David Triguiero's Idaho

Wrong From The Right

2009-11-10T13:55:45-07:00

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was incorrect when she called gangs of gun toting Tea Partiers disrupting town hall meetings “brown shirts.” But she wasn’t wrong. They were there to prevent Democratic Congressmen from explaining proposed health care reform legislation to their constituents in the same way fascist brown shirts broke up political meetings in Italy and Germany in the 1930s.

But Tea Partiers are not fascists; at least they don’t fit the textbook definition of the term. Fascists are opposed to democracy in every sense of the word; for them, it is the bedrock of evil, according to Walter Laqueur in his definitive book on the subject, Fascism, Past, Present, Future. Tea Partiers believe passionately in voting; but believe anyone who doesn’t vote as they do is evil.

Fascists infuse their politics with a religious zeal devised to justify their racial and ethnic prejudices. Evangelical Republicans, like so many Christians in the past, start with Christianity and manipulate it to justify their deep fears of change brought on by “liberals” in control of “the government”. Like Generalissimo Francisco Franco of Spain, they are “religious authoritarians” rather than fascists, according to Laqueur.

The balance of Tea Partiers is made up of fanatical libertarians allied with Evangelicals for the same reason the US and Great Britain allied with Stalin in WW II. They believe it is the lesser of two evils. As a result most of Eastern Europe endured 70 years more of jackboot tyranny. If the Republican Party becomes the Tea Party, the libbers may well find themselves in the same situation.

Tea Partiers, of course, do not wear uniform-like brown shirts as did their fascist counterparts of old. Most appeared at the warm weather protests in golf shirts, with the relatively small number of libbers in attendance wearing camouflage tees. When she referred to them as “brown shirts” Pelosi over-generalized and probably harmed the health care cause.

Had the Speaker called them “Republican golf shirts” she might have coined a new political aphorism. But hindsight is 20/20.

Like fascist officialdom, Republican Party officials eschew any connection with Tea Partiers, thereby providing themselves deniability should things get out of hand. If, for example, one of the gun toting partiers decided to blow someone away with the semi-automatic assault rifles and 44 magnums they carried to the town hall meetings “for protection”.

Hate-mouth radio blat jockey Rush Limbaugh and failed Republican Vice Presidential candidate, the dingbat Sarah Pallin, both dedicated toters and shooters, have assumed the “unofficial” leadership of the movement. This is all well and good for the Democratic Party, so long as President Barack Obama’s stimulus package and health care plan show real progress in the coming year.

If not, the electorate will start looking for more radical solutions, just as they did in 1931 when Hoover’s progressive approach to stimulating the economy failed. We have come to look at Hoover as an ultra-conservative on the order of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush; but a prescient article in Harper’s magazine points out that he was anything but. A close friend of Teddy Roosevelt, he was a “progressive” Republican who believed in government oversight and regulation of the economy.

The progressives were decimated by President William Howard Taft’s theft of the 1912 Republican presidential nomination and America’s entry into World War I, according to William Allen White, a Kansas newspaper publisher and editor who emerged as the national spokesman for progressive Republicanism. Hoover re-energized the party’s progressive wing with his outstanding organization of world hunger relief following the war and won the Republican presidential nomination in 1928.

The Harper’s article notes that Hoover used every method in the progressive arsenal to stimulate the economy, including bailing out banks. He encountered considerable opposition within his own party, as has Obama. Hoover’s secretary of state, whom he fired, welcomed the Great Depression declaring it would clear out bureaucratic dead wood, get the government out of business regulation, take care of the unions once and for all and put the country back on sound financial footing.

Sound familiar? Well, Franklin Delano Roosevelt brought the radical solution needed in 1933 from the left of the progressive political spectrum. The center had failed. From what direction will the radical solution come this time? Sarah Pallin is counting on it coming from the far right; so are her Republican golf shirts. They offer freedom; so did Generalissimo Franco.

Weiser's Wasteland Bar

2009-11-04T15:46:45-07:00

Every time one of those soft porn beer commercials comes on TV, women see red. That’s what the feminist leadership says, anyway, and I see no reason to disagree with them. Nobody likes being portrayed sitting around a bar with feature-perfect erogenous droids appraising each other like over-priced designer goods churned off an assembly line somewhere in southern California.

Men should see red too, and they do; although no masculine leadership has yet emerged to declare their indignation. They also turn enviously green because every man, even those who know better, likes to hope there really are bars where one sip of beer turns women into Katie Holmes and the men into Tom Cruise.

It was this impossible quest that took me to the Silver Bullet while vacationing in my hometown of Weiser some years back. Ron Yankey was disgusted when I suggested it instead of The Crescent for our reunion beer. “It’s not like the one on those TV ads,” he assured me with the patient indulgence of a father lecturing his five-year-old son. “They have Coors on tap. You know, it’s Mina’s old place, we don’t want to go to a dump like that.” (Neither of us would drink non-union Coors.)

Indeed I did know, but I wanted to go anyway. Mina was a classmate of ours and Weiser’s first and, to the best of my knowledge, last stripper. In school she had been the designated fat girl – the one you accused your buddies of carrying a torch for when you wanted to provoke them.

Mina’s family left Weiser in our sophomore year of high school and nothing was heard of her for 10 or 15 years. Novelty strippers were all the rage and an advertisement in the Idaho Daily Statesman for the Tops Down Club in Boise included a picture of its featured performer, Big Tiny Little. It was Mina.

Several years later she came back to Weiser and took over the old Stockman’s Bar premises, which had gone through a succession of owners and names. Mina renamed it Big Tiny Little’s and enjoyed a brief period of celebrity, with her clothes on, before going broke. She left town again and has not been heard from since.

I could see some vestiges of Mina’s occupancy as I sat at the Silver Bullet bar with Ron sipping a bottle of Budweiser. We were the only ones in the place and it was Saturday night. Maybe, the gang from the ski slopes hadn’t arrived yet. I knew they never would, of course. There are about as many skiers as polo players in Weiser. I just wanted to sit there and revel in nostalgia looking over the manifestations of past trends in the tavern, still evident beneath the slap dash redecorating of each successive owner.

Above the kitchen you could still make out the faint outline of Ye Olde Pizza Shoppe from the pizza parlor incarnation. Hanging on the wall near the men’s room were two dust covered dartboards and a faded sign absolving the Tally-Ho Pub of an responsibility for injuries resulting from the misuse of its darts.

The only thing that stirred any memories in me or Ron, though was the faint outline of the name Stockman’s on the door leading into the back alley. When we were just kids and Weiser was the bustling commercial center for surrounding farms, mines and logging operations, the Smoke House, along with The Crescent, just acorss the street, was a favorite lunch spot for local businessmen.

In front, opening on to the street was a café. It was there that I had my first cheeseburger, sharing the counter with such eminent citizens as Sam Emerich, owner of Globe Furniture, and Lou Farber of Farber’s Ladies Wear. It was a heady experience, my first taste of the sophisticated world of business.

Thinking back to that congenial time while sitting in the wasteland of the Silver Bullet, I couldn’t help blame television for all the bleakness of modern culture. Those people didn’t try to construct their lives in response to characters created in some never-never land behind the TV screen. The just lived them. If life was pretty much the same in Lovelock, Nevada as it was in Weiser, Idaho it was because the people had a common heritage and faced similar challenges.

The sameness induced by universal television seems to sap enterprise, dull the intellect and reduce life to the lowest common denominator. All of which is clearly evident in any beer commercial.

Hells Canyon Gateway Closed

2009-10-30T19:15:31-06:00

Before it was filled up with water by three dams some 40 years ago, Hells Canyon was a magnificent sight. Though not as spectacular as the Grand Canyon, it was considerably deeper. In fact, it was advertised as The World’s Deepest Gorge.

Weiser, my hometown, was The Gateway to Hells Canyon and the home of its legends. Chief among these was The Chief Joseph, the first boat to travel up stream on the Snake River in Hells Canyon and on the middle fork of the Salmon River, the world famous “River of No Return”.

Since the advent of the jet boat in the late1960s thousands of people have “returned” up the Salmon, but when I was a boy The Chief Joseph was unique. It was a big gray tub of a boat with a flat bottom curving to form the bow. About 20 or 30 feet aft, two huge motors drove the twin propellers that powered her up the Snake and Salmon Rivers. She was covered by canvas tarps and sat neglected in a bay of the old Penny Arcade in Oregon Trail Park.

The Chief Joseph is gone now as is Oregon Trail Park. A large water treatment plant now takes up most of the small island located at the confluence of the Snake and Weiser Rivers. I don’t know what became of The Chief Joseph, it probably burned up in one of the frequent fires that have plagued Weiser since its founding in the late 1860s.

It wouldn’t have been an “insurance fire” as the run down Oregon Trail Park buildings were not worth anything and were located on public land. Probably it was careless campers or kids playing with matches. We used to play there a lot when I was a kid in the 1950s and we were known to smoke cigarettes and cigars there while pretending to be riverboat gamblers.

During the 1970s when Weiser’s National Oldtime Fiddlers’ Contest and Festival was a favorite stop for roaming motorcycle gangs, Mortimer’s Island (named for the park’s founder John Mortimer) was a favorite camping spot. The gangs never robbed or hurt anyone, but they did turn the fiddle competition into a drinking and orgy festival that drew more participants and observers than the fiddling.

Biker girls stripped to fiddle music on the flat, wooden awnings over the sidewalks in front of bars. Inside the bars there were wet T-shirt contests and more obscene competitions involving men. Tricycle races from bar to bar were organized with the participants chugging a whiskey and beer “boilermaker” at each bar. Out on Mortimer’s Island the orgies continued nonstop.

Meanwhile, at the high school gymnasium, competing fiddlers scraped and scrapped while small crowds of clean living pensioners tapped their cowboy boots in time trying not to think about what was going on in the bars downtown and at the former Oregon Trail Park.

Before long city council outlawed carrying drinks from bar to bar and the police hired dozens of off duty officers from surrounding towns during fiddle week to crack down on “perversion” on Weiser city streets. The water treatment plant was expanded and the rest of Mortimer’s Island turned into a parking lot. The word “festival” was dropped making the annual event simply a fiddlers’ contest.

The motorcycle gangs never returned and neither did the tourists who came to watch them. Mortimer’s Island, a place of fun and games since the early 1900s when the Oregon Trail Park began attracting tourist from all over the Pacific Northwest, was officially dead.

Hells Canyon near Weiser is nothing but a series of lakes good for crappie and catfish fishing, but not much else. White water rafting and other sports available north of the dams, but Weiser is no longer The Gateway to Hells Canyon.