A Colossal Wreck (67 page)

People reckon legalization is not far off and spells the end of the thirty-year marijuana boom. The local weekly, the
North Coast Journal
, has made a somewhat comic effort to construct a silver lining for the county. It talks hopefully of branding the Humboldt “terroir,” of tours of “marijuanaries.” Dream on. Down south there’s more sun, more water, and very capable Mexicans ready to tend and trim for $15 an hour. The smarter growers reckon they have two years at most. Here on the North Coast the price of marijuana will drop, the price of land will drop, the trucks will stop being late-model. There’ll be less money floating around.

The New Deal began with an end to prohibition of the sale of alcohol across the United States. The individual small producers of bourbon—some good, a lot awful or downright poison—shut down,
and the big liquor producers took over, successfully pushing for illegalization of marijuana in 1937. How long will the small producers of gourmet marijuana last before the big companies run them off, pushing through the sort of regulatory “standards” that are now punishing small organic farmers?

April 9

The seventeen-minute video recording the US military’s massacre from the air in Baghdad is utterly damning. The visual and audio record reveal the two Apache helicopter pilots and the US Army intelligence personnel monitoring the real-time footage falling over themselves to make the snap judgment that the civilians roughly a thousand feet below are armed insurgents and that one of them, peeking round a corner, was carrying an RPG, that is, a rocket-propelled antitank grenade launcher.

The dialogue is particularly chilling, revealing gleeful pilots gloating over the effect of their initial machine-gun salvoes. “Look at those dead bastards,” one pilot says. “Nice,” answers the other. Then, as a wounded man painfully writhes toward the curb, the pilots eagerly wait for an excuse to finish him off. “All you gotta do is pick up a weapon,” one pilot says yearningly.

Defense analyst Pierre Sprey, who led the design teams for the F-16 and A-10 and who spent many years in the Pentagon, stresses two particularly damning features of the footage. The first is the claim that Noor-Eldeen’s telephoto lens could be mistaken for an RPG. “A big telephoto for a 35mm camera is under a foot and half at most. An RPG, unloaded, is 3 feet long and loaded, 4 foot long. These guys were breathing hard to kill someone.”

May 7

Oil drilling is one of the dirtiest of all businesses, physically and politically. In recent years BP has spent many millions in the US, trying to winch its reputation out of the mud with bright advertising paeans to its green commitment. Along with its green washing ad campaigns
it’s staked $500 million on a biofuel research center at the University of California’s Berkeley campus. Every gallon gushing from the holes in the ocean floor in the Gulf of Mexico sinks the company’s reputation back in the primal ooze of a reputation permanently disfigured by environmental havoc, political bribes, and ruthless campaigns against those courageous enough to blow the whistle on the company.

Obama now wags his finger at BP and vows that it will pay for every penny of the clean-up. He actually took more campaign money from BP than did his Republican opponent in 2008, Senator John McCain.

June 4

Israel regrets? But no! Israel doesn’t regret. It preens and boasts and demands approval, which it duly gets from its prime sponsor, the United States government, and most of the press. The attack on the Mavi Marmara was carefully planned.

Israel is plunging into deeper darkness. As the Israeli journalist Gideon Levy recently told one interviewer: “In the last year there have been real cracks in the democratic system of Israel. It’s systematic, it’s not here and there. Things are becoming much harder.” And Levy also wrote in
Ha’aretz
, “When Israel closes its gates to anyone who doesn’t fall in line with our official positions, we are quickly becoming similar to North Korea. When right-wing parties increase their number of anti-democratic bills, and from all sides there are calls to make certain groups illegal, we must worry, of course. But when all this is engulfed in silence, and when even academia is increasingly falling in line with dangerous and dark views, the situation is apparently far beyond desperate.”

June 11

Aggrieved British politicians denounce the Obama administration for throwing heavy emphasis on the formally discarded “British” in BP. What do they expect? Here in Petrolia, California (site of spec oil
drilling back in 1864) someone asked me at the post office yesterday was it true the Queen owned BP.

What goes around comes around. One of the greatest bailouts in history came in 1953, when the Eisenhower administration authorized a CIA-backed coup in Iran. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, owned by the British government, had been expropriated and nationalized in 1951 by unanimous vote of Iran’s parliament. The ’53 coup evicted Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq and installed Shah Reza Pahlevi, the creature of the West’s oil companies, with full tyrannical powers. The AIOC got back 40 percent of its old concession and became an internationally owned consortium, renamed? British Petroleum.

July 2

There’s been ripe chortling about the spy network run in the US by the Russian SVR, successor to the KGB in the area of foreign intelligence. The eleven accused were supposedly a bunch of bumblers so deficient in remitting secrets to Moscow across nearly a decade that the FBI can’t even muster the evidence to charge them with espionage.

All of the defendants who appeared in the New York court except one, the fetching Anna Chapman, are also charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering, which carries a maximum penalty of twenty years of prison. Assuming their lawyers don’t get them off, a doubtful proposition, we can assume the Russians will round up eleven Americans, accuse them of spying and then do a trade.

Then both sides will start again, the Russians training fresh sets of agents to spout American baseball records, burn hamburgers over the backyard grill, jog and do other all-American things like have negative equity on their houses and owe the IRS money. Meanwhile the Americans are forcing their agents to read Dostoevsky.

July 9

It’s the worst of times. America is plunging back into Depression. Only one out of every two Americans of working age has a job. Across
the last two months, more than a million Americans simply gave up seeking employment, even as benefits are running out.

Somewhere near ten million Americans without work aren’t getting any kind of check. One in every five children is living below the poverty line, sometimes by as much as 50 percent, classed as “extreme poverty.”

The stimulus has failed. The housing market is in free fall. A couple of months ago market analysts predicted there would be five million more foreclosures between now and 2011 and it looks like they’re on target. Forty percent of delinquent homeowners have already loaded up the SUV, thrown the plastic chairs in the swimming pool and tossed the house keys back at the bank.

For tens of millions of Americans the house is as central and crucial a financial asset as a pig was for an Irish peasant family in the nineteenth century. The pig, as the old Irish saying goes, was “the man beside the fire.” It had the place of honor. The pig died, the family starved.

People are down. I meet young people every day who say they’ve simply given up watching the news. It’s all too depressing.

August 6

It took a gay Republican judge with libertarian leanings to issue from the bench, in a US District courthouse in San Francisco, one of the warmest testimonials to the married state since Erasmus. Last Wednesday Vaughan R. Walker struck down California’s ban on gay marriage, prompting ecstatic rejoicing among a mostly gay crowd outside the courthouse. His ruling was the first in the country to strike down a marriage ban on federal constitutional grounds.

A final judicial verdict is years away, because appeals will now wend their way slowly through the system until they reach the US Supreme Court, six of whose nine current members are Catholics.

Judge Walker marshals the testimony mustered by the plaintiffs, those challenging Prop 8, into a veritable thesaurus of the miracles wrought by the marriage ceremony. At the mere overture of “Wilt
thou take” it seems that anxieties about self-worth, the burdens of low self esteem, the shadows of social ostracism, dissipate in the warm glow of the marriage contract.

In fact the drive for gay marriage is against the trend of the times, which is the single state, or people increasingly united—depending on the state they live in—by some form of civil union for the purpose of benefits, pensions, health care, wills, inheritances and so forth. Across America, on the last Census, there were 100 million unmarried employees, consumers, taxpayers, and voters who headed up a majority of households in twenty-two states, more than 380 cities.

Gays are crowding to board a sinking ship. Married couples with kids, who filled about 90 percent of residences a century ago, now total about 20 percent. Nearly 30 percent of homes are inhabited by someone who lives alone—no doubt awaiting foreclosure.

August 18

I went to get my hair cut the other day in the town of Fortuna and waited ten minutes while the elderly barber finished buzz-cutting a young Mexican American. After the young man had exited under his thin skullcap of black stubble, Don the barber sighed and said, “That’s the third boy I’ve cut today who’s headed into the Marines. They all say the same thing. ‘There’s no work around here and I’ve got a family to support.’ When I tell them to hold off, they say the same thing: ‘Too late. I’ve signed up.’ ”

Millions are plummeting into total destitution, having reached the end of their ninety-nine weeks of unemployment benefits. Their only option then is the soup line at a church and getting on the waiting list for a homeless shelter.

The nearest big city north of me is Portland, Oregon, where the downtown area is filled with homeless people, napping on steps, bedding down on cardboard in doorways. Along the Willamette one can see colonies of the destitute all along the river bank, from the shipyards to Willamette Falls, sleeping under thin plastic and gray skies.

Frank Bardacke, who lives in the farm town of Watsonville, a
couple of hours south of San Francisco, recently described a bank robbery by one young, desperate immigrant:

Several months ago Jario took his father’s pickup truck, drove 20 miles to the upscale tourist playpen Carmel by the Sea, and walked into the local branch of the Bank of America. He waited in line to see a teller, and, when his turn came, he pretended to have a gun under his shirt and quietly demanded that the teller give him her cash. As she was passing out the money, he apologized for frightening her; meanwhile, she was hiding a GPS device among the bills.

He left the bank, his crime apparently unnoticed, and returned to the truck for the drive home. On the way, he got confused and took a wrong turn through Monterey before he got back on the right road home. Twenty police cars from four different police jurisdictions followed the GPS signal and stopped him 45 minutes after he left the bank. He immediately confessed, explaining that he needed the money to help his dad pay the family mortgage. When his case came to trial, the DA pressed for two years in State Prison. The judge decided that six months in the county jail and five years probation would be enough.

In Texas or anywhere in the South the fellow would probably have got twenty-five years. But in desperate times one can expect people to do desperate, stupid things, and this decent judge showed compassion and understanding.

We can probably expect more laid-off workers going postal. On August 3, at 7 a.m., Omar Thornton showed up for a disciplinary hearing at the Hartford Distributors, a Budweiser distribution warehouse in Manchester, Connecticut. Thornton had been caught on video pinching some beer. They asked him whether he wanted to be fired, or just quit. Thornton pulled out a handgun and killed seven fellow employees before shooting himself dead. Before he loosed off his last shot into his head, Thornton, a black man, called a friend on his cellphone and said he’d taken care of some racists who’d been giving him a hard time. Unemployment means fear and fear nourishes racism, all the more because we have a black President. Racism is drifting across America like mustard gas in the trenches of World War I.

And, final token of hard times, we have Bonnie and Clyde on the
run. In their latest guise the duo consists of John McCluskey and his cousin and fiancée, Casslyn Welch, who’s no Faye Dunaway. She threw some wire cutters over the fence of her man’s Arizona prison. Cops suspect them of killing a couple of retirees, then stealing their truck and heading north up to the Canadian line through Glacier National Park. That’s the last sanctuary in America of
Ursus horribilis
, the American grizzly.

Behind them the cops, ahead the bears. It could be the first movie of a new era.

August 29

If the attack on Iraq was a “war for oil,” it scarcely went well for the United States.

Run your eye down the list of contracts the Iraqi government awarded in June and December 2009. Prominent is Russia’s Lukoil, which, in partnership with Norway’s Statoil, won the rights to West Qurna Phase Two, a 12.9 billion-barrel supergiant oilfield. Other successful bidders for fixed-term contracts included Russia’s Gazprom and Malaysia’s Petronas. Only two US-based oil companies came away with contracts: ExxonMobil partnered with Royal Dutch Shell on a contract for West Qurna Phase One (8.7 billion barrels in reserves); and Occidental shares a contract in the Zubair field (4 billion barrels), in company with Italy’s ENI and South Korea’s Kogas. The huge Rumaila field (17 billion barrels) yielded a contract for BP and the China National Petroleum Company, and Royal Dutch Shell split the 12.6 billion-barrel Majnoon field with Petronas, 60–40.