| Sunday,
June 10, 2001
Musing on the McGuckins of Idaho
I recently received a letter purporting to be from the "lawyer in
exile" of Mrs. JoAnn McGuckin, the mother in the very odd Idaho
situation involving a bunch of kids who didn't trust the cops, and their
pack of dogs which may or may not have been vicious. The letter purports
to be from "Edgar J. Steele, McGuckin Family Lawyer in Exile."
It came to me from a friend who forwarded it from an organization
purporting to be the Militia of Montana. My friend pleaded with me to get
the letter published. Attached to the letter was another from an official
of an Oregon local government who is involved with Internet attacks on her
police, including publication of the police home addresses and telephone
numbers.
All of that prompted me to write a reply to my two friends, and it got
long enough that I decided to edit it and put it here as well. So the
following was not written to be posted, and is pretty well first draft:
The problem here is one of credibility; there is no way for outsiders
to check facts. There are some inferences.
The media doesn't seem to have access to Mrs. McGuckin. Why? Absent
other information one assumes they are being kept away from her. I don't
much trust the media anyway, but I would rather see media interviews with
her than merely read statements purporting to come from her but delivered
by her jailors.
I have seen no TV coverage of this pack of dogs everyone talks about.
The letter claims they are mostly small dogs, and many are puppies.. I am
not sure what to make of that. Why haven't we seen that? To the best of my
knowledge we haven't seen any films of the dogs at all. I have seen
statements by neighbors to the effect that the dogs aren't vicious, many
are puppies, the
kids aren't starving, and they don't know what the fuss is about. I have
seen statements from public officials that conditions in the place were
horrible. I have heard that the kids kept the dogs inside during the
siege, preferring to live in the dog mess than risk having their dogs
killed by the local police. Knowing kids I can believe that, but really I have no notion of what to believe, and I don't have a lot of
faith in the sources of what little information I do have.
As to harassment of government officials, what are citizens to do when
the government harasses them? Harass policemen in general? Hardly wise.
"Makin' mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep is cheaper
than them uniforms and they're starvation cheap," and that applies to
the thin blue line as well as the thin red line. I don't want to have to
defend my home against all comers. I want police and order. I also don't
want the cops as tyrants.
In California it is a crime to publish a police officer's home address,
and In LA most of the cops live outside the city anyway. And we have
problems filling the police vacancies largely because the LA cops are now
more afraid of the Feds than the bad guys: they will try you again and
again until they can jail you. It's not just local citizens who harass the
cops.
But suppose we have police who trick a woman out of her house with
promises of welfare aid, then arrest her and put her under $100,000 bail,
not because they are afraid she will flee the jurisdiction, but because -
and they say so themselves - they are afraid she WILL NOT flee but will go
back and TALK TO HER OWN CHILDREN and of course we can't have that. This
was, according to the LA Times, exactly what happened in Idaho.
$100,000 is excessive bail by any possible stretch of the imagination
for the "crime" of neglecting one's own children, particularly
in the absence of complaints by the kids themselves and prior to any
inspection. There is a line between criminal neglect and not being the
ideal parent. It's not always easy to establish, but few actual parents
will dispute that there is a difference. Those excessively obsessed with
minding other people's business and who have no children of their own
probably have other views.
I have no idea what the conditions in that house were, but I do know
that people don't starve when there are dogs around. I recall many years
go going personally to Dimbazhe, as in "Last Graves at Dimbazhe".
The town was in South Africa and spawned an award winning
documentary of that title. At the time the documentary was being shown and
there was a favorable review of it in the Port Elizabeth paper I read that
morning. The film described the town as a concentration camp maintained by
the Bureau of State Security of South Africa, and stated it was inhabited
mostly be women, who were starving and were required to walk miles
to get water.
The South African government didn't want me to go there which made me
more determined, particularly when the Roman Catholic Bishop of Durban, a
place no more than 40 miles by good road from Dimbahze, said it was all
true and conditions were wretched, etc. I found out that His Reverence had
not in fact ever been there.
Fortunately I had a way of making the government let me go there, and
Roberta and I went, unannounced. When we drove in the first thing I saw
was a fat dog. I didn't much believe in the starvation from that moment;
then I saw FLOWER gardens. Cleary things grew and they weren't growing
edibles. Then I saw WATER HYDRANTS at each house. Turns out that the local
women didn't like the taste of chlorine in the water, and walked miles to
fill jugs in a reservoir despite the greater biological hazards from the
untreated water. The SA official said "Are we supposed to arrest them
for carrying water?"
I also talked to the village school master, who said his greatest need
was subscriptions to picture magazines there being no TV in the village,
and also Rugby uniforms as playing Rugby was the only incentive he had to
keep teen age boys in school when their parents wanted them out in the
fields tending cattle. I could go on, but the point is that the purpose of
the documentary was to win an award, not to tell the truth. Alas this is
often so with the media. It's for a good cause after all, so truth isn't
as important as getting the message across.
But stories of starving kids and well fed dogs do not make a lot of
sense to me, and when I see one discrepancy I wonder about others.
The Idaho story is full of such discrepancies. It's pretty clear that
wasn't an ideal home situation, but then rural places where the father is
dying of a wasting disease aren't likely to be ideal or even pleasant;
does this mean that the local authorities have the right to trick the
widow out of her house and place her under bail that even King George III
would agree was excessive for the alleged crime? I thought there was this
Constitution in the US that said something about excessive bail, but have
I misread it? Same place as it talks about cruel and unusual punishments
and twice being in jeopardy for the same offense I think.. At one time we
thought such matters fundamental. Apparently no longer. Pity
So while as former deputy mayor of Los Angeles I have considerable
sympathy for local government and the problems of officials and people
harassing my cops, as a citizen of the US I have a lot of problems with
government deciding to "help" those children and then using what
the local government itself admits was a shoddy ruse to get the widow out
of the house.
Incidentally it is my understanding that the Masons are supposed to be
sworn to HELP widows; I hope there were no Masons among the police force
that tricked her then put her under $100,000 bail so she would not have
access to her own children.
Note I am taking nothing from the letter you attached because I have no
idea of its authenticity. I take all my data from the LA times. If the
allegations in the letter attached are true, then for God's sake what
should a widow's neighbors and fellow citizens do? But I don't know if
they are true. At least one part of it is false: I don't know about the
roots but lily pad leaves aren't poisonous or they have a different
variety of lily pad in Idaho than they had in Tennessee. I would not
myself much fancy lily pad soup but kids do the damndest things and I am
not sure I would trick their mother out of her house and jail her because
her kids ate some soup made from something odd; I doubt we have enough
jails to hold all the parents if we started doing that.
I don't have a lot of confidence in the militia of Montana as a
reliable source and I don't know what a lawyer in exile is. I know that
it's pretty hard to keep a lawyer away from his client in this country if
indeed he is a lawyer and she is his client and wants to talk to him. It
is a very serious matter to prevent lawyer and client from talking. So on
the internal evidence of that attachment there is something wrong here.
And there I leave it. I wouldn't publish that document because I don't
believe it and I have no confidence in the source. On the other hand from
what I have heard from the LA Times something very odd happened up there
in Idaho. Finally from listening to interviews with the local sheriff he
seems a reasonably decent sort and he has to stand for election, and the
best remedy for most of this kind of problem is to leave it to the local
authorities who are responsible to the local people.
Truth is likely to come out, and this hardly seems the stuff from which
to make a rebellion...
I have just found out something I ought to have
known, that the novelist Trevanian (Eiger Sanction, Shibumi, etc.) is in
fact my old friend Rod Whitaker. I have recently come across a picture of
him and his wife of 40 years, and that's Rod and Diane all right: I give
away no secrets here since apparently his identity was secret for years
but has come out in the last decade or so. I am hardly surprised that he
has done well; in fact I was astonished that I hadn't heard of or from him
in nearly 40 years.
I don't have an email address and he may well not want correspondence
from me, but I would like to wish him well. We were pretty good friends in
Seattle a very long time ago. I can't think of one negative thing to say
about him or Diane.
I have an exchange of correspondence on Linux and
applications that I think is worth preserving. It isn't quite mail and it
isn't quite a report. I have a subweb called Linux here, and FrontPage
2000 does offer to convert it to a folder; I think I will try that and see
what happens, and if it works, I will put this in a page in that folder
and reference it in various other places.
It seems to have converted fine. There were a number of Linux pages in
it; some are not obsolete.
I have written an INDEX to the Linux
section here.
There is also an exchange of views on the subject of Linux
and APPLICATIONS.
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