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About The nugget. (Sisters, Or.) 1994-current | View Entire Issue (Sept. 5, 2018)
Wednesday, September 5, 2018 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon The Bunkhouse Chronicle Craig Rullman Columnist Agaonst trobalosm We are going to be hear- ing a lot about tribalism in the coming years. That’s mostly because so many Americans now see solu- tions to their angst in joining identity clubs. Pick some- thing about your identity — it must make you feel anxious — then go rant- ing and throwing stuff and lighting things on fire when the world doesn’t step aside for you and your special identity. What’s weird is that they often do this under a ban- ner of unity, though the laser focus on what makes them different from every- body else ends up being divisive. That’s also quite different from the mes- sage of say, Rosa Parks, or Jackie Robinson, whose points were that we aren’t so Forest Roa/ 12 to close for culvert The Deschutes National Forest will temporarily close a section of Forest Road 12 in the Metolius Basin to install a culvert where the road crosses a side channel of First Creek. From September 10 to September 17, a reroute will be signed using Forest Roads 1217, 1420 and 1425. The reroute will allow for contin- ued access to Forest Road 12 north of the closure includ- ing the roads to Jack Creek Campground, Jack Lake Trailhead, and Cabot Lake Trailhead. It is anticipated the construction will be complete and the road re-opened by Monday, September 17. In recent years, streams around First Creek have flooded onto Forest Road 12. Installing a larger cul- vert with increased capacity will help prevent this reoc- curring flooding and road damage. different at all. Also, it doesn’t seem to be enough to just not care much about what makes peo- ple so different and special. We are meant to embrace it. We must, under the identity formula, confess profound love for the particular iden- tity, and we should probably apologize in public for hav- ing an “unconscious bias” for so many years. That’s true even when the identity in question just sucks. Being a criminal, for instance, which the State of California is endeavoring to make a legitimate identity choice. No thanks. It’s amusing to me that college football teams — so long and so often derided by academics — are among the few fully integrated work- ings anywhere on contempo- rary college campuses. I sup- pose that’s because football teams are bound together by common goals, like winning. They are still meritocratic too, which is refreshing. Imagine if we were forced to play the third string quarter- back only because all these years we’ve been nurturing an unconscious bias against bad quarterbacks. Meanwhile, back in the classroom, other students are being relentlessly ham- mered by monkish academ- ics that encourage — even insist — on parsing every conceivable difference between human beings to prove one thesis or another about how very, very, differ- ent we all are. That’s tribalism, and it helps explain the prolifera- tion of new cultural afflic- tions and affiliations no one ever even heard of ten years ago. Some folks believe that is progress, but there are plenty of reasons to doubt it. Tribalism is really more about a kind of bottomless narcissism, so that anything or anyone who chafes at worshipping on the altar of the ego and the id must be boycotted or banned. Which is a mindset that ultimately just keeps banning or boy- cotting everything that causes personal discomfort. Which is interesting because, seen in that con- text, the hard right and the hard left would seem to have more in common than they think. I prefer a good team to all of that. Good teams unite people from all different backgrounds and experience and ability. Even a third- string quarterback, who never plays but always prac- tices, gets credit when the team wins. Maybe America needs an old football coach instead of the endless parade of critics and nitwits who spend all day, every day, looking for ways to make the team doubt itself. Racism, sexism, and homophobia are real things and they exist, but at this point in American his- tory they are more like the measles. Measles has dam- aged and killed a lot of people, and we have that disease mostly on the ropes — except for a few dumb holdouts that keep inviting it back into our lives by refus- ing to get their children, or even themselves, inoculated. What’s probably more important to focus on, going forward, is what J.D. Vance wrote about in his excellent book, “Hillbilly Elegy.” “To me,” Vance writes, “the fundamental question of our domestic politics over the next generation is how to continue to protect our soci- ety’s less fortunate while simultaneously enabling advancement and mobility for everyone. We can eas- ily create a welfare state that accepts the fact of a perma- nent American underclass... Or we can do something considerably more difficult: reject the notion of a perma- nent American underclass.” This column certainly has biases, but so far as I know they are all fully con- scious. One of those biases is against people who live in the lap of American lux- ury but seem to think it the very worst country on earth, which should be destroyed and rebuilt in the vision of racist, sexist, and economic ghouls like Marx and Engels. Another bias is against those folks who think that having a lot of money makes them virtuous. The pontifications of political and celebrity narcissists at both the Franklin and McCain memorials is a fine illustration. Maybe bias is too strong a word. Maybe I should say, “I am insufficiently per- suaded that America is rot- ten and must be replaced by a socialist paradise.” Or, “I am insufficiently per- suaded that having a lot of money has made you a good person.” At any rate, I’m going to resist the popular tendency to embrace tribal leanings in our culture. I just can’t see it producing many true heroes like Jesse Owens, Jim Thorpe, or Jackie Robinson. Those men — and there were lots of women too — were great because they managed, against heavy odds, to represent the very best of American optimism and promise. They over- came the very worst kinds of historical American tribal- ism to demonstrate that we aren’t so very different after all. They united us, then and now, because they were big- ger than stubborn insistence on their mere identity. Which is still the point, right? 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