Posted two days prior to US election...
I couldn’t resist.
Having sworn never again to return to the land of my birth, that lunatic asylum known as America, the comedic insanity of the 2016 presidential election pulled me like a cork from the bottle of southern comfort known as Ohope. Instead of going to the East Coast, from which I originally hail, however, I headed to a small West Coast university town I had lived for a year in the late 1970s, just before I meandered southwest and ultimately was washed up on a strange island somewhere in the South Pacific.
Eugene, Oregon no longer is a quiet burg of 50,000 surrounding a medium-size university. The place is now a full grown city of 150,000 breast-fed by a megaversity. Still, it is not without its charms. I’ve heard it said there are more hippies per capita in Eugene than anywhere on planet Earth, and indeed it appears as though a 1960s experiment in frozen cryological storage in San Francisco has been thawed out here 50 years later. Most live peacefully homeless on the streets, but as well a number teach at the uni, and while still sporting long beards, tie-dyed apparel and granny glasses, drive Beamers and are adorned with the more pricey commodities of an L.L. Bean catalogue.
As I pound the keyboard here in the kitchen of a friend’s home, just across the table his 72 year old sister sits ‘trimming’ a huge shopping bag of marijuana stalks and decanting the buds into sealed preserving jars. Oh, there’s no worry the local gendarmerie will suddenly burst in and drag us into a waiting van with winking rooftop jellybeans. The stuff is legal in Oregon. Purveying outlets abound and most every household has the maximum four plants blooming in the garden, some grown tall enough to climb. The same segment of humanity which in New Zealand titter and coo, volunteer at the Hospice shop and brandish smartphone pics of look-alike grandkids, hereabouts can be found toking Narnia Shatter and BlackBerry Kush and White Widow, swearing the label-stated contents of THC, CBD, MMD and other brain-bending chemicals are vastly exaggerated.
This being America, you’ve got giant stars and stripes hanging from every second house, in whose driveways sit humongous vehicles with great ‘O’ decals on the rear window, connoting heartfelt support for the University of Oregon football team despite their current pathetic performance, and, as goes without saying, guns! guns! guns! galore. Plus endless supersize supermarkets stocked with every top-tier organic product imaginable, and at prices as low as a scant third of our own ripoff foodstuff emporia.
But hang on. Comparing USA/NZ food prices, as well as ‘Dawgwalker’ (26.69% THC) with Tui Light, is not what I’m here for. It’s days – days! – before the prez election, and the topic is on every soul’s lips. Only a week back there seemed hardly a question who would win as The Donald’s ugly misogynistic demeanour had him performing a Mexican hat dance on his tongue, and the pundits were claiming a 90% chance of a Hillary victory, causing all those Trump signs I had observed my first few days here to suddenly disappear from neighbourhood lawns.
Then in a bizarre and unprecedented move, the supposedly non-political FBI, those kindly folks who dictate when and against whom the New Zealand police make nocturnal house raids, last week revealed all sorts of new email discretions against Clinton. This motivated those dear sweet evangelical climate-change-deniers who had dumped Trump for Hillary, not because of his charming rhetoric inciting loony-toons white male wingnuts to armed violence nor third-reichish policies aimed at cleansing the States of Certain Undesirable Elements, but rather due to his tut-tut/tch-tch language, were frantically ransacking rubbish bins to retrieve and replant said signs. And somehow that 90% Hillary position overnight shrunk to a mere smidgeon.
All this frantic and changeable behaviour has created classic entertainment for a born-again Kiwi who had grown accustomed to slumber-inducing NZ political races. But as the wonderful H. L. Mencken once noted: ‘Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.’ Combine this with another of the man’s notable quotes, ‘No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public,’ and you get some idea of the brand of craziness in full bore here.
Which is America 2016 in a nutshell: the glass no longer is half empty in regards to caring for its elderly, its sick, its poor and returned military personnel and blacks and Latinos and women and the environment and infrastructure. The glass now is completely barren.
But saying that, where else can you get a 12oz coffee and delicious bagel with cream cheese at a local café for four bucks?