I have posted once before on the little Anderson Valley Advertiser, published in Boonville, Mendocino County, and why it is that I happen to look over its news pages every now and again. We have a property up there we're fixing up is why. The AVA, as it is known, has a mix from all ends and meanders of the political landscape, largely not edited judging by the blowsy length of some of it but even the letters from readers tend to be sharply composed with decent grammar. It's "about us" page slyly declares that "Lots of people think the AVA is the best weekly newspaper in the country."
The last post was about killer whales. This one is very different:
- AVA.com – Mondocino Country Today/ MENDO PEOPLE TALK ABOUT OBAMACARE ; and most of them, from this non-scientitic newspaper overview, seem to like it to the extent that they know anything about it. The long roundup column's hed understates things. It starts off on Obamacare including suggestion that the ACA's big problem is that it is not socialist enough, wends through the gov't shutdown, and then finishes up with a stew pot of odds and ends that have Mendocino's tongues wagging.
It's a fun read, especially as it's from such a rural county yet appears unflavored by the Tea Party rants that dominate political discussion most places in the nation that are far from big cities.
A moment for language lovers to watch for is the appearance out of nowhere of "pwogs". Isn't that a flash from the past? I looked it up to make sure I'd get this right – it's shorthand for "progressives," is not entirely flattering in that it often is in reference to knee-jerk old wannabe rads who reflexively support anything that smells of far liberal to even socialist ideas. Its origin is the urban northeast. The yiddish-inflected spelling reflecting what one might hear in a New York coffee house in the middle to latter part of the last century. What a great and ambiguous word is pwog. It's casual use in a small, local news outlet is in keeping with Mendocino, especially the coastal villages where a a lot of intellectuals and a penumbra of poseurs have settled down. Mrs. Tracker and I are still (and probably forever) outsiders up there, but the county seems to include three rough population divisions. One is the old-timers, generally conservative and otherwise careful, diligent, conventional people with roots in farming, logging, fishing, etc. Then there are the urban migrants like us including a sub-stratum of former radicals and semi-hippies and their various kin, people among whom or about whom the word pwog might crop up. Its third component is the deep woodsy interior where the pot farms lurk, leaking both money and desperation into the rest of the region. Those marijuana plots, I hear, make the hinterland dangerous. People who run those operations perhaps fear cannabis rustlers even more than they do raids by federal narcs or local cops. So, they say, among their growing buds are scattered booby traps, claymore mines, and other such discouraging perils.
And from what I've seen, affordable care is something Mendocino County really, really needs.
A Few Other Riffs and Whiffs on Obamacare:
- YouTube: Six of One – Obamacare vs. The Affordable Care Act ;
- Daily Kos – Joan McCarter: Public still confused about Obamacare, blame media ; Which leads to another McCarter blog with a sharper point: Chuck Todd: Pointing out Republican lies isn't his job; Todd is of course a MSNBC pundit and host who said it is not the media's job to educate the public about the Affordable Care Act/Obamacare. I know what he was trying to say (reporting news is not the same as educating the public), but he should have tried harder.
- Forbes – Cameron King: ObamaCare (Affordable Care Act) Is Not An Insurance Or Healthcare Problem ; One of the saner explainers of a law that some seem to regard as an Obamapocalypse. No, King explains. It's just an incremental (not revoluationary) law about paying for health care and getting more people to be able to afford it – and it will have a rocky start, is damned complicated, and in the end will probably leave us all a little bit better off.
Leave a Reply