Campaign for Public Alternatives - with Che and Deacon Dan in October Country

People come to the country to get out of the city then hang out 24/7 in town. That's the story of Che and Deacon Dan. You couldn't get them off the streets of Emerald City, except when they went up to Taft to run some scam door to door. I mean hustle. No, how about campaign. That's a really good word. Che prefers it to all others now to describe the pair' activities: the Campaign for Public Alternatives.
Take Transportation, privatized to death in a car culture. The pair kept a 93 supercharger Volvo monstrosity, luxury interior, cracked windshield and no high beams known as the Ghetto Cab Company. They would hang around after Emerald's bars closed and take drunks home at 20 bucks a pop (3 at $10 each)
Deacon Dan drove and Che would lean over the front seat and talk. He was a self-styled post-commie commie and presently was pushing a product called Market Socialism. Not the old lefty version of apostasy for onetime true believers, but Obama inspired - a la "the public option." This was what Che had redubbed "Public Alternatives."
The Zeitgeist is blowing in our sails now, Che would say. Obama is one of the helpless mouthpiecesk, seized by the loa of real change. His Public Option idea points back to a civil society in which "public" was all but eradicated in favor of privation for the poor and the near poor while there is monopolization for the haves and the have-mores.
Che called the Ghetto Cab Company an example of the growing radicalization of the economy thru social entrepeneurs providing services without serving a profit margin.Che like to point out all the areas that could use a public option. Transportation, of course, but others like housing, education,health which has become all wheal and no heal,with social welfare stripped to its barest atoms and even "defense" itself completely mercenaried.
"Obama has his problems," Che would explain, although now he would be benefiting with a well-paid "massage dollar" - one of the pair's attempt to provide a public alternaitve to money. 'Ask me if I want a massage' says the button that enrollees wear. What he said next was obliterated by sustained groaning but then, loud and clear: "Obama's delusion is that he can rule from the center when his opponents will only accept rule from the right. However, keep false hope alive. Without a center, Obama and the neoliberals he represents will soon however have to merge left. That's where they will run into our Campaign for Public Alternatives."
Che and Deacon Dan took their campaign seriously. One of their finest accomplishments was the creation of Hospitality Houses. Thanks to Deacon Dan's hacking talents, they had access to info opn every house, cabin, trailer and lean-to in the country. For a modest, one time only fee, they could place people in need of housing with an empty dwelling to suit their tastes. For a bit more each week, squatters would be assured warning of any approach by realitors, owners or law enforcement. "The service is now available in 212 counties, 193 cities and 18 Nation states," according to Deacon Dan's website.
There's more to tell about the Campaign, but here's an event that happened to the pair at the beginning of the month. They were on the street with several others. Deacon Dan as usual was playing his guitar and singing, about the only vocalizing he did. "Nobama Pakistan, Nobama Afghanistan, Nobama Iranistan, Not even Palis - stan."
Che was making an argument about Afghanistan, with Obama as the all-knowing guru. "He set the standard on War for time: it''s not all wars, it's dumb wars. This definitely place Afghanistan at the top of the dumbest war possible. Obama the pragmatic pacifist!" Che as a postcommie-commie always wanted reality over pragmality. "Without a moral center, or rubber plug, pragmatism is down the drain."
This was just after noon and Che noticed people streaming from a tour bus. All the polyster overwhelmed for an instant, then he seized up one of the signs near the bottom of the sidewalk stack. "SAVE JESUS FROM THE REPUBLICANS" He fished into Deacon Dan's coat pockets for the clutch of holy cards that showed Jesus in beard and business suit on one side and a long quote from Matthew 21 all about white sepulchres, pharisees and hypocrites - i.e. Republicans. He offered these to the bristling clean mob, one by one, only to be contemptuously refused. In desparation, he borrowed one of Lady Fingers bags of brownies, put a couple leaflets near the bottom and dropped it into the shopping bags which was undergoing tourist trick or treat. This was October after all.
The bus driver got a big brownie all her own and when exit time came the bus was stalled.the driver explained that the fragen bolt had bolted and couldn't be recovered. By the time she was ready to find, the bus had scarffed down desert plus. Thoroughly stoned the leaflets were read aloud. A couple of the ladies descended from the bus to grab up Che and Deacon Dan. The bus ride went rogue and before it returned to Taft where it had started, and three of the town's most fundamental churches were seized as Gospel Outposts. Che had Deacon Dan had a hell of a time escaping back to Emerald City.

Holy No Petrol Country

You can come at the Petrol villages from several angles - all points of the compass actually. You can come from the sea the way the original settlers did, via shipwreck, though there is a sometimes safe harbor via Altermensch Cove. Once landed you can work your way upstream through No Bottom Creek. I went this way, having hooked up with my soster old boyfriend, Conrad Lee. In his incredible little power boat we can chug our way three miles or so upstream until we dock under the fall where a rope staircase will take us up to the first plateua where another two miles of walking will get you to the first of the Petrol buildings - a cluster of bathhouses.orchards and gardens.
The trip up river is worthy of the original Conrad, the great grandfather of his namesake conrad Lee. It is the habitat of the still undiscovered native American marvel founded 154 years ago of shipwricked New England and European religious fanatics and desparate remnants of the local massacred Indian culture who had crawled in from the west and tried to pull their ientrance in with them.
Conrad was a well known visitor. He often did errands for the No Bottom Valley dwellers and as we passed people came out of houses set back from the banks

Massacre of Little Point

"So how is our Serial Murderer's memoir selling," Mac Moon asked. He was in the best positon to know that since it was his thriving little vanity press which had broken with tradition and actually paid for the Memoir getting printed. MacMoon as usual had no interest in the money but was after the reputation of the Bunyan family. None of the hisotircal reminscences he printed had anything much good to say about the Bunyans. Some were nothing but extended attacks. Barbara Beecher's Mt. Salvage Regional History was a first class piece of revisionist history - out to prove that Bunyans were a disaster for the region from day one. Mowry Moore's novel Days of Crime and Poses had actually been compared to All the Kings Men. Huey Long in this case was the fourth Paul Bunyan who was a prominent Republican conservative - during the Reagan Era reaching a respectable level of power and recognition, a major broker whose influence was felt everywhere and whose personal trqagedy was an iability to get an elected office, except - three times - by appointment. And not elected in the aftermath of these appointments twice. The third time it was obvious even to himself that it was hopeless. Bunyan IV was able at one time to control directly 4 out of 5 supervisors, the DA, the Sheriff, everyCounty court room. THe Judges in fact were perhaps the most lopyal under the thrall of Bunyan's money and the thrill of Bunyan IV endless parties.
Bunyan V made sure that his partying was a seamless web with his father's - except that power, influence and profit were not the object any longer. Before Gdub in fact there was Bunyan V. He was something big in the the Bush One White House, serial Ambassador to a number of unfortunate L:atin American countries during which resources were rapidly extracted, particularly favoreed - Forests.
"Serial Ambassador," I responded defensivly. The "serail killer" charge rose from a line that went "Serial killers and seducers have a knack in common for sensing women in troublr." Not that this Bunyan in any way admirable. Preying on women was a way of life for him, as his Memoirs attested.
MacMoon's family and associated clans had been at war with the Bunyans since the day after the first Paul cast his shadown over the allied watersheds. It was never "Bunyan country" for them. He and his progeny were Barbarian invaders - killing an enslaving the native population and oppresssing the new settlers.This of course was perfectly rendered in the Little Point Massacre, in which most the local Indians and soon after most of the local settlers, were murdered by a semi-proffessional military troop led by Major Paul Bunyan. (Bunyan claimed the rank from service in the Mexican War).
Whitehead was immersed in this subject - not as a book for his associate Mac Moon (Unlicensed, Whitehead prqcised his privat detecting under the Court authority of lawyer MacMoon). MacMoon already published a book on the Massacre - and attendant atrocities - although the book was available only in photocopy thanks to convoluted court cases (from which some claimed MacMoon as lawyer profited immensely.) MacMoon employed Whitehead purely as an investigator into the genocide's perpetrtors. These implicated many prominent local Bunyanphobe as well as Bunyanite families. Complex narratives competed here. Did Bunyan instigate the deaths of the settlers who murdered the Indians. Or was Bunyan irrelevant to these deaths, which resulted in several interlocking feuds which hatched out of the Vigilante attitude that all shared.
The local blogs were currently flaming over the naming of criminal ancestors not Bunyans. MacMoon's clan had more enemies than the Bunyans, linked to the massacres. Take for instance the Miller family. The Killer Millers who actually did more business in slaves than corpses, getting their business affairs capitalized with slavery. They were a Southern family claiming aristocratic connections. The founding Patriarch was Madison Miller, alluding to a connection with James but not Dolly who was sterile. It has been inferred that the connecting link was a quadroon slave of a myriad horde all named Madison. This one in particular married a tenant farmer Miller who was headed for West Texas and thence to Coho Coumty.
Some say that this Miller actually took part as a private in the Mexican War - under the command of Major Bunyan himself! and that this was were the hatred began.
That strain of conflict culminated in the marriage of Bunyan V with Elsa Miller, a Mantague-Capulet resolution that did not end in Romantic deaths for the pair. Rather it became a Spy versus Spy comedy of errors with each attempting murder on the other on numerous occasions. It was a kind of spiderworld courtship, claimed MacMoon who himself was almost certainly an adulturous lover of Elsa Miller. Always adulterous because Bunyan and Miller never attempted legal dissolution.
"Bunyan relied on his married status as an immunization from further legal liasons," Whitehead concluded. "He despised his father for his seven wives which drained the family coffers."
In fact, it increased the family wealth over-all since a number of half-brothers and half-sisters parlayed their inheritances via mother's alimony into independent fortunes. Bunyan Trucking for instance grew out of shipping success and now had a continent wide range under its name Success Baggage Express - which became Suxpress, made famous by its titillating Suxpress ads.
All this history was punctuated by the appearance in Whitehead's office of Elsa Bubyan nee Miller.

The Porno Master

Coho City wasn't much of a city.population 3389. It was strung alopng the lengthof Coho Creek before it finally fed into the West Branch of the South Fork of the Eel.
Currently it was running water in all direction. The rains kept the otherwise neglected Coho shiny clean. This was once the capital of the County before Paul Bunyan junior, the first of the successor to the first Emperor of Logging, thru and threw a fit relocated the seat to Bunyana.
I visited Wishy Whitehead, hippie detective, at his office in the amazing copper castle - the Vets Building. It had been the Opera House or the County Court House or the Whore House or something public and showy. A flimsy cage of an elevator was there to take me to his third floor rooms.
The ceilings were low on the third floor and the wrap around windows were narrow enough to run artillery out through.
Whitehead accentuated that with a huge desk, an oversized armchair, a coach of similar proportions amd several heaps of cushions. He also had a half dozen rope chairs hanging like mobile at face level and which could be locked to the floor through deck rings.
Whitehead was not alone today. The lawyer. Albion MacMoon, had angled his Lincolnesqe frame onto one of the armchairs. They stopped their talking to fix a steady gaxe upon me, something of a smirk of macMoon's and a look of pity on Whitehead's.
"Ah, said MacMoon,it's the secretary of the Marquis de Sade."
"The Porno Master," said Whitehead in a tone of feigned awe.
Their response was typical of the reception given to my publication of the Memoirs of a Class Warrior: the 5th Paul Bunyan
I think that was the title i had place the manuscript with my notations with a vantage publisher who printed the book one order at a time. It sold, or was Whitehead put it, soiled well in Coho and the adjacent counties where the Bunyans were prqctically coexistent with the white man's way in northcoast California. The almost mythical Paul Bunyan the first caqme into the area in 1853 with a passel of rowdies including a dozen children, with several wives and exwives and began putting together the huge holdings which established his fortune for his old age, which went well into his ninties = before, legend has it, one of daughters poisoned him for attempts on a grandaughter.
My scrnful friends didn't want to hear any of this. It's not the individuals who should outrage us, but the system that harbored them. But the fifth Bunyan was part of a lineage of evil that had strewn the landscape with Sophoclean, Faulknerian, Ross MacDonaldian crimes. My point is that the Bunyans stood out as though a Great Gatsby had been a Snopes.
It's an all male ensemble here. Gatsby begat upon Snopes. Genetic Engineering of course, not some gay intercourse. Meanwhile they went through women like a colonial Plantation owner. In the successive seraglios where the Bunyan family played out its culture, there was a number one wife but no legitimacy of one child over another.
I had discoveed how much this Paul Bunyan was like the previous ones. There really was something to them - a charisma, an archetypal energy that stopped traffic.

Memoir of a Bunyan Timber Beast

The narrative that has fallen into my hands has created a storm of emotion even before I have published it.
There were many manuscript around - a large number to protect the innocent - me.perhaps. The family - if you can call the Bunyan wasp nest a family - has spawned various versions, some hastily created forgies. The struggle for legitmacy is raging.
Leadership there is not. Bunyan's oldest two children - a son and daughter - are both long dead. The son was named Paul Bunyan the Sixth and should have ascended smoothly to control of the Empire. There are otherwise five known living Bunyan boys - the results of Paul the Fifth's "polygomistical habits" (his own term) that also netted him 11 daughters. THe grandchildren were multiple - and plentiful. But of all this vast population - a veritible primate troop - there was not a single Paul the sixth. (There were however 2 unorthodox Paulas.)
Why was all this so important? Here is how the memoir of the 5th Paul Bunyan begins:

" It's been pretty important being me. An Icon. Like the Phantom, Paul
Bunyan is the ghost who walks and one who must always be ready in the wings to slip into the spandex tights and adjust the flannel shirt, pull over the bulging jeans and settle into the steel-toed stanleys. There are faces out there waiting to be stepped on, loins to be thrust into, chests to be collapsed by pointed fingers.
"The Emperor, starring the ultimate male - me Paul Bunyan - is dead, Long live the Emperor.
"The Owner I mean. Immortal Owner with green money dressing. Almost a Nature Spirit, relentlessly destroying Nature. the wholly Scion of Mammon, above the law. Architect Ruark had nothing on me. He was a derivitive modeled after my father - Paul the fourth.
"Here's my first claim to fame -I took sloppy seconds after my father fucked Ayn Rand who was slavishly devoted to him and gave me a piece here and again for which my father always paid handsomely to my Sexual Tutor in chief - Auntie Ayn. In other words the second turned into minutes and the minutes turned into whores.
"I fucked everything that moved in those days, and more than a few that, like my teacher Ayn, didn't. (She was not the only one who shouted instructions in my ear but she did so with the authority of a Russian Lotte Lenya)
"With jutting jaw and biceps like foothills, I'm an Adonis. 6 foot 4 and haven't weighted less than 200 lbs since I was 16.
"All American in four college sports for three straight years while I was at Princeton. Summers I was a Rodeo Performer. My specialty was throwing a smallish Brahma Bull, a friend of mine named Filly. The Rodeo belonged to my father of course and made a ton of money for Buncorp.
"I'm a Don Juan with more kids than Norman Mailer. But I've only been married once. Her children died but she lives on and has - it seems - outlived me. But I have infinitely outloved her. I've spilled more seed in the right places than Genghis Khan or the Irish O'Neill."
"I knew Hugh Hefner when he was humping sofa cushions. Mine was the first Bunny Mansion he ever saw. I have eleven Bunyan Bunnies in attendance right now but I won't bother to name them since there's bound to be a change by the time this comes out. I will tell you that I regularly shop the Russian girl yellow pages. Second of course are the ICE lockers where I make my choice through a satellite hook-up. A variety of Eastern European girls. I also have a great Nigerian contact and a Hong Kong agent."

(More ed.note): Like the story so far? This situation created a major scandal long before the memoir manusript surfaced. For one thing, the Bunnies spilled out into the public eye. Paul's sister - of the successful cable show "Babe Blue" - signed up all the girls - 17 at this point - for a fabulous Reality Show on VH1 (it's more Bimbo than entertaining, so maybe it is MTV) Babe Bunyan Blue is a notable hasbeen with a second flowering of career on Cable, after a string of B and X movies sucesses. Babe and Paul haven't spoken for decades (she claims that father and brother did her from puberty on) but in his dotage Paul allowed a quartet of stunning TV camera crews to take up residence in the Bunyan Mansion.
With Paul's death the show, which never really needed him - the focus went to the selection of Paul the 6th. There was a string of mothers with children sometimes in tow, DNA in hand, claiming the Throne. The program's current zinger is that one of the girls is 9 months pregnant and everyone is waiting for the possible birth of a boy - to be named Paul Bunyan the Sixth.
The mother is a latecomer - a teen-age Palestinian girl named Hagar who has since fallen under the managerial eye of Bunyan's only wife, Maggie Bunyan (she says she's 59 but she's really 74, goes the family joke) She features in Bunyan's memoirs - which he called "The Private Life of the Fifth Bunyan", written with the aid of a fifth of bourbon the text continues in smaller itlics. About Maggie he says:
"I pen thses reminiscences so that people will stop their mouths. i am not a murder or a rapist. At least not legally. I guess my relationship with Maggie was all rape and a bed wide. She never like sex, or me and after our honeymoon in Las Vegas in 1959 she got a room of her own in the old Mansion where I grew up and knew a secret door she never found. A devout Christian at the time, she couldn't divorce me, and her minister who was one of my father's toadies told her she had to stick it out and wait for god to change me into a gentleman.
"I of course was a timber beast, unable to change. My chemistry threw me at her in one assault wave after the other. A noble husband I climbed her breastworks and ungirded her loins quite a few times.I also like to punch her about before after during and without sex. The violence probably was a lot more regular but ultimately - though she was certainly a better fuck than Ayn Rand - I went back to working girls. Not working hookers, just local girls who had to work for a living and didn't mind doing IT on their own fabulous bed in their own fabulous room in my own fabulous house.
"Working girls had been my lot between Ayn and Maggie. I was 14 when I fucked one of my father's bookkeepers, a Buncorp office worker age 23 transferred from the LA office. Her name was Sheila and she wore so much stuff, all starched and Doris Day like that it was like what disrobing a nun might have been like. I acuired a taste for executive secretaries and clerical pool girls (here they had a real wet pool as well). Of course, I entrust these memoirs to a male secretary however.
"Sheila's main attraction were her unrelentingly long legs, excessively encased in nylons, thrillingly attached to a black garter belt. It was fifties' boy porno. apotheosis


Maggie Bunyan's main opponent is Buncorp CEO, Jack Knight, a onetime Australian spook who's invested the corporation heavily in Indonesian oil, Asian heroin and Hawaiin hash.He claims the memoirs are a forgery. Or does he claim that he wrote them? I can 't sort out Jack's stories which alwaystake me down, down, into the underworld of global princes, presidents, hitmen and jackals.
Even without the Comic strip touches, the key word here is Buncorp. Says the fith Bunyan:
"I'm better than the best - a Scion from the fabulously wealthy and influential Buncorp family. I epitomize the family's ongoing status as epic Robber Barons."

The only person I trust to sort all this out for me is my close friend Aloyoishis West Whitehead, "Wishy" - the Quaker detective. Fearless and unarmed except with the truth- he nonetheless judiciously promises his enemies an infinity of tripwires to embarrassing stories should he suddenly become an inert corpse.
It was he that authenticated the manuscript for me and arranged for its dissemination. I used to visit him on the bleak Slavage Ridge where he had built an immense driftwood castle. It was a glorious spot where the saucers ran on a nightly basis and interdeminsional beings manuevered against each other in a politics which our own earthly politics only mimiced. Now I hang out in his office in Taft located in a corner of the top floor of the old Opera House.I can look down through his glass wall to view the cobwebbed stage below.
Said West whitehead: "The third Bunyan built this palace back when Taft was the Coho County seat. He built another in his spankin new town - Bunyana - when the city fathers here pissed him off and he decided to use his plethora of wood to build a competitor. It worked out. Bunyana is now the County seat and poor little Taft has had to use guile to survive against the malice of a family that makes the Medici look like the Brady Bunch.Just listen to this guy.
Wishy read me the conclusion of the memoirs preface:

"Accept me as a Superman - a blond Nietschean timber beast - a Jack London Tree Wolf. I wield a supernatural saw with a secret name that levels forests at a sweep. I have improved on my industrious ancester, Paul Bunyan the first. These Redwoods were his last refuge - emgerging from his French Canadian nest to ravage far and wide, a glacier of destruction finally coming to earth in a coastal California corner.
"I'm the John Henry of Logging still!"

West Whitehead shook his head. He was no fan of the upcoming Timber Bragging Days, where the theater of destruction is rehearsed by competing bands of loggers for possession of the silver ax and the golden saw of the orginal Paul Bunyan.
"It's hard to escape the past when it has its hands around the throat of the present," he mourned.

Murder in Coho County

Winter is theater season in the WestBranch (of thesouth fork of the Eel) I have been visiting the coastal retreat of the Holy No Petrols since the seventies. This anti-petroleum cult has been boycotting all the derivitives of that ghastly chemical, living the simple life among a native culture of the West Branch of the South Fork of the Eel. In winter they have traditionally staged various of Plato's Dialogues - with suitable music. This year they have added plays of Camus - the Possessed, Caligula and the Just Assassins, done as puppet theatre with voices.
There is a legitimate California County that the Petrols fringe with its inland capital at Bunyana. My explorations of Coho County - if I am not hunkering down among the denizens of the Petrol Ranchero, the International Settlement on the facing bluffs built around the Lolita Arms Motel and Trailer Park, or the infamous White House of the Marxist-Grouchoists - involves mostly meandering about on the upper reaches of the coast, visiting my sister's eeyrie, her ex-boyfiriend Conrad Lee, or my cousin Donnie who manages my sister's little horse ranch.
However on this day I wanted to check in first with my old buddy, Aloysius West Whitehead, the famous hippie detective. He is another writing hobby horse I ride occasionally for a story whenever I need one. Like a veritable Dr. Witless I have been collecting his casebooks for some time. This includes classics of the 60s (The death of Allard Lowenstein), or the 80s apprehension of the serial killer Jimmie Jansen, the murder of nuke activist Klaus Kirkendorf,or more modern cases like scandalous case of Nan Black (better known locally as the Petrol Napdam Madpan, and several Venice, California murder cases when he was just getting started.
Wishy, as family called him, was currently immersed in a complex set of local murders, a linkage of deaths rooted in genocide and slavery of the mid-19th century right up to a murder committed at the end of 2008.
"Maybe I'll be next," Wishy said to me as I settled down onto an uncomfortable metal folding chair across from his cluttered desk. His office was in the historic building that dominated downtown Coho, once the capital before the Bunyans insisted on Bunyana. An adjoining glass door led to a plusher office inhabited by lawyer Albion MacMoon with whom he had aloose partnership.
MacMoon was a local celebrity, well known for his morning Wake Up show on his Aunt and Uncles radio station. MacMoon did his version of the news, took phone calls and played classic pop vocalists from Billie Holiday to Doris Day. He was doing a Peggy Lee special as I was driving over the hump to get here.