20 Years Ago in the Free Venice Beachhead (June 1987)
Right to the
Throat
Venice resident,
Ruth Galanter, was brutally attacked and stabbed in the neck by an intruder in
her home shortly before the City Council election, which she went on to win.
–FVBH
By Carol
Fondiller
When I started to write this
article, I was going to segue into it by recounting some of the violent attacks
I have sustained while living in Venice as a single woman and alone. I wrote
reams of adverbs, adjectives, full of deep descriptive phrases. But I started
talking about a violent incident that happened to me to a friend of mine. She
interrupted very sweetly, “Oh, I know. You’ve told me before ...
it’s awful.” Hey, I can take a hint. Violence is a real drag, and
don’t dwell on it. I’ll shut up about the violent attacks on me,
even though there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t acknowledge
them in some way.
Not consciously, but
it’s there. My health, my lifestyle, my attitudes have changed. I used to
walk out by myself at night - not any more. Sleep used to lay thickly on me and
I’d wake up refreshed. Now I have the television or the radio on, and the
light. I sleep in tee-shirts that could pass for street clothes so I won’t
be found naked and helpless by some Policeman or
Paramedic.
The Ruth Galanter incident
has twisted, seized and squeezed my entrails, and augmented my own experiences
of being unfair game.
* * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
I try to scream.
I can’t. My neck is wet with blood. Someone’s breathing heavily. I
put my hand to my throat to stop the blood, I can’t find where the blood
is coming from. I’m fully awake now, and the blood has turned to sweat and
the panting is my own.
* * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
I’m
waiting for the bus and a group of young black men approach, their voices raised
in mufuck-this and mufuck-that. My heart begins to pound - you get the picture.
The attack on Ruth Galanter might not
have been a political act in itself, but it has political consequences and
political roots. I don’t mean that I think the suspect is an innocent pawn
or a paid assassin, or that he was framed. I don’t have any more
information than the rest of the civilian population, as the police refer to us.
Police Chief Darryl Gates and District Attorney Ira Reiner have made the attack
political. They have held press conferences and have already declared that the
suspect Mark Olds is guilty. As we head into the Bicentennial of the
Constitution, I find this disquieting, and given the climate of the times, I
don’t see a fair trial for Mark Olds in the tea-leaves. By their hasty and
vociferous denials less than 24 hours after the suspect turned himself in that
the attack was not politically motivated, the Police Chief and the D.A. have
raised questions in the minds of many as to why the Police Chief and the D.A.
were so quick to discount any political
motives.
The Galanter stabbing was on
everyone’s mind and everyone I talked to had theories, ranging from Mark
Olds was innocent, or was just an innocent gang member (talk about your
Oxymoronics !), or was hired by powerful development pro-Russell interests to
off her. To which a friend of mine replied: “Why buy an Olds when you can
afford a Cadillac?” Those talks resonated back to the post-Kennedy
assassination days when a car backfiring made even the staunchest of us flinch.
How many years to go ‘til the Warren Commission Report becomes
public?
In the days following the
Galanter attack, I read every article that was printed about her in every local
paper. I became an obsessive channel-switcher, trying to get every
station’s coverage of the event. In the middle of doing the most mundane
of chores, watching t.v. or riding the bus, I’d catch myself saying out
loud, “Live, Ruth. Survive. Do it for
me.”
At her televised press
conference, she sat wrapped in a white terrycloth robe and said, “They
can’t shut me up.” I cheered. Oh, well, the neighbors think
I’m crazy anyway.
Aahh. But the
articles in the newspapers, and the background features on the newscasts:
“Fear Stalks Once Peaceful Neighborhood,” “Beauty and the
Beastly.” Headlines like that have been recycled about Bel-Air, Thousand
Oaks, Silverlake, but. But. Whether the motives were greed, need, political, all
or none of the above, an injury was sustained by us all. Injuries to Venice have
been sustained by us all, whether motivated by need, greed, politics, all or
none of the above.
We’ve
suffered the consequences when Venice is turned into investment properties by
people who don’t even want to live in Venice, just live off it. Our
present Councilwoman encourages these assaults of overdevelopment and tells us
“that’s
progress.”
There was a phrase in
one of the newspaper articles that caught my eye. “Venice ......Where
criminals rub elbows with millionaires.” Hey, sometimes the criminals and
the millionaires are one and the same, and they’re elbowing me out of
living here, you out of your parking space, and robbing us all of habitable
living space, drawing a visible line between the very rich and the very poor. As
the rich move in and take more space, the poor get pushed together in less
space, or get pushed out.
The assault
on Ruth by whomever is a macrorepresentation of the assault on all of us by the
forces of “improvement” manifested in Venice in recent times. This
evil, larger than life (but Goddess be thanked, lesser than death) catastrophe
is the everyday reality for many people “negatively impacted.”
That’s bureaucratese for sentenced to slow death by the on-slaught of the
VACuous invasion and perversion of the Venice “mix of different ethnic and
economic groups that make Venice so unique” lifestyle. These
“visionaries” are killing off the least terns, egrets, ducks, and
coots by turning the Canals into a sanitary cement-bottomed bathtub for the
fastidious rich. Low-income people are being turned into the new homeless
because office space displaces low-income
units.
Maybe the right person is in
jail, maybe not. Maybe other people are involved, maybe not. Maybe in view of
recent history, there is some justification for some Venetians’ conspiracy
theories.
In the past, City and State
officials along with developers have tried to silence us by jail, beatings,
vandalism.
But that’s not the
point. Not only are we, our cities, victims of assault, we are
survivors.
To paraphrase Ruth Galanter, as
she sat wrapped in her white terrycloth bathrobe, “They can’t shut
us up.”
Posted: Fri - June 1, 2007 at 04:37 PM