Pondering the Kesey conundrum: A wade through the sea of a Fox Reporter’s knowledge would barely get your feet damp
The background on this is that a conservative council member wanted to say the pledge of allegiance before every meeting, and the city council didn’t want to. They compromised by electing to say the pledge just near 4 federal holidays. The grandstanding over the pledge by a conservative quickly caught the attention of the culture warriors for God over at Fox and Fox nation, who easily manufactured a snit into an outrage of the day.
The same Ken Kesey who was staunchly anti-abortion? Ashland freelance writer John Darling remembers when Kesey, at a 1974 town hall meeting in Medford that exploded into a debate over the issue, told the crowd: “If you’re pregnant and thinking about an abortion, give the child to me.”
The same Ken Kesey who hiked into the Coburg Hills with a Bible in hand and whose most notable work, “Sometimes a Great Notion,” is about the union-busting Stamper family?
Look, I’m not denying Kesey’s wilder side. As a reporter, I’ve seen enough fallout from drug abuse to realize that acid trips — cross-country or not — are no laughing matter. And in the interest of full disclosure, Kesey wrote that, along with that Bible, he was taking hard hits on a bottle of Strawberry Hill wine. But here’s the thing: Spot-fire debates such as Eugene’s Pledge of Allegiance issue become Tillamook Burn-sized, in part, because we accord others so little respect for their respective nuances, political or otherwise. Because we immediately see people as white hats or black hats, good or evil, without stopping to consider that maybe they’re neither. Or both.
In the case of Kesey, who died 10 years ago this November, maybe those hats are Day-Glo yellow.
Fox’s report, the wind beneath the wings of media reports that spun Eugene residents into unpatriotic commies, clearly cast the issue as a good-vs.-evil debate, with Kesey representing the bad guys.
Perhaps it was only coincidental that the Kesey Square sculpture — showing Ken reading to his grandchildren — somehow was knocked off its marble foundation last weekend, only days after the City Council created national news for its decision to begin saying the Pledge of Allegiance four times a year, instead of at “every meeting,” as Councilor Mike Clark proposed.
Of course me calling the Fox reporters shallow in knowledge is a bit lazy, since they could instead just be cunning in trying to keep their antiquarian audience enthralled with bile and rage. After all, we don’t have to be shallow in our analysis just because Fox is.