The Problem with Private Property

I used to write about stuff like this more often when I first started my blog (1, 2, 3 ), but it seems like time to get back to basics. Here’s the story behind “private property:”

Here in Humboldt County, we take private property very seriously. We talk about “property rights” as though they were sacred principles, while we trample human and civil rights as if the Bill of Rights, and the UN Declaration of Human Rights, were just yesterday’s newspaper. One might be surprised by how wholeheartedly we embrace this idea of “private property,” when you consider just how recently the concept was imposed on this area.

300 years ago, there was no private property in Humboldt County. There were plenty of people here, but no title deeds, no “No Trespassing” signs, and no Sheriff’s deputies, courts or lawyers, and by all accounts, life was pretty good here, 300 years ago. The story of how private property came to Humboldt County is not a pretty one. It’s a story that most property owners around here would be ashamed to tell, and should be ashamed to tell, were they to tell it truthfully, which they don’t often do. It’s a shameful story because it involved so much heartless, vicious, violence and blood-lust, and because few of us want to admit that we could be related to, or even have financial dealings with, the monsters who carried out such atrocities.

The story of how “private property” came to Humboldt County is not unique. All around the world, where “private property” is honored, there is a legacy of brutal, monstrous violence upon which it was founded, and in which lies it’s only authority. Here in Humboldt County, only about one-quarter of the households residing in the county, can realistically afford private property on which to live. Three quarters of us are just shit-out-of-luck. This is also reflected globally. More than half the people in the whole world do not own private property, or “real” property if you prefer, and have no chance of ever doing so, while a tiny minority, like 1% of the worlds population, owns more than half of it. Every year, the percentage of private property in the hands of that tiny minority, increases, while the amount available to the rest of the planet’s growing population, decreases.

So, why do people continue to honor this system of private property, even though it works so poorly for the majority of us? There is only one answer to that question. Violence. All of those past monstrosities, must be backed up with day to day violence to maintain the system, and the threat of more violence to come, insures that people continue to honor this violently imposed system of private property. Armies, navies, armies of cops, prisons, courts, lawyers, and the whole modern arsenal of lethal weaponry all exist, primarily, to inspire and maintain respect for private property.

There is nothing moral or right about private property at all. People honor the system because they don’t want to get arrested and thrown in jail, or shot, and mothers teach their children to honor it, because they don’t want their kids to go to jail or get shot, or because, by luck of birth, the child is born into one of those privileged families, who own private property, and for whom the system of private property works very nicely, thank you very much. Either way, I don’t see how you could possibly make a moral case to defend it.

 

I know a lot of fundamentalist Christians who have done their best to do so, but in order to buy their baloney, you have to believe their fairy tales. You have to accept “God’s” word that he gave us “dominion” over the Earth, and you have to accept that “dominion” means “the right to rape, pillage and dissect.” I don’t buy it. If God had intended us to have private property, he would have given Moses a stack of title deeds instead of the 10 Commandments.

I reject their moral authority and discount their fairy tales, despite their popularity. In my eyes, private property is morally indefensible, as well it should be in yours too, but hey, let’s be scientific about it.

If Global Warming is an “Inconvenient Truth.” Private property is the convenient lie that made it possible and necessary. Private property turns the community of life into resources, and licenses their extraction and exploitation. Private property butchers integrated ecosystems slashing them with arbitrary property lines, which then become real fences and roads that divide and fragment habitat, and displace wild plants and animals.

People borrow money to purchase private property, and then extract and sell off the natural abundance of the land to pay the interest on the loan, so the owner is left with depleted land, and a title deed that declares that the Sheriff will defend his right to possess that depleted land, with violence, against all trespassers, provided the owner pays his taxes. Then the owner must find a way to produce something, on that land, that he can sell for enough money to pay whatever taxes the Sheriff demands, which then further depletes the land’s natural abundance, and drives displaced species who once thrived there, into extinction. In other words, when you look at it scientifically, you will discover that the concept and practice of private property is profoundly dysfunctional, from an ecological perspective.

I assume that none of this is new to you. You know the awful history of this place. You understand how private property works, and you have some awareness of the environmental crisis. By now you must see the moral bankruptcy, social injustice and ecological dysfunction of it. How can you say that any of it is right? You understand what’s legal within this system, but there’s nothing right about it. In fact, this system is killing us and destroying the planet because the system is wrong, dead wrong. It is very important that you understand that.

The same logic applies to intellectual property, in fact the concept of intellectual property was built on the morally bankrupt, socially unjust, and ecologically dysfunctional idea that everything on Earth, including our thoughts and ideas, can and should be commodified and sold to the highest bidder. Applying the violence of private property, to our ideas doesn’t make it a better idea. It is simply a method of enslaving our minds in the same way that it enslaves the world.

There has been a propaganda campaign to convince us that intellectual property rights protect struggling artists, but just the opposite is true. Most artists who make money from images you see on the internet, do not own those images. By the time you see them, those images have already been sold to corporations and business interests who dominate the media and use that system of private property to extract work from artists, before anyone has a chance to see it.

Artists, sell that work to those business interests because they need the money to pay their rent, and because the artist knows that no one but their immediate friends and family will ever see their work otherwise. Intellectual property rights were not designed to protect artists, or to prevent people from stealing artist’s work. Intellectual property rights were designed to prevent artists from selling their own work, again, to a different buyer. It was designed to allow capitalists to extract works of art from artists and exploit them for their own profit, without competition from the artists themselves.

This is why artists should be very careful not to assert their intellectual property rights on moral grounds. When an artist asserts his intellectual property rights on moral grounds, he also asserts the moral, just and sacred right of his landlord to hold the Earth beneath his feet, hostage, and to charge him for every footprint and shadow he casts upon it. I don’t know many artists who believe that. Hell, I don’t know many people who believe that, besides those who also own enough private real property to to feel invested in the whole rotten system, and choose to remain in denial about it.

I do not mean to say that artists should not exercise their intellectual property rights. Not at all. If you are an artists, and see some benefit to exercising your intellectual property rights as enumerated in the legal code, by all means do so, but do it for aesthetic reasons, political reasons, economic reasons or even petty personal reasons. Don’t do it on moral grounds or try to stand on principle about it, because the principle is wrong, dead wrong.

Kym Kemp’s Misplaced Hatred

I like seeing my work in respectable publications like the North Coast Journal and the Anderson Valley Advertiser, and on popular websites like LoCO, but there’s something unique, and uniquely satisfying about the way I present my work on my blog, Like You’ve Got Something Better To Do (www.lygsbtd.wordpress.com). I don’t make any money from my blog, but I also don’t spend any money to produce it, and even though I have other outlets for my work, I still enjoy putting it together, as a labor of love, for the thousands of people who come back to read it week after week. I don’t own the domain name. I have no control over any advertisements you see while you are there, but at my blog, I can say whatever I want, and have fun with how I present it.

I understand that the internet is a weapon. It is a tool of war, and a tool of oppression. Any useful information you find on it is incidental to it’s purpose, and it probably only saved you a trip to the library, but you have and will pay dearly for that convenience. I don’t enjoy being online at all. I find the internet vulgar, vapid and voyeuristic, and I don’t have to spend very long online before I’m disgusted, pissed off, and disappointed in humanity, but the internet has become the most affordable way for one individual to reach a large number of people, provided you are willing to compromise quality for convenience. Despite the drawbacks, I find some aspects of digital technology, interesting, creatively and aesthetically, and despite my very limited internet access, and even more limited expertise, I do my best to put together the kind of blog that I would enjoy reading, if, God forbid, I ever became bored enough to read a blog.

One aspect of the digital arts that interests me is how easy digital technology makes it to re-contextualize old cultural elements into new artistic expressions. I’ve been into collage since before the days when I made photocopied collage fliers to promote my band’s gigs, and lately, half of the new music I hear seems to be made, almost entirely, from bits of old records remixed together. To me, the one real highlight of the whole crass, ugly, pixilated wasteland we call the internet, is it’s vast potential for juxtaposition.

It was in that spirit that I began adding photos to my blog posts. I added pictures for aesthetic reasons, and for no other. Since I wasn’t making money, I didn’t worry about legalities. When I started www.lygsbtd.wordpress.com I saw the opportunity to re-contextualize photos, memes and cartoons into my essays, and found that it added another dimension to the experience. There is no way I would pay for pictures, and I don’t even have enough time online to ask permission. I add photos and pictures only because the internet makes it easy and convenient. Since we lose the directness of face to face communication and all of the non-verbal cues that go with it, in an online environment, the ability to share a low-resolution reproduction of practically any image in the world seems like an odd but reasonable trade-off to me.

In order to be re-contextualized, these images must first be de-contextualized. That is why I do not attribute most of the pictures I use on my blog. Just because I want to use a picture of a lion, that doesn’t mean I want you to go to the zoo, or even the zoo’s website. I have chosen those pictures to illustrate the ideas conveyed in the text, and that is all I want them to do. That’s why I choose to add pictures to my blog in the way that I do, and that’s the way I intend to continue to do it.

Is this legal? I think that’s a gray area that depends on the definition of “fair use,” and a slew of other thorny legal technicalities. I’m sure we could litigate it for years. Fortunately for me, however, it has never been an issue. After seven years, and thousands of pictures, no one has ever complained about the way I used their work. That is, except for one person, Kym Kemp, of kymkemp.com, the Redheaded Blackbelt.

 

 

Kym has asked me to remove her pictures from my blog a couple of times. I make a point of avoiding Kym’s pictures because I know that she doesn’t like me to use them, but on occasion, one of her pictures will show up in a google search, on another site, and I will use it, not knowing that it is hers. What can I say? I write a lot about SoHum, and she takes a lot of great pictures of SoHum. Sometimes her work is hard to avoid. When this happens, and she tells me about it, I’m always quick to remove the picture, and replace it with something else, but last week, Kym got all self-righteous on me.

Kym Kemp told me “I hate what you do.” She told me it was “wrong,” that I was ripping off struggling artists and photographers, and that I am “freeloading.” Give me a fucking break! This, from the woman who could never admit that there was anything wrong with “Mom and Pop growers” exploiting the violence and racism of the War on Drugs, “just to put new tires on their old truck.” Kym would never condemn SoHum’s Drug War profiteers, on principle, but she has the nerve to berate me for my creative re-appropriation of digital images online. I think that’s a truly Trumpian level of hypocrisy.

 

…and on the topic of ripping off artists, I’ll bet that if you asked all of the artists and photographers who’s work I have used over the years, and gave them this choice:

1. I John Hardin will graciously remove their image from my blog, and give them all of the income I have received for putting it together, or
2. Kym Kemp, will give them back half of the money they spent on overpriced black market marijuana because of the War on Drugs.

I’ll bet Kym Kemp would still be the only one who wanted me to remove an image from my blog.

It isn’t wrong if nobody gets hurt. Nobody ever died in a shootout over my blog. Nobody ever went to jail because of my blog. Nobody ever had a gun stuck in their face, or their kid’s face, because of my blog. My blog didn’t wreck the economy, destroy the forest or create the housing crisis. My blog doesn’t keep women as slaves, or rape women who come here looking for work. My blog doesn’t sell meth or heroin to your kids. People don’t go hungry because of my blog and my blog does not take food out Kym Kemp’s mouth. Maybe Kym Kemp should find someone else in Southern Humboldt who’s deeds are a little more deserving of her expressed hatred.

Please Don’t Scare the Trimmigrants

The trimmigrants really snuck up on me this year. A few Fridays, maybe a month, ago we were all talking about how dead it was in town. I recognized every face in the Garberville Town Square that day, strictly locals. The following Thursday evening, however, at home, almost 20 miles from town, 3 miles from the nearest county road, I heard a faint “halo” outside my window. I looked up to see two young women with big backpacks, looking at me with hopeful eyes.

“Do you think you could maybe, please, give us a ride to where the dirt road meets the paved road?” one of them asked with an accent I didn’t quite recognize. It was about 7:00pm, dusk. I asked them what they planned to do when they got to the end of the dirt road. “Hitchhike back to town.” she told us. I advised against hitchhiking after dark. I told them that they were welcome to camp around our place until morning, and that we had planned to go to town ourselves, the next day. “No” she replied, “We want to get out of here now.”

I could tell she was frightened. I asked her how they got here. She told us that one of our neighbors had hired them. He told them he had a few weeks work for them, but after two days, and one night, he had completely freaked them out. He had scared them so badly that they decided they would rather hitchhike back to town, after dark, than spend another night at his place. We understood completely. We gave them a ride to town.

By Southern Humboldt standards, we live in a pretty good neighborhood. We don’t know everyone in our neighborhood, and there’s some we know that we wish we didn’t, but I do know that we have a lot of dangerous men around here, who live alone on large tracts of land. I believe these women had good reason to be frightened, and we were happy help them get away from a scary situation.

On the way to town they filled us in on more of the details. One of them was from Belgium and the other, Argentina. They had met in Mexico, and came here together looking for work, in hopes of extending their travels. Originally, they were a group of five, with three guys, but my neighbor singled out the two women, and they got into his car. He told them he lived on a “peace community” where they “practice permaculture and green building techniques.” They became suspicious when they didn’t see anyone else there. He also became more unpredictable, and went from peaceful, green, eco-hippie, to angry psychopath without warning, and at the slightest provocation.

They both seemed very shaken by the experience, and were kicking themselves for their poor judgment. I could tell that they had never met anyone like this guy before, and he really scared them. We commiserated. I explained that a lot of people who live out here, alone, on large tracts of rugged land, do so because they don’t get along with people very well, and living out here doesn’t really help them develop those skills. We warned them that there are more guys like our neighbor out in these woods, and encouraged them to be more careful.

 

We wished them luck as we helped them unload their packs in Redway, where they headed straight into Deb’s for the wifi, and something to eat. All around us there seemed to be dozens of young, hopeful-looking people, with big backpacks, getting in and out of vehicles. Suddenly, we have trimmigrants everywhere. Since then, several people have asked me, in a variety of accents, if I know where they can find work. I’ve seen people hitchhiking at every conceivable intersection, and there’s a lot more young people in town, not as many as in years past, I think, but still a good showing.

I see them shopping all over town. Local merchants should be happy about that. Things had been pretty slow in town, for a while, before all of these kids arrived. Trimmigrants have got to make up a significant portion of the tourist dollars spent here in SoHum. Still, I see “No Trimmigrants” bumperstickers all over the place.

How bad do things have to get, economically, before we start to appreciate the people who come here and spend their money in our stores, restaurants and hotels? I’ve got a feeling we’re going to find out. Let’s hope we haven’t scared them all away by then.

Book Review: Kind Nepenthe by Mathew V Brockmeyer

I don’t read a lot. Hell, I wouldn’t read my own work if I could avoid it. I mean, why should I? I already know what I think. For some people, however, reading offers an escape from reality, and many people become addicted to it. Whether it’s online articles and newspapers, romance novels and mysteries or historical biographies and serious non-fiction, reading is all about filling your head with other people’s ideas, and if you do it a lot, pretty soon you know more about what other people think than you know about yourself.

Personally, I prefer to think for myself. I enjoy my own thoughts, and I cultivate them, so I tend to have a lot of them, and they consume a lot of my time. If I’m going to think someone else’s thoughts, I expect them to be at least as good as my own, tell me something I didn’t already know, and make me care about it. That’s a tall order, but I got sucked into a new book of horror fiction recently that really made the grade.

Local author Mathew V Brockmeyer has written a terrific new book titled “Kind Nepenthe.” I had to look it up, so I’ll save you the trouble. According to Webster: “nepenthe – a drug supposed by the ancient Greeks to cause forgetfulness of sorrow.”

It’s a ghost story, set somewhere in Humboldt County. Brockmeyer tells us that his story takes place in the far South-East corner of the county, where Humboldt, Mendocino and Trinity counties meet, but the scenery he describes sounds much more like South-West Humboldt County, like maybe Whitethorne or Gopherville, and the store in the story reminds me of the Honeydew General Store.

It’s a fictional world, but the monsters in this book are very real, very SoHum, and they haunt our streets every day. The horrors described in this book, really happen, all too frequently in our community. That’s what makes this book so scary.

The story revolves around a couple of young dreadlocked idealists from San Diego. He’s a young certified permaculture designer. She’s a fiercely protective mother of a five year old girl. Together, the three of them take a job sharecropping on a monster-sized diesel grow, in this remote corner of Humboldt County. They share a dream of living sustainably, off-the-grid, on their own land, and if they can just get through one more cycle, that dream could come true, but the grow is haunted.

 

In pursuit of their dream, the young couple compromise their principles again and again, and each time, it draws them deeper into the abyss. Meanwhile, we meet a cast of local characters, living and dead, who inhabit this abyss and call it home. The couple’s boss, “Coyote,” a Deadhead who drives a Lincoln Navigator and eats at McDonalds. the neighbor, “Diesel,” a mechanic with a drug problem, who’s family used to own all of the land in the area, and “DJ,” Diesel’s teenage son, and father to be, lead a cast of very realistic SoHum characters through a horrific nightmare that consumes them all.

The story sucked me in immediately, and the rich character development kept me engaged until the wrenching and the weeping and the unspeakable horrors take over, and then I just couldn’t stop reading til it was over. Kind Nepenthe is not only engrossing to read, but it reveals a lot about our community, our times, and our condition. The ghosts in this story give the characters bad dreams, and play tricks on them, but the horrors that Mathew V Brockmeyer describe in this book, really happen here in Southern Humboldt, all too often, and the monsters he describes are our neighbors.

I don’t usually like horror fiction. You didn’t see, “scare the shit out of me” in that list of stuff I want a book to do, but this genre proved to be a perfect vehicle for conveying these great character studies. In Kind Nepenthe we see how drugs, greed and the War on Drugs all work together to destroy peoples lives and poison the culture of a community. I think everyone should read Kind Nepenthe by local author, Mathew V Brockmeyer, but especially, everyone in SoHum really must read Kind Nepenthe by Mathew V Brockmeyer.

Make time for this SoHum horror story this Fall! Read it aloud to your trimmers. They’ll love it! You can find Kind Nepenthe at King Range Books in Garberville, Northtown Books in Arcata, and Eureka Books in Eureka, just in time for Halloween.

Community, What a Concept!

I hate to write about the Mateel Community Center, because there’s a baby in that bathwater, and because we really need a community center in Southern Humboldt. Much as I enjoy criticizing the gross excesses, pathetic deficiencies and laughably dishonest mythology of this community, I don’t want to be the one to tell us that our baby is dead. However, the Mateel Board’s decision to suspend the Mateel Meal program indicates to me that this latest trip to the Intensive Care Ward might be too little too late.

As a community center, the Mateel has always been exceptional. I don’t know of any other community center that could pull off an undertaking like Reggae on the River, or even Summer Arts and Music Festival, in it’s present incarnation. As we now see, big festivals are a big gamble. They have the potential to make a lot of money, but they cost a lot to produce, and if attendance falls, the losses can be catastrophic. Most community centers would never take that kind of risk with the community’s resources.

Summer Arts and Music Festival used to be the kind of event a community center would put on. In fact Summer Arts and Music Festival predates the Mateel as a community function. Before SoHum became a marijuana mono-culture, a lot of people around here made and sold art, pottery, cabinetry, candles, clothing, musical instruments and other handcrafted items, and relied on that income to survive. I know because I was one of them. I used to make a living selling my crafts at, mostly community center sponsored craft shows, all over Northern California and Southern Oregon. SAMF used to be one of the better ones.

 

Since the Reggae Wars, however, the focus of SAMF has changed. I wouldn’t call it an arts and crafts show anymore. I’d call it a music festival with arts and crafts. Now, instead of sponsoring a festival for the benefit of local artists and craftspeople, the Mateel expects artists and craftspeople, increasingly from out of the area, to finance a music festival, for the benefit of the community center.

Artists and craftspeople need community support, and they rely on institutions like community centers to survive and thrive. Helping local artists is an important function of a community center, and it pays to help artists in your community thrive. Supporting the arts builds economic diversity; it builds local culture and it encourages creativity. The goal of Summer Arts and Music should be to help local artists, craftspeople and musicians get their careers off the ground, not to make money off of them. If the local arts scene diminishes while the community center thrives, something’s wrong.

 

Reggae on the River also used to help people in our community much more than it does now. ROTR used to bring a lot more people from out of the area, and more of those people needed weed. Local growers sold A LOT of pot at Reggae on the River. Today, everyone in California has easy access to cannabis, and there are plenty of reggae festivals to attend. Now ROTR relies on local people to buy tickets, and since it’s just us, nobody needs weed, so growers don’t make much money at Reggae on the River anymore.

Reggae On The River is a massive undertaking that consumes people’s lives and our community center’s resources, and now it demands that we, as a community, make a commitment to spend a bunch of money to attend a four-day drug orgy where we drink way too much beer and chain smoke fat spliffs of ganja while he choke on dust in the August heat. That’s a lot to ask of a community. What’s more, it probably isn’t very good for us.

Things change, and sometimes we forget why we do things. One thing that hasn’t changed very much is the need for a hot nutritious meal. Every community has hungry people, and ours is no exception. The need for a hot free meal in Southern Humboldt remains as strong as ever. People in our community would feel better, think better and make better decisions if they got a good nutritious meal that day. Children in our community would do better in school and have a better chance for success, and mom would have an easier time making ends meet if they could get a free meal every once in a while. A free meal could help a lot of self-employed people get through a rough month or two, and really help unemployed people stay strong while they look for work.

 

Besides that, we benefit from sitting down to a meal together, as a community. We have a lot of lonely people here in SoHum. A lot of people around here are hungrier for company than they are for food. In many ways, bringing people together to share a free meal is the essence of community, and the Mateel used to do it pretty well.

Bob Binairs invited me to help out in the Mateel Meal kitchen back when we first moved here, and it was a great experience. Good food, good company and good vibes. The Mateel had enough of that revolutionary radical hippie spirit that made people proud to eat there. I was proud to eat there, and I met some great people there. Every free meal strikes a blow against capitalism and feeding people is a revolutionary act. It felt good to share a meal with comrades at the Mateel.

Over the years, however, those radical, revolutionary hippie ideas like “community” have steadily withered away in people’s minds in the face of an onslaught of even more radical, right-wing “free-market” rhetoric from corporate mass media. Fewer people understand ideas like “community” anymore, let alone believe in them. Unless the idea of “community” lives in people’s hearts and minds, they’ll never understand the importance of a community center, or what they should expect of one.

This constant barrage of disempowering messages from corporate media, and a changing culture, not to mention the greed that sparked the greenrush, has changed the way people around here think and see the world. Today, a lot of people want to make Southern Humboldt more exclusive. They don’t want to help their neighbor; they want to exclude needy people from their neighborhood. Here in SoHum we have a lot of people who want to use hunger as a weapon to drive poverty out of town.

The Mateel Meal program has been under attack for years, by a growing faction who believe that feeding hungry people only encourages more of them to come here. They don’t want to see needy people, let alone eat with them. They prefer to use their money to exclude people, rather than support their neighbors, and they intend to make Southern Humboldt more exclusive and upscale by starving poor people out.

The Mateel Hall is overflowing with donated food. The kitchen remains there in the hall, mostly unused, and all of the labor to put on the Mateel Meal is done by unpaid volunteers. At the most recent Mateel meeting, it was reported that the reasons for suspending the Mateel Meal included: the donated food is taking up more than its allotted space, and that the Mateel Meal puts extra wear and tear on the floor because the floor has to be mopped after every meal.

The easy solution to too much donated food is to feed more people, and if we wear-out the floor of the Mateel Hall by providing free meals, that floor will have been well used indeed. I don’t see any excuse for preserving the floorboards at the expense of hungry people in our community. People here need this food, today, before it goes bad, and the people who donated it, wanted it to be eaten, not thrown away. The Mateel Board has not only gambled with the community’s resources, they’ve used their bad decisions as an excuse to block this genuine volunteer effort to feed hungry people in our community.

Things change, and after 30 years of devicive rhetoric, gangsta rap and the rise of Randian, libertarian social Darwinism, there might not be enough people left around here who even understand that radical, revolutionary hippie idea we call “community,” let alone believe in it enough to support a community center anymore. Today we see that even a majority of the Mateel Board of Directors seems unclear on the concept. What are the chances they can convey it to the rest of us, convincingly? If the Mateel Community Center fails, it won’t be because they lost too much money at ROTR, it will be because we no longer understand, or believe in, the revolutionary concept of community.