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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Saturday, February 27, 2010

Fever Dreams and the Missing Olympics 

...as the Vancouver Olympics draw to a close, I find my one last moment of frustration: some strangely tall woman wandering the streets of a Canadian city on the other side of the continent seeking the core of Canada's comedic contribution to this great country of ours. This apparently was more important that any number of sporting events that could have been discussed...

As far as the family of NBC channels are concerned, this has been: Vancouver 2010 - the Lost Olympics....
Posted by: Jack K. / 10:54 PM 0 comments

The Downside of That High Wild Western Life 

...that there is a strong attraction to the idealistic dream of living out in those high, wild open spaces of the intermountain West - far from the Maddening Crowd, as it were - is a well-established fact. It isn't actually all that great all the time for us regular folks who really do live out here, of course, but never mind that. The point is that a remarkable assortment of people who are either famous or infamous (or who should seriously be considered for one or the other categories) seem to suffer a strange attraction to places that make up in difficult solitude and inconvenient distance for what they lack in actual services and convenient comfort...

We have living amongst us all sorts of movie stars and sports stars and other stars living out on all sorts of gated compounds and private communities and remote ranches. We never see them, of course, because they have 'People' to take care of their needs; either that or they have imported highly skilled makeup artists that allow them to infiltrate our small local societies disguised as actual locals, driving disheveled beat-up mid-nineties Chevy sedans while their $100K European rides hide in unseen barns on their vast estates. And that's cool; it's OK because the whole idea of living out here in the middle of nowhere is centered on the concept of being who you are at the moment, not who you are somewhere else or who you need to be or want to be on some larger stage...

The attraction may well reside in part in the fact that folks out here tend to leave each other alone. There are simple rules of life out here, and to a certain degree some of those rules reject other people's racial hatred and the lines drawn in the sand by those haters for no other reason than the fact that proving yourself is a matter of performance rather than of the color of your skin. Most of the time, and as most recently demonstrated by citizens of John Day, Orygun, the local folks don't care to cross those lines. Even at its simplest level, the idea that white supremacists would like to move into town and make the community the focal point for strange, dangerous racist passions is an idea that falls well over that line. In the spirit of full disclosure, I must reveal that I lived for several years in John Day, Orygun. In the spirit of further disclosure, I must admit that John Day, Orygun, is not some sort of peaceful Utopia free of racial tension; it is a small, primarily Caucasian town of about three thousand people who are inextricably tied to cattle grazing and logging, and you will drive for an hour or two at highway speed in any direction across the Eastern Orygun High Desert before you get to the next larger town (more to the point, you will not pass through another incorporated community during that drive). Most folks are nice, polite, and accepting enough, but a black woman who worked for Mrs. Jack K. and her two young boys were subjected to the sort of harassment and abuse by the minority of yahoos and jerks that one finds in these small towns that may explain why some twisted facsimile of the Aryan Nation may think that it can gain a foothold in this far corner of the high wild...

John Day, Orygun, is not a racist town in the crazy-eyed white supremacist sense, but it is also not a town that comfortably deals with racial issues on a day-to-day basis. I once had a fellow show up on my doorstep offering the argument that the community needed to rise up against a proposal to construct low-income housing just down the hill from me because to build this housing would attract "those Portland people" to our community. We both understood which non-white portions of 'those Portland people' he was referring to. I failed in my efforts to explain to him that our community had plenty of its own low income people who would benefit from this new housing and that no Portland resident of any race in his or her right mind would forsake big city services for cheap rents in a tiny cow town in eastern Orygun. That didn't resolve our debate, so I whipped out the Magnum and drove him away at gunpoint...

OK; so that last part didn't happen, but I did cordially invite him to get off my property and never come back. The episode wasn't actually instructive as to the community viewpoint, but it was instructive as to how these sorts of things can happen. Were you to ask them, the majority of people in this small, almost exclusively white, isolated Eastern Orygun town would insist that they don't have a racist bone in their bodies; as far as they know and as far as their remote life experiences are concerned, that wold be a true statement. With yesterday's protest, they took a step toward proving how they know that it is true. John Day may not be some ultimate Utopian center of interracial Peace and Love, but the best of its residents are willing to say in public that it will not be a center of racist hatred...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:43 PM 3 comments

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