Oregon, First Impressions

by Bruce Anderson

Its western hills, intermittently clearcut, look like cancer patients, its tourist-dependent coastal towns tarted up like Mendocino, the grass is greener because it rains more, and the state still seems to benefit from its now ended progressive years when it opted for the property tax over the sales tax. (Oregon home owners hanging on to their shelter by their fingernails are, of course, taxed out of all proportion to their ability to pay, just as sunny California's working people are bled under the sales tax, and what else is new in the country of canine cannibalism? The cost of living is lower in Oregon as are wages, but there are many more public amenities than here, including nicely maintained parks and buses that run all over town on schedules that put them very close to one's door ever 20 minutes.

Eugene is paradise for spectator sports and for people who like to get up off their jelly donuts to move around under their own power on a myriad of hiking and biking trails.

Went with friends to the UofO to buy a ticket to the Prefontaine Classic coming up on the 19th. By any standard, even contempo-berserko-jocko, the university's sports complex is outlandishly outsized in an Albert Speer-ish, goosestepper-ish fantasy come alive. The football stadium rises up almost vertically to the cheap seats — if there are any — at the rim of the stadium; I was vertiginous just looking up at it. Huge, unscholarly-looking young people of several sexes wandered around the place talking of lats and pecs. They were so large they could be a whole new species of human. "They are a whole new species of human," commented my friend, as a group of football players wandered by, good naturedly mauling and pummeling each other like a pack of gamboling bear cubs.

Twenty thousand undergrads? Maybe five thousand bona fide students? Student aid is being cut, just as in California, but if "higher education" in this doomed country were anything more than an extension of high school, which is now an extension of the sixth grade, which is now an extension of kindergarten, there'd be one college per state, no sports complexes and no bubbleheads driving from class to class in huge vehicles babbling into their cell phones. "Gotta go, mommy. Some old beatnik in the beater next to me is making sarcastic remarks about me. Me! Your little Debbie! Tell daddy to have him killed right now!" (Is it just me, or are "the kids" these days as vacuous as they look and talk?)

There's lots of good, cheap food in Eugene, excluding the numerous fast food franchises, which as we know, all now offer salads in the form of pesticide bouquets. It appears that in Yewgene's beginning, there was city planning and now there's not. Trees end about a mile west of downtown as the city slurbs farther and farther west. (Maybe east, too, but I haven't been east yet.) There's low-level free enterprise everywhere, selling literally everything, and how many get-government-off-our-backs people would dare call for an end to VA loans even though this particular honorably discharged subversive just got himself shelter for zero down, three percent annual interest? Ought to be the same deal for all of us, but...

My fave fueling station, eating type, is what appears to be an impromptu enterprise off River Road called "Lonches." It's housed in a tiny, brightly painted travel trailer, complete with drive-up window. Got me a chicken burrito for $3.50 that was so big I ate it in shifts over two days. As I ate my way through the burrito's south end, two successive gringos wandered up to inform the Mexican guy proprietor, "You got lunch spelled wrong." The proprietor replied it was spelled wrong on purpose, which struck me as pretty savvy marketing. "People tell me that all day long," he said. As we chatted, Mrs. Lonches drove up in a very expensive little sports car. Based on appearances, including what I could see of family morale, the Lonches are doing well.

O yea, and low-rent office space perfect for my low-rent newspaper. Wedged between a serve yourself dog wash and a denture repair business, the probable new home of AVA Eugene.

Eugene has a fine little museum, an even finer public library and a history replete with unpleasantnesses its Chamber of Commerce prefers not to emphasize. Or even mention. Oregon was, and some say is, menacingly hostile to ethnic minorities. The grueling city of Medford had signs posted on either end of town that warned blacks not to linger after dark. Eugene was Klan Central in the 1920s, the Klan's Grand Pointy Head being a professor of classics at the university. Crosses often burned on the surrounding ridges as the business community, in hoods and tailored sheets, marched through town in search of Catholics and other undesirables, persons of color not having been tolerated in the first place.

Media? The public radio station consists of NPR and music, a sure sign that thumbsuckers dominate the town's cultural life. Another sure sign of mass solipsism is the prevalence of the aroma-therapy gang and seeming hundreds of New Age barnacles interchangeable with the Mendocino County's infectious population of the same types. Eugene's "alternative" weekly paper is thick with ads for services popular with the decadent and the terminally silly, and if this is the alternative, captain, don't waste a life jacket on me. The big circulation papers dominant in Eugene are, ah, deficient in the usual way. The Oregonian is comparable to the Santa Rosa Press Democrat in all-round fatuity, while the Eugene Register-Guard, at least the issues I've read, is only half as bad. The R-G has run some good reporting on the trial of a cop accused of serial rapes, and seems to have a much livelier letters-to-the-editor page than the PD would ever allow. Of course it's wrapped around reams of neo-fascist opinion of the George Will-Charles Krauthammer variety and comes wrapped in the usual journalo-flotsam — teen pages, horoscopes and tributes to the local captains of free enterprise. (Get this: Local government up here is paying privately owned businesses to make jobs. Natch, the businesses promise a hundred jobs, create ten and say, "Give us the tax money anyway.")

I was welcomed to Eugene under a headline that said I was a "Muckracker." Certainly, I've racked my share of muck, having just cleaned out a failed composting toilet at my house in Boonville prior to the arrival of the real estate salesman and some looky-loos. Potential buyers might misunderstand The Fort's inflated value if they and their tasseled loafers have to negotiate a half-inch of raw sewage to get to my front door. Muckracker, muckraker. Whatever. It's an honorific I hope eventually to live up to.

A Eugene reporter said to me, "The word we're getting on you is that you're very hard on good people down there in Northern California." Good people? I asked. Names, sir! Names!

Christ on a sawed-off crutch. Spare me the good people, not there's any escaping the Dan Hamburg-Lynda McClure political personality type who, like Jerry Brown, will talk left and go right every time, and can only be counted on to be among the missing when real push comes to real shove. I've heard them all from the good people. "We never read that paper," says the resident of a print-free zone old growth redwood house. "Way too negative," pronounces another, a remedial reader in whose home the television set is never off. "Whose side is he on anyway?" demands a semi-literate Green who will talk Nader, vote Kerry. And if there's a dumber, more tedious, less free speech, more lock-step, more corporate under-written public radio station than Public Radio Mendocino County, it's Public Radio Lane County, state of Oregon.

I loathe the good people. And vicey-versy, thank the goddesses. But seriously, every time I hear any of this cringing excuse-making, topped by the one about me having driven some so-called activist "permanently into his house and under his bed," I say this: One either stands up for himself and his always self-alleged, self-ratified principles, or one privately snivels about how cruel the world's meanie faces are to his jive self. No, I won't miss progressive Mendocino County in the least. It's an institutionally cruel and stupid place, politically considered, and the people who seem to think they stand for something better, don't. (cf the Mendocino County Superior Court every day all day.)

AVA Eugene is all systems go, but I didn't come all the way up here to swap huggy bears with anybody. I could have circled-up down in Ecotopia and done that.