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Pre-Election Report from the American Road
by Doniphan Blair
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A scrap metal Brontosaurus from the Rusty Kingdom, outside of Barstow, California, one of the many examples of local arts in unexpected places. photo D. BlairVERY FEW TRUMP SIGNS WAS ONE OF
the many surprises on my 1800-mile drive from Oakland to Oklahoma and Texas, presumably Trump country (it gets really gorgeous, by the way, when you enter Arizona). Biden bumper stickers were even more absent, which may indicate fears of broken windows or sheer exhaustion.
Black Lives Matters signs were similarly limited, although there were many more Black people than in 2007, when I last drove Route 40. That people-of-color paucity was more than made up for, however, by large Latinx and Native American populations. The latter has an enormous presence in Arizona, New Mexico and, to my surprise, Oklahoma.
Another revelation was the increasing number of cities and towns with flourishing cultural communities (at least pre-Covid).
In Bakersfield, California, after dropping by a beautiful hot spring an hour north of town, I visited two music halls, one country, the other everything else, Buck Owen’s Crystal Palace and World Records, respectively. Both were shuttered by the pandemic, but their large theaters and accompanying restaurants and shops still testified to a vibrant music scene.
It started with Owens’s “Nashville West” but blew up with Meryl Haggard’s “outlaw” style, I was told by Pat Evans, the genial owner of World Records, where I bought some CDs (delivered curbside).
I assumed there would be some Trump fans when I caught the second Trump-Biden debate at the Roadkill Café in Seligman, Arizona, named for a 19th century Jewish railroad tycoon, Jesse Seligman. (Arizona has a few famous Jews, notably senator and presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.) The waitress turned the debate on at my request but neither she nor the bar’s good ol’ boys paid much heed—perhaps that exhaustion again.
In Oklahoma City, I toured two heavily cuisined, art-galleried AND marijuana-shopped neighborhoods. Despite Oklahoma’s Republican super-majority—the governor, both senators, over three quarters of Congressional representative and both state houses—its citizens voted 57% to 43% to legalize medical cannabis in 2018.
The National Memorial for the Oklahoma City Bombing serves as a grim reminder of horror of white supremacist terrorism. photo D. BlairThe city also features the artistic, moving and tolerance-professing National Memorial, featuring 168 chairs for those murdered in the 1995 truck bombing of the Alfred P. Murrow building. American’s worst terrorist attack in modern times other than 9/11 and only 25 years ago, the Oklahoma City Bombing appears to dampen the ardor of local white supremacists.
Tulsa, another Oklahoma city with elevated arts, recently received Bob Dylan’s archives, unfortunately only open to researchers. Evidently, Dylan wanted to be near his hero, the folksinger and anti-fascist Woody Guthrie, who was born in Okemah, Oklahoma, and is also archived in Tulsa.
In Tahlequah, Oklahoma, the capital of the Cherokee nation, I was generously hosted by Kellyquah Anquoe, co-director of Tahlequah Creates, a local art gallery. A devoted intellectual and rationalist, as well as painter, musician and Cherokee activist, Anquoe is a fantastic font of unbiased Cherokee lore.
While Arizona is almost half Navajo Reservation and New Mexico’s 22 tribes are world famous, I had forgotten Oklahoma’s story from high school history and didn’t realize how Native American it is.
Oklahoma’s indigenous population is 9.3%, just under New Mexico’s 10.6%, according to Wikipedia, although the CDC puts it at 14.5% and 6.5%, respectively, while my quick crunch of the 2010 census numbers comes up with 12.5% and 11% (evidently, Native people are hard to quantify).
In fact, Oklahoma was designated the Native American homeland state in the early 1800s, with many tribes either located or maintaining headquarters there to this day.
Of course, “located” meant “relocated” for the Cherokee, Choctaw, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw and other tribes who endured the Trail of Tears,” the various forced marches of up to 1000 miles, which killed over 5,000 people, about a quarter of those who endured it.
President Jackson, a populist hothead not unlike the current office holder, ignored the Supreme Court ruling against deportation as well as the fact that those were the “Five Civilized Tribes” and advanced multiculturalists. Indeed, they had integrated their traditions with white technology and behavior, from guns and horses to writing and square houses as well as becoming Christian, intermarrying and, since they were in the South, owning slaves.
Early Cherokee assimilation of Southern society is why there are so many conservative and even Republican Cherokee today. Nevertheless, most remain very much Native, replete with pow-wows, councils and other practices, as explained to me by Anquoe, who grew up traveling to pow-wows all over the country as a musician.
Painter, musician, gallery director and Cherokee activist Kellyquah Anquoe (rt) generously hosted the author in the interesting cultural center of Tahlequah, Oklahoma. photo D. BlairAnother testament to Cherokee multiculturalism is the many intermarriages, starting in the 18th century, mostly Cherokee women with Scottish-Irish men, considered the hardiest of the colonists. Such social integration indicates how matriarchs, who were conquered by patriarchs, retake power through relationships. Moreover, a matriarchal society means children with Cherokee mothers were fully accepted by the tribe and often remained with it.
The most famous Scottish-Irish Cherokee was John Ross (1790-1866), who became one of their greatest chiefs, although only one-eighth Cherokee. After a bi-cultural education, he rose rapidly into leadership, captained a Cherokee brigade under Andrew Jackson (fighting the French, English and other Natives), and became a tobacco plantation owner and merchant. A leader during the Trail of Tears tragedy, his wife died en route, but he helped rebuild Cherokee society in Oklahoma.
Another advanced cultural integrator was the full Cherokee Nancy Ward (1738-1834). A fierce warrior, who fought alongside her first husband, she became a powerful leader and the only woman to sit on the Cherokee council. She advocated for co-existence and her second and third husbands were white.
Much of the intermarriage was with Blacks, since some 2,000 hiked the Trail of Tears as slaves of Native “masters.” Others fled to the region before and during the Civil War, despite incursions by Confederate raiders, while others arrived after the Civil War, thinking it was the promising place of a diverse, new America.
In 2019, the Cherokee Nation was highly criticized for expelling some 2800 African American members, perhaps because their mothers were not Cherokee. As critical today as ever, tribal membership entitles one to full health care from the Indian Health Services.
The young, seemingly African American man running a cannabis pharmacy in Tahlequah told me he was part Cherokee but didn’t have to deal with expulsion issues since he was certified Seminole through his mother. Another one of the Civilized Tribes, the Seminole of Florida had long intermarried with runaway Blacks but also runaway whites, pirates and other rebels.
The history of Native Americans, Oklahoma and America is riddled with broken treaties, vicious killings and outright wars, slavery and genocide, but there were also many romances, cooperative projects and cultural integration (as noted in my article “Radical Multiculturalism to the Rescue”), which should inspire us in this difficult time.
The Black Live Matter movement has been revisiting Tulsa’s notorious 1921 pogrom, when a white mob slaughtered between 50 and 200 African Americans and destroyed the flourishing business district called Black Wall Street. It is also worth recalling, however, that four years earlier, Black, Native and poor white Oklahomans joined to protest the World War I draft, leading to the Green Corn Rebellion (only three killed, thankfully).
And Oklahoma is about to enter a new chapter. On July 8, 2020, the Supreme Court ruled that half the state is a Native American reservation. No land will change hands, but this will “have major consequences for both past and future criminal and civil cases.”
Just south of Oklahoma is the vast land of Texas, 800 miles across and 29 million people, making it second only to California’s 39 million citizens and fully deserving of the appellation “Third Coast.” Alas, Natives number just 1.1% of the population, since Texans drove the Apache, Comanche and other tribes into Oklahoma.
Not one Trump or Biden sign at the Kennedy Memorial in Dallas. photo D. BlairTexas is famously Republican. But it, too, is filled with creative communities and famous liberals, from Lyndon Johnson to Ann Richards. In fact, Texas has been waxing Democratic ever since Congressman Beto O’Rourke almost took down Ur-conservative Ted Cruz in the Senate race of 2018.
There remains so much hope for a surprise Democratic sweep that vice-president candidate Kamala Harris showed up for a speech earlier this week, with another push by O’Rourke and others tomorrow. As in Oklahoma, Texan people of color have a large conservative wing. If they shift a notch or two bluer, the state might flip—so call any Texan relatives you might have!
I crossed into Texas at night, in the rain, a series of red lights blinking in unison across the landscape. It was rather spooky, until I realized they were the wind turbines of liberal Texans investing in the future.
After stopping at Dallas’s National Memorial to John F. Kennedy—a pop-art, 30-foot-square, white cube, containing a small reflecting pool (by famed architect Philip Johnson), but strangely moving in the rain—I headed for Austin, naturally.
Texas’s intellectual as well as political capital, Austin emerged as a culture center starting with music in the 1970s.
Willie Nelson, the great musical artist as well as staunch Democrat and weed activist, grew up 100 miles from Austin. In the early-'70s, he came out of retirement, from his success with a string of country and jazz hits, to foster another Bakersfield-like scene, in opposition to Nashville's corporate country. Nelson’s Outlaws attracted Stevie Ray Vaughan, among other greats, and generated “Austin City Limits”, a musical show premiering on PBS in 1975.
In 1987, music and television was seconded by film: the South By South West Festival. It also blew up and now lasts over ten days, although this year it was just five and virtual.
Austin’s downtown is booming, with plenty of tall buildings and cranes as well as nightclubs, hipster hangouts and homeless, under the popular mayor Steve Adler, one of Texas’ many Jews. (Interestingly, the most prominent member of the community is probably Kinky Freedman, musician, Willie Nelson friend and one-time gubernatorial candidate).
Austin also has fantastic Tex-Mex food, a relief for me after so much bad American fare (although in the Texas Panhandle, I did find a truck stop featuring an East Indian buffet—testament to another rapidly expanding middle American community, indeed, one running a candidate for Vice President).
As with all the other cultural businesses, Austin’s music scene has taken a tremendous hit from the pandemic. But, according to a musician I talked to, it has inspired people to buy guitars and take Zoom lessons, suggesting the next musical generation is woodshedding and on its way.
Like the rest of the country, Texas is in the final throws of a hard fought election, with lots of local offices up for grabs and the airwaves full of attack ads, often featuring the latest video techniques of quick cuts, heavy music and arty coloration.
Of course, Texas has a lot of gun-toters and can be famously tough. But there were no open signs of anger, animosity or unrest. I suspect their diverse politics and neighbors has prepared them to weather even this most controversial of elections, despite the fears Fox News and talk radio are stoking.
The author in West Texas Hill Country, not far from Lyndon Johnson's birthplace: poor, flat and surprisingly multicultural with many Latinx and Natives as well as 'cowboys.' photo D. BlairIn the Mexican border town of Del Rio, I finally saw a significant number of Trump signs, but also tattooed white girls, long-haired Latinos and skater-types happily hanging out.
I did meet a Trumper who proudly claimed he had yet to wear a mask once. As I backed away, I reminded myself that practicing radical tolerance means of idiots as well. Indeed, there was nothing to be done until the passage of a nationwide mask mandate, hopefully after this guy’s neighbors flip Texas.
That will of course be the biggest surprise of all, which I will celebrate, perhaps at Texas’s single hot spring, located at Big Bend National Park. It is not that I fear the gun toters—in fact, my last 3,000 miles of America has reinforced my basic belief in our general decency. It is just that after so much noise, conflict and close calls, some nature would be nice.
To find out more about my American "Twilight of the Trumpians" adventure, see my Facebook page or Instagram
Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached . Posted on Oct 30, 2020 - 03:55 PM
by Doniphan Blair
Please support our stories by liking articles—thanks!
A scrap metal Brontosaurus from the Rusty Kingdom, outside of Barstow, California, one of the many examples of local arts in unexpected places. photo D. Blairthe many surprises on my 1800-mile drive from Oakland to Oklahoma and Texas, presumably Trump country (it gets really gorgeous, by the way, when you enter Arizona). Biden bumper stickers were even more absent, which may indicate fears of broken windows or sheer exhaustion.
Black Lives Matters signs were similarly limited, although there were many more Black people than in 2007, when I last drove Route 40. That people-of-color paucity was more than made up for, however, by large Latinx and Native American populations. The latter has an enormous presence in Arizona, New Mexico and, to my surprise, Oklahoma.
Another revelation was the increasing number of cities and towns with flourishing cultural communities (at least pre-Covid).
In Bakersfield, California, after dropping by a beautiful hot spring an hour north of town, I visited two music halls, one country, the other everything else, Buck Owen’s Crystal Palace and World Records, respectively. Both were shuttered by the pandemic, but their large theaters and accompanying restaurants and shops still testified to a vibrant music scene.
It started with Owens’s “Nashville West” but blew up with Meryl Haggard’s “outlaw” style, I was told by Pat Evans, the genial owner of World Records, where I bought some CDs (delivered curbside).
I assumed there would be some Trump fans when I caught the second Trump-Biden debate at the Roadkill Café in Seligman, Arizona, named for a 19th century Jewish railroad tycoon, Jesse Seligman. (Arizona has a few famous Jews, notably senator and presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.) The waitress turned the debate on at my request but neither she nor the bar’s good ol’ boys paid much heed—perhaps that exhaustion again.
In Oklahoma City, I toured two heavily cuisined, art-galleried AND marijuana-shopped neighborhoods. Despite Oklahoma’s Republican super-majority—the governor, both senators, over three quarters of Congressional representative and both state houses—its citizens voted 57% to 43% to legalize medical cannabis in 2018.
The National Memorial for the Oklahoma City Bombing serves as a grim reminder of horror of white supremacist terrorism. photo D. BlairTulsa, another Oklahoma city with elevated arts, recently received Bob Dylan’s archives, unfortunately only open to researchers. Evidently, Dylan wanted to be near his hero, the folksinger and anti-fascist Woody Guthrie, who was born in Okemah, Oklahoma, and is also archived in Tulsa.
In Tahlequah, Oklahoma, the capital of the Cherokee nation, I was generously hosted by Kellyquah Anquoe, co-director of Tahlequah Creates, a local art gallery. A devoted intellectual and rationalist, as well as painter, musician and Cherokee activist, Anquoe is a fantastic font of unbiased Cherokee lore.
While Arizona is almost half Navajo Reservation and New Mexico’s 22 tribes are world famous, I had forgotten Oklahoma’s story from high school history and didn’t realize how Native American it is.
Oklahoma’s indigenous population is 9.3%, just under New Mexico’s 10.6%, according to Wikipedia, although the CDC puts it at 14.5% and 6.5%, respectively, while my quick crunch of the 2010 census numbers comes up with 12.5% and 11% (evidently, Native people are hard to quantify).
In fact, Oklahoma was designated the Native American homeland state in the early 1800s, with many tribes either located or maintaining headquarters there to this day.
Of course, “located” meant “relocated” for the Cherokee, Choctaw, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw and other tribes who endured the Trail of Tears,” the various forced marches of up to 1000 miles, which killed over 5,000 people, about a quarter of those who endured it.
President Jackson, a populist hothead not unlike the current office holder, ignored the Supreme Court ruling against deportation as well as the fact that those were the “Five Civilized Tribes” and advanced multiculturalists. Indeed, they had integrated their traditions with white technology and behavior, from guns and horses to writing and square houses as well as becoming Christian, intermarrying and, since they were in the South, owning slaves.
Early Cherokee assimilation of Southern society is why there are so many conservative and even Republican Cherokee today. Nevertheless, most remain very much Native, replete with pow-wows, councils and other practices, as explained to me by Anquoe, who grew up traveling to pow-wows all over the country as a musician.
Painter, musician, gallery director and Cherokee activist Kellyquah Anquoe (rt) generously hosted the author in the interesting cultural center of Tahlequah, Oklahoma. photo D. BlairThe most famous Scottish-Irish Cherokee was John Ross (1790-1866), who became one of their greatest chiefs, although only one-eighth Cherokee. After a bi-cultural education, he rose rapidly into leadership, captained a Cherokee brigade under Andrew Jackson (fighting the French, English and other Natives), and became a tobacco plantation owner and merchant. A leader during the Trail of Tears tragedy, his wife died en route, but he helped rebuild Cherokee society in Oklahoma.
Another advanced cultural integrator was the full Cherokee Nancy Ward (1738-1834). A fierce warrior, who fought alongside her first husband, she became a powerful leader and the only woman to sit on the Cherokee council. She advocated for co-existence and her second and third husbands were white.
Much of the intermarriage was with Blacks, since some 2,000 hiked the Trail of Tears as slaves of Native “masters.” Others fled to the region before and during the Civil War, despite incursions by Confederate raiders, while others arrived after the Civil War, thinking it was the promising place of a diverse, new America.
In 2019, the Cherokee Nation was highly criticized for expelling some 2800 African American members, perhaps because their mothers were not Cherokee. As critical today as ever, tribal membership entitles one to full health care from the Indian Health Services.
The young, seemingly African American man running a cannabis pharmacy in Tahlequah told me he was part Cherokee but didn’t have to deal with expulsion issues since he was certified Seminole through his mother. Another one of the Civilized Tribes, the Seminole of Florida had long intermarried with runaway Blacks but also runaway whites, pirates and other rebels.
The history of Native Americans, Oklahoma and America is riddled with broken treaties, vicious killings and outright wars, slavery and genocide, but there were also many romances, cooperative projects and cultural integration (as noted in my article “Radical Multiculturalism to the Rescue”), which should inspire us in this difficult time.
The Black Live Matter movement has been revisiting Tulsa’s notorious 1921 pogrom, when a white mob slaughtered between 50 and 200 African Americans and destroyed the flourishing business district called Black Wall Street. It is also worth recalling, however, that four years earlier, Black, Native and poor white Oklahomans joined to protest the World War I draft, leading to the Green Corn Rebellion (only three killed, thankfully).
And Oklahoma is about to enter a new chapter. On July 8, 2020, the Supreme Court ruled that half the state is a Native American reservation. No land will change hands, but this will “have major consequences for both past and future criminal and civil cases.”
Just south of Oklahoma is the vast land of Texas, 800 miles across and 29 million people, making it second only to California’s 39 million citizens and fully deserving of the appellation “Third Coast.” Alas, Natives number just 1.1% of the population, since Texans drove the Apache, Comanche and other tribes into Oklahoma.
Not one Trump or Biden sign at the Kennedy Memorial in Dallas. photo D. BlairThere remains so much hope for a surprise Democratic sweep that vice-president candidate Kamala Harris showed up for a speech earlier this week, with another push by O’Rourke and others tomorrow. As in Oklahoma, Texan people of color have a large conservative wing. If they shift a notch or two bluer, the state might flip—so call any Texan relatives you might have!
I crossed into Texas at night, in the rain, a series of red lights blinking in unison across the landscape. It was rather spooky, until I realized they were the wind turbines of liberal Texans investing in the future.
After stopping at Dallas’s National Memorial to John F. Kennedy—a pop-art, 30-foot-square, white cube, containing a small reflecting pool (by famed architect Philip Johnson), but strangely moving in the rain—I headed for Austin, naturally.
Texas’s intellectual as well as political capital, Austin emerged as a culture center starting with music in the 1970s.
Willie Nelson, the great musical artist as well as staunch Democrat and weed activist, grew up 100 miles from Austin. In the early-'70s, he came out of retirement, from his success with a string of country and jazz hits, to foster another Bakersfield-like scene, in opposition to Nashville's corporate country. Nelson’s Outlaws attracted Stevie Ray Vaughan, among other greats, and generated “Austin City Limits”, a musical show premiering on PBS in 1975.
In 1987, music and television was seconded by film: the South By South West Festival. It also blew up and now lasts over ten days, although this year it was just five and virtual.
Austin’s downtown is booming, with plenty of tall buildings and cranes as well as nightclubs, hipster hangouts and homeless, under the popular mayor Steve Adler, one of Texas’ many Jews. (Interestingly, the most prominent member of the community is probably Kinky Freedman, musician, Willie Nelson friend and one-time gubernatorial candidate).
Austin also has fantastic Tex-Mex food, a relief for me after so much bad American fare (although in the Texas Panhandle, I did find a truck stop featuring an East Indian buffet—testament to another rapidly expanding middle American community, indeed, one running a candidate for Vice President).
As with all the other cultural businesses, Austin’s music scene has taken a tremendous hit from the pandemic. But, according to a musician I talked to, it has inspired people to buy guitars and take Zoom lessons, suggesting the next musical generation is woodshedding and on its way.
Like the rest of the country, Texas is in the final throws of a hard fought election, with lots of local offices up for grabs and the airwaves full of attack ads, often featuring the latest video techniques of quick cuts, heavy music and arty coloration.
Of course, Texas has a lot of gun-toters and can be famously tough. But there were no open signs of anger, animosity or unrest. I suspect their diverse politics and neighbors has prepared them to weather even this most controversial of elections, despite the fears Fox News and talk radio are stoking.
The author in West Texas Hill Country, not far from Lyndon Johnson's birthplace: poor, flat and surprisingly multicultural with many Latinx and Natives as well as 'cowboys.' photo D. BlairI did meet a Trumper who proudly claimed he had yet to wear a mask once. As I backed away, I reminded myself that practicing radical tolerance means of idiots as well. Indeed, there was nothing to be done until the passage of a nationwide mask mandate, hopefully after this guy’s neighbors flip Texas.
That will of course be the biggest surprise of all, which I will celebrate, perhaps at Texas’s single hot spring, located at Big Bend National Park. It is not that I fear the gun toters—in fact, my last 3,000 miles of America has reinforced my basic belief in our general decency. It is just that after so much noise, conflict and close calls, some nature would be nice.
To find out more about my American "Twilight of the Trumpians" adventure, see my Facebook page or Instagram
Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached . Posted on Oct 30, 2020 - 03:55 PM
