More Than Christmas Cards in the Mail

Is it just me, or is the mail a lot creepier this season? I’ve been combat-trained on political mailers. I’m prepped for the passively-aggressively chatty holiday newsletters.

But this, as the TV-casters say to scare you into paying attention, is a new and alarming trend! Letters haven’t been this loaded with grim tidings since the mail brought sprinklings of anthrax to Florida and Capitol Hill.

* The letter on the machinists union Web site announcing that United Airlines would be filing for bankruptcy.

* The letter read to Catholics across California on Sunday telling the faithful that their spiritual shepherds would be calling their own wrath down to stop a state law that lifts the statute of limitations on molestations for a year to let victims of priestly abuse have a day or more in court.

* The letter from Saddam Hussein, read on Iraqi TV, apologizing for invading Kuwait in 1990; you just know Hussein had his fingers crossed behind his back when he wrote that, or, more likely, told his goons to cross some political prisoner’s fingers behind his back -- permanently.

* The letter to the editor from the former Bush White House consultant apologizing for using the term “Mayberry Machiavellis” to describe White House aides; this was very bad news to me because I thought the letter was going to apologize to the town of Mayberry, individually and severally, from Floyd the Barber to Goober the Mechanic.

* The pink-slip letters firing two investigators who uncovered “a culture of theft” at hush-hush Los Alamos nuclear lab.

So I’ll be using a bit of this space to give Santa a heads-up about his mailbags. At this moment some wiseacre kid is probably crafting an “I want a .22 rifle-or-else” letter. Let the elves open the mail; that’s what they get workers’ comp for.

More than 150,000 Angelenos recently opened our mailboxes to “you may already be a business” shakedown letters -- out-of-the-blue missives demanding business taxes, fees and late penalties from people who hadn’t a clue that their little endeavors, like taking clippings from their garden and potting them to sell at street fairs, could make them as much fair game for the tax collector as Arco -- and, more deplorably than even a law-abiding, tax-paying petro-giant, make them scofflaws for not knowing they were operating a taxable business.

Los Angeles council member Wendy Greuel has sent a letter of her own, to the head of the city finance department who sent out those letters with Mayor Jim Hahn’s blessing. Greuel wants the city to give a break, a penalty waiver, a one-time get-out-of-jail-free card to those folks who didn’t know that excessive dog-sitting is a business -- and she is also bringing in some of those folks to the City Council meeting tomorrow to describe the nasty postmarked surprise that came from City Hall.

And now another 133 letters have made it to the 90012 mail chute, addressed to all 133 people who ran for the City Council and mayor positions that yes-on-secession votes would have created in Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley.

The letters are from Hahn and pro-secession businessman and Police Commissioner Bert Boeckmann, inviting all 133 to a meeting next Monday in Encino. Hahn praises each addressee for the “commitment” to improving his or her part of town, and asks “your ideas, particularly your thoughts on ways to improve the quality of life in every Los Angeles neighborhood.”

I was trying to think of where I’d heard before about an invitation with the potential of this one. Maybe it was from the “Thousand and One Arabian Nights,” the tale of a caliph who vowed that he wanted to make nice with his enemies, invited them all to dinner, and had them done away with between the soup and the entree.

Or maybe I was thinking of Saddam Hussein. His sons-in-law defected to Jordan, but Saddam wheedled them into coming back to Iraq, all was forgiven, let’s have a nice roast goat and let bygones be bygones -- and then had ‘em whacked. Hahn should craft something warm and welcoming for the 133 who wanted to stray from his flock. I like Lincoln’s second inaugural speech -- “with malice toward none, with charity for all ... let us strive on ... to bind up the nation’s wounds.... “ Hahn should use the second inaugural spirit as a blueprint for binding up the city’s post-secession wounds. He can’t match Lincoln’s phrasemaking; the letter is written in that particularly hideous language, Bureaucratian, wallowing around in lardy phrases like “governance structure.”

These invitations will reach every candidate, from the Hollywood guy who printed up “Free Winona” T-shirts to Valley mayor aspirant Assemblyman Keith Richman, a Republican and MD, and Gene La Pietra, the nightclub owner who wanted to be mayor of Hollywood. He is steamed about a weekend raid on his Hollywood nightclub by about 100 law enforcement officers, an action that netted five arrests and six figures’ worth of illegal drugs.

Was it drugs, La Pietra is wondering darkly -- or ... retaliation for the secession campaign? “The timing is very suspect, no question about it ... they call it a drug raid, and I say it’s a raid on my reputation.” Granted, La Pietra can be a bit over the top, but City Hall in full secession reward-and-retaliation mode is something many people have muttered fearfully about.

Want to put La Pietra and the other 132 at ease? Permit me a suggestion: no more letters. Next Monday, at that get-together in Encino, Jim Hahn should be the first to taste the punch.

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Patt Morrison’s columns appear Mondays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.