I’m rereading One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and realizing how living in Oakland is so similar to Randall McMurphy’s experience of living in the asylum where he’d been committed.
Poor Mac just couldn’t comprehend his new environment—its cruelty, its absurdities, its malice, its indignities upon the human soul--until it was too late. And we all know what happened to him.
Mac was and is the star of the novel (and of the film, for which Jack Nicholson won an Oscar), but the novel is narrated, in the first person, by Chief Broom, who to me is the more interesting character. It’s through the Chief we learn of The Combine. We never learn exactly what The Combine is, except that it’s a paranoid’s fantasy explaining why and how everything got so twisted out of shape. In this sense, the villain of Cuckoo’s Nest isn’t Nurse Ratched, evil though she is. It’s The Combine, which has taken control over her (and everyone else), in a sort of Invasion of the Body Snatchers monster movie.
We here in Oakland blame people like Sheng Thao, Pamela Price, Nikki Bas and Carroll Fife for the evil, mutilated system over which they presided, and in which we are compelled to live. But, like Nurse Ratched, they’re not really the problem. Thaos and Fifes come and go, but the system that produces them—The Combine—goes on. Tweedledee dies, retires or is thrown out of office, and Tweedledum pops up to take her place, in an insane game of Whack A Mole. It seems like Oakland can never get out of this cycle. We vote for, say, a Kevin Jenkins, someone who seems like they can change direction, but it turns out like the conclusion of Animal Farm: “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
What is The Combine? I’m no better able to define it than Chief Broom. As in the Netflix thriller Zero Day (which I’m quite enjoying), nobody knows who was responsible for the electronic outages that devastated America. Was it Russia? A homegrown group? It’s a mystery: there has to be a culprit because these things don’t happen by themselves but must be planned, organized and managed. But by whom?
Unfortunately, what happened to Oakland isn’t as simple as a deranged cult of fanatics getting their hands on a computer virus. It has metastasized over decades, with corrupt individuals passing the sickness on to younger fanatics, in a long chain of misery, grift and greed. There isn’t one group leader to arrest. I blame the unions for being a big part of it (because they provide the funding). I blame the media, whose reporters seem to grow dumber with each passing year. I blame the voters who consistently choose mediocre, incompetent politicians for City Council and Mayor. At times, autocratic dictatorships like Russia, China or Iran make sense to me: they can strike down their opponents with impunity, whereas in our democracy we have to coexist them ours, despite the damage they cause. Not that I would change America into an autocratic dictatorship, although you-know-who is trying to do just that. We just have to trust that our democracy is the best system, even when it doesn’t seem to be working very well.
At any rate, there remains The Combine, however inchoate it may be. The first step toward combatting it is to acknowledge its existence. We aren’t able to smash it, yet, but we can identify who works for it, and chop off those tentacles. We’ve begun that process by recalling Thao and Price. It’s interesting that the politician who hopes to accede to power, Barbara Lee, two days ago refused to retract her statement that the Recalls were anti-democratic when, in fact, they were the essence of democracy. Lee is too old, too ideologically rigid, and too indebted to her union and racist paymasters to recognize reality. I don’t think she’ll be our next mayor (I could be wrong), but if she is elected, Oakland will have gotten what it deserves…again.
Steve Heimoff