The Watts bombing, the Navy, and the Rev. Leslie R. White

The Petrophile Overlords are coming undone over the Watts bombing.

I was pretty surprised to hear on the news last week that the Navy had "accidentally" dropped a load of bombs on the Watts district of Los Angeles. Turns out the only person who thought it was accidental was the Channel 7 anchorwoman who reported it. Morale has never been lower around here. The brigs are full of sailors who don't want to have anything to do with the Navy anymore.

Ear to the ground

If you want to know what the military is up to, for heaven's sake, don't read the official report. Official channels are mostly used for blowing smoke up the public skirt. Instead, go to the Navy housing playground next to their hospital and push your cute son on the baby bucket swings. And listen. Sure, there's plenty of wild speculation from people who have no idea what they're talking about, but you can pick out the real stuff from the garbage if you know what to listen for.
The officer's quarters jogging path, by the way, is another good place to have your ears open. Oh, yes, and the bx - the base's grocery store - where a nosy civilian named electric-car-girl is now delivering local organic produce every Tuesday, with her Navy escort, Williams...that's another good place to be a fly on the wall.


Here are some interesting tidbits related to the Watts bombing, if anyone's interested...

1) The plane and the pilot involved flew out of Whidbey Island Naval Air Station here on my peninsula, on the northern end of the New Naval Territories, as my husband sarcastically refers to it since WWO. It didn't come from the aircraft carrier off shore, as was originally reported. (That carrier, the Stennis, is temporarily back in port here from its West Coast patrol - and the gossip is very definite on that point.)

2) That pilot is dead. He committed "suicide" last week.

It seems that the Navy pilots all know each other. Why? Not that many of them. Virtually all of them train at Miramar, and the West Coasties mostly fly out of Whidbey, and so over the years they've all run into each other at the officer's mess here or there at one time or another. Brothers. And guess what? Nobody had ever heard of this guy. Correction: Not nobody, exactly. See item 4), below.

3) The plane has vanished off the surface of the earth.

Two different sources think they saw that plane go down in the deep water off the coast, the Mariana Trench, so that was a real good place to put it if you never want to see it again. My question is, did it fly there on its own?


Now, this is where the story gets really interesting...

If this truly was no "accident", why would the US military bomb the Watts district of Los Angeles, you might ask? And after a little thought, you might even get around to wondering how they even got a highly motivated, carefully trained pilot - an officer - to drop a load of bombs on his own country. After all, we're not talking about flying halfway around the world to bomb things that belong to people you've never met and who are prone to driving suicide bombs into your checkpoint shack. We're talking about dropping bombs on Aunt Sophie and Grandma Hattie, and maybe the next Shaquille O'Neal.

4) The pilot might have washed out of flight school as a mental case.

Word is, the guy might have been recruited for his psychotic neo-nazi skills rather than for his piloting. Somebody thinks they might remember him from Miramar, but he didn't last two weeks. They said his radio handle was Skinhead, if that gives you any insight into his character.

5) The Bush administration didn't do it.

Playground gossip is that this strike was rogue DHS/FEMA, not White House.

Word is also that it might have actually been a very messy assassination of a particularly dangerous terrorist: the Rev. Leslie R. White of the Grant AME church, also known as the Church of Watts. Around here, Rev. White is being compared to the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and his picture is popping up everywhere.

If anybody knows why specifically Rev. White would be targeted by Homeland Insecurity as a terrorist, I'd sure like to hear about it.

Having a ball

I refuse to accept a life without joy, without culture. What good is it to be human if you can't dance?


Yes, yes, the Navy's got my knickers in a knot.

They've been making a few changes around the school district; most of them for the worse, in my opinion. I suppose I could have predicted that their definition of "necessary" would be different from mine.

For example: Gavvy's school has been closed. Bruce (my husband) says all "non-essential" classes around the district have been cancelled until further notice. Surprisingly, they weren't referring to math; ) They mean art, dance, drama, choir, band, special ed(!)...even languages like French and Spanish are considered "non-essential". In other words, they seem determined to suck all the remaining happiness out of the kids' lives. The parents around here just duck their heads and go right along, same as they always do. The other teachers have been around long enough to know when to keep their mouths shut... but not Bruce, of course.

He argued with the new Navy-issued Super about it until the guy threatened to put him in jail. Apparently somebody from the admin office intervened - funny, she's usually fighting with Bruce, not for him - and the other teachers got him out of there before he could do any more harm to his job prospects.

Really, he doesn't have anything to worry about. Nobody else wants to babysit.


On other subjects, the ferries have stopped. Even the Bainbridge ferry to Seattle, which is where half of Seattle's (rich) lawyers and (rich) accountants live. It's some kind of terrorism threat, according to the news. I'm more likely to believe that, with the ferry system operating so close to the bone for so many years, the state just doesn't have the money to put diesel in them now. And no doubt the Navy sees them as "non-essential", or else they can't justify appropriating that much fuel just to keep the peninsula workers happy.

Still, that's a few thousand more Bremerton, Bainbridge, and Vashon workers and professionals who can't get to work.


I'm on the planning committee for the local farmers market, and we've all agreed that it should probably remain where it's always been; in the Silverdale hotel parking lot. Nice central location. Problem is, the farmers can't afford to drive the food to the market from the farms around Silverdale, Poulsbo, Kingston, and we've even got a honey supplier from up in Port Gamble... and still break even.

Now the Navy, while they don't see the need for organic produce (it doesn't come in a can tattooed with letters and numbers, does it?), can definitely get behind the idea of local food; it means self-sufficiency. Very military.
Their budget for fuel is pretty loose, so once we found the right person to propose to, the rest was a piece of cake. We got a (refrigerated!) diesel truck, a fuel card, and a pair of twenty-somethings in uniform named Williams and Fish.

I've got a two-seat Zenn, which isn't much good for carpooling, but I can fit a fair amount of stuff in the back...so I'm taking vegetable orders and bringing boxes back to Bremerton. Note to self: If down to less than half-charge, you can't get up Andersen Hill with a hundred pounds of produce in the back; )


Anyway, back to the theme of joy.

Item 1: We're not letting the school go to the dogs. There are no non-essential subjects, and no non-essential students. I'm calling Gavvy's teacher to see if there's anything I can do.

Item 2: We're planning a neighborhood ball. Yes, you heard me right. There's going to be dressing up, dancing, and laughing until dawn in the gymnasium of the elementary school down the street. Now, to figure out the best way to broach this with our keepers.

Item 3: We're learning how to garden. Seems there's more to it than putting seeds in the dirt and throwing some water on top, and some of the old people in our neighborhood are really good at it. Now, to get up the nerve to go talk to them.

Item 4: We're not going to live in fear, or pessimism. Reality is what it is; and you might say it's not that bad for us, so we can afford to fart clouds of sunshine. You might be thinking your neck of the woods is so steeped in violence and need that you can't help but despair. But I argue that - no matter what - we've got the choice to live with hope, love, and optimism, even if it seems insane. Better to be insane and human, than "realistic"...and much less.


The Seattle Electric Vehicle Association meeting was cancelled, because of security, or lack of it. I suggested we move it to Bremerton. I might be irritated at Big Brother, but they do keep the crime under control. Nothing's decided yet.

Hummer-flogging Petrophiles

I've been calling them the Hummer-floggers, or Petrophiles, or other disparaging terms for so long that I forgot they sometimes actually make themselves useful: I'm talking about the huge Navy community here in Bremerton, thanks to the naval shipyard on one end and the submarine base on the other.
Started calling 'em that because we've got a huge autoplex here - for a relatively small town - and all those boys from the ships and the Naval hospital seem to have driven off the lot with a Hummer or some other unsightly land-tank. I keep telling 'em that driving a giant gas-gobbler doesn't REALLY compensate for anything, but I've never felt like I got through; )

Anyway, I KNEW there was a good reason I wanted to situate myself in the warm, hairy lap of the Navy: They live here. The officers - the doctors and nurses at the Naval hospital, the scientists and metallurgists at the shipyard, and all the other military middle-class that makes the floating blue world go 'round - they all own homes here, send their kids to school here, and will retire here. It just follows that they're going to make it their business to take good care of it.

Now the Navy has quietly taken over Bremerton and Silverdale. I hear they've "secured" the whole Olympic Peninsula, Whidbey to Pt. Townsend to Pt. Angeles, too. I don't know whether this is a good thing or not. Our family isn't remotely Navy - in fact, we're overeducated bleeding-heart liberals - and all the mindless goose-stepping usually gets on our nerves.
It's hard to turn down good help, though.

They're making sure the civilian hospital stays supplied with equipment and staff, putting uniformed patrol on the streets, in the schools, in the grocery stores, and at the gas stations.
They've taken over the (diesel) city buses, which are now free and run a lot. Uniformed Navy personnel are driving the extra city bus routes.

My husband's job (he's a substitute teacher here in the Bremerton School District) isn't in any danger; in fact, he's got more work than ever. Lots of the regular teachers around here actually live in the outlying areas where the improved city bus service can't reach them. Consequently, the administration has gotten pretty desperate to staff the school. I hear they're tapping the Navy for that, too. Why not.

The compounding pharmacy in Maryland that's been shipping Gavvy's special vitamins to him since he was born actually called me yesterday to say their supplies might be unstable, and would we like to order an extra bottle, just to be sure? We don't really have the money, but I ordered two extra (they're about 75 dollars for a month's supply, but shipping has gone from 6.95 a package to 21.50). I'm feeling optimistic about business and pessimistic about continued availability of the vitamins, so I went ahead.

For most of us, vitamin supplements are sort of a luxury. For my beautiful son, an urgent necessity. Because of a chromosomal abnormality, his body will eat itself alive without the antioxidants.

I can't think about that too much.

Anyway, the news is basically good from Bremerton, thanks to the Navy. Everything still works. Sounds like naptime is over, so I'll say goodbye until next week.

There's a meeting of the Seattle chapter of the electric vehicle association on Tuesday night, and my presence has been sweetly requested. It'll be interesting to see what my buddies are doing with their alternative transportation. Only good deeds, I hope; )