Excerpt from "OFF THE RECORD"

World's Second-Oldest Profession

by Bruce Anderson

AS PREDICTED, it was the same old, same old at last week's deep-think confab at Dana Gray School in Fort Bragg. The same old, same olds, many of them public employees, gathered to discuss the County's economic future, as if they knew or could affect it in any significant way.

ACCORDING TO THE FORT BRAGG ADVOCATE, "Mendocino Coast District Hospital CEO Bryan Ballard began the conference as a moderator, saying that in a societal transition from goods to service industries, the county and coastal regions need to prepare themselves to meet the demands of the future. Ballard cited a study that estimated by the year 2030 the nation would face a shortage of 28 million workers. 'In our coastal community, I see that we have opportunities,' he said. 'We have opportunities to do something about it, to come together, to work together for the business community. To come together with the College of the Redwoods, and with the other education systems to prepare our work force to meet that demand.' Saying that the 2001 census showed that over 80 percent of the 535 Fort Bragg businesses employed less than 10 people, Ballard suggested that the community should look into what it is doing to continue developing small business on the coast. Ballard said that the future of the Georgia Pacific Mill site presents an opportunity for the community to engage in one of the most unique programs in the country. 'As business leaders, we need information see the reality to begin the process of change,' he said."

FIRST OFF, BALLARD isn't a "business leader." He's a public bureaucrat drawing an over-large salary for administering Coast Hospital, a publicly-owned entity whose solvency Ballard's profligate leadership threatens to destroy. Ballard is not an entrepreneur, not a capitalist, not even a permanent resident of the Mendocino Coast. Like many of the people discussing the future of the local economy, Ballard is a mercenary. He will go wherever someone is willing to pay him lots of money to run a hospital. His first and only allegiance is to himself; ditto for the school administrators and the other publicly paid people at the conference.

SECOND, it's true that Coast Hospital's present and its future partially depends on the health of the local economy, although a government funded, single payer national health insurance plan for all Americans would guarantee Coast's survival and radically improve the business climate in one stroke, Coast Hospital's immediate future is made precarious in the present economic context by its board of trustees and Ballard because they direct disproportionate amounts of the Hospital's finite income for raises for Ballard and other overly-priced Hospital employees, starving patient care as they go. Coast Hospital's board of trustees, like school boards, the present County board of supervisors, and any other public board of trustees in the Hobbesian economy of Mendocino County are captives of the people they allegedly supervise in the wider public interest.

THIRD, it's incorrect and perverse to say that public entities should, in the salacious phrase, "come together..... to work for the business community." (What's next, uniforms?) A functioning educational system is innately good for business because, metaphorically speaking, business won't have to buy exact change cash registers and write operating instructions in retarded language drafted in big block letters if their labor force can read, write and perform basic math calculations which, thanks to the public schools, few of them can now do. It is correct and not perverse to say that Ballard and the rest of the public sector blah-blahers at the conference would not make the nice money they presently make screwing up hospitals, schools and County government if they had to sell themselves in the local free market jungle. In other words, the manager of Fort Bragg Purity could run Coast Hospital, but it is unlikely Coast Hospital administrators could successfully run Fort Bragg Purity. Public school administrators, and the present board of supervisors would not, could not, be employed in any private sector management-level position anywhere in Mendocino County because they're too goddamn dumb and/or crazy. There is a huge difference in public-private ability levels, hence the present state of public institutions in this county and this probably doomed country.

FOURTH, the simple truth of the local economy and the national economy is that both are captives of private investors, aka capitalists. If, for example, the Skunk Railroad had not been purchased by an outside company with the resources to repair the track and otherwise run the train in a way likely to make money the Skunk would have had no chance for resurrection. The people who bought the Skunk could care less what the supervisors, the school wankers, Brian Ballard, and the rest of the local free lunch gang think about anything, much less the future of the local economy.

FIFTH, and as even the feckless Ballard recognizes, it is small business people who keep the Mendocino Coast's economy limping along, and many of them would not have succeeded if it weren't for the Coast's uniquely temperate climate, its natural beauty, its proximity to the Bay Area's six million people, and its neo-demographic — trust fund hippies and rich retired people, aka the hill muffins.

SIXTH, who are these people to assume that a woods and fishing-based economy are gone forever? Commercial fishing may be kaput for our lifetimes, but if I'm decoding the forest stats correctly, in about twenty years, when tree re-growth catches up with the devastation wrought by L-P and G-P's short-term profit taking on their 400,000 or so Mendocino County acres — wholeheartedly, militantly supported by the same people discussing the County's economic future last week at Dana Gray — there will again be a large demand for milled trees. Who says we're stuck forever with a tourist-based economy?

ACCORDING TO THE PRESS DEMOCRAT, "least favored" uses for the 400-acre G-P mill site running between the Pacific and downtown Fort Bragg, include: big box stores; heavy industrial development; tourist theme parks; vacation rentals; condos; hotels; resorts; casinos.

I'M NEVER SURE how much reality the Mendocino Coast's population can take in one sitting, but here goes: these 400 acres are owned by Georgia-Pacific, not the Caspar Community Association or The Albion Nation. Georgia-Pacific looted Mendocino County and ran off to Atlanta with the money and the jobs. That just happened, remember? G-P's board of bandits will pretend to listen to "what the community wants," then return to "the community" whatever G-P wants in suppository form. If G-P concludes that a 400-acre silicon replica of a Big Mac will fatten G-P's bottom line, you can be sure Jere Melo and Company will promptly respond, "You want fries with that, sir?"

FORT BRAGG could fight G-P by seizing the pivotal 400 acres via the eminent domain process, but who's up for that in a community of natural born serfs and collabos? The lawyers paid by the City would immediately come up with a thousand reasons it couldn't be done and that would be the end of it. After all, Fort Bragg rolled all the way over for Dominic Affinito who's gotten clean away with a whole extra floor on top of his eyesore motel at the northwest corner of the Noyo Bridge. And that's not even 10% of what Affinito's gotten away with in Fort Bragg since he arrived 25 years ago and started bribing the Fort Bragg City Council.

PREDICTION: G-P will sell the G-P mill site to developers who'll do a seaside version of Larkspur Landing — upscale housing for geriatric vegetables, view restaurants, shops, and a high rise Wal-Mart, the compromise being that Wal-Mart will agree to keep its logo off the front of the building.

BY THE WAY, here's why people, even politically correct people like my sister, shop at Wal-Mart. For Christmas a couple of years ago I bought Sis a $14.95 watch at Long's Drugs, Ukiah. Last Christmas I bought her a new E-Z Off watch band because the lead-based paint had started to flake off the original. A couple of months ago her watch battery woke up dead. Sis took it to a Long's in Marin County to get them to insert a replacement battery. She was prepared to pay more than the value of the watch for the service, the watch having the priceless sentimental value to her that it does because it was gift from her loving brother. Long's said, "We don't do that at any of our stores in Marin. Try Wal-Mart." Naturally, there's no Wal-Mart in Marin County because Marin directly imports the Third World themselves to do childcare, housekeeping, kitchen work, and landscaping rather than shop Wal-Mart for the Third World once removed. So Sis dropped the watch off in Boonville with instructions to me to take it to Wal-Mart in Ukiah for Wal-Mart to put a new battery in her $14.95 keepsake. Did Wal-Mart, Ukiah, put a new battery in the cheap-o China import of a competitor's watch? Yes, Wal-Mart, Ukiah, did, and did it for $2.88 too!

SERIOUSLY, doesn't Don Rumsfeld look like your neighbor from way back in childhood days who'd storm out of his house and yell, "Goddamit! I told you kids if that ball comes over here one goddam more time, I'm keeping it!"? Rummy also bears a close resemblance to that same neighbor guy who was on 24-hour alert for any sign of dandelions in his 5x5 lawn. The fate of the world has rested in the hands of crazy people before, but Nixon was surrounded by people who knew he was nuts; Nixon couldn't even get out of bed unless two or three of his advisors agreed to let him out of his jammies. Bush? His advisors are more dangerous than he is, and he's Nixon squared.

IN A LOT of ways, this is a silly book, which is understandable because it's about a mostly silly bunch of people, but it's a fair silly book. Let me explain. (How can we stop you, big boy?) A Good Forest for Dying: The Tragic Death of a Young Man on the Front Lines of the Environmental Wars (sob, slobber, drool, mawk) by Patrick Beach describes the life and death and subsequent events related to David Chain, a 24-year-old Texan who'd made the fatal mistake of hooking up with Earth First! to save trees in Humboldt County. A tree faller, employed as contract labor by Pacific Lumber, accidentally dropped a tree on Chain as Chain and a few other protesters hid out on a logging site where the faller, a fellow named Ammons, was at work. If you think tree fallers can drop big trees precisely on the dreadlocks of forest elves, well, you probably think Ammons is a killer. You also don't know anything about woods work. What Ammons is is a fall guy faller of a working stiff, and what the forest activists are are dilettantes whose very beings are great big walking insults delivered every summer in the faces of working people. The annual activists regard working people as saps, stooges, etc.

THE CHERNEY WING of what passes for Ecotopian political activism is as mercenary as their co-dependent, Charles Hurwitz, Pacific Lumber's relentless owner, a fact the author of A Good Forest misses entirely. Ammons clearly had no idea where the protesters were when he felled the fatal tree but he, of course, inevitably wound up as the villain, while a creepy, self-interested lawyer named Steve Schectman got a big pay day and creepy, self-interested, forest parasites like Darryl Cherney got exempted from responsibility for placing kids like Chain in harm's way every summer during Humboldt County's "protest season." Patrick Beach takes the forest activists of the Cherney type at face value, even going so far as to pronounce the arrogant nutball calling himself "Shunka," as "perhaps the gentlest and most trusting soul I've ever met." (Christ save us all, in this, the time of our greatest need for clarity, O Lord!)

THE REAL STORY behind Chain's death is the old one of naked greed all round, except for Ammons, who's merely trying to make a living in an impossibly fraught context of, on the one side the neo-druids who pop up at his work site like so many mushrooms after a spring rain and, on the other, a distant junk bond tycoon who'd wipe out all of Humboldt County, human and biological, if he could make a few bucks doing it. We will note here for the umpteenth time, the Cherney forces seldom "lock-down" in the offices of the true power, but are great ones for hassling low-level guys doing dangerous work for starvation wages, which is generally typical of the obliviousness of most leisure-class activism, and especially Earth First!'s.

DARRYL CHERNEY is proportionately as big a crook as Hurwitz, and the real story here is about how Cherney and Company, hiding behind bogus non-profits like the wholly bogus Redwood Summer Justice Project and Bay Area Coalition For Headwaters, harvest the redwoods as relentlessly as Hurwitz does. But Beach's book about all this, if you can get through the mawk to the rare paragraphs of gawp, is interesting, if only as a credulous view of these events.

AUTHOR BEACH, by the way, is blurbed as having received "awards from the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors and the Texas Institute of Letters, and was a finalist for the Livingston Award."

WHAT IS IT ABOUT contemporary journalists that they seem so needy for trophies? Journalism is kinda like a Little League banquet where every kid gets a prize so he won't get his feelings hurt, which I'm also opposed to. I'm for getting your feelings hurt at an early age because your feelings are going to get stomped on, and stomped on repeatedly as you stagger on through life. Early blows, short of lethal, toughen you up for what's to come. I think Little League should be like it was when I was a kid — non-existent. You went to the playground without mommy, without batting helmets, without insurance, without lawyers. The big kids made you shag balls until they got tired of hitting, and when you said, "Hey! You promised me I got to hit if I shagged for you guys," and they said, "Shut up, punk, or we'll kick your ass." So you got your ass kicked and trudged home and complained to Mom, and she said, "Suck it up, fool. That's life. If you're dumb enough to shag fly balls all day in the hot sun, you don't deserve to get your ups." A hard school, but we could catch flyballs by the time we graduated.

SO HERE'S JOURNALISM, the world's second oldest profession, acting like they're doing something grand and noble for $125,000 and up a year, all the while giving each other awards. Please. To make these prizes mean something, how about doing journalism awards on the basis of blind readings like wine tastings? Have newspapers send stories to the trophy presenters at Columbia University and the rest of the in-house venues without identifying the newspaper or magazine they appeared in. A lot of "prize winning" stuff is pure crap, and badly written crap at that, but the trophy presenters, mostly retired corporate hacks and hackettes, see something with The New York Times on it and immediately salute and prepare to pass out the awards. Sure, there are lots of fine journalists in America, and the better they are the sparser their trophy case.

ALL YOU CYBER-SHUT-INS be sure now to write in and say, "You're just jealous." I'm not. I'm just tired of hearing from people who think these prizes mean something.

SPEAKING of the world's two oldest professions, I suppose it was ironical to see Glenda Anderson's name attached to this Crime Pays blurb in Friday's Press Democrat: "Earth First bomb suit settled. The U.S. Justice Department and the city of Oakland this week agreed to a $4 million settlement with two North Coast environmentalists injured in a 1990 car bombing in Oakland. Earth First activists Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney were injured when a bomb blew up in their car while they were on a speaking tour to promote Redwood Summer, a campaign to save old-growth redwood trees. They were arrested shortly after the bombing on suspicion of transporting the bomb, but released for lack of evidence. They sued in 1991, claiming the FBI and Oakland police violated their civil rights. Bari died of breast cancer in 1997, but her estate continued the suit. In 2000, a jury awarded Bari's estate and Cherney $4.4 million. The plaintiffs and defendants have, since then, been working on a settlement agreement. Attorneys will get nearly 40 percent of the $4 million settlement — around 1.4 million — according to court documents. Bari's estate will get $1.7 million, which will be split between the Redwood Justice Fund and her two daughters, who are expected to end up with between $350,000 and $400,000 each after estate taxes. Cherney will get $850,000. — Glenda Anderson"

GLENDA is the former live-in love interest of Mike Sweeney, the not-well-enough-known car bomber. Glenda's recently gone over from the Ukiah Daily Journal to the Press Democrat's "Ukiah Bureau," i.e., her and Mike Geniella. She told me recently she'd never seen Steve Talbot's film on the Bari Bombing, never read or heard anything about it from the Sweeney Did It perspective, never thought about it all. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is Mendocino County journalism in a pipe bomb.

THE REDWOOD JUSTICE FUND is a rolling scam comprised of key insiders like Karen Pickett, Darlene Commingore, Tanya Brannan. The Fund has nothing to do with preserving redwoods or justice. It's a slush fund for Cherney and Sweeney's co-conspirators in the bombing cover-up.

THE FIRST of two reality-based books on the Bari interlude will appear this summer. It's called The Secret Wars of Judi Bari by Kate Coleman, a veteran Bay Area journalist best known for taking on the Black Panthers when writing honestly about the Panthers was both dangerous and unfashionable. Susan Faludi's book on the Bari phenomenon and related matters is due out in March of '05.

STATE ATTORNEY GENERAL Bill Lockyer has a video tape of the crime and still says there's not enough evidence to prosecute? That's what the portly loafer told the media the other day when he was asked why we shouldn't expect a prosecution of the two Youth Authority staffers who are captured on video beating the crap-a-roo out of two handcuffed punks long after they'd been subdued. "Problems with the case," Lockyer said. Like no close-ups?

I'M PRETTY SURE I was the last guy in the country to figure out that the New York Times Book Review is not only a slough of "On the one hand this author is clearly pre-literate, but on the other hand he's written an interesting book and he has a nice family," it represents the ultimate in nambo-pambo-ism and log rolling, book division. I'd been gulled so many times by deceptive NYT reviews into buying bad books it finally occurred to me that either I was stupid, which is always a strong possibility given my obvious limitations, or it was merely the nambos giving me the pambo every week, which also translates as my stupidity. The New York Times Book Review is never ever as nasty to anybody as its lead reviewer was to Alice Walker last week. The purple legions must be reeling.

IN THE TUESDAY, April 20th edition of the Times, under the title, "If the River Is Dry, Can You Be All Wet?" Michiko Kakutani writes: "Alice Walker's latest book of fiction is called Now is the Time To Open Your Heart.... If this novel did not boast the name of Alice Walker, who won acclaim some two decades ago with The Color Purple, it's hard to imagine how it could have been published... it's a remarkably awful compendium of inanities." The review continues for a thousand buttressing words, many of them not merely inane but stupendously inane before concluding, "In the end, Now Is the Time to Open Your Hearts is less a novel than a cloying collection of New Age homilies, multicultural pieties and trippy Carlos Castaneda-ish riffs, hung like politically correct Christmas ornaments on the armature of Kate's torturous journey from self-pity to self-congratulation."

AMONG THE INANITIES, which in certain literal circles in Mendocino County would be regarded as a drop-fall profundities, "What would happen if our foreign policy centered on the cultivation of joy rather than pain?"

HMMMM. Think about it, and while you're considering the relative merits of joy and pain in the foreign policy context, think about this: What would happen if my ass fell off at the top of a very steep hill but, as the ivory magnificence of my fleeing buttocks tumbled past them, passersby, fearing the splendid globes were two new moons freshly hurled from Urania's skies by a careless goddess heedlessly tending her stellar closet, refused to arrest them, and forever more I was forced to remain standing?

I THINK I can explain what happened to Alice Walker whom, as it happens, is a resident of Anderson Valley, which is also home to this fine publication. No, I don't know the lady, but she smiled at me once at Boont Berry Farm. She has a nice smile. In two words, Mendocino County happened to Alice Walker. She is said to have written The Color Purple in a shack not far from downtown Boonville, but Ms. Walker had kept to herself during the composition process and, because she'd not stepped into the intellectual quicksand of civic-social Mendoland, she wrote a hundred interesting pages of an otherwise ho hum, but politically timely, didactic novel. When the book became a huge success, and then an even more successful filmic update of Birth of a Nation without the artistic merit of the earlier movie, Ms. Walker became rich, and built a house on a ridge top at the Holmes Ranch, and began spending lots of time in the Anderson Valley. And began spending lots of time with people for whom self-pity and self-congratulation are ways of life, and soon her art became so bad it became un-art, and has now become anti-art, the prose equivalent of chipmunk paintings and Hallmark narratives, and what we have today is a very sad case of a talented person who failed to take the elementary, but absolutely necessary prophylactic precaution of inoculating herself against KZYX-itis, New Dimensions Syndrome, Encepho-Hippieology, and, finally, the fatal (no known antidote) Lewallen-Lipmanson Malignitis Infantilism, a tofu and marijuana-borne parasite that causes irreversible mental regression in adults. Combined, these diseases are artistically fatal and, unless potential victims isolate themselves from all its carriers, well, R.I.P. Alice.

FOR LYING about the Bari Bombing for 14 years, Darryl Cherney has made $178.98 per day, $65,384 per year.