A Colossal Wreck (6 page)

September 27

When Bosnian Muslims are shelled, driven from their homes or murdered, the world weeps. When Serbs are driven from their homes or are discovered with their throats cut, eyes stay dry. When Serbs do the cleansing, it’s “genocide.” When Serbs are cleansed, it’s either silence, or an exultant cry that they had it coming to them.

The largest ethnic cleansing of the entire war—the expulsion of the Serbs from the Krajina region now overrun by the Croats—is a topic virtually unmentioned in any news forum in the United States.

At least 150,000 Serbs have now fled the Krajina, abandoning the homes in which they and their ancestors have lived since the seventeenth century. President Franjo Tudjman of Croatia bellowed coarsely from this “freedom train” that the refugees left so fast they didn’t have time to take “their dirty hard currency and their dirty underwear”—language somewhat similar in timbre to Tudjman’s diatribes about the Jews in his professorial writings.

October 4

OJ innocent! We the jury, to judge by most of the people I spoke to at the Petrolia store, at the post office and on the phone after the verdict, thought OJ was guilty. Of course they, the real jury, found otherwise. The word “nullification” is now being wrongly thrown around for what the jury did.

Don Doig of the Fully Informed Jury Association—which campaigns for the constitutional right of jurors to “nullify,” that is, to disregard law and the instructions of the judge, and to be told in advance of that right—put it thus: “I believe that this verdict does not represent a nullification of the law against murder, but it may reflect the jury’s distrust of the testimony of police and other prosecution witnesses. If the police are demonstrably racist, or if they routinely violate the rights of defendants, particularly if they’re black, then there could well be legitimate doubts that the guilt of the defendant had been established beyond a reasonable doubt.”

So the guilty verdict went, not against Simpson, but against the Los Angeles Police Department, which has been on more or less continual trial since the beating of Rodney King. No juror has yet
said so publically, but I suspect that this decision against the police would include counts ranging from sloppiness, careless handling of evidence and botched procedures, to racism, as symbolized by Detective Mark Fuhrman’s vicious reminiscences overshadowing all. Given Fuhrman, but much else besides, the evidence against the cops was at least strong as the evidence against Simpson.

November 29

Here comes the “Comprehensive Antiterrorism Act of 1995,” otherwise known as HR-1710. Under its provisions, many of them sought for years by the FBI, the state will accumulate further vast powers abusive of privacy and due process.

HR-1710 defines terrorism in terms so broad that offenses now treated as vandalism under state law would in federal law become “terrorism.” The use of a .22 caliber rifle to inflict “substantial damage” on a stop sign would become “terrorism.” Planning with one’s friends—i.e., partaking in a “conspiracy”—to shoot at the aforementioned stop sign would become “terrorism.” Shooting at the stop sign and missing would similarly be “terrorism,” with all the fearsome sanctions attaching to any offense burdened with that description.

Privacy, already severely eroded by predations upon the Fourth Amendment, would take another beating. Sections 302–304 and 310 of the bill would give the FBI access to an individual’s bank accounts, credit cards, employment and travel records, without a court order and without evidence of criminal activity. The target of such secret enquiries might never know of the FBI’s scrutiny, or of the reasons that prompted it. The FBI could get data on an individual from a credit bureau merely by telling a judge that the target individual may “be in contact with” an agent of a foreign power.

December 20

People are getting loonier all the time. Robin Cembalist, a columnist from
Jewish Forward
in New York, called me a couple of weeks ago to ask what I thought about the attack on me in the
Voice Literary Supplement
. The
VLS
isn’t big in Humboldt County. Maybe nowhere
else either west of the Hudson, since no one from anywhere in the country has called to exult or commiserate or even say they’d seen it.

Soon a very, very long article by Michael Tolkin, the fellow who wrote Altman’s
The Player
, came churning through the fax, courtesy of Cembalist. It was mostly about
The Turner Diaries
, with lunges at yours truly when the mood took him. Among my achievements: I’d driven him back to Judaism. Among my deficits: by quoting Bruce Cockburn’s line, “If I had a rocket launcher …” I’d expressed the unspoken impotence and hypocrisy of the left. I apparently hate liberalism because of its Judaism. Mostly Tolkin was ruminating sourly on the fact that if the Jews hadn’t rejected the concubine Timna, she wouldn’t have ended up with Esau’s son Eliphaz “who had grown up with his father’s resentment” and given birth to Amalek. You’ll recall the Amalekites whom the Lord God enjoined the children of Israel (as relayed by the prophet Samuel to Saul) to smite and “utterly destroy all that they have and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and sucking ox and sheep, camel and ass.” The divinely mandated genocide was duly performed, with Samuel himself finally hewing King Agag in pieces before the Lord in Gilgal.

Apparently Tolkin feels all this could have been avoided if the Timna crisis had been better handled. As things are, “The Book is the Book of the Order of Amalek. We cast them off, set them in motion, and wherever we’re weak, there they are.”

So like the hound of heaven which pursued Francis Thompson to the Catholic Church, I have pursued Tolkin back into the synagogue he had abandoned. (“I came back to Judaism because of a few columns by Alexander Cockburn.”)

Most of what Tolkin wrote was either mad or incomprehensible but he got furious when Cembalist told him she’d faxed me his ravings. “I think a Jew sending it is a betrayal,” she reported him in the
Forward
as saying. “It’s theoretically wrong for a Jewish paper to send it.” He went on, “If I’m trying to say something to fellow Jews—saying it in a language that may be difficult for non-Jews to understand—to bring it to the attention of non-Jews may be dangerous to the Jews.”

The effrontery and demented self-righteousness! Imagine, if I publicly berated a columnist for faxing one of my articles to a Jew.

1996

January 4

Animal rights people in Arcata, the buckle of the PC belt here in northern California, are buying lobsters out of restaurant tanks and shipping them back up to Maine to resume their submarine existence, at least until the next bit of rotted herring in the next lobster trap attracts their attention. The Maine lobstermen say that the do-gooders should watch a lobster tearing up a crab before getting so worked up.

The big scandal in the lobster world remains that of Ralph, the thirty-seven-pounder being weighed some years back in the Boston Aquarium when he supposedly made “a convulsive leap” from the weighing tray and cracked his shell on the floor. Tears streaming down their faces, the Aquarium folk broiled up Ralph on the grill the next day, which just happened to be July 4. Avenge Ralph! All power to the Soviets!

In April 1933, soon after they came to power, the Nazis preoccupied themselves with determining the most merciful way to dispatch crabs and lobsters. In 1936 a law was promulgated decreeing that they were to be thrown into rapidly boiling water. Scientists at the Nazi ministry of the interior had produced learned research papers on the kindest method of killing.

January 5

Troglodytes have been on my mind since I found in Breasted’s
History of Egypt
that King Sesostris III (twelfth dynasty) was a devoted fort builder and named one such structure on the island of Uronarti, “Repulse of the Troglodytes.” According to the
Britannica
(11th edition), “Their burial rites were peculiar. The dead body, its neck and legs bound together with withies of the shrub called
paliurus
, was set up on a mound, and pelted with stones amidst the jeers of the onlookers, until its face was completely covered with them. A goat’s horn was then placed above it, and the crowd dispersed with manifestations of joy.”

January 12

In Humboldt County, where I live, in the Mattole Valley, a couple of hours drive south of Eureka, the ranchers here run cattle on the hills, or the river bottom or the King Range, which is controlled by the Bureau of Land Management. The sheep have come and mostly gone. Here it’s cattle, raised and grazed and shipped off to the feedlots. I suppose my house goes through a couple of sheep, a pig and a hindquarter of a cow each year. The pig would be one raised by a 4-H kid—Cisco Benemann’s was the best so far—from around Ferndale, an hour over the hills, and killed and cut up by a local butcher. The cow for the last two years was called Mochie, raised by Michael Evenson.

At a Christmas party last year I ate a good piece of beef, said so, and Michael told me it was from Mochie and sold me a hindquarter. He gave me this little piece of Homeric history about her origins, which go back to the early 1970s, when a number of counterculture folk headed north from the Bay Area and settled in southern Humboldt. Michael bought Mochie’s grandmother as a day-old calf in a Fortuna auction in 1972. She gave good milk in Michael’s three-cow dairy. At the age of sixteen or seventeen, she’d had fourteen calves and earned retirement. She died in the pasture of natural causes at the age of twenty-two. Her last calf was a heifer, who herself had fourteen calves. Michael sold her to a couple that wanted a milk cow, and he got back the calf she was about to have:

So the animal you had part of was that calf that came to me. I was out of milking and dairy by then. I had very few animals and the pasture was in perfect condition. About sixty acres. When I first got there we figured about fifteen acres a cow but after we reseeded it, this dropped down to ten. When you reseed, you reseed a balanced diet, with perennial and annual grasses, so the soil is always alive with something. A lot of variety. It was a mix Fred Hurlbutt, a rancher in Garberville, developed. My animals were slaughtered in winter and the butcher thought they’d been on grain. I don’t grain feed animals. Too concentrated and unbalanced. My animals always had choices, in the kind of grasses to eat and where to sleep. I had cross fencing but they were generous enough pastures and choice. I had goats in the 1960s and they really taught me animals like choices. They let you know when they’re not happy. There have never been any diseases on my place.

Bullocks I’d slaughter after about two years. I don’t lie to my animals. I tell them the only way I know, using English, that I’m going to slaughter them. I give them as much love and care as I can. Then, when they’re slaughtered they will be part of my body, part of your body. You do the same in your garden.

The couple I sold Mochie’s mother to are hippies living east of the Eel River. She’s a midwife and he grows lettuce. They’re new settlers, and they were the ones who called the calf Mochie. I never sent any animal to a commercial slaughterhouse. Mochie was four and she was breaking fences and wandering. I used a 30.30 and shot her behind the ear, out through the eye.

Michael is off red meat now. A friend of his, the late John Iris, who started the Wild Iris Institute for Sustainable Forestry, got bone cancer when he was fairly young. In the military he’d worked in missile silos in Europe, and with nuclear warheads in Vietnam. He lived in Briceland and went on a macrobiotic diet. Michael joined him, eating fish and chicken, but nothing from the nightshade family, for example tomatoes or potatoes. No milk, no red meat, “even though I had a freezer full of beef and a cow I was milking. I felt better. I’m realizing now my life has changed because I no longer have twice daily contact with cows. I wouldn’t say life is more peaceful. It became more turbulent.”

So much for versions of pastoral in the Mattole Valley. Most people don’t have the option of getting Greg Smith to kill them a lamb.
Probably most people wouldn’t want to cut it up. Someone in the supermarket in Garberville the other day went to the manager and complained because the meat-counter man had some bloodstains on his apron. But even so, there are options. If you don’t like the thought of debeaked chickens sitting in a wire box all their lives, don’t buy them. Figure out if you can have a meal that squares with ethical standards you can live with, or even vaguely aspire to. If you don’t want to eat a piece of an animal tortured by hog barons, then cut up by prisoners, aside from campaigning against such cruelties and conditions, ask yourself, is there a way out, at a level that goes beyond eating the pre-Fall diet.

January 17

I was sad to see ROTC being kicked around the paddock as “targeting poor minority students, the Armed Forces’ favorite cannon fodder these days.” Come on, fellows! Where else is the reserve army of the unemployed supposed to end up?

There’s nothing wrong with a bit of military training, particularly if it might open up some avenue of employment, not to mention self-esteem, among people otherwise destined to be hamburger flippers, crack runners or whatever. I’m for a citizen army. Abolish Annapolis Naval Academy, the Air Force Academy, and West Point, and install a draft, no exemptions.

The Pentagon is the US economy’s last line of defense, never forget it, and probably the only way that any money will get redistributed to the deserving. Ninety-nine percent to Lockheed and the other big firms, one percent to basic training, ROTC and so forth.

The only way many kids can get anywhere near college is on military scholarships. As in many other societies in history the armed forces do offer an avenue for advancement when all else seems closed.

January 24

Hillary Clinton is one of nature’s blue-stockings. The prime do-gooder blue-stocking of all time was probably Beatrice Webb, who
with her husband Sydney fostered the political tendency known as Fabianism, very influential in the evolution of the British Labour Party. The Fabian view was that under the expert guidance of enlightened intellectuals such as the Webbs, society would gradually evolve toward maximum efficiency—good drains, good trains, sound economic management, with the state judiciously presiding over all.