Wanda & Politics in 1984

[Steelhead]

>From the Wanda Tinasky files.  June 6, 1984

Dear Mr. Anderson:

Hitching along Highway One lately, I've been finding this litter that looks
like kiddie porn...and here's a guy with a dog in the act...and Omigawd,
this one's got a FISH! Izzat POSSIBLE? No, wait a minute...these are
candidates for public office...prospective public servants, so to
speak...they don't say they think it might be fun to have the power or the
money...nobody's out to square an old touch...a nice, dull bunch...I'll
sleep more securely in the woods tonight.

Some kidding aside, I was glad to see Judge Heeb re-elected her on the
coast; It reaffirmed my notion that the folks here are, by and large, the
clearest-headed people I've come across in the USA.  I figure the people
hereabout voted for Judge Heeb for two reasons:  a) they appreciate his
decency; and b) they had no yen to be low rungs on Mr. Kubanis's ladder to
success.

I think Judge Heeb found out he was going to win from all the people he
talked to the week before the election...(he was patrolling the downtown
streets of Fort Bragg like the beaver twins) because when I was in the fort
Bragg Safeway the Sunday before the election trying to boost a new pair of
tennis shoes, Judge Heeb was in there buying several cases of Cragmont cola
(2 litres, 79 cents)...I suppose, for a victory celebration.

It was nice that Judge Heeb really buried Mr. Kubanis, as far as I
personally am concerned, because when an election is close, I usually have
a nasty suspicion that it was fudged, although where I get this feeling I
don't know...there seems to be very little about it in the present-day
propaganda media...an occasional story about a ballot box bobbing up in
Lake Michigan or the Gulf of Mexico or some exotic place like that...and
folks seem to feel that elections around the country are pretty honest, if
they feel anything about it at all.

Still I remember a year or so ago when Country Joe McDonald's mom was up
here, running for state office, she was on a call-in program on K-Dump and
some guy called in and started talking about when Ronzo was first elected
President, and how the people on national TV would take the first few votes
in a state, much too small a sample to be significant ("As anyone who knows
anything about statistics could tell you," he said) and they would say,
"Well, there's another one for the Gipper," and they would concede the
state to Ronzo, and they were never wrong, and this guy asked mom McDonald
if she thought anybody really counted the votes, and she walked around that
for a while and ended by saying she thought the system was very corrupt.

I think the only well-publicized case of an American election being stolen
was what is politely called the Tilden-Hayes Controversy, when Samuel
Tilden, a Democratic candidate, was elected to the Presidency and the
Republican incumbent, President Grant, who commanded the machinery of the
government and the loyalty of the armed services, said, no, we won't count
the votes that elected Mr. Tilden, we will count the votes for Mr. Hayes,
and this was the way it went down.  This occurred in 1876; Gore Vidal wrote
a novel about it with that name, 1876, published in 1976, (this was the
Gore Vidal who ran for the U.S. Senate here in California a few years ago),
but this thing really happened, not like the Bob Hope story that had Joseph
Kennedy telling his son JFK, "Just win...I'm not going to pay for a
landslide."

If you want to take a shot at it, here's a droll story I think you might be
able to work up into something for a Pulitzer Prize...I think the Pulitzer
Prize committee sometimes gets within a hundred years of a touchy subject:
In a certain San Francisco city and county election...I forget the year,
but it was the first time the honorable Joseph Alioto was elected mayor of
San Francisco...it cost practically nothing to register as a candidate, &
people were feeling pretty perky, so a lot of people registered as clown
candidates for mayor and supervisor...one of Owsley's salesmen was a
candidate, as I remember...and some of these candidates were extremely
obscure and stayed that way, whereas some ran heavy campaigns.  In the
election results, as published by the San Francisco Chronicle, the obscure
mayoral candidates received a few dozen votes apiece, whereas EVERY
supervisorial candidate, no matter how obscure, received AT LEAST one
thousand votes, which seems peculiar unless someone was just being kind to
the supervisorial candidates...but if that was the case, why didn't they
extend the same consideration to the mayoral candidates as well?

The San Francisco Chronicle and its readers are, of course, notable for
erring on the side of kindness in relation to political figures.  I
remember the Republican convention held in San Francisco nominated Senator
Goldwater as its Presidential candidate, and I remember Nelson Rockefeller
being hooted off the podium when he attempted to address those delegates,
and I remember the San Francisco Chronicle front page headline the
following day that said, ROCKY READS THE RIOT ACT TO THE CONVENTION...the
diametric opposite of what everyone knew had actually happened, and no one
thought it strange.

Someone (Rexroth, actually) once observed that most of the people who could
vote in the United States just don't vote.  HE thought that this was
because they know they would be participating in a hoax, but I think it's
more that they just don't give a damn.  I think one example of people being
interested enough to vote occurred recently in Portland, Oregon, where a
man was elected mayor on the strength of the notice he gained from
appearing on a nationally-distributed picture poster.  I saw one of these
posters on Main Street in Mendocino...I think in Zacha's front window...and
you see a rear view of this man, wearing no trousers, holding his raincoat
open in front of a statue of a nude lady, and the caption said, "Expose
yourself to Art."  This man said he thought it might be fun to be mayor of
Portland, Oregon.

I think these two examples indicate where most of the American voters are
at.  And anyone who wants to unseat Chormin' Norman before he moves up to
Sacramento will either have to act more decent than he does or do a better
imitation of Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

Wanda Tinasky
Highway One
Fort Bragg