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Ash on Bakersfield streets, Yemeni cigarettes, and the Superdome syndrome
Topics: Bakersfield, music, Bakotopia, Bakotopia.com, entertainment, Bakotunes Belardes
Posted by thenovelist Sat Sep 30, 2006 14:39:08 PDT
Viewed 196 times
0 responses 0 comments  In case you didn’t notice why your car is dusty, what the little pieces of grey snow are that have been delicately falling all day, and why your sinuses have been itching, it’s the ash fallout from the Day Fire.

I don’t remember Bakersfield ever getting coated in ash. Tell me this isn’t what fallout was like in downtown Las Vegas in the 1950s when gamblers stopped pulling slots just long enough to go outside and see a mushroom cloud appear in the Nevadan skyline.

You can go to Mt. Charleston just thirty minutes northwest of Las Vegas and park at a vista lookout carved by the old Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). From there you can see a map of the Nevada Test Site and a silhouette of the nearby mountain ranges. This was a popular spot to watch the explosions too. Lots of folks had picnics while watching the light show.

You didn’t see that on I Love Lucy.

Talk about American cancer clusters.

Here in the Central Valley we don’t need fallout from A-bombs or forest fires to get cancer. All you have to do is live in a small farming community like Delano or McFarland where toxins are still poured onto fields from airplanes and machines. Farmers do it because they’re obsessed with high productivity of agricultural output—numbers that consistently multiply the output of early 20th Century farms.

Bio-systems poisoned, cancer clusters, and soil wracked beyond repair—the cost of progress. Go organic when you can. The cost is higher, but society pays a smaller price in cancer medical bills. And the environment won’t get so wracked. (Read Blithe Tomato, the story of an organic farm and farmers’ market society. It’s a good book. It’s eye-opening).

I guarantee some of the readers of this blog have known young folks stricken with cancer in the Central Valley. Unexplained? Maybe. The truth? Think about it—kids playing in vineyards, parent fieldworkers eating grapes from the vine, sometimes gooey with pesticides.

Licking their fingers.

It’s called big money cover-up and news-suppression. That’s the valley we live in.

Google terms like “pesticides” and “Central Valley pesticides” for starters and see what kind of reports you come up with. It’s far worse than the stuffy noses we’ve all been getting from the Day Fire ash fallout.

Speaking of local news making national headlines within the last year or so: The Day Fire near Frazier Park is linked on major news networks—no news-suppression there; the intelligent design controversy and class closure at Frazier Park, the 40mm shell explosion in the Oleander area of Bakersfield, the Red Cross Katrina scam (Some perpetrators caught by our own Jesse Rivera I might add. He’s a damn hero. Why isn’t our All-American city honoring him?), Bill Thomas Shenanigans, Bakersfield as one of America’s most polluted cities (finally a ranking higher than Fresno!). No news-suppression there—except maybe in Bakersfield itself. I swear you can turn on the nightly news in Bakersfield and see the top of a gas mask nearly out of range as the local meteorologist out in the field says, “The weather today is Tony the Tiger grrrrreat in Bakersfield and its surrounding communities!” And then you see him reach for the mask as a Mauricios commercial starts screaming.

And then there’s the Yemeni-terrorist-Bakersfield-secret government document news story. This is the biggest news out of Bakersfield since the Lords of Bakersfield stories were exposed by conspiracy journalist Robert Price.

The local news was all over this story of scandal and secrets. Let’s talk terrorist associations in Bakersfield and question how many more are out there? I wrote about Hezbollah in Bakersfield, and then the Yemeni story happened? What’s next? 

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