[Kzyxtalk] [MCN-Announce]- MCPB Corporation (KZYX) board meeting, 6pm Monday night, Fort Bragg Senior Center.

[Marco McClean]

On 5/14/2018 5:32 PM, Mark Slafkes wrote:
 > Marco, normally I just delete your postings on the Announce list 
serve.  However, I know both Bob and Meg and have been on a board with 
Bob.  Although I don't agree with Bob on many things, these are two very 
honest and good hearted people.  We are lucky to have them take the time 
in their lives to make things better.
 >
 > You clearly have a different philosophy about how a non-profit public 
radio station should be run.  At a time in my life I would have agreed 
with you.  But I don't nowadays.  Managers work hard and they don't get 
even the small public recognition that volunteers do.  I think everyone 
on this list understands your issues and your right to promote them.  
But this is an Announce list and not a public forum to demean others.
 >
 > I believe that this email will have no impact on what you do. But, I 
just couldn't stand by and see your attack on Bob and Meg who both 
contribute so much to the community when it is not easy for them to do this.
 >
 > Mark Slafkes


Okay, Mark. Marco here. I just came from the board meeting, which 
resembled any lunch at the old folks' home for being a pack of 
white-haired (if haired) old white people, but in this case was 
comprised of the poobahs of KZYX; I'd be surprised if anyone there but 
Teevee Terry's little boy was younger than I am, and I'm 59. Wait, no, 
Sheila Tracy was there, she's not that old. But most of them are clearly 
in their seventies.

All of the old people, though, smiling and smug, patting themselves and 
each other on the back, applauding the manager's report about how we're 
in the new digital age now and what's important is /connectivity/ and 
how about that new studio in the closet down the hall, hey? Why, we can 
connect to the /internet/ in there, and do internetty things and even 
talk on the phone! And to hear him tell it, he talked on the phone with 
some very important people at KQED just last Friday. It was a conference 
call! And back during the fires 1,000 people clicked on some recorded 
content about the fires in the station's website, so that's exciting. 
But then the phone rates went up (!) so he called around and eventually 
got a bargain, you know, like you do. And also he spoke about how cool 
it will be to partner with Mendocino College in exactly the same terms 
he used at the meeting in March of 2017. It was gonna be so cool then 
and it still is. "Imagine: students learning to record a show." There: 
he's sure earned the ninety large he's sucked out of the station for 
himself so far. The strain is telling, though. His hair is entirely gray 
now, and his face seems pressurized with blood (mainly the red and 
bulging eyes, more so than before) the way Captain Fathom's face gets 
when he's getting ready to flip out, but this guy isn't quite at Fathom 
level yet. Give him a little longer and a couple more phone rate hikes.

Then the chairman exclaimed that the CPB people told him that if the 
station could raise even /more/ money, CPB would grant them even /more 
money still/, so let's raise some more money! And there's cake in the 
back of the room, and a case of warm Coke. Help yourselves, everybody. 
He even made the tale of the CPB audit sound like a dish of ice cream.

After about an hour of this nightmare I could take no more. I wasted my 
three minutes of what they call /public expression time/ suggesting 
again that they pay the airpeople, whose work is what the radio station 
is there to transmit, after all. I mentioned that there's a reason the 
minimum wage is called the minimum wage-- that it's the /very minimum 
amount of money per hour that a person's work is worth/, and the entire 
room, except for Sheila and a couple of others, turned against me. I 
think you know how that feels when that happens.

You mention my "attack" on Bob Bushansky. I don't think of it as an 
attack to quote a man's campaign slogan, rigged election or not. And the 
first thing the MCPB trustees did as a convened new board, was to 
/appoint him treasurer of the fiefdom/. Also, in addition to being 
apprised by a homeless guy in the Safeway parking lot of the Great 
Paintbrush Embezzlement, I just got email that Bob Bushansky is behind 
the new chainsaw-motor ATV park project in the forest up Highway 20. If 
that's true, is that good? Because I don't think it's good. I think it's 
like the Hare Creek dented can store and similar slow-motion destruction 
of the commons everywhere so a bunch of old rich people can stay rich 
for another fifteen minutes until their little lives are rounded with 
the Big Sleep anyway, so why screw everything up just to make them 
happy, as though /their/ having plenty enough means everyone else has to 
keep bowing and scraping before them and giving them their own way in 
all things forever.

I may have read it wrong though. Maybe he's opposed to the ATV park. 
Somebody will set me straight, either way.

Really-- room full of the polar opposite of progressive energy. Radio 
station run by and mostly supported by arrogant old very-well-off white 
people, none of whom have built a radio station (I've built two, with my 
hands, from circuit diagrams and surplus parts), very few of whom have 
any expertise in or passion for actually doing radio in specific or 
teaching in general. And if they're old teachers, I wonder how they 
would have felt back in the day if school administrators would only hire 
volunteers and keep all the school money for the principal and his 
secretary. That's different, they would say. That's not the same thing 
at all. But isn't it?

And I can't even give them the benefit of the doubt for their having 
been bamboozled by all these other Nice People who are just like them, 
who could be their dozens of brothers and sisters all old and slightly 
tipsy together in the reunion at the Grand Manse. I don't think they 
were bamboozled. I think that's really just who they all are.

Afterward, just before I left, I spoke with a new boardmember who had 
patronizingly berated me for wanting /volunteers/ to be paid. (They're 
volunteers, after all; why should we pay them? And it's just impossibly 
complicated to do that, was his implication. And it's not as if there's 
any money.) (Besides the $600,000 they /manage to/ piss away every 
year.) I said, "I applied to get my show on KZYX in February of 2012 and 
got zero action on that ever since. I was the first person kicked off 
KZYX in 1989. This station has been treating me like shit for thirty 
years. That's why I'm upset." He waved his hand, said, "I dunno anything 
/about/ that," and turned away, dismissing me from his august presence.

I want to say, honestly, I don't know why I bother to even go, but I 
keep thinking that next time it'll be different, and it is, it's worse 
every time. Maybe I'll go next year, stick my head momentarily past the 
door and say, Please, sir, may I have another, and not even wait around 
for it.

On the way home I stopped in Mendocino and took a walk around the 
headlands. It was so long since the last time I went out there that the 
whole experience is changed. Not just the weeds and the season and the 
weather, but the paths near dropoffs seem treacherous to me now. I went 
near an edge to look down into where the waves go underneath the rocks, 
that big dark hole with the tunnels going in and out, and I felt spooked 
and involuntarily stepped backward, and then felt doubly spooked 
because, what if the other side was closer and I hadn't been paying 
attention, and then I'd be dead down there. Yeech.

There's a series of books by Steven Brust that Juanita and I like, about 
a man named Vlad Taltos, who lives in another very Earthlike world 
that's got different races of people who are /really/ different races, 
not just different colors and eye-shapes. A man and a woman are from a 
race where people live to be a thousand years old (barring accident), 
but these are young people in their 70s or 90s, and at one point they're 
discussing a course of action. The man urges caution. The woman says 
something like, "We should not fall into a rut of always being careful, 
lest we one day become afraid to throw a stick into the river, in case 
the water might be all poisoned and a drop could splash out and get on 
our shoe and kill us."

--
Marco McClean
memo at mcn.org
https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com