Excerpt from "OFF THE RECORD"

Bring Back Logging

by Bruce Anderson

BRING BACK LOGGING! Premier Pacific Vineyards, Inc. of Napa has bought up 19,000 acres (30 square miles) of the Gualala watershed, thus reviving the mother of all vineyards scheme conjured by Coastal Forestlands Ltd. a few years ago. Coastal Forestlands couldn't quite bring off 30 miles of vineyard after logging what was left of marketable trees remaining from previous blitzes of the land. According to the Independent Coast Observer, the purchase "consists of more than 100 parcels, many of them adjacent to each other" and that "CalPERS, the California Public Employee Retirement System, was a partner in the venture."

A GLIB FELLOW by the name of Thompson is front man for Premier Pacific. He says his company is "primarily a farming business." Thompson has announced that the 30 miles of severely logged-over land at the southwestern tip of Mendocino County is now called "Preservation Ranch," a sure sign it is about to be destroyed by industrial viticulture.

"MUCH OF THE LAND," Thompson told the Independent Coast Observer, "is historic farmsteads," which is not true. The historic farmsteads were long ago bought up and consolidated by large timber concerns. The few homesteaders living deep in the hills of the South Coast were forced off the land by the timber barons, occasionally at gun point, early in the 20th century, a process comprising one more chapter in the untold history of Mendocino County. The largest timber holdings were amassed by capitalists who paid "homesteaders" — Frisco barflies, for instance — to lay claim to designated parcels vast tracts of undeveloped government land. The big boys of early timber would then buy out the phony homesteaders.

THOMPSON, front man for distant investment collectives is, in keeping with the times, less direct than the old robber barons. He says Premier Pacific "is interested in planting previously-farmed areas in vineyards, with some orchard crops. It's most likely there would be a minority of grapes, and a majority of timber," he said. "We're intrigued by the viticultural potential. In terms of forest practices, we'll see if we can treat the land more gently than [it has been] in the past."

TRANSLATION: Thirty miles of grapes relieved by scrub oak and a few upscale homes.

THE GRUESOME facts of the wine industry are these: It's wholly dependent on immigrant Mexican labor for whom the industry provides little to no housing or labor protections or fair compensation or anything else that American labor, also on the ropes these days, more or less assumes as its birthright. The wine industry receives enormous public subsidies in the form of ag tax exemptions and in the various forms of welfare benefits citizens must pay which immigrant labor depends on in lieu of fair compensation and benefits.

MEXICAN IMMIGRANTS suffer more from the prevalent dumbassification encouraged by popular culture. And Mexican-American children, like all the children of the American poor, suffer from poor public schooling. In Boonville, where more than 60% of the K-12 student body is made up of the children of recent immigrants, the entrenched edu-satrapy is impervious to reform because immigrant parents are unable to pressure the public apparatus on behalf of their children because (1) They don't speak English, let alone edu-speak, an obfuscating language all its own, (2) Immigrants can only look on in horror as the public schools condone behavior and dress not tolerated in the villages of rural Mexico or anywhere else hoping to produce young people who can successfully function in techno-world, (3) Immigrants are mostly illegal and generally fear the repercussions of involvement in public controversies, and fear those repercussions specifically in small communities like ours which are dominated by their gringo wine industry padrones, public school employees, and their interchangeable allies, the oblivious Subaru-libs of the NPR type. An immigrant who looks to Mendolib for specific help is a doomed immigrant. (4) Immigrants assume, fatally, that the gringo knows best when it comes to education, realizing too late that education in America, like all other forms of success in our materialist sweepstakes, is class-based. People who begin life on third base are much more likely to score than people perpetually in the on-deck circle.

AND THEN there are the drug and gang interdependencies plaguing the immigrant communities and the rest of us. Immigrants rightly fear the criminals among them because the gang and drug trades, are the source of great misery right here in the bucolic Anderson Valley, Anderson Valley being constantly touted by the co-dependent wine and tour industries as "an unspoiled Napa." Gangs and drugs are interchangeably affiliated and are now omnipresent throughout Mendocino and Sonoma counties. Gangs have a strong presence in Ukiah, have extended their evil influence into Fort Bragg, Willits, Boonville, and Potter Valley. (Gangs are way outta hand in Santa Rosa.) Mexican criminals now dominate the marijuana and methamphetamine businesses in Anderson Valley. Mom and Pop Hippie dope farms have been bonged by the Mexican syndicates whose energy and enterprise are such that they've driven pot prices to all-time lows.

THE WHOLE SHOW has been brought to us by the wine industry and America's padrone class generally, George W and John Kerry, proprietors.

AND THE WINE industry is catastrophically bad for the land, aka the environment. First they clearcut, then they poison the earth to depths of 10 to 12 feet to plant the vines. Thereafter, literal tons of herbicides and pesticides are applied in annual maintenance dosages. Of course the wine industry also helps itself to whatever water is in the area and the vines themselves aspirate huge, eternal gulps of the water table the deeper their roots penetrate.