97 Channels And There's Nothing On

Channel 97 is usually a comforting sight, something you can feel at home with during the long winter months - nothing but static and an occasional lonely shot of someone with dreadlocks looking confused. Then, seemingly at the moment the camera is switched on, all their cable flotsam coalesces into a solid feed, and God only knows what's going to happen next. What has happened in this case, and what everybody in our living room is staring fixedly at, is this guy - bowed head, spirit-of-76 decor, baffling leaps of rhetoric, beaming himself into our lives for an unpredictable period of time to hold forth on whatever topic he pleases. Attendance for this event has been steadily rising, for reasons that are unclear but are causing some worried speculation, and everyone here is rapt.

Hard to say why this should be so compelling - the high turnover of subject matter, the unassuming delivery, the aggressive lack of production values? For whatever reason, it's public access programming at its very best. It's genuinely hard to stop watching the guy. This week's principal target appears to be the practice of usury, and he has a couple of novel ideas to very quietly get across here. Firstly, when you take out a loan, where do they get off charging you all that interest? You have to pay back all this extra money that you never saw a dime of, and if the value of the thing you bought has decreased, you're sinking up to your eyeballs in negative equity. This then leads on to a number of unflattering assumptions concerning the morals and motivations of the institutions that loan money under these restrictive interest-charging schemes instead of (presumably) doing so out of the goodness of their hearts. But the second major question, the real kicker, is this: why does the Federal Reserve itself engage in this practice of paper transfer, of imaginary money, holding the government it supposedly serves to ransom? The Federal Reserve can make more money any time it wants, by just printing it, right? You want to stimulate the economy? Make it policy to every so often print up a few more piles of those crisp, money-smelling hundreds and distribute them to the citizenry. If we increase the amount of money that's in circulation, and hand it out to people, then that means more people can buy more stuff, right?

It's pronouncements like these that generate the most enthusiastic viewer response. "You know, he's on to something here. It worked incredibly well in Weimar Germany. You can't argue with results."

"Did he just have someone foreclose on his house, or what? Why the hatred of interest?" "I want to know what he thinks about Enron."

These unkind words notwithstanding, this man has us transfixed. Water drips from the ceiling of our ravaged apartment, makes xylophone sounds in the half-eaten bowls of ramen. More people are crammed between the arms of the couch than it can withstand without complaint, and others lurk on the sidelines, perched and balanced on what little other furniture we possess. Not everyone here is immediately identifiable to me by name, and that's another slightly troubling thing. Occasionally someone else will shake the rain off and come in to receive the word.

"Has he blamed everything on the Jews yet?" smokers ask as they reenter from the porch. No, he has not. But you can never tell what's going to happen next. It might only be a matter of time.

One of the ideas that has been toyed with regarding the sudden, inexplicable appeal of this endearingly shy demagogue is rooted in the elements: Conspiracy theories gestate in the winter, so goes the hypothesis, and they overflow in the spring. After four months of medium-to-bad weather in a city that might as well have a major thoroughfare named Seasonal Affective Disorder Boulevard, people are hurting for diversions, needing leadership and direction, becoming curious about cable channels in the high 90s. And we can hardly be alone. It seems not just plausible but inevitable that there are groups of like-minded souls glued to their TVs all over the Eugene-Springfield metropolitan area, and further afield - Coburg, Junction City, even Creswell. Especially Creswell, come to think. In lazier, happier seasons, there would be juleps, and the conversation would cover no topic deeper than whether the house number "78520" on that party invite is what they intended to say and, if so, whether or not 785th Street is on this side of the state line. Instead, we are listening to an analysis of the current war effort filtered through what appears to be an informative booklet on ancient Greek society. On the screen, through some miracle of production, there now hovers a phone number.

"We should call that," some smartass says. "I want to ask about the Illuminati." But the phone has already been safely hidden. There will be no enquiries regarding the Illuminati, or the Freemasons, or Zionist Occupational Government, from our home number. We are careful - some would say obsessive - about such things. We have been bitten before.

The story is that, after one too many late nights watching terrible films, and one too many exposures to the Army of One ads with the 1-800 number, we stumbled unwittingly into the ranks of (to paraphrase Full Metal Jacket) the phony tough, the crazy brave, and the people who spend too much time on the couch and decide that Army recruitment films are funny. Now, some weeks after the ill-advised call, we still haven't seen any of the promised free stuff, but the fringe benefits have been considerable. In a word, recruiters. The courtship of my roommate that ensued so speedily has been something impressive to behold, and may actually be paying off for the folks in the uniforms. After all, how many times would somebody have to ask you whether you wanted to join the Army before, in a moment of weakness or distraction, you accidentally said yes? I've already caught him whistling the occasional martial air and channeling Jack Nicholson's character from A Few Good Men while engaged in innocent activities like, say, grocery shopping. A similar fate may have scooped up even the estimable Bryan "Che" Roberts, curator of this column in the 1999-2000 season and, currently, defender of freedom somewhere down in Texas. Unlikely though it may sound, we can't rule out the possibility that he just called up for a free T-shirt one night, and awoke to find himself nose-to-nose with a drill instructor. Either way, we're getting increasingly leery of any phone number that appears on our TV screen. And the Don't Tread On Me fellow isn't doing much to put us at our ease.

In fact, when the next segment of the show - slowly reading from an old Reader's Digest and looking uncomfortable - starts, myself and the roommate excuse ourselves and go to stand on the porch. I try to figure out if the person parked across the street might be another Army recruiter. He balefully puffs cigar smoke at a pickup that's in our parking spot. We stand there trying to recapture the feeling of those halcyon summer days, days in which we never asked these counterintuitive questions about banking, never almost joined the military by mistake. All we did was speculate about the location of 785th Street, and demonstrate our faith in the institution of credit by running up huge amounts of it. Can it be that it all seemed so simple then? Can we not recover this spirit of insolvent innocence? What the hell is the matter with everybody?

After a few minutes' psychological strain, I have to conclude that these questions have no answers, or no answers that we'd care to know. Even without the overwhelming kitsch factor that the anti-banking TV guru represents, there is still plenty going on in the way of malaise. For one thing, the Oregon Logging Convention is in town, perhaps to study the efficacy of our recent citywide "wait until the trees are pulled out of the ground by the roots and pinwheel across the street in a gale-force wind" initiative. The tone of the neighborhood has... changed, somehow. A free shuttle to Springfield's finest - or most astutely marketed, at any rate - strip club has been laid on, and by the looks of things it's going to be run off its axles by the end of the event. Why the whole damn convention isn't happening at the strip club, nobody has been able to figure out. Being the David Lynch fans that we are, we were at least hoping for some nice Twin Peaks moments - people carrying logs around with them for no reason, Piper Laurie masquerading as a Japanese businessman, that sort of thing. What we are having to settle for is a few discordant echoes of Wild At Heart. And in case you haven't heard, the city of Eugene was recently hailed as having the cheapest street heroin anywhere in the contiguous United States, by no less an authority than the DEA. (The Register-Guard seized the opportunity to scale new heights of Onion-esque hilarity with their headline "Area Heroin Plentiful, Cheap.") Even discounting the hurt feelings on the part of Eugene's busy little meth-producing community - entire motels full of twitchy-looking people on Highway 99 were said to be "angry" at the lack of recognition afforded them in this report - this can hardly be good news. Least of all in our neighborhood, where the petty thieves are already discombobulated enough to break into a car, steal a pack of cigarettes, and ignore the stereo altogether.

The rain keeps coming down. It's the middle of the night. Inside, a cheer goes up as our newest hero - for many, alas, the face of third-party politics in America - comes up with another zinger for the moneylenders. Three robustly-dressed men wander past us, heading north in the direction of Blair Boulevard. They probably aren't here to steal cigarettes from cars, but that's a dangerous assumption to make. They might be looking for logs, loggers, or other log-related activities. They might be out-of-towners looking for inexpensive heroin. Who knows anymore, in this crazy mixed-up world? And just to cap it off, to really make things perfect, when we venture back inside we're probably going to be faced with the beginnings of a massive grassroots write-in campaign to elect the public access guy to the state legislature.

"Assuming he's not there already," Frank notes.

Always assuming that, yes. This is getting to be beyond a joke. Everyone's waiting for Spring.

Olly Ruff is the AP columnist for the Oregon Commentator.