How terrible and brief was my desire of you!
How difficult and drunken, how tensed and avid.

Cemetery of kisses, there is still fire in your tombs,
still the fruited boughs burn, pecked at by birds.

Oh the bitten mouth, oh the kissed limbs,
oh the hungering teeth, oh the entwined bodies.

Oh the mad coupling of hope and force
in which we merged and despaired.

And the tenderness, light as water and as flour.
And the word scarcely begun on the lips.

This was my destiny and in it was the voyage of my longing,
and in it my longing fell, in you everything sank!

Oh pit of debris, everything fell into you,
what sorrow did you not express, in what sorrow are you not drowned!

From billow to billow you still called and sang.
Standing like a sailor in the prow of a vessel.

You still flowered in songs, you still broke in currents.
Oh pit of debris, open and bitter well.

Pale blind diver, luckless slinger,
lost discoverer, in you everything sank!

It is the hour of departure, the hard cold hour
which the night fastens to all the timetables.

The rustling belt of the sea girdles the shore.
Cold stars heave up, black birds migrate.

Deserted like the wharves at dawn.
Only the tremulous shadow twists in my hands.

Oh farther than everything. Oh farther than everything.

It is the hour of departure. Oh abandoned one.

— Pablo Neruda, translated by W. S. Merwin

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