Liberal Politics is Just a Football Game
And Southern Oregon is a microcosm of the stupidity of American culture wars.
Allow me to set the very real scene before we get to the thesis of this essay: Ashland, Oregon — a historically rural town in a very purple district, just south of the decidedly more downscale and conservative Medford (lovingly known as “Meth-ford” to some and where I lived for a year in an old hotel converted into low-income housing. One of the residents there once told me and my girlfriend: “You two look like Ashland people.”). Ashland is home to the storied Oregon Shakespeare Festival, now going into its 90th anniversary. The festival is Ashland’s biggest tourist draw, and also a pain in the ass to longtime locals who view the theatre company as an elite institution full of artsy liberals that look down on and scold the atavistic townies (I just started working here as a stagehand). Some demonstrative examples: OSF actors once took offense to a banned books display in a local shop which prominently featured, among other historically banned books, Little Black Sambo, a novel with antiquated themes and racially insensitive depictions of the titular character on its artwork. The actors had a tiff with the shop owner, calling on her to remove the book from the display. The irony of trying to ban the display of a banned book was apparently lost on them. Additionally, one longtime stagehand with the festival, who is also an Ashland native, expressed to me disdain for the years when he washed the dishes of the rich white people who travel across the country to go to the festival. He’s also been turned off by entitled OSF staff who have insisted to customer service workers that they receive their OSF discount wherever they shop and dine.
Another stagehand local took me out for a drink and we talked politics and labor unions (OSF’s technicians are organized as I.A.T.S.E. Local 154, woot-woot!). He was the first OSF employee to reach out to I.A.T.S.E. and he kept the ball rolling through their first contract negotiation with OSF. He’s got a big long beard and long hair and rides a motorcycle. I caught him reading Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years' War on Palestine, so he’s basically an undercover leftist masquerading as a biker. He told me about times when trucks in rural Oregon have tried to run him and his bike off the road when they see his Pride flag patches on his jacket. The local biker gangs are hyper-masculine, racist, and anti-gay. He describes himself as a “pacifist, mostly.” He gets yelled at at biker bars and takes punches without hitting back. He said he used to be in a fight club in Medford and got stabbed in the ribs because of it. He does what leftwing proselytizing he can to other bikers by speaking in their language, focusing on bread-and-butter issues, and framing things as workers vs. the bosses.
Racialized social justice politics have continued to be a wedge in Ashland’s community, for different reasons. The former Artistic Director of OSF, Nataki Garrett, is a contentious figure in that regard. Depending on who you ask, she was a strong-willed anti-racist who tried to shake up OSF’s milquetoast programming with more radical theatre and was thus forced out of her job by threats of white violence and racist millionaires who pulled their funding from the festival; or she was a bullheaded, egotistical, overpaid social justice warrior who alienated everyone from longtime OSF staff, donors, and audiences by shaking her finger at anyone who dared question her new direction for the company, telling everyone else that they were the problem, and thereby put OSF on incredibly shaky financial footing during an already apocalyptic time for live entertainment — the pandemic. The truth is probably a bit of everything. I am generally sympathetic to trying to produce radical theatre in order to cultivate political consciousness and stir up the masses, but if you don’t include your own community in a bottom-up, democratic way in that process of change — you know, the people who could benefit the most from radical storytelling, then you’re going to be dead on arrival. Regardless of how anyone feels about Garrett’s tenure, the fact is that OSF is a keystone institution for Ashland’s and the broader Rogue Valley’s economy. With the festival still trying to regain audience numbers from pre-2020, Ashland remains, these four years later, a quieter town than before.
Another example of Ashland’s political tension: The city just hosted the Ashland World Music Festival in its famed Lithia Park, an excuse for aging hippies and the tarot card crowd to lay about in the sun and dance to some steel drum inflected rhythms. When one of the lead singers of a Latin-Fusion group started saying that she stood in solidarity with the Palestinian people, a young unstable homeless man shouted “Nobody cares!” and got up onstage to try to shut her up. Elsewhere, some tenacious soul has been writing in chalk on the walls and sidewalks all over town messages in support of Palestine. “How many more Palestinians will it take?” “Free Palestine.” “The Palestinian Genocide is paid for with your tax dollars.” Every day someone else goes by and erases the word “Palestine” from every one of those messages, leaving an obvious chalk smear. And the next day new chalk messages pop up.
Dirty train hoppers and hitchhikers hang out on the streets and storecorners of Ashland all night — panhandling, yelling at each other, playing music on the sidewalk. I talked to one travelling banjo player, Bobby, who plays with a lovely clawhammer style except he uses finger picks to do it, a particular oddity. Bobby always wears a brown, wide-brimmed hat with his long curly locks dangling below. He hasn’t had a job in over fifteen years. He lives out of his car. He tells me he really likes Wyoming because the mountains are beautiful and he makes good money playing on the street there because there aren’t any homeless people to compete with. “I have dreams where it’s all mountains going way up to the sky,” he said gesturing upwards. “I guess I’m just looking for the place of my dreams.” He tells me that he’s kind of scared of the homeless people around Ashland. He’s seen some violence. He says he’s thinking about going up to Bend, where people are nice and there’s not as much of a homeless population. Eugene on the other hand is a total wasteland. The homeless have taken over its downtown and there’s nothing but drug markets and knife fights he says.
Another longtime traveling musician and Ashland resident, Cody Meyocks, tells me about his current woes. He used to play with the now-defunct St. Cinder band, a sort-of gypsy, bluegrass, old-timey, jazzy, folky outfit. He’s living out of his bus here, which I randomly saw parked on the street so I went and knocked on his door. We chatted there on the sidewalk for a little while. He sat on the ground at the hood of his bus and described feeling unwelcome in the town because he’s dirty and also a leftist. “I’ve been struggling with trying to just break through the class barrier around here,” he tells me. “It’s really hard. People seem to look at me and are like, ‘I know what three-day socks smell like.’” There’s a lot of old rich white folks and shallow hippies in Ashland. “The pipeline from hippy to right-wing extremist is a pneumatic tube,” he said.
Cody’s lost a lot of money on vehicle deals gone bad, his friends have let him down, romantic partnerships have turned from sour to downright dangerous, old bandmates are being weird. He seems scattered about keeping his instrument repair business going, and generally seems both antsy and directionless, which is pretty much the exact same state I found him in last time I was in Ashland over a year ago. He chain-smokes hand-rolled cigarettes with good smelling herbs in them (which he also smells like from a mile away). “It’s just like air to me at this point,” he says. He uses tobacco, lemon balm, and raspberry leaves, among other things. He offered to roll me a cigarette, so to be polite I took my very first puff of tobacco, without letting it into my lungs. It just tasted like smoke. But at least it smelled decent.
Cody is a kind of enigma of a human. He’s got this very old-timey aesthetic, which doesn’t quite feel like an affectation when you actually talk to him. He really does seem a bit out of time. But he also spends time making tik-tok videos that have millions of views where he discusses metaphysics and ghost stories and conspiracy theories. He’s an off-kilter oddball, very endearing in person, and I feel very romantic about him and others like him, but I know he doesn’t feel that way about himself. I can tell he’s lonely, but he also seems to be holding people at bay. I don’t blame him, given the woes he’s hinted at.
I see nothing of substance in the hippies of Ashland, the granola ecstatic dance organic world music palm reading woo-woo girls. The non-profit liberals of OSF continue to suck on the poisoned teat of corporate dollars and millionaire donors. The conservatives are not on my side, but I respect their disdain for elitism. I share in their rage. I instead find the most affinity in my fellow union members — because we are in a union — and in the weirdo street walkers. These real-life bards are a pain to talk to sometimes when they go off on their inevitable paranoid tangents fed by years of deprivation. But I like that they’re dirty, not because they’re “natural,” but because they literally can’t shower.
So anyway, that’s Ashland in a nutshell — conservatives, liberals, stupid dumb hippies, and beleaguered leftists and street denizens just taking it as it comes.
This morning I’m sitting on a couch in a little hipster café outside downtown. There’s a group of about ten men and women, all 50 to 65-year olds, sitting together at a table. Suddenly, this group of middle-aged citizens erupts into applause and cheers. One of the women yells, “Guilty on all counts!” A man gets up and proudly shows off his laptop screen to the entire café, a headline on it reads “Donald Trump found guilty in New York hush money trial.” Moments later I get an anonymous text on my cell phone from some Democratic hack robot saying, “Trump is guilty on all 34 counts! Trump fans are RILED UP. Rush $7 ASAP to help DESTROY him in November.”
These are the ridiculous framings of our political discourse today. We want our team to win big and we want the other team to lose everything. Nothing else matters. But what if both teams are rotten to the core? What if both teams are actually part of the same team? What if you don’t want there to be any “teams” at all? Well, you’re shit outta luck, Jack! We’re trying to play football here and you’re just taking a big runny shit on the field.
These cheering old liberal bozos make me sick. I want to scream at them: Do you know that the tax dollars of every single person in this room are currently being used to facilitate a genocide in Palestine? Do you know that Joe Biden is doing everything in his power to keep the Israeli death machine running? The shredded remains of Gaza’s children are being held up for all the world to see. What are you even celebrating here? What are you doing? Can you explain to me why this is good news, worthy of making fools out of yourselves in public? What is one ex-president being found guilty of his least egregious crime going to do for literally anyone who finds themselves under the bootheel of global capitalism? It strikes me that these clowns would likely not do what they just did in a bar in Medford. But here in a café on the southeast side of Ashland, they feel themselves free to prance around and gloat.
I leave the café in disgust. I bike over to work and see a rusty old truck with right-wing political stickers plastered all over it: TRUMP 2024, LET’S GO BRANDON, “COEXIST” spelled out using the silhouettes of firearms, etc. I laugh because there’s nothing else to do but laugh.
Here’s some other headlines of the day: “US-UK warplanes bomb the Yemeni capital Sanaa” … “Bodies Everywhere: the Horrors of Israel’s Strike On a Rafah camp” … “The US-built pier in Gaza has collapsed into the sea. It cost $320 million.” … “Thousands of U.S. Students Arrested While Israel Invades Rafah” … “Celebrated NYC Nurse Fired After Highlighting Gaza Genocide in Speech” … “White House: Israeli Attack on Rafah Tent Camp Does Not Violate Biden’s ‘Red Line.’” … “People Burned Alive, Child Decapitated: Report from Rafah on Israeli Strike That Killed 45 in Camp” … “State Dept. Official Resigns After U.S. Claims Israel Is Not Obstructing Aid to Gaza.”
No U.S. president has ever been tried for the unforgivable crimes of empire. To play their stupid game and again pit Republican vs. Democrat, the only rivalry that seems to make any sense to American liberals such as those cloying celebrators in the café: Donald Trump has nowhere near the body counts of Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Lyndon B. Johnson, or John F. Kennedy. Each one of those Democrats far outstrips him. To be more universalist about it: Every single U.S. president since WWII has committed indictable war crimes. None of them have seen a jail cell or been brought to face their victims. Again, tell me, please, why are you celebrating?
As the world burns, as Western orchestrated genocides continue unimpeded, as those who rebel are murdered or imprisoned or demonized as terrorists, and as every conceivable official mechanism of accountability for those in power has been destroyed or co-opted by those same powerful people, the liberal project — the project of selling impotent rage against right-wing reactionaries, of scolding those who don’t use the same corporate-friendly language of inclusion, of hypocritically preening themselves in front of the world as being the good guys of history — is not even an insulting joke anymore. Given the exigencies of our moment, the feckless liberals, those giddy dimwits in the café among them, are willing accomplices to the greatest evils of our age.
There was one other man I met in Ashland that same night at a bar. He introduced himself as Ninja (not his legal name). He was in Ashland by way of Puerto Rico by way of New York City. He had been commissioned by a local play festival to do a modern verse translation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. He said his playwriting collective focused on political messages in their work, having done plays about the Black Panthers and the Young Lords, but that this social justice angle would not be present in his version of Hamlet. It was just a simple work-for-hire thing. He needed the money. Ninja has been living in Puerto Rico since it was decimated by a hurricane and multiple earthquakes. “It’s just been survival, man,” he said. Times are really hard there right now. “It’s no kind of life.” So Ninja was happy to be in Ashland again after being gone for seven years. “This is a nice place to hate,” was how he put it. Someone brought up the recent guilty verdicts for Trump. “Y’all are lucky that Puerto Ricans can’t vote,” Ninja said, “because if we could we would vote for Trump because we want to see you destroyed. We want the U.S. occupation of our country to end. We want you all dead.” Ninja had had a few drinks at this point. He got to talking about his own conception of politics:
I love the left. But the left has no initiative. It’s powerless. The right are more willing to die and kill for their beliefs. They’re willing to shed blood. They’re willing to defend their families. The left isn’t there yet. I just see a lot of flag waving, but no action. The Black Panthers defended their communities. They were like, “Okay, you want to come in here and try some shit? — try it.” We need to kill people. I want to say whatever I want and have my family and community stand up for my right to do that. I want to shed blood. And that’s not because of the leftist in me. That’s because of my gangster upbringing in New York. You asserted your right to live and exist there through violence. I’m a pro-gun leftist. The right has all the guns. [And here Ninja stared directly into my eyes and pointed at me with a cigarette in his hand:] You will be disemboweled by people that disagree with you… Y’all be dead… They’re gonna shave your head, put you in a camp, make you eat crackers, and that’s how you’re gonna die… I’d rather die before that happens to me.
Call that philosophy what you will. After spending too much time around softheaded hippies in the park, after the liberal spectacle that I witnessed in the café that morning, Ninja’s blood-filled diatribe was a welcome, dangerous jolt of electric energy. But sure, go on playing the great American game of political football, Democrat vs. Republican. The hippies will keep dancing and fucking and tarot-ing. The liberals will keep wagging their fingers. The biker gangs will keep gay bashing. The conservatives will keep their guns. The students will keep bleeding from their hearts. The poor street denizens will keep eking, feeding ducks, finding another bush to sleep in. The leftists will stay lost and homeless and beaten. The Western war criminals will all die old and happy and right. And another child or parent or grandparent in a world far away will die cursing all our names with their last breath — if they even have the time to see what it is that hits them.