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Moses on the Beach

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You remember Malibu Joe. He was the darling old man who smelled of pork grease and urine who Malibu took to its heart as its very own Homeless Person. They fed him grapes and Fritos and challenged the world to say Malibu didn’t care about the poor.

Joe lived in a clump of oleanders behind a gas station and was seen to ride a battered old bike around town, trying to remember what his name was and why he was pedaling a battered old bike around town.

I refered to him in a column once as a bum because that’s what he seemed to be. I was swamped by telephone callers and letter writers who said he was a dear homeless person and I was pond scum.

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Malibu felt so strongly about Joe that when he died last year at age 96 its citizens erected a plaque in his honor and no doubt remember him fondly over cocktails at the Beaurivage.

I mention him today because if the people of Malibu really loved Joe they are going to have a lot more to love if actor Martin Sheen has his way.

Imagine, for instance, a tent city on the beach loaded with lovable Joes.

You know by now, of course, that Sheen was named honorary mayor of Malibu, replacing actress Ali MacGraw, whose essential contribution to the welfare of her community was to look good and talk sweet.

When the Chamber of Commerce recently appointed Sheen to succeed MacGraw, it no doubt expected a ceremonial administration with a similar tilt. Sheen is also cute and has a kind of soft-spoken sweetness to him.

What the chamber apparently forgot, however, is that Sheen, nee Estevez, is also something of a social activist who has been arrested a few times in pursuit of peace, clean air and a full belly, all of which Malibu says it’s for.

The difference is that Sheen means it, and as proof began his tenure as honorary mayor by declaring Malibu a nuclear-free zone and a sanctuary for the homeless. Not since roof rats were discovered in the Colony has there been such a stunned silence on the beach.

Creating a nuclear-free zone means very little. To the best of my knowledge, there are no proposals to build either nuclear power plants or Minuteman missile silos anywhere near Alice’s Restaurant. In the event of war, Malibu will not fire first.

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But welcoming the homeless to its canyons and beaches is something else. If God had intended them to live in Malibu, he’d have made them television producers.

I spoke with several Malibuians about it. One compared Sheen to a slightly skewed Moses, standing on a sand dune summoning the masses to follow him to salvation.

“If he feels that strongly about the poor,” the person said, “let him open his house at Point Dume to them.”

Another characterized Sheen’s inaugural address as his first dive off the Malibu springboard and added, “Too bad there wasn’t any water in the pool.”

Just about everyone thought the actor made a fool of himself. The Chamber of Commerce, which is more concerned with business than social morality, is appalled at the idea of homeless families massing in Malibu.

They reason quite properly that people scratching for beans and blankets are not likely to spend a lot of money buying bikinis or dining on ecrevisse de mer at trendy seaside bistros. Their contribution to the economy would be, at best, minimal.

Malibu isn’t the only community to view poverty in the abstract. Two years ago, the Los Angeles City Council bought more than 100 trailers to house the homeless, but have managed to place only 66 of them because of neighborhood protests.

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Everyone loves the dispossessed, but from a distance.

I agree with Sheen’s motives and admire him for having the temerity to offer Malibu as a sanctuary for the poor. Herding the homeless to Hooverville-on-the-beach is a swell idea and possibly a two-hour movie of the week.

I see Sheen as a good-hearted mayor with an egalitarian cant who is eventually run out of town by those who prefer the old way of helping the poor, when they only had to send checks.

Once rid of Sheen and his lopsided concepts of altruism, the town will reassemble the homeless and march them off to a pleasant reservation in the desert where they will be allowed to retain their rich cultural tradition of eating garbage and sleeping in cardboard boxes generously donated by Malibu.

Back on the beach, Ali MacGraw will be named the queen of sweetness on a platform of smiling prettily and saying nice things. Her first official act will be to canonize Malibu Joe, whose image will miraculously appear on the fiberglass surface of a $600, high-performance Natural Progression surf board.

Oh, the hosannas. Oh, the joy. Hold on the happiness, freeze frame and fade out.

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