Nothing Stays the Same

I left home yesterday. I’m visiting some friends in the Treasure Valley area for a few days, and then on Saturday I will be flying to Washington, D.C. When I was in school I could be away for up to six months at a time, but I was always home for summer and Christmas break. This time I do not know when I'll be back, nor under what circumstances. Nor do I know what McCall will look like when I return, for it is a very different McCall than it was twenty, ten, even five years ago.

In 1990, when I was five years old, my family came to Valley County. It was and is a sleepy resort town, with a couple ski hills for the winter sporters and a lake that is wonderfully small enough that one can see ant-sized cars cruising around on the other side. Back then I was too busy pretending I was a velociraptor and doing other things kids do to take much note of the town as it was. But I can recall its broad contours: it was a laid back community; buildings and businesses came and went, the tourist seasons--Winter Carnival in late January and early February, and the Fourth of July most especially--instilled a provincial distaste for tourists, and everyone knew or knew of nearly everyone else. All of these are still true, but there is much that has changed in the meantime.



It began while I was in high school. A wine bar opened in 2001. The next year a coffee shop that specialized in music opened not far from my house. A few years into its existence its proprietors built an outdoor stage and started having bands from all over the U.S., and sometimes other countries, play. A pizza place that had started in the back of the breakfast-lunch cafe I worked at moved into its own space and started also having bands. Not all the change was good. The bowling alley closed. My then-boss decided not to renew her lease on the breakfast-lunch café I worked at. The movie theater’s lease was up as well, but they—and the town—did want to renew. The lumber company that owned the building that housed it, however, had plans to expand their business and refused. Construction was on the upswing, with new houses and condos going up all over town. Before I left for school I spent a couple weeks painting and staining boards for a house that was being built in a subdivision experiencing particularly explosive growth; I would pass eight or nine other houses being constructed on my way to work every day. This was alarming, but on the other hand McCall was a much more interesting place than it had been growing up.

While I was gone Tamarack Resort opened in Donnelly, and the resulting attention drew speculators like blood brings sharks. I returned the next summer to three story "cabins," open spaces and forest land ripped up for new developments, and ostentatious condominia that dwarfed the modest twenty-feet-or-so buildings surrounding them. The following year the City Council updated the building code, changing the height limit from 35 feet to 50 feet. This was extremely unpopular, and an attempt to build a five-story hotel on the lake provoked a protracted fight that was itself a proxy for the broader struggle to keep business interests from making housing even less affordable. The frenzied construction and speculation led to a rise in property values, and therefore property taxes, which climbed precipitously. I have no figures for Valley County available, but they were well in line with the rest of the nation.

As this was happening, artists and musicians continued to thrive. New restaurants were opening, many of them booking bands on a regular basis. It was not uncommon for several groups to be playing at the same time in a single night. There was also good money to be made, even for us grunts. At the wine bar, where I was now working, everyone went home on a Saturday night with no less than $70 in tips, and often over a hundred. One night, as we were about to close, the son of Tamarack owner Alfredo Miguel came in with his friend and some women and ordered nearly $450 in wine, from three bottles of steeply escalating prices (the most expensive was a large bottle that cost $250). He shared his wine with us and tipped me and my co-worker $20 each.

In 2009 Alfredo Miguel and the other Tamerack owners were sued for lack of repayment on loans and interest totaling $3.5 million.

McCall’s day of reckoning did not come unheralded. The customers of summer 2008 were stingy with their tips, as if they knew they couldn’t really afford to eat out but wanted to pretend that they could. It was the beginning of the collective realization that our raging housing market had been growing atop illusions. And so, consequences: Tamarack, in the midst of further construction, shut its doors and declared bankruptcy. Construction ceased, and the drinking class of McCall was no longer flush with disposable income. Unemployment in the off-season rose to 20%, second in the state only to Adams county.



There are signs of continuing vitality. Several restaurants—a coffee shop on the highway (which I worked at until the move), a brewery, a sushi bar—opened in the teeth of the recession, and the holidays are still typically a nightmare to navigate. But the damage to the town has been immense. The largest stretch of resort condos in the middle of town sits mostly uninhabited. A short walk away another such building is completely uninhabitable, having never opened, with water leaking its way through several incomplete floors. Many residents have moved to Boise, where job prospects are better. The music and coffee shop that opened in ‘02 closed its doors just last month, and restaurants that opened in the boom years are struggling to compete, with a diminished base and fresh competition, castaways caught in a receding economic tide. And there is still no movie theater.




Before I left for my second year of college I wrote a letter to the editor for the local paper, the Star News, about how much McCall had changed just in the year I'd been gone, and I wondered aloud what would be left of my hometown when I returned.
Even then it was obvious the construction boom was unsustainable, and so I made the (obvious) observation that when it went bust "there won't be a booming construction industry to accommodate the workers who are right now resorting to camping out all summer to make ends meet." McCall is still McCall in spite of its changes, but it is in an awkward state of transition, and the temptation to chase easy profits remains. Thus I will end this piece the same way I did the letter to the editor five years ago (with caveats on when I actually will come back):

"When I return for my Christmas and summer vacations, I want to have an easily available place to take my dogs out for a run where I won't be bothered. I want to still be able to recognize the town I grew up in. I don't want to come back to some empty second-home ghost town, devoid of an actual community and bereft of the natural beauty that made it attractive to begin with.”

Walt Minnick's Black Waltz

There are some things I will miss about Idaho, but Walt Minnick is not one of them.

I've been less-than-thrilled with Minnick. His chumminess with Republicans has been less a function of bipartisanship than legislative indistinguishability, and his vote against Health Care Reform--the signature issue of the Democratic party--was infuriating. But I was ready to hold my nose and vote for him in November, on the grounds that "I'll take a D+ Democrat over an F-ing Republican," which is to say disagreeable is always more agreeable than crazy.

And make no mistake, his opponent, Raul Labrador, holds some nutty views, including support for a court challenge to the health care bill, keeping taxes low in the face of soaring deficits, and draconian immigration laws, including the one recently passed in Arizona.

Yes, Labrador is very conservative when it comes to immigration (though he is in favor of a guest worker program). But one wouldn't know that based on Minnick's attacks:



There is a lot to unpack in this ad, and it has been done elsewhere, but I do want to draw attention to one section,the use of the quote that Labrador "like[s our current immigration laws] because I make a good living because of it." The ad conveniently leaves out what was said immediately after, "but they shouldn't have to pay an attorney thousands of dollars to bring somebody legally to the United States." He was leavening discussion about needing to change the law.

There is no difference between this and the way Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor's comment about appellate courts being "where policy is made," a joke that functioned as acknowledgment of the sensitivity of the issue, was turned into 'proof' that she was a liberal activist judge. So too with her "wise Latina" comment. Sotomayor was attacked by vicious, racist demagogues, and Labrador, a Latino immigration attorney, is facing the same treatment.

Suffice it to say the ad is wildly misleading about Labrador's views; it's the kind of nasty campaign spot a Republican would cut against a Democrat who is "soft" on illegal immigration.

I don't know what Minnick's views on the subject are. I did a quick Google, but the only immediate results are about the attack ad fuferaw, and it's getting late. I went to Minnick's House web page, where one would think the information would be readily available, and could not find a link to an issues page. I typed 'issues' into the search engine and did manage to come across this:



Walt Minnick is distorting his opponent's views on immigration. He is doing this to a Hispanic immigration attorney, with the implication that Labrador wants to help "his kind" break the law. And he is doing this while offering no position of his own. Ostensibly, people go into politics in order to legislate in favor of and stand for some ideal.

Yet Minnick's own page shows him to literally be standing for nothing.

He is committing character assassination to get re-elected.

It's bald-faced careerism, and I cannot in good conscience support it. Assuming I vote on an Idaho ballot in November, I will abstain from the Congressional race. If Walt Minnick is going to dance with the devil, then to hell with Walt Minnick.

Of Boisean Bosniaks

It's a little strange. This Idaho Statesmen piece about Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) has been making the rounds--by which I mean, in true scientific fashion, that friends on Facebook and Andrew Sullivan have been linking to it--with a general sentiment of "This is so unexpected and wonderful!"

Which it is, don't get me wrong.

But:

Boise is something of a demographic outlier. It voted Republican in 2008 and is still 94% white, but it is the capital. As the article mentions, it has a well-established Basque presence. It has a strong professional class. It's a hub for refugees, not just Bosnian, but also Iraqi, Burman, and Afghan (and more; I had a college roommate whose family came to Boise after escaping the Rwandan genocide). It has a (mixed company) gay bar. This is par for many urban areas, but compared to the rest of the state it may as well be New York City.

Yet in the actual New York City, of course, people have been driven to distraction over a Muslim community center. And far less cosmopolitan burgs have displayed a similar intolerance. The best explanation I can think of is that Boise is diverse enough to cultivate a sizeable Muslim community, but one that isn't so visible as to be easily demagogued. Also, Vaughan Ward, the Palin-endorsed Republican candidate for Congress who would have most likely attacked the mosque, did not get the nomination.

But enough hand-wringing. Whatever the reason, Boiseans have shown themselves to be more tolerant than New Yorkers. The margin of decency has been eclipsed. This in itself is encouraging, but in the broader context it's the exception that proves a particularly ugly rule.

Given Liberty, Given Death

Ralph Smeed, libertarian lion of Caldwell, Idaho, is dead of cancer at 88. For those unfamiliar with him, which is to say just about anyone reading this that hasn't lived in Caldwell, his website's bio is a good enough primer. It will also give you a flavor of his political character, though it neglects certain details like Smeed's veneration of the cultist Sun Myung Moon or the fact that H.L. Mencken, to whom Smeed compares himself, was a strident atheist.

I and most other students of the College of Idaho only ever knew Smeed as the owner of a billboard just off the freeway, which he used to express anti-statist sentiments like this:



A gallery can also be found on the Reader Board section of Smeed's website.
Of a more general political interest is Ron Paul's familiarity with Smeed and the board, which he has "always applauded."

The board went garishly electronic a year-and-a-half ago or so, and ever since Obama took office it's amounted to a long line of Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin endorsements and animated American flags. Smeed and his board were more or less a joke to the students, but this was something of an underestimation; as mentor to current Idaho governor Butch Otter, Ralph Smeed was, at the very least, an influential joke.