Oct/Nov 2002
A
Statement of Conscience: "Not In Our Name"
The Bill of Rights Foundation
We
Must No Longer Tolerate a Culture of Violence
Depak Chopra
Murder
for Profit
William Rivers Pitt
Opposing
the President's Call for "Relentless War"
David Krieger
"Diplomacy"
in the Age of the American Empire
Robert Jensen and Rahul Mahajan
The
Middle East: A Human Perspective
Pam Derby
What
Awaits Us in Iraq "Warrior Kings and the Test of True Vision"
David LaChapelle
Free
to Choose: Health Care for All-Oregon: Measure 23 on the Ballot this November
Gerald Cavanaugh
We
Have the Right to Know What's in Our Food
Louis Mincer
Oregon's
Measure 27
Give Oregonians A Choice
Same
News Every Channel, Every Media
Don Monkerud
The
Cult of Greed and the Anesthetization of Democracy
John Darling
Forest
Health & Logging Wealth
Lesley Adams and Joseph E. Vaile
Finding
Balance in the Autumn Season with ayurvedic Practices
Myrica Morningstar
Sacred
Plants
David Crow
The
Movie Mystic
Stephen Simon
The
Thomas Messages
James Twyman
The
Yearly Round
Richard Moeschl
Cosmic
Calendar
Salina Rain
The Cult of Greed and the Anesthetization of Democracy
A Lone Hope Speaks Truth to Power
By John Darling
Peter Buckley is an oddity—so odd, in fact, that when I pitched the story about his David vs. Goliath race for Congress to my New York Times editor, he immediately saw the novelty in it. What’s odd about Buckley is that he stumps around his huge 2nd district doing something almost unique among politicians and quite embarrassing in this cynical era—he tells the truth.
People kept telling me I gotta go hear this guy. His campaign manager, Ashley Henry, emailed me and said he’s got to get some national media, but that’s practically impossible. Why, I ask. Because all the politicians say the same stuff and if you have a different voice or vision, well, you’re fringe, you’re out of step, you’re naïve or stupid, you’re not savvy and shooting for the great middle of the bell curve and you won’t get any campaign money, so you’ll die.
Well, you need a peg, a hook, I say, something different to make this a Story. Ashley says, the catch is that he tells the truth to people he’s almost sure don’t want to hear it—ranchers, farmers, cowboys, the great middle-class—but strangely, they’re sitting still for it and listening and sometimes nodding.
I go hear the guy. He’s speaking at a Solstice Indian pow-wow, a place all Republicans and most savvy Democrats avoid. (Fringe!) And right out of his mouth pops, “America is moving in exactly the wrong direction.” I gasp. My god, he’s not sucking up! There’s no spin. I haven’t heard anything like this since I covered the slash-and-burn Oregon primary race between Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy in ’68. “The spending priorities of the federal government need to change drastically,” he says. But he’s smiling. He’s not angry. He’s charismatic and has a boyish, winning grin. He’s likeable. Hell, he’s an actor—and a good one.
My first thought—everyone’s first thought is, dang, this guy is good on the stump and obviously is smart and seems to love campaigning (a must), but what the hell is he doing running in a district that hasn’t sent a Democrat to Congress since they carved Salem (heavily Democrat with state workers) out in 1970 and tossed out our powerful Ways and Means chair Al Ullman? This guy has virtually no chance of winning.
I ask him, hey man, why you running here? You could move to Portland or Eugene or back to the Bay Area where you came from and get elected just like that. Why you trying to swing these cowboys? Man, they hate government, period, and here you are telling ‘em they ought to pay for universal health care, federal support for all education through college and repeal the Bush tax cut. You’re lucky they don’t take you out back of the tavern and whup your butt.
Well, he says, he did have this one roughneck at the county fair in Bend who wagged his finger under his (Buckley’s) nose and said the lowest thing he could think of: “You love the pansies and anyone who loves the pansies can’t be trusted with national security.” Now, in large sections of Eastern and Central Oregon, that passes for common sense, if not revealed wisdom. But Buckley deftly pulls out his two favorite tools, his smile and reason. As if to say—hey, I’m going to get you on my wavelength and it’s going to be an enjoyable experience. We’re going to have fun! That’s the part of him that’s Clintonesque—persistence, grasp of the information and an inclusive goodwill.
“We should be an inspiration and a light in the world,” he says, “not an instrument of brute force.” There it is again. It sounds vaguely unpatriotic, but, even if you lean right, you still see the truth in it. And you see the guts it takes to say it. In public. While running for office. He goes on, “The national defense budget has so much waste—hugely expensive weapons systems that have nothing to do with fighting terror. They’re for defense contractors who contributed money to Bush.”
When he says this stuff in Eastern Oregon, (registration 55 percent Republican, 35 percent Democratic) they don’t stand up and throw garbage at him, Buckley reports. Yes, they vote for Bush and Rep. Greg Walden (the incumbent Republican that Buckley’s running against). But then, they’ve also heard about the thousand-dollar toilet seats. We all know how the game is played.
“The Nuclear Missile Defense Shield,” he exhorts, “is the most expensive possible reaction to the least likely danger our nation faces. I mean, which country is really going to develop a nuclear missile system against us? China and Russia want to be our economic partners. North Korea is impoverished. Bush stopped those nego-tiations between North and South Korea so he could make North Korea an enemy, to justify creation of his weapons systems.”
Bush is working hard to favor the top two percent of rich people, he says, instead of helping people with their lives, communities and schools. Y’know, some-day, maybe even this year, this obvious truth about our oligarchy just might be getting through to the common folk—as it did for decades back in FDR-Truman-JFK times.
Do they listen to this stuff in the Oregon outback, I ask him, sitting in his kitchen with one of his three young sons running around and Buddha and St. Francis statues staring at me from his garden. “Yes, actually, they do,” he says. “I ask for a show of hands everywhere I go. I say, is there one person here who does not think every politician is bought and paid for by the highest bidder before they even get in office? I’ve never seen one person raise a hand.”
At the top, he says, it’s a growing cult of greed over citizenship and Jefferson County (Madras), ranchers and farmers were furious about manipulation of energy markets, the secret Cheney energy committee meetings and corporate fraud—one even branding Lay as “Kenny Boy,” said Buckley.
So, they all know it’s rigged and they hate being made fools of so why don’t they do something beside sit back and buy that tired crap of hating the government that Reagan sold them a generation ago?
People today recoil from politics, he says. There’s so much pain in it for them, starting back in the sixties. We’ve exhausted our faith that politics can lead to any positive change. We think it can bring only trouble.
“One of my earliest memories is my dad coming in my bedroom and weeping when Bobby Kennedy was shot,” Buckley says. “Something went out of our collective heart with that and the killings of John Kennedy and Martin Luthur King. We staggered through Vietnam and Watergate and now we don’t have the will to fulfill our potential. There’s an America in each of our hearts and we can’t let it out. We pull back and are afraid to dream and to stand up for our ideals.”
God, he’s right, I realize. It’s like an anesthetic that creeps into your previously vital nerve and muscle and numbs a few cells every day until you don’t see any way to make a difference. I was young in the sixties and had hope. I don’t have that anymore. When did it stop? Buckley is getting to me. He’s teaching me what has happened to our country. He makes it clear that that is more important than him getting elected to office and being somebody. He’s doing a Paul Revere thing—waking up the town folk to the arrival of the enemy: indifference. It’s about the death of democracy, he says and he assures me he’s not kidding.
I want to deny it. But I know he’s right and if I know that, then it forces an immediate choice, doesn’t it? I can sit here and enjoy the cynicism I share with the nation and resign myself to the monoculture we’re creating (watched CNN lately?) and keep my tattered ideals to myself. Or I can make a fool of myself like Peter Buckley and stand up and speak the truth. With a smile, preferably. I mean, that’s what hope is all about, right?
It was the 2000 presidential election, especially the Florida debacle, that brought Buckley into doing public radio commen-taries, then declaring for Congress. “I was horrified at what happened,” he said. The money that went into Bush, more than any race in history. The media coverage—“abysmal” with no focus on issues. The passionate movement not to count votes. The Supreme Court stopping the count with one vote. “They threw out every principle of democracy because the acquisition of power was more important than de-mocracy.”
9/11 has just made things worse, he says, giving more pretext for limiting First Amendment rights to free speech and press. Buckley picketed Bush when he flew into the Rogue Valley in August. Fenced in away from press and public in the tiny compound for dissenters, Buckley waved a sign that said, “Justice for Ken Lay: a minimum wage job and no health coverage.” If he’d strayed from this compound, he’d have been quickly arrested.
Buckley doesn’t look like a Kennedy, but he gets called “Kennedyesque” a lot. They mean Bobby Kennedy, the Kennedy that went into the South and, when they complained of joblessness, he cheekily told them, hey why don’t you start by making a job of cleaning up all the car bodies and old washing machines all over the place down here?
“I was inspired by Kennedy when I was a kid,” said Buckley, who cut his political teeth at age 14, canvassing door-to-door, defending rebel Pete McCloskey, the Congressman who took on fellow Republican Richard Nixon in ’72. “These people set a path in front of me that said this country was about opportunity and freedom—and that expanded and expanded because we have a creed of energy that we can accomplish anything, solve any problem. We’ve lost that. The message of greed has been pounded in our heads for so long. They’ve developed a credo that sacrifice, democracy, being a good citizen is for the sucker. The smart guys can rig the system and make it work for them. It’s extremely appalling in today’s culture.”
I never hear Buckley attack his opponent or even mention him. He mostly confronts the process—and us, the people who’ve let it happen. So I ask him about Walden. “He’s a dedicated man,” Buckley shrugs. “Just a very different point of view. His voting record is the DeLay-Army direction—not corrupt, just extraordinarily destructive for our country. He’s like most Republicans who’ve painted themselves into an ideological box by screaming how awful government is and we must deregulate and un-tax and now they’re not capable of a conversation about anything. They can’t move the country forward.”
Knowing it’s virtually impossible to defeat an entrenched, deep-pocketed conservative Republican in a rural district—why does Buckley run? “It’s a very long shot. I have no illusions about it, but I’m doing it for my children, so they don’t inherit the world I see coming. It’s important to do the work, to get people in the habit of political discourse and participation in the democratic process.”
Now, if that sounds naïve (and Buckley knows it does) then that’s the problem. But there’s a more strategic dimension to it. Buckley intends to run next time, too, and to use the race for building a base of active, aware voters who could swing Oregon in the next presidential race (it was close last time)—and in 2004, head off another default election of Bush.
It’s not a range fire yet, but Buckley thinks he’s getting the hang of it. “Even people who disagree with me appreciate my energy and passion. They tell me I’m obviously sincere. And some,” he laughs, “just shake their heads and walk away.”
Buckley points to a book, Matthew Fox’s Creation Spirituality. It’s been a big influence on him, he notes. “It’s about merging the spiritual path with the day-to-day world. And that we’re here to participate at the highest level as human beings. We’re here to accomplish something.”
John Darling,
M.S. is an Ashland writer and counselor who has worked in the Oregon Senate,
as press secretary on campaigns for Oregon governor and U.S. Senate, and for
United Press International, The Oregonian, The Ashland Daily Tidings, Medford
Mail Tribune and as news director for KOBI-TV, Medford.
