Three OhOh Six

Choices, choices, who gets to choose?

Apr 07, 2024

This is the sixth in the Old Truck Good Coffee Volley series, in which Joel and Leo respond to each other’s essays with a piece of their own. In So you thought you might like to go to the show, Joel wrote about how groups can gel around shared experiences. Experiences which may in turn grow into a chosen identity and help foster a personality. Here, I put chosen identity and its social implications under a microscope.

Gun raffles are big in Montana, though you will be spotted as a gun culture outsider if you call most guns a gun here. Rifles are rifles and pistols fit your hand. Half of humanity has a “gun” in our groin. Such are the terms by local math, if you care to pass for local.

In a similar vein, you had better know to pronounce 30.06 as "thirty ought six" not "three oh-oh six" or "thirty point oh six" when you ask the guy sitting next to you at the bar if he wants to drop twenty bucks a ticket for a shot at a nice new 30.06 hunting rifle, so he will have caliber to drop an elk and not just deer come next hunting season. Meanwhile, back in my former Portland home, you will be spotted as an outsider if you call Couch Street for a couch, rhyme Willamette with jetty, or use an umbrella for anything less than a downpour. Whatever the stakes, there are always sides to be drawn, should you choose.

We Americans seem of late to love spotting outsiders as much as we love our own identity claims. Which is interesting, given that — except for the 1.3% of us who are indigenous1 to this continent — we have all been tossed into the melting pot at some point in our not-so-distant history. Every single one of us. 1492 was simply not that long ago, for anyone with a factually informed sense of history. All we non-indigenous folks here are here because someone in our bloodline immigrated to the Western Hemisphere in the last 500 years or so, not always voluntarily. Our ancestors showed up for many reasons, some more ethical than others. Once here, they did all the things humans do to survive, usually losing their old language2 along with most of their former culture along the way. Losing such things can be disorienting, as any foreign exchange student could attest (n.b., I spent my sophomore college year in Salzburg, Austria, with only one year of German language study under my belt.)

Humans are wired to survive in part by classifying our environments and sorting our relationships accordingly3. Said differently, we love to keep gates as much as we may love storming them. Gates are how we find ourselves. We admit some into our circles but not others.

Recent generations have been obsessed with social deconstruction. As if social resources are somehow endless even while natural resources are not. As a result, I see most Americans as unconsciously lost for our lack of any national story more compelling than pop culture may provide. So, we gate our identities by other standards instead: race, clan, class, region, ancestry, urbanity, job, religion, sports team, sex, fashion, gender, tattoos, hobby, or maybe gun collection size. Identifiers vary and overlap. Regardless, we choose our identity, build some personality around it, then expect others to agree. Sometimes they do. Other times they classify us how they choose for their own convenience.

Do I get to make these choices for them? Do they get to make mine? Are we obligated to agree? When are these questions worth a fight, and when we fight, who pays?

Thank you for reading Old Truck Good Coffee. This post is public so feel free to share it.

When I asked my Lodge brothers if we should raffle an emergency power generator instead of a rifle, I may as well have proposed a tutu. I just wanted an easier item to sell. Something less controversial than guns, in an era when mass shootings are so common we go numb. Even in Montana, I thought almost no one I know outside of the Lodge would want a rifle. My friends and my family would want something homier and more helpful, like an emergency power generator. Not a weapon. So I thought. Then firearms came up while chatting down at our local bookshop.

Our local new, not used, bookshop, was bought by a Queer, not Lesbian, woman and their Trans husband about six years ago, after they left Portland too. Over the past several years they (the collective they, not singular) have turned this quiet old source for recent bestsellers, calendars, coffee table books, and some Montana history for the tourists, into a virtual community center for The Acronym. "The Acronym" being a flexible generalization for the 21st century set of cultural and political movements composed of lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgenders, intersexuals, queers, asexuals, demisexuals, polysexuals, polyamorals, two spirits, allies, unicorns, and whomever else last chose to stitch a flag, define an identity, and hop on the bandwagon with those of us who have been fighting for basic rights and simple dignity all our lives.

When White Christian Nationalists threatened to attack a Drag Queen Story Hour at this bookshop during Pride Week 2022, the storytelling went on anyhow. Ten "christians" showed up, presumably armed by their stance and suspicious bulges. The Acronym showed up too with nearly two hundred defenders for our community. We built a colorful human tunnel for several dozen kids and their parents to safely enter the bookshop and have fun hearing colorful queens read children's stories.

In the wake of this overwhelming victory for social and sartorial education, The Guardian news out of London declared this one of the world's most dangerous bookstores4. Which could be true. More than just White Christian Nationalists were quietly armed and ready to return fire that day. Many homos out here in the boondocks are prepared to do the same. Cuddly does not mean defenseless. Is this wrong? Should homos be armed? Would Gandhi be sad?

My friend Tom sells a lot of rifle raffle tickets. He is a three-times Past Master of the local Lodge, and a big gay libertarian bear of a man who figures if he can consensually fuck whomever he wants, then so can you, armed or otherwise, your call, because this is America. I am sure he is a decent shot. Three times now Tom has delivered clear instructions within my earshot on how to properly pronounce 30.06 so as to sell tickets and not draw mockery.

I already know this, though. I have for decades, even if I lived thirty-six years out in Portlandia, back when it was weird, and have never won a rifle raffle, much less bought a thirty ought six of my own. My father was no hunter, at least not by the time I met him. He sang in a Barbershop chorus instead. But, as the son of a late-arriving Homestead Act land-grant immigrant — granted crap-land strewn with alkali patches — my Dad hunted prairie dog and rabbit with his brothers on the high plains during the Great Depression, while their own Dad dry-farmed whatever wheat, barley, and hay he could coax from his scraggly fields north of Absarokee. His sons put protein on the table as best they could.

By the time I came along forty-some years later, we ate ranch-raised, plastic-wrapped meat from the grocery store most every night. A fact I later learned was a major point of pride in my father's life. My Dad could now afford to keep our killing at a distance. This was wealth to him. This was success. His bolt-action Winchester .22 "coney killer" is a family heirloom that sits in my own home. It has never been fired in my lifetime.

Still, plastic-wrapped beef aside, Dad raised me in Montana. And, when you grow up in a time and place like Billings in the 1970s, while also knowing deep down you are a sissy, you pick some things up naturally to help navigate passage among the hunters. I know some hunting lingo. I have seen a bullet packed. I can load and fire my Ruger. I buy my rifle raffle tickets and sell my quota, even if I cannot imagine dropping an elk. Alpha predators need no disguise. Prey do. Prey have an intense capacity to read other creatures. Camouflage is non-violent defense, and unexercised rights tend to fade.

Packing heat is challenging for folks who just want peace, love, and good hot sex, the same as everyone else, down to the protected legal rights to all the above. Rights some still think only they deserve. So, is love all we need? Sure. Love plus food, water, shelter, healthcare, education, public safety, and the systems to produce, manage, and deliver all this to a planet we have covered in eight billion human lives, so far.

In 1819, political theorist Max Weber famously defined government as the entity which holds the local monopoly on violence5. Find the source of legitimized violence and you have found your government. Absent fencing and some controlled threat, mammals gravitate into mutually-identifying herds which then sort into classes of predator and prey. Humans are mammals. We may refer to our herds as “tribes” or “governments,” but we still hunt things, in various ways, including each other. There has never been an enduringly successful, economically independent, yet unarmed political utopia. Ancient monasteries were anything but independent of the vast wealth and protection gifted them by well-armed elites in search of God’s favor and a tax break. Modern worker collectives, intentional communities, and “sovereign citizen” ranches all exist, free as housecats, within infrastructures funded, governed, and protected by state-enforced laws. Even Ernest Callenbach's 70s utopian hippie classic Ecotopia acknowledges the human drive towards tribalism, albeit via a sexist vision of a supposedly male-only need for ritual combat. The whole existence of Callenbach’s fictional Pacific Northwest utopia is premised on its having a security border enforced by nuclear threat6.

Out in places like Montana, rifle sales help men pay rent on their Lodge room, a place where they meet to soften their edges, and think deeper thoughts. Drag shows raise chuckles, spirits, and money too. All sorts of community organizers do what needs to be done to keep things safe. Soft, thoughtful folk guard gates and bear arms, too. When we must.

Three OhOh Six

Choices, choices, who gets to choose?

Discussion about this post