How The Democrats Captured The Northcoast, Forever

A JAUNDICED EYE looks back: In the pivotal year of 1967, the Summer of Love having gone to speed, STDs, Nixon, and the endless war on Vietnam, hippies and hip-symps headed north, through the rainbow tunnel, north through the suburban terrors of Santa Rosa, farther north yet to plunge through the Green Curtain at Cloverdale, and on north to the vast, sparsely populated Northcoast, headed vaguely back to the land, and the farther north we went the cheaper the land got, but when we got back to the land there was no way to earn a living on our logged over, remote acreages other than remittance farming at places like the Rainbow commune above Philo, a site Timothy Leary tellingly described as “one of the most successful, upscale hippie communes in the country.” (The rainbow property is now a vineyard.) Upscale is the keyword here. Read upscale in this case as insolence and a immutable sense of privilege and, in a pinch, a government check or an emergency check from despised Mom and Dad.

LESS UP-MARKET HIPPIES, the ones who preferred not to risk jail growing marijuna and the annual infestation of pot bandits, dusted off their diplomas and came down out of the hills to get themselves public jobs which, in the perennially tight job market of Mendocino County, are the only jobs that pay college people the kind of money college people think they deserve.

THE HIPPIES were re-entering a society they'd spent their youths yearning to escape. But being middle-class and college-certified and civic-minded, the hippies elected other hippies, or hip-symps like “anti-nuke” Doug Bosco, to public offices high and low, from school boards to supervisors to superior court judges, and before the “rednecks” and the “straights” (anybody who believed in Little League and orderly households) could mobilize their side’s vote, a majority of Mendocino County's public jobs were occupied by the love generation.

AND PUBLIC POLICY in Mendocino County grew crueler by the year, always in direct proportion to the re-entry of the formerly estranged. For the then-livable wage of $30,000 a year, a graduate of the big naked solstice piles would put the programmatic boots to anybody a rung down the ladder. Pay an old hippie with a law degree a $200,000 a year with a package full of fringes and he'll blandly process the proles into prison.

CONGRESSMAN MIKE THOMPSON, mercifully now moved to another gerrymandered district to the east, picked up a Purple Heart in Vietnam. He said when he got home a hippie spit on him. The hippies, once removed, voted him into office and have kept him there ever since where Thompson, representing the wine industry full-time, has been a reliable vote for war and against the environment. (Not a single vet was spat upon; I refer you to the definitive book on that myth subject by Jerry Lembcke, “The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam.”) Republicans don't bother to run anyone against the “liberals” of the Northcoast because Democrats, talking left, voting right, are merely Republican Lite, hence, for instance, the monstrous Dick Cheney’s no problemo signing on with the welcoming Democrats.

THE ELECTORAL BASE for career officeholders like the Democrats foist off on the Northcoast is largely composed of public employees, whose funding depends on Democrats at the state and federal level. The edu-bloc, proportionately large in Mendocino County, votes as one for Democrats. The Democrats send the edu-bloc lots of money while saying, “Gee, I wish I could send more for the kids but the Republicans spend it all on war, and I have to support our men and women in uniform so I have to vote for war, too.”

PEOPLE EMPLOYED at various levels of government, a third of all persons employed in Mendocino County, vote for Democrats because Democrats can be depended upon to make more government of the type that faithfully re-elects them. (Take a look at the laughable admin chart for the Great Redwood Trail, a looming jobs program for well connected Democrats, as was the railroad before it.)

WHAT THE DEMOCRATS have done on the Northcoast is create an old-fashioned political machine that claims Democrats are the “progressive” alternative to MAGA-ism, which is politically invisible on the Northcoast. Maybe they are in some places — San Francisco and some other cities elect people to city councils and even Congress who are genuinely progressive, er, well, kinda, sometimes — but not in Mendocino County. In Mendocino County, Democrats comprise a forever one-party monopoly.

CONGRESSMAN THOMPSON, the wine industry's main man in Washington, as is our alleged rep, Huffman, was instrumental in getting the ban on ozone-destroying methyl bromide delayed for five more years because that's what the industrial wine industry demanded at the time. (Thompson, natch, owns a vineyard and winery.) Pumped down into the earth to depths of 12 feet, methyl bromide sterilizes the earth for new vines. Immigrant Mexicans, upon whom the entire industry depends for their hard work at starvation wages, applied not only this particular poison to the earth, but year round poisons that kill weeds and insects, this annual chemical stew runs off into the Navarro River, now fish-free The poisons get into the water, and everything around these vineyards is soon dead. (When’s the last time you saw a frog anywhere near a vineyard?) The wine industry, thanks to Democrats, is basically exempt from industrial-environmental safety standards, and the industry’s use of pesticides and herbicides is almost as loosely supervised because Mendocino County is short on inspectors, and all the poisoners have to do is report what poisons they applyl.

THE LATE MICHEL SALGUES, a PhD in chemistry, and the former boss at the huge, French-owned Roederer Winery in Philo, was quite candid about the realities of wine making in Mendocino County. “Why do you think we're here?,” Salgues asked us. “We can do things here we cannot do in France because the wine industry in France, right down to labor practices, is heavily regulated.”

ONE SPRING MORNING back in the early 1970s, as clusters of hippie kids waited on Greenwood Road for the big yellow buses to carry them to classrooms as dull as the ones their alienated parents had fled for California's backwoods, a Louisiana-Pacific helicopter, spraying the freshly logged hills with herbicides to prevent non-commercial re-vegetation, heedlessly doused the little Rainbows and Karmas as they stood beside the road near where the logging had been done. The hippies mobilized and quickly passed a county-wide ban on the aerial application of herbicides. Within months, state Democrats, including the Northcoast contingent, led by mega-liberal Willie Brown, their pockets stuffed with corporate ag cash, passed legislation that prohibited individual counties from regulating herbicides and pesticides; only the state could decide who could poison the kids and who couldn't and what regs would apply.

AMONG THE RE-ENTRY HIPPIES who dominate Mendocino County's public institutions are too many lawyers. Law degreed hippies were quick to note that Mendocino County's far-flung communities were served by one-day-a-week justice courts whose judges were “lay persons,” i.e., non-lawyers. Nobody in Mendocino County was unhappy with the lay judges in any organized sense of unhappiness. Lay judges were a non-issue. People living in the county's outback liked their community judges because the judges lived in the community, knew the community, and were trusted by the community to do justice for the non-felonies they dealt with.

BUT THE HIPPIE LAWYERS saw big pay days going to waste. They began to say, “The quality of justice is likely to be inferior if the dispensing person it isn't properly trained. We really should have lawyers sitting as judges in these justice courts.” The law was duly changed, and the lay judges, who had sat in judgment of their friends and neighbors for a hundred years without complaint, were gone.

THERE HAS INDEED been a dramatic change in the quality of justice in Mendocino County. Not only are more people than ever before going to jail for longer periods of time, and where the “lay” judges cost taxpayers $300 a month for a court that convened one day a week, thus sparing plaintiffs and defendants alike the long trip to Ukiah, the law degreed justice court judges now made upwards of $200,000 a year plus fringes for them and their families, a rate of pay and a benefits package few defendants or local citizens enjoy.

THE QUALITY OF JUSTICE now that the boys and girls with the credentials wear the black robes? If you can afford a well-connected lawyer you get off; if you can't afford a well-connected lawyer you go to the state pen, and the people sending you there, from judges to most of the lawyers involved, the probation officers to the psychologists to the social workers who evaluate you for the judges, are all NPR listeners, Democrats, Clintonians, groovies, joyous Kamalas.

AND NOTHING will ever change for the better for the people on the receiving end of the Hip-Autocracy that has had Mendocino County in a lavender chokehold ever since Jim Jones, a liberal, a Democrat, and a committed doper.