“A new poll of Americans has found that though the nation remains wary over the prospect of becoming involved in another Middle Eastern war, the vast majority of US citizens strongly approve of sending Congress to Syria,” The Onion reported in its Sept. 5 issue.

“The New York Times/CBS News poll showed that though just 1 in 4 Americans believe that the United States has a responsibility to intervene in the Syrian conflict, more than 90 percent of the public is convinced that putting all 535 representatives of the United States Congress on the ground in Syria… is the best course of action at this time,” the satirical newspaper and website added.

In fact, the Obama Administration’s proposal to attack Syria to punish its ruler for attacking its own civilians with poison gas was a terrible farce. Thank God that idea seems to be fading. According to news reports, the Syrian government had moved its weaponry to residential neighborhoods, thus creating a human shield for its arsenal. As a result, the primary effect of air raids on Syria could well have been to kill hundreds, if not thousands, more civilians.

Fortunately President Obama on Monday announced that if there are adequate safeguards, he’s prepared to accept Russian President Vladimir Putin’s plan to head off a US attack: let the UN take possession of Syria’s chemical weapons and destroy them. The proposal, which has Syria’s blessing, comes only days before Congress was to vote on whether to approve an attack. That vote has now been postponed. To many people, Obama’s statements in preparation for the vote seemed downright disgraceful.

Former congressional candidate Norman Solomon of Inverness Park commented in the Sept. 8 Marin Independent Journal, “President Barack Obama is seeking authorization from Congress for use of military force against Syria, while asserting the right to ignore the decision by Congress if it doesn’t go his way.

“Blending tragedy and farce, this approach would destroy the meaning of congressional ‘authorization,’ turning Congress into an advisory body when it votes on whether the US government should launch a military attack on another country,” Solomon wrote.

“In matters of war and peace, the next step might be for the Executive Branch to provide all 535 members of Congress with juice, graham crackers and blankets for naptime….

Democrat Norman Solomon and his wife, Cheryl Higgins, campaigning in the 2012 Western Weekend parade.

“An American attack would also provide major help to ‘rebels,’ aligned with al-Qaeda and other Islamic extremists, who are as repressively cruel as the Assad regime they seek to overthrow. The chilling parallels with massive US aid to mujahedeen forces in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan during the 1980s should be hard to miss….

“It’s crucial that Congress vote against attacking Syria. But the problems with the president’s approach go far deeper than his scenario for war, awful as it is. Without enormous pushback, Obama will succeed in establishing a political precedent that is antithetical to the separation of powers and the consent of the governed.

“As with the president’s atrocious support for the now-exposed surveillance programs that have put the National Security Agency in a Big Brother role, our country’s basic constitutional principles are at stake.”

So what should the US do? In a letter to the editor printed in the Sept. 5 San Francisco Chronicle, Pete McCloskey proposed one reasonable response to Syria’s use of chemical weapons. A much-decorated Navy and Marine Corps veteran who served in Congress from 1967 to 1983, McCloskey wrote:

“Whatever might be the vote with respect to military action against Syria, it would be a good time for Congress to reassert its reliance on international law and the World Court’s jurisdiction to try national leaders for war crimes such as the use of poison gas….

“Declaring Bashar Assad a war criminal and suggesting that a tribunal be convened to try him might do as much to deter future use of poison gas by Assad as any ‘surgical’ military strike…. If deterrence of future use of poison gas is a primary goal of President Obama, it is entirely consistent with the goal that Assad know that he will one day face trial as a war criminal.”

Former Congressman Pete McCloskey at West Marin School in November 2011. Annoyed at the “new brand of Republicanism,” McCloskey in 2007 switched from Republican to Democrat.

If Assad loses his grip on Syria, it will, of course, be possible to put him on trial, so it’s worth remembering that the State Department for some time has predicted that his regime isn’t going to last too much longer. In July a year ago, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told reporters, “The sand is running out of the hour glass… [It] should be abundantly clear to those who support the Assad regime: the days are numbered.”

Assad’s government is a brutal one, the US government correctly declares, but that very brutality is the reason our government had a close working relationship with Syria until recently.

After 9/11, the CIA began a program of “extraordinary rendition” in order to use torture to interrogate foreigners we captured in the Middle East. Because it was unable to use “enhanced interrogation” techniques on US soil, the CIA began sending detainees to foreign countries. As The Washington Post reported last Feb. 5, the CIA often counted on foreign governments, “some of them quite nasty,” to do the torturing.

The Post quoted a 2005 New Yorker article that noted, “Syria was one of the ‘most common destinations for rendered suspects.’ [Syrian] government forces, according to [an Open Society Foundation] report, held some of the US-provided detainees in a prison known as ‘The Grave’ for its coffin-sized cells and subjected them to ‘torture involving a chair frame used to stretch the spine and beatings.'”

Interestingly, some of the other renditions were to Iran which, like Syria, is usually our adversary. So why did the two countries cooperate with the US? Syria and Iran, like the US, are enemies of al-Qaeda, The Washington Post explained, and it was a matter of the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Whether President Assad ordered a poison-gas attack on his own people was still being debated as recently as last weekend. Assad was claiming the rebels did the gassing. The German press said government forces may have carried out the attack without his authorization. And the Russian press claimed the West’s account of what happened “doesn’t make sense.”

Is Syrian President Bashar Assad getting the message?

I personally believe that Assad did order a poison-gas attack and, like McCloskey, think he should eventually be held accountable.

In the meantime, is there anything else to be done?

According to the poll of Americans quoted by The Onion, “91 percent of those surveyed agreed that the active use of sarin gas by the Syrian government would, if anything, only increase poll respondents’ desire to send Congress to Syria.”

The Onion quoted a “survey respondent and Iraq War veteran Maj. General John Mill” as saying that sending Congress or at least congressional leaders to Syria “is the correct course of action.” But the US needs to take action “sooner rather than later,” Mill added. “This war isn’t going to last forever.”

Ironically, an actual poll by the Associated Press found public opinion isn’t much different from the tongue-in-cheek poll reported in The Onion. “Only 1 in 5 Americans believe that failing to respond to chemical weapons attacks in Syria would embolden other rogue governments,” AP reported Monday. The wire service described these findings as “rejecting the heart of a weeks-long White House campaign for US military strikes.”

I found it fascinating that the results suggest Democrats are significantly more hawkish than Republicans, at least in this case. “The poll indicated that 53 percent of Democrats, 59 percent of independents, and 73 percent of Republicans believe Congress should vote against the plan to strike Syria,” AP reported.

“Overall, 61 percent of people surveyed said they wanted Congress to vote against authorizing military strikes in Syria.” This gets us back to The Onion’s poll: if members of Congress ignore public opinion and vote for an attack, send them all to Syria.

Tomales was founded in 1850, and almost a thousand people showed up Sunday for the town’s annual Founders’ Day celebration. It was a huge crowd for a town with only 200 or so year-round residents. Attracting all the visitors were both a parade and festivities in the town park.

This year the parade route was shortened to just one long block of the main street, Highway 1. The reduction allowed the Highway Patrol to reroute traffic onto Dillon Beach Road, Carrie Street, and Second Street instead of having to temporarily stop all vehicles on the highway.

Bystanders clapped as the US Coast Guard honor guard from the Two Rock Training Center marched past in the early going of the parade.

The middle of a long line of motorcycles that rumbled up the main street.

The Redwood Empire Harley Owners Group, affectionately known as HOGS, provided the riders. HOGS is based in Rohnert Park, and among its activities is raising money for Meals on Wheels.

A flowery float.

Hands Full Farm of Valley Ford is run by the truck’s driver, Anna Erickson, a fifth generation rancher. The farm has now gone “big time into eggs and lots of chickens,” she says but adds that she still finds time to make “jams and homemade goodies.” _______________________________________________________________

At the microphone.

From the balcony over Diekmann’s General Store, Bert Crews and Lena Furlong, both of Tomales, were the parade announcers. _______________________________________________________________

The Stair Builders float, a motorized mini go-cart, was entered by George R. Magan, whose business designs, constructs, delivers, and installs handcrafted staircases. The business, which previously operated in Petaluma, has moved into Tomales’ Cerini Garage building.

The Hubbub Club from Graton, Sonoma County, provided upbeat music and some lively dancing.

School spirit.

Tomales High cheerleaders sang out as they marched up the main street.

Dan’s Auto Repair of Tomales again this year entered a clown car that fell apart during the procession and had to be reassembled before continuing.

The Sam Brannan Chapter of E Clampus Vitus is an annual entry in the parade.

The Clampers, a fraternal organization dedicated to the study and preservation of Western heritage, has memorialized events in Tomales history. This Napa-based chapter has also contributed greatly to Tomales Community Park’s remodeling project.

District 3 Dairy Princess Francesa (Frankie) Gambonini (right) and first alternate Jessi Peterson are this year’s goodwill ambassadors for the North Bay dairy industry. They are riding in a 2008 Corvette driven by Bill Maestretti of Maestretti and Son Firewood.

Marshall sculptor Jason McLean drove a truck carrying his elaborate creation called “Got Art?” A skateboarder caught a ride by holding onto the rear.

Riding another McLean entry, which has appeared in a number of parades, is Shannon Hobbs.

A doodle, llama, and goat procession.

A 13-year-old llama named Crunch was led by Jeff Etemad of Tunnel Hill Ranch in Tomales. In front of Jeff, his son Cam led a golden doodle named Lucky. They were accompanied by Aidan Black. Following close behind the llama were the Barlas Boer Goats,  great for clearing brush, entered by Nancy Barlas of Petaluma.

Rancher Al Poncia of Tomales rides on a 1946 International truck driven by Gary Thornton of the Thornton Ranch. Al’s son Loren was the grand marshal of the parade.

A 1950 Farmall M.

The sexagenarian tractor, which was driven by Johnny Sanchez, pulled a trailer carrying seven Sanchez grandchildren, who ranged in age from 2 to 10. The Sanchez family ranch is located on Fallon Road northeast of town. ________________________________________________________________

A prophet (Beth Koelker of Tomales) carried a “visual alert” that “The End Is Near,” the end of the parade, that is.

________________________________________________________________

After the parade, most of the crowd repaired to Tomales Community Park where booths sold food, drinks, crafts, and more throughout the afternoon.

Seven women sold tamales to raise funds for the Reading Book Club of Tomales. The private group is comprised of people who enjoy reading books published in Spanish.

Standing at center (from left) are booster club board members Debbie Becera, John Azevedo, and Missy Calvi.

Tomales Booster Club sold t-shirts and sweatshirts to raise money for Tomales High sports. The group, which just put in a new scoreboard at the football field, also raises funds for scholarships and puts on sports banquets.

Festivities in Tomales are always grand fun, and the only serious problem I noticed Sunday was that the park’s two restrooms were about to run out of T.P. Unable to find any park personnel to restock the lavatories, I walked a block to the general store and bought a four-roll package. I then asked the first two people waiting in line for a door to open to each take a couple of rolls in with them. Both were more than pleased to do so.

“Well, I’ve done my good deed for today,” I told a friend from Marshall afterward. “So everything came out all right in the end,” the older man quipped.

It’s been a particularly good week to live in Marin, where the news was mostly positive, rather than in certain other parts of California, where the news too often was grim. Consider the following:

1. On Thursday, a 36-year-man, who had been teaching at O.B. Whaley Elementary School in San Jose, was found guilty on five counts of lewd and lascivious behavior with five second-grade girls between 2010 and 2012. The victims, who were 7 to 8 years old, testified teacher Craig Chandler had taken them to a locked room during recess, blindfolded them, and then made them perform oral sex on him. Chandler now faces 75 years to life in prison.

2. On Friday, a 33-year-old Catholic priest from Sacramento, the Rev. Uriel Ojeda, was sentenced to eight years in prison for molesting a 13-year-old girl while he was an overnight guest in her parents’ house.

3. Also on Friday, Los Angeles Police arrested Scott Hounsell, who until June 15 was the executive director of the Los Angeles County Republican Party. Hounsell is charged with sexting a 16-year-old girl. Ironically, the GOP leader in May had publicly snickered, “is it just me, or does every Weiner headline for the NY Mayor’s race seem like an intentional dirty pun?” (At least none of the females Democratic candidate Anthony Weiner has been sexting is underage.)

Tragic underestimate. (AP Photo/The Bakersfield Californian, by Autumn Parry)

4. At 6 a.m. Saturday, the demolition of an old PG&E power plant in Bakersfield sent shards of metal flying more than 1,000 feet. The shrapnel cut off a 43-year-old Bakersfield man’s leg and caused major injuries to his other leg. Another two people, who suffered lesser injuries, as well as two cars were likewise struck in a Lowe’s parking lot. The 1,000-foot safety zone was too small for blowing up a steel structure, an outside demolition expert later told The Bakersfield Californian. “Cleveland Wrecking Co. of Covina was the prime contractor,” the newspaper reported. “Subcontractor Alpha Demolition hired Demtech Inc. to take down the structures.”

5. At 8 p.m. Saturday, a 38-year-old motorist drove down the paved boardwalk at Venice Beach at high speed and deliberately struck 17 people (click here for video). A 32-year-old Italian tourist on her honeymoon died while 16 other people received injuries ranging from minor to major. The driver, Nathan Campbell, drove off but turned himself in to Santa Monica police two hours later. His motive remains unknown.

6. On Monday, a 30-year-old sheriff’s deputy from Orange County will be arraigned for allegedly pepper spraying a 19 year old’s pizza after another officer stopped the teen for a traffic violation. “[Deputy Juan] Tavera is accused of spotting a pizza on the back seat of the victim’s car and then pepper spraying it without the teen noticing,” The Los Angeles Times reported. “Later at home, the victim shared the pizza with four friends, leading all five to experience physical discomfort.” The incident occurred last September, and the sheriff’s office spent the last 10 months investigating the alleged assault.

Gayer news. These two headlines ran on successive pages in Tuesday’s San Francisco Chronicle, on the last page of the B section and on the first page of the C section. Was it the “rose-colored view” provided by local dykes that got Marin County Republicans to support marriage equality?

San Francisco standup comic Marilyn Pittman, who performs a risque show called “Ask a Lesbian” (click here for video), visited Mitchell cabin in June, treating Lynn and me, as well as our friends, to a sampling of her brash humor.

In some sketches, Marilyn describes herself as a “dyke,” so I sent her a copy of these headlines. Unfortunately, the “Dykes” refers to Sonny Dykes, the new head football coach at UC Berkeley.

All the same, it was a very good week for the struggle against homophobia. From the GOP in Marin County, to Vatican City, to California’s Central Valley farmlands, tolerance of differing sexual orientations is growing.

While being interviewed by the press a week ago, Pope Francis remarked, “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” Later that day, The Bakersfield Californian did a spot check of Catholics leaving mass at St. Francis of Assisi near the city and found the people it interviewed overwhelming in agreement with the pope.

“God created us as equals, and as Catholics we believe in welcoming anyone into our church, so it’s excellent to hear that he wasn’t afraid to say it verbally for the whole world to hear,” said one of the people interviewed, Lupe Galindo, 66.

So that’s a roundup of California new, good, bad, and off color, during the past week. In closing I’ll return to the aforementioned comic, Marilyn Pittman, because a couple of her sketches remind me of the old limerick: “A gay in a bar in Khartoum/ Asked a lesbian up to his room./ But they argued all night/ Over who had the right/ To do what/ And with which/ And to whom.”

During the 27 years I edited and published The Point Reyes Light, I belonged to a variety of newspaper associations, among them: the San Francisco Press Club; the California Newspaper Publishers Association (CNPA); the National Newspaper Association (NNA); and the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors (ISWNE).

Since retiring at the end of 2005, however, the only membership I’ve maintained is in ISWNE. The society’s purpose, to quote our website, “is to help those involved in the weekly press to improve standards of editorial writing and news reporting and to encourage strong, independent editorial voices.”

Moreover, the society really is international notwithstanding its being based in the American heartland at Missouri Southern State University in Joplin. Three or four years ago, ISWNE listed the locations of its members’ newspapers, and I was surprised to see there were more in Alberta than California.

ISWNE’s annual conferences are often held abroad: Calgary, Alberta, 1994; London, Edinburgh, Cardiff & Dublin, 1995; Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1999; Victoria, British Columbia, 2000; Galway, Ireland, 2003; Edmonton & Fort McMurray, Alberta, 2005; Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, 2009; Coventry, England, 2011. In 2016, the group will head to Australia.

Postings from this blog are occasionally republished in the ISWNE newsletter.

Whether they’re in the US or abroad, most ISWNE members edit community weeklies. One of the more active members, who happens to be particularly savvy about community newspapers in the UK, is Jeremy Condliffe, who edits The Congleton Chronicle in Congleton, Cheshire, England. Perhaps these international editors merely have small-town common sense, but their comments in ISWNE’s publications and on its email hotline reflect a world of wisdom.

Why am I telling you all this? As a member of ISWNE, I receive its quarterly journal, Grassroots Editor, plus its monthly newsletter (above). I also read the bimonthly Columbia Journalism Review (below), which is published at Columbia University in New York City. The difference between New York’s and Joplin’s assessments of the state of newspapers is fascinating.

The July-August issue of CJR contains a review of The Wired City: Reimagining Journalism and Civic Life in the Post-Newspaper Age.

The author, Dan Kennedy, an assistant professor of journalism at Northeastern University, apparently imagines a day when nonprofit websites will replace many newspapers.

Post-Newspaper Age? The impression that newspapers in general are fading away has gained credence mostly from being so oft repeated.

It’s true that several well-known newspapers such as The Honolulu Advertiser and The Rocky Mountain News have folded in the last few years. Several big city dailies such as the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the Detroit News, and the Detroit Free Press have cut back to three days a week. The Christian Science Monitor has had to drop its print edition and publish only online. We’ve all heard the story. It’s been discussed on CBS’s 60 Minutes.

In contrast, the spring issue of Grassroots Editor headlines a spot-check of far-flung weeklies, “Despite predictions of their pending demise, community newspapers are alive and well in: Montana, Bahamas, California, Ireland, Missouri, North Dakota, Atlantic Canada.”

In that issue, the editor of The Winters Express in Yolo County, Debra DeAngelo, commented on a conversation she’d had with CNPA’s director of affiliate relations, Joe Wirt.

“He explained that he’s visiting small Northern California newspapers to see what it’s really like in our world rather than assuming that we’re all in a rush to ditch print publication for online formats and iPhone apps.

“Apparently, the good folks at CNPA noticed that, wait a minute, not every small paper is dying a slow, choking death. Many are surviving, just as they are, despite years of economic stagnation and the explosion of online technology….

“People still want to read the city council stories on paper rather than watch them on cable, likely because waiting a week for the story is less painful than sitting through a meeting.”

Steve Andrist, executive director of the North Dakota Newspaper Association, put it more bluntly: “Those people who say newspapers are dead or irrelevant or dinosaurs — they’re still reading newspapers.” Nor is optimism about the future of newspapers unique to supposedly old-fashioned editors at county weeklies.

Warren Buffett, chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. holding company, is similarly optimistic about the future of bigger newspapers. And Buffett has amassed a personal fortune of $54 billion by knowing when a good business is undervalued.

In the past 19 months, Berkshire Hathaway has spent $344 million acquiring 28 daily newspapers. The company has stressed it doesn’t intend to “flip” (resell) any of these papers but instead plans to be their long-term owner.

In 2011, Buffett (left) was ranked the third richest man in the world. In 2008, he was the richest. He has repeatedly said the US under-taxes the rich and endorsed President Obama’s reelection.

It’s worth noting that Buffett does not interfere with his newspapers’ editorial policies. In a letter to shareholders, he wrote, “I voted for Obama; of our 12 dailies that endorsed a presidential candidate, 10 opted for Romney.”

Buffett also told shareholders why newspapers can survive regardless of widespread lamentations about their future:

“Newspapers continue to reign supreme,” he wrote, “in the delivery of local news. If you want to know what’s going on in your town, whether the news is about the mayor or taxes or high school football, there is no substitute for a local newspaper that is doing its job.

“A reader’s eyes may glaze over after they take in a couple of paragraphs about Canadian tariffs or political developments in Pakistan; a story about the reader himself or his neighbors will be read to the end. Wherever there is a pervasive sense of community, a paper that serves the special informational needs of that community will remain indispensable to a significant portion of its residents.”

Buffett doesn’t dispute the need for daily papers to include national and international news but makes explicit that what sells newspapers is good coverage of local news.

That’s just what the weekly press has been doing all along, informing readers about events in their own community. This, in turn, is why weekly newspapers aren’t about to die off.

As usual, Buffett knows what he’s talking about. The last I heard, there were fewer than 5,000 households in West Marin; nonetheless, two competing weeklies, The Point Reyes Light and The West Marin Citizen, are able to survive here thanks to their both providing intense coverage of local news.

How a sewer district came to run a park is one of those idiosyncratic West Marin stories.

Tomales Community Services District was created in 1998 to take over the town’s sewer system from North Marin Water District. At the time, Tomales already had a park, which had opened in 1982. However, after state government inspected the park’s playground equipment and found it unsafe, the district with grants and volunteer labor by townspeople took on making ambitious improvements, including, appropriately, creating the town’s first public restrooms.

Development and maintenance of the park continue to be financed by a variety of grants and fundraisers, with one of the fundraisers held this past Sunday: the third annual Party in the Park.

Giving particular importance to the fundraiser was the Dean Witter Foundation of San Francisco, which had agreed to match dollar for dollar all the money raised up to $10,000.

Having fun selling Tomales Community Park wine glasses, as well as tickets for oysters and drinks.

Among the musical groups entertaining the crowd was the Gary Foster Trio from Sebastopol. Foster (center) also happens to be the organist for Tomales Presbyterian Church. He delighted the crowd by singing rhythm and blues such as What’d I Say, rock ‘n’ roll such as Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On, and country music such as Route 66. But what dazzled many of us was his unexpectedly breaking out of this repertoire to sing a bit of grand opera, giving a masterful performance of La donna è mobile from Verdi’s Rigoletto.

Hoop dancing to most of the music (except Verdi’s) were young people led by Lilea Duran (center in red and black). Lilea teaches adult classes and performs throughout the Bay Area with her company Sunglow Hoop Dance. She also takes part in Vegetable Circus whose mission is to get kids excited about eating their vegetables and staying active in fun, creative ways. Working with schools, youth groups, and other community organizations, Vegetable Circus teaches the kids circus arts like hula hooping. Photo by Lynn Axelrod

Tomales Regional History Center raised funds by selling raffle tickets for a quilt. Alex Mitchell (center), president of the center’s board of directors, is seen here manning the ticket booth.

Sounding like he was auctioning livestock, Sam Dolcini with help from Deborah Parrish raised money by auctioning such prizes as two nights at Donna and Marc Clavaud’s Marinette Cottage in Tomales and a day at Dillon Beach for 20 people.

Among the prizes auctioned was this oil painting by Kathryn LeMieux of a cottage in the Tomales Bay hamlet of Hamlet. During the days of the North Pacific Coast narrow-gauge railway line (1875-1930), Hamlet was a whistlestop with its own post office, restaurant, oyster beds, and cannery. Notwithstanding the rail line’s closing, the homes, oyster beds, and restaurant remained in use.

Sadly, the historic village was acquired by the National Park Service in 1987, thus preventing any commercial or residential use of Hamlet’s buildings. Unoccupied, they were easy prey for burglars who stole furnishings. Hamlet had always been in the line of storms on the bay, and the Park Service made no effort to maintain the old buildings. Some collapsed, and in 2003, the Park Service took a bulldozer to those that remained.

Another prize Dolcini auctioned was this model of a Victorian home, which Barbara Taddei of Tomales created over four years working off and on. Liz Miller of Dillon Beach made the winning bid of $350. Photo by Lynn Axelrod

Tomales Volunteer Fire Department used the party as an occasion to recruit new members. The firefighters reminded me they will hold their own fundraiser, a “country breakfast” from 7:30 a.m. to noon Sunday, July 21, at Tomales Town Hall.

At a popular booth selling books, my partner Lynn found a book she’d always wanted to read, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara Tuchman. The author is perhaps best known for The Guns of August, a history of the beginning of World War I.

And what festival in West Marin would be complete without face painting? Youngsters chose designs that ranged from cats to ghosts to super heroes. For some kids, getting their face painted was a highlight of the jovial afternoon.

By my lights, Tomales with a population of only 200 has a disproportionate amount of fun. The community services district website observes, “Tomales is the town that West Marin forgot, and we like it that way. A few times a year the park comes alive with activity, but most of the time the pace is pleasantly slow, the dogs friendly, and good food close at hand.”

Remember the New Age movement? In the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, it was a whole subculture “drawing on both Eastern and Western spiritual and metaphysical traditions and infusing them with influences from self-help and motivational psychology, holistic health, parapsychology [clairvoyance], consciousness research and quantum physics.”

Or so Nevill Drury effusively wrote in The New Age: Searching for the Spiritual Self, Thames and Hudson publishers, London, 2004.

Well, the paradigm has apparently shifted, as Lynn and I discovered Wednesday while driving through the San Geronimo Valley.

Sir Francis Drake Boulevard in Lagunitas.

In front of a sign threatening $1,000 fines for littering the roadside, someone had dumped a large pile of rubbish. The contempt for the county sign was so blatant I assumed the culprit was some anti-social moron, and we stopped so I could snap a few photos.

Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View in a discarded basket leans over Writing Spiritual Books in a nearby trash bag.

When Lynn and I then took a look at what was in the refuse heap, we were startled by what we saw. Along with bedding, a table lamp, women’s clothes, and cosmetic bottles, there were numerous New Age books.

Among the books in one cardboard box were New Age Tarot: Guide to the Throth Deck and a volume about “Universal Peace… Within and Without.”

Lying on the ground was Freud and Man’s Soul by Bruno Bettelheim, “the author of The Uses of Enchantment.” The latter book, by the way, argues that children’s fairy tales help us understand the meaning of life.

In short, we had found an amazing trove of enlightenment or psychobabble, depending on your paradigm. But in either case, how in the world could someone who’d read all these “touchy-feely” tracts feel right about dumping them beside a public road?

The closest I personally ever came to the New Age movement was to buy a few Windam Hill records by pianist George Winston, guitarist William Ackerman, and others back in the 1970s.

Ackerman, who once owned the record label, hated the fact its music was frequently described as New Age, which to him meant wimpy. Before becoming a record label executive, Ackerman had dropped out of Stanford to work as a carpenter, and to emphasize he was no wimp, he one day growled to an interviewer, “I’d like to find the guy that coined the phrase New Age and punch him in the nose.” Or words to that effect.

I’m more pacific. I’d merely like to see the New Age apostate who dumped the trash beside the road caught and fined $1,000. But is there any chance of that happening? Actually it just might if we are to believe county government. At the bottom of the “$1,000 Fine for Littering” sign are two small, yellow stickers warning that the site is under video surveillance.

I’m now waiting to see whether the surveillance videos are produced with scientific technology or with New Age parapsychology. The problem with clairvoyance, of course, is that it doesn’t hold up in court.

We humans sometimes don’t know what we’re seeing and often don’t know what we’re hearing and saying.

Abandoned by its mother.

A couple of weeks ago, this bird’s egg suddenly appeared on the railing outside the dining-room window at Mitchell cabin. Although Lynn was sitting at the dining-room table, she didn’t see the bird that laid it, but the egg couldn’t have been on the railing very long. The day was windy, and shortly after I snapped this picture, the egg was blown off the railing and broke.

I later showed this photo to Dave DeSante, president of the Institute for Bird Populations in Point Reyes Station, but he couldn’t identify it. “Too many birds have white eggs like that,” he said.

Nor would he hazard a guess as to what the egg had been doing on my railing. My own SWAG (military parlance for “scientific wild-ass guess”) is that some bird went into labor before she could make it back to her nest.

Another mystery: Why is the National Rifle Association, which is dominated by southern white men, now fighting against federal gun-control legislation.

People need to be armed, they claim, to protect themselves from not only criminals but also from oppressive government.

The NRA seems to forget that in the 1960s, it helped draft some of the early gun-control laws. What has changed?

During the Civil Rights Movement, armed Black Panthers began patrolling the streets of various cities to protect blacks, sometimes from abuse by police.

On May 2, 1967, when Ronald Reagan was governor of California, he chanced upon a group of armed Black Panthers at the state capitol. Reagan became so frightened that he took off running and despite his political conservatism immediately began advocating gun-control legislation and garnered support from the NRA.

It sounds to me as if the way to get gun-control legislation passed is to bring back the Black Panthers.

Here’s an expression we hear all the time, but few people know its origin: “Leave no stone unturned.”

The expression, according to the Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, “goes back to a battle between forces led by the Persian general Mardonius and the Theban general Polycrates in 477 BC.

“The Persian was supposed to have hidden a great treasure under his tent, but after he was defeated, the victorious Polycrates couldn’t find the valuables. So he put the question to the oracle at Delphi (above left) and was told to return and leave no stone unturned. He did — and found the treasure.”

A “girl” in the Middle Ages: is the child really male or a female? Hard to tell. And, no, the kid’s not a hermaphrodite.

As the Morris Dictionary explains: “It seems hard to believe that in the Middle Ages [the 5th to the 15 century] a girl could be a young child of either sex.

“Indeed, such phrases as knave girl to designate a boy child were common. In Middle English the word had various spellings: gerle, girle, and gurle.”

By the way, there is no such thing as a true hemaphrodite, according to the Intersex Society of North America.

That would require a person to be both fully male and fully female. At most, some people are born with, or develop at puberty, ambiguous genitalia. Other people may look female on the outside but have typical male anatomy on the inside (or vice versa), but that doesn’t mean they are of both sexes, the Society says. Indeed, it adds, one percent of all human “bodies differ from standard male or female.”

We’ll close with a one last surprise from the Morris Dictionary. The term “filibuster was originally a Dutch term and had nothing to do with government. Indeed, it originally meant ‘freebooting,’ i.e, private citizens’ engaging in warfare against a state with whom their country was at peace, usually for personal gain.

“The Dutch word vribuiter literally meant ‘freebooter or pirate.’ And its derivative filibuster was first used in this country during the 1850s to describe adventurers who were running guns to revolutionists in Cuba and other Central and South American countries.

“However, the term filibustering has become so completely identified with delaying tactics in the Senate that the word is not used for gun-running or piracy anymore.

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) filibusters for eight hours to block a vote on an Obama tax bill in 2010.

“The first use of filibuster to describe obstruction of legislation by invoking parliamentary delays and resorting to prolonged speechmaking appeared in 1853, when one member of Congress sharply criticized the tactics of his rivals as ‘filibustering against the United States.'”

So the next time some Senator resorts to a filibuster to forestall a vote, just remind yourself that he/she is tacitly behaving like a 19th century gunrunner.

When a Guatemalan court on May 10 found former Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity while head of state, I like many indigenous Guatemalans was pleased. Officials in that Central American country had for decades committed atrocities with impunity.

The case has special interest for me because my stepdaughters are from Guatemala and because 30 years ago I reported on and photographed some of the Guatemalan civil war for the old San Francisco Examiner.

General Efraín Ríos Montt, who became president of Guatemala in a March 1982 coup, was kicked out of office in an August 1983 coup. (AP photo by Moises Castillo)

Unfortunately, the good news was not to last. Impunity again raised its ugly head. On Monday, the Guatemalan Constitutional Court overturned the conviction because of a dispute over which lower court judges should have heard the case. Now the trial will have to return to where it stood on April 19, once the dispute over the judges is resolved.

General Rí­os Montt had been clearly elected president in 1974, but blatant election fraud prevented him from taking office. Quixotically, he then fled to California and joined the Eureka-based Gospel Outreach fundamentalist movement.

After returning to Guatemala, Rí­os Montt, along with two other military men seized power in a mostly bloodless coup in 1982 and formed a three-man junta. Less than three months after the coup, however, Ríi­os Mott dissolved the junta and became dictator.

Helping orchestrate the coup, according to the US liberal group Democratic Underground, were “gringo evangelical cronies [who were] co-founders of the Church of the Word, a Guatemala-based offshoot of Gospel Outreach.”

(Gringo, by the way, is slang but not derogatory. In Spain, the word has been around for more than two centuries. Initially, it was simply a way of referring to people from other places whose speech was difficult to understand. Gringo, in fact, is a variant of griego meaning “Greek,” as in it’s Greek to me.)

Estancia de la Virgen. A refugee stands in front of his former home, which was destroyed by the Guatemalan Army on March 31, 1982.

Well before Rí­os Montt took power, the army had begun massacring indigenous villagers lest leftist guerrillas get food or recruits from them. A story I wrote for The Examiner made public for the first time that Guatemalan soldiers had massacred 180 residents of two Indian villages, Trinitaria and El Quetzal, near the Mexican border in February 1982.

In the destruction of Estancia de la Virgen, which occurred after Ríos Montt had taken power, the army ordered all the villagers to relocate to the less-remote village of San Antonio las Trojes where it could keep an eye on them.

Soldiers use the belfry of the San Antonio las Trojes cathedral as a guard tower.

The army had attacked the village of 1,800 previously, killing many residents including children who were beheaded with machetes. This time all but eight men fled, and soldiers shot them to death.

“The men had stayed in their houses, believing God would protect them,” a guide named Miguel told me. There was no road to Estancia de la Virgen, and getting there required hiring three refugees from the village to guide my translator and me through the steep terrain.

A soldier in San Antonio las Trojes assembles men from Estancia de la Virgen in order to count them and give out instructions. Barely visible at upper left is a nun who had shown up to distribute food to the refugees.

The refugees from Estancia de la Virgen were bewildered as to why their village had been destroyed. “We are all farmers,” one Indian said. “There are no guerrillas.”

Another said, “We hope this shadow will go from our village because we are innocent.”

A mother and daughter from Estancia de la Virgen in one of the tents distributed to refugees.

After taking a photo of this mother and daughter, I bought a dozen eggs for them at a tienda in San Antonio las Trojes, but when I went to deliver them, she cried out and ran away, apparently not realizing why I had returned.

Nor were refugees from Estancia de la Virgen the only survivors of massacres I interviewed. On April 26, 1982, I traveled to the village of Chipiacul where Guatemalan soldiers had killed 20 residents the previous night. The victims had ranged in age from 13 to 80.

Many of them were shot to death in the village’s small, cement-block meeting hall. The soldiers then used the books from the village’s one-shelf library to build a funeral pyre in an unsuccessful attempt to dispose of the bodies. The survivors I talked with were still in shock and were mystified as to why Chipiacul had been targeted.

The Guatemalan civil war was fought off and on from 1960 to 1996 and cost roughly 200,000 lives, most of them civilian. What was the fighting all about?

After decades of repressive governments, Guatemala enjoyed its “Ten Years of Spring” from 1944 to 1954 under liberal leadership. But agrarian reforms in the early 1950s outraged the United Fruit Company, and it prevailed upon the Eisenhower Administration to intervene. The result was a June 1954 military coup carried out by a group of CIA-trained Guatemalan exiles and billed as stopping Communism from establishing a beachhead in Central America.

Guatemala has never fully recovered. Indeed, at the very time the Guatemalan army under General Rí­os Montt was massacring more than 1,700 Ixil Mayans, the White House endorsed him. “President Rí­os Montt is a man of great personal integrity and commitment,” said President Reagan in December 1982. “I know he wants to improve the quality of life for all Guatemalans and to promote social justice.”

Were he alive today, I’m sure Ronald Reagan would be pleased that Rí­os Montt for the moment at least is still enjoying impunity.

Scene of fatal accident on the Rohnert Park Expressway. (Photo by Alvin Jornada, courtesy of the Santa Rosa Press Democrat)

My buddy Terry Gray, 54, of Inverness Park was struck by a car around 5:20 p.m. Friday in Rohnert Park. There was no crosswalk in the area, and my friend apparently stepped off the center median into the path of the Ford Escape at left.

He died instantly, police told his brother Mike McIsaac, and the woman driving the car immediately stopped. The accident closed the road for four hours.

Terry’s sister Debra had driven Terry and his granddaughter Tanisha to Rohnert Park to see a movie. Tanisha was already in the theater when the accident occurred and neither saw it happen.

From left: Linda Sturdivant, Terry, Lynn Axelrod, and me at Tony’s Seafood in Marshall, his favorite restaurant.

Terry and his companion Linda Sturdivant had lived together for almost 17 years, and as soon as she got the awful news, she called me sobbing: “Terry’s dead!” Lynn and I immediately rushed to their home.

Terry had helped Lynn and me with innumerable home-maintenance projects, and we enjoyed each other’s company. He had worked for various building contractors most of his adult life, and Lynn and I were always pleased with his workmanship.

We, of course, paid him something, but he inevitably tried to give back all or part of the money, saying he was just helping his close friends.

A perfectionist, Terry twice replaced shingles and fascia boards on the eaves of Mitchell cabin: first on the back side, then on the front side.

Terry was born in Costa Mesa, Orange County, and when his parents divorced, his mother Luella, née Nichols, brought Terry and his sister Debra Gray to West Marin, where she married Don McIsaac Jr. Don was a Marin County firefighter for awhile, and the family lived at the firehouse in Tomales.

Out of their marriage came two more children, Buddy McIsaac of Santa Rosa and Mike McIsaac of Inverness Park. All the children grew up together. On Friday evening, Mike told me their family had made no distinction between half and full brothers: “I can’t remember a time when Terry wasn’t there.”

He was often too shy to speak up in public, but when Don McIsaac died last year, Terry gathered his courage and spoke at the memorial service. Afterward, he prided himself at having found the strength to talk to the crowd about how much Don had meant to him.

Terry was basically a gentle soul with a wonderful sense of humor. Despite standing 6-feet, 3-inches tall and weighing more than 200 pounds, Terry was never a fighter even when he’d had a few beers and was confronted by a belligerent jerk. Although physically strong in part because of his work, Terry preferred to just walk away.

Terry (center), Lynn, and me in the home where he and Linda Sturdivant lived together.

Not long ago he told me of a time when he was a student at Tomales High and a bully slugged him in a classroom. Rather than intervening, he said, the teacher told the boys to “take it outside.” Terry protested that he didn’t want to fight, but the teacher sent the boys outside anyway. Although he was a big kid, Terry was knocked down, punched and kicked.

“All I did was cover my head,” he told me. Afterward, adults told him he should have fought back, and the bully was never punished, Terry said.

One of the highlights of Terry’s recent life was going skydiving in Sonoma County two years ago. He took his daughters Laura Gray and Diana Baltzley along, and they jumped too. Until he and his instructor jumped from the airplane, he was terrified, Terry said, but once they were in the air and falling, he was thrilled. He talked about the experience for months.

Terry is survived by: his companion Linda Sturdivant, his sister Debra Gray of Point Reyes Station, his brother Mike McIsaac of Inverness Park, his brother Buddy McIsaac of Santa Rosa, his daughter Laura Gray of Reno, and his daughter Diana Baltzley of San Jose.

His grandchildren are: Tanisha Coleman of Santa Rosa, Isaac and Jayson of Reno, Niriah and Kia of San Leandro, Breyonna and Peyton of Eureka.

Also surviving him are Haley and Summer Cherms of Oroville; the sisters are granddaughters of Linda Sturdivant, and Terry considered them his granddaughters too.

All of us who knew Terry are stunned by his death. A memorial service will be held, but it has not yet been scheduled.

Ever since the April 15 explosion of two bombs at the end of the Boston Marathon, Lynn and I have found ourselves continually reading and watching the news. I’ve even awakened in the middle of the night to check the latest developments. And like the crowd in Watertown, Massachusetts, I rejoiced when the second suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was apprehended there Friday evening.

Dzhokhar’s brother Tamerlan, the supposed mastermind of the terrorist plot, died following a gunfight with police early that day. The cause of his death, however, is still uncertain. Was it the result of a gunshot or gunshots? Was he fatally wounded by a blast from one of the explosives the pair were throwing at police? Or did Dzhokhar fatally injure his older brother by driving over him while trying to escape?

Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 19 and 26, among the spectators at the footrace as they waited to set off their bombs.

Nor were the three people killed and more than 250 people injured in the bombing the brothers’ only victims. In trying to flee the area, the brothers fatally shot a Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer and shot a Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority policeman, leaving him critically wounded.

Much has been said in the news media about the brothers being ethnic Chechens. However, the two were brought up in the United States. Dzhokar is a US citizen. Russia, as it turned out, had in 2011 asked the FBI to investigate Tamerlan before letting him into the country, but the bureau turned up nothing incriminating at that time.

Getting even more attention in the news media is the fact that the Tsarnaev family is Muslim. An uncle, as well as people who knew the brothers and their mother, have reported Tamerlan and his mother during the past three to five years had pushed each other into becoming Islamic fundamentalists.

The mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, initiated the conversion, she has said, out of concern that Tamerlan was smoking pot, drinking, and partying. He, in turn, began pressing her to adopt an ultra-conservative form of Islamic fundamentalism. In an interview with London’s Daily Telegraph, the mother said, “Tamerlan said to me, ‘You know mama, you are pushing me toward the truth, but I would like you to wear a hijab. A woman in Islam should be concealed.'”

“After that, relatives from Russia, communicating by Skype, were shocked to see her wearing a veil,” The Daily Telegraph reported. She also “started to refuse to see boys who had gone through puberty, as she had consulted a religious figure and he had told her it was sacrilegious,” writer Alyssa Lindley Kilzer reported in The Daily Beast.

As it happened the writer had been receiving facial treatments from Zubeidat, but she had stopped after the mother evolved into a religious zealot. Zubeidat had begun claiming the 9/11 attack was actually the work of the US government to make Muslims look bad, Kilzer wrote. Her sons knew all about this from the Internet, the mother had said.

How does all this reflect on Islam? First, members of Tamerlan’s mosque described him as a disruptive zealot with an anger problem, so he certainly didn’t fit in the mainstream.

Second, his fanaticism doesn’t sound any different from that of Christian fanatics who attack abortion clinics and staff. In the past 20 years, eight abortion-clinic staff have been murdered; there have been attempts to murder 17 others; there have also been 153 physical attacks on staffers; and there have been three kidnappings. Yet no one claims that all this violence reflects badly on Christianity.

Less than a day after crowds in Watertown, Massachusetts, cheered law enforcement personnel who captured Dzohkar Tsarnaev, another crowd was running for cover after a man, a woman, a boy, and a dog were wounded by gunshots during a marijuana festival in Denver.

And how did the shootings reflect on Colorado’s recent legalization of recreational pot? Despite conservative attempts to make political hay from the crime, no link exists. It now turns out the shots were fired during a fight between rival gang members.

Nor was Saturday’s incident an indication that a marijuana celebration is more likely to experience gang violence than other public events. As The Denver Post later reported, “It was the second time in less than a year that gang gunfire pierced a large gathering. Denver police Officer Celena Hollis was killed last summer when Rollin Oliver, apparently fleeing a group of Crips, opened fire in a crowded jazz concert at City Park.”

The crime scene in Federal Way, a city of 90,000 people between Seattle and Tacoma.

Nor were those the last of the multiple shootings. The following day, Sunday, a man in the city of Federal Way, Dennis Clark, 23, became angry with his girlfriend and shot her to death at their apartment complex. When he was confronted by two men in a parking lot, he killed them too along with a third man. Police fatally shot Clark while he was attempting to shoot witnesses.

Then came Monday’s news from Canada where police arrested two men who allegedly planned to bomb a passenger train line between Toronto and the US.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the American CIA had worked together for a year to foil the terrorist plot. Canada’s Global Post reported, “Police said that the two men arrested, Chiheb Esseghaier, 30, and Raed Jaser, 35, were receiving support from ‘al Qaeda elements in Iran.'”

But don’t make too much of the Iran connection either. Al Qaeda is a Sunni terrorist group and has not been linked to the government of Iran, most of whose citizens belong to the rival Shiite sect of Islam.

The crime scene in Belgorod, southwestern Russia.

Also on Monday, a man in the Russian city of Belgorod randomly opened fire at people on the street and in a store, apparently outraged that his car had been scratched. Six people died, including a 14-year-old girl. The man, who is approximately 30 years old, fled in his scratched car, which he later abandoned.

“The attack comes some six months after a Moscow lawyer shot dead six people in the Russian capital in what was believed to have been his violent response to the end of a romance,” the Russian press reported.

The crime scene in the Serbian village of Velika Ivanca, which consists of only 12 houses. The village is 25 miles from Belgrade, the capital.

The use of guns and explosives to commit random violence is obviously a worldwide problem. In the early hours of April 9, a former soldier, Ljubisa Bogdanovic, went on a killing spree in Velika Ivanca, shooting to death 13 people, including members of his own family, and critically wounding two others plus himself. He has now died.

Bogdanovic, 60, was a veteran of Serbia’s war in Croatia 20 years ago, and some Serbs have suggested he suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The Serbian cabinet is now reviewing the tragedy, and officials have said the shootings show that the government must pay more attention to gun control.

In the midst of all this, the US Senate voted not to require background checks for those purchasing guns. One can only wish US lawmakers were as enlightened as officials in Serbia, who last week even managed to normalize relations with their long-standing nemesis Kosovo.

Looking for a respite from a week of violent news, Lynn and our resident raccoon turned their attention to the comics.