It looks like if any Boy Scout in Eugene gets inspired to say the pledge to any American flag during city business, he can be put in juvenile hall. Or if his mother becomes an accessory in this crime of American patriotism, she may be thrown into jail, too.
But if this Boy Scout still wants to say the American pledge of allegiance without getting busted into an Oregon “juvie” slammer, he can always leave Eugene and move to France. I have personally discovered that in France, at least, they pretty much leave Americans alone when we express our own American patriotism. But now we can’t love our own country in Eugene, Oregon.
Like I said, I myself have spent most of my childhood in Oregon, obviously deprived of the Vitamin D that Oregonians have not able to glean off the practically constantly overcast Oregon sky. I grew up in Oregon schools where I was educated by a number of memorable eccentrics. This is the state that—in Benton County, home of Oregon State University – sought to ban marriage between men and women a few years ago.
I don’t exempt myself from the culture of eccentricity that abounds in this very watery state. In fact, I have recently completed my second book since “Dangerous Learning” – it’s about ghosts who linger in a beach town. I feel sure I would never have understood so much about ghosts if I had not grown up in hirsute Oregon during the hirsute Sixties.
To paraphrase the Russian novelist Dostoyevsky, the fact that only crazy people see ghosts does not mean ghosts do not exist. It only means that crazy people seem to have special internal equipment to see the ghosts. And a lot of Oregonians carry this equipment.
Of course, to generalize any population of individuals as oddball is both unscientific and uncivil. Indeed, I have met many Oregonians who seem as sane as anyone in any other state. But I suspect these people only seem sane in Oregon because they take extra vitamin supplements or perhaps – like people who live nearer the North Pole – they take fluorescent lighting therapy.
I really didn’t realize the deprivation impact of direct Vitamin D – a nurturing solar vitamin on its second link in the food chain in our milk – until I traveled to London and I spent a Sunday afternoon in that city’s famous Hyde Park.
Sunday was “free speech day” at Hyde Park, a territory that like Mr. Hyde himself is beset by insufficient Vitamin D from soupy skies. Since most Londoners hate to refrigerate their milk, you might say the whole city has Vitamin D deficiency.
There I saw various London free speakers – anyone in London was encouraged to make a public speech on any subject on all Sundays in Hyde Park – and I felt like I was back in the most back woods of Oregon.
The speeches were bad enough. But the speakers created visual absurdities as well. A young man who stood on two big cans – one for each big foot – kept starting his speech over again every time he fell over. A young little woman stood on the prostrate back of a large man who might have been unconscious. At least, I was nervously hoping he wasn’t worse than unconscious.
Shakespeare wrote that if only Hamlet had moved to England at the height of his mad behavior, he would no longer be a problem because he would then be immersed in a national culture of this madness.
Let me say that the same might be said about Oregon. And yet people driving down to California from Oregon’s Route 5 are simply waved in without checking to see if the people in the cars are okay or not.
Novelist Ken Kesey in his “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and Tom Wolf in his “Electric Kool-Aide Acid Test” both essentially portrayed an Oregon that is a reservation for America’s most acutely eccentric population. But the proof can only be found in the pudding.
A mayor of Silverton
Some time ago I was watching a TV magazine news show when I heard about “some new eccentricity from Oregon.” Immediately I assumed it to be an item that would have to be very funny to make America laugh between gruesomely forbidding hard news. I was right. The TV show interviewed “America’s first cross-dressing mayor,” Stu Rasmussen, who had surgery to gain the body of a woman even though he says he maintains a heterosexual relationship with his long-time woman friend (also of course an Oregonian).
You would think any small-town mayor lucky enough to be featured on a national news show would jump at the chance to promote his fine city to America. But this mayor spent his air time taking star turns in what looked like the last century’s nouveau couture from Paris and Milan. The city that Rasmussen was mayor of got lost in the movement of all the sequins and taffeta.
I have also discovered the history of Bud Clark, who became notorious on the basis of his successful official campaign poster to become mayor of Oregon’s largest city.
A mayor of Portland
The poster featured Clark in a long raincoat with his back turned to the camera, bare legs coming down from the hem of the raincoat, a yuppie-looking couple looking at him in alarm as he spread the raincoat out to them. The bold message at the top of the poster was “Expose yourself to culture.”
Not many people had heard of Clark before he ran for mayor of Portland. But Clark – actually a shrewd politician and a successful tavern owner who liked to portray himself as just a bartender – had carefully weighed Oregon’s record of voting for public lunatics. These included singular US. Senator veterans like Democrat Wayne Morse and Republican Bob Packwood. Thus Portland voters – mostly thinking of him as a great nutty bartender – voted Clark easily into City Hall.
Clark actually never wore a raincoat to work when he became mayor. But during his time in office, he cultivated his reelection by affecting a Hamlet-like madness with method in it. This extended to regularly riding his bicycle through Portland’s crowded sidewalks and shouting “whoop, whoop” to spread a path for himself. Portlanders just loved this, especially when he crashed into something.
After talking with Oregonians so much in my life, I have come to realize that a lot of the Oregon attitude is a little sister reaction to living next to such a big and famous state as California. The little sister realizes she cannot become bigger or richer than California, so she brings more nutty drama to the table.
So it may be sentimentality driving me to this belief, but I feel Oregon will remain a much more eccentric place than its big liberal sister Massachusetts will ever dream of becoming. After all, Oregon still has the world’s only euthanasia law of its kind. Oregon’s comprehensive assisted-suicide law still allows us when getting up on the wrong side of the bed to call an Oregon certified physician who will gladly get the ball rolling at helping us die in a matter of minutes. I mean, really fast, before their clients can change their mind. Stick a fork in you! You’re done!
Look, how about we just not complain about out our southern neighbors until we compare them with Oregonians. As for me, give me a border with home-made tamales and mariachi any day – not a border with grinning Oregon doctors sharpening instruments that would put me to sleep forever.
If you felt a little déjà vu while reading this article, it is because I wrote a lot of it three years ago in the Beacon, in November of 2008, to be exact. When it comes to the subject of eccentricity in Oregon, this material is endless,
Chris Sharp- Commentary
Chris Sharp is an Educator and a prize-winning professional writer. He has recently published a new book titled “Dangerous Learning: The New Schooling in California.” His commentaries represent his own opinions and not necessarily the views of any organization he may be affiliated with or those of the West Ranch Beacon.