Alcatraz - Alcalosi

Alcatraz: The place where the really notorious gangster-era thugs were sent.

Think Al Capone, George “Machine Gun” Kelly, and the criminally eccentric Robert Stroud, “Birdman of Alcatraz”.

Between the years 1934 - 1963 the Fed’s used “The Rock” - as the island prison was so aptly named - to keep our infamous societal miscreants at bay, literally: It sits in San Francisco Bay. You can see it in the distance from one of the restaurants at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco proper. (Ah, but is there really such a thing as San Francisco proper?)

Well, this week I was going to write a story about how The Rock - long since abandoned and demoted to tourist attraction status - could be used to house the Islamo-terrorists currently harbored at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba: aka “Gitmo”. The idea of dusting off Alcatraz has so much going for it.

First and foremost is the fact that the Speaktress of the House of Representatives, Democrat Nancy Pelosi is, in a way, already the owner of the island: It sits right within her 8th Congressional District. And as an inveterate critic of the Gitmo prison, what better place to put the roughly 250 baddest terrorists than within view of her local congressional office where she and her staff can keep a personal eye on them? Perhaps bring them homemade cookies and lemonade?

She could also supplement her Speaker’s paltry salary by entrepreneurially starting her own see-how-nicer-these-digs-are tour, once taxpayer dollars are used to renovate the place and raise the inmate’s treatment to her morally superior standards. And with Washington about to print ONE TRILLION DOLLARS of taxpayer money it doesn’t have, what’s a paltry couple of hundred million for refurbishment of this landmark jail?

Ms. Speaker could further reward herself by rechristening the complex Alcalosi, in honor of her principled respect for human rights.

But alas, there will not be such an article about a Gitmo-to-Alcatraz resettlement, at least not from me. I discovered, after investing over an hour of intense research and evaluation time on the internet, that someone beat me to it.

(But one of the factual tidbits I did unearth is that Alcatraz’s maximum occupancy (*) - 336 - was never fully realized. So you see it could easily provide room and board for the Pelosi 250!)

That’s what brings me to the point of this story: With the World Wide Web open to any one of the 6.7 billion people on the planet who has a computer, it is becoming increasingly difficult to come up with a truly original thought that hasn’t yet hit the cyber world. I write that from personal experience.

Week after week I initially pursue scrawls of ideas from my messy pile of post-it notes, only to find that the seed of a theme has already been sown. So what is a writer to do? Just keep exercising that imagination and adding to the stack of yellow paper squares.

I want to be able to continue to say “we all need alittlecommonsense” proudly knowing that our material is uniquely our own.

Six point seven billion people notwithstanding.

[EdNote1: A big THANK YOU for the photo that appears above - through Google Images - goes to: Alcatraz Photo]

[EdNote2:* One of many sources of facts about Alcatraz can also be found at: Alcatraz History]

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