Every city has illusions about its culture. Here’s a list of Asheville’s, because it’s time we started facing our myths
Above: Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Conjuror,” with a crowd getting their pockets picked while they watch an illusionist perform.
Asheville’s got its own magic, a spell it casts that brings people from far away to visit and relocate here. But just like a stage magician, we are really talking about illusions and hopes. Happiness, reinvention, acceptance, peace, escape. If the mirrors aren’t placed properly and the sleight of hand is poor we get a glance at the foundation of our city’s mythology. That’s good practice, necessary even, if we are going to identify real issues that underpin what we’d like to think of ourselves.
What stories and assumptions do we operate on, what do they tell us, what do they conceal? I am going to attempt to break this nut open and reveal a few.
1. Asheville is escapist But what’s really wrong with that? People come here to reinvent their lives and identities in a place that’s generally more friendly than many places in the rural South. They come to get away from their work-a-day lives to enjoy a little achievable luxury and rest, leaving a bundle of sweaty bills, before returning to their homes. Only a huge bore would suggest that’s a bad thing.
Of course the problem is the overemphasis on individualism and the uneven freedom to ‘reinvent’ one’s self based on wealth and racial privilege.
While our city is thankfully a damn sight more welcoming to the LGBT community than many, many others, it can be very unwelcoming to low-income people and people of color regardless of their walk of life. This escapism also speaks to a desire to retreat from real problems and conflicts and to create a frictionless community. In practice this usually means self-selecting groups of similar people; the opposite of actual diversity.
This current of personal escapism has a particularly ugly narcissism to it: personalizing difficulties that are essentially the result of impersonal social forces, and separating people when their better-heeled peers tell them that they too must have the gumption, will, and chutzpah to reinvent their lives, but they must do so alone.
2. In Asheville, small business is always good It’s a Norman Rockwell-esque throwback that only a complete philistine would criticize. Artisan producers add to the vibrancy of our community and are an important cornerstone of the city.
If you would like to be a tomato target, I would suggest criticizing small businesses in a public political forum and just watch the vitriol fly. Don’t suggest that small businesses — especially service and leisure economy related ones — rely on low-wage labor as a matter of fact. Don’t suggest that where people spend the majority of their time, the workplace, can be a friendly environment of liberal-minded bosses, but more often it’s a petty dictatorship that considers you imminently replaceable, like an AC filter with a resume.
Wander around the city and put in reams of applications at these businesses and be expected to opine about how grateful and important you think your prospective bosses’ businesses are. It’s just simply not enough to say “I know how to do this work, I do it well and on time, you need someone to do it, I need money for food and shelter.” Instead, there’s a bootlicking that’s required, a glossing over the nasty nature of work over which you have no control, but you are required to participate in to even be considered for a job.
Whatever, they may say, our progressive political leaders are basically aping small business Eisenhower Republican public policy, a kind of managerial oversight to create the conditions for businesses. The simple fact is that this strategy, while it may make short-term political sense, will not and can not significantly alleviate poverty, pollution, and the erosion of the public good in our city and society. It’s the path of least resistance and mostly benefits the already-wealthy, dressed up and concealed as progressive politics. It’s time we said so.
3. ‘Natural’ puritanism Alright, for the love of god, what could one possibly have against bike riding and organic farmers’ markets? It seems so innocuous that positing it as a problem is silly.
But it is a problem insofar as this natural puritanism is exclusively the purview of the wealthy. Everyone should have the opportunity, time and ability to cook delicious, healthy food for themselves — regardless of their buying power — as a matter of right. But here it is a niche market. A big one perhaps, but still the purview of the better-off.
There have been some efforts recently to bring these issues of food sovereignty and community self-determination to the surface and they should be commended and supported. We need more of it. But it extends beyond food politics and its unfortunate wealthy, pale color.
This puritanism conceals an anti-scientific strain that is virulent, quite literally in terms of whooping cough, and figuratively with regards to things like GMO freakouts and chem-trails. I don’t know many people who think it’s a good idea to write Roundup into the genetic makeup of corn or fight a losing war on evolution with terminator seeds. However, does this argument extend to Vitamin-A rice? It’s not the government — which leaks information like a sieve — that’s pumping toxins into the environment vis a vis commercial aircraft. That’s Duke Power, and they are doing it openly while they charge you more and more money for it.
This crippling worldview is self-reinforcing and perpetuates an uncritical, ultimately disempowering paranoid view of trends in the environment, health and production that desperately need sober analysis.
4. Asheville as Quaint-ville Who doesn’t want a desirable and mid-sized city to live in?
Many, many of us, myself included moved here from other places. Frankly put, why should things remain the same quaint town just because we moved here?
This city is changing and it will continue to change. That’s not a matter of political debate. The rising seas and continuing internal migration in America will mean that we will grow in the coming decades. How we go about doing that and managing the difficulties that Asheville will face is an open question. But expecting — or demanding — that it won’t is fuddy-duddy conservatism of the worst sort. It also primarily rewards the wealthy by making housing more expensive and necessary changes nigh-impossible. A perspective that desires stagnation and exclusivity needs to be excised from our thinking and practice.
5. Asheville’s ‘I’m okay, you’re okay‘ non-confrontational attitude Who really can hate on being nice, who could have a problem with our relaxed and permissive vibes?
Well, the problem is that refusing to make a fuss and not wanting to ruffle feathers doesn’t get anything done. You can’t even talk about wages and housing without pissing off landlords and business owners. What about if we want to DO something about it? Refusing to draw lines and take positions is a big problem. It creates a city where some terrible ideas get far too much indulgence.
There’s nothing wrong with being helpful and affable, but there is something wrong with letting people run roughshod over you and then guilt-trip you about the tone of your voice.
Without harshing the vibe at times, it’s not possible to hold people accountable for their actions. What public figures do slips into the memory hole and we’re left with the power of their affiliations. People begin responding almost tribally rather than based on a clear understanding of what is wrong, who is responsible, and what should be done about it. Then the steps toward positive change become muddy and more difficult because in refusing to define sides you’ve no idea who your actual allies (or enemies) might be and what you’re trying to accomplish. Exploitation at worst, and mediocrity at best, thrives in social arenas where critical conversation is frowned upon or absent.
Righteous anger is okay and we could use a little more of it smartly applied in our efforts to build a just city.
6. Keep Asheville Weird This is actually the most hopeful item on our list. I also know that this is not unique to our city and the sentiment has been marshaled in other places like Austin, San Francisco, etc.
The Keep____ Weird sentiment, despite being fundamentally defensive, has popped up in many places but one of the unifying things about them all it that they are sites of unique cultural production. They are artistry hubs, innovative centers, and counter-cultural hot spots.
Eventually, business interests capitalize on the cultural commons created by the population, exacerbating rents, the price of land, and utilizing the cultural zeitgeist as a marketing ploy. This causes tension, naturally, between the people who live in and have collectively created the cultural atmosphere and landlords and business owners who are trying to cash in on it as fast as they can.
Eventually the pressure on land values and rents becomes so high that the venues, spaces, studios, and boutique businesses that ‘created‘ Asheville(or Soho, or the Mission District, etc.) are pushed out and another wave of gentrification follows the last. But that’s not an ideal outcome, obviously, so many culturally driven communities try to hover in a sweet spot between cashing in on their cultural commons just enough not to destroy what made them great to begin with. I don’t think that’s possible in the long run, but it does offer an opportunity.
Basically, in order to keep Asheville on all those top ten lists, some cultural space has to remain available for alternative cultures to flower. If they are all priced out, Asheville will jump right over that shark and find itself much like a bigger, more expensive Hendersonville, full of wealth and retirees whose service class lives far outside the city they popularized and lost. Then we can expect to find Asheville on an entirely different set of lists.
So that’s the tightrope situation: Keep Asheville Weird enough to make the Chamber and the RAD happy. Some subversive genius created the “Keep Asheville Weird (until someone complains)” bumper sticker, which much more succinctly than I have sums up the tension between cash and culture.
Somewhere in between, there’s a space for left political action to assert a different set of values than the market. There’s a space to claim the right to make and shape the city as a political struggle for all of us. There’s a space to politicize our cultural and artistic atmosphere to confront comfortable lies that we tell ourselves about where we live and the paths we’re on. There’s space for a better, liberating politics that can’t be closed without slaying the golden goose. We should take that opportunity, seize that space, and while we do, look past the marketing to see what kind of future we really want.
Taken together with these illusions, I’d like to posit a possibility for social and political organizing in this town. We can take advantage of that cultural space that makes Asheville “so Asheville” in order to bring new organizations into being. We need those. We need them to take the better aspects of the above list beyond the realm of illusions and into reality. We can reinvent and celebrate our lives and cultural identities, create empowering work based on economic democracy, care for the natural world and design an urban space to help realize that.
That’s not impossible. It’s not illusory. And we need each other’s help, because it’s going to be a fight.
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Martin Ramsey is a left political activist, a media maker and service industry worker. A life-long NC resident, he gardens, lives and works in Asheville.
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