Midterms in the Oregon Multiverse

Nehalem, All Souls Day, 2022

Sayings handed down from pundits of yore suggest the veil between realities thins this time of year. And every election cycle, something else happens too. Campaign conjurers work late into the stretchy nights, burning candles at both ends. They fill our homes and workplaces with ads, foretelling how the world will change based on who we vote for.

Outside the rain pours, later than usual, though usual doesn’t mean as much anymore. As watersheds brim, salmon return from the ocean to their streams of origin.

Coaxing midterm votes can be a challenge, especially for the incumbent president’s party. Folks are often skeptical after two years of reality under that party’s leadership. We’re tempted to think life will shift for the better if we simply switch political brands, even if problems span generations.

Wouldn’t it be useful to return to our beginnings, be like the salmon and travel between worlds? We could compare how realities diverge over time; explore every fork, each different decision. That might give us creative ideas for improving our own dimensional prospects.

Let’s try, using a theory that’s trending thanks to popular media. The concept of the multiverse posits that every variation of our world exists in parallel universes, each created by different human choices. Voting decisions can spawn unique timelines of events. So can casual druthers. In one reality, you navigate this entire essay. In another you stop at the end of this paragraph, but remember to watch how the multiverse is conveyed by a character named Waymond Wang in “Everything Everywhere All At Once.” Seriously, it’s the best movie I’ve seen this year.

Wang demonstrates how to access and use experiences from various realities. In one of those Wang-worlds he and his cohorts have developed verse-jumping technology that enables them to tap into the consciousness of their dimensional counterparts. Crossing the veil he channels memories, emotions, and skills developed by different versions of himself.

During this youth the actor who portrays Wang — Ke Huy Quan — played another heroic techie with the same surname. He was Richard “Data” Wang in “The Goonies.” Filmed in two small towns on Oregon’s coast, the movie hails from Hollywood but has now become part of Northwest culture. It’s linked with our state’s zest for big-hearted adventure and notoriously weird spunk.

In “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” the adult Wang deftly shows how human decisions co-create an infinite number of possible storylines that differ in ways subtle and huge. Applying that principle, as a warm-up exercise, we can assume there’s a neighboring universe where producers of “The Goonies” decided to make sequels.

“Return of the Goonies” came out in early 1987, shortly after Ronald Reagan’s second midterm. Up until that point, everything else in that world happened the same way it did here. Vote-by-mail had just been made permanent in a majority of Oregon counties for local and special elections. Debate was heating up over increased logging of old-growth forests on public lands. Spotted owls were either cherished or vilified.

The movie begins on prom night, where Brand and Andy have just had a lover’s spat despite being chosen as king and queen. As Stef consoles Andy by the waterfront, the two besties witness a mean duo wrestling a third man into a skiff against his will. The girls realize that the person being manhandled is their giant disabled friend Sloth, bound and gagged. We soon learn that Sloth’s captors are his criminal brothers, recently escaped from custody (again) after attending the funeral of their gang-mom.

Embarking from there, most of the original Goonies come to assist their handicapped comrade. Mouth only appears for a split-screen phone chat, saying he’s missed the old crew since he moved to Santa Cruz with his dad. The sequel was well-received by fans, but like many sequels it failed to achieve the desired returns on investment. Producers realized that any future installment would need more edgy content to grab the interest of young adults.

In 1991 they they tried again with “Goonies Never Say Die,” shortly after the midterm of George H.W. Bush. Republican Mark Hatfield had just been re-elected to the U.S. Senate. Kirk Anderson was the top vote-getter in the race for Cannon Beach City Council. Grunge fashions worn by rockers who shopped at lumberjack thrifts spread across the country.

In the third movie, Brand and Mikey have opened a pirate themed fish-and-chips stand. Andy has returned to town after graduating from Oregon State, pondering her future with a marketing degree. Stef works at the front desk of Red Lion Inn, cracking jokes about flirty guests with co-workers. Data Wang attends U.C. Berkeley and is part of an emergent network of computer hacktivists. Mouth was never heard from again, but has presumably adapted to life in California.

The group gathers at a meeting called by the former “Chunk” – who Stef dubs  “Hunk” due to his newfound obsession with health food and his job at a local fitness center.

Hunk reports that while he was hiking near Timber Cove he met an elder fellow gathering mushrooms in an old spruce grove. The man said their encounter was not by chance, and requested help in protecting the area that’s been home to his people for thousands of years. Hunk shows his friends a little elk-skin pouch that the man gave him, empties it to reveal an emerald. He says this is proof that a chest of One Eyed Willie’s loot has washed ashore near the cove. He wants to find the treasure and use it to help restore habitat for wild salmon (which is, he points out, one of nature’s most nutritious foods). Problem is, the cove is also the training ground for an anti-government militia that loathes environmentalists.

Thus “The Goonies” franchise went out with a bang, filling theaters and making a world that’s different from our own. Sequels gave audiences more to work with. Fans didn’t need to extract every gram of intrigue from one single script. Wild salmon benefitted too. In fact the third movie directly influenced the public service of a staunch salmon advocate, state Senator Joan Dukes, who was cast as herself to inject a note of reality into the movie. I smile across the veil in the knowledge that profits from Goonie-Smoked™ salmon in that world far exceeded revenues from belly-dancing Chunk dolls in our own.

This thought experiment touches the surface of a quantum shift caused by one small difference in human judgement. Life as we know it would be altered as a result of all the relationships surrounding those sequels. Changes would spill out from every social interaction and create feedback in the general buzz. Remarks would spark confabs in the halls of state capitols and the booths at Bill’s Tavern.

Author Claire Hall ponders a much larger change of events in her novel “McCallandia” (Nestucca Spit Press, 2015).* The book sat on my shelf until a few weeks ago, waiting for a precise moment to poke my attention. It envisions an alternate world created in 1973 when President Richard Nixon filled the vacancy left by the resignation of Vice President Spiro Agnew.

In Hall’s quantum universe, Nixon did not appoint Michigan Congressman Gerald Ford to replace Agnew. He picked Oregon’s two-term Republican Governor Tom McCall. Then when Nixon resigned, one year later, McCall became the 38th U.S. President.

The politics of that alternate world were similar in our own. Oregon’s Senator Mark Hatfield was on the short list for Nixon’s running-mate in ‘68. Nixon chose Agnew instead because he reckoned that a wheeler-dealer from Maryland would attract more delegates from the East, especially the Southeast. But if Nixon had chosen differently, Hatfield would have become President.

So it’s not hard to imagine, over in yon alter-verse, that Agnew’s fall from grace made Nixon consider a variation of his earlier idea. Unlike Hatfield, McCall had not opposed Nixon on the war in Vietnam. He would not upset the hawks. Yet McCall’s record on environmental protection would strengthen the administration’s center, help anchor Nixon’s appeal to conservationists.

According to Hall, President McCall first set his sights on extending policies he achieved for Oregon to the whole country. These included a national bottle bill, public-access to America’s beaches, and a federal program to incentivize land-use planning. These policies advance fairly fluidly in the book, without many wonky details. And I can see how opposition to the first two was overcome through conventional political force.

Yet the third one…well, for us to imagine how federal land-use planning became a reality in that world requires a seismic shift of perception. I believe that possibility hinges on the titanic distinction between Spiro Agnew and Tom McCall. Here’s some background that applies to both worlds.

Agnew was convicted for tax evasion that was tied to deeper problems. After resigning he perp-walked off the national stage and moved to his summer home in Ocean City, Maryland. He covered his tax and legal bills with money borrowed from Frank Sinatra, then wheeled his way through a variety of business deals. After a few years he had enough dough to pay off Sinatra and move to a country club in California.

McCall, by contrast, was in the final stretch of his second term as Oregon’s governor (the most he was allowed to serve consecutively by state law). He had just signed Senate Bill 100, which required every city and county to prepare comprehensive plans that adhere to common goals. While preserving the local responsibility for land-use decisions, this made it more tricky for the same wheeler-dealers who bribed Agnew to have their way with Oregon.

In our world, Agnew and McCall were seldom mentioned in the same sentence. They lived their separate lives, far away from each other.  That changed completely in a quantum reality where McCall replaced Agnew as Vice President. These men were exact opposites in their approach to growth. Any news commentator worth their salt would remark about how someone who took kickbacks from developers was replaced by a man devoted to the prevention of urban sprawl.

That contrast opened the door for a lively public conversation about how growth should not be an abstract goal, but considered alongside the needs of community health and security, including the protection of natural resources. The public costs of development should be assessed up front in order to balance budgets without jeopardizing these priorities.

In the world where McCall became president, these aims were mutually supportive.  His administration led the way for fiscal watchdogs to champion economic stability rather than just drill down on deregulation and tax cuts. They scrutinized earmarks for roads and other capital projects that for decades lined the pockets of Fratelli-style politicians like Agnew. Public agencies balanced budgets for public needs rather than wasting money on politically-driven pork.

In short, leaders awakened the country to long-term expenses that arise from unplanned growth. This encouraged citizens to work together for a kind of conservatism that embraced good government, one that didn’t scapegoat welfare mothers or paint public servants as foes.

Meanwhile, back in our dimension, officials railed against social security while providing de facto insurance for speculators who build and rebuild in areas that are increasingly prone to floods, fires, droughts and storm surges. Hardliners held that regulations are unnecessary, often harmful, and that all of life’s essential needs can be met through business transactions. When disasters hit, speculators can rely on emergency government aid so that development proceeds anon.

President McCall put the brakes on that narrative. He did so by defining leadership as the will to address the consequences of our exploits, including long-term costs that are often hidden from the view of taxpayers. That’s maverick, not moderate, and McCall conveyed his message with the skills of master newsman.

In that other world, President McCall announced his intention to run for his next term as an Independent. Nelson Rockefeller agreed to be his running mate in ’76. Both men believed the party was losing its center, moving far to the right of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Eisenhower. Rather than fight in the Republican trenches, they made a tactical retreat and let Reagan have the primary.

That changed the calculus for Democrats, who nominated Jerry Brown rather than Jimmy Carter. In his book Hall attributes this shift to personality, saying Brown was more capable of competing against McCall’s media prowess and Reagan’s skills as an actor.

But another factor was involved too, in that world and in ours. When presented with the alternative of Reagan, many Southern Dems switched parties in order to remake the GOP, reconstruct it in a way that fed their lingering antipathy toward the federal government. In our world Dixiecrats flocked to the Republican Party in 1980. Over yonder that migration occurred four years earlier. 

No doubt Carter was intimately aware of the South’s aversion to federal authority. This probably shaped his deregulation of a variety of economic sectors, including the Savings and Loan industry. The S&L crisis that was overseen by Carter, Reagan and Bush cost taxpayers over $132 billion. That was the price of doing business with anti-government forces who ended up capturing the Republican party.

President McCall planned against that crisis. He treated regulation as a tool that could be used or abused, depending on the context. So instead of deregulating Savings and Loans, he worked to curb high-risk speculation. This made it easier for folks to fend off wheeler-dealers who converted affordable neighborhoods into luxury developments. If the Goonies had lived in McCallandia they could have saved that first bit of treasure. They wouldn’t have had to use it to keep their homes.

Carter did end up playing a pivotal role in McCallandia. After the election McCall asked him to serve as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Mark Hatfield championed Carter’s nomination, citing his commitment to matters of conscience. A strong bond formed between these two Oregonians and the Georgia Democrat. Following Vice President Rockefeller’s death in ‘79, McCall asked Carter to join him as second in command of the executive branch.

During a prayer meeting at the White House on Pentecost Sunday Hatfield shared an idea in keeping with his convictions as one the first public leaders to oppose the war in Vietnam. He suggested that our government apply the same fiscal scrutiny to military spending that McCall advanced in other areas of the budget. Carter agreed, as did other leaders in the room. Though initially hesitant, McCall was persuaded on condition that Hatfield help him with a related goal. He asked the senator to fold military spending into a Balanced Budget Amendment.

That moment marked the beginning of a Swords-to-Plowshares movement that acted upon Eisenhower’s final warning. A trans-partisan alliance of leaders worked to provide genuine government oversight of the military industrial complex. Mountains of money were saved in the process.

Thus it came to be, in 1980, that two of the same names appeared on the ballot in two quantum realities. In our world, Dixiecrats abandoned Carter to help Reagan win by a cowboy margin. How did Reagan perform in that other reality, where McCall’s Independents teamed up with Carter and the rest of the Democrats who believed in good government?

Truth is, I can’t tell. Maybe my vision’s too clouded by personal attachments. Jennifer and I were seniors in high school, just months shy of being eligible to vote. It was a huge election for us, on a formative and cosmic level.

Maybe after losing to McCall and Rockefeller in ‘76, Reagan reconsidered his position. After a good deal of prayer, he decided to lean into McCall’s playbook. He assembled a team to help build a Republican platform with the goal of making sure that support for private enterprise doesn’t undercut our stewardship of creation or our care for the least among us. Maybe Reagan won by adopting more of that kind of conservatism, re-interpreting McCall’s message as his own.

If Reagan had chosen this path I suspect that other America would be less secessionist, more united than ours. But this probably wasn’t what screen-writers had in mind. War movies sell tickets, and it’s hard to imagine a reality where producers made a blockbuster called “Goonies in Paradise.” Reagan would go another way, assuming our counterparts in that world are as addicted to combat as we are.

So I suspect the Gipper decided to undo McCall’s kind of leadership, replace it with something else entirely. That would require a counter-offensive. Since McCall had expanded the meaning of conservatism, Reagan would seek out other political actors to help him reinvent the meaning of “independent.” His producers would seize upon any economic hardship as evidence that government should just get out of the way, hand the keys to the bosses of commerce. They’d make alliances with people who don’t mince words in the crusade for unbridled growth.


People like Dixy Lee Ray, for example. Born and bred in Washington state, Ray was appointed by Nixon to the Atomic Energy Commission in 1973. In our world Gerald Ford subsequently picked her as Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs. Then she went on to run for governor of Washington as a Democrat in ’76, defeating John Spellman (another Northwest Republican who shared McCall’s concern for the environment).

Ray was a blunt-talking battleax who disparaged reporters, allowed supertankers to dock in Puget Sound, and put developers on speed dial. She famously opposed legislation to promote energy conservation.  Though she did not win reelection in our world, Ray went on to write books that were praised by Rush Limbaugh, who reveled in her radical split with Dems on environmental policy.

Ray became Washington’s 17th governor in that other dimension, just as she did here. She was a natural ally to help Reagan undermine President McCall’s credibility, close to his home state. Soon after Reagan lost the race for president in ‘76, his forces reached out to Ray to strengthen their relationship. Together they led the charge to blame McCall for economic problems, however long in the making, specifically criticizing his approach to development and regulatory oversight.

After the McCallandian midterms of ’78 Reagan suggested to Ray that she run for re-election as an Independent. Polling showed she could not prevail again as a Democrat in the primary (she’d squeaked by the last time), and that running as an Independent was the only chance she had in the general election. Win or lose, Ray was assured of a top-level spot in the Reagan administration. If Reagan lost, his network would continue to boost her book deals and speaking gigs.

In that world the words “Dixiecrat” and “Dixycrat” became cross-regional synonyms. It’s a fact, in this world too, that at age 16 Ray changed her name to Dixy Lee in honor of her family ties with the confederate general. She herded Northwest Dems away from McCall in that world the same way a friend of mine steered Southern Dems to Reagan. After Reagan won, my friend shook his hand in the White House, saying “Sir, I believe you will be the greatest American president since Jefferson Davis.”

Sometimes when I hear anti-government candidates talk about the rural/urban divide, it reminds me of how my Southern-born buddies and I used to jeer at Yankees. Some wheeler-dealers seem prone to that kind of talk, especially if it strengthens the hand of speculators with large holdings of forests and farmland. They’re eager to liquidate those green assets for sprawl.

Maybe Ray said something similar in both worlds, saluting Reagan in the memory of anti-government rebels just after he removed the solar panels from the White House.

I’d love to live in an America where the call to conserve was revived for good in the late 70s and 80s. Jennifer and I had high hopes for that possibility, when we are adolescents and young adults. In fact we fell in love at a national recycling conference, fully expecting to turn the world around.

She spent the first part of her childhood in Washington State, while Dan Evans was governor. Like other Northwest Republicans of that era, Evans cared for the environment. His Department of Ecology served as a model for the Environmental Protection Agency. In ’77 Jennifer moved to Oregon, at age 14, back when Tom McCall’s legacy stood tall.

I first visited this beautiful state twelve years later, soon after we became a couple. Coming here felt like plunging my soul into the waters of Eden. Yet Jennifer told me how much closer it was to that promised land before she left for college.

“Kids in the Northwest were familiar with clear-cuts,” she said. “You’d come upon one in the forest and it just looked like a big clearing. It wasn’t that far to look across to the other side.”

When Jennifer returned in the 80s she saw more and more cuts that grew exponentially in size. That pace and scale of change paralleled the spread of urban development. Both towns where she grew up took hits in affordability and quality of life, especially in Washington. Jennifer grieves. Me too.

Yet we know from experience it could get a lot worse. We try to keep an attitude like Waymond Wang in “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” At a turning point in the movie he delivers my favorite lines.

“When I choose to see the good side of things, I’m not being naïve. It’s strategic and necessary. It’s how I’ve learned to survive through everything. I know you see yourself as a fighter. Well, I see myself as one too. This is how I fight.”

I believe the old Northwest Republicans still fight the good fight in spirit. But most candidates who wear an “R” these days don’t look anything like Tom McCall. They look like Donald Trump. So I voted my conscience for the Ds this time, grateful to live in a place  where elections still count.

These words are for all who swim upstream, homeward with full hearts and open minds.

* Claire Hall wrote “McCallandia” as Bill Hall. Though out of print, her trove of words can still be found by explorers of libraries and bookstores.