A plea for bicycle season

By Dan Brooks in Etiquette 1 Comment
The Midnight Special, courtesy of Hellgate Cyclery

The Midnight Special, courtesy of Hellgate Cyclery

Bicycle season in Missoula is a long time coming, but when it arrives it’s worth the wait. The former site of a glacial lake, Missoula is remarkably flat with hills on either end of town. Humidity is desert-low all summer, and it’s rarely windy. Best of all, the town has lots of bike trials, which intersect with car traffic only at intervals. All you have to do is pull up to the place where the trail meets the street, stop, and then watch as cross traffic also stops and motions you impatiently ahead. Then fly into a rage.

Now that bicycle season is upon us, I have one message for the drivers of Missoula: If I have come to a complete stop, do not also stop.

I know you are scared of killing me. And I forgive you for the summer of 2014, when you hit me twice—once by turning left through the bike lane and once by backing into me in the grocery store parking lot. It’s okay, despite what I said in those intemperate moments after I was unhorsed. While collisions between bicycles and cars are dangerous, they are also uncommon. When you see a bicycle stopped at a stop sign, it’s safe to take your right of way. To stop and wave the cyclist ahead is like stopping at a door held open and saying, “no, after you.”

You can read my desperate plea in this week’s column for the Independent, which contains lots of grisly images of bicycle accidents. Not photographic images, though. That would be unseemly. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links!

I knew the Montana stare was a thing

By Dan Brooks in Etiquette 3 Comments

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I came to Montana from Iowa by way of New York City. Two of those places discourage staring. When I began to think that a larger-than-usual number of strangers in Montana’s restaurants, shops, and passing vehicles were staring at me, I came to the reasonable conclusion: I was insane. Because I am a crazy person, I think people are staring at me when all they want is to eat pancakes with their weird families. As a rule, when you move someplace and develop theories about what people are like there, you are wrong. But then I read this profile of Montana travel author Russell Rowland implying “the stare” is a thing:

Rowland said during one of his favorite interviews, Fallon County farmer Jerry Sikorski invited him to smell his soil. Others, mostly people in tiny eastern Montana towns, gave him “the stare.”

“Those who encounter ‘the stare’ should not panic,” Rowland wrote. “Although at first glance, the stare suggests that you might want to turn around and go back to your car, the explanation is pretty simple. The stare comes from seeing the same 25 or 30 people day after day for the past five or 10 years.”

That was my explanation, too: as population density goes down, the social acceptability of eyeballing me in the laundromat goes up. But this explanation boils down to “they’re staring because they’re rubes.” I don’t want to think that.

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With DAD Act, Commander Zinke invades the realm of satire

By Dan Brooks in Fighting 1 Comment
Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-MT) visits a Special Forces parade in Helena.

Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-MT) visits a Special Forces parade in Helena.

Those readers who fail to live in Montana may not be familiar with our lone delegate to the US House, freshman representative and former Navy SEAL Ryan Zinke. He is a war guy. His public persona centers on his identity as a former member of one of the world’s most selective fighting forces, sometimes to a degree that verges on parody. For example, his office consistently refers to him as “Commander Zinke,” not “Representative Zinke.” During the 2014 election, his campaign gave away an AR-15 in a raffle. And of course there was the time he criticized President Obama’s participation in the Paris conference on climate change because it wouldn’t do anything to stop ISIS, then levied the same criticism against gun control a month later.

He’s a character, in other words. I have enjoyed Commander Zinke’s hooah schtick, and so have voters in Montana, a state where 13% of adults are veterans and a substantial number of those who aren’t might be described as lifestyle conservatives. As the Republican Party continues to corner the market on warlike patriotism, Zinke is the killer app. But I cannot abide his recent behavior, in which his gung-ho act invades the realm of satire.

Last week, Commander Zinke co-sponsored the Draft America’s Daughters Act with Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA), a former US Marine. The DAD Act would require women between the ages of 18 and 26 to register for the draft, just as men do now. Lest you think Zinke and Hunter are at the forefront of gender equality in military service, here’s the latter in a public statement:

It’s unfortunate that a bill like this even needs to be introduced. And it’s legislation that I might very well vote against, should it be considered during the annual defense authorization process.

It turns out the DAD Act is a jab at Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, who in December instructed the US military to open all combat specializations to women, including infantry and other front-line positions. Zinke and Hunter object to Carter taking that measure “without regard for the research and perspective of the Marine Corps and special operations community.” If you let women join armor divisions or become SEALS, they argue, drafting them is the next logical step.

This venture into satire might be funnier if Commander Zinke had ever sponsored a bill that actually became law. As it is, his record in legislation lags far behind his record in war. Although he is a fixture on Fox News and anywhere flags come together with guns or motorcycles, he has yet to propose an idea the House actually took up. Maybe now is a bad time to sponsor laws he doesn’t actually support, since he his success rate stands at zero with laws he actually does. You can read all about it in this week’s column for the Missoula Independent. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links.

Good country people for Carson, Benji Hughes, and the charm of first dates

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized 1 Comment
Singer-songwriter Benji Hughes

Singer-songwriter Benji Hughes

Last week, the Federal Election Commission announced that Ben Carson had raised more money from individual donors in Montana than any other candidate. Like Montanans themselves, his donors cluster around Billings and Kalispell, but they are also more widely distributed than donors to any other candidate. They live in the boonies. This supports the hypothesis I developed during my independent research in Iowa, where I found that Carson had the support of 100% of voters on my great aunt and uncle’s hog farm. He is the candidate of good country people.

That he is not the candidate of the GOP tells us something about the changing dynamics of Republican politics. Carson is not the different from the two other men leading his field. Like Trump, he has no previous experience in government. Like Cruz, he made a name for himself as an outspoken—some might say obstreperous—critic of President Obama. But unlike Trump and Cruz, Carson is meek. His meekness is a quality that good country people hold dear, but in the 2016 Republican nominating contest, talking loud and crazy is a feature, not a bug. You can read all about in this week’s column for the Missoula Independent.

But that’s not all the Indy has to offer. Valentine’s Day is this weekend, and that means it’s time for the annual Love and Sex issue, featuring essays on subjects from strip clubs to the slow fade, Valentine’s for ironists and the charm of first dates. That last one is by me. You can read ’em all here, and I recommend that you do. There’s Jamie Rogers in there, and he is always good.

Meanwhile, Benji Hughes is getting better. If you’ve been foolish enough to let me control your stereo, you’ve probably heard The Mummy, a strange and pleasing song from his 2008 debut. That sprawling double album is fun, but it felt more like a series of ideas for songs rather than a developed work. Eight years later, Hughes has released his second album, Songs in the Key of Animals, and it’s great. It’s got the same 1970s modal sound, but the songs are more fully formed and, as the album progresses, heartfelt. That’s a positive development for a talented artist who has verged on novelty music before. You can read my review here. I consider this track the single:

You’ll find that sweet jam on my Winter 2 mix, which I have recorded as a single, continuous track and uploaded to SoundCloud, because CD drives are a vanishing species. I didn’t think I did much this week, but I guess I’ve been pretty busy. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links!

With $300 million, Gianforte challenges governor to refuse PAC money

By Dan Brooks in Montana Politics 1 Comment
Televised advisor Dr. Phil, whose net worth is about half Greg Gianforte's

Televised advisor Dr. Phil, whose net worth is about half Greg Gianforte’s

Last week, Montana entrepreneur and admitted gubernatorial candidate Greg Gianforte challenged Governor Bullock to refuse donations from political action committees. Gianforte personally delivered the pledge to his office in Helena, although the governor was in Billings at the time. But no matter! The gauntlet was thrown down, by a man still holding approximately 300 million gauntlets.

After that public gesture, Gianforte told reporters he would take their questions not at all. Even the Independent, which previously ran a friendly interview from the state’s handsomest columnist, got shut out. Gianforte started the day with a stunt carried on every media outlet in the state and finished by telling us there was money on the dresser, so to speak. But we didn’t get any money. It was an insult our honor could not bear, and we repaid him by calling him a secret theocrat before he actually did it.

I understand why Gianforte mistrusts the press. Back when he told the Montana Bible College that Noah didn’t retire and that’s why he doesn’t believe in Social Security, we pilloried him for treating Genesis as policy. He explicitly told me he didn’t want to discuss religion in November. In January, Darrell Ehrlick of the Billings Gazette published this editorial complaining that Gianforte wasn’t talking about his faith.

I wish I could believe that his reservations on the topic were borne out [of] some modesty or humility. Instead, Gianforte may be reluctant to talk about his beliefs because then we might discover what he really believes—about gay people, evolution or any number of hot-button issues.

His reservation seem borne of the time we all made fun of him for three weeks, bro. Also, we know he believes a bunch of crazy stuff about gay people and evolution because there’s an (R) next to his name. These and other insights will reveal themselves to you if you read my column in this week’s Missoula Independent. If you don’t, who knows what will happen? Everyone but you, I reckon. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links!