Fast Food And Casinos
June 22, 2020 Filed under Curious, Introspection
For the next three days I hunkered down in Pahrump and worked, visiting nearby restaurants for food. Between sessions of writing code I did my own writing, and checked in with friends and family.
I got out a few times just to look around. Pahrump didn’t have much going for it. It felt like just the wrong size — too big to be close-knit and friendly, too small to support fancy shops or a unique culture. Perhaps Las Vegas was stealing all its momentum.
Any city is filled with two categories of residents: People who want to be there, and people who can’t leave. I think the ratio in Pahrump is 10/90.
At the end of the first day, standing outside a fast food joint, I got some nice video of the local bats flitting about:
In the middle of the second day I made the mistake of logging in to Nextdoor, a social networking site focused on gathering people from the same neighborhood and putting them into the same forum. No matter what neighborhood you start with, the forum always devolves into a mess of passive-aggressive complaints and reports of “suspicious characters” that are often blatant racial profiling.
My neighborhood back in Oakland was no different. This time the Nextdoor turmoil was because someone was circulating a petition to remove all the historical markers from Jack London Square and rename it to something else. Why? Because, according to the petition, “Jack London was a racist who embraced eugenics and forced sterilization.” The author of the petition wasn’t suggesting that we honor anyone in particular as a replacement in Jack London Square. Just that we tear out Jack London. He compared it directly to the tearing down of monuments to Civil War generals in the South.
“Huh, what’s this all about?” I thought. “If Jack London was racist, this is the first I’ve heard of it.”
I did some digging. Turns out the author of the petition had not even read Jack London’s work, and was basing his conclusion on a short essay about London written by a food critic in the East Bay Express. That in turn was based on a very narrow reading of a non-fiction essay Jack London wrote in 1902 called “The Salt Of The Earth.”
In the essay, London describes what he believes are the geopolitics of China and Japan as potential world powers, and how Western perception does not account for them. He declares the West is underestimating the strength, resources, and ability of Japan and China as nations. He declares China a sleeping giant (it was) that will be awakened by Japan’s imperial aspirations (it was), and that this will lead to China and Japan’s growth into superpowers on the world stage (they did), and that as nations, Japan and China will present threats to the West that the West is unprepared for (yes and yes).
Not a bad bit of prediction for one writer just following his instincts. But, by referring to the Japanese nation collectively as “the little brown man” in the essay, he provided just enough material for the food critic to willfully misinterpret his meaning and accuse him of endorsing a race war.
In my personal opinion – and I’m definitely not alone here – Jack London is a brilliant author, worthy of honor in his hometown of Oakland. He wrote and traveled prolifically, and his life story is nothing short of awe inspiring. He was largely self-educated with the help of an Oakland Public Library librarian, went to work in a cannery at the age of 13, rode the rails as a child, became an oyster pirate, got into UC Berkeley, sailed to and participated in the Klondike Gold Rush, was a war correspondent for the Russo-Japanese War traveling with the Imperial Japanese Army, and wrote with passion about everything he experienced. My father loved Jack London’s stories growing up, and so did I.
Needless to say, I found the petition appalling. It was a perfect example of what some people call “cancel culture,” which is not just free speech or editorializing: It’s a deliberate attempt to take something that isn’t currently a sign or symbol of racial division by those who embrace it, and make it into one, so that those who embrace it are forced to either defend themselves, or voluntarily destroy the thing to prove their innocence. (E.g. “The host of your favorite TV show just said something problematic in a tweet! You are now supporting racism by liking the show; cancel it and find something else or you’re a racist.”)
It’s a thin cloak of political progressivism thrown over a desire to watch your enemies burn — even if you have to create those enemies by carving them away from your allies. It’s not very hard to recognize. It also seems to be confined to the internet, as it requires a certain amount of indiscriminate groupthink to operate.
No one – and I can say this with absolute confidence, categorically – NO ONE who embraces Jack London does so for his supposed racist views. A campaign to slander and erase the beloved Oakland author serves no purpose but to pointlessly divide and make enemies of sympathetic people.
Compare this to the monuments to Civil War figures in the South: Most of them were put up well after the war ended as an attempt to claim public spaces for white supremacists. These are people whose only claim to fame is as representatives of the antebellum south. In their case I do support tearing the statues the heck down. But even then, we need to practice some restraint and figure out why or whether anyone cares about them, instead of leaping to a conclusion about their current significance.
Or hey, here’s another suggestion: We could start a tradition where we get all our farmer’s market produce that looks too gross to sell, and bring it to the square every week, and pelt the monument with it, to constantly renew our contempt for their ideals. It could be a scheduled thing, with food stalls and music, and lots of explanatory plaques for why we do it every summer. Wouldn’t that be useful, and cathartic as well? Old General So-and-so with rotten turnips hanging off his sword, until he rusts away?
Anyway, I had to make some posts on that forum, and then sit and stew for a while, before logging off and getting back to work. Has the whole country gone mad this summer? Maybe COVID-19 has given people too much free time, and too much stress, simultaneously?
On the third day, my friend Matt came over from Las Vegas to hang out with me. We grabbed late-night dinner in an empty casino, then he took me on a tour of the slot machines, explaining to me how they worked internally and what the pay tables were for.
It was a fun distraction, and I even won twenty bucks on a machine, which was just enough to pay for dinner!
At the end of the night, Matt let me pack all of my heavy luggage into his car before he drove back to Vegas. Tomorrow I would be making a 3000-foot ascent over the mountain pass into the city, and it would be very hard to do in a single day with all that extra weight. Thanks, man!

























































































