An Indian guru landed in rural Oregon in 1981 and started a free-love sect for US hippies. The sect took over a tiny town of Antelope, population 93, antagonized the residents with public nudity and loud orgies, and started delivering its message of love and peace with weapons, threats, and murder.
The story of the Oregon sect is like a trial run for the current political moment. The believers started by preaching decolonization, anti-racism, abortion, environmentalism and anti-capitalism. They renamed Main Street into something less colonialist and practiced nudism in the city park. Then they decided it would be helpful to overtake the local government. They dragged homeless from all over the country to flood the local elections with “new residents.” But when the homeless became rowdy, the sect members drugged them into compliance. That wasn’t enough, so they took the homeless to another town and dumped them in the streets.
I told you. It’s really recognizable.
Wild Wild Country is a Netflix documentary, so the creators are sympathetic to the sect. They try to persuade the viewers that the locals only objected to having the sect around because they were bigoted toothless hicks. I mean, who else would have a problem with open-air orgies and hordes of psychotic homeless? But the filmmakers fail at massaging reality into a DEI narrative. The documentary is good and quite eerie in the recognizability of its themes.
Clarissa's Blog 
Wait, aren’t these the guys who went around spraying salmonella on restaurant buffets to cause an outbreak? Actually killed a few people?
And the docu was sympathetic??
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Sweet Tomatoes once opened a salad buffet in the south part of metro PDX …
Amazed it had as much staying power as it did, but it’s long gone.
Ever been to The Dalles?
Pretty little town by day, but pretty creepy in spots at night.
It’s one of those spots like Hemingway’s old town in Idaho.
Some lovely turn of the 20th buildings along the main drag, but at night you could easily get why that place would bug the crap out of him.
Never been to “Oshoville” but by now it has to have psychogeographic echoes of something just as awful.
Some towns reach out to your psyche and ask you if you’re mad merely considering staying there.
Ah, but that’s quite all right.
You will be in time! :-)
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Out West is not my stomping ground, but I do believe that there are “spirits of place” and some of them are ugly…
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“I do believe that there are “spirits of place” and some of them are ugly…”
(cough cough) years ago I was on a car trip to another part of Poland when we stopped at a famous church (not the first or last on the trip).
Almost as soon as I got in I felt incredibly uncomfortable and felt like there was some kind of menace around every corner. I’ve been in lots of churches and this was the first and last time that’s happened.
I more or less forced myself to stay for a few minutes and it didn’t let up at all and finally I went outside. While no one claimed to share my feelings they had all left the church long before I had (this was a reverse of the usual pattern I was usually done while they were still examining portraits and different alters spread around).
If you’ve experience this, you get it, if you haven’t it’s impossible to explain.
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That’s how I felt in New Haven. Four years of that, starting on day one. It was horrible.
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The scariest part is that those sect members with their hatred of America and their progressivist blabber have gone mainstream. We have accepted their belief system as completely normal and morally superior.
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There’s a multi-national “church” with its HQ in Clearwater, Florida that merits this consideration as well …
They declared me PNG after I helped a few of the people they were bilking out of money get free of their rancid sci-fi hallucinations and modified voltmeters.
Best day ever. 🙂
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But they were provoked by the bigots, so it’s all good. It’s the same people who justified BLM. And the sect was a precursor to BLM.
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Weird psychogeography abounds: I’ve had lunch at the Taco Time in The Dalles that the Oshonuts poisoned back in the 1980s, and I didn’t know that was the place until I saw the building on Wikipedia.
Also pretty sure that the mobile phone store next to it in the Wikipedia pictures used to be a Radio Shack. It’s where I bought a replacement CB radio when my old one died on an “On The Road” trip around the US after completing an architectural project.
Taco Time is Mexican food reinvented for regional Scandinavian and Germanic tastes, with some tater tots and mild salsa thrown in.
It’s this kind of place you tolerate in the Pacific Northwest because it’s cheap, fast, probably won’t get you sick, and is incredibly convenient especially when limping into town with a vehicle that’s cooked its fuel system.
Hence why a CB was top priority before a very pricey fuel system replacement, especially since my mobile with national coverage had very little on the maps between The Dalles and Boise.
A memorable day, in other words.
So, methylethyl: “Out West is not my stomping ground …”
My usual modus operandi for projects involving consulting periods typically made use of hotels in the area.
For metro PDX that was usually Tigard, and for city PDX that was anywhere near Powell’s City of Books.
I’d just wrapped up and was heading east toward Chicago when my vehicle’s fuel system chose to eat itself.
If the destination was potentially interesting, I’d drive rather than fly.
Lots of things were different then: I was vegetarian for health reasons as well.
Ah, but what kind of health reasons, you may wonder?
The kind that can kill you before you get to be 45.
That’s how I’d also remember Sweet Tomatoes, of course.
Far, far too often a customer.
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