Speaker 1: Welcome back to the Dire Straits Cast, a podcast where
Speaker 1: I know exactly one song by the band The dire
Speaker 1: Straits money for Nothing, and Margaret, I understand you still
Speaker 1: know two songs by the dire Straits.
Speaker 2: I do.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Sultan's is excellent.
Speaker 1: So this is a news and culture podcast about all
Speaker 1: of the things going on in the Dire Straits world.
Speaker 1: Any any updates that you're aware of, Margaret, Well, they
Speaker 1: don't need to make the guitar cry or sing. Okay,
Speaker 1: I've learned that, Mukay. How do we feel are they
Speaker 1: allowed to use that slur sing no no, no no
Speaker 1: in Money for Nothing?
Speaker 4: Oh? You know, there's no accountability that I could ask
Speaker 4: from the Dire Straits.
Speaker 1: I don't think there ever was.
Speaker 4: I don't think it's what I would recommend they did.
Speaker 4: That's That's where I'm going to go.
Speaker 1: My assumption is that everyone involved with that band died
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty nine, and yeah, they can't have lived
Speaker 1: past that. They certainly can't have outlived in TV.
Speaker 2: Why is this the thing you wanted to do? This
Speaker 2: is this is.
Speaker 1: This is Margaret and I's most beloved bit. The Dire
Speaker 1: Straits Podcast by two people who know very little about
Speaker 1: the Dire Straits, Margaret, can you because I only know
Speaker 1: one song and Margaret knows two.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well, we've done it before, so therefore it's our
Speaker 4: most beloved I was.
Speaker 1: I was. I've been waiting for weeks to talk about
Speaker 1: the Dire Straits again, because, you know, after we did
Speaker 1: it the first time, I listened to Money for Nothing
Speaker 1: again because I mostly had listened to a cover of
Speaker 1: it done by a bluegrass band, and it wound up
Speaker 1: you know that thing YouTube does where they like stick
Speaker 1: it in your like recently listened to thing. And so
Speaker 1: for the last like several months, every time I hop
Speaker 1: on YouTube to put on music, there's like a fifty
Speaker 1: percent chance I start playing that one song and then
Speaker 1: it it quickly takes me away from that to other songs,
Speaker 1: and then in thirty minutes, I'm singing Hotel California. But
Speaker 1: you know, and it's four thirty in the morning. What else,
Speaker 1: what are you gonna do? Anyway, this concludes the Dire
Speaker 1: Straits cast. If they're not dead, don't tell us. You know,
Speaker 1: we're We're both fine with that. I don't, I don't.
Speaker 4: Unless you are listening and you are in dire Strain,
Speaker 4: in which case you have permissions.
Speaker 1: Especially if you will record us a custom version of
Speaker 1: either one of those two songs, but themed about I
Speaker 1: don't know whatever we do here podcasting. I guess that
Speaker 1: probably wouldn't be a very interesting song. Actually, you know what,
Speaker 1: I'm certain there is a deeply, deeply frustrating version of
Speaker 1: money for Nothing that's about like podcasters making money as
Speaker 1: opposed to rock stars, and I don't want to hear it.
Speaker 1: So no, no, thank you, yeap. That is the exception.
Speaker 4: Yeah, even if you're the Dire Straits people and you
Speaker 4: wrote that song, you don't want it.
Speaker 1: Would be very funny if the Dire Straits people were
Speaker 1: just like the Monster mash Guy, where they just kept
Speaker 1: making as anytime there was like a new group of
Speaker 1: people who like got a bunch of money, they do
Speaker 1: another version of that.
Speaker 2: Why are you still talking about this?
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 1: I don't know, Sophie, because the rest of the story
Speaker 1: we're talking about today, which is the history of vagrancy
Speaker 1: and how it intertwines with the history of Benjamin Darling's
Speaker 1: descendants and Malaga Island, the rest of that story is
Speaker 1: very sad. So that's why we're talking about the Dire Straan.
Speaker 2: Legally, we are only allowed to feel joy when we're
Speaker 2: on cool people did cool stuff, bastards bad time.
Speaker 1: We did sign that contract. Well great, I don't know, Sophie,
Speaker 1: See if we can get a deal with MTV and
Speaker 1: do a real music podcast. Are they still around?
Speaker 3: I think so, But it's just like now they're m
Speaker 3: pod for It.
Speaker 2: Just seems to be like more like spinoff shows of
Speaker 2: Jersey Shore.
Speaker 4: And over again.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's what a tragic state of affairs.
Speaker 3: That was a cultural moment.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because honestly, like the Jersey Shore people probably committed
Speaker 1: fewer sex crimes than the musicians that were previously the
Speaker 1: draw to that channel. So I don't know, it seems
Speaker 1: probably pretty equal. Well, now I've made our fun bit
Speaker 1: about the Dire Straits, just.
Speaker 3: The regular shift, So yeah, let's continue on.
Speaker 1: So when we left our friends on Malaga Island, things
Speaker 1: were still going pretty well there, but the twentieth century
Speaker 1: was starting to turn and there were problems on the horizon. Right.
Speaker 1: You know, this kind of anti vagrant hysteria had sort
Speaker 1: of fed into you know, this kind of local culture
Speaker 1: demonizing this this one. You know, dude, you know, squatting
Speaker 1: alone on an island, and it was kind of like
Speaker 1: a sign of things that are about to start becoming
Speaker 1: a problem for more of the people who live on
Speaker 1: these islands, because the kind of pleasant state of being
Speaker 1: ignored that had benefited these people for so many generations
Speaker 1: was going to come to an end because of the
Speaker 1: development of Maine's first tourist industry. Suddenly Americans with disposable
Speaker 1: income were flocking to the main coast every summer. These
Speaker 1: isolated islands, you know, with the additional technology that existed,
Speaker 1: were now less isolated. And you know, for a while,
Speaker 1: about a century or so, affluent white maners had been
Speaker 1: pretty happy to leave the people of the Casco Bay
Speaker 1: Islands alone, especially since they were both an exit valve
Speaker 1: for folks who didn't fit into like Portland society, and
Speaker 1: they were a source of cheap labor. But now they
Speaker 1: were starting to think, well, maybe there's more money if
Speaker 1: we just kind of imminent domain those islands and put
Speaker 1: up summer houses on them for you know, rich people,
Speaker 1: and shit, yeah, what do we airbnb community? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's basically what's happening. So since there's money to be
Speaker 1: made in the islands, now local businesses start leaning on
Speaker 1: the local media to portray the Malagaites and their neighbors
Speaker 1: as an iesore and a shame to the community. In
Speaker 1: eighteen ninety nine, a columnist for the Bath Enterprise limited
Speaker 1: that quote, few people of Pipsburg had faith that the
Speaker 1: effort to get rid of Malaga with its burden of
Speaker 1: poor people, would be successful. A flurry of local news articles,
Speaker 1: like this one from the Casco Bay Breeze in nineteen
Speaker 1: oh five described Malaga as the home of southern Negro
Speaker 1: blood and an incongruent scene on a spot of natural beauty.
Speaker 1: In nineteen oh eight, the Popular Liberals standby Harper's magazine
Speaker 1: cent a correspondent, Home and Day and a photographer out
Speaker 1: to Malaga and several neighboring islands to do an article
Speaker 1: on the communities that had caused such a sudden panic
Speaker 1: to their longtime neighbors. The piece, titled The Queer Folk
Speaker 1: of the Main Coast, is a fascinating historical document, and
Speaker 1: it uses the word queer more than any other document
Speaker 1: not about like queer people that I've ever seen. It
Speaker 1: is every third word in this.
Speaker 3: So well that just brings us back to money for nothing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly exactly. Does Holman Day get a pass?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't like this. I thought. I have such
Speaker 1: a mixed feeling about this because Day comes across as
Speaker 1: like a very like up his own ass like liberal
Speaker 1: elite asshole, looking down on these people and kind of
Speaker 1: like cheerfully condescending them. But also he is competent as
Speaker 1: a reporter. He is going and talk and he's like
Speaker 1: the only one who does and so a huge amount
Speaker 1: of what we know about the culture of these islands
Speaker 1: is just because he went and talked to people and
Speaker 1: gave delivered their stories. So it is one of those
Speaker 1: like kind of the way he does it is frustrating,
Speaker 1: but he does provide us with an absolutely it's kind
Speaker 1: of like you got that guy and like the White
Speaker 1: House Press Corps, the one guy who can about aids
Speaker 1: and like he's like dropping some you know, slurs and
Speaker 1: laughing about it sometimes. But he also is pushing the
Speaker 1: only guy pushing the Reagan administration about the fact that
Speaker 1: people are dying and this is a serious problem. So
Speaker 1: like you know, journalism, you get a lot of these
Speaker 1: stories there where it's like this is fucked up, but
Speaker 1: also this is the only reason we know about these people.
Speaker 1: So I don't know, I don't know what to we're
Speaker 1: morally to put that. It doesn't really matter. I guess
Speaker 1: it happened.
Speaker 3: Morally, it goes in the past. It's at a category
Speaker 3: thing that happened.
Speaker 1: So holand Day's article opens promisingly enough with the lines
Speaker 1: of old muskets drove the Abnakis off the coast of Maine.
Speaker 1: Today money is driving away another race, which could be
Speaker 1: like a good opening if you're trying to be like,
Speaker 1: you know, the cruelty of settlers against the indigenous people
Speaker 1: is being replicated by capitalists against these folks who have
Speaker 1: found refuge here. That is a little bit of what
Speaker 1: he means, but not not. I don't think he really
Speaker 1: analyzes things in that context, you know, Okay. He continues
Speaker 1: between Kittery Point and Quota Head. Resorters have acquired hundreds
Speaker 1: of headlands and thousands of islands. A phalanx of cottages
Speaker 1: fronts the sea. The queer squad are people who have
Speaker 1: been dispossessed find little relish in being stared at as
Speaker 1: human curiosities. So the queer folk live alone, and it
Speaker 1: is said that isolation develops eccentricity. The ocean creeps to
Speaker 1: the doors of their huts, and winter waves thunder in
Speaker 1: their ears. And there are those who say that the
Speaker 1: din of the sea boats beats curious ideas into their head.
Speaker 1: So for one thing, this.
Speaker 4: Rules they're just cool as they are so cool. Even
Speaker 4: though this guy sounds like love he does.
Speaker 1: That's what he's about to say, is he sounds like
Speaker 1: like the madness is creeping in from the ocean waves,
Speaker 1: battering their their simple brains. It is interesting that he
Speaker 1: like he starts with almost almost like actual class analysis here,
Speaker 1: talking about like a real like the kind of like
Speaker 1: longitudinal problems between the genocide of the native peoples of
Speaker 1: this isle and kind of the relentless hunger that that,
Speaker 1: you know, the quest for profit brings and how it
Speaker 1: just inherently dispossesses and forces people out of their homes.
Speaker 1: But he immediately moves to like, and these folks believe
Speaker 1: weird shit, like that's the focus of the article, espe
Speaker 1: silly they are. So he acknowledges that problem and then
Speaker 1: drops it right away, like a paragraph into this fucking
Speaker 1: article that said, Homan Day is a pretty textbook earnest
Speaker 1: white liberal intellectual. That's at least the picture one gets it.
Speaker 1: I haven't read his entire ouvra. That's the picture that
Speaker 1: you get of this guy. In this article. He paints
Speaker 1: a pretty desperate picture of the educational standards in general culture, which,
Speaker 1: as we've already said, is not accurate. These people seem
Speaker 1: to have been and this is something that like modern
Speaker 1: day archaeologist will note, seem to have been pretty like
Speaker 1: reasonably well educated by the standards of the day and
Speaker 1: the area. Day uses a lot of noble savage imagery
Speaker 1: here too, in lines like this quote. They are not envious,
Speaker 1: they do not want to beg Where penury and pride
Speaker 1: meet in the city, there are heart burnings. But the
Speaker 1: man tossing in the battered dory in the swash of
Speaker 1: a millionaire's yacht neither size nor glares, provided he be
Speaker 1: one of the queer folk. For the queer folk are
Speaker 1: queer in one respective. Especially, they dwell content in their
Speaker 1: own world, which is often a world of illusion. For
Speaker 1: solitariness and the sea breeds strange thoughts. Kids, keeps going back.
Speaker 3: To that, Uh, this guy is just as it is.
Speaker 1: He's like this reporters living some dog shit life back
Speaker 1: in the city, watching all of his friends get collar
Speaker 1: every season, and like, what do I have on these people? Well,
Speaker 1: some of them believe silly stuff. Holman really wanted to
Speaker 1: make sure people got the picture that these people were
Speaker 1: sweet but deranged and thus not capable of taking care
Speaker 1: of themselves and the ways that we modern Americans expect now.
Speaker 1: To his credit, Holman travels pretty widely around the islands,
Speaker 1: and he comes across people with legitimately fascinating stories that
Speaker 1: I wish desperately had been investigated by a proper anthropologist,
Speaker 1: although those didn't really exist back then. But yeah, it's
Speaker 1: enticing the bits that he gives us. One of the
Speaker 1: stories he tells us is about a guy named Ossian Dustin.
Speaker 1: Ossian lives on an island called Newcastle, not far away
Speaker 1: from Malaga, and when Holman meets him, Ossian Dustin is
Speaker 1: eighty years old. He survives mostly off of just kind
Speaker 1: of like pulling what he can out of the ocean.
Speaker 1: He makes about fifty dollars a year doing odd jobs
Speaker 1: for people back on shore, mostly firewood sawing, and this
Speaker 1: pittance is enough for him to remain alone and independent
Speaker 1: on the island, engaging in his life's goal hunting for
Speaker 1: Captain Kid's treasure. That is his entire This man has
Speaker 1: spent hell y rad Dude, he spent his whole life
Speaker 1: living alone on this eye and hunting for Captain Kid's
Speaker 1: treasure quote the buried existence of which he implicitly believes. Now,
Speaker 1: what this guy represents in actuality is a dude who
Speaker 1: was born in around the early eighteen twenties and seems
Speaker 1: to have decided, like, taken a look at American society
Speaker 1: in the eighteen twenties and been like, nah, fuck that shit.
Speaker 1: And he has this kind of comfortable fantasy about Captain
Speaker 1: hood Kid's treasure that gives him like purpose and a
Speaker 1: sense of meaning and seems to make him pretty happy.
Speaker 1: As far as we can gather from Holman's reporting, he
Speaker 1: came to believe that Kid's treasure was hidden in the
Speaker 1: area due to a local legend he encountered as a
Speaker 1: young man, and he just decided to spend his entire
Speaker 1: life trying to find it. Holman describes this as quote
Speaker 1: the type of content that relieves these hidden human tragedies
Speaker 1: of some of that pitifulness. Right, Well, this guy's so
Speaker 1: happy it makes it less sad that he lives this
Speaker 1: depressing life. He is like, the life's only depressing to you, Holman.
Speaker 1: Like this guy's doing fine. He is hunting for buried treasure.
Speaker 1: He is probably friends with seagulls. Like his life is great.
Speaker 1: He is eighty years old. Nobody lives that long. Like
Speaker 1: whatever he's doing is working well for him. Yeah, here's
Speaker 1: Holman again. He has toiled nights for the most part,
Speaker 1: believing that in the night a treasure seeker can best
Speaker 1: circumvent the enchantments laid on buried pirate spoils. He searches
Speaker 1: with the treasure rod made by his own hands. He
Speaker 1: has the tip of a cow's horn, plugged with wood
Speaker 1: and containing various metals. In the wooden plug are stuck
Speaker 1: parallel strips of whalebone, and he clutches these strips, one
Speaker 1: in each hand and walks along, balancing the tip of
Speaker 1: the horn. When he passes over the famous iron pot,
Speaker 1: the tip, thus is his belief, will turn down and
Speaker 1: point at the buried treasure. He says his spade has
Speaker 1: struck the iron pot several times, but that enchantment has
Speaker 1: whisked away the treasure. He expects that eventually his own
Speaker 1: charms will prevail over the power of evil. That's a
Speaker 1: cool That's a fine life. I'm sorry, Like, that's a
Speaker 1: perfectly fine existence.
Speaker 3: He gets his steps in every day.
Speaker 1: Like what has built a whole, like almost religious mythology
Speaker 1: around this treasure that allows him to always be searching
Speaker 1: for it but never quite finding it, while still getting
Speaker 1: little victories along the way. What's wrong with this life?
Speaker 1: In the grand scheme of things? How can you have
Speaker 1: a problem with this? I bring this guy up both
Speaker 1: because this is an amazing story and it made me
Speaker 1: so happy to read, and also because as evidence of
Speaker 1: what these islands were, they were a refuge, not just
Speaker 1: for people like the Darlings and their descendants whose very
Speaker 1: relationships are criminal, but for folks. I think it's fair
Speaker 1: to say, whatever is going on with Ossian Dustin, He's
Speaker 1: not what you'd call neurotypical, right. He is someone who
Speaker 1: has built this kind of religious cosmology around the search
Speaker 1: for this treasure. He has visions that he talks about
Speaker 1: regularly of a figure in shining gold guiding him along,
Speaker 1: and in most of the rest of the country, a
Speaker 1: man who said these things and did these things would
Speaker 1: have been forced into a sanitarium where he would have
Speaker 1: fucking died of cholera. Right, that's this guy's story. Ninety
Speaker 1: nine percent of the US is he is imprisoned and
Speaker 1: left to die of disease, but instead he's eighty years old,
Speaker 1: you know. And Holman is absolute like repeatedly mentions he's
Speaker 1: the happiest, one of the happiest men that he's ever met. Right, Like,
Speaker 1: this guy has has built a life for himself, which
Speaker 1: is a pretty awesome achievement. And Holman is human enough
Speaker 1: to recognize that he's witnessing something remarkable. Well at the
Speaker 1: same time rejecting this man's beliefs as worth any thought. Quote,
Speaker 1: it can scarcely be said that Uncle Ossian's unfailing cheerfulness
Speaker 1: springs from any philosophy of life that he has evolved.
Speaker 1: But after our talk, I came out of his dingy
Speaker 1: hut with the feeling that probably some of the proud
Speaker 1: folk in the cottages down the bay needed pity more
Speaker 1: than he. So he's like, Wow, this guy seems deeply
Speaker 1: happy and has lived in an advanced age, but there's
Speaker 1: probably nothing worth studying. And like his approach to life,
Speaker 1: I don't know if he's not Ray, he's not in
Speaker 1: them money. I don't know, man. Maybe he figured something
Speaker 1: out that most of us never do. Yeah, he seems firal.
Speaker 3: Maybe he found a goal the year after him.
Speaker 1: Maybe he did.
Speaker 3: Maybe he did.
Speaker 1: So again. Holman here is kind of on the edge
Speaker 1: of a revelation that his journey through these islands makes
Speaker 1: crystal clear, which is that civilization is not an unalloyed good,
Speaker 1: and many marginalized people have always been able to take
Speaker 1: care of themselves better by dropping out of it. That
Speaker 1: has been a fact of history for as long as
Speaker 1: people have been like building cities and making rules. Is
Speaker 1: that some people, particularly those persecuted society, are better off
Speaker 1: without them. Next, Holman visits Spruce Island, inhabited solely by
Speaker 1: three elderly men, the Shanks brothers, William, Daniel, and Nehemiah.
Speaker 1: They had lived all their lives and what he describes
Speaker 1: as a tumble down shelter. William and Daniel never married,
Speaker 1: but Neamiyah had what our writer Buddy patronizingly calls a
Speaker 1: poor little romance that broke his heart. Basically, Neamia and
Speaker 1: their dad used to go to Portland to sell their
Speaker 1: fish catch, and at one point this lady married him
Speaker 1: as a con to take his money family savings away,
Speaker 1: which is sad their father forgave Neemiyah by tasking him
Speaker 1: to watch over his brothers for the rest of their lives.
Speaker 1: It kind of seems again like his brothers at least
Speaker 1: are it sounds like a myth that you're telling. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean this is amazing. He meant these people basically
Speaker 1: what you know? Yeah, no, no, no, no, I believe it.
Speaker 1: It's just I think that it's like his actual life
Speaker 1: has elements that are mythic storytelling. Yeah, like, ah, you
Speaker 1: have done You've failed in this way by being tricked.
Speaker 3: Now you have a new task. Yeah, and it does.
Speaker 1: It does. That is kind of what's cool happening because
Speaker 1: like William and Daniel, it seems like are again what
Speaker 1: you would say, not neurotypical, right they are. They are
Speaker 1: not people who can live. Neamiah probably could have, these
Speaker 1: are not people who can exist in the regular society
Speaker 1: of the time. Their dad realizes that and he's like, look,
Speaker 1: you've got to take care of them because this is
Speaker 1: the only place that they're ever going to have. And
Speaker 1: so that's what Neami. These guys are all like, I
Speaker 1: think in their sixties seventies when Holman meets them, and
Speaker 1: it's an int remarkable stories you've noted, and it gets
Speaker 1: kind of more fascinating to me. There's a paragraph in
Speaker 1: here about William in particular that I have not been
Speaker 1: able to get out of my head since I read
Speaker 1: it for more than twenty years. William has never come
Speaker 1: out of the hut into the sunshine. He told me
Speaker 1: that he feared the sun might heat his brains and
Speaker 1: interfere with his life work, which is the composition of poetry.
Speaker 1: There is a brain blanket slung across one end of
Speaker 1: the hut. William sits behind his blank this blanket and
Speaker 1: fixes his eyes on the sunlight that enters through Anthole
Speaker 1: and composes. He states that he is now the author
Speaker 1: of a thousand pieces, none of which he ever writes down.
Speaker 1: He just his entire life is sitting in that chair,
Speaker 1: filling his brain with his own poetry that no one
Speaker 1: else will ever hear.
Speaker 4: That's yeah, that's cool, Yeah, that's like. Yeah, it's like
Speaker 4: the anchor writes. The people who would like to go
Speaker 4: and like wall themselves.
Speaker 1: Up, Yeah, like yeah, And I honestly, you know, if
Speaker 1: Holman was a better journalist. The thing to do would
Speaker 1: be like, would you read me some poems, like so
Speaker 1: I can write them down. I want to know what
Speaker 1: this is like.
Speaker 4: Yeah, of course, yeah, he's either like he's probably the
Speaker 4: best or worst poets, never absolute trash verse.
Speaker 1: Yeah either way, that's there's like a deep kind of
Speaker 1: harrowing beauty and that that simple statement about this guy's life. Anyway,
Speaker 1: when I started researching this, my thinking was again that
Speaker 1: I would start with the tale of Benjamin Darling and
Speaker 1: then Malaga and how it became a haven for these
Speaker 1: kind of like these people who had who couldn't live
Speaker 1: in regular society or chose not to and built this
Speaker 1: resilient culture of their own, and how that culture was
Speaker 1: destroyed in the name of progress. But for all my
Speaker 1: issues with homans smugness and dismissal of the depth of
Speaker 1: inner life lived by his subjects, I must admit that
Speaker 1: the substantial footwork he did is what keyed me into
Speaker 1: the deeper story here, because the people he's describing, a
Speaker 1: lot of these folks. You lead a guy like Ossian, right,
Speaker 1: you look at people like these brothers. These are folks
Speaker 1: who today would probably be living on the street, right,
Speaker 1: you know, if they don't have family support, if they
Speaker 1: don't have like some access to funding, a lot like
Speaker 1: these are people who cannot fit in with capitalism, right.
Speaker 1: You know. They can do like some odd jobs and
Speaker 1: stuff here, but they're never going to like buy a
Speaker 1: house in a city. They're never going to like own
Speaker 1: anything that they have a deed for. That's like not
Speaker 1: for most of these people, not the kind of people
Speaker 1: that they are. And while there was this place where
Speaker 1: they could go and be outside of the law and free,
Speaker 1: a lot of them lived okay lives based on the
Speaker 1: standards of the time, you know, verging on a lot
Speaker 1: better lives than many of the people back on land
Speaker 1: would have lived. Not that they were easy lives, but
Speaker 1: they were lives. And that's not an option for people
Speaker 1: like this anymore.
Speaker 4: There's just there's no outside anymore. It's like one of
Speaker 4: the things that you.
Speaker 1: Know, there's no it's not like any you know, the
Speaker 1: quote unquote places that aren't owned, you know, by somebody
Speaker 1: who can lock you out, are owned by the city,
Speaker 1: who can make a law saying it's illegal DeCamp there
Speaker 1: or whatever. Yeah, So this is a story about how
Speaker 1: that happened and about how these anti vagrancy laws that
Speaker 1: primarily got instituted in order to police the behavior of
Speaker 1: newly free black Americans kind of coincided with the disgust
Speaker 1: of moneyed people in cities against the folks who had
Speaker 1: managed to build a life outside of them. That's that's
Speaker 1: what we're talking about. But you know what we're talking about, first, Margaret,
Speaker 1: what's that ads for products?
Speaker 3: Wait? Why are there there's advertisers on this?
Speaker 1: There sure are, there's sure are all of whom I
Speaker 1: don't I don't know. I don't know. I'm kind of
Speaker 1: kind of bumming out right now. So we're just we're
Speaker 1: just gonna throw to ads. I don't have a joke.
Speaker 1: Here you go. Ah, we're back. You know, good, good stuff.
Speaker 1: We're we're feeling happy. Everybody's having a good time and
Speaker 1: on a solid emotional level.
Speaker 3: So yay.
Speaker 1: Anyway, I'm having a good time. Yeah, uh yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's cool. And obviously, like you know, the fact that
Speaker 1: these islands were available for this descendants of the Darlings
Speaker 1: and all these other people is partly a result of
Speaker 1: the ongoing genocide against the indigenous peoples who had inhabited
Speaker 1: them before. But you know, Benjamin Darling didn't have a
Speaker 1: choice about being here, right, Like, I don't, I don't,
Speaker 1: I can't. I don't put that on them that like, well, shit,
Speaker 1: there's nobody here, and like the folks in those cities
Speaker 1: suck ass. Let's get the fuck out of here, you know,
Speaker 1: like what else are they going to do?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 1: So, as I write this, in Portland, Oregon, the mayor
Speaker 1: Ted Wheeler is working to has Actually when I wrote this,
Speaker 1: he was still building support for it. But the vote
Speaker 1: just passed to ban camping, as he calls it, during
Speaker 1: daylight hours on city property. This includes the parks in
Speaker 1: green spaces that tend to be preferred by the kind
Speaker 1: of folks who find themselves living in encampments. And of
Speaker 1: course these laws are not meant to criminalize the kind
Speaker 1: of camping that like affluent white people do where they
Speaker 1: like go out to camp to feel connected to nature.
Speaker 1: What they're trying to criminalize is the existence of people
Speaker 1: who cannot afford rent or a house, who they don't
Speaker 1: really care where these people end up. A camp, like
Speaker 1: a concentration camp is kind of the thing that Ted
Speaker 1: Wheeler is floating is like actively trying to build support
Speaker 1: for is like enforced camps where people are checked when
Speaker 1: they enter and leave and have like their hours restricted
Speaker 1: and are searched when they come in, Like that is
Speaker 1: the goal. I think the real goal would be just
Speaker 1: to like force them to move somewhere else. People used
Speaker 1: to bust their homeless folks to California. Yeah, but yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's it is kind of One of the things
Speaker 1: that I'm frustrated by is sort of the patronizing mockery
Speaker 1: of describing these people as as like camping, you know,
Speaker 1: like these are their homes. This is the lives that
Speaker 1: they've built for themselves. It's kind of like describing the
Speaker 1: people of Malaga or whatever is like hermits living in caves,
Speaker 1: where it's like, no, I mean they have they have
Speaker 1: structures that they built, they have houses, like they're just
Speaker 1: they're they're living the life that they are able to live.
Speaker 1: Like you don't have to be a dick about it.
Speaker 1: You couldn't you couldn't hack it out there. So from
Speaker 1: time to time folks put out in this way attempt
Speaker 1: to construct more elaborate structures for themselves in order to survive.
Speaker 1: A lot of this makes me think about the kind
Speaker 1: of communities that build up on these islands in Malaga,
Speaker 1: and they make me think. When I was reading about
Speaker 1: and looking at some of the photos of the houses there,
Speaker 1: I was brought back to a story of a guy
Speaker 1: outside of Portland named Mikey, who in November of twenty
Speaker 1: twenty built a two story wooden home for himself off
Speaker 1: Airport Way. This immediately became like a huge There was
Speaker 1: a bunch of different like conservative news stories and stuff
Speaker 1: that like fucking covered this kind of a representative example
Speaker 1: is on a Babylon b affiliated website written by an
Speaker 1: author who gives his name as the Ghost of Reagan,
Speaker 1: titled this Portland homeless Man's house is fancier than your home.
Speaker 1: It's interesting, Like when he was interviewed by local media,
Speaker 1: he was like, I needed somewhere to live and I
Speaker 1: hate tents, so I like built myself a house. And
Speaker 1: of course the city finds out. Yeah, like pisses off
Speaker 1: all these right wingers. Mikey gets forced out of his home,
Speaker 1: which is demolished. You know, I love that that they're
Speaker 1: going to present this man as lazy.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know this this on industrious man who has
Speaker 4: built a two stories where's.
Speaker 1: The third story? There's not even a basement. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: it is like, you know, when you're talking about sort
Speaker 1: of some of the problems of encamp ments and stuff.
Speaker 1: You know, I live near several of them. You and
Speaker 1: I just went and put out a fire at one
Speaker 1: the other day. Now, in that case, I think it
Speaker 1: was a fire started by there's some local kids who
Speaker 1: like to attack homeless people. I believe it was them
Speaker 1: lighting some of their shit on fire, because it seems
Speaker 1: to be random, you know that said stuff like that.
Speaker 1: I talk to people who live there. Sometimes it's like
Speaker 1: one group has beef with another and like their shit
Speaker 1: gets lit on fire. There's also like fires happen in
Speaker 1: these encampments because of improperly you know, handled like propane
Speaker 1: stoves and stuff. There are problems that need to be
Speaker 1: dealt with, and in some cases even it, like especially
Speaker 1: during fire season, you may have to say like, hey, guys,
Speaker 1: we can't have a bunch of fucking propane burners out here.
Speaker 1: It's going to cause like a serious problem for a
Speaker 1: lot of people. I'm not saying like there shouldn't be
Speaker 1: any kind of like attention paid to what people do
Speaker 1: if they decide to set up homes for themselves. On
Speaker 1: like you know, city property or whatever. I just don't
Speaker 1: think the default should be destroying everything they have and
Speaker 1: putting them in jail, like you know, there's all this,
Speaker 1: it's also this like yeah.
Speaker 4: I just I can't quite wrap my head around the
Speaker 4: kind of person who thinks that criminalizing homelessness is a
Speaker 4: good idea, because part of it is like, well, but
Speaker 4: that could just be yeah, right, like that could just
Speaker 4: like the crime is that they had a series of
Speaker 4: bad events and you just assume that your life will
Speaker 4: never include bad events, Like what life have you led
Speaker 4: where you don't have bad events? Like yeah, I don't know,
Speaker 4: I don't know how to even phrase it. It just
Speaker 4: makes no sense to me.
Speaker 1: And there's and there's like a lot of options that
Speaker 1: are not like obviously there's a lot of safety reasons
Speaker 1: why yeah, maybe we can't just have people setting up
Speaker 1: wherever they want to, like for example, like in the
Speaker 1: West during fire season, that presents a danger. I spent
Speaker 1: a decent amount of time back in twenty fifteen in
Speaker 1: a place called Nicholsville, which is one of a couple
Speaker 1: of Nicholsville's that have existed in Seattle, which was like
Speaker 1: empty land that local homeless people started building tiny homes
Speaker 1: in fairly well constructed safe they were able to get
Speaker 1: like trash pickup and stuff, and as a result, it
Speaker 1: was like a decent safe play. I mean, eventually they
Speaker 1: got forced out. It's happened a couple of times. But
Speaker 1: you know, one of the things that's kind of neat
Speaker 1: is that there have also been like kind of the
Speaker 1: attention that this got helped build support in Seattle for
Speaker 1: local and governments to embrace some ideas that kind of
Speaker 1: offer more dignity on autonomy to houseless regiments like Nicholsville,
Speaker 1: and so there have been we've seen the creation of
Speaker 1: more kind of like tiny home villages made for recycled
Speaker 1: materials and stuff, where people kind of have more autonomy
Speaker 1: and are involved in the project of like helping to
Speaker 1: craft their own living spaces. These are not perfect. These
Speaker 1: projects are generally, when they're legal, are conducted under the
Speaker 1: strict eye of the city. This sometimes means that some
Speaker 1: of them have like mandatory searches for drugs or strict
Speaker 1: limits on what pets are available. But you know, it's better,
Speaker 1: you know, certainly than a lot of options that exist.
Speaker 1: I do find it frustrating that when homeless people build
Speaker 1: their own communities on undeveloped land, rather than being given
Speaker 1: access to services that might allow them to do this
Speaker 1: safely and hygenically, they're more often forced violently out of
Speaker 1: their homes at greater expense than it would be to
Speaker 1: provide them with services, because it's not cheap to actually
Speaker 1: do all this. When cities do give these people the
Speaker 1: opportunity to exist in a place where they could build
Speaker 1: some sort of comfort for themselves, the reactions from neighbors
Speaker 1: are often vicious, and I want to quote from a
Speaker 1: twenty seventeen article in Crosscut about a Seattle community called
Speaker 1: Nicholsville in Ballard. This is a couple of years after.
Speaker 1: I think it's from a different location from the one
Speaker 1: I went to quote. The plan to build one of
Speaker 1: the camps near residences and in the middle of businesses
Speaker 1: on the west end of Ballard's Market Street drew frustration
Speaker 1: and angry objections, including from the Ballard Chamber of Commerce.
Speaker 1: When the news report was reported on My Ballard, it
Speaker 1: garnered nearly one hundred comments. Reasonable voices were drowned out
Speaker 1: by the aggressive rhetoric of some commenters. The real brilliance
Speaker 1: put them between a liquor store and a bar. Brilliant
Speaker 1: thinking better Yet, let's put them right at the gateway
Speaker 1: of a historic treasure, like the Locks, one of our
Speaker 1: most visited sites, wrote one commenter on my ballard. Another
Speaker 1: compared the encampment to an episode of The Walking Dead,
Speaker 1: claiming the area would no doubt go to total shit fuck.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that means that person's thinking about machine gun in there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, of course. Yeah. And it's like, there's
Speaker 1: this outrage people have, not just when homeless people build
Speaker 1: something for theirselves, but when they do it in a
Speaker 1: place where like they have a nice view. There was
Speaker 1: an article that went viral in Portland in April, and
Speaker 1: I'm going to quote from the Fox coverage of this.
Speaker 1: Residents living near Portland's Willamette River have witnessed a series
Speaker 1: of homeless cabins and structures being built on prime river
Speaker 1: real estate with million dollar city views, but have so
Speaker 1: far been unable to get anyone to do anything about it.
Speaker 1: Pretty Much everyone comes back and says they don't have
Speaker 1: jurisdiction because it's Union Pacific rail Road. Rick Scaramella, who
Speaker 1: owns a condominium on the other side of the Willamette
Speaker 1: River told KOI n on a report. In a report
Speaker 1: Thursday this Voice, I hate it too. Scaramella told the
Speaker 1: outlet that people from across the river. Across the river
Speaker 1: from his home have been building makeshift cabins complete with doors, windows,
Speaker 1: and sometimes even solar panels, on the banks of the
Speaker 1: river that feature views of downtown Portland. Rick, fuck you.
Speaker 1: I hope you step on a nail and get tetanus.
Speaker 1: That costs you your leg. That's what I hope for you, Rick, Scaramella.
Speaker 1: You fucking condo owning piece of shit, like they've got
Speaker 1: a nice view and they didn't pay what I paid
Speaker 1: for it.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 1: Suck my dick, Rick, go fuck yourself.
Speaker 3: I lived.
Speaker 4: I've been a squad in a lot of different cities
Speaker 4: at various points, and I remember and one I think
Speaker 4: that the way the Netherlands used to handle it until
Speaker 4: they changed the laws is brilliant, which is a lot
Speaker 4: of people were suddenly houseless in the late eighties. I'm
Speaker 4: gonna have the timeline of this a little bit wrong. Yeah,
Speaker 4: the ladies and so eventually everyone just started squatting all
Speaker 4: of these buildings and it became this massive thing, and
Speaker 4: eventually they got the law changed where if a building
Speaker 4: was left vacant for a year with no clear plan
Speaker 4: of what was going to happen to it, it was
Speaker 4: legal for people to squat it. And so you don't
Speaker 4: have real estate prospectors holding properties empty while people need houses,
Speaker 4: because if you leave it empty, someone's gonna move in
Speaker 4: and then you're fucked as the landowner or whatever. And
Speaker 4: so it got people to lower rents, it got people
Speaker 4: to sell properties to families, and it provided squatters places
Speaker 4: to live. And I remember I at this moment, I
Speaker 4: was playing accordion on the street with one of my
Speaker 4: squatterfront's next to me, and this person comes up and
Speaker 4: asks my friend, why does that accordion player play such
Speaker 4: sad music? And the actual answer is that I'm a
Speaker 4: goth and I like sad music. But the answer that
Speaker 4: my squatter friend had was like, oh, it's because we're squatters.
Speaker 4: We spend all of our time building things and then
Speaker 4: they come and they take them away, And I just
Speaker 4: I think about that where it's like there's this version
Speaker 4: of the squatter where they like they shit everywhere and
Speaker 4: they live in absolute hord everything. But then when people
Speaker 4: are like, okay, I'm going to build a cabin. I'm
Speaker 4: going to put solar panels on it. I'm going to
Speaker 4: like get the trash taken out. I'm going to like
Speaker 4: try and do this right. Yeah, people get even angrier
Speaker 4: because they want people living in squalor, because they want
Speaker 4: people to suffer, because they're bad people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's the like you know again, I spend a
Speaker 1: lot of time in and around encampments. I'm like friendly
Speaker 1: with One of the reasons why I'm friendly with folks
Speaker 1: is that, like a year or so ago, a woman
Speaker 1: I lived with, who has had an infant child at
Speaker 1: the time, was like going along this area and got
Speaker 1: shot at by kids on very nice new motorbikes with
Speaker 1: BB guns, and like some of the local homeless folks
Speaker 1: like rallied to her defense. And we're like, yeah, they
Speaker 1: come and like shoot at us all the time. It's
Speaker 1: just like a thing shitty kids do. And you know,
Speaker 1: I've gotten to know folks and stuff, and it's you see, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't like that there's trash out there. I don't
Speaker 1: like that there's piles of trash in a nice natural area.
Speaker 1: That's not nice, you know, where there would be big
Speaker 1: piles of trash if I is my house, if I
Speaker 1: didn't have access to like city trash pickup. You know,
Speaker 1: like this is an optional and it's cheaper than letting
Speaker 1: it all build up and then hiring professionals to come
Speaker 1: and deal with it, like they don't want to live
Speaker 1: in trail Like anyway, there's solutions to this that aren't
Speaker 1: sending the fucking cops and the fucking biohazard drugs every
Speaker 1: like two or three times a year to fuck with
Speaker 1: people's stuff. You know, I find the discourse around this
Speaker 1: all very frustrating, which is why this episode got written.
Speaker 1: So yeah, let's go back to Mlaga Island. So in
Speaker 1: nineteen oh eight, you know, The Walking Dead was still
Speaker 1: a couple of years away from being on television. But
Speaker 1: Holman Day's description of the community isn't much more interests
Speaker 1: than that fear mongering bullshit We hurt a little earlier.
Speaker 1: As a no man's land, Malaga has more striking peculiarities
Speaker 1: than any other island alongshore. There are about fifty persons
Speaker 1: on it oft, all of grades of Negro blood, and
Speaker 1: most of them descendants of a runaway slave who came
Speaker 1: and hid here more years ago than any man about
Speaker 1: their remembers. That's Benjamin Darling. He's talking about These people
Speaker 1: form a strange clan. They have married and intermarried until
Speaker 1: the trespass on consanguinity has until the trespass on consanguinality
Speaker 1: has produced its usual lamentable effects. They are as near
Speaker 1: to being children of nature as it is possible for
Speaker 1: people to be who are only as stones to away
Speaker 1: from the mainland and civilization. They lack entirely the spirit
Speaker 1: of thrift and of providing for future emergencies. Winter after winter,
Speaker 1: through all the years they have shivered and starved, but
Speaker 1: never does November find a woodpile on Malaga, nor a
Speaker 1: weak supply of food in reserve. To counsel on economy
Speaker 1: and to preachment on thrift. They are as inattentive as
Speaker 1: little children would be. A coast missionary took in hand
Speaker 1: one especially improvident family of six father, mother and four
Speaker 1: children well grown. Spurred by him, they fished doug clams,
Speaker 1: sold bait to trawlers, and at the end of the
Speaker 1: summer had saved about seventy dollars among them. Then the
Speaker 1: missionary went away, confident that at least one Malaga family
Speaker 1: would reach march Hill in comparative comfort. When his back
Speaker 1: was turned, they used for kindlings the shingles that he
Speaker 1: had given them for the repair of their miserable Hut
Speaker 1: bought six dogs in order to each member of the
Speaker 1: family could have his own pet, and spent the rest
Speaker 1: of the money for sweets, pickles, jellies, and fancy groceries.
Speaker 1: He's literally be like these poor people are buying nice food,
Speaker 1: they have pets. I also love like he is full
Speaker 1: of shit here, like everything he says about them, like
Speaker 1: not being able to store food, they don't know how
Speaker 1: to survive the winter. They don't like you know, like yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean among other things, like he's like their children
Speaker 1: are well grown and healthy where It's like, how did
Speaker 1: they get that way home? Man? It just happened by
Speaker 1: accident before this minister showed up. Or were they actually
Speaker 1: capable of taking care of themselves. We know again from
Speaker 1: recent archaeology that local children were reasonably well educated by
Speaker 1: the standards of the time, and the fact that this
Speaker 1: community survived more than half a century and more like
Speaker 1: about a century doesn't really suggest people who were incapable
Speaker 1: of planning for the future or storing food. Archivist Kate McBryan,
Speaker 1: who curated an exhibition about Malaga for the Maine State Museum,
Speaker 1: notes the documentary and archaeological evidence refutes all of these myths.
Speaker 1: The people of Malaga Island lived just like their neighbors
Speaker 1: on the mainland. Again, we have evidence of how these
Speaker 1: people lived and it was not in like shocking desperation,
Speaker 1: and Holman's article includes photographs that don't agree with the
Speaker 1: statements in his article. The only extant visual evidence of
Speaker 1: Malaga in these days shows well dressed women in what
Speaker 1: appear to be competently constructed homes like here's and you
Speaker 1: know this is like there are some mission there's like
Speaker 1: a missionary family on the island who seemed like they
Speaker 1: were pretty chill, but like these homes are older than
Speaker 1: them showing up like Sophie, if you'll show Margaret the picture,
Speaker 1: like these are these are not like tumble down shacks
Speaker 1: like these are well, seem to be pretty well constructed
Speaker 1: homes with like shingles and shit, like you can see
Speaker 1: them like in the article where you're talking about like
Speaker 1: these are competently built homes.
Speaker 3: I don't know what is fucking talking.
Speaker 4: They burned all the shingles except for the ones that
Speaker 4: are on all the shingles you can see and the siding.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's a lot of big use of shingles.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: And then the house in the background is even more
Speaker 4: like that. It's nice, Yes, it's fine. Yeah. They we're
Speaker 4: doing plenty of windows, a lot of yeah, and windows
Speaker 4: is like when you're building a house on the chips.
Speaker 4: Windows is like the crazy expensive part, you know. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: they got fucking glass and stuff.
Speaker 1: You know. They're clearly like again, interfacing with mainstream society
Speaker 1: to some extent to get stuff that they can't. You
Speaker 1: can't make your You're not going to have like build
Speaker 1: a glacier in some island off the coast of Maine,
Speaker 1: so they get what they need.
Speaker 3: There's multiple uh, multiple gables.
Speaker 4: Enough house in the back right, Like that's not even
Speaker 4: just like like that is fancier than if I went
Speaker 4: out and built a house I would build.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they're like, you know, it's fine. I find this
Speaker 1: all particularly fascinating in light of how differently Holman describes
Speaker 1: another one of these communities, Loud's Island. Now, we don't
Speaker 1: have information on what the specific racial makeup makeup of
Speaker 1: Loud's island was. But my assumption is that they were
Speaker 1: mostly white, and my assumption that there is that they
Speaker 1: were mostly white, because Holman does not describe them as
Speaker 1: blacker mixed race, and he does that every single time
Speaker 1: he writes about Malaga. So again, these are two islands
Speaker 1: like a mile from each other something like that. Here's
Speaker 1: how he describes Loud's Island, and I'm gonna say you
Speaker 1: can pick up on the slant in his coverage at all.
Speaker 1: It has a considerable population of thrifty fishermen and farmers.
Speaker 1: They live in good houses and are intelligent. They and
Speaker 1: their ancestors have dwelt here for more than one hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty years. But the men of the island have
Speaker 1: never voted in any election towns or state or national.
Speaker 1: They have never paid any state in our county taxes.
Speaker 1: They resisted the draft at the time of the Civil
Speaker 1: War and drove the officers off the island with clubs
Speaker 1: and rocks. They say they do not need the protecting
Speaker 1: arm of state or national government. They raise money for
Speaker 1: schools and roads, elect municipal officers to administer affairs, and
Speaker 1: seem to get along very comfortably. The Malaga is doing
Speaker 1: this it's the same thing. They've got their own little
Speaker 1: thing going on, and they don't trust the government, like
Speaker 1: just like these other people. But one of them get
Speaker 1: described as like thrifty pioneers and the other like dangerous,
Speaker 1: savage or not dangerous. He doesn't describe the miss dangerous.
Speaker 1: Give him that they live close to nature, animals exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so Holman paints a picture of the Malagaites is all
Speaker 1: but incapable of work because of their childlike nature. The
Speaker 1: fact that he describes them as harmless does not make
Speaker 1: this less toxic. And we know that his assessment was
Speaker 1: again inaccurate. By the early nineteen hundreds, many Malagaites worked
Speaker 1: ashore at resorts like the New Meadows. In from a
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty article in Downey Magazine, quote their ragtag Island neighbors,
Speaker 1: some white, some black, many of mixed blood living in
Speaker 1: make dew dwellings became an embarrassing eye sore to both
Speaker 1: local and summer and year round residents. There was a belief, too,
Speaker 1: made popular by several widely read even sensational sociology studies
Speaker 1: of the time, that poverty, crime, and mental retardation stemmed
Speaker 1: directly from retrograde families, and that removing such decaying stock
Speaker 1: would improve the moral fiber of society. Oh god, in
Speaker 1: nineteen oh half step from here to Nazis. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: we are right on the road. This is right when
Speaker 1: eugenics is starting up. Like it all is cooking together, right,
Speaker 1: this is all you're putting, putting more stuff in the pot, right,
Speaker 1: you know. Now you've got a stew going, right now,
Speaker 1: you got a real racism stew agoing. So in nineteen
Speaker 1: oh eight, the same year as holman Days, Harper's article,
Speaker 1: main established a school for the feeble minded, later renamed
Speaker 1: the Pineland Center. This was a prison where poor unfortunates
Speaker 1: would be removed from public site, basically right. This happened
Speaker 1: as the media campaign against the Islanders reached a fever pitch,
Speaker 1: and the people who lived on the mainland grew horrified
Speaker 1: that the bad press about these Islanders might rub off
Speaker 1: on them and damage their reputations to like folks in
Speaker 1: New York, they might think everyone in Maine was like
Speaker 1: a savage, right, Like, that's a big part of why
Speaker 1: they take action.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 1: By the standards of a lot of these articles, I
Speaker 1: will say Holman's Peace positively shines. And to provide an
Speaker 1: example of that, I'm going to read a quote from
Speaker 1: an article in the Casco Bay Breeze from nineteen oh five.
Speaker 1: This is them talking about the Malagaites. They drank tea
Speaker 1: spelled with a capital if you please, for if reports
Speaker 1: be true, its strength would sink a ship tobacco as
Speaker 1: their ambrosia. And it said they would almost sell their
Speaker 1: souls for a cut. A superstitious race, are they on Malaga?
Speaker 1: Even the screeching of an owl is an ominous sign
Speaker 1: for them? And then the author goes on to suggest
Speaker 1: that these people should be removed from their home so
Speaker 1: that summer houses can be built upon the island. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I hope that guy died badly. From nineteen ten on,
Speaker 1: the state began pumping more and more resources into Malaga
Speaker 1: in the form of aid. And again, this is one
Speaker 1: of the justifications is they're like, look at all this share,
Speaker 1: look at all the public aid money they're taking, all
Speaker 1: of like the welfare money that they're taking, which like
Speaker 1: they'd basically gotten none up until the early nineteen hundreds
Speaker 1: when suddenly it starts being pushed into the island by
Speaker 1: the state government. And then they're like, well, now that
Speaker 1: you're receiving aid, we have to go police things to
Speaker 1: make sure that you're not doing things improperly, which leads
Speaker 1: immediately to them taking children away from their families because
Speaker 1: the living standards aren't high enough, and these children are
Speaker 1: taken and immediately interned in the School for the Feeble Minded,
Speaker 1: because obviously these kids can't learn, like they wouldn't live
Speaker 1: out here if they were capable of learning things, So
Speaker 1: let's take them from their loving families and put them
Speaker 1: in a prison home. The purpose of all this was
Speaker 1: laid out quite clearly in a nineteen sixty eight article
Speaker 1: of The Pineland Observer. Looking back on this moment, Maine
Speaker 1: was reputedly a wasteland with popular pockets of social indigence
Speaker 1: of low intelligence. It was considered advisable for the good
Speaker 1: of society that these little settlements be broken up and
Speaker 1: persons incapable of working moved to a home for them.
Speaker 1: In nineteen eleven, I don't like it. No, it's not good.
Speaker 1: It's bad, Margaret, It's real bad. In nineteen eleven, a
Speaker 1: whole family was forced out of their home on Malaga
Speaker 1: for the very first time. The justification was that the
Speaker 1: father and one of his sons were both terminally ill,
Speaker 1: so they and all of their younger siblings were forced
Speaker 1: into a sanitarium at the stroke of a doctor's pen.
Speaker 1: That year, Mulaga was declared by the state government to
Speaker 1: be part of Phitpsburg. They also decided that a wealthy
Speaker 1: family from that town actually owned the island. Now, this
Speaker 1: family had never bought Mulaga Island. They were the family
Speaker 1: who had bought Horse Island from the Darlings in eighteen
Speaker 1: forty seven, before the Darlings bought Malaga Island, and so
Speaker 1: basically they are like, well, if they bought Horse Island,
Speaker 1: they must also own the island. That the black people
Speaker 1: they that sold the island to them like bought right,
Speaker 1: it must be their property too. So this family become
Speaker 1: the owners of Malaga Island, which becomes an excuse for
Speaker 1: the local government to send the sheriff in with an
Speaker 1: order for everyone to vacate. Modern sources agree that this
Speaker 1: was all extremely illegal, But the Malagites are going to
Speaker 1: be evicted without resistance. They're given tiny pittances for their
Speaker 1: homes and forced onto the mainland. We have but a
Speaker 1: few precious direct writings from residents at this time. One
Speaker 1: is from a letter by an islander named Nelson Layton McKinney.
Speaker 1: And here's what he says about the process of eviction.
Speaker 1: And this is after he and his family have been
Speaker 1: forced out. The others of us are having hard times
Speaker 1: to find homes anywhere on all an account of folks
Speaker 1: saying we've got the cramp catch in our fingers and
Speaker 1: take too many things that are lying around loose. But
Speaker 1: it's all a lie. We don't steal if we are poor.
Speaker 1: If you know any place where I can crawl in
Speaker 1: with my wife and five kids and my old peg leg,
Speaker 1: please let me know, right because of like all of
Speaker 1: the rumors about how these people are like dangerous tramps
Speaker 1: who will steal it. And he's not layed, laid down
Speaker 1: once the state kicks them out of their home, like
Speaker 1: they can't find any place to settle, you know, no
Speaker 1: one will rent to them, no one will like let them,
Speaker 1: you know, live anywhere, because they're dangerous. In nineteen twelve,
Speaker 1: the last forty five holdouts on Malaga are evicted by
Speaker 1: Governor Plaistead, who made a big showy visit to the
Speaker 1: island with media in tow before finishing the eviction, he
Speaker 1: had himself photographed setting foot on the island like a
Speaker 1: conquering hero. He and his executive council ordered the eviction
Speaker 1: of the community after taking eight residents into custody and
Speaker 1: forcibly institutionalizing them, putting them in a mental institution.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: The justification in most of these cases, for like, why
Speaker 1: these people had to be put in an insane asylum
Speaker 1: was that when questioned, they didn't recognize a phone. Now
Speaker 1: this is nineteen twelve.
Speaker 3: Uh huh.
Speaker 1: None of these people were born in a world with phones,
Speaker 1: and there are no phones on the island in which
Speaker 1: they live. But they don't know a phone. Put them,
Speaker 1: Lock them up forever in an insane asylum death camp,
Speaker 1: you know.
Speaker 4: Yeah, which is funny because you could show the same
Speaker 4: phone to someone born fifteen years ago and they might
Speaker 4: not recognize it either.
Speaker 3: Things change, Yeah, Like, and.
Speaker 1: It's one of those like I don't know, you know what,
Speaker 1: maybe they don't recognize a phone. What I would like
Speaker 1: to see, governor place dead. Can you last an entire
Speaker 1: winter alone on fucking Malaga Islands?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Oh no, you're dead, ah, cause you're not competent to
Speaker 1: manage your affairs anyway. Yeah, you know who's competent to
Speaker 1: manage all of our affairs, Margaret, Ooh, is it stuff?
Speaker 1: It is the products and services that support this podcast
Speaker 1: are the only people who should be allowed to vote.
Speaker 1: I think we can all agree on that absolutely, and
Speaker 1: we're back living in a product ocracy. So Governor Playstead
Speaker 1: evicts the last people on Malaga Island in nineteen twelve.
Speaker 1: The island is almost immediately sold to a friend and
Speaker 1: a business partner of the governor's, a guy named doctor
Speaker 1: Gustavus Kilgore, who had signed the commitment levers letters to
Speaker 1: the institution of all of the evicts. That's cool. Fuck,
Speaker 1: not crooked at all. They're not at all crooked. No,
Speaker 1: it's fine, it's fine. It's fine.
Speaker 3: This isn't a.
Speaker 1: Problem that could have all been solved with one well
Speaker 1: placed pipe bomb. So good stuff, good stuff. Other photos
Speaker 1: from the island before its clearing became popular tourist chachkes.
Speaker 1: One infamous set is called The Deuce of Spades and
Speaker 1: the Tray of Spades, and it shows a black woman
Speaker 1: sitting inside of a corral holding a small child. The
Speaker 1: other postcard shows the same woman with two children looking
Speaker 1: through a fence line. The implication was that the malaga
Speaker 1: Ites kept their children lif animals in a pin, when
Speaker 1: it was really like a photo of a family who
Speaker 1: kept animals properly on their land that they lived on.
Speaker 1: But like, look they're animals, their kids are in a pin.
Speaker 1: It's it's very frustrating. Once the state forced everyone off
Speaker 1: of Mlaga Island, they exhumed the local cemetery and put
Speaker 1: them in prison. No, no, they rebury them on the mainland.
Speaker 4: Which what they do they do put them in prison
Speaker 4: because they just saying, but the kids, they're like, these
Speaker 4: people keep kids in pens.
Speaker 3: That's fucked up. We better put those kids in a
Speaker 3: prison and.
Speaker 1: A crazy people jail, which they do anyway, I'm sorry.
Speaker 1: Then they dig up all of their dead relatives and
Speaker 1: bury them the institution, like they literally imprison the corpses.
Speaker 1: Like it is like, I don't know, maybe there's a
Speaker 1: degree of like the fear level, the fear that like
Speaker 1: these rich and powerful people always have about folks who
Speaker 1: don't need them, or the society that they've thrived in,
Speaker 1: about folks who like literally like enthusiastically reject the society
Speaker 1: in which these people are successful and manage to make
Speaker 1: a life for themselves is the most frightening thing of
Speaker 1: all of them anyway. Cool stuff. A January nineteen thirteen
Speaker 1: news article celebrated cleaning up Malaga Island no longer a
Speaker 1: reproach to the good name of the state. It celebrated
Speaker 1: that these dispossessed people had been raised to a standard
Speaker 1: of living they'd probably never dreamed of before. Look, they
Speaker 1: never dreamed of prisons. Yeah, before this, none of them
Speaker 1: had died of cholera in a dank cell.
Speaker 3: Progress. They can use a phone once a week.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they can see the phone. They're not allowed to
Speaker 1: use it now when they know as a phone number.
Speaker 1: That article in Down East magazine, The Shameful Story of
Speaker 1: Malaga from nineteen eighty goes further about kind of what
Speaker 1: happens to these folks after eviction. Except for those sent
Speaker 1: to the main school for the feeble minded, no provision
Speaker 1: had been made for the other islanders, and, as the
Speaker 1: press soon discovered, not only was it costly to support
Speaker 1: people at the state home, but surrounding towns and refusing
Speaker 1: popper status to the displaced Islanders denied their right to
Speaker 1: belong to any community. King McKinney and Jerry Murphy were lucky.
Speaker 1: They rafted their houses to lots on the mainland at
Speaker 1: Pipsburg and Meadowbrook. Not so fortunate was Robert Tripp's family, who,
Speaker 1: having rafted their house up on a whole, sailed up
Speaker 1: the new ret Meadows River in search of a lot,
Speaker 1: but were prevented from landing by prosperous Christian people and
Speaker 1: town authorities. Caught literally between the well known rock and
Speaker 1: a hard place, the family hawsered up some trees on
Speaker 1: the tiny bush island. They were barely able to eke
Speaker 1: out an existence and often bordered on starvation. This was
Speaker 1: acknowledged in a newspaper story of December nineteen fourteen, the
Speaker 1: first year of World War One, with a headline reading
Speaker 1: Maine misery as dark as Belgium's. When Laura Tripp, formerly
Speaker 1: strong and healthy, soon became desperately ill, her husband rode
Speaker 1: three miles for help through the worst gale that has
Speaker 1: swept the coast in years, but by the time he
Speaker 1: returned with a doctor, his wife had died. She was
Speaker 1: later buried in Potter's Field. And probably it is the
Speaker 1: place to point out that, like you know, being evicted
Speaker 1: increases mortality by an enormous amount, Like having all of
Speaker 1: your stuff trashed, having like whatever structures you've built trashed
Speaker 1: increases the risk of mortality. You know, this war on
Speaker 1: the homelessness in San Diego has been met with a
Speaker 1: lot of deaths of houseless people. This is what happens
Speaker 1: anywhere this kind of shit goes on, and it was
Speaker 1: happening back then too. The war on vagrancy continued even
Speaker 1: though I should know. Sorry, Malaga Island remains uninhabited to
Speaker 1: this day. There are if you find some modern stories
Speaker 1: about descendants of the Darlings, there's people with last named
Speaker 1: Darling who like found within the Latin most within the
Speaker 1: last like ten years, the story of their family and
Speaker 1: like where they like what had happened. There have been
Speaker 1: some attempts, like there's been like official apologies from local
Speaker 1: governments in Maine. There have been like some trips that
Speaker 1: some of these descendants have gotten to take to Malaga Island.
Speaker 1: There's like been This is part of why there's we
Speaker 1: know what we do now, Like archaeology has been done.
Speaker 1: People have been studying this. But there are one of
Speaker 1: the stories I read it was it was with some
Speaker 1: you know, this young woman who was like, I never
Speaker 1: had heard about any of this, and when I brought
Speaker 1: it up, her dad was like, don't fucking look into this,
Speaker 1: like because there was still this fear of like this
Speaker 1: is dangerous, Like don't go dig in this shit up,
Speaker 1: Like do you know what happened to my grandpa?
Speaker 3: Like it's fucked up.
Speaker 1: It's fucked I mean it's good that like this has
Speaker 1: turned a corner and people are talking about this. I
Speaker 1: don't know, I feel like we should give those people
Speaker 1: that island. Maybe I don't know what to do. It's probably, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean hard to live on. But it was always
Speaker 1: legally theirs.
Speaker 4: Yeah, like that's the even the like like I don't
Speaker 4: have a ton of repet for.
Speaker 3: The concept of.
Speaker 1: I'm not a property rights yeah uh yeah, but they
Speaker 1: it was literally theirs.
Speaker 3: They literally bought.
Speaker 1: It, like they purchased it with money with your currency
Speaker 1: and owned it. And then you were like, now we'll
Speaker 1: give it to this these guys. So this doctor who
Speaker 1: locks people up can buy it because he's friends with
Speaker 1: our fucking dog shit ass governor. Anyway, cool stuff. Uh yeah,
Speaker 1: So that is the story of Malaga Island. It's you know,
Speaker 1: tail ends for a while, but the war on vagrancy continues.
Speaker 1: The laws pioneered in Tennessee and Massachusetts spread over the land,
Speaker 1: and soon enough places like California and Florida had their
Speaker 1: own vagrancy laws. In California, the state declared everyone from
Speaker 1: wanderers and willfully unemployed people to prostitutes and the lewde
Speaker 1: guilty of vagrancy. The way the laws were written gave
Speaker 1: police total power todaye who actually fit the definition of vagrant,
Speaker 1: and whether or not to take them into custody. This
Speaker 1: power was used primarily on non white people, but it
Speaker 1: was also used on other folks who were disliked by
Speaker 1: the state, including communists. For example, in nineteen forty nine
Speaker 1: in Los Angeles, Isidore Edelman, a Russian born communist soapbox speaker,
Speaker 1: was arrested by the LAPD as he spoke in Pershing
Speaker 1: Square Time magazine Rights. It was Edelman's strident and offensive
Speaker 1: speeches that caught the attention of the police. His politics
Speaker 1: were just too inflammatory for the early Cold War. Twenty
Speaker 1: years later, in Jacksonville, Florida, Margaret Lorraine Papa Cristo was
Speaker 1: arrested while out with her friend, another young blonde woman
Speaker 1: and their dates to black men. Papa Cristo was arrested
Speaker 1: under a Jacksonville law that made twenty kinds of vagrancy illegal.
Speaker 1: Time notes that this included rogues and vagabonds or dissolute
Speaker 1: persons who go about begging, Persons who used juggling or
Speaker 1: unlawful games or plays, common drunkards, common railers and brawlers.
Speaker 1: Persons wandering are strolling about from place to place without
Speaker 1: any lawful purpose or object, habitual loafers, disorderly persons. How
Speaker 1: often juggling is in these especially since Yeah, one of
Speaker 1: my favorite movies is fucking Hot Fuzz, which is about
Speaker 1: a town whose hatred of I think it starts with
Speaker 1: like Roma traveling through town, but of like homeless people
Speaker 1: of like you know, folks like travelers kind of going
Speaker 1: through and setting up camps and stuff. Briefly leads them
Speaker 1: to like mass murder, like I build a fascist death
Speaker 1: state where they kill anyone who doesn't abide by the
Speaker 1: local laws. It's a pretty based movie, but like the
Speaker 1: old people in it who are like creating this death
Speaker 1: state are like one of the things they complain about
Speaker 1: is the jugglers, right, like, who all get murdered by
Speaker 1: their their junta. Pretty cool stuff. Good movie. Watch Hot Fuzz.
Speaker 1: It's about all this actually in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1: So yeah, Papa Christo. One of the things I found
Speaker 1: interesting was that she and her friends were found guilty
Speaker 1: of vagrancy for these acific modern crime of what was
Speaker 1: called prowling by auto, which is I think just like
Speaker 1: hell yeah. Basically the crime was like she and her
Speaker 1: friend were white and they were dating black eyes and
Speaker 1: they were driving around like so that we got a
Speaker 1: crackdown on that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's not gonna fly.
Speaker 4: The kinds of laws that make me angriest are laws
Speaker 4: that are well racist laws are the mostest, the most angry.
Speaker 4: But laws that are just like literally victimless crimes. There
Speaker 4: are laws that like might possibly lead to situations where
Speaker 4: other crimes might be more likely or whatever, like yeah,
Speaker 4: like no cruisy, like you can't just drive around or whatever.
Speaker 1: This is not you know, the cruising law, the anti
Speaker 1: vagrant law. When you kind of look at the civil
Speaker 1: rights movement about like the end of like Jim Crow,
Speaker 1: and shit, these are not examples of Jim Crow, right,
Speaker 1: This anti vagrancy law is not a Jim Crow law.
Speaker 1: Doesn't specify any race, but it gives the police to
Speaker 1: do whatever they want with someone they think is a vagrant.
Speaker 1: And the cops happen to feel that anytime they see
Speaker 1: a black person right likes. That's how it works. You know,
Speaker 1: these are racial laws. They're just a little stealthier than
Speaker 1: you know. Jim Crow, James Crow, as his friends know him,
Speaker 1: who are bad people? I don't know. I don't know
Speaker 1: why what I was going whatever, anyway, let's continue. So
Speaker 1: I'm going to continue with a quote from that Time
Speaker 1: magazine article talking about vagrancy laws. Between Aedelman's arrest and
Speaker 1: Papa Cristo's twenty years later, literally millions of people shared
Speaker 1: their vagrancy fates. Some of those arrested comported with the
Speaker 1: usual image of the vagrant. Sam Thompson, for example, was
Speaker 1: an underemployed handyman and alcoholic arrested some fifty five times
Speaker 1: in Louisville, Kentucky in the nineteen fifties, but many, like
Speaker 1: Adelman and Papa Cristo, are more surprising. The police arrested
Speaker 1: for loitering the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, co founder with Martin
Speaker 1: Luther King, junior of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference when
Speaker 1: he spoke briefly with colleagues and a Birmingham Street corner
Speaker 1: during a nineteen sixty two department store boycott. It was
Speaker 1: vagrancy the police used when they could not get to
Speaker 1: Lane law students Stephen Wainwright to cooperate with a murder
Speaker 1: investigation in New Orleans' French Quarter in nineteen sixty four.
Speaker 1: It was vagrancy as well, that justified the nineteen sixty
Speaker 1: six arrest of Marsha of Martin Hichhorn, a young cross
Speaker 1: dressing hairstylist, arrested in his hotel room in Manhattan wearing
Speaker 1: only a half slip in Brazier. Police turned to vagrancy
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty seven when they arrested Joy Kelly in
Speaker 1: the crash pad she had rented for herself and her
Speaker 1: Hippi friends in Charlotte, North Carolina, and they used it
Speaker 1: again when they mistook Dorothy Anne Kirkwood for a prostitute
Speaker 1: when she was on her way to meet her boyfriend
Speaker 1: on Memphis famous Beale Street in nineteen sixty eight. These
Speaker 1: and other vagrancy suspects were white and black, male and female,
Speaker 1: straight and gay, urban and rural, southern, northern, Western, and Midwestern.
Speaker 1: They had money or needed it to fight authority or
Speaker 1: tried to comply with it. They were arrested on public
Speaker 1: streets and in their own homes as locals or strangers
Speaker 1: for political protests or seeming like a murderer for their race,
Speaker 1: their sexuality, their poverty, or their lifestyle.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yep, fucked up. The state doesn't like. Yeah, yep,
Speaker 4: the state doesn't like when people live outside. It's logic
Speaker 4: it does not. And cops, you know, are when you
Speaker 4: just kind of give them the power to do what
Speaker 4: they want against the people who they think are doing wrong,
Speaker 4: they will wind up, you know, enforcing the kind of
Speaker 4: laws that the governor of Maine, you know, would have
Speaker 4: thought were good. You know, you don't have to like
Speaker 4: write out who they should do violence to, who they
Speaker 4: should stomp out. You know, they'll get to it on
Speaker 4: their own. And you know, it was one of those
Speaker 4: things because of how all pervasive these vagrancy laws were.
Speaker 4: And one of the things that paragraph I read makes
Speaker 4: me think about is there's a song I quite like,
Speaker 4: back back from the era before country music was taken
Speaker 4: over by boot liquors by Chris Christofferson called the law
Speaker 4: is for protection of the people. And it starts with
Speaker 4: Billy Barton, a drunk guy, you know, stumbling around the sidewalk,
Speaker 4: and the bunch of police cars come screaming to the
Speaker 4: rescue and haul old Billy Barton off to jail. And
Speaker 4: then there's a hippie dude walking through town and the
Speaker 4: cops pull him over and like beat him up and
Speaker 4: shave his hair, and you know, like this goes on.
Speaker 4: Like the refrain is because the law is for protection
Speaker 4: of the people, rules or rules, and anyone can see,
Speaker 4: you know, we don't need no drunks like Billy Dalton
Speaker 4: scaring decent folks like you and me. And the song
Speaker 4: kind of builds to you know, these lines here, So
Speaker 4: thank your lucky stars, you've got protection. Walk the lion
Speaker 4: and never mind the cost, and don't wonder who them
Speaker 4: lawmen was protecting when they nailed the Savior to the cross.
Speaker 1: Because the laws for protection of the people, rules are rules,
Speaker 1: and any fool can see we don't need no riddle
Speaker 1: speaking prophets scaring decent folk like you and me. Chris Kristofferson,
Speaker 1: pretty based guy. Oh yeah yeah, because of sort of
Speaker 1: how universal these laws were and how universally they were
Speaker 1: applied to people on the margins. It became, you know,
Speaker 1: wrote for folks who lived you know, in the margins
Speaker 1: of you know, kind of white society to warn their
Speaker 1: children about these laws. Working class immigrant families would tell
Speaker 1: their kids like, do not leave home without You have
Speaker 1: to have money on you at all times. You can't
Speaker 1: spend it, like you have to have money because if
Speaker 1: the police full you over, you have to be able
Speaker 1: to prove that you have money. You know that, otherwise
Speaker 1: you can't exist in public. Right. There were early home
Speaker 1: what were called homo file organizations, which are like the
Speaker 1: first pro gay organizations, right, that would educate you know,
Speaker 1: their members who were young, gay, lesbian, trans people about
Speaker 1: lewd vagrancy arrests and that the way to avoid them
Speaker 1: was quote where at least three items of clothing of
Speaker 1: your own sex, otherwise like you would get in trouble.
Speaker 1: Black newspapers would tell you know, people that like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you like vagrancy arrests, Like here's how to avoid doing them,
Speaker 1: because like if you if you piss off the cops
Speaker 1: or just exist in a way that pisses off the cops,
Speaker 1: Like this is what's going to happen to you. Civil
Speaker 1: rights organizations would publish like vagrancy forms that you could
Speaker 1: get like filled out, that would basically be a thing
Speaker 1: you carry it around that looked official, that would say
Speaker 1: you were a respected member of the community. And this
Speaker 1: kind of persisted until, Yeah, the night, you know, nineteen
Speaker 1: forty nine is when this guy Aedelman is arrested and
Speaker 1: he he sues and stuff, and he doesn't win his case.
Speaker 1: But over the next twenty or so years until the
Speaker 1: early nineteen seventies, reformers and activists repeatedly kind of bring
Speaker 1: cases against these vagrancy laws. And in the early nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: seventy one and seventy two, there are three cases, including
Speaker 1: Papa Cristo's, that eventually make their way to the Supreme Court,
Speaker 1: who announces that vagrancy, loitering and suspicious persons person's laws unconstitutional.
Speaker 1: So that's kind of where we've been living since nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy two. Is this world where these laws that were
Speaker 1: used to give the police kind of ultimate power to
Speaker 1: do violence against anyone that didn't fit in, you know,
Speaker 1: we're not constitutional. And now we are seeing them start
Speaker 1: to return the authoritarians of our day, who are liberal
Speaker 1: as often as they are conservative, are poking at the edges,
Speaker 1: seeing what they can get away from, seeing what they
Speaker 1: can reinstitute, because, as we all know, Margaret, the law
Speaker 1: is for protection of the people.
Speaker 4: This is the quote that I come back to you
Speaker 4: all the time as an anatole friends, quote, the law
Speaker 4: and its majestic equality forbids rich and poor alike to
Speaker 4: sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to
Speaker 4: steal their bread. Yep, you know, it's just like, oh, well,
Speaker 4: no one's allowed to be homeless, rich people in poor people.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's.
Speaker 1: It's cool. It's the same, It's I mean, it's it's different,
Speaker 1: but it's a similar logic. We've got this law that
Speaker 1: the liberals are trying to pass in Portland to criminalize
Speaker 1: what they call like domestic terrorist organizing, which is so
Speaker 1: ill defined that basically, if like anyone ever arms themselves
Speaker 1: or acts in self defense as part of a protest,
Speaker 1: that can be seen as like a terrorist paramilitary organization.
Speaker 1: And they're like, well, this is because of all the
Speaker 1: right wing terrorism that we have a huge problem with
Speaker 1: in Oregon. And it's like, yeah, but you're just handing
Speaker 1: the cops a thing they can use against anyone they
Speaker 1: don't like, and who don't the cops like. Anyone who
Speaker 1: supports that law is an idiot, and if your legislator does,
Speaker 1: you should throw raw eggs at them, is my opinion,
Speaker 1: my legal opinion on the First Amendment, raw eggs. I
Speaker 1: don't like these people. I don't like any of this.
Speaker 1: I'm angry. Fuck fucket.
Speaker 3: Anyway.
Speaker 1: You know what's cool is that it turns out the
Speaker 1: head of intelligence for the Capitol Police was feeding information
Speaker 1: to the Proud Boys before January sixth. It's good that
Speaker 1: the cops could be trusted. I love our men in
Speaker 1: law enforcement supporting the vagrancy laws that were used to
Speaker 1: institute a police state only for certain people for most
Speaker 1: of the time that my parents were alive or are
Speaker 1: a love have been alive, whatever, my grandparents whole lives,
Speaker 1: all sorts of cool shit. I don't know. I'm very
Speaker 1: angry now, Margaret. I don't know what to do. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna go or something.
Speaker 4: Yeah. No, it's just bad. And it still happens in
Speaker 4: a lot of different ways, you know, like and obviously
Speaker 4: it's getting worse again. I don't know. And none of
Speaker 4: it makes sense. I mean, it only makes sense within
Speaker 4: a certain logic, but it doesn't make any sense on
Speaker 4: like a moral level or anything like that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, throwing eggs at state legislators make sense to me.
Speaker 1: You know, providing aid and sucker to people who are
Speaker 1: living you know, outside of you know what, Yeah, assholes
Speaker 1: are comfortable with makes sense to me. Yeah, listening to
Speaker 1: Chris Christofferson makes sense to me. Also, check out that
Speaker 1: that State radio song about Benjamin Darling. You know, that's
Speaker 1: a that's a good one, and that's I also think,
Speaker 1: like when we think about what the antidote to this
Speaker 1: stuff is, it is the kind of radical compassion that
Speaker 1: Darling exemplified when he chose to save a person just
Speaker 1: because they were a person, regardless of the wrong that
Speaker 1: had been done to him. Which is probably why I
Speaker 1: shouldn't talk so much about throwing eggs at people who
Speaker 1: annoy me, because Benjamin Darling wouldn't do that. But you
Speaker 1: know whatever, I mean, he than me. Maybe he wouldn't.
Speaker 1: Maybe he would have done that. I shouldn't talk about
Speaker 1: the other things that I talk about sometimes when I
Speaker 1: get because Benjamin Darling wouldn't have done that, Benjamin Darling.
Speaker 1: Let's let's all remember that there was a cool dude
Speaker 1: named Benjamin Darling who rocked.
Speaker 3: Yeah, hell yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Margaret, you got anything to plug?
Speaker 4: Well, if you like cool people who rocked, let me
Speaker 4: tell you about cool people, the cool stuff where we
Speaker 4: cover things about like cool people who threw rocks at fascists. Yeah,
Speaker 4: like a recent episode, I've literally no idea when this
Speaker 4: comes out. A recent episode about the Cable story. Next
Speaker 4: week the Battle for Cable Street great in it might
Speaker 4: be the same week. Who knows that. You can listen
Speaker 4: to my podcast talking about it, and it actually gets
Speaker 4: into a bunch of this really similar stuff about how
Speaker 4: after the Fascist Party was defeated in by working class
Speaker 4: people fighting them, the state passed a law saying, Okay,
Speaker 4: no one's allowed to march in uniform anymore. And it
Speaker 4: was directed against the fascists, and it was used primarily
Speaker 4: against the left and against anti colonial movements.
Speaker 1: You know, there's another thing, ever, changes There's another thought
Speaker 1: I have based on something you told me about that story,
Speaker 1: which was that when the fascists came to Cable Street
Speaker 1: to attack the Jews. One of the reasons why the
Speaker 1: anti fascist one is because all of the Irish showed up,
Speaker 1: and the Irish showed up because when they had been
Speaker 1: having a strike earlier and been cracked down on by
Speaker 1: the state, the Jewish community took their children into their
Speaker 1: houses to take care of them during the strike, like
Speaker 1: twenty years earlier. And so when the Irish heard that
Speaker 1: there were fascists coming around to threaten the folks who
Speaker 1: had helped raise them, they were like, well, let's go
Speaker 1: fuck some shit up and maybe, you know, it's a
Speaker 1: lesson again, back to Benjamin Darling of the sometimes unpredictable
Speaker 1: value of radical compassion.
Speaker 4: Yeah, totally. Yeah, So that's my main plug. Cool people,
Speaker 4: the cool stuff every Monday and Wednesday, and cool Zone
Speaker 4: Media and also I Kickstarting or have finished Kickstarting or
Speaker 4: whatever tabletop role playing game called panumber City that gets
Speaker 4: into if you want to play this kind of thing,
Speaker 4: this life, this living outside the system, et cetera, is
Speaker 4: a really good game for you.
Speaker 3: And that's what I got.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, let's uh, let's all check out that spend
Speaker 1: some time in Panumbra City before it is it is
Speaker 1: attacked by whatever that governor's name of Maine, you know,
Speaker 1: or maybe make him your bad guy if you want
Speaker 1: to run a campaign governor placed it. You know there's
Speaker 1: a there's a fucking monster name for you right there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I might do that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's burn him in effigy in our role playing games. Well,
Speaker 1: you can listen to this podcast and Margaret's podcast, and
Speaker 1: a variety of other excellent podcasts like Hood Politics by
Speaker 1: our friend prop for without ads. If you pay a
Speaker 1: small amount of money by getting on Apple and signing
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Speaker 1: our stuff ad free cooler Zone Media on Apple. There
Speaker 1: will be an Android version soon. We are working on it.
Speaker 1: Sophie's working on it. I'm doing nothing at all. I
Speaker 1: don't care about it. You Android users. I'm an Android user,
Speaker 1: but I don't care about you. Sophie does, and she
Speaker 1: is taking care of it.
Speaker 2: Mm hmmmm.
Speaker 1: Also I didn't care about the Apple people. Sophie did
Speaker 1: all the work on that too, So thank you, thank
Speaker 1: you so much.
Speaker 2: And our friend, our friend Jack and Ran is a
Speaker 2: new show on cool Zone Media.
Speaker 4: Robert.
Speaker 2: What's it called?
Speaker 3: He does?
Speaker 1: He does? It's called sad Oligarch, and it's about all
Speaker 1: those Russian oligarchs who strangely died the exact same way
Speaker 1: by falling out of windows at high heights. Anyway, check
Speaker 1: all that out. Cooler Zone Media, Apple Whatever, Bye.
Speaker 2: Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia
Speaker 2: dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 2: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.