Behind the Bastards - Part Two: The War On Vagrants

Episode Date: June 15, 2023

Margaret and Robert continue the tale of the default world's war on Malaga Island.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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or wherever you get the stories that matter, to you. Oh, welcome back to the Dyer Straits cast, a podcast where I know exactly one song by the band the Dyer Straits money for nothing and Margaret I understand you you still know two songs by the Dyer Straits. I do yeah So this is a news and culture podcast about all of the the things going on in the Dyer Straits world. Any updates that you're aware of, Margaret? Well, they don't need to make the guitar cry or sing. Okay. I've learned that much.

How do we feel? Are they allowed to use that slur? Sing? Cry? No, no, no, no, in money for nothing. Oh. No, no, no, no, no, in money for nothing. Oh. You know, there's no accountability that I could ask

from the dire straits. I don't think there ever was. I don't think it's what I would recommend they do. That's where I'm going to go. My assumption is that everyone involved with that band died in 1989. And I, yeah, I can't have lived past that they certainly can't have outlived in TV.

Why is this the thing you wanted to do? This is Margaret and I's most beloved bit, the Dyer Straits podcast by two people who know very little about the Dyer Straits. Margaret, can you confirm that? Cause I only know one song and Margaret knows too. That. Yeah, well we've done it before.

So therefore, it's our most beloved day. I was, I've been waiting for weeks to talk about the dire straits again. Um, because, you know, after we did it the first time, I listened to money for nothing again, uh, because I mostly had listened to a cover that had done by a blue grass band. And it wound up, you know, that thing YouTube does

where they like stick it in your like recently listened to thing. And so for the last like several months every time I hop on YouTube to put on music, there's like a 50% chance I start playing that one song. And then it it quickly takes me away from that to other songs. And then in 30 minutes I'm singing Hotel California. But you know, and it's 4.30 in the morning. It's 4.30 in the morning. What else, what are you going to do? Anyway, this concludes the dire straits cast. If they're not dead, don't tell us, you know, we're both fine with that. I don't, I don't, unless you are listening and you are in dire straits.

In which case, you have permission to tell us. I suppose. I suppose. I suppose. I suppose. In which case you have permission to tell. That's absolutely. If you will record us a custom version of either one of those two songs, but themed about, I don't know, whatever pot we do here, podcasting, I guess. That probably wouldn't be a very interesting song. Actually, you know what, I'm certain there is a deeply, deeply frustrating version of money for nothing that's about like podcasters making money as opposed to rock stars, and

I don't want to hear it. So, no, no thank you. Yeah, that is the exception. Yeah, even if you're the dire straits people and you wrote that song, you don't want to hear it. It would be very funny if the dire straits people were just like the monster-mash guy

where they just kept making, as any time there was like a new group of people who like got a bunch of money, they'd do another version of that. Why are you still talking about this? I don't know. I don't know, Sophie, because the rest of the story we're talking about today, which is the history of vagrancy and how it intertwines with the history of Benjamin Darling's

descendants and Malag Island. The rest of that story is very sad. So that's why we're talking about the dire straits cast. But legally, we are only allowed to feel joy when we're on cool people to cool stuff. Bastards, bad time. We did sign that contract. Well, great. I don't know. So if you see if we can get a deal with MTV and do a real music podcast. Are they still around? I think so. But it's just like, now they're mpod for music podcast. It just seems to be like more like spin off shows of Jersey Shore. Over to over again. Yeah. That's what a tragic state of affairs.

That was a cultural moment. Yeah, because honestly, like the Jersey Shore people probably committed fewer sex crimes than the musicians that were previously the draw to that channel. So I don't know. I don't know. It's probably pretty cool. Well, now I've made our fun bit about the dire straits just to give you a second. And we're back baby.

That's the regular show. So yeah, let's continue on. So when we left our friends on Malaga Island, things were still going pretty well there, but the 20th century was starting to turn and there were problems on the horizon, right? You know, this kind of anti-vagrant hysteria had sort of fed into this kind of local culture demonizing this one dude, squatting alone on an island and it was kind of like a sign of things that

are about to start becoming a problem for more of the people who live on these islands. Because the kind of pleasant state of being ignored that had benefited these people for so many generations was going to come to an end because of the development of Maine's first tourist industry. Suddenly, Americans with disposable income were flocking to the main coast every summer. These isolated islands, with the additional technology that existed, were now less isolated. For a while, about a century or so, affluent white manors had been pretty happy to leave the people of the Casco Bay Islands alone, especially since they were both in exit valve for folks who didn't fit into Portland society and they were a source of cheap labor. But now they were starting to think,

well, maybe there's more money if we just kind of imminent domain those islands and put up summer houses on them. For, you know, rich people, isn't it? Yeah. What if we air be and be there? That's what I meant to make. Is there community?

Yeah. That's basically what's happening. So since there's money to be made in the islands now Local businesses start leaning on the local media to portray the Malagaites and their neighbors as an Isor and a shame to the community in 1899 a columnist for the bath Enterprise limited that quote few people of Fipsburg had faith that the effort to get rid of Malaga with its burden of poor people would be successful. A flurry of local news articles like this one from the Casco Bay Breeze in 1905 described Malaga as, the home of Southern Negro blood, and an incongruous scene on a spot of natural beauty.

In 1908, the popular liberal stand by Harper's, sent a correspondent, Holman Day, and a photographer out to Malaga and several neighboring islands to do an article on the communities that had caused such a sudden panic to their longtime neighbors. The piece titled, The Queer Folk of the Main Coast

is a fascinating historical document. And it uses the word queer more than any other document, not about like queer people that I've ever seen. It is every third word in this. So. Well, that just brings us back to life or not. Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. Does home and day get a pass? No. Yeah. I don't like this. I have such a mixed feeling about this because day comes across as like a very, up his own ass like liberal elite asshole looking down on these people and kind of like cheerfully condescending them but also he is competent as a reporter he is going and talk and he's like the only one who does and so a huge amount of what we know about the culture of his islands is just because he wouldn't talk to people and gave

delivery their stories. So it is one of those like kind of the way he does it is frustrating, but he just provides us with an absolutely it's kind of like you got that guy and like the White House Press Corps, the one guy who cared about AIDS and like he's like dropping some you know slurs and laughing about it sometimes, but he also is pushing the only guy pushing the Reagan administration about the fact that people are dying and this is a serious problem. So like, you know, journalism, you get a lot of these stories there where it's like, this is fucked up, but also this is the only reason we know about these people. So I don't know. I don't know what to, we're morally to put that. It

doesn't really matter, I guess. It happened. Morally it goes in the past. It's the category of the map. So Holenday's article opens promisingly enough with the lines of old muskets drove the abnackies off the coast of Maine. Today, money is driving away another race, which could be like a good opening, if you're trying to be like, you know, the cruelty of settlers against the indigenous people is being replicated by capitalists against these folks who have found refuge here. That is a little bit of what he means, but not, I don't think he really analyzes things in that context, you know. Okay, he continues. Between Kiddery Point and Quote Head,

Resorters have acquired hundreds of headlands and thousands of islands, a failings of cottages, fronts the sea, the queer, squatter people who have been dispossessed find little relish in being stared at as human curiosities. So the queer folk live alone, and it is said that isolation develops eccentricity. The ocean creeps to the doors of their huts and winter waves thundering their ears and there are

those who say that the din of the sea boats beats curious ideas into their head. So for one thing, this rules. They're just cool as they are. They are so cool. Even though this guy sounds like a lovecraft. He does, that's what I was about to say. He sounds like the madness is creeping in from the ocean waves, battering their simple brains. It is interesting that he starts with, is almost like actual class analysis here, talking about like a real,

like the kind of like longitudinal problems between the genocide of the native peoples of this aisle and kind of the relentless hunger that, you know, the quest for profit brings and how it just inherently dispossesses and forces people out of their homes. But he immediately moves to like, and these folks believe weird shit. Like, that's the focus of the article, as I said, they are. So he acknowledges that problem and then drops it right away, like a paragraph into this fucking article.

That said, home and day is a pretty textbook earnest white liberal intellectual. That's at least the picture one gets of, I haven't read his entire uvra. That's the picture that you get of this guy in this article. He paints a pretty desperate picture of the educational standards and general culture, which as we've already said, is not accurate.

These people seem to have been, and this is something that like modern day archeologists will note seem to have been pretty like reasonably well educated by the standards of the day and the area. Day uses a lot of noble savage imagery here too in lines like this quote. They're not inviace, they do not want to beg where pinnury and pride meet in the city, there are heartburnings, but the man tossing in the battered dory in the swash of a millionaires

yacht, neither size nor glares, provided he be one of the queer folk. For the queer folk are queer in one respect especially especially they dwell content in their own world, which is often a world of illusion for solitaryness and the sea breeds strange thoughts. He keeps going back to that. This guy is jealous. It is. He's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's living some dog shit life back in the city watching all of his friends get collar every season.

And like, what do I have on these people? Well, some of them believe silly stuff. Home in really wanted to make sure people got the picture that these people were sweet but deranged and thus not capable of taking care of themselves and the ways that we modern Americans expect now. To his credit, home in travels pretty widely around the islands. And he comes across people with legitimately fascinating stories that I wish desperately had been investigated by a proper anthropologist,

although those didn't really exist back then. Um, but yeah, it's enticing the bits that he gives us. One of the stories he tells us is about a guy named Ossian Dustin. Ossian lives on an island called Newcastle, not far away from Malaga. And when Holman meets him, Aussie and Dustin is 80 years old. He survives, mostly off of just kind of like pulling what he can out of the ocean. He makes about $50 a year doing odd jobs for people back on shore, mostly firewoods sawing.

And this pittance is enough for him to remain alone and independent on the island, engaging in his life's goal, hunting for Captain Kid's treasure. That is his, this man has spent hell, he's been his whole life living alone on this island, hunting for Captain Kid's treasure. Quote, the buried existence of which he implicitly believes. Now, what this guy represents in actuality is a dude who was born in around the early 1820s and seems to have decided like taking a look at American society in the 1820s and been like, nah, fuck that shit. And he has this kind of comfortable fantasy about Captain Hood kid's treasure that gives him like purpose and a sense of like meaning and seems to make him pretty happy.

As far as we can gather from Holman's reporting, he came to believe that Kid's treasure was hidden in the area due to a local legend he encountered as a young man and he just decided to spend his entire life trying to find it. Holman describes this as quote, the type of content that relieves these hidden human tragedies of some of their pitifulness, right? Well, this guy's so happy, it makes it less sad that he lives this depressing life. He's like, the life's only depressing to you, Holman.

Like, this guy's doing fine. He is hunting for buried treasure. He is probably friends with seagulls. Like, his life is great. He is 80 years old. Nobody lives that long. Like, whatever he's doing is working well for him.

Like, yeah. Here's home and again. He has toiled knights for the most part, believing that in the night, a treasure seeker can best circumvent the enchantments laid on buried pirate spoils. He searches with a treasure rod made by his own hands. He has the tip of a cow's horn, plugged with wood and containing various metals. In the wooden plug are stuck parallel strips of whalebone, and he clutches these strips one in each hand and walks along, balancing the tip of the horn. When he passes over the famous iron pot, the tip, thus is his belief will turn down and point at the buried treasure.

He said his spade has struck the iron pot several times, but that enchantment has whisked away the treasure. He expects that eventually his own charms will prevail over the power of evil. That's a cool, that's a fine life. I'm sorry, like that's a perfectly fine existence. He gets his steps in every day, like whatever. He has built a whole like almost religious mythology

around this treasure that allows him to always be searching for it, but never quite finding it while still getting little victories along the way. What's wrong with this life? In the grand scheme of things. How can you have a problem with this? Yeah. Yeah.

I bring this guy up, both because this is an amazing story and it made me so happy to read. And also because it's evidence of what these islands were. They were a refuge, not just for people like the darlings and their descendants, whose very relationships are criminal. But for folks, I think it's fair to say whatever is going on with Ossian Dustin, he's not what you'd call neurotypical, right? He is someone who has like built this kind of religious cosmology around the search for this treasure. He has visions that he talks about regularly of a figure in shining gold,

guiding him along. And in most of the rest of the country, a man who said these things and did these things would have been forced into a sanitarium where he would have fucking died of cholera, right? That's this guy's story. 99% of the US is he is imprisoned and left to die of disease. is he is imprisoned and left to die of disease. But instead, he's 80 years old. You know, and a home in is absolute, like repeatedly mentions he's the happiest, what of the happiest men that he's ever met, right? Like this guy has built a life for himself,

which is a pretty awesome achievement. And a home in is human enough to recognize that he's witnessing something remarkable. We'll at the same time rejecting this man's beliefs as worth any thought. Quote, it can scarcely be said that Uncle Aussie and his unfailing cheerfulness springs from any philosophy of life that he has evolved.

But after our talk, I came out of his dingy hut with the feeling that probably some of the proud folk in the cottages down the bay needed pity more than he. So he's like, wow, this guy seems deeply happy and is lived in advanced age, but there's probably nothing worth studying and like has approached a life. He's not in that money.

I don't know, man, he figured something out that most of us never do. He seems fine. I don't know, maybe he found the goal the year after him. Maybe he did. Maybe he found the goal the year after him. Maybe he did. Maybe he did. So again, home in here is kind of on the edge of a revelation that his journey through these islands makes crystal clear, which is that civilization is not an unalloyed good.

And many marginalized people have always been able to take care of themselves better by dropping out of it. That has been a fact of history for as long as people have been like building cities and making rules, is that some people, particularly those persecuted society, are better off without them. Next, home and visits Spruce Island, inhabited solely by three elderly men, the Shanks brothers, William, Daniel, and Nehemiah. They had lived all their lives in what he describes as a tumbled down shelter. William and Daniel never married, but Nehemiah had what our writer buddy patronizingly calls

a poor little romance that broke his heart. Basically, Nehemiah and their dad used to go to Portland to sell their fish catch, and at one point this lady married him as a con to take his family savings away, which is sad. Their father forgave Nehemiah by tasking him to watch over his brothers for the rest of their lives. It kind of seems again, like his brothers at least are, that sounds like a myth that you're telling.

Well, I mean, this is, that's amazing. It's amazing. It's amazing. Basically, what, yeah, no, no, no, no, I believe it. It's just, I think that it's like, his actual life has elements that are mythic story to him. Like, ah, you have failed in this way by being tricked. Now you have a new task.

Yeah, and it does, that is kind of what's cool. It's happening, because like William and Daniel, it seems like, again, what you would say, not neurotypical, right? They are not people who can live. Nehemiah probably could have, these are not people who can exist in the regular society of the time. Their dad realizes that he's like, look, you've got to take care of them because this

is the only place that they're ever going to have. And so that's what Nehemiah, these guys are all, like I think in their 60s, 70s, when a home meets them. And it's an intru, remarkable story as you've noted, and it gets kind of more fascinating to me. There's a paragraph in here about William in particular that I have not been able to get out of my head since I read it. For more than 20 years, William has never come out of the hut into the sunshine.

He told me that he feared the sun might heat his brains and interfere with his life work, which is the composition of poetry. There is a blanket slung across one end of the hut. William sits behind his blanket and fixes his eyes on the sunlight that enters through a knot hole and composes. He states that he is now the author of a thousand pieces. None of which he ever writes down. His entire life is sitting in that chair, filling his brain with his own poetry that no one else will ever hear. That's cool. Yeah, that's like, yeah, it's like the anchor rights

the people who would like to go and like wall themselves up. Yeah, like, yeah, and I honestly, you know, if Holman was a better journalist, the thing to do would be like, would you read me some poems? Like, so I can write them down?

Yeah, so I want to know what this is like. Yeah, of course. Yeah, he's either like, he's probably the best or worst poet. He's just a dog shit. Absolutely trash versus. Yes. Yeah.

Either way, that's, there's like a deep kind of harrowing beauty in that, that simple statement about this guy's life. Anyway, when I started researching this, my thinking was again that I would start with the tale of Benjamin Darling and then Malaga and how it became a haven for these kind of like, these people who couldn't live in regular society or chose not to and built this resilient culture of their own and how that culture was destroyed in the name of progress. But for all of my issues with home and smugness and dismissal of the depth of inner life lived by his subjects, I must admit that the substantial footwork he did is what keyed me into the deeper story here

because the people he's describing, a lot of these folks, you look at a guy like Aussie and right, you look at people like these brothers, these are folks who today would probably be living on the street, right? You know, if they don't have family support, if they don't have like some access to funding, a lot like these are people who cannot fit in with capitalism,

right? You know, they can do like some jobs and stuff here, but they're never going to like buy a house, a lot, like these are people who cannot fit in with capitalism, right? You know, they can do like some other jobs and stuff here, but they're never going to like buy a house in a city. They're never going to like own anything that they have a deed for. That's like not, for most of these people, not the kind of people that they are. And while there was this place, where they could go and be outside of the law and free,

a lot of them lived okay lives based on the standards of the time. Virging on a lot better lives than many of the people back on land would have lived. Not that they were easy lives, but they were lives. And that's not an option for people like this anymore. There's just no outside anymore. It's like one of the things that,

you know, there's no, yeah. like one of the things that you know, there's no. Yeah, it's not like any, you know, the quote unquote places that aren't owned, you know, by somebody who can lock you out or owned by the city who can make a law saying it's illegal to camp there or whatever. Yeah, so this is a story about how that happened and about how these anti-vagrancy laws that primarily got instituted in order to police the behavior of newly free black Americans, kind of coincided with the disgust of moneyed people in cities against the folks who had managed to build a life outside of them. That's what we're talking about. But you know what we're talking about first, Margaret.

What's that? Ads for products. Wait, why are there, there's advertisers on this? They sure are. They're sure are all of whom. I don't, I don't know. I don't know. I'm kind of kind of bumming out right now.

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And I'm like, something's going on here. So you do personal security all over the world and you have somebody call you and say can you get grenades and guns for this guy in Colombia? Not not specified grenades, a lot of ammunition. It's a mystery wrapped around an international arm steel who are the cops, who are the criminals and is anyone really who they claim to be? Listen to Alphabet Boys on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There's a ton of stuff they don't want you to know. Does the US government really have alien technology?

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So, yay. Anyway, I'm having a good time. Yeah. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, right? Like, I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't put that on them that like, well,

shit, there's nobody here in like the folks in those cities suck ass. Let's get the fuck out of here, you know, like, what, what else are they going to do, right? So as I write this in Portland, Oregon, the mayor, Ted Wheeler is working to, has actually, I, when I wrote this, he was still building support for it, but the vote just passed to ban camping as he calls it during daylight hours on city property. This includes the parks and green spaces that tend to be preferred by the kind of folks who find themselves living in encampments. And of course, these laws are not meant to criminalize the kind of camping that like affluent

white people do, where they like go out to camp to feel connected in nature. What they're trying to criminalize is the existence of people who cannot afford rent or a house. Who they don't really care where these people end up. A camp, like a concentration camp, is kind of the thing that Ted Wheeler is floating, is like actively trying to build support for, is like enforced camps where people are checked

when they enter and leave and have like their hours restricted and are searched when they come in. That is the goal. I think the real goal would be just to force them to move somewhere else, like people used to bust their homeless folks to California. But yeah, it is kind of one of the things that I'm frustrated by is sort of the patronizing mockery of describing these people as like camping. You know, like these are their homes. This is the lives that they've built for themselves. It's kind of like describing the people of Malaga or whatever is like hermits living in caves.

Whereas like, no, I mean, they have structures that they built. They have houses. Like they're just they're living the life that they are able to live. Like you don't have to be a dick about it. You couldn't you couldn't hack it out there. So from time to time folks put out in this way attempt to construct more elaborate structures for themselves in order to survive. A lot of this makes me think about the kind of communities that that build up on these islands in Malaga. And they make me think when I was reading about looking at some of the photos of the houses there, I was brought back to a story of a guy outside of Portland named Mikey who in November of 2020 built a two story wouldn't

home for himself off airport way. This immediately became like a huge there was a bunch of different like conservative news stories and stuff that like fucking covered this. Kind of a representative example is on a Babylon B affiliated website written by an author who gives his name as the Ghost of Reagan titled this Portland Homeless Man's House is fancier than you're home. It's interesting like when he was interviewed by local media, he was like, I needed somewhere to live and I hate tents. So I like built myself a house. And of course, the city finds out, like pisses off all these right wingers.

Mikey gets forced out of his home, which is demolished. You know. I love that they put it going to present this man as lazy. Yeah. You know, this this on industrious male who has built a two story. Where's the third story? There's not even a basement. Yeah. So this this on industrious male who is built a two story. Where's the third story? There's not even a basement.

Yeah. And it is like, you know, when you're talking about sort of some of the problems of encampments and stuff, you know, I live near several of them, but you and I just went and put out a fire at one the other day. Now, in that case, I think it was a fire started by there's some local kids who liked to attack homeless people. I believe it was them lighting started by there's some local kids who liked to attack homeless people I believe it was them lighting some of their shit on fire Because it seems to be random, you know that said stuff like that

I talk to people who live there sometimes it's like one group has beef with another and like their shit gets lit on fire There's also like fires happen in these encampments because of improperly You know handled like a propane stoves and stuff. There are problems that need to be dealt with, and in some cases, even especially during fire season, you may have to say, hey guys, we can't have a bunch of fucking propane burners out here. It's going to cause a serious problem for a lot of people. I'm not saying there shouldn't be any kind of like a tension paid to what people do if they decide to set up homes for themselves on like, you know, city property or whatever.

I just don't think the default should be destroying everything they have and putting them in jail. Like, you know, there's all this. It's also this like, yeah. I just I can't quite wrap my head around the kind of person who thinks that criminalizing homelessness is a good idea because part of it is like, well, but that could just be, yeah, right? Like that could just, like, the crime is that they had a series of bad events and you just assume that your life will never include bad events.

Like what life have you led where you don't have bad events? Like, yeah, I don't know. I don't know how to even phrase it. It just makes no sense to me. And there's like a lot of options that are not like, obviously there's a lot of safety reasons why, yeah, maybe we can't just have people setting up wherever they want to, like for example,

like in the West during fire season, that presents a danger. I spent a decent amount of time back in 2015 in a place called Nicholsville, which is one of a couple of Nicholsville's that have existed in Seattle, which was like empty land that local homeless people started building tiny homes in,

fairly well-constructed, safe. They were able to get trash pickup and stuff. And as a result, it was like a decent safe play. I mean, eventually they got forced out. It's happened a couple of times. Yeah. But one of the things that's kind of neat is that there have also been the kind of the attention

that this got helped build support in Seattle for local and governments to embrace some ideas that kind of offer more dignity on autonomy to houseless regiments like Nicholsville. And so we've seen the creation of more kind of like tiny home villages made from recycled materials and stuff where people kind of have more autonomy and are involved in the project of like helping to craft their own living spaces. These are not perfect.

These projects are generally when their legal are conducted under the strict eye of the city. This sometimes means that some of them have like mandatory searches for drugs or strict limits on what pets are available. But you know, it's better, you know, certainly than a lot of options that exist. I do find it frustrating that when homeless people build their own communities on undeveloped land rather than being given access to services that might allow them to do this safely and hygienically. They're more often forced violently out of their homes at greater expense than it would be to provide them with services because it's not cheap to actually do all this. Wind cities do give these people the opportunity to exist in a place where they can build some sort of comfort for themselves. The reactions from neighbors are often vicious, and I want to quote from a 2017 article in Crosscut

about a Seattle community called Nicholsville in Ballard. This is a couple of years after, I think it's from a different location from the one I went to. Quote, the plan to build one of the camps near residences and in the middle of businesses on the west end of Ballard's Market Street,

drew frustration and angry objections, including from the Ballard Chamber of Commerce. When the news was reported on my Ballard, it garnered nearly a hundred comments. Reasonable voices were drowned out by the aggressive rhetoric of some commenters. The real brilliance put them between a liquor store and a bar, brilliant thinking.

Better yet, let's put them right at the gateway of a historic treasure like the locks, one of our most visited sites wrote one commenter on my ballard another compared the encampment to an episode of the walking dead claiming the area would no doubt go to total shit fuck yeah That means that person's thinking about machine gun in the yeah, I mean of course. Yeah And it's like there's this outrage people have, not just when homeless people build something for themselves, but when they do it in a place where they have a nice view. There was an article that went viral in Portland in April, and I'm gonna quote from the Fox coverage of this.

Residents living near Portland's Willemette River have witnessed a series of homeless cabins and structures being built on prime river real estate with million dollar city views, but have so far been unable to get anyone to do anything about it. Pretty much everyone comes back and says they don't have jurisdiction because it's union Pacific. It's a railroad.

Rick Scaremella who owns a condominium on the other side of the Willamette River told KOIN on a report in a report Thursday. I hate when you do this, boys. I hate it too. Scaremella told the outlet that people from across the river, across the river from his home have been building makeshift cabins, complete with doors, windows, and sometimes even solar panels on the banks of the river that feature views of downtown Portland. Rick, fuck you.

I hope you step on a nail and get tetanus that costs you your leg. That's what I hope for you, Rick Scareonella. You fucking condo owning piece of shit. Like they've got a nice view and they didn't pay what I paid for it. I don't know suck my dick Rick. Go fuck yourself. I Have been a squatter in a lot of different cities at various points and, and one, I think that the way the Netherlands used to handle it until they changed the laws is brilliant, which is a lot of people were suddenly houseless in the late 80s. The way that I'm going to have the timeline of this a little bit wrong. Yeah, the ladies.

And so eventually everyone just started squatting on all of these buildings and it became this massive thing. And eventually, they got the law changed where if a building was left vacant for a year with no clear plan of what was going to happen to it, it was legal for people to squat it. And so you don't have real estate prospectors holding properties empty while people need houses. Because if you leave it empty,

someone's gonna move in and then you're fucked as the landowner or whatever. And so it got people to lower rents, it got people to sell properties to families, it got, and it provided squatters places to live. And I remember I had this moment I was playing a accordion on the street with one of my squatter fronts next to me and this person comes up and asks my friend, why does that accordion player play such sad music? And the actual answer is, and I'm a goth, and I like sad music. But the answer that my squadron friend had was like, oh, it's because we're squadrons.

We spend all of our time building things, and then they come and they take them away. And I just, I think about that where it's like, there's this version of the squatter where they shit everywhere and they live in absolute horror and everything. But then when people are like, okay, I'm gonna build a cabin. I'm gonna put solar panels on it. I'm gonna like get the trash taken out.

I'm gonna like try and do this right. People get even angrier because they want people living in squalor because they want people to suffer because they're bad people. Yeah, it's the like, you know, again, I spend a lot of time in and around encampments. I'm like, friendly. One of the reasons why I'm friendly with folks is that like a year or so ago, a woman I lived with who has had an infant child at the time was like going along this area and

got shot at by kids on very nice new motorbikes with BB guns. And like some of the local homeless folks like Rally to her defense. And we're like, yeah, they come and like shoot at us all the time. It's just like a thing shitty rich kids do. And, you know, I've gotten to know folks and stuff. And it's, you see, like, yeah, I don't like

that there's trash out there. I don't like that there's piles of trash in a nice natural area. That's not nice. You know't like that there's piles of trash in a nice natural area. That's not nice. You know where there would be big piles of trash if I, it is my house, if I didn't have access to like city trash pickup, you know? Like this is an option.

And it's cheaper than letting it all build up and then hiring professionals to come and deal with it. Like they don't wanna live in a trash. Like anyway, there's solutions to this that aren't send sending the fucking cops and the fucking biohazard drugs every like two or three times a year to fuck with people's stuff. You know?

It's, I find the discourse around this all very frustrating, which is why this episode got written. So, let's go back to Malaga Island. So, in 1908, the walking dead was still a couple years away from being on television. But Holman Day's description of the community isn't much more generous than that fear-mongering bullshit we heard a little earlier.

As an Oman's land, Malaga has more striking peculiarities than any other island along shore. There are about 50 persons on it of all grades of Negro blood, and most of them descendants of a runaway slave who came and hid here more years ago than any man about their remembers. That's Benjamin Darling he's talking about. These people form a strange clan. They have married and intermarried until the trespass on consanguinarity has, until the trespass on consanguinarity, until the trespass on consanguality has produced

its usual lamentable effects. They are as near to being children of nature, as it is possible for people to be, who are only a stones to roll away from the mainland and civilization. They lack entirely the spirit of thrift and of providing for future emergencies. Winter after winter, through all the years,

they have shivered and starved, but never does November find a woodpile on Malaga, nor a weak supply of food in reserve. To counsel on economy and to preachment on thrift, they are as inattentive as little children would be. A coast missionary took in hand, one especially in Provident Family of Six, father, mother, and four children well grown. Spurred by him, they fished, dug, clam, sold bait to trawlers, and at the end of the summer had saved about $70 among them.

Then the missionary went away, confident that at least one malaga family would reach March Hill in comparative comfort. When his back was turned, they used for kindlings the shingles that he had given them for the repair of their miserable hut, bought six dogs in order to, at each member of the family can have his own pet, and spent the rest of the money for sweets, pickles, jellies, and fancy groceries. He's literally being like, theseellies, and fancy groceries. He's literally being like,

these poor people are buying nice food. They have pets. I also love, like, he is full of shit here, like everything he says about them, like not being able to store food. They don't know how to survive the winter. They don't like, you know, like, they're 80.

I mean, among other things, like, he's like, their children are well grown and healthy. Where it's like, how, they're 80. I mean, among other things, like he's like, their children are well grown and healthy. It's like, how do they get that way? Oh, man, this just happened by accident before this minister showed up or were they actually capable of taking care of themselves. We know, again, from recent archeology that local children were reasonably well educated

by the standards of the time. And the fact that this community survived more than half a century and more like about a century doesn't really suggest people who were incapable of planning for the future or storing food. Archivist Kate McRion, who curated an exhibition about Malaga for the main state museum notes, the documentary and archaeological evidence refutes all of these myths. The people of Malaga Island lived just like their neighbors on the mainland. Again, we have evidence of how these people lived and it was not in like shocking desperation. And a Holman's article includes photographs that don't agree with the statements in his

article. The only extant visual evidence in Malaga in these days shows well-dressed women and what appear to be competently constructed homes. Like here's, and you know, this is a missionary family on the island who seemed like they were pretty chill, but these homes are older than them showing up. Sophie, if you'll show Margaret the picture, these are not like tumbled down shacks. These are well seemed to be pretty well constructed homes with shingles and shit. You can see them.

In the article where you sound. Oh yeah. Like these are competently built homes. I don't know what he's fucking talking about. They burned all the shingles, except for the ones that are on the roof. All the shingles you can see. And the siding.

Yeah. There's a lot of good use of shingles here. Yeah. And then the house in the background is even more. Like that's not background, look there's a fucking machine. It's nice. Yes, it's fine.

They were doing those plenty of windows. A lot of yeah. And windows is like, when you're building a house on the cheap, windows is like the crazy expensive part, you know? Yeah, yeah, they got fucking glass and stuff. You know, they're clearly like, again, interfacing with mainstream society to some extent to get stuff that they can't,

you're not gonna have like build a glacier in some highland off the coast of Maine. So they get what they need. There's multiple, multiple gables in that house in the back. That's not even just like, like that is fancier than if I went out and built a house I would build, you know?

Yeah, they're like, you know, it's the fine. I find this all particularly fascinating in light of how differently Holman describes another one of these communities, Louds Island. Now we don't have information on like what the specific racial makeup makeup of Louds Island was, but my assumption is that they were mostly white and my assumption that they is that they were mostly white because Holman does not describe those black or mixed race. And he does that every single time he writes about Malaga. So again, these are two islands like a mile from each other,

something like that. Here's how he describes Louds Island. And I'm gonna see you can pick up on the slant in his coverage at all. It has a considerable population of thrifty fishermen and farmers. They live in good houses and are intelligent. They and their ancestors have dwelt here for more than 150 years, but the men of the island

have never voted in any election, towns, or state or national. They have never paid any state, town, or county taxes. They resisted the draft at the time of the Civil War and drove the officers off the island with clubs and rocks. They say they do not need the protecting arm of state or national government. They raise money for schools and roads, elect municipal officers to administer affairs and seem to get along very comfortably.

Like, while that is doing this, it's the same thing. Same thing. They've got their own little thing going on and they don't trust the government like just like these other people. But one of them get described as like, thrifty pioneers at the other are like dangerous savage,

or not dangerous. He doesn't describe the misdemeanor. So give him that. They live close to nature. Close to nature, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, home and paints a picture of the Malagaites

is all but incapable of work because of their childlike nature. The fact that he describes them as harmless does not make this less toxic. And we know that his assessment was again inaccurate. By the early 1900s, many Malagaites worked to shore at resorts like the new meadows in. From a 1980 article in Down East magazine, quote, The Ragtag Island neighbors, some white, some black, many of mixed blood, living in make-do dwellings, became an embarrassing eye-sort to both local and summer and year-round

residents. There was a belief, too, made popular by several widely-read, even sensational sociology studies of the time, that poverty, crime, and mental retardation stemmed directly from retrograde families, and that removing such decaying stock would improve the moral fiber of society. Oh, God. In 1910, that half-step from here to Nazis. Yeah, yeah 1908, we are right on the road. This is right when you ginnex is starting up, like it all is cooking together, right?

This is all you're putting more stuff in the pot, right? You know, now you got a stew going, right? Now you got a real racist stew going. So in 1908, the same year as Holman Day's Harper's article, Maine established a school for the feeble-minded, later renamed the Pineland Center. This was a prison where poor unfortunate would be removed from public sight, basically, right?

This happened as the media campaign against the islanders reached a fever pitch in the people who lived on the mainland, grew horrified that the bad press about these islanders might rub off on them and damage their reputations to like folks in New York. They might think everyone in Maine was like a savage, right, like that's a big part of why they take action.

Now by the standards of a lot of these articles, I will say homens piece positively shines. And to provide an example of that, I'm gonna read a quote from an article in the Casco Bay breeze from 1905. This is them talking about the malagaites. They drank tea, spelled with a capital, if you please, for if reports be true, it's strength would sink a ship tobacco is their embrosia, and it said they would almost sell their souls for a cut. A superstitious race are they on malaga.

Even the screeching of an owl is an ominous sign for them. And then the author goes on to suggest that these people should be removed from their homes so that summer houses can be built upon the island. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, hope that guy died badly. Great.

From 1910 on, the state began pumping more and more resources into Malaga in the form of aid. And again, this is one of the justifications is they're like, look at all the, look at all the public aid money they're taking, all of like the welfare money that they're taking, which like they basically got none up until the early 1900s when suddenly it starts being like pushed into the island

by the state government. And then they're like, well now that you're receiving aid, we have to go police things to make sure that you're not doing things improperly, which leads immediately to them taking children away from their families because the living standards aren't high enough. And these children are taken and immediately interned in the school for the feeble-minded,

because obviously these kids can't learn, like they wouldn't live out here if they were capable of learning things. So let's take them from their loving families and put them in a prison home. The purpose of all this was laid out quite clearly in a 1968 article of the Pineland Observer looking back on this moment. Maine was reputedly a wasteland with pockets of social indigents of low intelligence. It was considered advisable for the good of society that these little settlements be broken up, and persons incapable of working moved to a home for them.

In 1911, it's not good, it's bad. Margaret, it's real bad. In 1911, a whole family was forced out of their home on Malaga for the very first time. The justification was that the father and one of his sons were both terminally ill, so they and all of their younger siblings were forced into a sanitarium at the stroke of a doctor's pin. That year, Malaga was declared by the state government to be part of Fippsburg.

They also decided that a wealthy family from that town actually owned the island. Now, this family had never bought Malaga Island. They were the family who had bought horse island from the darlings in 1847 before the darlings bought Malaga Island. And so basically they were like, well, if they bought horse island, they must also own the island that the black people that sold the island to them like bought, right? It must be their property too. So this family become the owners of Malaga Island, which becomes an excuse for the the local government to send the sheriff in with an order for everyone to vacate. Modern sources agree that this was all extremely illegal,

but the Malagaites are going to be evicted without resistance. They're given tiny pitances for their homes and forced on to the mainland. We have but a few precious direct writings from residents at this time. One is from a letter by an islander named Nelson Layton McKinney. And here's what he says about the process of eviction. And this is after he and his family have been forced out.

The others of us are having hard times to find homes anywhere on all an account of folks saying we've got the cramp catch in our fingers and take too many things that are lying around loose. But it's all a lie. We don't steal if we are poor. If you know any place where I can crawl in with my wife and five kids and my old peg leg,

please let me know, right? Because of like all of the rumors about how these people are like dangerous traps who will steal it and he's not laid down. Once the state kicks them out of their home, like they can't find any place to settle. You know, no one will rent to them, no one will let them live anywhere,

because they're dangerous. In 1912, the last 45 holdouts on Malaga are evicted by Governor Placedad, who made a big showy visit to the island with media in tow before finishing the eviction. He had himself photographed setting foot on the island like a conquering hero. He and his executive council ordered the eviction

of the community after taking eight residents into custody and forcibly institutionalizing them, putting them in a mental institution, right? The justification, in most of these cases, for like why these people had to be put in an insane asylum was that when questioned, they didn't recognize a phone. Now, this is 1912. Yeah.

None of these people were born in a world with phones and there are no phones on the island in which they live. They don't know a phone, put them, lock them up forever in an insane asylum death camp. You know? Yeah. Which is funny, because you could show the same phone to someone born 15 years ago, and they might not recognize it either.

Things change. Yeah. And it's one of those, like, I don't know, you know what? Maybe they don't recognize a phone. What I would like to see Governor Placedead, can you last an entire winter alone on fucking Malaga Island? Yeah. Oh, no, you're dead. Guess you're not competent to manage your affairs.

Anyway, you know who's competent to manage all of our affairs, Margaret? Ooh, is it stuff? It is. The products and services that support this podcast are the only people who should be allowed to vote. I think we can all agree on that. Absolutely. In the podcast, Alphabet Boys, we take you inside undercover investigations. I'm Trevor

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on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. Living in a productocracy. So, Governor Placedead evicts the last people on Malaga Island in 1912. The island is almost immediately sold to a friend and a business partner of the governors, a guy named Dr. Gustavus Kilgore, who had signed the commitment letters to the institution of all of the evicties.

That's cool. And not crooked at all. Then at it all crooked. No, it's fine. It's fine. It's fine. This isn't a problem that could have all been solved with one well-placed pipe bomb. So good stuff.

Good stuff. Other photos from the island before it's clearing became popular tourist chachkis. One infamous set is called the Doose of Spades and the Tray of Spades, and it shows a black woman sitting inside of a corral holding a small child. The other postcard shows the same woman with two children looking through a fence line.

The implication was that the Malagaites kept their children like animals and a pin when it was really like a photo of a family who kept animals properly on their land that they lived on But like look their animals their kids are in a pin It's it's very frustrating Once the state forced everyone off of Malaga Island they exhumed the local cemetery and we put them in prison No, they re-berry them on the

mainland. What do they do? They do put them in prison. But the kids, they're like, these people keep kids in pens. That's fucked up. We better put those kids in a prison. It's been a crazy people jail. Which they do. Anyway, I'm sorry. Then they dig up all of their dead relatives and bury them at the institution. Like, they literally imprison the corpses. Like, it is, like, I don't know, maybe there's a degree of like the fear level. The fear that like these rich and powerful people

always have about folks who don't need them or the society that they've thrived in, about folks who literally enthusiastically reject the society in which these people are successful and manage to make a life for themselves, is the most frightening thing of all to them. Anyway, cool stuff. A January 1913 news article celebrated cleaning up Malaga Island, no longer a reproach to the good name of the state It celebrated that these dispossessed people had been raised to a standard of living They'd probably never dreamed of before look. They never dreamed of prisons

Before this none of them had died of cholera in a dank cell Progress had died of cholera in a dank cell progress. They can use a phone once a week. Yeah, they can see the phone. They're not allowed to use it. No, when they know as a phone number. That article in Down East magazine, the shameful story of Malaga from 1980 goes further about kind of what happens to the these folks after eviction. Except for those sent to the main school for feeble- for the feeble-minded, no provision had been made for the other islanders. And as the press soon discovered, not only was it costly to support people at the state

home, but surrounding towns and refusing popper status to the displaced islanders, denied their right to belong to any community. King McKinney and Jerry Murphy were lucky. They rafted their houses to lots on the mainland at Fipsburg and Meadowbrook. Not so fortunate was Robert Tripp's family, who, having rafted their house up on a hole, sailed up the new Red Meadows River in search of a lot, but were prevented from landing by prosperous Christian people and town authorities. Caught literally between the well-known rock and a hard place, the family haussered up some

trees on the tiny Bush Island. They were barely able to eat out an existence and often bordered on starvation. This was acknowledged in a newspaper story of December 1914. The first year of World War I with a headline reading, Maine Misery is Dark as Belgium's. When Laura Tripp, formerly strong and healthy, soon became desperately ill, her husband rode three miles for help through the worst gale that has swept the coast in years.

But by the time he returned with a doctor, his wife had died. She was later buried in Potter's field. And probably some of the place to point out that like being evicted increases mortality by an enormous amount, like having all of your stuff trashed, having like whatever structures you built, trashed, increases the risk of mortality. You know, this war on the homeless to Cincinnati ago has been met

with a lot of deaths of houseless people. This is what happens anywhere. This kind of shit goes on. And it was happening back then too. The war on vagrancy continued, even though I should know, sorry, Malaga Island remains uninhabited to this day. There are, if you find some modern stories about descendants of the darlings, there's people with last named darling who like found within the last, mostly up within the last like 10 years, the story of their family and like where they, like what had happened. There have been some attempts,

like there's been like official apologies from local governments in Maine. There have been like some trips that some of these descendants have gotten to take to Malaga Island. This is part of why we know what we do now. Like archeology has been done people have been studying this. But there are one of other stories I read.

It was with some, this young woman who was like, I never had heard about any of this. And when I brought it up, her dad was like, don't fucking look into this. Like because there was still this fear of like, this is dangerous. Like don't go digging this shit up. Like do you know what happened to my grandpa?

Like it's fucked up. It's fucked up. I mean it's good that like this is turned to corner and people are talking about this. I don't know. I feel like we should give those people that island, maybe I don't know what to do. It's probably hard to live on.

But it was always legally theirs. Yeah. Like, that's even the like, like I don't have a ton of respect for the concept of, like, property rights don't have a ton of respect for the concept of I'm not a bit of a property rights. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But they, it was literally theirs. They literally bought it. They, like they purchased it with money with your currency and owned it. Yeah. And then you were like, now we'll give it to this, these guys. So this

doctor who locks people up can buy it. Because he's friends with our fucking dog shit ass governor. Yeah. Anyway, cool stuff. Yeah, so that is the story of Malaga Island. It's, you know, tail-ins for a while, but the war on vagrancy continues. The laws pioneered in Tennessee and Massachusetts spread over the land, and soon enough places like California and Florida had their own vagrancy laws. In California, the state declared everyone from wanderers and willfully unemployed people to prostitutes in the lute guilty of vagrancy. The way the laws were written gave police total power to decide who actually fit the definition

of vagrant, and whether or not to take them into custody. This power was used primarily on non-white people, but it was also used on other folks who were disliked by the state, including communists. For example, in 1949, in Los Angeles, Isidore Edelman, a Russian-born communist soapbox speaker, was arrested by the LAPD as he spoke in Pershing Square. Time magazine writes, It was Edelman's strident and offensive speeches that caught the attention of the police. His politics were just too inflammatory for the early Cold War.

20 years later, in Jacksonville, Florida, Margaret Lorraine Papa Christo was arrested while out with her friend, another young blonde woman, and their dates to Black men. Papa Christo was arrested under Ajax and they'll law that made 20 kinds of vagrancy illegal. Time notes that this included, rogues and vagabonds or disillute persons who go about begging, persons who use juggling or unlawful games or plays, common drunkards,

common railers and brawlers, persons wandering or strolling about from place to place without any lawful purpose or object, habitual loafers disorderly persons. I love how often juggling is in these, that's the law. Especially since, yeah. One of my favorite movies is fucking Hot Fuzz,

which is about a town who's hatred of, I think it starts with like Roma traveling through town, but of like homeless people, of like, you know, folks like travelers kind of going through and setting up camps and stuff briefly, leads them to mass murder, like build a fascist death state where they kill anyone who doesn't abide by the local laws.

It's a pretty based movie, but the old people in it who are creating this death state are one of the things they complain about is the jugglers, right? Like who all get murdered by their junta. Pretty cool stuff, good movie, watch out Fuzz. It's about all this actually in a lot of ways. Um, so yeah, Papa Cristo, one of the things I found

interesting was that she and her friends were found guilty of vagrancy for the specific modern crime of what was called prowling by auto, which is I think just like hell yeah. Basically the crime was like she and her friend were white and they were dating black guys and they were driving around. Yeah. So that we got to crack down on that. Yeah. That's not going to fly in. The kinds of laws that make me angriest are laws that are, well, race is laws are the most, one's the most angry, but laws that are just like literally victimless crimes, they're laws that like might possibly lead to situations where other crimes might be more likely or whatever, like, yeah, like no cruziate, like you can't just drive around

and serve goals or whatever. This is not, you know, the cruising law, the anti-vagrant law, when you kind of look at the civil rights movement about like the end of like Jim Crow and shit, these are not examples of Jim Crow, right? This anti-vagrancy law is not a Jim Crow law, it doesn't specify any race, but it gives the police to do whatever they want with someone they think is a vagrant and the cops happen to feel that way any time they see a black person, right? Like that's how it works.

These are racial laws. They're just a little stealthier than Jim Crow. James Crow, as his friends know him, who are bad people. I don't know. I don't know why, whatever. Anyway, let's continue. So I'm going to continue with a quote from that Time magazine article talking about vagrancy laws. Between Edelman's arrest and Papa Christo's 20 years later,

literally millions of people shared their vagrancy fates. Some of those arrested comported with the usual image of the vagrant. Sam Thompson, for example, was an under-employed handyman and alcoholic, arrested some 55 times in Louisville, Kentucky in the 1950s. But many, like Adelman and Papa Christo, are more surprising. The police arrested for loitering the Reverend Fred Shuttle's worth, co-founder with Martin Luther King Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, when he spoke briefly with colleagues and a Birmingham Street Corner during a 1962 department store boycott. It was vagrancy, the police used, when they could not get to Lane Law students, Stephen Wayne Wright, to cooperate with a murder investigation in New Orleans's French Quarter in 1964.

It was vagrancy as well that justified the 1966 arrest of Martin Hishhorn, a young cross-dressing hairstylist arrested in his hotel room in Manhattan, wearing only a half-slip in Brzeeer. Police turned to Vagrancy in 1967 when they arrested Joy Kelly in the crash pad she had rented for herself and her hippie friends in Charlotte, North Carolina. And they used it again when they mistook Dorothy Ann Kirkwood for a prostitute, when she was on her way to meet her boyfriend on Memphis' famous Beale Street in 1968. These and other Vagrancy suspects were white and black, male and female, straight and gay, urban and rural, southern, northern, western and midwestern. They had money

or needed it to fight authority or tried to comply with it. They were arrested on public streets and in their own homes, as locals are strangers for political protests or seeming like a murderer for their race, their sexuality, their poverty, or their lifestyle. Yeah. Yep. It's fucked up. The state doesn't like it. Yeah.

The state doesn't like when people live outside its logic. It does not. And cops, you know, are when you just kind of give them the power to do what they want against the people who they think are doing wrong, they will wind up enforcing the kind of laws that the governor of Maine would have thought were good. You don't have to write out who they should do violence to, who they should stomp out. They'll get to it on their own. Um, and, you know, it was one of those things because of how all pervasive these vagrancy

laws were. And one of the things that paragraph I read makes me think about is there's a song I quite like back, back from the era before country music was taken over by bootlickers by Chris Christoffer, and called the law is for protection of the people. And it starts with Billy Barton, a drunk guy, you know, stumbling around the sidewalk and the bunch of police cars come screaming to the rescue and hollow Billy Barton off to jail. And then there's a hippie dude walking through town and the cops pull him over and like beat him up and shave his hair.

And you know, this goes on like the the refrain is, because the laws for protection of the people, rules or rules, and anyone can see, you know, we don't need no drunks like Billy Dalton, the scaring decent folks like you and me. And the song kind of builds to, you know, these lines here. So thank your lucky stars, you've got protection. Walk the line and never mind the cost. And don't wonder who them lawmen was protecting when they nailed the savior to the cross. Because the laws for protection of the people, rules are rules and any fool can see.

We don't need no riddle-speaking profits. Scaring decent folk like you and me. Chris Christopherson, pretty based guy. I know. Yeah. Yeah, because of sort of how universal these laws were and how universally they were applied to people on the margins, it became, you know, wrote for folks who lived, you know, in the margins of, you know, kind of white society to warn their children about these laws.

Working class immigrant families would tell their kids like, do not leave home without you have to have money on you at all times. You can't spend it like you have to have money because if the police fool you over you have to be able to prove that you have money. You know, otherwise you can't exist in public, right? Yeah. There were early home what were called homophile organizations, which are like the first pro gay organizations, right? That would educate, you know, their members who were young gay, lesbian, trans people about nude vagrancy arrests and that the way to avoid them was, quote, where at least three items of clothing of your own sex. Otherwise, like, you would get in trouble. Black newspapers would tell, you know,

people that like, yeah, you like vagrancy arrests, like, here's how to avoid doing them because like, if you, if you piss off the cops or just exist in a way that pisses off the cops, like, this is what's going to happen to you. Several rights organizations would publish like vagrancy forms that you could get like filled out that would basically be a thing you carry it around that looked official that would say you were a respected member of the community. And this kind of persisted until, yeah, 1949 is when this guy, Edelman, is arrested and he sews and stuff and he doesn't win his case. But over the next 20 or so years until the early 1970s, reformers and activists repeatedly kind of bring cases against these

vagrancy laws. And in the early 1970s, 71 and 72, there are three cases, including Papa Christos, that eventually make their way to the Supreme Court, who announces that vagrancy, loitering, and suspicious persons' laws are unconstitutional. So that's kind of where we've been living since 1972. Is this world where these laws that were used to give the police kind of ultimate power to do violence against anyone that didn't fit in? We're not constitutional. And now we are seeing them start to return.

The authoritarians of our day, who are liberal as often as they are conservative are poking at the edges, seeing what they can get away from, seeing what they can re-institute, because as we all know, Margaret, the law is for protection of the people. This is the quote that I come back to all the time as an Anatole France quote, the law and its majestic equality forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal their bread. Yep, you know, it's just like, oh, well no one's allowed to be homeless.

Rich people live poor people. Yeah, it's, um, it's cool. It's the same, you know, it's, I mean, it's different, but it's a similar logic. We've got this law that the liberals are trying to pass in Portland to criminalize what they call domestic terrorist organizing, which is so ill-defined that basically if anyone ever arms themselves or acts in self-defense as part of a protest, that can be seen as like a terrorist paramilitary organization. And they're like, well, this is because of all the right wing terrorism that we have a huge problem with in Oregon. And it's like, yeah, but you're just handing the cops a thing they can use against anyone they don't like and who don't the cops like. Anyone who supports that law is an idiot. And if your legislator

does, you should throw raw eggs at them is my opinion, my legal opinion on the first amendment, raw eggs. I don't like these people. I don't like any of this. I'm angry. Fuck, fuck it. Anyway, you know what's cool is that it turns out the head of intelligence for the Capitol police was feeding information to the proud boys before January 6th. It's good that the cops can be trusted. I love our men and law enforcement supporting the vagrancy laws that were used to institute a police state only for certain people for most of the time that my parents were alive or are alive, have been alive, whatever. My grandparents' whole lives.

Also, it's a cool shit. I don't know. I'm very angry now, Margaret. I don't know what to do. I'm gonna go like, it's just something. Yeah, no, it's just bad. And it still happens in a lot of different ways. And obviously, it's getting worse again.

I don't know. And not if it makes sense. I mean, it only makes sense within a certain logic, but it doesn't make any sense on like a moral level or anything like that. Yeah. Through an eggs at state legislators makes sense to me. to me, providing aid and the sucker to people who are living outside of what assholes are comfortable with, makes sense to me, listening to Chris Christofferson makes sense to me. Also check out that state radio song about Benjamin Darling, that's a good one. And that's, I also think, like when we think about what the antidote to this stuff is,

it is the kind of radical compassion that Darling exemplified when he chose to save a person just because they were a person, regardless of the wrong that had been done to him, which is probably why I shouldn't talk so much about throwing eggs at people who annoy me, because Benjamin Darling wouldn't do that. But, you know, whatever. I mean, he was better person than me. Maybe he wouldn't. Maybe he would have done that. I shouldn't talk about the other things that I talk

about sometimes when I get angry because Benjamin Darling wouldn't have done that. Benjamin Darling, let's let's all remember that there was a cool dude named Benjamin Darling who rocked. Yeah, hell yeah. Yeah. Margaret, you got anything to plug? Well, if you like cool people who rocked, let me tell you about cool people that cool stuff where we cover things about like cool people who threw rocks at fascists.

Yeah. Like a recent episode, I have literally no idea when this comes out, a recent episode about the cable street. Right next week. The battle for cable street. Great in Might be the same week who knows that you can listen to my podcast talking about it and actually gets into a bunch of this really similar stuff about how after the fascist party was defeated in By working class people fighting them the The state passed a law saying, okay, no one's

allowed to march in uniform anymore. And it was directed against the fascists and it was used primarily against the left and against anti-colonial movements. There's another thing ever changes. There's another thought I have based on something you told me about that story, which was that when the fascists came to cable street to attack the Jews, one of the reasons why the anti-fascist one is because all of the Irish showed up. And the Irish showed up because when they had been having a strike earlier and been cracked down on by the state, the Jewish community took their children into their houses to take

care of them during the strike like 20 years earlier. And so when the Irish heard that there were fascists coming around to threaten the folks who had helped raise them, they were like, well, let's go fuck some shit up. And maybe, you know, it's a lesson again, back to Benjamin Darling of the sometimes unpredictable value of radical compassion. Yeah, totally. Yeah. So that's my main plug.

Cool people, the cool stuff every Monday and Wednesday and cool zone media. And also I kickstarting or have finished kickstarting or whatever a tabletop role playing game called penumbra city that gets into if you want to play this kind of thing, this life, this living outside the system, etc cetera, is a really good game for you. And that's what I got. Yeah. Well, let's all check out that, spend some time in Penumbra City before it is attacked by whatever that governor's name of Maine, you know, or maybe make him your bad guy.

If you want to run a campaign, Governor placed it, you know, there's a there's a fucking monster name for you right there. Yeah, I might do that. Yeah, let's burn him in effigy in our roleplay games. Well, you can listen to this podcast and Margaret's podcast and a variety of other excellent podcasts like Hood Politics by our friend Prop. For without ads, if you pay a small amount of money by getting on Apple and signing up for Cooler Zone media, where you'll get all of our stuff ad free, Cooler Zone media on Apple, there will be an Android version soon.

We are working on it. Sophie's working on it. I'm doing nothing at all. I don't care about it. You Android users. I'm doing nothing at all. I don't care about it if you Android users. I'm an Android user, but I don't care about you. Sophie does, and she is taking care of it. Also, I didn't care about the Apple people. Sophie did all the work on that, too.

Thank you, Sophie. I'm all in. And our friend, our friend, Jake-Anne, ran a new show on Cools and Means and Robert. What's it called? He does. He does. It's called Sad Olegarch.

And it's about all those Russian Olegarchs who strangely died the exact same wave by falling out of windows at high heights. Anyway, check all that out. Cooler's Unmedia, Apple, whatever. Byeee! Bye! Behind the bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website CoolZoneMedia.com or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Alphabet Boys is a podcast that takes you inside undercover investigations. In the second season, we've got an alphabet soup, with the DEA, the CIA, and the FBI, all mixed up in the same case. So you do personal security all over the world, and you have somebody call you and say, can you get grenades and guns for this guy in Colombia? No, no, no. It's a mystery wrapped around an international arm deal, alphabet boys, on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts,

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