Fire is the story of the week, of course. Vast acreages of wilderness burn, sometimes, and we are concerned, but we remind ourselves that fire is part of the natural cycle of events in the forest. When houses are burning along with the trees, however, our concern takes on different dimensions. Everyone knows the problem. People want to live in the forest, so they do their best to prevent fire, but it’s a losing battle. When it finally comes, there’s plenty of fuel to burn. There’s no solution, just a coin toss. You pays your money and takes your chances.

When people are standing in the ashes where they used to live, they tend to be a little bitter toward the firefighters who came in with a heavy hand at evacuation time, but couldn’t stop the fire. Here on the other side of the hill, the people who think they know what we should chop down and what we can let grow around our houses can be heavy handed, too. "Defensible space," they call it, and that’s an apt description. Put your house in a barren place, and you may not get burned, but when the fire is in the treetops, the underbrush or lack of it doesn’t matter. People who say, "I choose to live with the trees and I accept the risk," have a point. But so do the people living on the asphalt who ask, "Why should I spend my money to save your house in the trees?" If we all lived in high rise, concrete clusters, forest fires still would happen, and in the long view, I suspect that fire takes as many homes on the asphalt as it takes in the forest, and I know for sure that making laws to protect people from themselves never works.

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A couple of local things. I was amused by a letter in The Union last Saturday offering a little Grass Valley architectural criticism. The reader’s bias was obvious. Some new buildings put up by long time local merchants were praised for their beauty, while the Holiday Inn, also known as the Gold Miners Inn, was called atrocious. The new hotel isn’t really any more atrocious than the others, but as far as we know, the others are paid for. The Union reported this week that 13 different subcontractors who worked on the Holiday Inn have filed liens against the property because they haven’t been paid. The developers, of course, say everything is under control, and maybe it is, but coming on the heels of the story about the Darkhorse subdivision developers going broke, it looks like real estate development isn’t especially lucrative right now. That’s probably just fine with the slow-growth people, but it also bears out the old fashioned conservative philosophy that the market place corrects itself.

And the county B of S finally decided to appoint Greg Diaz to the county clerk’s job. A couple of supervisors made some noise indicating they weren’t too happy about it, but the appointment was unanimous because there was no other choice. Diaz was the only qualified person who wanted the job.

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The great compromise immigration reform bill was resuscitated in Congress this week, but with every additional compromise among its supporters, it becomes less likely to bring any change, and change in immigration law is just what everyone except the immigrants wants to avoid. I mention this for two reasons. One is just to note the irony that the chief financial officer of the California Republican party just got busted for being an illegal alien. It’s the Republicans, of course, who have worked so hard to make immigration an issue, but they’re only interested in Mexican farm workers. This guy is a politically astute Australian, one of the white collar Republican type illegal aliens, the kind of guy who gives honest farm laborers a bad name.

The other reason is that the media has been calling it a Pelosi compromise. The Speaker of the house had to reverse her earlier opposition to bring new life to the bill. Being a liberal female politician from San Francisco means always having to say you’re sorry. Pelosi took a lot of heat for backing down from the bill to block funding for the Iraq war, too, but that was a lost cause anyway. Politics is the art of compromise, but when politicians compromise, we call them hypocrites. They can’t win. In that regard, it’s a tough job. They probably figure they’re entitled to all those perks as their reward for the abuse they have to absorb. No doubt there’s a better way, but sticking to a set of principles and being a functioning elected official may be mutually exclusive goals.

You’ve probably heard that new regulations requiring a passport just to visit a neighboring country resulted in complete gridlock in the issuance of passports. The crunch which shut that system down was about three million. The immigration bill which still clings to life in Congress calls for that same federal government to create a new work authorization bureaucracy for about 146 million people. By my calculations, the chances of success run about 50 million to one.

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I’ve been wanting to talk a little about free speech, but I’m not exactly sure what I’m allowed to say. The subject comes up frequently these days, and that’s a sign that the act of speaking freely isn’t quite dead yet, but I want Homeland Security to know that I’m not protecting any sources here. Some of it is censorship and the suppression of journalists, some of it is spying on personal communications, and some of it is the homogenization of the media, but mostly it’s the apparent indifference of the people about these things. Maybe I’m naive to believe the things I was taught as a child. Back in those prehistoric times, free speech was a big deal, something worthy of staging a revolution and starting a new country. Maybe I’m a slow learner because I seem to recall that speaking freely almost always results in a chorus of people eager to say, "Shut up!" I’m starting to consider the possibility that the American people don’t actually believe in free speech at all. Everyone seems to want to shut somebody up.

But I still believe everyone should mouth off all they want. I have a low tolerance for that right-wing, call-in talk radio corner of the dialogue, but I’m glad it’s there. It allows me to peek occasionally at what those people are thinking, and it offers the illusion that maybe I can head them off at the pass. All the low budget broadcasters engaged in a day of silence this week to protest being priced out of the business by federal regulators. I understand the idea, but silence is exactly what those federal regulators want. My instinct is not to turn the voices off; it’s to turn ‘em up.