Off the Record 11/19/2025

SHERIFF MATT KENDALL:

Winter is well on its way and I’m hopeful everyone will be prepared for some challenging weather. This morning I ran into a few problems on the way to work. Thankfully, our partners at Mendocino County DOT were on the issue quickly and we all made it to work.

As we head into rainy season and especially over the next few days please be ready for slippery surfaces and road hazards. Please remember to give yourself a little more time while heading to your destination.

Also when you see our deputies, DOT, EMS, CHP and fire out assisting our residents, cut them a wide swath as you pass.

Thank you

Sheriff Matt Kendall

NEW SHERIFF’S OFFICE HOURS

Beginning December 1, 2025, the front office at the Administration Building in Ukiah will be closed daily for lunch between the hours of 11:30 AM to 12:30 PM and the Fort Bragg Substation will be closed daily for lunch from 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM.

The Administration Building in Ukiah will be closed to the public every second and fourth Friday of the month with the first closure beginning on December 12, 2025. The Fort Bragg Substation Office will remain closed every Friday to the public.

There are phones at the Fort Bragg Substation and a night lobby near the Administration Office in Ukiah for anyone needing assistance.

NOSTALGIC stories about Candlestick Park keep popping up. I miss it, too, especially for football. The 'Stick any day, baseball or football, especially football over that corporate hideosity in Santa Clara, a site about as related to San Francisco as Santa Rosa is to Paris.

I WAS AT THE 'STICK for the Giants against the Mets the day Ukiah's Kelvin Chapman started at second base for the Mets. There were a lot of Mendo people there that day because Chapman was, and is, a legendary local sports figure known personally to many of us who played men's league basketball against him in the 1970s. Boonville's Gene ‘Yewgene’ Waggoner one-on-one against Chapman was something to see. Both of them could have stepped into the NBA without embarrassing themselves.

ANOTHER TIME at Candlestick, and we're going way back here, I saw Orlando Cepeda hit a batting practice pitch so hard it knuckle-balled all the way out to the left field fence. I'd never seen that before or since, although I'm told it happens. I also remember the first time I saw fans throwing stuff at the Giants' cornball mascot Krazy Krab, and I thought to myself, “I really love this city. Where else would people attack a minor irritant like a cartoon figure?”

WHERE AND HOW SF got the false rep as a kind of effete, wimped out town I don't know. Among ballplayers, the city has the reputation as the worst fans in sports, the most violent, the most foulmouthed, the craziest. But anybody who went out to the 'Stick for either a baseball or a football game knew out front to expect fights and various other forms of low rent behavior, male and female. It was part of the experience. The Giants have since made acceptable fan behavior a top priority out of fear of a return to Candlestick-ism. You can't shout out obscenities that turned the air blue at Candlestick and wrecked the ball game experience for young families, and you certainly can't fight. That's over.

AT THE 'Stick the left field bleachers was fight city, meaning everyone out there who wanted to watch the game wound up dodging the yobbos fists instead. It was so far out of control you wondered, for the umpty numty time: Why? How? Where am I?

I HAD LOCKED the gates and taken the phone off the hook, just settling in with a six pack of tall Buds to watch the World Series — the memorable Bay Series between the Giants and the A's in 1989 — when there was a sonic boom, a fairly big boom by Boonville standards. That's what I thought the sound was as it hit my house. The screen went dark for just a fraction of a second as the announcers interrupted their pre-game patter to say things like, “This isn't good. It must be an earthquake. The light standards are weaving.” Then the ballplayers and their families were standing on the infield, and the rest of the night we all watched as fires broke out in the Marina, cars fell off the collapsed stretch of the Bay Bridge into the bay and, we learned later, Joe DiMaggio hustled out of his damaged house in The Marina toting $600,000 in cash in a black garbage bag.

CANDLESTICK survived intact while the Bay Bridge partially collapsed and the freeway came down in West Oakland. The Stick was built to last, and it lasted. I've always been sorry to see it go.

MUCH TALK in the Frisco media about the proliferation of coyotes in the City. I've seen many myself, especially in the Presidio, and the intriguing critters have always been totally at ease in the presence of human-type people. In many years of Mendo life, I've only seen exactly two of the little beasts, one jogging across mid-day Flynn Creek Road, the other engaging me in a long stare down, me at one end of a large drain pipe, him at the other. The standoff made me understand why the Indians regarded the coyote as a highly sentient creature, and a creature with a sense of humor. I could have sworn the drainpipe coyote was laughing at me.

THERE'S A LOT of hysteria and coyote misinformation circulating in the city, such as one young mommy worrying that an unattended infant or small child could be carried off by a coyote. An unattended child under the age of 14 anywhere in NorCal is about as rare as a coyote sighting, what with the large numbers of free range pervs and unpredictable mental cases roaming the country. Mummsies and poppsies long ago gave up shoving the kid out the door after breakfast. “Be back by dark, kjddo.” Well, not quite, but there was a time when parents weren't as terrified of life outside their front doors as they rightly are now.

BUT MOST of the coyote hysteria, in SF anyway where there are far more dogs than there are children, has to do with those wildly indulged canines. It may be urban legend, but quite a few people are claiming they know of coyotes dashing out of park bushes to carry off Little Fluffems. Not to be too hard hearted about it, but given the choice between a coyote and a poodle, right-thinking people would certainly go with coyote.

THE FRISCO PEOPLE who track the city's wildlife claim the coyote population has doubled in a year, up from about 50 to a hundred or so. That figure seems improbable, but I find it positively exhilarating.

AN ON-LINE COMMENTER offered this sensible assessment of “God's dog,” as Ed Abbey called the coyote: “Coyotes definitely do eat small dogs and cats. Large dogs usually overcome any coyote attack and are able to kill the coyote. Coyotes should be considered a danger to small children but are not a match for, and very rarely attempt to attack adult people. Coyotes can only be domesticated for the first year of their life; when they mature they become wild and unmanageable. Coyote packs tend to be smaller than wolfpacks (5 or 6 is about normal). Like wolfpacks coyote packs can be joined by human participants who are researching their behavior, and after a while the humans will be accepted into the pack. Coyotes in a pack, like wolves, are monogamous, unlike dogs, as long as the alpha mates remain alive. When the alphas die, even an omega can become the new alpha and chooses his alpha mate. Only alphas mate and reproduce. No wolf or coyote has EVER killed a pack member. Coyotes are even more ‘intelligent’ than wolves. They tend to respond more to human language whereas wolves tend to respond more to facial and body expressions. This could be one reason why coyotes are such good colonizers of urban areas.”

HANK SIMS, editor of one of our favorite websites, LostCoastOutpost.com, once posted his “Top Ten Books Off The Top Of My Head” list: 1. Bleak House, Charles Dickens 2. Glue, Irvine Welsh (“Glue tells the stories of four Scottish boys over four decades, through the use of different perspectives and different voices. It addresses sex, drugs, violence, and other social issues in Scotland, mapping ‘the furious energies of working-class masculinity in the late 20th century, using a compulsive mixture of Lothians dialect, libertarian socialist theory, and an irresistible black humor.’ The title refers not to solvent abuse, but the metaphorical glue holding the four friends together through changing times.”) 3. War With the Newts, Karl Capek (“A 1936 satirical science fiction novel by Czech author Karel Zapek). It concerns the discovery in the Pacific of a sea-dwelling race, an intelligent breed of newts, who are initially enslaved and exploited. They acquire human knowledge and rebel, leading to a global war for supremacy.”) 4. Newspaper Days, HL Mencken (Mencken’s Autobiography of the years from 1899-1906.) 5. The 20-Volume Patrick O'Brien Serial Novel (“Beginning in 1969, O'Brian began writing what turned into the 20-volume Aubrey-Maturin ‘Master & Commander’ series of novels. The books are set in the early 19th century and describe the life and careers of Captain Jack Aubrey and his friend, naval physician Dr. Stephen Maturin. The books are distinguished by O'Brian's deliberate use and adaptation of actual historical events, either integrating his protagonists in the action without changing the outcome, or using adapted historical events as templates. In addition to this trait and to O'Brian's distinctive literary style, his sense of humor is prominent. Technical sailing terminology is employed throughout the series. The books are considered by critics to be a roman fleuve, which can be read as one long story; the books follow Aubrey and Maturin's professional and domestic lives continuously.” 6. Tinker Tailor Solider Spy/The Honorable Schoolboy/Smiley's People, John Le Carre 7. Already Dead, Denis Johnson (“A contemporary noir, Already Dead is the tangled story of Nelson Fairchild Jr., disenfranchised scion to a northern California land fortune. A relentless failure, Nelson has botched nearly every scheme he’s attempted to pull off. Now his future lies in a potentially profitable marijuana patch hidden in the lush old-growth redwoods on the family land. Nelson has some serious problems. His marriage has fallen apart, and he may lose his land, cash and crop in the divorce. What’s more, in need of some quick cash, he had foolishly agreed to smuggle $90,000 worth of cocaine through customs for Harry Lally, a major player in a drug syndicate. Chickening out just before bringing the drugs through, he flushed the powder. Now Lally wants him dead, and two goons are hot on his trail. Desperate, terrified and alone, for Nelson, there may be only one way out.”) 8. Unacknowledged Legislation, Christopher Hitchens “Described as 'A celebration of Percy Shelley's assertion that ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,’ the book contains 38 essays on writers such as Oscar Wilde, P.G. Wodehouse, George Orwell, Rudyard Kipling, Philip Larkin, H.L. Mencken, Anthony Powell, T.S. Eliot and Salman Rushdie, in which Hitchens attempts to ‘dispel the myth of politics as a stone tied to the neck of literature’.” 9. Wolf Hall/Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel ‘Bring Up the Bodies’ is a historical novel by Hilary Mantel and sequel to her award-winning ‘Wolf Hall.’ It is the second part of a planned trilogy charting the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell, the powerful minister in the court of King Henry VIII. Bring Up the Bodies won the 2012 Man Booker Prize and the 2012 Costa Book of the Year. Preceded by Wolf Hall, it is to be followed by The Mirror and the Light.) 10. Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy “The majority of the narrative follows a teenager referred to only as ‘the kid,’ with the bulk of the text devoted to his experiences with the Glanton gang, a historical group of scalp hunters who massacred Native Americans and others in the United States-Mexico borderlands from 1849 to 1850 for bounty, pleasure, and eventually out of sheer compulsion. The role of antagonist is gradually filled by Judge Holden, a large, intelligent man depicted as entirely devoid of body hair and philosophically emblematic of the eternal and all-encompassing nature of war.”

THE EDITOR can't resist throwing his top ten out there: Moby Dick; The Brothers Karamazov; David Copperfield; USA Trilogy; Miss LonelyHearts and Day of the Locust; Sentimental Education; Madam Bovary; Farewell To Arms and A Moveable Feast; Desperate Characters; The Way We Live Now (Trollope); Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; Homage to Catalonia and the Collected Essays (Orwell).There's probably a generation gap in effect here. Sims is a lot younger. The young 'uns heads seem wired differently. The only really good contemporary fiction I've read lately has been by Roth, Edward P. Jones, Junot Diaz, Sherman Alexie, Gillian Flynn, and not just log rollin' here, but I also liked a couple of short stories from Carolyn Cooke's Amor and Psycho. With Cockburn gone, there's no first-rate political writing that manages the wit and erudition he did. I haven't read a single book on Sims' list, but a couple do sound intriguing.

MARK SCARAMELLA’S TOP TEN (plus) in no particular order:

1. Red Mutiny, Neal Bascomb
2. I Married A Communist, Philip Roth
3. A Civil Action, Jonathan Harr
4. Lush Life, Richard Price

5a,b,c. Shah of Shahs (Kapuscinski), All The Shah’s Men (Kinzer), Out of Control, Andrew & Leslie Cockburn

6. For Whom The Bell Tolls, Hemingway
7. The Captured, Scott Zesch
8. Legacy of Ashes, Tim Weiner
9. Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
10. Benito Cerino, Herman Melville
11. In The Heart of the Sea, Nathaniel Philbrick
12. American Tempest, Harlow Unger
13. Tom Paine: A Political Life, John Keane; Thomas Paine and the Clarion Call for American Independence, Harlow Unger
14. The Closing Circle, Barry Commoner
15. Blue Blood, Edward Conlon

JULIE BEARDSLEY:

Here’s a short list of books I’ve loved that are more recent:

• “Demon Copperhead” by Barbara Kingsolver
• “The Secret History of Bigfoot” by John O’Connor
• “The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break, A Novel” by Steven Sherrill (a really fun book)
• “Lionel Asbo, State of England” by Martin Amis (very funny)
• “The Ballad of the Whiskey Robber” by Julian Rubinstein
• “Foreskin’s Lament” by Shalom Auslander
• “Empire of the Summer Moon” by S.C. Gwynne
• “On Bullshit” by Harry G. Frankfurt
• “The Crimson Pearl and the White” by Michel Faber

And anything by Anthony Bourdain, Diana Gabaldon, Irvine Welsh, David Seddaris and Bill Bryson.

PEBBLES TRIPPET turned 83 on November 10. Although she has been recognized for advancing the medical-marijuana cause, Pebbles, like Dennis Peron, Tod Mikuriya, and Mary Rathbun, was much more than a "single-issue" activist. Thanks to Laura Costa for encouraging her to write this account of her remarkable life. (Fred Gardner)

Aside from agonizing migraine headaches that killed all life within me, my childhood was not exceptional. Catcher on the baseball team, swimming, standing broad jump, horseback riding and helping my younger sister develop her artistry, it wasn't until high school when I met Peaches Littlejohn, one of four Black people at Central High, who became my best friend. that something meaningful came into my life. Peaches approached me for help concerning her D in chemistry. I told her I had no such clout but that I could be her friend. We began by her climbing into the trunk of my 1950 Mercury Sedan to get into the segregated drive in theater and when the coast was clear, she joined me in the front seat as equals. I went on to help the NAACP integrate Tulsa OK lunchrooms in 1960 at 19.

I attended the University of Wisconsin, known as a liberal college but was expelled for violating rules about staying out at night and missing an appointment with the Dean, only to later be kicked out of the Memphis Cotton Carnival for raising a fuss about their whites-only discrimination. I went to Oklahoma University and started the OU Committee to End the War in VietNam by organizing a march on campus with 100 people led by a local minister and his wife. As a member of Students for a Democratic Society, I invited Paul Boutelle Vice Presidential Candidate for the Socialist Workers Party which caused a sensation and got the Human Rights Commissioner fired as co-sponsor of the event. Shortly after that, the Minutemen threw a bomb in my house which only singed the wall but didn't explode.

With one reference I left for New York City to start clean. I got clerk jobs at Sam Goody's Record Shop and Juilliard School of Music and waitressing on the side, I explored left wing politics and became a socialist revolutionary, having joined SWP, despite disagreements. I was expelled based on violating their anti-weed/psychedelics policy and became an independent activist.

I then moved to the Boston/Cambridge area where I drove a taxi to get by and raised funds for the anti-war movement by selling the Militant newspaper in Harvard Square during the revolutionary period in France when the Militant provided needed information. Being bisexual, I also linked up with Lesbian Tide for a short time.

By then, I moved to Venice California as an independent activist. Thinking creatively to get by, I placed a classified ad in the LA Free Press: 'Woman who loves being eaten seeking generous person who loves eating out.' This involved no fucking and attracted a unique type of person who put the woman's needs first which allowed for sexual experimentation with a minimum of hassle. At a time that was showing most women's orgasms to stem from the clitoris, men in general had no clue of it. It also coincided with the emergence of COYOTE /Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics, showing respect for women's labor and control of her own body, introducing the idea of prostitute's rights to the public.

1972, marijuana use was gaining momentum. I joined with 200 others to put the California Marijuana Initiative on the statewide ballot, winning 33% of the vote followed by a close vote in 1974. I moved to San Francisco where the initiative was centered and joined in with Brownie Mary, Dennis Peron, Dr. Tod Mikuriya and others promoting Cannabis Buyers' Clubs as a lead up to Prop 215 the Compassionate Use Act which passed by 56% and has grown in popular support up to 90%. Sparked by the AIDS epidemic, Prop 215 turned a negative into a positive benefiting the greater good.

My own case –10 busts in 10 years with prosecutions in 5 counties, also turned a negative into a positive based on appeal of my conviction, winning 2 things: transportation became an 'implicit right' of Prop 215 and the 'Trippet standard' introduced 'reasonably related' to one's medical condition as the quantity standard replacing the 6 plants/8 oz numbers game that 'the voters did not intend'. Winning on appeal benefited everybody, not just she who appealed. It is a lesson in the importance of losing for the greater good.

I forgot to add that I was an organizer in the first national march against the VietNam War organized by Students for a Democratic Society –the best thing SDS ever did. Also during the 70s, after Harvey Milk and George Moscone were assassinated, I along with my partner Geb started a petitioners' co-op to put initiatives on the local San Francisco ballot, which was relatively easy with only 13,000 signatures needed to earn the right to a vote (compared to a statewide vote which took half a million sigs). In 1967 we put several issues on the ballot and won them all: the Apartheid Consumers' Boycott to boycott the 'worst first' of businesses doing business with South Africa, the AIDS Research Initiative and the Nuclear Free Zone that stopped the Battleship Missouri from being homeported in SF for the purpose of attacking Nicaragua (Mayor Diane Feinstein's baby). We wrote the texts based on our instinct of how voters would vote and ran fledgling campaigns on a shoestring. We weren't taken seriously, so the opposition failed to adequately oppose us, which helped us win the Nuclear Free Zone, which we worded: 'Do you support financing a nuclear military installation in our midst?' without mentioning the Battleship Missouri as our target. Most people supported home-porting the ship but didn't want to fund it (our secret weapon).

SOCIALISM, A TUTORIAL, A PUBLIC SERVICE BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE BOONVILLE DAILY

MOST OF US know by now that the rightwing describes even the tamest liberal as, variously, "leftist" or "left-leaning" or "communist" or, among their heavy hitters , "Marxist." Of course the rightwing has conflated socialism and communism for years as, say, social security, in their dim eyes, becomes a “socialist” program devised by “communists” in the Roosevelt Administration, of which there were zero. I recently read a really dumb article by a black scholar named Deroy Murdock that began, “The sinister plan to fire teachers for being white is naked bigotry and Marxist.” He refers to a scheme by guilt-ridden libs in Minnesota to atone for the sins of the past in this crazy, color-coded manner is not a good idea and, as Professor Murdock writes, bigoted, clothed or unclothed but not even faintly “Marxist.”

MARX’S sociology was pegged to social class, not race, as in the working class creates the wealth stolen from them by the owning classes and, over the long haul, the owning classes wind up owning just about everything unless the working class takes it away from them, by force if it comes to it. Which has happened in Russia, China and Cuba led by Marxists. Russia and Cuba failed, China became more of a fascist state than anything approaching democracy.

NATURALLY, it's in the interest of today’s owning classes, who count media ownership among their most useful possessions, to describe any program or movement that might cost them money as “socialist” or “Marxist.” Their propaganda has worked to convince millions of Americans, mostly Trump followers but many others as well, and many of the duped of the working class, to vote against their own best interests, against themselves and against the welfare of their families.

THE PROB in this country is that both parties are funded by the wealthy. If you apply a Marxist class analysis to, say, Mendo Democrats, you'll find that the most enthusiastic of them, the Westside of Ukiah for instance and up in the hills for another instance, are drawn from the financially secure sectors of the middle and upper middle classes. Everyone else lives east of State Street and here and there in pockets of nearly Third World squalor with only dope and booze as succor.

THE DEMOCRATS pretend not to be class-based by faking concern for the interests of working people and the poor but become rich in office defending the interests of the wealthy, while Republicans make it clear they're organized to protect wealth and to keep back the poor. In the view of the Boonville daily both parties are utterly, irremediably corrupt with the two least capable people in our country — Trump and, before him, Biden —leading us to a likely violent dissolution.

IT ANNOYS hell outta me to hear socialism constantly linked to monsters at the head of monstrous states. If you're even going to get into the socialism conversation you ought to at least know the diff between it and other isms and something of its history. For instance the fact that many towns in the United States, including nearby Eureka in 1915, elected Debsian socialists as mayors and to city councils. (There were many socialists on the Northcoast in the early 20th century among loggers, millworkers and miners especially. And among loggers and mill workers, especially Finns, in pre-War Fort Bragg, there were many socialists and even a few communists. Finnish immigrants were split between Red Finns and White Finns, the latter committed to the Czar of Russia, the former to the Bolsheviks of Russia. The saddest photograph you will see is a group of Red Finns setting sail from Noyo Harbor in a boat they made themselves for the Red promised land of Bolshevik Russia, not one of them ever heard from again.)

"NO TO SOCIALISM IN AMERICA." That slogan pops up on placards wherever rightwingers assemble. I wish every person who brandished the S-word in public had to also present a brief essay demonstrating his or her knowledge of the difference between communism, socialism and fascism. I'd include anarchism but that would be asking a little too much homework for the average bluster-brains whose heads, if you had their contents on film, would look like ten movies played simultaneously upside down and backwards.

ONE MORE TIME: Socialism is not the same thing as communism, especially communism of the Lenin type. Bernie Sanders is not Pol Pot or Fidel Castro or Mao Tse Tung. Mendocino County's pioneer tweaker, Reverend Jones, was simply a nut with the gift of gab who called his robbery of dependent persons and exploitation of credulous lawyers “socialism” because, to the fashion-driven sectors of the population in those days, that made Jones much cooler, more sophisticated than the acquisitive faith healer and meth-fueled nut case he in fact was.

AS AMERICA CAREENS politically rightward with catastrophic results for everyday citizens — Trump every day — the opposition will be called socialists on the safe assumption that to millions of people socialism is what Fox News says it is.

WHAT IT IS, and what it has been in this country, is Medicare and Social Security and, hopefully, single payer health insurance for everyone. Socialist ideas have a long and honorable tradition in America and characterize all the governments of Western Europe and many in Asia and Africa.

IF YOU WORK for wages and you aren't a socialist you are politically in opposition to yourself.

WHENEVER I hear some blowhard blowing hard about the dangers of socialism, I wonder if the speaker knows anything at all about socialism in its many incarnations, from the Leninist variety as installed by Stalin in Russia to the tepid version as represented by the liberal Democrat, Bernie Sanders, not to mention the commonsense social insurance socialism practiced by Trump's favorite people, the Norwegians.

SANDERS said during the last campaign he wanted our oligarchs taxed at 36 percent. There were shocked gasps from the rightwing that such a suggestion was positively Bolshevikian, but the capitalist Depression-era president Franklin Roosevelt put the income tax at about 96 percent on the big incomes. Of course the super-rich, from whose class Roosevelt rose denounced Roosevelt as a “class traitor,” screaming that their money was being confiscated. Which it was, and put to useful social purpose, too, and, hopefully, will be again when Americans finally realize how badly the rich are ripping off the rest of us.

ROOSEVELT'S socialist programs saved capitalism from itself, re-distributing just enough wealth in the form of Social Security and federal jobs programs to stave off serious insurrection. World War Two employment also helped pull the US out of the Great Depression. Single Payer Healthcare (or MediCare for All), despite what the yobbos on Fox claim, would save millions and put an end to the current medical fraud dominated by the pharmaceutical companies, the medical insurance combines and the corporatized medical centers now feasting on America's cheeseburger-fattened flesh.

EVEN A NORMALLY sagacious ava reader recently described AOC and her three insurgent Democrat allies as “radical left.” Back when words still had meaning, “far left” were the Bolsheviks. A determined little fellow named Lenin added a new wrinkle to Marxism which, boiled down, was himself and his adherents as the vanguard of the revolution who would run the country on behalf of working people, working people being too goddam dumb and irresponsible to run things themselves. But what happened was the vanguardists were simply another ruling class, driving around in limos and enjoying the houses and summer houses of the aristocrats they'd murdered, banished and replaced.

THE VANGUARDISTS also murdered the Mensheviks (liberals), who comprised the Russian liberal-left. The Mensheviks believed people would peacefully opt for socialism in a mixed capitalist-social welfare context if given the choice.

SO, CLASS, we have "far left" with the Bolsheviks wherein the state owns everything right down to the neighborhood barbershop, and the lib-left with the Mensheviks who create a mixed capitalist-social welfare state and nobody gets killed creating it.

OUR CAPITALIST COUNTRY basically consists of four political groupings: The far right, more accurately called fascists anywhere else, and which always includes most of the Big Money, as it did with Hitler, as it does with Trump, although in the US some of it is liberal, at least until it's threatened. Second, you have country club Republicans of the small business type who are mildly liberal on social issues so long as they're left alone to make money; they go with the fascists in the crunch; third, there are the lib-labs of the Mendo type who think Democrats will make things better but are so comfortable inside the bubble themselves they are clinically delusional.

LOCALLY, the lib-labs are people who think our reps — Huffman, McGuire, etc. — are “progressive.” Finally, there is the lib-left, no farther left than Bernie and Liz and the four young women in Congress who the Trumpers and Fox News consider the “far left.” Much of the Northcoast electorate is lib-lab-ish but to the left of Pelosi-Huffman wing of the Democratic Party. Bottom line: we're absolutely politically screwed at the state and national level, and maybe a third of the way down the road to fascism.

THERE is no “far left” in America. It died in 1955 along with the old Moscow-oriented Communist Party USA. There were a few dwarf Lenins around in the 1960s but they generated even less enthusiasm than the Moonies and the Manson Family, and a hell of a lot less enthusiasm than sex, drugs and rock and roll. Bernie, Liz and the four young women constantly vilified by the hard right, and Pelosi-Huffman "liberals,” are no more threatening than Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. They are liberal reformers, not revolutionaries.

PS: Tommy Wayne Kramer has lately gone over to Maga-think while constantly recommending local socialist upgrades — adequate funding for Ukiah-area firefighting and hazard pay for food store clerks, for example. Kramer's a smart guy, and a very good writer. His Sunday columns enliven our intellectually entombed county like no other. I know he reads a lot so I'm recommending a crash course in the isms via Edmund Wilson's seminal primer, “To the Finland Station” where, if the columnist reads with the understanding he's capable of, he will conclude that Bernie, any other place in the world, would be a social democrat, placed comfortably in Franklin Roosevelt's Democratic Party and even more comfortably placed among the sensible sectors of today's Democrats. Which is why Bernie has again reverted to the tame precincts of mainstream liberalism as represented by Democrats.

FDR, some people still argue, saved American capitalism from real Bolsheviks of which Bernie is definitely not one. Comrade Kramer, if he reads with even half-attention, will learn the diff between a communist, a socialist, a fascist, a Bolshevik, a Menshevik and so on. A funnier version of basically the same primer is George Bernard Shaw's “The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism…” Bernie, in the Bolshie-Lenin-communist-socialist context, would be a Menshevik, the democratic socialist political party murdered unto oblivion by the Bolsheviks.

If You’re Going To Talk Socialism, and you have even a grain of integrity, you’ll study up at least enough to have some idea what you’re talking about. There’s also even simpler texts around like “The Idiot’s Guides” to the various isms. The idiot’s guides are funny, but even funnier is George Bernard Shaw's “The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism” which, as you can see from its title, assumes that women, being smarter than men, are also generally more educable.

THESE aren't distinctions without a real difference. They matter because, as our country descends into widespread chaos and the accompanying civil pain certain to ensue, life and death arguments over who gets what and how much will be back again with the same life and death intensity it was fought over during our Great Depression.

THE REPUBLICANS brandish the term “socialism” like everyday Americans should be afraid of gramp’s and gram’s social security and ought to be absolutely terrified of single-payer health insurance. As if the Democrats intend to bring US a few federal amenities to take some of the sting out of life, particularly life now, as crises multiply and intensify for most people. I wonder if “socialism” scares anyone other than millionaires and billionaires, and even the savvier plutocrats among them understand that if they don’t give up off a few bucks for life’s necessities for the rest of us, their heads could wind up on pikes, their perfect teeth grinning from their severed heads.

THE TRUMPS of the Roosevelt era also brandished socialism as a boogeyman that Americans should fear, that if Roosevelt, a plutocrat himself, guaranteed a few of the basics for his fellow Americans and taxed the rich 90 percent to pay for them, we’d be finished as a country. We got jobs and social security and hope, and the only people who complained were the very rich who were compelled to pay their fair share to support the country that made them rich.

IT ANNOYS me no end to hear the Trumpian yobbos scream “socialism” without the slightest notion of what they’re screaming about. And it’s simply sad to watch working people support Trump, a man who would do a George Floyd on them without a second thought if it were in his interests to do it.

BUT THIS IS WHAT we’re getting and what we’re going to get from the Trump Republicans — fear of socialism, a term most Americans would be hard pressed to distinguish from a peanut butter sandwich, and the fear of “socialist” civil disorder at a time when millions of people have the much more immediate fear of being out on the street, jobless, no income and now, food-less.

ONCE UPON a time in America there really were socialists organized as a Socialist Party of millions of registered voters. Their standard bearer was the great Eugene Debs, a railroad worker from Terre Haute. Debs once threatened to free the popular labor leader Big Bill Haywood, imprisoned on a false murder charge in Idaho, by bringing armed sympathizers to Idaho to free Haywood by force, and right there’s your contrast with the “socialist” Bernie Sanders.

A REPUBLICAN CONGRESSMAN named Matt Gaetz of Florida said of the Democrats: “They’ll disarm you, empty the prisons, lock you in your home and invite MS-13 to live next door.”

GOT THAT AMERICA? All that stands between you and MS-13 next door is… the Democrats. (If that’s true, learn Spanish as fast as you can.)

DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM, which is not communism, is a good thing, as a visit to one of the European countries quickly reveals. We should be so lucky to have a country with universal health care, affordable day care, and the ability to live without the fear of financial ruin if you contract a serious illness. Perhaps one day we'll join the rest of the civilized world.

CHURCHILL usually gets the credit for the old saw, “Any man who is not a socialist when he's twenty has no heart. Any man who is still a socialist at age forty has no head.” I've made it headless into my eighth decade, having been a socialist all my conscious days and, in my case, that consciousness light bulb fluttered on when I was about twenty from a combination of books and experience, inchoate as my great dawning was. It's surreal hearing ideas I've taken as obvious truth for sixty years being recited by Bernie Sanders on national television — not only being recited but resonating with millions of people, especially young people.

SANDERS gets derided by the hard left as merely a "nominal" socialist, more of an FDR liberal than whatever the hard left means by a real socialist. Well, there he is talking to millions, while the real socialists are still in the echo chamber checking each other's credentials. Bern's soft FDR-like socialism is much more workable here in our rapidly fraying country because Bern's socialism is based on nothing more radical than a fair system of taxation with the proceeds going to working people. FDR taxed the shit out of the rich, hitting the greedy bastards at 95% on the big incomes, of which there were then a lot fewer. Bern's proposals are at a positively wimpy 40%.

TO THIS SOCIALIST, almost all the left stuff I read is dependent on theoretical models that leave out the catastrophic damage that an industrial-based society has parlayed into an iffy future for the planet itself. Substituting the faculty socialists as bosses of smoke stack economies would be pretty much a lateral move, and simply continue the multiplying catastrophes. Which is why I'm drawn to James Kunstler, a libertarian doomer, who seems much more in touch with the social, eco-realities than, say, most contributors to CounterPunch. He's also a very lively, funny writer. The left hasn't had a lively, funny writer since Cockburn.

I SUSPECT that a lot of socialist thinkers would like to see themselves in the big black limos, meaning them as the ruling class in place of the present one. Which is what happened in the Leninist models of socialism that took power in Russia and China and Cuba. It said, “You people are obviously too goddamn dumb and irresponsible to rule yourselves so we're going to run everything for you.” To hold on to power these socialists murdered the opposition. Bernie is not that kind of socialist, hence his appeal to the millions of Americans shut out of Clintonia. I think he's this system's last hope, and I also know in my bones it's all poised to fall apart in unpredictable but predictably ugly ways.

ON-LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK

[1] Martin Luther King. Jr.'s quote - "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice" - has been proven (at least for now) to be wishful thinking. With the ascendancy of white christian nationalism, fascism, nativism, racism, Constitutional anarchy, wealth inequality, and anti-human indecency in politics and discourse among right-wing reactionary trumpers and groypers, the arc has taken a decidedly swift and different shape: one bending (the knee to an autocrat) toward injustice and inequality for all - except for those defined as and proud of being all those execrable isms.

[2] You know how I know that Thatcher was wrong about socialism? Because inverse socialism via government capture is alive and well in the USA, and has been for decades to an increasing degree (case in point - our leaders wail about "fiscal responsibility" whenever it's time to spend money on, say, healthcare, infrastructure, education, or the environment, but when it comes to multi-trillion dollar giveaways to the rich, the answer is, "let's blow up the credit card!"). If the ultra wealthy have thrived so utterly by engineering systems to squeeze the poor, middle class, and government coffers, then surely it can work the other way too… with the teensy difference that there may be a beneficial difference in the public good.

[3] My grandmother was a hardcore Italian Fascist. She had no problem with a squad of radio operators using the ground floor of the house to reside in for much of the war. After all, her husband was somewhere in France fighting for the Austrian Painter, though she didn't know he had been taken prisoner a few short days after the invasion of Normandy.

The Fascists took care of her and her 9 siblings after the Great War given that her father and uncle were swallowed up and perished in the disaster of Caporetto. The fascists kept the family fed, gave the family money for clothing, and even paid for my grandmother's school books. My grandmother was a big strong girl so she was often put at the front of parades to carry a flag or banner whenever the big guy made an appearance.

My grandmother told us that everyone was a Fascist or NAZI right up until the very moment that the food ran out then no one was a Fascist or NAZI anymore.

It will be no different here.

[4] I agree with you, but, how long does it take. $36 trillion in the hole and counting and the money is still thick. Lines at Disneyland are long. I-phones sell as fast as they are released. NFL stadiums are still full of season ticket holders. Pornography still generates multi-billions in revenue every year. Everyone is driving newer vehicles costing well over $40,000 (I drive a 2007 Tacoma, can't afford a new truck). New, $650,000 homes are still being purchased, old $500,000 homes are still being sold. I see motorhomes, RV trailers, Side by Side UTVs and toy haulers every where, especially on the weekends. Cable companies are still raking in the dough from cable subscriptions. People still have money, and lots of it, to spend apparently.

Eventually the money will dry up, you are correct. But when? It takes a looooooooong time to bankrupt a republic, especially one that has the reserve currency status of the world. I remember reading predictions back in 2008 that the US would lose its reserve currency status in 2011. Here it is 2025 and the debt ship continues to plow forward leaving its awful wake for everyone to clean up. Nothing has changed.

[5] MAMDANI, AN ON-LINE COMMENT:

There seems to be quite a bit of pearl-clutching over Mamdani’s election as Mayor of New York City, being as how he is a self-proclaimed Socialist, that ranges from over-the-top hysterics to pragmatic skepticism. As for me, politically, my roots are in Kansas populism, as ably described by Thomas Frank. That makes me sympathetic to policies favoring small businesses, entrepreneurs, and family farms over big corporations and oligarchs generally. So I am with him on many of his policy goals. But as with any politician, deeply skeptical that he can actually deliver on his ambitions. This has nothing to do with the label “Socialism” which I believe, like that other capital first letter word, “Capitalism,” comes in both benign and odious forms. I might also point out that, according to Wikipedia, there have been 174 socialist mayors of American towns and cities since 1911-- six currently plus Mamdani, including the improbable Khalid Kamau of South Fulton, Georgia. I haven’t heard that civilization as we know it has collapsed in any of those places. I don’t live in a city with a Socialist mayor, so I don’t have a dog in the fight, but I wish them all well, and in particular, I hope Mamdani does well enough to dispel the fears that the Socialist moniker appears to create.

[6] "So yes, billionaires should start paying their fair share. For example, why is Social Security capped at 200 grand, and above that number, no more contributions from the wealthy?" That's right in principle. The trouble is, Daddy Warbucks and his team of lawyers and grateful politicians will see that it never comes to pass. At worst, your billionaire will shift house to his fifth residence in Zurich and renounce his US citizenship.

[7] Young people today barely know of any history before WWII, and that’s being generous! Universities have so corrupted education they don’t stand a chance when faced with all kinds of charlatans, con men and truly evil intentioned people.

These young people today have been brainwashed into hating their own country, thus susceptible to every dangerous and false notion about what else might be better, so they’ll fall for anything that confirms these biases and feel righteous about it in the process.

If you don’t know history, you’re bound to repeat never rang more true than it does today with a myriad of these radical interlopers, and their mind-numbingly stupid devotees cross-crossing the country.

It’s all coming to a head, and it will not be pretty.

[8] New York is a Democratic city. Normally a reliable vote for the mainstream Dem. But guess what? Those voters (like many Americans) are sick and tired of the status quo Dem. The party itself has sold its soul to the devil. Take note, the voters are now stronger than all that corrupt money.

[9] We live in such a weird time. How is it that when I talk to people with normal jobs and lives, like bank tellers and small business owners and salespeople etc and whoever crosses my daily path, they sound kind, smart and reasonable, but our official thinking classes—journalists and professors and politicians—are brazen phony idiots who only speak to lie and who are always swallowing the latest political craze and demanding you too (or else!) and who are babbling conformists who imagine themselves as an infallible priesthood of wise elders!?!?