Tying it All Together - Part 3 Friends in High Places? (TELL me about it!)

Tying it All Together - Part 3
Friends in High Places? (TELL me about it!)

SYNOPSIS: Parts 1 & 2 brought us through Mainstream America’s aversion to American Indians, and linked the Marin County Board of Supervisors to the Pomo Indians in Cloverdale and the memorial to them that was lost when a suspicious fire destroyed the historic Cloverdale depot in 1991.

This episode, Part 3, lays out my belief that the fire was truly arson and that an ominous link exists between the Cloverdale affair and the Evergreen Avenue sidewalk project in Homestead Valley because the Disciples of Progress are in charge, and while not obvious, a real and potentially volatile situation is rushing upon us with momentum and freewheeling energy that has built up over many miles of clear and unobstructed track, with nary a thought of cooperation or negotiation and certainly no inclination to brook any changes now. With the Cloverdale affair as a precedent, a kneejerk reaction will soon be invoked to pull a few strings and zingo – it’s done!

Part 3
Several weeks ago the Mill Valley Patch, an online news medium at “http://millvalley.patch.com,” published a feature entitled, “Where am I?” It was a photo of a bronze plaque embedded in the sidewalk near 48 Locust Avenue, (which is behind the Miller Avenue 7-11) which memorializes “Marino,” the Miwok Indian for whom Marin County is named. By their approval of this memorial plaque the Mill Valley City Council is now linked to the Cloverdale affair, at least spiritually, and it would take a pretty feeble imagination to wonder how or why.

Before the fire, in the autumn of 1991, the City of Cloverdale was negotiating with Caltrans to acquire a lot the State owned on Main Street in Cloverdale, between Third Street and Fourth Street, (which the State eventually deeded to the Cloverdale Community Development Agency.) One day my office telephone rang in San Francisco. The caller was an eminent political figure in the City of Cloverdale and wanted to talk about the lot on Main Street. After an interval of official talk about the lot on Main Street, the conversation drifted to the historic Depot, which Caltrans was soon supposed to relocate. Before long this person says, "Cook, if that depot ever catches fire, the fire trucks will never make it on time. I guarantee you that."

They didn’t.

And that is why MY kneejerk reaction is to suspect trouble if anyone should interfere with the published plans for Evergreen Avenue, and my kneejerk fear is that those who will suffer most are the County staff who are caught in the pincers between their consciences and their superiors and politicians who hold a good measure of dominion over their lives. The Disciples of Progress operate like the law of gravity: “without rancor but without pity.” They just get up every day and do their thing: more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more… ad infinitum. I operate on the assumption that most public officials are either themselves Disciples of Progress, or sympathetic to the “more, more, more “ credo of the Disciples of Progress, or fear for the disposition of their souls at Judgment time if they should question the Disciples of Progress.

I am concerned about the few who may have the wisdom and the courage to ask, “Why are we doing this?” and run for the vomitory when they hear the answer.

Friends in high places? TELL me about it.

To be continued.