Mendocino County Today: Saturday 7/5/2025

Warming Ahead | Parade Photos | Hang Together | Windmills Dinners | Congressman Huffy | Brock Farm | Yesterday's Catch | Coronation Day | Silent Complicity | Hermit Crabs | Socially Inept | Marco Radio | Fairfax Freakout | Giants Lose | Beach Chair | 76 Trombones | America | Red Poppy | Hooray USA | Ten Novels | Star-Spangled Banner | Nation Makers | Election Interference | Die Poor | Lead Stories | Stefano Spinelli | War Veterans

---

TEMPERATURES will generally trend warmer through Monday. Slight chance for interior thunderstorms early next week. Much warmer temperatures possible late next week. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A brisk 43F under clear skies this Saturday morning on the coast. The NWS has brought more cloud cover back into play for tonight & going forward. WHEN tonight is of course the question? Hopefully AFTER the fireworks show we all hope of course!

---

FOURTH OF JULY PARADE IN MENDOCINO

Photos by Karen Rifkin

---

HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY to all of my fellow Revolutionaries.

As Ben Franklin said at the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately,” referring to the death warrants issued by King George III against all of the leaders of the revolt against the Crown.

I wonder what Washington, Jefferson, Adams and Franklin would think about the state of affairs today, July 4, 2025, in the Republic they founded and bequeathed to those living today?

I wonder what their reaction would be to self-described “leaders” today who repetitively boast they are making America great again?

I wonder if they would wonder about whether citizens today understand that the Republic they established in 1776, is not just another form of government, but that it is a principle born of an ideal that legally establishes the supremacy of the people over all else, including those who are just temporary custodians of our Republic.

The American people are resilient, our history proves that. Once you cross the line on them, you’re finished; our history proves that also.

Keep those things in mind as we go through whatever it is we’re going through at this time. Enough preaching.

As I like to say, take your politics seriously but keep your sense of humor.

Happy Fourth!

Jim Shields

---

---

RON PARKER

A release put out by Rep Huffman’s office Thursday detailed the collateral damage Trump’s bill will have on Huffman’s district, stretching along the Northern California coast from the Golden Gate to the Oregon border. The legislation, it said:

• Increases average premiums by $3,070 per year for the 41,000 people who receive coverage under the Affordable Care Act.
• Puts 231,738 people who depend on Medicaid at risk of losing their health care.
• Threatens 28,369 households who count on SNAP to put food on the table.
• Takes away 5,130 jobs in clean energy and manufacturing.

Hands on the podium, the congressman from St. Helena did not mince words, railing against legislation that would “cut health care for 17 million Americans, close one in four nursing homes and many rural hospitals, rip nutrition assistance away from 11 million Americans, and cede leadership in the Green Economy to China. To China!”

---

BILL KIMBERLIN

When I drive up from the City, just as I turn onto my dirt road, there is Brock Organic Farm (real organic not Safeway organic). Elegant in it’s simplicity. No sales clerk. You weigh your veggies, make your change and you are done.

---

CATCH OF THE DAY, Friday, July 4, 2025

JASON BACCHI, 44, Dos Rios. Trespassing, suspended license for DUI, no license, evasion, failure to appear.

TRAVIS BELL, 37, Fort Bragg. Domestic battery, disorderly conduct-alcohol, resisting.

RICKIE CURTIS, 51, Willits. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, failure to appear, resisting.

MATTHEW FAUST, 50, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

NICHOLAS GAVRILOFF, 20, Petaluma/Ukiah. DUI-alcohol&drugs.

ROGER GORRIN JR., 47, Lakeport/Ukiah. Parole violation.

TONY HANOVER, 19, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol&drugs, controlled substance, probation violation, resisting.

DEBORAH LAWRENCE, 59, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol&drugs, contempt of court.

GEOVANY MENDEZ-LOPEZ, 26, Fairfield/Ukiah. DUI-suspended license for DUI, probation revocation.

ANGEL MILLER, 37, Ukiah. Sex offender failure to register with prior.

SHANNON PHILLIPS, 52, Willits. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, paraphernalia.

ANGELA PINCHES, 45, Laytonville. Domestic battery.

BRAYDEN POLSON, 19, Laytonville. DUI.

BLANCA VILLAGRANA, 40, Willits. Failure to appear.

DANIEL YEOMANS, 54, Fort Bragg. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, probation revocation.

---

UK CORONATION DAY, 2023. Sound familiar? (Randy Burke)

---

IS THIS US?

To the Editor:

I’m curious to know: Apart from enforcers of the current political regime in Washington, are there American citizens who celebrate the fact that unidentified thugs, dressed in black tactical gear, are grabbing our neighbors from their homes or workplaces and tossing them into vehicles to imprison them in crowded detention centers? What has become of us?

As a culture, we Americans pretend to value freedom, we boast of being hard-working and ambitious, and we display bumper stickers advising lovingkindness. How is it that now we are encouraged by right-wing politicians to celebrate the vicious separation of families, the arrests of individuals who have lived in our cities and towns for decades and who are children and parents and grandparents? So many of them work hard to make a living, provide a service and belong to our community.

Is this who we are now? And if that’s not who we are, are we prepared to watch from the sidelines without demanding that our senators and representatives call out and prohibit these police-state outrages? What happened to our cherished rule of law, due process and common humanity?

Have we become so cruel or hopeless or cynical that we keep our heads down and hope that the gaze of the authorities — feeding on fear and intimidation — will pass over us and enforce our silence in the face of their hateful and illegal actions? We may avoid their attention, but history will understand that silence as complicity.

Brad Parks

Santa Barbara

---

CRABS

Cell phone addiction is a Big Thing. And now ChatGPT is the Next Big Thing.

Are we becoming a new species of self-isolating “hermit crabs”? Is the crab a deep symbol of our devil’s bargain with technology?

Are humans destined to evolve into crabs? | Aeon Essays

(John Sakowicz)

---

FOURTH OF JULY FLASHBACK

Diary of a Lonely Socially Inept Guy (2004)

by Paul Modic

Yesterday, I went down to the 4th of July celebration at Benbow and I lasted fifteen minutes. Everyone was in their little subgroups, family groups, friend groups, all in their little security groups. Is that just how life is? Everywhere? But I was a wanderer, just vaguely looking for my two friends so I too could inhabit a subgroup?

(I have never had a “group,” though I did experience the little security group feeling last year at the Salmon Creek Halloween party where for the first time in my life I stood around with people I knew for no other reason than the “social security” of that moment. I remember a young blond woman walked by dressed up only in her bra and panties. “You’re my dream girl,” I had said.)

Last year when driving up to a party at the volleyball scene up Seely Creek with a friend, I was stoned and insecure. “What do we do when we get there?” I asked.

“Just spot someone you know and go up to them and start talking,” he said.

Maybe I’ve never really accepted or liked myself enough to believe I really belonged, in a group or anywhere. Is it just me (probably) or is there something fundamentally shallow or boring about stomping through the picnic grounds looking for someone I know? Why? To have an inane conversation about nothing?

I drove away from America’s Independence Day celebration and felt like crying, but I didn’t. It must have been loneliness, four months now since my sweetie flew away: it had been a long distance relationship to Mexico, a frustrating set up, getting together every few months and now feeling the loss of that intimacy?

Could that be it? I drove into Garberville with appropriately dismal thoughts such as, “No one’s going to come to my (50th birthday) party anyway,” but then I counted up the “very probables,” over twenty, so what was I worried about?

I just wanted to get stoned, then maybe I’d feel better. I went outside and watched the guys on the riverbank blow off their fireworks, a mini-version of what was happening over the mountain in Benbow. I could hear the Benbow explosions and saw the shimmer of light at the top of the mountain, and with a stoned smile on my face I walked along the road enjoying the mini-version across the river.

Maybe turning fifty is starting to get to me, three more days at 49, its a countdown: I’m a mess, thank you and good night.

(Twenty-one years later I’ve realized that dealing with anxiety comes down to answering this question positively: Do you know, accept, and like yourself?)

---

MEMO OF THE AIR: Good Night Radio all night tonight on KNYO and KAKX!

Soft deadline to email your writing for tonight’s (Friday night’s) MOTA show is 5:30 or so. If that’s too soon, send it any time after that and I’ll read it next Friday.

Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio is every Friday, 9pm to 5am PST on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg and KNYO.org. The first three hours of the show, meaning till midnight, are simulcast on KAKX 89.3fm Mendocino.

Plus you can always go to https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com and hear last week’s MOTA show. By Saturday night I’ll put up the recording of tonight’s show. You’ll find plenty of other educational amusements there to educate and amuse yourself with until showtime, or any time, such as:

These were wonderful pickup trucks. This truck weighed less than half what a modern behemoth pickup truck weighs, got better gas mileage, fit easily in an old house’s garage, and it could carry just as much weight (a full ton). Fun to drive. Great visibility. Way cheaper (even in corrected dollars). https://macsmotorcitygarage.com/video-introducing-the-1967-datsun-520-pickup/

This is a whole regular keyboard and mouse arranged for one hand. It reminds me of a day back in the old Community School in the early 1980s, when then-Chuck-now-Charles Bush was teaching a class or seminar on, um, I don’t even remember what. At one point people were throwing out ideas, and I talked about how neat if would be to have a typing keyboard that you could use with just one hand. I was endlessly annoying in those days, very full of myself, and that was my third or fourth idea. Chuck asked, What would be the point? I said, So people could do other things at the same time, with the other hand. I was thinking of a truck driver maybe writing a book while driving, but I didn’t have time to say that yet, when Chuck said, “What would people wanta do?” I made a jerking-off motion in the air. Chuck pointed at my hand and said drily, “That’s the most interesting thing you’ve said all day.” Zing. https://theawesomer.com/making-a-one-handed-qwerty-keyboard/775112/

And Sofia Ros plays Paganini on accordion. With both hands. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ARC2YxsbE0

Marco McClean, [email protected], https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com

---

MARIN COUNTY TOWN HAVING A ‘FREAKOUT’ OVER A PLANNED DOWNTOWN APARTMENT COMPLEX

by J.K. Dineen

Perched up on a hillside on the outskirts of downtown Fairfax for decades, the rambling wooden Frogs Hot Tubs complex was the embodiment of the sun-kissed, laid-back Marin County lifestyle.

There were community hot tubs, cold plunge pools, yoga studios and a clothing-optional sundeck.

Rock bands practiced in some of the rooms. The hot tubs and saunas were located in a woodsy area next to Contratti Park, home of West Marin Little League action and where the Grateful Dead played softball against Jefferson Airplane in the mid-1960s.

Now Frogs is boarded up and the blighted property is at the center of a development fight over a proposed 243-unit apartment complex that says as much about Marin County politics 2025 as hippies and nude sunbathing did about the town in decades past.

It’s a battle that pits a vision of Fairfax as blue-collar bastion of musicians and artists and outdoors enthusiasts — considered the birthplace of mountain biking, the town has four bike stores and a bicycle museum — against the reality that it, like most of Marin County, has substantially gentrified, with the average home selling for $1.4 million and the average apartment renting for $2,700, according to Redfin.

The dispute has also fueled an attempted recall of the mayor and vice mayor, who critics blame for approving the state-certified housing plan that changes the zoning to allow the apartment complex to be built. And the fight could be a test case of what happens when a town’s residents dig in their heels and rebel against state requirements meant to ease the housing shortage that has made Marin County and much of the state unaffordable to the majority of workers.

Developer Mill Creek is proposing a six-story, 243-unit apartment complex on the 95 School St. site, which was identified as the biggest development opportunity in Fairfax’s state-certified housing element, which requires the town to plan for 490 units of housing between 2023 and 2031.

The California Department of Housing and Community Development’s approval of the housing plan was contingent on Fairfax committing to an “action plan” stating all opportunity site projects that are 20% affordable — including 95 School St. — are “entitled to ministerial approval.” The Mill Creek project would include 25% of its units at below market rates.

Then, in June, Fairfax Planning Director Jeffrey Beiswenger reversed course, saying that the project actually did not qualify for over-the-counter approval, citing a chapter in town code that excluded projects in high fire hazard severity zones from ministerial review.

Mill Creek attorney Riley Hurd said the code the town cited has nothing to do with the application, which was based on a policy adopted as part of the housing element.

“This is a town just saying, ‘We don’t care what the law says, we’re gonna say no,” said Hurd. “I guess the plan is to pretend that the ministerial policy doesn’t exist. They’re gonna get their housing element decertified, they’re gonna get sued and lose. The question is why? It might be as simple as, ‘We are going to have a court make us do it.’”

As town officials and developers clash, the Fairfax Citizens Coalition has been gathering signatures to recall two elected officials they blame for what they see as a botched housing plan. On Monday the group submitted 1,783 signatures to recall Mayor Lisel Blash and 1,806 to recall Vice Mayor Stephanie Hellman. That’s about 300 more than the 25% of registered voters required to qualify a recall for the ballot. The county has 30 days to verify the signatures.

The recall petition argues the mayor and vice mayor “blatantly ignored” a homeless encampment in Contratti Park,” siding with “the mentally ill drug addicts” while dismissing “West Marin Little League’s desperate pleas about threats to child safety.” It criticizes the pair for pursuing “high-density housing in downtown Fairfax, increasing the risk of a death trap scenario for residents during wildfires, floods or earthquakes.” It also accuses the officials of fiscal mismanagement and curtailing free speech.

Coalition Treasurer Sean Fitzgerald said the effort was “100% grassroots” with no paid signature gatherers. He said adding 243 units downtown would be a disaster in the case of an earthquake or wildfire.

“We are a tiny canyon valley town,” he said. “If one lane of Sir Francis Drake is blocked or if there is a light out in San Rafael it can take 45 minutes to get to the freeway. We are gridlocked back here.”

Hurd said Fairfax clearly identified the School Street property as a site that could accommodate a large chunk of the required housing, and that the argument that the 243 units would lead to gridlock in the case of a natural disaster is disingenuous given that the town’s housing element plans for twice that number.

“If there is this much outrage and hyperbole over building less than 50% of the assigned number, it’s very clear they do not intend to come anywhere close to achieving the full number,” he said.

In opposing the recall petition, Hellman’s campaign stated that she “has served Fairfax with dedication to protecting the town’s character, ensuring responsible governance, and advancing policies that prioritize the well-being of all residents.”

She said the recall “mirrors the toxic and divisive tactics of MAGA politics — disinformation, personal attacks, and manufactured outrage — designed to sow division instead of promoting solutions.”

Even before the recall vote the development has already shaken up town politics.

Two Town Council candidates elected in November, “Mikey” Ghiringhelli and Frank Egger, successfully ran on a platform opposing the rezoning that allows taller buildings. Fairfax has long had a 35-foot height limit. Egger, a former Fairfax mayor who served on the council for 39 years before losing his seat in 2005, said “all this talk of high-rise development dragged me out of retirement.”

Ghiringhelli, who owns a pizza place and several restaurants in town, said he had retired from politics 20 years ago and wasn’t even paying attention to the development fight when a group of residents urged him to run.

He said the pressures applied by the state, the role of social media, and the clash between YIMBYs and NIMBYs have changed politics — for the worse.

“I thought things were brutal 25 years ago, they are more brutal now,” Ghiringhelli said.

He sees the role of elected officials as looking out for constituents and dealing with potholes, not trying to solve the state’s housing crisis.

“I used the exact same campaign slogan as I did 28 years ago – ‘Mikey likes Fairfax,’” Ghiringhelli said. “The older I get, the less it seems like a great slogan.”

Walking around downtown Fairfax, it’s hard to avoid conversations about the recall and the development. Fairfax Citizens Coalition Lead Candace Neal-Ricker manages Nave’s Bar and on a recent weekday afternoon there was no shortage of patrons willing to weigh in on the Frog’s development.

One was Lew Tramaine, a former Fairfax mayor and newspaper publisher, who now manages a general store.

“It’s not divisive at all — nobody wants it,” he said. “The biggest problem with Fairfax council is they are not standing up and fighting back. They are just bending over. It’s like ‘Grow a pair.’ You don’t have to let the state tell you to change the character of the town. That is not going to work here.”

Neal-Ricker said she hears the dissatisfaction every day.

“Why are our roads falling apart? Why are people so angry? Why aren’t people getting along? Why do you feel like you are being treated with hostility?” she said. “I was born and raised in this town. I’ve walked every inch of it. I have a lot of pride in it, a lot of love for the children growing up here.”

She said she could never qualify for the proposed project’s 41 affordable units, which would be rented to households earning 80% of area median income, which translates to $119,000 for a two-person household and $134,000 for a three-person household. She said she would support a three-story project in which 50% of the units were deeply affordable.

“I’m low income,” she said. “Affordable housing would be great but that is not what this project is.”

Hurd said the argument that the project would be palatable if the developer were to increase affordability level or “lope off three stories” is unrealistic in the current economic environment of high interest rates and construction costs. “That would mean no project,” he said.

“I think what the town is banking on is that the project cannot sustain the costs and delays associated with their obstinance,” Hurd said. “That is a real concern. As the saying goes, ‘time kills all deals.’”

Hurd said he expects the state housing officials to weigh in on the dispute soon, although he said he has been unimpressed with the state’s follow-through when it comes to punishing towns that violate housing law.

“Everybody got spooked that there would be serious repercussions and so far I haven’t seen them,” he said. “There has to be ramifications for this behavior or other entities will follow suit.”

The town also faces a potential lawsuit from YIMBY law, which sues municipalities across California that violate state housing laws. In a June letter to the town, YIMBY Law Executive Director Sonja Trauss said the town “is legally bound to approve the project ministerially unless it can make findings that the proposed housing development would be a threat to public health and safety.”

“Fairfax is walking into a buzzsaw — they are going to waste a lot of money and they are going to lose,” Trauss said. “They are having an absolute and complete freakout over one project that is not that big a deal.”

(SF Chronicle)

---

GIANTS CRUSHED BY A’s as Justin Verlander’s winless streak reaches 14

by Susan Slusser

WEST SACRAMENTO — On the 20th anniversary of his big-league debut, Justin Verlander of the San Francisco Giants was pitching in a minor-league park and victory remained elusive.

The 42-year-old projected first-ballot Hall of Famer was facing a team he has absolutely dominated throughout his career, including some very good Oakland playoff teams. This A’s team, based at Sutter Health Park while the team’s planned Las Vegas stadium is built, has not performed up to pre-season expectations, entering the day with the third-worst record in the majors. But on the Fourth of July, they banged double after double off Verlander in an 11-2 win over San Francisco.

Verlander, painfully stuck 38 wins shy of 300 for his career, has zero W’s in 14 starts with the Giants and he’s pitched well enough to have pocketed at least a few, Friday aside — it was the first time he’d allowed more than three earned runs in an outing since April 15.

“I feel like I was pretty easy to hit tonight,” Verlander said. “Frankly, embarrassing I didn’t do better than that. I thought I found something in between starts that was going to help and send me the right direction, and no, it didn’t. So back to the drawing board.”

He went only three innings and gave up seven hits, five of them doubles, a walk and a season-high six runs. He entered the game 17-8 lifetime against the A’s with a 2.64 ERA and .207 opponents average in the regular season; in four playoff games against Oakland in 2012-13, he allowed one run in 31 innings and struck out 43.

Deception has been the issue, he said. That can mean several things, from tipping pitches to varying timing and delivery, but in this case, it’s mostly to do with how the ball is coming out of his hand, making pitches easier to identify.

“The only person that can really tell you if it’s going to be beneficial or not is the hitter in a situation where they’re reacting to the pitches in a real-time situation and the reactions I saw tonight, I wasn’t good enough,” he said, adding later, “Hopefully I can rely on a lot of my past and understand biomechanics and my mechanics and figure it out quickly.”

It might seem like a given at this point, but Verlander got no run support, and the Giants had a less than crisp game defensively, with a case of the dropsies. With Lawrence Butler on base after a leadoff single in the first, Brent Rooker singled to right and Heliot Ramos bobbled the ball as Butler sped in to score and Rooker took second on the error.

Ramos had another bobble in the second inning on Tyler Soderstrom’s double, Tyler Fitzgerald dropped a throw to second that might have doubled Max Muncy off in the third and in the fourth, Sergio Alcántara, a defensive specialist making his first start with the Giants, stabbed at Butler’s grounder to third and had it tick off his glove, another error.

“It was bad,” manager Bob Melvin said of the three-error night. “We’ve had a couple of these games in the last week that are uncharacteristic of how we play. That’s the part that bothered me the most about this game, the defense. It just looked like there was a lack of focus on the defensive end, and that’s a concern.”

Ramos said he feels like the team has been pretty focused for the most part. “We felt good, it was just one of those games,” he said.

The Giants played a night game at Arizona then arrived in Sacramento in the wee hours, but Melvin wouldn’t use that or the minor-league stadium or the windy conditions as an excuse. “It’s not a good look,” he said.

Mason Black entered in relief in the fourth, and he is more than familiar with Sutter Health Park — he’d made 19 previous appearances there, including a start one week earlier. He didn’t get a lot of offensive support or sterling defense either.

Jung Hoo Lee got turned around on Denzel Clarke’s drive to the track and it fell in for a triple; Butler sent Clarke in promptly with a single. Nick Kurtz added a two-run homer to right. After another Giants error, this one by Brett Wisely, in the seventh, Clarke, the A’s No. 9 hitter, smacked a two-run homer. Wisely provided the Giants’ lone run with a homer to center in the eighth, just the fourth hit for San Francisco.

Logan Webb, also familiar with the ballpark from his minor-league days and from nearby Rocklin, will start Saturday night’s game against Luis Severino, the A’s big offseason signing. Severino has been less than complimentary of the ballpark, saying it feels more like a spring-training stadium and complaining about the lack of air conditioning and the clubhouse’s location beyond center field. That distance factored into a lengthy delay Friday when home-plate umpire Andy Fletcher left the game two innings after taking a hard foul ball off his mask.

The game drew 12,322 tickets sold, in what is the A’s largest announced crowd of the season. The team entered the day averaging a MLB-low 9,722 tickets sold per game.

“The fans that showed up, we didn’t get put on a good show,” Melvin said. “It felt like there were a lot of Giants fans there, once we started scoring some runs you could hear them. We just didn’t give them enough of an opportunity to get into it.”

(sfchronicle.com)

---

---

SEVENTY-SIX TROMBONES

by Meredith Willson (1957)

Seventy-six trombones led the big parade
With a hundred and ten cornets close at hand.
They were followed by rows and rows of the finest virtuo-
Sos, the cream of ev'ry famous band.

Seventy-six trombones caught the morning sun
With a hundred and ten cornets right behind
There were more than a thousand reeds
Springing up like weeds
There were horns of ev'ry shape and kind.

There were copper bottom tympani in horse platoons
Thundering, thundering all along the way.
Double bell euphoniums and big bassoons,
Each bassoon having it's big, fat say!

There were fifty mounted cannon in the battery
Thundering, thundering louder than before
Clarinets of ev'ry size
And trumpeters who'd improvise
A full octave higher than the score!

---

AMERICA

by Robert Creeley (1969)

America, you ode for reality!
Give back the people you took.

Let the sun shine again
on the four corners of the world

you thought of first but do not
own, or keep like a convenience.

People are your own word, you
invented that locus and term.

Here, you said and say, is
where we are. Give back

what we are, these people you made,
us, and nowhere but you to be.

---

---

IN SPITE OF EVERYTHING, CELEBRATE THIS FOURTH OF JULY

On ignoring the noise and celebrating what matters

by Matt Taibbi

Canadian author Stephen Marche, in The Guardian, writes “This Fourth of July, the world declares its independence from America“:

As the United States retreats from the world, it is reshaping the lives of its former trading partners and allies, leaving huge holes in its wake… The Canadian strategy, undertaken with vigor by the newly elected government of Mark Carney, has been clear in spirit at least: a polite “go fuck yourself.” After you’ve told America to fuck off, though, the real work starts. You have to figure out how to live without them.

This Fourth of July, the consensus around the world and in our still-humming (despite distress calls about a fascist takeover) mainstream press, is that 2025 America is lost, a reject, the pig of the world. We’re delinquents, no longer fit to sit at the grownup table, much less lead. Pundits like Mr. Marche (is there anything in the world less believable than a Canadian saying “Go fuck yourself”?) imagine they’re insulting us by saying we no longer deserve titles like “responsible” or “dignified,” forgetting who Americans are and always have been: screwups, losers, earth’s trash. Mutants, as Bill Murray put it in Stripes, whose “forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world.”

Independence Day is when we embrace being sneered at and dismissed as lowlifes by the civilized world. At least, that’s what I’m choosing to do today:

There are reasons for mixed feelings. On one hand, the images of ICE agents tossing people out of the country sting and contrast with my idea of what this country is about. Even knowing that a lot of what we’re looking at is media manipulation (on both sides, incidentally) doesn’t make it feel right. These raids have always gone on and as even the New York Times points out today, Donald Trump has a long way to go before he catches up with the number of “repatriations” in George W. Bush’s second term, or Barack Obama‘s, for that matter. Still, the image of the America that took in everyone’s tired, their poor, their huddled masses is gone for now, and that’s something to be mourned, no matter what your politics.

On the other hand, we’re now about a decade into a relentless campaign by consensus-makers in academia, media, and politics to rewrite history in a way that describes even aspirational America as flawed, racist, and vicious. There’s something bizarre and suspicious about this campaign. The New York Times today, for instance, ran a Frankensteinian editorial by Yale professor Greg Grandin that stitched George Washington to Trump, then negatively compared both with South American revolutionaries:

George Washington was among the first to appropriate America exclusively for the United States: “The name of American,” he told U.S. citizens in his 1796 Farewell Address, “belongs to you.” In contrast, the revolutionaries who sought to throw off Spanish rule did not claim the name America as their own.

For them, America symbolized not nationalism but internationalism. The Colombian political leader Francisco de Paula Santander wrote in 1818 that it mattered little where, exactly, he was born, for he “is nothing less than an American, and my country is any corner of America that isn’t ruled by the Spanish.” Simón Bolívar, the Venezuelan revolutionary who liberated much of South America from Spanish rule, hoped that a free America — all of it — would lead humanity into a future ruled by law and justice.

Grandin went on to decry “a bellicose nationalism, the kind today represented by MAGA,” as being responsible for slavery, Indian removal, and “westward expanasion.” That “America” he contrasted with the later concept of Latin America, which was more “humanist, spiritual and attuned to the social interdependence of human existence than their grubbing, individualistic, egotistic, conquering, enslaving ‘Saxon’ neighbors to the north.”

I read this in shock. Are we supposed to be embarrassed to be Americans instead of Colombians or Venezuelans? Was “Go west, young man” canceled while I was on a flight this week? Is a United States that codified religious freedom really not “spiritual”? And is a professor from Yale really arguing on Independence Day that America’s problem is that it’s insufficiently tuned in to the “interdependence of human existence”? The Fourth of July has its silly side and obviously is no sacred cow, but how pathological does a person have to be to chide America for its lack of collectivist spirit on a holiday celebrating individual liberty?

Not long ago, the basics of American citizenship were uncontroversial and the challenge for all of us was living up to the ideal. As Martin Luther King put it, “All we say to America is be true to what you said on paper.“ Now it’s as if our historians look back and see massacres and misery, but no Edison, Elvis, Chuck Berry, or Muhammad Ali. I don’t love the parody version of patriotism touted by Trump, but it shines through in the writings of people like Professor Grandin that they’re not proud to be Americans at all. Who can sign up for that? Why are we continually asked to choose between too much pride, and none?

We should be encouraged on this of all days to remember the good things about this country that have nothing to do with politics, from baseball to airplanes to most of the Rocky movies to just-departed George Foreman, Roberta Flack, Val Kilmer, and Brian Wilson. That’s who we are, not this dumb argument. To hell with the sourpusses. Happy Birthday, America.

(racket.news)

---

---

THE STAR-SPANGLED BANNER

by Francis Scott Key (1814)

Complete version showing spelling and punctuation from Francis Scott Key's manuscript in the Maryland Historical Society collection.

O say can you see, by the dawn's early light,
What so proudly we hail'd at the twilight's last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight
O'er the ramparts we watch'd were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket's red glare, the bomb bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there,
O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

On the shore dimly seen through the mists of the deep
Where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o'er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam,
In full glory reflected now shines in the stream,
'Tis the star-spangled banner - O long may it wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore,
That the havoc of war and the battle's confusion
A home and a Country should leave us no more?
Their blood has wash'd out their foul footstep's pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

O thus be it ever when freemen shall stand
Between their lov'd home and the war's desolation!
Blest with vict'ry and peace may the heav'n rescued land
Praise the power that hath made and preserv'd us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto - "In God is our trust,"
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave

---

---

THE FOURTH OF JULY

by James Kunstler

O, Norman Rockwell, where are you when we really need you? Forgive us, Emma Lazarus, our second thoughts about those huddled masses yearning to breathe free. . . the wretched refuse of your teeming shore(s). That was then and this is now. O, beautiful for spacious skies (but, why so many contrails criss-crossing overhead from the New York Island to the gulf stream waters?). O, land of tattooed grandmas, hostages of the tiny screens, the sexually confounded, the illiterate and innumerate, the lawless and the feckless, brainwashed youth marinated in Marx, the deranged, befuddled, the bought-off, the bug-eyed and bewildered, the lame, the halt, the addicts, grifters, hustlers, porn-stars, drugstore cowboys, alpha dogs, beta boys, shrieking Karens, and sundry victims of future-shock — wither, this hallowed experiment in nationhood?

Wouldn’t you like to know? In the meantime, husk that corn and flip them burgers! Turn them wieners! Mash your guacamole, pop another frostie, pass the Jack, lock-and-load, and mind those hovering drones! It is the 249th birthday of what remains of our country! Respect and thanks, ye ancestors! At least, there is Mr. Trump in command now, not Norman Bates’s mother (or whatever decrepitating thing pretended to rule from the White House those previous four years of anarchy and agony). Daddy’s in da house — finally! — and things are being put in order against all odds. Yeah, you’re gonna clean up your damn room, or else! For many, this is a yuge relief. The rest of you, with your “No Kings” fake revolution, your Antifa monkey business, your mean girl psychodramas, your trans psychosis, your childless despair, your occult Gramscian schemes of destruction — please report back to the margins, where you belong.

The struggle to get normal again is epic and harsh. And, of course, many will deny that there ever was such a state of being, of minding your business in the purest sense of the phrase, acting like responsible, self-respecting, autonomous adults. In the immortal words of Aimee Mann, better wise-up. Childhood ends; something else begins. Take yourself seriously for a change, but keep your heart light, ready for the jokes that travail always presents. After all, nothing is funnier than unhappiness.

To get back to normal, to shed the burden of absurdities we’ve been heaped with, requires an accounting. You know this. Matter of fact, the absence of such an accounting has been bugging you no end. A whole lot of pain and suffering was inflicted across this land in recent years and barely a soul has had to do any ’splainin’. It rankles badly. When, if ever, will these vicious, seditionist goons who turned the nation inside-out and upside-down be compelled to sit at the defendant’s table in a court of law?

I have a theory. The right dawgs, you well-know, have been in position for months. They understand the conspiracy hatched ten years ago through-and-through. Mr. Patel, remember, ran Chairman Devon Nunes investigation of the nascent RussiaRussiaRussia hoax in 2017 as senior counsel for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and helped draft the “Nunes Letter,” much abused by the perfidious news media, that laid out the plot by Brennan, Clapper, Comey, Obama & Company to smother Donald Trump’s newborn presidency in its crib.

Through some alchemy of mass political psychosis, that conspiracy has rolled on for a whole decade, one malice-driven prank after another. It continues to this day, an evermore rearguard action conducted by Deep state rogues and their public mouthpiece, Norm Eisen of Lawfare, Inc. Dan Bongino, now at Mr. Patel’s right-hand, chronicled that long march of treason in several books while he conducted daily podcast discourses on the workings of it all. “Remember the names,” he always said. Danny Boombatz remembers the names.

Normality, with all its own problems and hazards, demands that accounting for crimes and insults against the people of this sore-beset Republic.

That fateful accounting is the one element missing in all of Mr. Trump’s implacable “winning” of the past five months. Those remembered names fester like an abscessed wound in America’s body politic. That wound must be cleaned, irrigated, debrided, and dressed in judicial process that restores the probity and honor of our much-abused law.

My theory is that a whole lot of other matters had to be cleared out of the way first. And now, that is pretty much where we’re at. Mr. Ratcliffe, formerly Director of National Intelligence (in Trump One) and now Director of the CIA, also knows all the names. He’s been as quiet as a tick on a wild hog lo these many months, but on Wednesday he issued quite a squawk, in the public arena of X, no less, along with a report by trusted agency colleagues titled (nontoxically) Tradecraft Review 2016 ICA on Election Interference 062625.

This fateful report, which lays out the originating crime, should commence the more general institutional accounting so overdue. It’s coming. Cases are being laid and made quietly in the background. Cases will be brought. The insults will be redressed. Derangement will slip away like that quicksilver mirage on a desert highway. The inordinate division of recent years will go with it. We will allow ourselves to be a people again, one nation under God, as the old chestnut goes. Next year, on our country’s 250th birthday, there will be a special reason to celebrate. For now, patience and fortitude.

---

---

LEAD STORIES, SATURDAY'S NYT

Desperate Search After Texas Floods Kill at Least 24

As Many as 25 Girls Missing From Camp Along River

In Texas Flooding, the Most Urgent Alerts Came in the Middle of the Night

The Girls Camp Where Many Children Are Missing Is Nearly a Century Old

Mother of 2 Rescued Campers Relays Their Story

The Cost of Victory: Israel Overpowered Its Foes, but Deepened Its Isolation

Hamas Says It Is Ready to Negotiate Truce Proposal

Israeli Ministers Set to Meet on Next Steps Toward Gaza Truce

A Weakened Iran Looks to BRICS for Allies, Testing a New World Order

States Brace for Added Burdens of Trump’s Tax and Spending Law

---

ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

My grandfather came here from Italy at the beginning of the 1900’s. He had nothing. Stefano Spinelli took a job in a factory in CT that he hated. He saw the workers didn’t like the cafeteria food. So, he quit the factory and made sandwiches that he sold from a cart outside the factory. He made sandwiches that appealed to Irish, Polish and Italians. He was outside for lunch breaks for ALL 3 Shifts. From the proceeds he opened a restaurant near this huge GM factory. He became a lover of the Yankees. When Joe D was at bat on the radio he would stop cooking to listen. Stefano became a US citizen. I’m sure countless people loved the US as much as him. But none loved this country more than him. That restaurant stayed in the family for 60 years.

---