Piggies

It was the evening of the day that old stupidhead got his AHCA passed, and we were walking up Glisan Street in the Pearl District in downtown Portland, beautiful Portland. Suddenly, we heard a huge commotion, cheers, boos, a loudspeaker, and so forth.

gentrification kills kittens

“It must be a protest!” My cousin Alex said happily, making a beeline in that direction. “Let’s join in!”

“More likely it’s some event at one of these places advertising some kind of new Kale soda pop or something,” Jackson told us, trailing boredly behind with his girlfriend and my daughter.

And sadly, he was closer to the truth than his mother: the commotion was coming from an impromptu arena set up outside a brewery where a Cinco de Mayo celebration was ongoing, and it featured, not the bad rock band I feared, but a bevy of Alaskan racing pigs. Alas, no one was protesting the destruction of health care (and sanity) in America, not even in Portlandia; although it should be said that people did give little halfhearted boos to the poor little piggie that was named “Donald Trump.” They did not insist that it be made into bacon, instantly, but they also did not cheer it on.

So there’s that.

As the kids walked ahead of us on up to Buffalo Exchange and Powell’s Books, Alex and I – both of us journalists, both of us old enough to remember outrage, sanctimony (and laughter, LOL)  -- were given pause. We’d both wanted a protest, damn it. I can also remember when this exact neighborhood was full of old man bars and felt sort of dangerous to walk around in at night. It’s nice that it’s not anymore, and yet at the same time, the proliferation of kale soda and pig races, and of a society that takes part in them at the expense of protesting injustice, somehow seem implicated in the creation of the dark forces that are aligning in this country. The whole scene was like Animal House meets Animal Farm.

all animals are created equal but some animals are more equal than others

Indeed, Alaskan racing pigs are indeed a fitting allegory for the situation we are in now. First the pigs noodle around in a tiny pen all nudging one another out of the way, and then they are stuffed into little track suits and made to run around a course and jump a little hurdle, only to get their snouts into a feed bag at the end of it. There’s no real sport in it. They do what they’re told, like the patrons of the bar who believe it is necessary to celebrate Cinco de Mayo by cheering them on.

Those are kind of harsh thoughts, but I’ll be honest. This week has been tough. O n the way home from Portland, Caitlin asked me if I thought the phrase “Cinco de Drinko” is racist. I told her I don’t think so: I just think the whole concept of Cinco de Mayo is pretty wrongheaded and white-centered, not so much racist as racially awry, especially in this era when it is a pretty feeble counterpart to the anti-ethnic rhetoric and legislation that simultaneously blights our landscape. But I had to add that my opinion is worthless, as I have been censured a lot lately, if not for explicit racism, for somehow being implicated in a racist system that hires white people like me to teach about subjects like race and then lets them show movies like Gimme Shelter wherein a black person (Meredith Hunter) is killed by whites and then white students are asked to discuss it in front of black students, who don’t really like their remarks.

It turns out that might not have been a good move, on my part, pedagogically speaking. The question I asked was: “Are the Rolling Stones partially responsible for this young man’s death”? Here’s a  list of answers that I got:

1     1. Yes.

2.      2. No.

3.      3. The responsibility lies with the Hell’s Angels

4.      4. The responsibility lies with the individual Hell’s Angel who killed him

5.      5. The responsibility is embedded in issues to do with the era and the historical context.

6.      6. The responsibility lies with the victim who waved a gun in the face of a violent Hell’s Angel. (I believe the exact comment was, “What did he expect to have happen?”)

7.      7. The responsibility lies with the filmmakers, for colluding at a situation that was getting out of hand and then for callously displaying the death as spectacle, for, in Pauline Kael’s words,  producing an actual snuff film.

There are probably other answers that I’m forgetting, but those are the main ones, and if you’ve seen Gimme Shelter, you may have your own answer to this question. My personal  feelings are weighted well towards #1 (as you know if you’ve read my book Exile In Guyville, I have a complex love/hate relationship with the Rolling Stones, and anyway, Altamont was the Fyre Festival of 1969), but the point of teaching is not to tell the students what I think about it, it’s to explore (“unpack”) the range of options in a situation like this.

You can probably guess which answer caused the ongoing ruckus that we’ve had in my class all week – a drama which, now that I’m writing about it, I don’t think is unmerited. I mean, earlier in the week, Geoff had given a lecture in which he railed on the educational concept of ‘western civilization’ as one of the ideological underpinnings of both the Cold War and of our nationally ingrained racist policies in general. Perhaps he and I should not then have been surprised that later on the class rose up as one and said, ‘If this is so, why is our entire reading list written or made or by white people?”

That was our bad. It really was. Some of the damage was undone with a more fruitful lecture on Wattstax, and surely going forward into the hip hop era I can do a better job of shining a light on the opposition, rather than just exposing the disgusting nature of white America and then going, “Oh, whoops.”  In retrospect, I feel like showing Gimme Shelter at all was sort of my Cinco-de-Mayo moment, that is, a  time when  thought that I was being an ally, but actually I was being an aggressor.

Meanwhile, the pigs keep running around in that little pen getting nowhere, and the people, they keep cheering us on. Get it? The pigs are us; people. And the cheering masses are the forces of evil, getting more and more gleeful as the night goes on.

yep.