“Small-town hatreds…verging on civil war, have happened everywhere in this country: over a man shooting a neighbor’s dog; over one kid’s slapping another; over a dead relative’s will; over which farmer was first in line at the grain elevator; over hiring a new preacher. It’s small and disgusting, but it’s America. And I reckon we might as well get used to the idea that people are going to be mean and ornery at certain times of the moon.”
— Journalist Ernie Pyle, on a battle over a town name in Alabama, 1935
It would be easy to say something trite about the controversy over the state fair hosting a drag show act, something like, “We’re fighting for the soul of Haines.”
In truth, the culture wars of the Chilkat Valley started centuries ago and the battle for the soul of our valley will never end.
The big difference today is that our town also gets sucked into culture wars from afar. These wars are started by national media companies owned by wealthy people who fan the flames to keep the middle class and working class at each other’s throats.
A unified middle class and working class would dismantle laws and policies favoring the rich so quickly that the One Percenters would all have to move to Bimini where the people are brown and the putting greens substandard. They’d rather not.
Someone cue up Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”
The fire was burning in the early 1980s when the porn movie, “Deep Throat,” was shown at the Coliseum Theater on Main Street. (Today’s Alpenglow Pizza building.) Newspaper coverage of the controversy suggests that half the town went to see the film and the other half was outside protesting.
The town survived.
The fire also was burning when Presbyterian missionaries told Tlingits to literally burn their rattles and regalia and cursed their gods as idols.
The Tlingits survived.
Previous to that, history tells us that the great Whale House treasures of Klukwan were carved around 1830 as a kind of peace offering to heal the Gaanaaxteidi Clan, which was dividing itself over some issue, maybe the proper way to wear a Chilkat blanket.
The clan survived.
Every culture has its wars, continually. A multi-cultured nation such as ours is bound to have many of them.
Such wars have been as much a part of human history as military battles. Often in the past, one has led to the other, such as the Crusades. Some people predict our current battles – over civil rights and abortion, for example – will end in bloodshed, just like the culture war over human slavery in the United States that led to U.S. Civil War.
Some people thought they might be shot for walking in Saturday’s “Love Parade” down Main Street, for crying out loud. (And if that’s not a reason for reasonable laws restricting ownership of guns to people who are sane, there isn’t one.)
But the Love Paraders survived.
Culture wars are themselves not the problem. They’re natural. Cultures are not written in stone. They are fluid and must change over time to stay relevant to people’s lives. “Wars” over those changes occur as new ideas come into our lives and are resisted because people generally – and people who hold power specifically – tend to resist change, even changes that might benefit them in the long run.
There’s an apocryphal story that in the early 1970s, the town fathers of Haines got wind that a ferry full of hippies planning to resettle in Haines was about to dock and that Carl Heinmiller and some henchmen drove out and refused to let the ship tie up. Like most attempts to hold back the tide of change, that one failed.
In the mid-1970s, George Figdor was hired to run the City of Haines teen center, located in the former Human Resources Building on First Avenue. As George tells it, he was on the job a day or two when a city official stopped by to tell him, “If you want to keep this job, you’d better get a haircut.”
So long hair was not allowed – until Tony Tengs, Lee Heinmiller and a couple other local kids came home from college with shoulder-length tresses. The high priests of morality can be trusted to look the other way at the sins of their own.
When I arrived in Haines in the mid-1980s, teachers were still told not to be seen buying alcohol at a liquor store. Not too many years previous to that, the school district would hire women teachers only if they were married.
After I arrived, the moral pooh-bahs fought a showing of the movie “The Breakfast Club,” protested a screening of “Rocky Horror Picture Show” and testified for months about a school mission statement that rather disturbingly for that time referred to the district graduating “responsible global citizens.”
Billy Joel nailed the ending of this song: “And on and on and on and on.”