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Fair Notes

by Bruce Anderson on Sep 23rd, 2010

A big weekend with rain everywhere but here.

A dismayed caller assessed the first rains this way: “Did you know that the government seeds the clouds this time every year to wreck the pot crop?”

No, we didn’t know the government’s big bag of tricks included the unleashing of inclement weather on Mendocino County’s marijuana fields, but these particu lar paranoids, the globally threatened ones, tend to monologue, and sure enough this very, very concerned citizen veered off into a multiplicity of menaces, which included contrails, PG&E’s smart meters, genetically altered salmon, peanut butter allergies, and secret surveillances everywhere, all of it aimed specifically at him. Just as we were about to recommend the only known prophylactic — a do-it-yourself tinfoil hat — the besieged man got off the line and we got back to geneti cally altered ballplayers and the Giants game.

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There were tensions where, in ordinary elections in Mendocino County, there is usually only a kind of qui etly resigned despair, that the incumbents will only make everything worse and the challengers are crazy.

The Roberts-Hamburg race for 5th District Supervi sor is as bitter and apparently embittering as any we can remember. You’d have to go back to the early 1970s when Norman de Vall took on incumbent Ted Galletti, a very good supervisor and a very nice man. But the hip pies viewed Galletti as, well, not a hippie, and certainly not a liberal of the lockstep variety ever since dominant in much of Mendocino County. Galletti planned a huge development on Cameron Road, a straight up fabrication that Galletti never could beat back. de Vall won. And won again, and again.

But de Vall never generated the pure hatred that candi date Hamburg engenders among the County’s Ukiah-based rightwing, an entirely irrational hatred impossible to reconcile with the real life Hamburg, a modest, good-natured fellow seemingly devoid of mal ice. But to hear his opponents tell it Hamburg’s a cross between Fidel Castro and some kind of mega-hippie.

Hamburg’s opponent, Wendy Roberts of Mendo cino, is personally appalled by Hamburg. A bright, tire less, conventional woman of middle-years, Mrs. Roberts has mobilized those sectors of Mendocino County’s seething population who view Hamburg as the representative of everything that has gone wrong with the County over the past 40 years.

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Larry Carr Sr., the mayor of Yorkville, stopped by the booth to say his family claimed he was senile. I con soled Larry with the information that I’d had to fight off the same accusations. “Larry, my friend of these many years, as soon as you nod off at the dinner table they start nudging each other and saying stuff like, ‘Well, he’s always had selective hearing but now he’s deaf and won’t get a hearing aide. He’ll be in diapers soon.’