by Charles Fischman.
The small city of Ashland, Oregon, so far south it is almost in California, is peaceful. Ashland has a Peace Wall, a Peace Flame, a Culture of Peace Commission, a Peace House, and at least two Peace Poles. In fact, the non-profit organization, International City of Peace, a one-man operation out of Dayton, Ohio, has officially designated Ashland an “International City of Peace,” although it is unclear whether Ashland sought this recognition or its beacon of harmony shone clear to Ohio, a mysterious Northwest-Midwest connection.
Ashland residents themselves project a largely peaceful image out in public (as long as you don’t cut them off in the notoriously crowded parking lot at the food co-op). They smile at fellow Ashlanders walking, riding, and driving up and down Siskiyou Boulevard, the city’s main road, to and from the abundant groceries, coffee houses, restaurants, banks, shops, and two used record stores. Of course, given that the number of cannabis dispensaries in Ashland is catching up with the number of coffeeshops, there is the distinct possibility that the smiles might be cannabis induced.
If they must drive, perhaps to attend a Peace Commission confab, to consult with their spiritual or financial advisors, or to replenish their cannabis supply, many Ashlanders navigate the city’s untroubled thoroughfares in hybrid vehicles, perhaps a practical Toyota, or a more luxurious Tesla. Emitting no emissions, sporting Patagonia outerwear and hemp or canvas footwear, Ashlanders even strive to send peace to the planet through their conscientious consumerism, as much as it pains them to admit to being a consumer.
How far does Ashland’s tranquility extend? Let us visit the public library, an institution where one might certainly expect to find more peace cultivation inspiration. In fact, the library’s reputation as a serene oasis from the outside world’s daily tribulations is so great that it also houses those without houses in addition to its traditional media collections. Homeless Ashlanders line up before opening hours to get in and, once admitted, set up camp in front of the windows with the choicest mountain views. Who can blame them? If they can’t have a house with any sort of view, at least they can enjoy the library’s.
So peace-inducing is the library’s atmosphere, that the library district recently installed height strips (or height markers) at the main entrance just like those at any convenience store. Although the library somehow managed to install the height markers on the wrong side of the doors (visible upon entering, not exiting), this error does not really matter as, similar to convenience stores, the height markers are largely symbolic. They imply, “you are under surveillance here,” a fact which perhaps explains their installation for view upon arrival rather than departure. The place where local mommies bring their toddlers for story hour, where independent minded teenagers might find Sartre or Vonnegut or even just J.D. Salinger, where everyday citizens might pick up a tax form, read a magazine, or do some genealogy research on the computer, now apparently requires the same deterrent to crime as a robbery prone convenience store. Perhaps the librarians requested that the height markers be installed out of their sight so that they need not be reminded that their role as custodians of the town’s information resources has evolved into social worker/law enforcement official, or at least to feel less like a 7-11 clerk.
Let us examine other public spaces of the International City of Peace: the parks, the paths, the bus stops. In warmer weather, Ashland’s downtown Lithia Park also serves as a day campground (relieving the library of bearing the full burden). Although the daily encampments may be temporary, the chance that the occupants could be involved in one of the illicit activities well-known to flow up and down nearby I-5 (Ashland’s connection to Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and LA) disturbs the park’s serenity. Parents who might have been able to give their children an opportunity to run around without library-level surveillance must keep close tabs on their youngsters (although, given how distracted parents are by their phones, this supervision is perhaps compromised).
Meanwhile, the regional transportation system bus stands serve as impromptu rain shelters, dining areas, and occasionally public restrooms for those without homes, sanitary facilities, or transportation. Although the sides are clear plexiglass, the bus shelters do provide an illusion of privacy for those accustomed to no shelter whatsoever. Why not urinate or defecate there after breakfast, lunch, or dinner, the remnants of which litter the benches and sidewalks despite each shelter having its own trash can?
Let us last consider the lauded bike and walking path, the Bear Creek Greenway, situated along the mountain valley’s floor. The Greenway is another public amenity which the public avoids thanks to its reputation as the “Homeless Highway.” Occasional police sweeps yield a handful of arrests from society’s human refuse and tons of their actual trash. Fortunately for the local vineyards and wineries, tourists have not yet conflated the “Bear Creek Wine Trail” with the Bear Creek Greenway.
Is a popular, democratic equality in station a natural outcome of Ashland’s peaceful ways? The million dollar homes spreading like blackberry canes in the hills above Siskiyou Boulevard suggest not. To live “above the boulevard” requires one of two circumstances: purchasing one’s home prior to 1990, when Ashland had yet to become a desirable vacation and retirement community, or having the financial resources to afford homes for no less than $500,000. Rental property owners, perhaps themselves high on the aroma of peace, extract extortionate rents from the remaining working people who would like to enjoy some peace for themselves.
Such contrasts grow uglier the deeper one looks. The City Council spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on “public art” and proposes a twenty-million dollar new city hall but threatens every month to close its “emergency” shelters for people without homes. Local religious congregations generously offer parking spots to those living out of their vehicles for “safe” overnight parking. A prominent family chooses to build its latest residence, a several year, multi-million dollar contemporary mansion, next door to the decrepit, emergency overnight shelter. Who cannot connect the dots between the construction of the palace moderne and the City Council letting the shelter funding lapse?
Ashland’s Peace Warriors, when they are not busy constructing new empty gestures to demonstrate their heartfelt commitment to promoting peace, are busy promoting Ashland as the next Aspen or Telluride, two quintessential Western enclaves of the ultra rich. If only Ashland could become like Aspen! America’s One-Percenters would have a third option in which to congratulate themselves on their progressive views over white-tablecloth, farm-to-table dinners or in micro-breweries decorated with galvanized steel, the cheap, rural building material fetishized in the architecture and interior design of gentrification. Galvanized metal says, ‘yes, we respect the hardships of the farm or the factory, and we will raise our ten dollar pint of Belgian-style sour ale in tribute to the noble peasants.” Aspen, Telluride, and aspiring Ashland are exactly Ayn Rand’s Valhalla, “Galt’s Gulch,” in the One-Percenter fantasy-romance novel, Atlas Shrugged
One of Ashland’s Peace promoters, the Peace House, emblazons its website homepage with a quote it attributes to Martin Luther King, Jr.: “Peace is not the absence of conflict but the presence of justice.” This thoughtful gesture is especially charming given that Martin Luther King, Jr. would have never been welcome in Ashland during his lifetime. “Sundown” laws persisted in Ashland into the 1960s (as in, no person without white skin may be on city streets after sundown). The city itself takes its name from the plantation of the famous, 19th Century slave-owning Kentuckian, Henry Clay. Clay, depending on whether a Southerner or Northerner has most recently edited his Wikipedia page, either was a great American statesman or was largely responsible for perpetuating slavery in the United States for another forty years. How proud to be both an “International City of Peace” and named after a plantation at the same time! One imagines that potential new migrants to Ashland who cannot quite afford Aspen or Telluride might balk at Ashland’s poor branding.
In fact, this disconnection between image and reality is the real scratch mark on Ashland’s polished veneer of peace. Just like Nixon’s call for “Law and Order,” or Reagan’s fictional “Welfare Queens,” or Bush, Sr.’s infamous “Willie Horton” campaign ad, what the Peace Wall and Peace Flame and Culture of Peace Commission and Peace House and Peace Posts truly represent (despite what would certainly be non-violent protests to the contrary) is a coded message. The message is, “We are converting Ashland into a quasi-gated community, free from undesirables, whether homeless, non-white, or poor.” The peace quest is a thinly-veiled effort to sanitize and secure, to keep out the non-white and clear out the non-wealthy to construct a virtual walled city with inflated property values, control of local government, and extortionate rents in place of mortar and stones.
Ashlanders care more for the oppressed inhabitants of any wretched African backwater than for the less fortunate making the library and the parks and the bus shelters their homes right in front of them. They go blithely to “Circle Time” like kindergarteners on their way in from recess without stopping for a moment to consider that their way of life–the 3000 ft2 McMansions encroaching into wilderness for the sake of views better than the library’s; having to drive everywhere (and, to be honest, mostly in luxury SUVs rather than Teslas and Toyotas) since they have deliberately isolated themselves on the outskirts from the hoi polloi; paying inflated home prices without any concern for how doing so makes the city unaffordable; and caressing their smartphones while slurping coffee or microbrews on patios heated by propane stoves burning 12 hours a day–is unsustainable and immoral.
Ashland’s peace is the pseudo-peace of a security state–as orderly as Communist China, as unruffled as any favorite Middle Eastern despotic oil kingdom. It is the peace of power, American style–money purchasing property and government with an attitude of, “I earned mine; screw the rest of you.” Wherever such power lurks, there is certainly no justice. And, wherever people loudly proclaim that they are virtuous for sharing parking lots; that they are compassionate for offering an “emergency shelter;” that they are humanitarian for modeling an “International City of Peace;” wherever they frantically erect peace walls and peace flames and peace houses and peace posts and peace commissions, they are really soothing their consciences. For, if any of these intentions could be taken as genuine, the library would not have to install a height marker, the parks would not double as bedrooms, the bus shelters not double as bathrooms, and the city’s less-fortunate would have the support services they needed to become not so (drug and alcohol counseling, job training, transitional housing, and all other services necessary to becoming productive citizens again). Ashland has neither peace nor justice. It has the cruel calm of a plantation, just like Henry Clay’s Ashland, where the vastly outnumbered master subdues the many with the whip, the pistol, and the threat of the noose.
John Steinbeck wrote in Travels with Charley, “When people are engaged in something that they are not proud of, they do not welcome witness. In fact, they come to believe the witness causes the trouble.” Though Ashland’s Peace Warriors do not advertise their contempt for others like the Southerners about whom Steinbeck was writing, try knocking on one of their hillside mansion or cul-de-sac subdivision doors for a hot meal, a shower, and a roof over one’s head. Try asking for the chance to feel decent for a few hours when the library closes or the park gets dark or the church parking lot seems too scary. Perhaps try flashing the peace sign and singing a verse or two of Kumbaya…