[Vision2020] And now for something completely different

[Joan Opyr]

Dear Visionaries:

I've read that pain focuses the mind, that it helps to sort the wheat 
from the chaff.  Perhaps that was the case for Flannery O'Connor, but 
I'm not so noble a creature.  For me, chronic pain made me fuzzy and 
cross.  It made me angry.  Those of you who have had a gallbladder 
attack -- or who have been kicked repeatedly in the stomach by Peyton 
Manning -- will perhaps understand what I'm talking about.  What 
doesn't kill us may make us stronger, but it doesn't necessarily make 
us better.  I was not a better woman when everything I ate, whether it 
was a single Triscuit or a bowl of Hagen Daas, gave me horrible 
abdominal cramps.  I wasn't sweet when I was jaundiced; I was a crab's 
ass.

I feel better now, much better, and consequently, I want to make a 
different kind of argument against the proposed Wal-Mart Supercenter 
than those I've made in the past.  I want to make an argument that has 
nothing to do with health care, poor wages, the U. S. trade deficit, or 
the sheer, mind-numbing horror I feel that we, the people of Moscow, 
might actually situate a monstrous cheesy retail store directly across 
from our city cemetery.  Instead, I want to talk about the reasons I 
moved here 12 years ago.

I first came to Moscow in August of 1992.  I stayed for exactly one 
week.  I ate breakfast at The Beanery, shopped at Bookpeople and 
Tri-State, and felt that indefinable Moscow vibe.  This was a small 
Western town, but it felt like a larger city; it felt like the Raleigh 
of my youth.  Hip, lively, not too big.  It was a college town with all 
the amenities that designation brings, but it was also a small, 
intimate place where people were friendly, nosy, charming, and curious. 
  For me and Moscow's Main Street, it was love at first stroll.  I came 
back with Melynda for two weeks over the Christmas break, and I was 
hooked.  I finished my PhD coursework at Ohio State in record time, 
waved goodbye to my dissertation director, promising to write my great 
Beowulf opus (knowing all the while that I was lying through my teeth), 
packed up my computer, my hamster, my three dogs, and my girlfriend -- 
in that order, as Melynda insisted on sitting in the front seat -- and 
drove from Ohio to Moscow in three days flat.  I have never looked 
back.

Both of my children were born in Gritman Hospital.  At first, Melynda 
and I were a curiosity -- a lesbian couple having a baby.  The nursing 
staff were puzzled but polite.  By the time our second child was born 
five years later, we were old hat.  No one batted an eyelid.  I've had 
major surgery in Gritman twice, as has Melynda.  Our daughter broke the 
growth plate on her arm by falling off a swing in East City Park, and 
Dr. Steve Penington pinned the bone and took such excellent and kind 
care of her that we will always be grateful to him.  Some of the nurses 
at Gritman feel like old friends.  I see them around town, and I always 
feel a certain sense of comfort when I meet them, a reminder of the 
care I received on their respective wards.

I love our children's school.  I love their principal, the office 
staff, and the many wonderful teachers who have enriched us with their 
knowledge, their professionalism, and their sense of humor.  As funding 
for public education has waxed and waned -- mostly waned -- they have 
continued to do their jobs without complaint and without detriment to 
their pupils.  Some (largely those who have no direct experience of our 
"government" schools) abuse our teachers and public school staff on 
nasty blogs and in letters to the editor with a vitriol that ought to 
be reserved for people like Baby Doc or General Pinochet, and yet I 
have never seen a teacher manifest any bitterness at the unfairness -- 
or the unmitigated gall -- of men like Dale Courtney and Jack Wenders, 
both of whom feed continuously on the public tit, using their generous 
tax-funded retirement dollars to tear our public schools down.  
Amazing.*

So, why don't I want a Wal-Mart Supercenter in Moscow?  Why do I feel 
-- not think -- that it would be a bad thing?  Because it would be the 
first step toward turning this place into Anywhere, America -- 
impersonal, faceless, plastic and corporate.  On Saturday, I left the 
house for the first time since coming home from the hospital.  Where 
did I go?  First, I went to Spence Hardware.  I needed a light for my 
chicken coop and a timer to switch it on and off.  I know the people 
who work at Spence; I buy chicken feed and dog and cat food from them 
on a fairly regular basis.  I also shop there for Carhartts.  I 
couldn't find the light in the chicken/horse/dog department, but no 
worries.  A Spence employee found me what I needed, and he put the 
timer I'd picked up back on the shelf, remembering that there was a 
cheaper one up front -- same brand but it was on sale and came with an 
extra timer for use in the house.  I think he saved me about six bucks.

Next, I went to the new and improved Moscow Food Co-Op.  I was 
beginning to flag a bit, so I sat down in the new deli and had a cup of 
Fair Trade coffee and a grilled turkey sandwich.  Delicious.  The new 
deli isn't really new -- it's so much like the late, lamented Beanery 
that it overwhelms me with nostalgia.  I ran into about a dozen people 
I knew there; I flashed my surgical staples at the curious, and I 
bought some truly hilarious holiday cards.  It was a rejuvenating 
experience -- I was greeted at the Co-Op like a long-lost relative -- 
the kind of relative you actually like, rather than Uncle Jim whose 
only joke is "Pull my finger."  A quick swing through the Goodwill for 
snow pants, a trip to Pets Are People, Too for a freshwater eel and 
some nasty frozen bloodworms, and then it was off home for a nap.  A 
day well-spent.

(If I'd had the time and the energy, I would have gone to Bookpeople.  
I don't feel like I've really been downtown unless I've gone to 
Bookpeople and Hodgins.  I needed a good read and a pair of Bubba teeth 
from the Hodgins' joke rack to make my day complete.  But I'm taking it 
easy.  For now.)

This is the Moscow I know and love, the Moscow where everyone knows 
your name, where service is truly personalized, where you are a human 
being and not a number.  This is a town in which we are all 
interdependent.  We all rely on the University; we all rely on local 
retail.  Yes, we do need to attract more good business to this town, 
but a Wal-Mart Supercenter is not good business.  It's a corporate 
cookie-cutter, an impersonal fanged predatory monster, out to drive 
down prices by gouging suppliers and shipping American manufacturing to 
sweatshops overseas.  Every Wal-Mart in America is exactly like every 
other Wal-Mart the world over.  You cannot tell the difference between 
our existing Wal-Mart on Warbonnet Drive and the Wal-Marts in Raleigh, 
or Seattle, or Missoula, or Bentonville.  They're all just alike; 
you're just a number; and the employees, the goods for sale, and you, 
the customer, are completely and utterly disposable.  Spence Hardware 
needs my business; Tri-State wants my business; Bookpeople appreciates 
my business.  Wal-Mart doesn't give a shit about me.  The clerks come 
and go; so, too, the floor managers.  The goods are complete and utter 
crap, shoddy and disposable.  So much fodder for the landfill.

Moscow is not a disposable town, and ours is not a disposable culture.  
I said in an earlier post that we were better than Bentonville, 
Arkansas.  Here's why; we know one another here.  We don't all like one 
another, but there are damn few people I wouldn't pull out of the ditch 
on a snowy day.  Wal-Mart is a rotten neighbor, and a Wal-Mart 
Supercenter will endanger far too many of our genuinely good neighbors 
-- Spence, the small Sears store, Tri-State, Safeway, the Co-Op, 
Hodgins, Rosauers, Les Schwab, Bruneel, Hyperspud, Wild Women Traders, 
Moscow Building Supply, Quilt Something, the Needlenook, and 
Bookpeople, just to name a few.  I don't think that a few more minimum 
wage jobs and access to cheap toothpaste and toilet paper is worth the 
disruption to our way of life.  I think it's a bad bargain.

That's how I feel.  Pick this apart as you see fit; as I said at the 
beginning, this isn't a logical argument, but it's the primary reason 
I'm going to fight the Supercenter tooth and nail.  In ten or twenty 
years time, I want to recognize Moscow as the place I moved to back in 
1993.  I want this town to grow; I want Moscow to succeed.  But if I 
wanted to live in an impersonal metropolis, I'd move back to Raleigh, 
NC, or to Seattle, or to Spokane.  I don't.  I want to flash my 
surgical staples at diners at the Co-Op.  I think it really helped this 
Saturday with the tofu sales.

In fact, I think I created quite a few vegetarians . . .

Joan Opyr/Auntie Establishment
www.joanopyr.com

*Jack Wenders is retired from the University of Idaho.  He is a 
graduate of the University of Hawaii.  Dale Courtney is retired from 
the U. S. Navy; he collects a military pension and teaches classes for 
a Navy school.  The fact that either of them would spit at public 
school employees while themselves chewing our tax dollars every night 
at dinner time is a hypocrisy beyond my understanding.  What a load of 
belligerant, two-faced, brain dead hooey.  May they choke on the state 
quarters in their macaroni and cheese.
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