The first time that Samantha wore a mask at work, her manager issued a reprimand. A customer had complained. She was scaring people, the shopper had told Samantha’s boss at the grocery store where she’s a cashier and service-desk attendant. This was mid-March, with the coronavirus outbreak in full bloom and spreading through the country. Although Oregon had yet to detect even a hundred cases, and there were none confirmed in the rural town along the Columbia River where Samantha lives and works, Washington State, just over the river, had already clocked more than seven hundred confirmed cases and more than forty deaths. (Samantha’s name has been changed, due to fears of retribution from her employer.) Because she shares a household with her in-laws, both of whom are in their seventies and, therefore, vulnerable to coronavirus infection, Samantha paid extra close attention to COVID-19 and its dangers early on. Covering her nose and mouth, she knew, could help prevent transmission of the virus, and donning a mask during her shift seemed not only wise but responsible, a decision that could save shoppers’ lives.
Yet this shopper accused Samantha of wearing it to boost a socialist agenda, to hype the pandemic, to strike fear in the minds of those wheeling their carts down aisles to procure the week’s groceries. The customer, a former employee at the store, likely held sway with Samantha’s boss, who pulled her from her work station. “So I spent an hour in the office being talked to about how they had to ‘O.K. things,’ and I couldn’t wear it, and they’re going to have to send me home,” Samantha told me.
About a week later, on March 23rd, with a hundred and ninety-one confirmed cases in the state, Governor Kate Brown issued a stay-at-home order, closing businesses deemed unable to maintain social distancing (including theatres, boutiques, malls, gyms, and restaurants without takeout options) and most parks, and insisting that Oregonians keep six feet apart—measures the governor later described to me as “very early and very aggressive actions.” When the grocery chain where Samantha works finally adjusted its policy, at first allowing and then requiring employees to wear masks, there was no vindication, no apology. Instead, Samantha and her co-workers absorbed, and continue to absorb, more accusations of fearmongering. “A lot of people make . . . remarks at us about how we’re feeding hysteria, how there’s nothing going on and it’s a government thing,” she said.
Feeding hysteria. A government “thing.” Cloth masks as emblems of nanny-state rule. These charges echo far beyond Samantha’s checkout line. They’re now part of a political landscape that belies Oregon’s image as a progressive enclave. The state presents blue on electoral maps: it’s voted Democratic in the past eight Presidential elections; Governor Brown is a Democrat, as are both the state’s U.S. senators and four of its five U.S. representatives; and the Party dominates the state house and state senate. Pan out, away from the cities, though, and you gain a more discordant picture.
If your vision of Oregon comes via “Portlandia”—the sketch-comedy show on IFC starring Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein, which, for eight seasons, both lampooned and gushed affection for a certain stripe of twee progressivism—this other Oregon will come as a surprise. This other Oregon is less likely to obsess over craft beer and bike lanes, tiny houses and food carts. The majority of the state’s counties are red, and this generally means a traditional, no-frills conservative base—Christian, white, G.O.P.-voting. Then there’s the other other Oregon. The Oregon of Ammon Bundy’s armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, in 2016. The Oregon where multiple counties are attempting to secede and join unambiguously red Idaho. The Oregon where the pandemic, while not the source of these tensions, has exacerbated them. All of this is despite—and possibly because—the state has a much lower infection rate than the two Pacific Coast states that it’s caught between.
On May 2nd, forty days after Governor Brown ordered much of the state closed, this other Oregon was in orbit around the capitol, in Salem—a parade of cars and pickup trucks from which issued whoops and honks and the sputtering of diesel engines which sounded like the clearing of throats. On the capitol steps, below the white marble Art Deco tower, hundreds of protesters stood in a lashing rain, hoisting signs representing a spectrum of right-wing ideology: Trump-reëlection signs; signs that took aim at the Governor (“Down with Dictator Kate!,” “I’d rather have COVID than KATE,” “Kate Brown for Prison!”); signs that deemed the coronavirus a hoax (“END THE PLANDEMIC,” “This is a mass vaccination campaign hosted by Bill Gates, Big Pharma + Fauci. Paid for by our jobs and economy”).
Trying to spot even one person wearing a mask would be like playing the world’s weirdest, most futile find-it game—“Where’s Waldo?: MAGA Edition.” Unless you happened to glimpse, in that sea of red hats and camo, the slight frame of the University of Oregon professor Joseph Lowndes. An expert in populist movements and the co-author of “Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity,” Lowndes quickly recognized the far-right groups at the rally: the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, Patriot Prayer. Many participants slung semi-automatic rifles and were sheathed in Kevlar. “Then, a lot of people who just look like middle-class white families,” Lowndes told me, “with teen-agers and adolescents and kids and babies in strollers.”
Lowndes attends rallies like this for research. He’s inured to the spectacle: the barely-cloaked racist rhetoric, the rage, even the weapons. But a highly contagious virus? All those uncovered mouths and nostrils releasing who knows what? Potentially lethal spittle? That was new. “Everybody’s breathing and shouting and chanting in close proximity. Suddenly, the actual bodily threats were much more grave and much more unsettling,” Lowndes told me. “It had almost a macabre, carnival-esque feel. I think these people were so thrilled to be together, and to be able to transgress these new social norms together.”
In the crowd also lurked proponents of QAnon, the conspiracy theory that stars Donald Trump as a warrior genius central in the fight against the so-called deep state, with its predictions that all the President’s enemies will soon be jailed. These proponents, their “Q” placards held high, had a candidate, Jo Rae Perkins, running in the G.O.P. primary election for the U.S. Senate a few weeks later. And Lowndes identified another festering tension on display: the state’s rural-versus-urban divide. Many of the protesters hailed from counties with few or virtually no coronavirus cases, counties where the pandemic isn’t regarded as just a “government thing” but also a “city thing”—often code for “nonwhite.” And “white” is etched into the region’s earliest vision of itself. In the eighteen-forties and fifties, in a series of exclusion laws, Oregon banned slaves and free blacks (“it shall not be lawful for any negro or mulatto to enter into, or reside” in the territory, one read). “So it was set up as a white polity from the very beginning,” Lowndes said. “And something about the Oregonian racism, the Oregonian white identity, is really in its constitutional makeup, in both the metaphoric and literal sense.”
