FAINT OF HEART, read no farther for there is not a single encouraging sentence in this column.
THE BRITISH BROADCASTING Corporation will be here next week to do a program on Alice Walker. The entire Corporation won’t be here, silly, just a fire team of trendies, who, I guess, will elicit a few sensible words from Alice, Anderson Valley’s Pulitzer Prize winner. So you won’t be caught unprepared in front of the Horn of Zeese when some limey thrusts a microphone in your face and asks, “Well, Mr. Logger, what do you think of Miss Walker’s work?” I want you to come right back with, “Actually, I prefer Toni Morrison if the discussion is going to be black American female writers. Toni is much tougher, certainly more politically astute and her ouevre is generally more impressive than Walker’s.” It’ll be up to you whether or not to get into the deterioration of standards as evidenced in recent Pulitzer awards. But this is the kind of stuff that will knock ’em dead in London.
MORE CLICHÉS: You must know that neither Lee Iacocca nor Geraldine Ferraro wrote the books about them presently befouling the best-seller lists. Iacocca is regarded as some kind of mastermind for having taken a billion dollars of public money to “save” the Chrysler Corporation. Following this triumph, Iacocca hired a team of ghost writers to pay tribute to himself and in the process ripped off another million or so bucks from unsuspecting would-be tycoons. This kind of dishonesty and signing your name to work that isn’t our own is now an accepted American practice. Everyone from Reagan on down does it.
GERALDINE FERRARO’S team of hacks couldn’t manage to make Geraldine any more palatable than she is. I couldn’t believe my ears when local libs who are, as we know, basically Rockefeller Republicans, told me how brilliant they thought Ferraro was in her debates with George Bush. Ferraro, an alleged feminist who said her slum lord husband never told her he made his money working with crooks to exploit the poor, has a voice like a chainsaw and less charm. Bush looks like the kind of guy who gets hit by a car and at the hospital is discovered to be wearing ladies underwear. If his hysterical presentation had been delivered in front of the Boonville Lodge, he would have been grabbed by Deputy Squires for a 48-hour hold in the Ukiah psycho unit.
I’M GLAD TO SEE Charlene Rollins honored for her culinary skills by Esquire magazine who sent a team of “writers” to Boonville for a few days some months ago to write her up. Esquire “writers took back to New York six paragraphs of info on Charlene that reads as if it were cranked out by the Mendocino County Chamber of Commerce on an off day. Get this one: “Four years ago Rollins opened her own restaurant in Boonville, a tiny town two and a half hours north of Berkeley. The restaurant, a former flophouse for cowboys, is called the New Boonville Hotel. During lunch and dinner hours Mercedeses and Jaguars park next to such local institutions as the Horn of Zeese coffee shop and the Boontling Club of America. On the covered porch, you might see Raymond Burr and his friends enjoying lunch next to a group of local wine makers.”
CHRIST HELP US ALL. I’m so sick of reading paragraphs like this about Anderson Valley I’ve become assaultive if I hear them repeated within ten feet of me. Is there something inherently admirable about the sort of people who drive Jaguars or other fancy, expensive imported cars? And can you think of one person in Anderson Valley who has the faintest desire to have lunch with local vintners or Raymond Burr? Esquire has become the second-most despicable publication in the United States, the first being Vanity Fair. The latter lends the concept of degeneracy a whole new dimension.
THERE’S A SIGN ON the south end of Cloverdale announcing Pat Paulsen’s winery a few miles down the road toward Geyserville. It says, “Is It Really THE Pat Paulsen?” It is difficult to imagine anyone so utterly bereft that he would actually swerve off Highway 101 for a taste of wine solely because a third string comic owns the winery.
THE MENDOCINO COUNTY Mental Health Advisory Board has put out a call for persons to sit on its board which advises to Supervisors on human psychology. The blurb says the board is especially seeking “consumers’ by which they mean people who actually are forced for one reason or another to seek mental health services. One of the consumers appointed to the advisory group several years ago was a man who had chopped his daughter’s head off. When this fact became publicly known after it was leaked to the local press by a disgruntled aspirant to the job of Mental Health Director, Ukiah libs were in quite a tiz. The libs were offended that ordinary citizens were rightfully aghast at the macabre irony of such a man being appointed to a mental health advisory board of all things. I’m repeating this story because it’s a good example of how the basic stupidity of phony liberals actually discredit valuable programs. The goofies who defended the axe-murderer’s appointment are still on the board themselves.
GREENS BUSINESS: The following statement of purpose, as it is described, adopted by the Laytonville, Willits and North Coast Greens reads as if it were written by management trainees at Dow Chemical. In fact there’s nothing in the turgid, redundant nambo-pambo paragraph that would disturb anyone at Dow. Is it necessary to constantly say we’re non-violent? Such assurances seem designed only to show the owners of Mendocino County that we will forever be good boys and girls, never doing anything to disturb existing property arrangements. Violence is simply one tactic among many and should never be ruled out beforehand.
ANYWAY, Here’s the statement, Hubert Humphrey at his most eloquent: “We are united in support of ecological wisdom, social justice and responsibility, grassroots democracy, nonviolence, and peace. We seek a society based on sound, sustainable economic policy that is decentralized, equitable, and comprised of flexible institutions wherein people have significant control of their personal lives.”
INVOKING THE DEITY for the second time today, for Christ’s sake wake up!
Good Morning Bruce, 😢🤦♀️🤯
The Mental Health Advisory Board of 1985. I’m not surprised, but damn-I’m in shock reading this.
Do you have any archived stories on this man, or can you point me toward where I might look? I’d like more context.
First off, calling people who receive mental health services “consumers” is absurd. It turns human struggle into a transaction. Nobody is “consuming” anything, they’re trying to survive. The term is ridiculous!
But here’s my real question:
They appointed a man to this board without any background check? Without even looking into who he was?
He murdered his daughter-and they had no idea?
How long did he sit on that board?
And do you know when the county changed the name from the Mental Health Board to the Behavioral Health Advisory Board? I believe it’s the same entity, just renamed.
Back in 1985 they weren’t using the term “lived experience.” They wanted input from people who had been in the system, and this is who they chose? I’d love to know what he said in those meetings. I’m sure he was very charming.🤮
Here’s the thing: lived experience is essential. It is one of the most important components for driving real change in how these issues are understood and addressed.
This isn’t an isolated story. Mendocino County has a history of putting people into mental and behavioral health roles without proper vetting or accountability. Over the decades, we’ve seen individuals with serious past misconduct end up in positions where they should never have been, while many of the people who actually have constructive lived experience and insight are ignored. That imbalance is part of the problem.
People like to bring up generational trauma, but the trauma we’re dealing with here didn’t come from families. it came from the board itself. This is systemic trauma, inherited through decades of poor judgment and repeated failures. The lineage starts at the system, not the people!
mm💕