ONE YEAR, I CELEBRATED Martin Luther King’s birthday by paying HBO $46 on a Saturday night to watch Mike Tyson knockout Francois Botha. I’d better say here that I think it’s way past time to either ban boxing or require that the pros wear protective headgear like the amateurs are required to do. Anyone who can look at what boxing did to great athletes like Mohammed Ali and Sugar Ray Robinson, not to mention the hundreds of lesser known pugs like the tragic Jerry Quarry and Tommy ‘Hurricane’ Jackson and still defend boxing as a sport would seem to be deficient in the humanity department. But the Tyson-Botha undercard was pretty good, too.
MIKE TYSON is probably a better gauge of the state of race relations in the country than the innumerable, rote MLK memorials underway across the country. The local remembrances seem to me to miss most of what the man stood for, consisting of a lot of weepy declarations of brotherhood — not that they can hurt — and Family of Man-quality rhetoric. Now that most white people are liberals on race — even Maga Man claims to be — at least in public, there’s a widespread tendency to ignore the ongoing class and economic realities of this country, a basic fact of American life that Martin Luther King seldom failed to point out and probably gave up his life for saying. King persisted in demanding that wealth be fairly apportioned among all citizens. He emphasized that a country as rich as this one should not tolerate deprivation whatever the color of the people deprived. The primacy of economics in King’s vision of a color blind society is left out of the celebrations of his remarkable, too brief life.
IT ISN’T HARD to imagine what King would have thought and said about contemporary economic and social policies, but I won't forget Maya Angelou claiming on national television that Bill Clinton, acclaimed as a surrogate black person, was being “lynched” over his Lewinski interlude. Lynched? I still don’t think that’s the word we want here, Ms. Angelou.
THE TWO PARTY stranglehold on the throats of the people of this ever more precarious country, whatever their race, is a much more effective enemy of black people than Bull Connor ever was, and working people of the racial rainbow haven’t had more relentless adversaries in the White House since Calvin Coolidge.
WHAT WE get in the Martin Luther King memorials is a lot of slobbery rhetoric of the Love-One-Another-Or-Die with an emphasis to keep the dissent “non-violent.”
MOST OF US would settle for simple ethnic tolerance without the appended admonition to love one another. And some of us are also aware from bitter personal experience that the bigoted personality type is as plentiful among liberals as it is among conservatives.
BUT RACE RELATIONS are the one area of American life where progress is a matter of verifiable, objective fact. Race relations are better — a lot better — than they were when King was alive.
SO THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS and government take another paid day off, which is about all Martin Luther King’s life means these days just as a solid 40% of the population slides into a kind of permanent hopelessness. Now that black heroes like King have been co-opted into the great consensus, the great fight for equality of opportunity is over.
THE MSM'S editorial lab rats can be depended on to waddle into editorial print every MLK Day with a denunciation of some black sports figure or a rapper for their perceived deleterious effect on the nation’s youth, with Mexican gang bangers coming on strong as ultra-menace, civic division. Read a biography of Babe Ruth or Ty Cobb some time for a lesson in the silliness of making athletes into role models. Cobb was a lot crazier than any contemporary sports figure, and Ruth, who was not a racist, managed somehow to emerge into adulthood unaffected by modern civilization. (Another example of flagrant prose racism, albeit on a much higher level than the Press Democrat’s, is Tom Wolfe’s best-selling novel, ‘A Man In Full.’ It’s right up there with the film version of ‘The Color Purple.’)
ONE MORE PARENTHETICAL: I forget the name of the sports writer, but when baseball teams carried writers with them on their train commutes between cities, a bunch of writers were sitting around the club car one night when a naked Ruth comes running through, a naked woman with a big knife in hot pursuit. The writer comments, “There goes another story we can't write.”
IT’S SURPRISING that given all the attention Tyson gets that nobody has offered up an academic paper called something like, The Black Athlete and His Psychic Search for Family — A Psycho-History of Mike Tyson. After he dispatched Botha in the fifth round that long ago Saturday night, Tyson gave a big hello to a Brooklyn gang, apparently his stand-in family at the time.
THAT SATURDAY NIGHT the ringside crowd included a delighted old lady who seemed to be with her daughter and her granddaughter. Three incongruous lookalikes sitting side by side. The old lady’s attentions were riveted on the ring action; she looked like she knew her boxing. Daughter and granddaughter’s attentions seemed to wander to movie stars seated nearby. The three of them looked like money, but then again maybe the grand dame had put aside a little out of her social security checks to treat the family to a night of live mayhem.
AMERICA is wonderful in its unmatched variousnesses. Also at ringside was a little Chinese girl of 9 or 10 or so. She was seated next to her mother, I assumed, and later in the evening sat in mom’s lap when dad showed up to take the kid’s seat. At one point early on in the first of three fights on the evening’s card, the child became aware that the television cameras were on her and jumped up out of her chair to wave and mug at it. Mom pulled the kid emphatically back into her seat. A fully assimilated American child would have been allowed to perform endlessly, probably with mom and pop elbowing her out of the way to get their pusses into range of the magic eye.
THE FIXED camera angles made these intriguing people unavoidable on-screen, so we saw a lot of them and wondered about them. Everyone else looked like the kind of people you’d expect to see close up at a retro bloodsport, complete with girls in bikinis strutting around the ring holding up round cards while men wolf-whistled at them. I hadn’t heard a live wolf-whistle since the last time I watched a fight on TV, and I haven’t heard one in person since about 1955.
THE REFEREE for the Tyson-Botha fight was roundly booed when he was introduced because he has a reputation for stopping fights short of death. The ref smiled at the boos. An ironist. Botha, who looked exactly like my late friend Ted Bertsch of Ukiah but twice Bertsch’s size, was introduced as the “White Buffalo.” For being a white guy willing to be knocked out by a black guy he picked up $1.5 mil.
TYSON, for serving so well as white America’s worst black nightmare, picked up $10 mil without breaking a sweat. The announcer described Botha accurately if unkindly as “a morass of flesh,” while Tyson was described accurately as “sculpted.” I couldn’t make out Botha’s tattoos but Tyson’s are Chairman Mao on one arm and Malcolm X on the other, which may make sense to him, but don’t quite mesh in any socio-political historical sense I’m aware of.
THE CHAMP came into the ring wearing a T-shirt inscribed “Be Real,” another psychological tipoff to the man’s preoccupations, and further evidence of an integrity superior to most of the people writing about him. As the Tyson entourage made its way to the ring, some kind of kill-’em-all rap music filled the auditorium.
THE WHITE BUFFALO entered the ring to cowboy music. The first round had the mob on its feet because Buff and Mike continued to punch each over after the bell ending the first round. But a few minutes later, in round five, the inevitable happened. The morass of flesh — not much more skilled as a fighter than the big guy at the end of the bar in Anywhere USA — went down in a heap when he walked straight into a Tyson right that Tyson seemed to bring all the way up from the floor, and had pivoted into with all his strength directly onto the White Buffalo’s fully exposed chin.
BUFF went down like he’d been poleaxed, which he had, and when he tried to get up he fell through the ropes. Tyson hustled over to help Buff regain his feet, then gave him a big hug and told the announcers he admired Buff’s heart. Then Mike said a big hello to the Brooklyn gangsters.
EARLIER IN THE TELECAST, perfectly organized into a three-hour program with Mike and Buff preceded by two prelims guaranteed to each last 12 rounds because none of the four fighters had ever been knocked out and only rarely knocked off their feet, Tyson talked about how he’d just learned that Cus d’Amato, the only person in his life who liked Tyson for himself, had put away money for him in a secret account only recently revealed, but now worth $200,000. d’Amato was the last person in Tyson's life with the authority to pull him back into his seat, and Mike has been in trouble ever since he left the old man's home.
REWRITING HISTORY: It’s 7pm the day before Martin Luther King’s birthday and I still haven’t heard a true word about the guy, the last truly progressive national figure our odd country has produced. The waves of pure mawk coming at me from the television set and (of course) pseudo-public radio KZYX, remind me that no one voted for Nixon, everyone was for the civil rights movement of the 1960s, no one supported the war on Vietnam, and Martin Luther King wanted people of different races to be nice to each other.
IN FACT, by the time King was murdered in Memphis, the mass media had turned against him big time and had never been too keen on him in the first place because he was connecting too many social-economic dots for too many people. He was aggressively opposed to the war on Vietnam, pointing out it was the latest chapter in a long history of imperial murder of non-white peoples and he was for democratic socialism, and had even gone so far as to speak the forbidden S-word on national television. So long as he stuck to preaching racial harmony, even the closet Klan types of the rightwing of the Republican Party couldn’t denounce King who, after all, was certainly preferable to the scowling leather lungs in dark glasses who were thrilling the white suburbs with a lot of wild talk about how, with a few photogenic bad boys out front, 12% of the population was going to off on the national pig.
AS GREAT WAVES of pure bullshit rolled over America in 1968, Martin Luther King was calmly pointing out that a few fundamental social guarantees would make America a much less violent place and a far more ethnically harmonious country. If people were guaranteed food, shelter, work, health care, and education they would be less inclined to harm other persons. Once achieved, social and economic justice would cool everyone out. It would, too, and Martin Luther King was murdered for preaching it, not that much of anybody seems to remember the most important two-thirds of King’s message.
YOU’LL never hear it said by the kind of weepy liberals who dominate the national and local media but it was Jock World and the Armed Services where the greatest advances in race relations were made in this country. It was at the ball game and in boot camp where lasting and loyal cross-ethnic friendships were first made in a mass way in this country. Since, as a trip to any downtown area in any town in America makes obvious, millions of Americans of all races enjoy loyal and affectionate relations where virtually none existed in 1950.
RACE RELATIONS aren’t bad at all considering that we’ve moved in less than 90 years from wholesale lynchings and a nearly South African-quality apartheid to unharassed inter-marriage and generally non-lethal relations among America’s rainbow family. What isn’t better is economic relations, not that you’d know it from most of the media. Average income folks find it harder and harder to get by in what is still billed as capitalism’s finest hour, with magic money everywhere except where much of the real work gets done. And “liberals” of the Democratic Party type have managed to exacerbate race relations by defining people as “oppressed” whose grievances hardly amount to oppression in any historical sense of the term.
THE SUPERVISORS worked so darn hard on their two day “work”-shop last week, the one they paid a pointless facilitator over $5,500 for one day’s facilitation, that they have taken another long hibernation. Their next board meeting is Tuesday, February 11, 2025. So they’re off for their winter hiatus from January 15 to February 11, essentially one entire month. There’s a “general government” standing committee meeting on Wednesday, January 29, but they won’t do anything. We’ll advise when that agenda is posted next week. With the new board rules, doing nothing will be a little harder than it used to be, but we’re sure they’re up to the task, having had a month to rest up.
(Mark Scaramella)
MARK SCARAMELLA: The first day of the workshop was “facilitated” by a professional facilitator from Sacramento named Yolanda Underwood of “CPS HR Consulting,” a former Social Worker turned Human Resources Consultant. Ms. Underwood got a whopping $4,800 for her one day appearance, plus an additional $720 to prepare an “action plan.”
ED NOTE: Remember the quaint old days when public officials spent public money as carefully as they did their own money? That was the prevailing maxim anyway, but not that many years ago $5,000 for a day of blah-blah would have been unthinkable. What happened?
HERE'S HOW IT LOOKED to the Magas: “Democrats set the tone early in Tuesday's highly anticipated confirmation hearing for President-elect Trump's embattled Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth: Double, triple, and quadruple down on bogus allegations and discredited smears. He's an alcoholic! He's a rapist! He's a misogynist! Oh, and he also ran a veteran's charity into the ground! Rhode Island Senator Jack Reed, the top Dem on the Armed Services Committee, led the Banzai charge and his colleagues followed: the hysterical Kirsten Gillibrand, the dim-witted Mazie Hirono, the self-righteous Tim Kaine and the shrieking Elizabeth Warren, numbering among the legislative lightweights.” (DM)
LOOKED that way to me, too, and I don't think he or any other Maga should be Secretary of Anything, let alone our lunatic arsenal and the global muscle about to be at the disposal of the Orange Absurdity.
AS I SAT there watching these dim hysterics pound on this guy it was another lesson in how repulsive the big time Democrats are, how unaware that the screechingly pious (and hypocritical) behavior they displayed in the Hegseth hearing has undoubtedly created whole new posses of Magas.
IN MY RECENT SCREED lamenting the cost of the apparently unending Eyster vs. Cubbison matter, I should also have said that I think Eyster has otherwise been an excellent DA. He's made rational charging decisions and has often appeared in court himself rather than function simply as an administrator. And he's saved (and made) the County many thousands of dollars by allowing dope defendants to plead out to fines and misdemeanors rather than clog up the courts, as his predecessor did, with all-out prosecutions and expensive jury trials. Eyster isn't stupid and he isn't nuts; I bet he regrets his pursuit of two honest women simply doing their authorized jobs.
JD VANCE, nihilist changeling, going from “Trump is America's Hitler” to Trump's slavish VP, has disagreed with Trump on pardoning January 6 rioters, arguing against clemency for the violent yobbos but pardons for the non-violent members of the mob.
TRUMP, natch, has said the Jan 6 mob he incited are “great patriots,” but watch him back off blanket pardons as per Vance's advice. Trump, limited as he is, has got to know that even most of his Magas don't want pardons for the most vicious members of his invading force.
I WISH Pence would have confronted the mob instead of hauling ass outta there. Would he have been lynched? Yes, but only if the event had been an insurrection and not a mere riot, the diff being, for the millionth time, insurrectionists have a plan to take and hold, rioters don't.
I SHOULD know better but I bit on a headline that screamed outrage about an ICU nurse doing something so awful at the bedside of a comatose patient that she should be… pick your sanction. I bit and read the story. Turned out she was flossing her teeth, not exactly “appropriate” as Mendolib's favorite pejorative would likely declare but, as a recent ICU patient myself, I wouldn't care, comatose or fully awake.
SELDOM do I read a story about Marin County that doesn't contain the adjective, “privileged.” There are indeed lots of wealthy people in Marin but most residents are no more privileged than citizens of Mendocino County. On my street in San Anselmo, for instance, most of my neighbors leave for work early every morning, and their dwellings are, on average, more modest than Ukiah's Westside. And like Ukiah where the town’s poorest residents are clustered in the dreary neighborhoods of South State Street, Marin's working poor, almost all immigrants, are clustered east of 101 in crowded, sub-standard apartment buildings much like those of South State in Ukiah.
MARIN'S fire danger? Constant. Imminent. Clustered, bushy neighborhoods in the hills, thousands of people resident along long roads in and out with no exit options. In a catastrophe, people will die in their vehicles trying to get out.
"I am hopeful that Zuckerberg and the tech bros aren't just sucking up to Trump. I hope that their eyes have been opened to the danger to democracy that comes from allowing government censorship and control on their platforms. Perhaps their convictions are changing and strengthening. Maybe they are just going back to protecting First Amendment rights for ALL of us, not just one side. Perhaps I'm being naive! Time will tell.”
THE ABOVE is an anonymous on-line observation, but count me among the free speechers. The thought that Zuckerberg and the Appropriate Police were deciding what people could read and see had me stomping my ancient feet. Boiled down, people believe what they need to believe, what jibes with their world views, wacky as those views may be, and often dangerously wacky they are, too, as the rise of Trump proves for all time. But censorship is a two-way street. It’s healthier in the long run to let ‘er rip and hope sanity prevails. Orwell famously declared that so long as you can tell truth from untruth you're not nuts, but the internet has made truth more difficult to see, fer shure, fer shure. Overall though, people ought to be trusted to make their own judgements. Right?
THE ATTEMPTED lib lab lynching of Hegseth from the NYT, lib lab media of record: “Some of the toughest questioning was over Mr. Hegseth’s previous statements that women should not serve in combat roles. Democratic senators accused him of modulating those views purely in hopes of winning a cabinet post.” Hegseth replied, “Yes, women will have access to ground combat roles, given that standards remain high, and we will have a review to ensure the standards have not been eroded.”
THE ARGUMENT by, ahem, inexperienced men, that women are too weak to fight is, well, weak, as any number of women fighting effectively in any number of guerrilla wars should prove beyond all doubt. But in contexts of weak leadership and undisciplined male soldiers, women would be as imperiled by their fellow soldiers as the enemy, but relative physical strength? On the average about even.
I READ SOMEWHERE that women trying out for elite American military units have to do a minimum of 9 pull-ups and hump 80-pound packs. In Marine boot camp way, way back, the standard was three pull-ups, twenty push-ups, a bunch of sit-ups, and kindred lay-up physical standards which, even then, even in the supposedly elite Marine Corps, lots of recruits couldn’t manage. The hard part for me, as it was for my fellow “maggots, syphilitic misfucks and California queers” were the constant physical beatings, not beatings exactly, but sudden punches and other assaults from the drill instructors, three psychopaths overseeing my platoon. And the assaults were constant. Young and dumb as I was, I thought, “If these bastards are on my side, how bad can the Russians be?”
I'M NOT ONE for Newsom bashing. I see the guv as the inevitable work product of the semi-liberal politics of the Democrat elite, a guy eating his capitalism and having it too as capitalism eats a majority of US. But when my PG&E bill goes from $90 to $435 in one month to heat my solarized house, I remember that Newsom appoints the Public Utilities Commission that just authorized extortionate rate hikes for PG&E and pays its top exec something like $11 mil a year.
WHICH BRINGS US to Jack Kerouac, one of the last generation of American writers to have a personality. A recent piece in the Chron about Kerouac was called “Kerouac legacy in legal limbo.” The old boy's heirs are still fighting over his estate, a large one, although Kerouac made it clear before he drowned in the bottle who he wanted to get his money. “This is Uncle Jack,” he wrote to Paul Blake in 1969 shortly before he died. “I've turned over my entire estate, real, personal and mixed, to Memere (mom) and if she dies before me, it will be turned to you. I wanted to leave my estate to someone directly connected with the last remaining drop of my direct blood line, and not to leave a dingblasted fucking thing to my wife's one hundred Greek relatives.”
PLAIN ENOUGH, but the one hundred relatives sued and sued, then sued some more on the basis that Kerouac stayed drunk in his last days and didn't know what he was saying. But finally a judge ruled the money should go where Kerouac wanted it to go, which the article was about.
BUT THE PIECE libeled him anyway in a sidebar called “Six facts you might not know,” where this alleged fact appeared: “Contrary to the belief of '60s radicals like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, who thought him a hopeless redneck, Kerouac actually opposed the Vietnam War. But his reason for opposing it was unique – he claimed it was ‘a conspiracy between the North and South Vietnamese to get American jeeps’.”
IF KEROUAC said that he was obviously kidding, and Jerry Rubin, like a lot of so-called 60s radicals, stopped being a radical when the radical fad ended about 1973, with literary culture now disappeared into Gadget Land and the credulity that reigns there, making up stories about dead writers and even whole eras like the 1960s, has never been easier.
WHICH THEN BRINGS US to “An Idiot's Guide to Charles Bukowski,” which I spotted the other day in an otherwise respectable book store. As if there's something that needs decoding in Bukowski? Or the all-time idiot's festival at Woodstock? Lots of varsity hippies are checking in with their memoirs of Hippie Time, but really, didn't you see the Hep C and methamphetamine coming? Wasn't it clear even then that the big naked piles would end in death and miles of human destruction?
FROM A RECENT CHRON: “The highway that winds along the coast of Marin County offers some of California’s most magnificent vistas, with the deep blue Pacific Ocean glittering through veils of fog. But for a handful of travelers, the views aren’t the prize. At one blink-and-you’ll-miss-it pullout is a natural spring that draws people from across the San Francisco Bay Area, some of whom drive hours through traffic to get there. Many of them reject water from any other source and drink only what they say is ‘liquid gold’ that gushes from the copper pipes of Red Rock Spring.” RED ROCK SPRING is near Stinson Beach. I bring it up because I know lots of Mendo old timers who have their own secret spring waters, their own liquid gold. At the risk of going all woo-woo ancient on you, I was tipped to a spring on Mountain View Road a coupla-three miles west of Boonville High School by a Native American, who told me that on his commute from the Manchester rez to Ukiah he always filled up a few jugs from the site, conveniently capped by Caltrans some years ago. I never had the water tested but it was so sweet and cold I always downed a cup or two in tribute to this gift directly from God before leaving with a week's supply.
TOM HINE (aka Tommy Wayne Kramer)
Re the Anthony James Pelfrey case mentioned in last week’s Off the Record
(https://theava.com/archives/259460)…
All my memories of the Anthony Pelfrey case are bad memories. I worked the case as a criminal defense investigator and I’ll leave it at Pelfrey being the most floridly psycho guy I ever sat in a small jailhouse interview room with in my life. Everything from the panicked sideways glances to the sudden jerky movements that were just this side of violent combined to make him an obvious 1368. (Unable to stand trial or assist his attorney or understand the nature and consequences of his behavior.)
Pelfrey’s cramped little cottage on North State Street adjacent to a bar that’s been empty 20-plus years was a nightmare of scrawlings and messages of doom and despair. I took Dr. John Podboy out to have a look at the abode before he testified in Judge Brown’s courtroom about Pelfrey’s condition, and I furnished Judge Brown photos of that interior. We had a handful of longtime acquaintences testify about Pelfrey’s weird fixations on anything having to do with the left: turning left onto a street, being left-handed etc. They came, they talked, and Judge Brown took everything in, weighed and considered and decided the evidence suggested Pelfrey was an excellent candidate for the California State Prison system. I hate to think of what happened to him in there.
WHY?
A ceasefire deal seems to have been reached in Gaza. Great. But recall that Israel has breached the Lebanon truce nearly 500 times in the two months since it was signed…and any retaliation or defensive measures taken by Palestinians will be considered a violation, which is how Israel justified ending the first ceasefire/hostage release deal back in late November 2023.
This ceasefire deal could have been reached any time since May and likely anytime since December of 2023, as Qatar’s Prime Minister, Sheikh Mohammed, acidly noted: “13 months of a waste, of negotiating details that [have] no meaning and aren’t worth any single life that we lost in Gaza, or any single life of those hostages.” It wasn’t because neither Netanyahu nor Biden wanted an agreement; even after the leadership of Hamas and Hezbollah had been eliminated, the mass killing and destruction went on.
According to many reports, Wednesday was one of the bloodiest days in Gaza in months, with Israeli airstrikes on Palestinian tent camps, homes, apartments, and journalists. At least 80 Palestinians were killed and nearly 200 injured. How many more Palestinians will Israel kill in the next four days before the ceasefire takes effect (if it does)?
Who will be the last Palestinian child killed by an Israeli-launched US-made bomb in Gaza in the days and hours before the ceasefire commences? (During WW I, the US and UK forces launched a senseless massive artillery barrage on German positions after they’d laid down their arms in the minutes leading up to the 11 a.m. start of the Armistice. At least 2,738 men were killed on the final morning of the war.) Why?
— Jeffrey St. Clair
JENNIFER POOLE (Willits Weekly):
The eight candidates Willits City Council will consider for appointment as a councilmember next week include: (1) Franklin Rockwell. (2) Robin Leler. (3) Raghda Zacharia. (4) Sherrie Ebyam, (5) Bruce Burton, (6) Daniel Sansom, (7) Ithaca Moore, and (8 Garrett Moore. The appointment item, item 9a, is set for the Wednesday, January 22 meeting. The new councilmember will fill the rest of Greta Kanne's term, through 2026.
TRUMP was sworn in as the 47th president of the United States on Monday. “The golden age of America begins right now. My recent election is a mandate to completely and totally reverse a horrible betrayal and all these many betrayals that have taken place and give people back their faith, their wealth, their democracy and indeed their freedom. From this moment on, America’s decline is over.”
THE ESSENTIAL DOUG HENWOOD in his Left Business Observer, “So we’ve got downward mobility for over 90% of the population, a level of inequality unseen in a century, scores of millions without health insurance — and little prospect for any of this improving in the conceivable future. Yet we have Democrats who seem more interested in courting Republicans and subsidizing Wall Street than in doing anything serious about social rot, and a polity that seems pretty much OK with that. In fact, about the only people in the streets are out to protest a creeping socialism that exists only in their peculiar minds. What a country.”
YES, SIR, what a country, the only one in the world, the only country ever that no matter what you say about it is true, and certainly the only country that could produce J. Andrew Scheubeck, Mayor of Mina, born August 2, 1914 died May 28, 2002, about whom I would have remained ignorant except I happened to see a classified ad in the Ukiah paper announcing that a kind of memoir about Scheubeck's life in the northeastern part of Mendocino County was available for $40. A little steep, but now that I’ve got the book I probably would have gone a hundred for it. The best book on early Mendocino County — the only book on early Mendo other than ‘Genocide and Vendetta’ that accurately tells it like it was.
WHEN I could still talk, I often got into low intensity arguments with my Fox News-informed friends, and I have a lot of them in Boonville. My local friends' world views are pretty much shaped by Rupert Murdoch and his Fox talking heads, who specialize in beating up on people who can't fight back.
BUT my Fox-informed buddies' everyday conduct is at odds with their cruel political views. A lot of Americans are like this, politically schizophrenic, their terrifying political opinions contradicted by their fully functioning humanity on the personal, daily level.
ONE guy’s opposed to single-payer although he would benefit directly from it, a fact he can't grasp through the din of pure bullshit he absorbs every day from the tough talkers and their blonde babe surrogates on Fox.
I SAY I'm for single payer, for free education through college, for guaranteed work at a competitive wage, for decent housing for all citizens, for a free range chicken in every pot. The rich will be delighted, I lie, to at last pay their fair share to make America a much happier, a much less violent, a comprehensively much less crazed place, a truly great country again.
“HOW would we pay for all that?” he demands.
I SAY we wouldn't pay for it. They would pay for it, they defined as all those patriots making more than $450,000 a year and up. He said he didn’t want communism. I said I didn't want communism either because it would mean mandatory NPR.
BUT, old pal, get yerself a Canadian phone book and call a Canuck number at random and ask whoever picks up the phone if they want to trade health care systems with US.
HE SAYS the Canadians are “brainwashed.”
I BRANDISH the Norwegians, the French, the Japanese, the Swedes. How many of them are trying to sneak into America to get our medical system, our cool-o public housing, our food stamps and public schools, and Sean Hannitty?
AND on and on it always went, and now we have Fox Ultimo at the controls, and we will see what we shall see.
PRESIDENT TRUMP on Monday pardoned members of the mob that attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and signed dozens of executive orders addressing the first priorities of his administration. He gave sweeping pardons to nearly all of the 1,600 rioters charged with storming the Capitol and commuted the sentences of several others. His decision appears to cover both people accused of low-level, nonviolent offenses that day and those who committed violence.
ON-LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK
[1] The ever optimistic anti vaxxers. The religiosity of their beliefs. First they announced that the covid shot would kill people in a week. When there was no massive die off, then it was going to be three weeks. Then five months. Then a year. Then five years. Now how many years is the latest doomsday to arrive?
[2] Will Trump have a poet at his inauguration? I doubt it. The cry-baby threw a tantrum about half mast flags so they will now be flown full mast. What's next? Will he ask that Martin Luther King jr Day be canceled because it falls on the 20th. I can hear Trump now. “I am more important than King. I am the greatest President ever. What did King ever do”
[3] New Yorker who recently moved to California here. My impression of my new neighbors is that a lot of them enjoy living the daydream. It’s why they’re here, to experience life in a blissed-out, dreamy (in many cases CBD-enhanced) bubble. Even the ones who seem to have been gifted with good brain matter in a material/genetic sense have their thought processes switched to Off. It’s quite bizarre to me how checked out of reality they are. Reality’s the enemy! Take it away!
[4] But Trump says he will fix all sorts of things “on day one!” So…on day two, all will be right with the world. The wars will stop, everyone will have a good paying job, illegal immigrants will be gone, gas prices will be lower than anyone has ever seen, food prices will be affordable.
[5] Biden is a symptom, and not the cause, of why America is fucked. The entire project is a careening car on Dead Man’s Road. Over that reality is superimposed a doctrine that reflects the core beliefs of those in power at the moment that doesn’t seem to address or correct our real problems but only contradict previous solutions that didn’t work, etc, etc. The whole message of America has been reduced to one big, incessant Warning about Everything.
[6] Goodbye, Joe Biden - aka “Joe Tater” - the poster child of everything that is wrong with America’s phony and hypocritical politicians. As a career politician, he enriched himself and his wicked family with riches no common American could afford, like two-multi-million-dollar mansions, luxury cars, and a luxurious lifestyle.
[7] I predict that, in less than a century, the good old USA will be gone. Instead it will be divided into five countries: Northeast, South, Midwest, Mountain, and Pacific States of America. And, to no one's surprise, they will declare war on each other. That, in my opinion, will be Trump's ultimate legacy.
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