Before we get into this on Christmas Eve, 2023: Merry Christmas, happy holidays.
Blessings to you and yours.

Now put your hands up!
Hardy har har. I haven’t heard that one ever. That’s from a popular song, or something, si? Chauncey, or something. She lives around here, I’m told.

Is that uncomfortable, standing in the hot sun with your
arms up, wearing what is probably a full-body, wool robe?Head unprotected in what Mr. Rindge called “The Cathedral of the Sun?”
You have no idea. They could have faced me the other way. At least I get a bit of seabreeze. Malibu has a lovely climate. One of the best climates in a state blessed with perfect weather.

Maybe the most consistently perfect climate on the planet. Although I hear Southern Sicily is like this.

My home can be just like this. Makes me homesick, a bit.

You’re from?
Mallorca, originally. Higher latitude than Malibu at around 39 degrees, but on the Mediterranean, so a similar climate. If only I were facing the sea… Woe is me.

Well you aren’t alone. La Salsa man has been stuck looking at PCH since 1960. The Unknown Surfer has been in Legacy Park staring at ducks since 2011. The little girl statue outside of Starbucks has been reading the same sentence since 1996. None of them are too pleased.

(sighing and singing) Sunrise, sunset, swiftly flow the years.

A GALLERY OF DISGRUNTLED, DISPLACED MALIBU STATUES

How many years have flowed by here for you? 
Decades - but it seems like a thousand centuries ago…

That’s… Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now. “Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies. I remember when I was with Special Forces. Seems a thousand centuries ago.”

You know your stuff.

Sometimes. As for Serra Retreat, Google says: “In May 1942, the Franciscan Friars of Saint Barbara Province purchased the property where the retreat now stands from the Rindge estate. All 26 acres of the property were purchased for $50,000.”
Fifty thousand dollars? Righteous bucks!

Wow, throwing down Spicoli lines. You know Fast Times?

I know Sean a little bit. He used to come up here looking for I don’t know what. We would talk. Smart guy, and I like smart guys. Local boy. Born and raised in Malibu.

Fifty thousand clams in 1942 is the equivalent of $922,603.77 in now/2024 dollars but still, the land at your feet and all you survey is worth gazillions…
I reckon they got a bargain, don’t you?

I recognize that line. What’s that line from?
Mel Gibson, Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, to the Gyrocopter Captain, who says: “Look, we had a deal. I show you the gas, and you let me go, right?” Max says: “The arrangement was I wouldn't kill you.” The Gyro Captain says: “After all I've done for you…” Mad Max stares him down: “I reckon you got a bargain, don't you?”

Wow, you know your Mel Gibson movies.

Mel lived down around here for quite a while. He came up here to reflect - and maybe for meetings. They have meetings up here. Mel and I had some chats. He’s an odd bird, but whip smart. And funny. That man knows his history.

Did you see Apocalypto?

I did, Mel showed it to me. He was very proud of that movie.

He should be proud. The ending is great - right up there with LA Confidential, Cinema Paradiso, RoboCop and The Long Goodbye for greatest ending to a movie. After all that running through the jungle and poison darts and life and death and sweat and rain and water births and mortal worry and peril, Jaguar Paw barely makes it to the beach with Drunkards Four and Monkey Jaw or whoever hot on his heels and seconds away from killing that running dude.

And they just stop in their tracks…

After all that, they just STOP! What are they looking at?
Here come the Spaniards!!!

That would be like modern humans seeing space aliens. Mel’s message was clear: “This isn’t just the end of your chase, hombres salvajes. This is the end of times! Your times!”
Well, or the start.

Those are your people.
Correctamente, there was a big philosophical difference between the padres and the conquistadors. They wanted gold. We wanted souls.

Who did more damage?

What kind of question is that?

It’s a 21st Century question. Where I come from in Santa Cruz, they are changing the name of Cabrillo College.
Cabrillo is before my time, but why?

For what the Spanish - and Cabrillo was the first to cross here in 1542 - did to the natives of the Americas: Aztecs, Incas, Mayans. Chumash.

So they’re changing the name of a community college in the 21st Century for deeds done in the 16th Century? 

They are. I suggested they call it Steinbeck College as he is probably the most famous, accomplished person to come from the Monterey Bay. Steinbeck writes beautifully about a place I know well: the sky, the mountains, the ocean, the fertility of the land, the color of the people…
There’s a word for that: “Presentism” means judging past actions by today’s standards, or uncritical adherence to present-day attitudes, especially the tendency to interpret past events in terms of modern values and concepts.

Well cultural and human genocide ain’t cool now, and wasn’t cool then.
The Franciscans did not come here to wipe out the natives. What kind of world is this?

This is the modern world. A ball of confusion.
The world has always been a ball of confusion.

There are other statues of Junipero Serra all up and down the coast. There’s one on the 280 near Stanford. He.. you’re down on one knee in a crouch pointing. One year some rascals put a Stanford helmet on your head and a big football under your finger.

Ha ha. That’s harmless enough. That’s kind of funny.

And then in 2020 the Serra statue in Ventura got vandalized then canceled. A bronze statue outside and a wood one inside.
Canceled, you called it?

Take a look.
(Father Serra looks at a slideshow of images showing his statue in Ventura overlooking the sea, then surrounded by protestors, then protected by a cage, then taken down by a crane and hauled away on a flat bed - leaving an empty platform and cage. TSFKAFS does not like what he sees, and a tear appears in the eye of a bronze statue.)

Serra wept!
Well if you endure what I endured and build what I built and someone ever builds a statue dedicated to you, and then someone desecrates it and it gets hauled away on a flatbed. You tell me how that feels, will you?

Canceled? Cancelado!

FRIAR TODAY, GONE TOMORROW. ST. SERRA CANCELED IN VENTURA

Canceled. That’s the thing these days. There are a lot of Junipero Serra statues up and down California and some have been canceled. According to Wikipedia: “Junípero Serra was a Roman Catholic Spanish priest and friar of the Franciscan Order who founded nine Spanish missions in California. In 1782, Serra founded Mission San Buenaventura, his ninth and final mission, on a site that became downtown Ventura. Objections to the public display of Serra statuary cite the mistreatment of the Native American people during the mission era….” 

I could argue against that.

“…following Serra's canonization in 2015…” They shot you out of a cannon? Harsh!
No canonization means I was made a saint.

Oh congrats on that. Here I’ve been calling you Father Serra but that’s not right is it? How should I address you?
My friends call me Miguel. That’s my proper name. Miguel Jose Serra.

Can I stick to Father Serra for now?
As you wish.

According to Wikipedia, following your canonization in 2015 Serra statues were vandalized at Carmel Mission, Monterey's Lower Presidio Historic Park, San Fernando Mission, Mission Santa Barbara, and San Gabriel Mission. “...the George Floyd protests which expanded to include…”
George Floyd? A fighter? Boxer?

George Floyd was an African American man who died while being arrested by police in Minnesota in May of 2020. That set off a firestorm of protests across the country.
I see, and that involved me?

…the George Floyd protests which expanded to include monuments of individuals associated with the genocide of indigenous peoples in the Americas. A statue in Los Angeles and another statue in San Francisco were toppled on Juneteenth.
Juneteenth?

Yeah I’m not exactly sure what that is either. history.com says: “Juneteenth (short for “June Nineteenth”) marks the day when federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas in 1865 to take control of the state and ensure that all enslaved people be freed. The troops’ arrival came a full two and a half years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. Juneteenth honors the end to slavery in the United States and is considered the longest-running African American holiday. On June 17, 2021, it officially became a federal holiday. Juneteenth 2023 will occur on Monday, June 19.
Intiendo, gracias. Juneteenth.

”A statue in Carmel was removed for safekeeping. Mission San Luis Obispo also removed their statue from public display.”

Wow, so that’s canceled. I’m being canceled. Cancelado! All my hard work, so far from home, so long ago… Making it all the way to California in the 18th Century took months, by land or sea. It was like being on the far side of the moon. Building missions. Saving souls. It wasn’t easy...

Surprising the cancelers didn’t come after you up here. Maybe because Serra Retreat is gated and private?
Well someone tried to cancel me - if that’s what you call it -  a couple years ago. 

No kidding? When was this?
August of 2020. A bunch of creeps smashed me in half and left my head lying in the dirt.

That wasn’t very nice. Did you get a look at them? Was this political/historical or just hooliganism?

Well I doubt a bunch of dudes would sneak into Serra Retreat and come up here in the middle of the night and bash me if they weren’t trying to make a statement. Why are they going after Junipero Ser… Me? What is their gripe, exactly? What was my crime?

This story in The LAist by Hadley Meares sums it up pretty well: “The chain of 21 California missions, stretching from San Diego to Sonoma, was responsible for forced labor, forced religious conversions and tribal genocide. The mission system led to the deaths of thousands of Native Americans and the destruction of cultures that had flourished in California for millennia before the Spanish began arriving in the 16th century.

…”In the Los Angeles area alone, Mission San Gabriel, founded in 1771…”
That wasn’t one of mine.

Which missions did you establish? I’ve been to a few.
San Diego de Alcala in 1769.

Haven’t been to that one. San Diego doesn’t feel right to me. Malibu is about as far as I go. This is the last, best place in SoCal.
San Carlos Borromeo de Carmelo in 1770.

Oh no kidding? I got married in the Carmel Mission. A beautiful building, if you appreciate history. Beautiful inside and out. You should be proud of the buildings you created, so long ago. Buildings that have lasted for centuries.
I am proud of that. Very.

Married a Salinas girl in Carmel Mission. All the dirty-finger millionaires of the Salinas Valley were there - Driscolls, Gizdiches, D’Arrigos. Her side looked like The Godfather, and then my half of the church looked like Fast Times at Ridgemont High - Team Spicoli. 
Ha! I’ve talked to Sean Penn a few times. Another smart, talented oddball. Crazed Catholic. I call them Catholocos. Irish, you understand.

There was a point in the very dignified, Catholic ceremony where we kneeled down in front of the Monsignor. My idiot, rascal surfer Spicoli friends thought it would be funny to tape HELP ME to the bottom of my shoes.
Was it funny?

My half of the church was giggling. Hers definitely was not. God has been punishing me ever since.
Yeah well you earned that one, pal. Do you know Mission San Antonio de Padua? That was finished in 1771.

That’s in Jolon, in the Santa Lucia Mountains? Fort Hunter Liggett. I’ve been up there. Beautiful, hidden away in the Big Sur Mountains. 
That’s where Mel shot We Were Soldiers Once… And Young. Fort Hunter Liggett.

Dude! Sorry… Your Holiness. You are MeLiterate. You know your Mel Gibson.
Hey we hung out. We shared time.

Ha! That’s from Point Break. Bodhi to Johnny Utah after they kidnapped his chick and threatened her: “I could never do that man, I could never hold a knife to Tyler's throat, she was my woman, we shared time.”

Mel and I shared time. His brain goes a million miles a minute. He needed someone to talk to. He don't come around much anymore. I miss our talks.

[A timeline of the evolution of the Mission San Antonio de Padua: https://www.missionsanantonio.net/history]

I’ve always wondered: How did you build a mission hell and gone… sorry… way up there in the Big Sur Mountains in 1771? That’s in the middle of nowhere now. Can’t imagine back then.
It is beautiful up there. We went to where the locals were and that’s where they were. Wasn’t easy. Nothing was easy then, but we got ‘er done. Do you know San Luis Obispo de Tolosa? That was 1772.

Been by that one I think. I ain’t too keen on Central California either. Too dry. Too… something. Exposed. Whatever.
San Juan Capistrano in 1776.

I lived near that one when I worked at SURFER Magazine. Used to go to Pedro’s Tacos near that mission. I believe it’s the oldest existing building in California.
Santa Clara de Asis in 1777.

I grew up in Santa Clara before we moved to Santa Cruz in 1972. Santa Clara has changed, dude. The dopey apartment my parents bought for $25,000 way back when is now like one point five million!!!! Santa Clara is all heathen Chinee and east Indians now. KSJO is a Bollywood station!

Changed? You don’t know what change is.  And then San Buenaventura in 1782.

Nine missions in 12 years. Get ‘er done!
Indeed. Under conditions I would describe as harsh.

How harsh?
More harsh than I hope you can imagine.

Ha! Feisal to Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia. “Feisal: I mean we leave no wounded for the Turks. In their eyes, we are not soldiers, but rebels. And rebels, wounded or whole, are not protected by the Geneva Code and are treated harshly.”
No, that was Feisal to Jackson Bentley.

Oh right you are Mr. IMDB: Immobile Missionary Data Base! We should get you on Jeopardy! or something,

Jackson Bentley asks the king: “How harshly?” The king responds: “More harshly than I hope you can imagine.”

Nine missions in 12 years, 250 years ago. You were on a mission!!!
Ho ho, ha ha, it is to laugh. Everyone's a comedian.

To continue… “In the Los Angeles area alone, Mission San Gabriel, founded in 1771 coerced and seized members of the Tataviam, Tongva and Chumash tribes. Tribal people also often ended up at the missions because European disease and the disruption of their ecosystems had made them ill and starving. There, and later at Mission San Fernando, they were made to relinquish their land, perform hard, manual labor and give up their religious practices. This system of forced labor was initiated under Serra, and Salazar believes that as mission system founder, he was responsible for these human rights abuses.

Yadda yadda yadda.

"Our tribal land was taken from us by the missions, by the Spanish, and they promised to give us the land back if we became citizens and became Catholics," said Alan Salazar, of the Fernandeño Tataviam Band of Mission Indians. "We did both. The land was never given back to us. Regardless of  'Did he beat people? Did he forcibly take the land? Did he have a gun to our heads?' No, but he was the founder... and while he was leader... all those tribal cultures were destroyed, all those tribal languages were destroyed. Our way of life, gone. Our songs, our stories, gone. Our land, gone."

Well that’s not entirely fair.

Think how good the Chumash had it. Especially here: Perfect weather, beautiful skies, sunrises, sunsets, the Channel Islands beckoning. And what did the Chumash eat? Lobster, abalone, tuna, steelhead which were probably thick as thieves in Malibu Creek. Birds, deer, rabbit on land. Acorn meal!

Paradise! Fresh water! Plenty of sunshine. Nothing to do but breed.

Wow, you’re busting out Curmudgeon lines from Mad Max II: The Road Warrior! You do know your Mel Gibson.

I like that guy. He’s wild, but likable. I learned how to deal with wild.

You really think you improved Chumash lives by herding them into missions?

We brought them to God.

God. Swell. Who needs God when you have abundant nature?

They did.

Therein lies the rub. There are those - me included - who would argue the Chumash would have been better off left alone.

They needed God.

LA VIDA CHUMASH BEFORE THE SPANISH

The Chumash did?

Yes they did. They needed God’s grace.

Well, there’s a lot of people who disagree with that. Some believe the Chumash would have been better off being left alone. And that God’s grace was harsh. More harsh than they could have imagined.

They needed God.

You have your defenders though. Google “defending father Serra.”

Google?

It’s a 21st Century, computer thing: a kind of God-like, omnipotent device for arguments.

Careful with the blasphemy there, pal. Only God is omnipotent.

Google “defending father Serra” and you have defenders. On the Knights of Columbus site, Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone of San Francisco wrote an opinion piece in The Washington Post:  TO THE PROTESTERS who tore down his statue in Los Angeles this month, the priest, friar and saint Junípero Serra represents “hate, bigotry and colonization,” as one activist put it. Nothing would have made Serra sadder, for the real man was a profound lover of all people and especially of the Indigenous peoples he came to serve.

That is correct. We came to save souls, not exterminate them.

It continues in your defense: “Who, then, is Junípero Serra after all? First and foremost, Serra represents the true spirit of a Church identified with the poor and outcast. He left his home, his family, his sinecure as a philosophy professor to offer the very best thing he had to the California people: the news that God himself loved them enough to send his only Son to die on a cross to redeem them. St. Junípero Serra is “the Apostle of California.” Serra repeatedly intervened for mercy on behalf of Indigenous rebels against Spanish authorities. He famously walked to Mexico City with a painful ulcerated leg to obtain the authority to discipline the military who were abusing the Indigenous people. Then he walked back. …

You walked from Alta California to Mexico City? Walked? With a gammy leg?
No my now apparently now legendary walk was from where the ship dropped us off in Vera Cruz, Mexico: 250 miles. Took us 24 days. That was 1749. I worked in Mexico for 18 years before they sent me to Alta California. I got bit by something on that walk and the wound bothered me for the rest of my life.

To continue: “There is no denying that Native Americans in California endured grave human rights abuses. They suffered wrongs during all three eras: the Spanish colonization (known as the Mission era), the Mexican secularization and the American era. But Serra should not bear the weight of all that went wrong and all who did wrong. If we looked at him with clear eyes, we would see Serra as one of the first American champions of the human rights of Indigenous peoples, a man who protested abusive police powers by government authorities.
Well that is correct. Please thank Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone for me. I was a defender, not a conqueror. I wanted to save souls, not enslave them or send them on beyond.

There is more: “Archbishop José H. Gomez of Los Angeles, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops wrote: ‘Letter to the faithful for the memorial of St. Junípero Serra” I UNDERSTAND the deep pain being expressed by some native peoples in California. But I also believe Fray Junípero is a saint for our times, the spiritual founder of Los Angeles, a champion of human rights, and this country’s first Hispanic saint…

The sad truth is that, beginning decades ago, activists started “revising” history to make St. Junípero the focus of all the abuses committed against California’s Indigenous peoples. … It was California’s first governor who called for “a war of extermination” against the Indians and called in the U.S. Cavalry to help carry out his genocidal plans. That was in 1851. St. Junípero died in 1784.

That is all true.

I have written a fair bit of Malibu history which ties into California history in a number of ways. I polished a screenplay for a Malibu guy that is set in Santa Barbara in 1850. California is about to become a state and everyone is going loco with gold fever. And the guy who would become the first governor of California - Peter Burnett - actually said so, on the record, according to Wikipedia: “As Governor, Burnett signed into law the so-called Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, which enabled the enslavement of Native Californians and contributed to their genocide. He declared in an 1851 speech, "[t]hat a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct must be expected. While we cannot anticipate the result with but painful regret, the inevitable destiny of the race is beyond the power and wisdom of man to avert." Efforts by federal negotiators to preserve some Native land rights were fought by the administration of Burnett, who favored the elimination of California's indigenous peoples. 
Harsh! But That wasn’t me, and it wasn’t us, the Franciscans. That was a greedy gringo. Way past my time.

Archbishop Gomez continues: “The real St. Junípero fought a colonial system where natives were regarded as ‘barbarians’ and ‘savages,’ whose only value was to serve the appetites of the white man. For St. Junípero, this colonial ideology was a blasphemy against the God who has ‘created (all men and women) and redeemed them with the most precious blood of his Son.’” …

Correct. Bien dicho.

Hay mas: “St. Junípero came not to conquer; he came to be a brother. ‘We have all come here and remained here for the sole purpose of their well-being and salvation,’ he once wrote. ‘And I believe everyone realizes we love them.’ …

St. Junípero was 60 years old when he traveled 2,000 miles from Carmel to Mexico City to protest the injustices of the colonial system and demand that authorities adopt a ‘bill of rights’ that he had written for the native peoples. 

Oh so you didn’t walk from California to Mexico City. Got it. Mea culpa. My bad.
No, I took a ship. Still took some time. Nothing was easy back then. Nothing.

Para continuar: “That was in 1773, three years before America’s founders declared this nation’s independence with those beautiful words: “all men are created equal … endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.”

Pope Francis called St. Junípero “one of the founding fathers of the United States.” He recognized that the saint’s witness anticipated the great spirit of human equality and liberty under God that has come to define the American project.

Yet in online petitions today we find St. Junípero compared to Adolf Hitler, his missions compared to concentration camps. No serious historian would accept this, and we should not allow these libels to be made in public arguments about our great saint.
Also correct. 

There’s more in your defense: Auxiliary Bishop Robert Barron of Los Angeles, founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries equates canceling Father Serra to the Ku Klux Klan going after Catholics in the 20th Century: “WHEN I SAW the videos of Serra statues being torn down, burned, spat upon, trampled and desecrated in San Francisco and Los Angeles, I shuddered — not only because such behavior was boorish and unjustified, but also because it called to mind very similar activities at earlier stages of American history.

In the mid-to-late 19th century, anti-Catholicism was rampant in the United States, due in part to prejudices inherited from Protestantism but also due to the arrival of large groups of immigrants from Catholic countries, who were considered inferior. A powerful political party, the Know-Nothings, was organized precisely around the theme of opposing Catholicism, and in many of the major cities of our country, Catholic convents, parishes, cathedrals, statues and churches were burned to the ground by unruly mobs. Moreover, in that same period, the Ku Klux Klan, which was active not just in the South but in many northern cities as well, endeavored to terrorize blacks and Jews, of course, but also, it is easy to forget, Catholics.

If you doubt that this sort of knee-jerk opposition to Catholicism endured well into the 20th century, I would recommend you consult some of the histrionic rhetoric used by the opponents of John F. Kennedy during the presidential campaign of 1960. …

So when I see mobs of people tearing down and desecrating statues of a great Catholic saint, canonized just five years ago by Pope Francis, how can I not see the ugly specter of anti- Catholicism raising its head?”

We are passing through a Jacobin moment in our cultural history, and such periods are dangerous indeed, for there is no clear indication what can stop their momentum. …

One can only hope that cooler heads will prevail and that responsible people might bring to an end this ridiculous and dangerous attempt to erase Padre Serra.

Are cooler heads prevailing?

No, you are being canceled - physically, intellectually, legally and spiritually - alongside Harvey Weinsten, Kevin Spacey, Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, Christopher Columbus, Juan Ponce de Leon, Robert E Lee, George Washington, the Texas Rangers… a lot of canceling going on. Now that I think about it, I wonder why the San Diego Padres haven’t been cancelled.
What a strange world.

Your amigo Mel Gibson almost got canceled. Went into Hollywood Jail for 10 years. Directed Braveheart in 1995 and then only acted until he directed Passion of the Christ in 2004.
He told me about all that.

Jesus sells! Mel made bank on Passion of the Christ. Bofo BO as they say up the road in Hollywood: Six hundred and twelve million!
Righteous bucks! Mel showed off some very big checks.

Mel financed that movie himself. Clever lad.
Despite appearances and reputation, Mel’s a good Catholic and kind of confided in me as his Confessor. I wasn’t entirely comfortable with it, but he’s so fascinating and has so many stories to tell. I could write a book.

If you could lower your arms.
Everyone’s a comedian. Yes, if I could lower my arms I would write a book. About Mel Gibson and lots of things.

So Mel got cancelled as an auteur for almost 10 years. But he’s like a cat, landed on his feet and started making movies again.
Yeah he was pretty down there for awhile, but he has a lot of energy that guy.
Our conversation has been illuminating. That’s why those hooligans chopped my head off and dragged me through the dirt.
Canceled. All this time! That’s dishonest! Low!

Another Gyrocopter Captain line, when Max shows the gun he’d been pointing had no shells. You know your stuff. MeLiterate, as I said.

Correct. So what do you think about all this? Do I deserve to be beheaded, decapitated, removed, slandered, libeled, dragged through the slime and the mud? Cancelado??!?!?

I think the Chumash would have been better off left alone. Who needs God when you have sunshine and lobster and ocean and beauty and abalone and privacy and peace and quiet?

Well that’s your opinion. We saw heathen and brought them to God.

Now that I think about it, the story of Father Junipero Serra and his adventures in the New World would make for a good Mel Gibson movie: It’s got violence, blood, upheaval, history, relevance to now.

That would be an honor, to have Mel tell my story. If he comes back around I’ll broach it and set up a pitch meeting.

Well thank you for your time and patience, Father. Your Saintliness.
I have lots of patience. Had it when I was living, and I have it now.

And Merry Christmas, sir.
Blessings to you and yours.