On the Passing of Jerry Parker

Sonoma journalist Jerry Parker died recently. This is in memory and honor of a man I knew and admired.

I knew Jerry Parker, I liked him, I admired his writing style and I’ll mourn his passing.

Jerry was writing a weekly column for this paper when I first came to town in the mid-80s, and I wrote in to the paper that it was the best thing about it. This did not endear me to the paper’s former editor. C’est la vie.

In those days Jerry’s column ranged from the intricacy and inherent beauty of the natural world, reminiscent of Thoreau, to critiques or commentaries on the political, social or environmental issues of the day, local and otherwise. His writing was incisive, succinct and direct to the matter at hand, but never hyperbolic or ranting. He was an iconoclast and a fierce critic of the cultural excesses and vanities he considered extraneous distractions. He was a serious man, and an astute observer of and witness to the failings of what he considered an overindulgent and superficial culture caught up in the pursuit of wealth and self-aggrandizement.

He was never petty or personally insulting, but he spoke his truth plainly and, in my estimation, poignantly. He had a great writing style, careful and precise, honed over many years in journalism, and inspired by a voluminous and well-read library of the literary masters. Just as well he could artfully explore the beauty of the natural world that he felt more attached to and aligned with than the human one. He could also take the reader on walks with him and his beloved dog Chester through the Sonoma hills, which gave one entry to his heart and soul and truly moral nature.

I got to know Jerry personally when I did some work around his very modest cabins off Warm Springs Road when he’d reached an age where he needed help with roofing or other small building projects. Around that time I started publishing a newsletter that focused on Sonoma City and Valley issues, featuring commentary pieces by local writers. After work we’d get into long political, sometimes philosophical discussions about all sorts of things, finding common ground in our critical and sometimes jaundiced view on the passing parade, and directions in which our country had been going. Or we’d talk about New York City where I hale from and where he lived and worked in the 40s, or about the dignity and nobility of dogs and how much we enjoyed their company, or about some of the writers, none contemporary, that he loved and I pleasured in learning more about.

He could certainly be irascible and extremely opinionated, but I always found him to be a gentle, self-effacing and non-egoic man. He had regrets and failings that he talked about, and probably loved books, and nature, and dogs as well as if not more so than most humans. He did speak glowingly about his wife and family, always remarking that he did not feel worthy of their love and devotion. Whatever his failings, real or perceived, he was a man of great character and deep substance, and Sonoma and the world beyond is the lesser for his passing.

If there’s a world beyond this one I hope it looks like the Sonoma hills and valley, and I’ll catch up with Jerry Parker and we’ll walk our dogs through the valleys of eternity. Maybe we’ll stop for a cold beer at day’s end.

See ya, Jerry.

Will Shonbrun

The Real Culprit

It’s all the fault of the free-market deregulators. No, no, it’s all the fault of the greedy, sub-prime mortgage lenders. Un unh, it’s those rapacious speculators who played the market like slick Enron gamers. Wrong again, it was the sickeningly usurious banks and Wall Street geeks who shuffled around bundles of crappy mortgage-backed securities from one institutional dupe to another. Think again, John and Jane Public, it’s all because China got too filthy rich, and dumped a gazillion dollars into U.S. markets, thereby inflating, and devaluing, and doing whatever it is that they did to bring financial ruin to the world. Let’s see, has anyone been left out? Oh yes! It’s the credit industry, the credit mentality, the buy it now, pay for it…whenever, virus that’s infected Americans for the last half-century. It’s the entitlement mongers. It’s you, and me, and the rest of the 95% of us who don’t make $3 million bucks a year, and don’t care if we’re in debt up to our nostrils. Of course, it was all OUR FAULT!

Oh, it’s so simple. How could we have not known it was all our doing – this whole financial meltdown? It was us! We wanted houses, and cars, and colleges for our kids, and medical care, and wage increases, and vacations, and, you know, all those outrageous extravagances, like food and shelter and clothes, and so forth. Greedy, bad, welfare-grubbing, no-account Americans who want government to coddle them and buy them lunch. Now we know who got us, 95% of us anyway, into this mess. It’s our own something-for-nothing, screw-you-I’ve-got-mine, nothing-counts-but-me, you know, human nature. How could we not have seen that?

So, okay, what are we going to do about it? Everyone knows you can’t change human nature. Well, everyone except evangelicals and psychoanalysts. Left to our own devices, we humans are a brutal, aggressive, club-wielding lot only out for our own survival. If you don’t believe me go to any playground. It’s horrifying. They don’t call it a jungle gym for nothing. All right, all right, we know it was us and our unbridled, ego-driven human natures who are responsible for THE CRASH. Does that mean it’s all hopeless and we’ll be living out the Mad Max scenario for the next millennia?

Of course not fellow (by nature) miscreants. Like the (nausea inducing) song says, “ We will survive.” Sure there’ll be a few rough years - cardboard box housing, bread and ketchup dinners, dumpster-diving employment, - but we’re Americans! We’ll bounce back! We always do. We may have to forego some of the luxuries for a while – jobs, housing, food, that kind of stuff, - but we’ll be back stronger than ever. We rebounded bigger and better from other crashes, and this one’s no different. The Dow will rise again, new funding will ride in from somewhere, we’ll be able to borrow our brains out once again, and, and…we’ll probably repeat the whole circus again sometime down the line. It’s human nature.

Is the War in Iraq a Local Issue?

If you could choose how to spend the tax dollars that provide federal government funding for our nation’s needs would you have that money go toward a universal health care system, affordable housing units, elementary school teachers, public safety, transportation and infrastructure needs, or to the continuation of war and occupation in Iraq?

*According to a study issued by MoveOn.org, using estimates based on congressional budget allocations and supplemental funding bills the cost of the war/occupation was $456 billion in 2007. According to Internal Revenue Service records used to compute the costs at a local level, war spending included $1.33 billion of taxes collected in the 6th and 1st Congressional Districts, which comprises most of Sonoma County.

In Sonoma County we’ve seen funding diminished for our schools, hospitals, libraries, environmental protections, transportation needs and affordable workforce housing. Three of our county hospitals are in dire financial straits and face closing their doors. Tuition for Sonoma high school graduates applying to UC and UCS colleges is skyrocketing, ranging from $17,000-$24,000 a year, and loans for higher education are financially crippling many families and students. Despite the downturn in Sonoma housing prices, entry level housing for essential Sonoma workforce services – education, public safety, health care, etc. – is still prohibitive, forcing longer out-of-town commute hours, and increasing highway deterioration, air pollution and greenhouse gasses. Who in Sonoma County has not felt the financial and social impacts related to the cost of this war?

And then there are the unquantifiable and devastating impacts on Sonoma families and their communities when Sonoma’s sons or daughters are killed or grievously wounded in Iraq. Such losses are inestimable and lived with for a lifetime.

The war machine has deployed California’s National Guard to Iraq, as it has the other states, of which Sonoma County has 200 members or so. By so doing Sonoma county and other regions are left vulnerable to emergencies and natural disasters. Thus the prosecution and elongation of this war/occupation puts all Sonomans in greater jeopardy.

President Eisenhower famously said in his Cross of Iron speech:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.”

Schools, homes, roads and hospitals. How do you get more local than that?


The “war on terrorism” with Iraq as ground zero has given rise to illegal warrantless secret government surveillance on American’s phone calls and mail. Government domestic spying has not just been relegated to international calls as we were led to believe, but to collecting phone call data from tens of thousands of citizens as reported in the N.Y. Times and other media. We in Sonoma are not immune to these abuses of Constitutional rights of privacy, just as we are subject to certain provisions of the U.S.A. Patriot Act’s incursion into library and bookstore records.

The Iraq war has resulted in the use and contracting of torture and clandestine renditions for that nefarious purpose, and the elimination of judicial due process. Unprecedented and incredible! Besides putting our military in extraordinary danger (if captured), this reprehensible violation of the Geneva Conventions disgraces the model of American democracy in the eyes of the world, as we are all, Sonomans included, tarred with that despicable brush.

The theme of this edition of the Peace Press is sustainability. One of the meanings of the word sustain is: to bear up under; suffer or undergo. This begs the question: how much longer can this occupation of a foreign land be sustained – by our fellow countrymen or we in Sonoma?

The late, great Molly Ivins said in her last published column, “We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war.”

*Sources: The Santa Rosa Press Democrat, 8/17/07, and National Priorities Project, 2007.