Inlander 8/06/2020

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ARBOR CREST DEBUTS A NEW MENU PAGE 27

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AUGUST 6-12, 2020 | FAMILY OWNED. COMMUNITY FOCUSED.

AMERICAN

VIGILANTES Why some experts believe they’re on the rise

BY DANIEL WALTERS PAGE 12

Inland Northwest strong.

If there’s one thing we’re certain of, it’s that we’ll get through this together. #awesometogether

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igilantes thrive in uncertain times — when the status quo is threatened, when people worry about meeting their basic needs, when they doubt society’s institutions are up to the task of maintaining their sense of peace and JUSTICE. “It’s more common in situations where you have lots of social changes happen,” Jonathan Obert, a college professor who studies vigilantism, tells us. “We’re in the middle of one of those cycles. We’re definitely in an upswing.”

You can see it happening across America and in our own backyard: Average Americans are taking the law into their hands. Locally, we’ve witnessed people pull pistols on suspected shoplifters, chase a Black man and his family in what they wrongly believed to be a stolen car, and hunt down burglars and zip-tie them to chairs. Also, it probably comes as no great shock: Gun sales are booming.

Don’t miss staff writer Daniel Walters’ special report on page 12.

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WHAT HORROR MOVIE SCENARIO DO YOU THINK YOU COULD SURVIVE? EDITOR’S NOTE

Normally, we ask our question of the week of people we randomly encounter on the street. But with the coronavirus pandemic, we instead asked our followers on social media to share their thoughts.

JOSEPH EDWIN HAEGER: Me? My milquetoast ass is doomed no matter what the scenario is.

DANNY BUSH: Global pandemic leading to widespread panic and rioting. Oh wait.

ORIANA NITYA: All of them. I was raised on horror

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JACK O’DEA: It wouldn’t be right now. I don’t do well in dystopias.

TREVOR THOMPSON: Child’s Play.

I’ve always wanted a chance to dropkick Chucky to the moon.

FELICIA DIAMOND: The one where scientists warn the public against a danger and many don’t take it seriously.

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KARI WOOD COOKSEY: I’m surviving the most ridiculous horror movie ever. The setting is a bunch of sheep that believe everything that they see and hear and read and are scared to live.

CAYA BERNDT: Anything ghostrelated. Spokane is haunted, anyone who lives here is pretty much an honorary professional at handling that stuff.

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BLAISE BARSHAW: One where brains are needed over brawn… and guns. Guns mess every scenario up.

ELAINE FULTON: My horror movie scenario I could survive is one in which people will read and understand more than two sentences of logic about how to stay home, mask-up and social distance during the coronavirus. n

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John Lewis died in July and was celebrated in a memorial service last week.

Remembering John Lewis

SENATE DEMOCRATS PHOTO

The civil rights icon led with love and compassion

BY CLAIRE RUDOLF MURPHY

W

hen news of John Lewis’ death first broke, messages poured into my phone and email. Friends and family remembered how I’d met my hero in 2014. The civil rights leader beaten to a pulp as a member of the 1961 Freedom Riders trying to integrate Southern bus stations; the 23-year-old leader of the Students Nonviolent Coordinating Committee who gave the most militant speech at the

1963 March on Washington. The young protestor who in March 1965 led 600 voting rights marchers onto Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, to face 150 state troopers pointing their guns. When Lewis dropped to his knees and led them in prayer, troopers attacked them with bullwhips and clubs.

Actually I met John Lewis three times. At the 2014 American Library Association conference

in 2014 I told him I was writing a book about Dr. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy for teens. He shook my hand. “I would like to help you. I was in Indianapolis the night Senator Kennedy spoke to the crowd after Dr. King was killed in Memphis.” I was thrilled.

In November 2014 I walked down the marbled, sparkling hallways of the Cannon Office Building in Washington, D.C. Since 1986 John had served in Congress, representing Atlanta, Georgia. Inside his office, his friendly staff greeted me. “John is on the House floor for a vote, but will be back shortly. Would

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“We grew up so fast. I felt like I never had a childhood. I was 17 when I met Rosa Parks. Eighteen when I met Martin Luther King.” you like anything to drink?” I was too nervous to drink or sit down. I spotted his large office, the walls covered with photos of King and other leaders, Bobby Kennedy’s presidential campaign poster and Lewis’ many civil rights awards. I asked if I could wait there, to study the memorabilia. An aide accompanied me inside.

“We have you scheduled for 10 minutes.” I nodded, my questions memorized.

John soon arrived, striding into his office and shaking my hand once again. He motioned me to two chairs and we sat at a table, conversing like old friends. My nerves faded as we talked about what Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy meant to him. About the night Bobby Kennedy was killed. “I was in his hotel room on the fifth floor with his sister, Jean Kennedy Smith. I saw it all on television. I just cried.”

When I asked how he felt during Bobby’s speech the night Dr. King was killed, he shook his head. “I have not been back to that spot since. It took me years to return to the church where the four little girls were killed in Birmingham. Sometimes it gets to the point where you don’t want to cry anymore.”

He told me about his early days in the movement. “We grew up so fast. I felt like I never had a childhood. I was 17 when I met Rosa Parks. Eighteen when I met Martin Luther King.”

“I was put on my track. Taught not to be afraid, not to be afraid of being arrested.” (Lewis was arrested 40 times in the 1960s, five times since he served in Congress.) “Fear will immobilize you.”

I looked at my watch. Sixty minutes had flown by. I stood up.

I’d taken so much of his time. But at the doorway I blurted out, “What do we tell the young people?”

“Tell them that they give me hope. That they will show us the way.”

Outside in the hallway, I leaned against the marble wall and cried. I had met my hero. He had given me hope.

He gave me hope again at the 50th anniversary of Bobby’s 1968 speech in Indianapolis. Lewis spoke about his love for Dr. King and Senator Kennedy. Then his familiar voice rose, shouting to the large crowd. “When you see something that is not right, not fair, you have a moral obligation to say something. You cannot be quiet. We have to be on the right side of history. We have to love everybody… We are all the children of God Almighty and none of our children should be left behind. We’re one people, one family. We all live in the same house. Love each other and never hate. Hate is too heavy a burden to bear.”

No matter how many times he’d been beaten or jailed or disagreed with colleagues in Congress, Lewis was never filled with hate. He led with love and compassion — in both his political dialog and personal interactions. Rest in peace, John Lewis. I will do my best to honor your legacy, to live with love, not hate. n

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AUGUST 6, 2020 INLANDER 7

The Bike Hub downtown store Manager Tim Dunn, right, helps customer Scott Anderson in June.

YOUNG KWAK PHOTO

CORONAVIRUS

MASKING MATTERS

How to report face mask violations, plus other guidance for local businesses dealing with positive cases

BY CHEY SCOTT

T

he scenario: You’re wearing a face mask while out running errands as the spread of coronavirus continues to increase across the U.S. Maybe you’re grocery shopping or picking up a takeout order from your favorite local restaurant when you encounter others who appear to be openly flouting Washington’s statewide face-covering mandate issued back on June 23 and amended on July 24.

Besides keeping a distance of 6 feet or more (and perhaps making a mental note not to patronize the violating establishment again, at least during the pandemic), what other proactive steps can one take?

It’s a question many Inlander readers have had lately, so we chatted with experts at the Spokane Regional Health District to find out which local and state agencies are overseeing mask-mandate violations, as well as what businesses, mainly restaurants, are required to do if or when an employee tests positive for COVID-19.

Face coverings are proven to be effective in helping prevent the spread of COVID-19 via respiratory droplets

8 INLANDER AUGUST 6, 2020

that are released when an infected person coughs, sneezes, speaks or breathes. There are some health-related exemptions to the mask requirement, including for children under age 5 and those with disabilities or medical conditions. As of July 7, businesses in Washington state are ordered to refuse service to anyone not wearing a face covering, excluding those who are exempt (and who can also be accommodated via services such as delivery or curbside pickup).

Health district staff say the majority of local businesses are following the temporary face-covering rule, which is set to remain in place for the foreseeable future. But for those that aren’t, violations can be reported by the public in two ways.

In a situation where a business’s employees are not wearing face masks while working, the violation should be reported to Washington’s Department of Labor and Industries, says the health district’s food safety program manager Steve Main. The agency is currently asking people to report such violations online (lni.wa.gov) or by

phone to 1-800-423-7233.

To report an establishment for not enforcing the facecovering mandate or not following other safety rules in place to prevent the spread of COVID-19, the public can submit complaints (anonymously if they choose) through the state’s coronavirus response website (coronavirus. wa.gov).

“Someone will then reach out to the establishment and talk to them,” Main says.

If a person reports these incidents directly to the health district, Main says staff will forward the report to the enforcing agency, however doing it yourself can expedite the response process.

While the health district doesn’t have the authority to enforce mask-wearing in restaurants or other businesses, it does oversee the state’s Safe Start requirements for local restaurants to have written safety procedures in place addressing sanitation, physical distancing, protective equipment, employee training and screening of employees for symptoms of illness.

“We do education and training and offer guidance materials to businesses as part of our inspection process, and make sure they are in compliance with what the governor has required,” says Lisa Breen, food safety environmental health specialist for the district.

“We will also answer any questions and refer [businesses] to other agencies where appropriate,” she adds. “If there is noncompliance, we have the option to report to the Governor’s Office, and they will contact the business and do follow-ups and refer to another agency that has enforcement.”

“It’s concerning when someone sees a business or food establishment not in compliance, but the establishments we contact have been very responsible overall.”

Food safety complaints of any level are still being addressed as usual by the health district and its inspectors during the pandemic, Breen notes.

“It’s concerning when someone sees a business or food establishment not in compliance,” Main adds, “but the establishments we contact have been very responsible overall. Obviously there are a few outliers, but for the most part they are pretty responsive.”

M

any Spokane-area restaurants have been forthcoming with the community when an employee or recent diner has tested positive for COVID-19, sharing updates on social media that often include when the sick employee last worked, or plans to temporarily close.

Currently, there is no mandate requiring businesses to publicly announce these incidents, Breen says. The health district can offer guidance to any business that’s had an employee contract the virus and who worked before knowing they were infected.

Many restaurants with staff who’ve contracted COVID-19 have also opted, as a precaution, to have all employees tested for the virus. Breen says the only time this step is required, however, is when another person is known to have been in contact with a positive case for 15 consecutive minutes at 6 feet or closer.

“Some feel they needed all staff to be tested, but we’re trying to let them know that’s not necessary, and they also don’t need to require negative test results to employees to come back to work,” she says. “If an employee does test positive, they can come back after at least 10 days in isolation, and within 24 hours of being fever-free without needing any fever-reducing medicines.”

There’s also no rigid requirement that a restaurant or any other business close for any set period of time after learning of a positive case among employees.

“In those instances, it’s case-by-case,” Main says. “It’s dependent upon the number of people exposed and that kind of thing.”

Breen adds that since extra sanitation practices are already in place, any areas a positive-testing employee previously worked in should “already have been cleaned and sanitized.”

Neither of the food safety experts say there’s anything wrong with a restaurant voluntarily opting to close for a few days, have all employees tested or undergo a deep clean; only that there are no broad rules in place to require any of those steps be taken.

Since the state’s face-covering mandate has gone into effect, local citizens have taken to both shaming and praising various businesses on social media for enforcing or not enforcing compliance among staff and customers.

“Rather than shame restaurants or workers or patrons at a restaurant, just highlighting the positive and telling stories of someone doing a really good job, and moving businesses in that direction” is most effective, says health district spokeswoman Kelli Hawkins.

“Those are things that help serve as examples for a business that isn’t doing it right,” she adds. n cheys@inlander.com

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PLANNED PARENTHOOD GOES TO COURT The debate over whether a Spokane religious group can hold services in front of a Planned Parenthood facility is getting so loud and heated that it is headed toward a courtroom. The religious group calls itself the CHURCH AT PLANNED PARENTHOOD — founded

by Ken Peters, above — and those who attend hear sermons and sing worship songs, all broadcast over a PA system. But Planned Parenthood has been measuring noise levels, which it says are disruptive, intimidating, detrimental to the health and safety of staff and clients. In June, they filed a lawsuit against Covenant Church. (CROSSCUT)

48 TH ANNUAL

FEATURING NATIONAL NEWS FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES

CULLINAN STEPS DOWN Eastern Washington University President MARY CULLINAN is stepping down, effective immediately. During an EWU Board of Trustees meeting Tuesday morning, Cullinan told the board that she will retire from her position. David May, provost and vice president for academic affairs, will serve as the interim president. The announcement comes six weeks after the EWU faculty gave Cullinan a vote of no confidence. Julia Smith, EWU faculty organization president, tells the Inlander that the faculty had faith that the board would listen to what they had to say: “I do believe this resignation is a direct result of the vote of no confidence.” (WILSON CRISCIONE)

STRAINING THE SAFETY NET The poverty rate in Washington currently is believed to be less now than before COVID-19 arrived in the state. The reason, say experts and administrators of assistance programs, is in large part thanks to the federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act. With an extra $600 a week in unemployment assistance, families and individuals didn’t need and maybe didn’t qualify for what limited emergency assistance existed before Washington went into lockdown. But now as Congress limps toward its next round of COVID-19 relief, thousands of people in the state find themselves hanging, Looney Tunes-like, over a cliff and waiting to fall. (CROSSCUT)

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‘NO SET PRICE’ Even in a public health emergency, what could be considered the first rule of American health care is still in effect: There is no set price. Medical providers often inflate their charges and then give discounts to insurance plans that sign contracts with them. Out-of-network insurers and their members are often left to pay the full tab or whatever discount they can negotiate after the fact. The CARES Act, passed by Congress in March, includes a provision that says insurers must pay for an out-of-network COVID-19 test at the price the testing facility lists on its website. But it sets no maximum for the cost of the tests. Insurance representatives told ProPublica that the charge for a COVID-19 test in Texas can range from less than $100 to thousands of dollars.

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TRIGGERED How America’s social unrest and weakened institutions have incited vigilantes

12 INLANDER AUGUST 6, 2020

BY DANIEL WALTERS

Men who only identified themselves as militia walk through downtown Spokane on June 7. They said that businesses had called them for protection. YOUNG KWAK PHOTO

T

hey’re trapped. They’re under siege from all sides, their attackers screaming at them, hitting their car, pulling at the doors and blocking their escape from a parking lot near the Spokane Valley Walmart. Lee Allen, who is Black, tells his son to call 911 and his 14-year-old daughter to keep recording everything on her phone.

It unfolds like a horror movie, and the camera whips between the faces closing in on them: A woman with a cross around her neck and a T-shirt that says “LOVE” yells over and over again: “Get out of the f---ing car. Get out of the f---ing car.”

A man stands in front of the car, with his hand tucked inside his leather jacket like he has a weapon, and stares straight ahead with a half-smile.

A biker with a long white goatee hops off his Harley, yanks open up the car door, leans in and tells Allen: “Let me explain something: This is her car!”

Allen slams the door on the biker’s fingers, but that just makes him angrier: “Mother---er!” he screams. “Get out of the f---ing car!”

Another figure attacks from the passenger side, slamming his bicycle against the car. Allen drives forward, but the guy in the jacket just clings to his hood. It’s a frenzy: The driver’s side door won’t latch, Allen’s daughter is crying and the biker is now chasing them on his motorcycle.

“Dad, he’s behind you!” Allen’s daughter screams.

Somehow, nobody got seriously hurt. The Spokane County Sheriff’s Office chalks the late February incident up to a horrifying misunderstanding: A woman heard her ’94 Chevy Camaro, which had been missing for four years, was in the Walmart parking lot. But instead of calling the cops, she and her boyfriend decided to confront the driver themselves. But Allen’s Camaro — same year, make and model — wasn’t hers. And it kept escalating as bystanders jumped in.

The biker, 69-year-old Lawton Miller, says he saw what was happening and decided to “eliminate the situation” by taking matters into his own hands.

He denies that he used racial slurs in the confrontation, saying he didn’t know Allen was Black when he opened the door. He claims he was only chasing Allen’s car because he was worried about the man clinging to the front of it.

But Miller didn’t call the cops, either. He didn’t have his phone on him. Besides, in the world of outlaw bikers that Miller is from, dialing 911 isn’t something he prefers to do.

“I’m not a cop-caller,” Miller tells the Inlander. “I handle my own shit.”

You could brush off what happened to Allen’s family as just an isolated example — except in the next few months, other terrifying scenes play out.

A Spokane woman is held at gunpoint in broad daylight as a stranger tells her he could shoot her and get away with it. Three teenage girls are photographed by armed men and then followed when they start to drive away. A 13-year-old finds herself besieged by a harassment campaign meant for someone she’s never met. A multigenerational family visits a small town only to be terrorized in the woods by gunshots and chainsaws. ...continued on next page

AUGUST 6, 2020 INLANDER 13

LAW AND ORDER

The Spokane Valley Walmart where Lee Allen and his children were confronted by an angry mob who wrongly believed Allen’s car was stolen.

YOUNG KWAK PHOTO

“TRIGGERED,” CONTINUED...

Each time, like those who laid siege to Allen’s car, the perpetrators seemed to believe they were on the side of justice — that they were intervening to stop a crime, protecting a town or punishing people who deserved it.

They could all be considered forms of vigilantism.

Vigilantism is tricky to define and hard to measure.

But Jonathan Obert, who researches the topic at Amherst College, says he’s seeing more and more examples of it.

“It must have to do with the collective crisis we’re undergoing,” he says.

We’re facing chaos and insecurity. We’ve lost faith in our institutions — in the media, in the police, in the government, in each other. We’re driven to fury by YouTube clips, by social media hoaxes, by a mounting sense of injustice. We’re both the terrified family trapped inside the car and we’re the angry mob outside — screaming, chasing, sometimes falsely accusing the innocent.

If there’s any comfort, it’s this: America has been like this before. Vigilantism tends to rise and fall in cycles.

“We’re in the middle of one of those cycles,” Obert says. “We’re definitely in an upswing.”

GETTING AWAY WITH IT

When Black Lives Matter marchers chant “say their names,” they aren’t just talking about the names of Black men killed by police. They want you to say the name of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old Black jogger who was chased down and killed by three White men in Georgia who suspected him of committing recent burglaries.

They want you to say the name of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed Black teenager who was shot and killed in 2014 by George Zimmerman, an armed neighborhoodwatch volunteer, profiling the teen by his hoodie and upset that “these assholes, they always get away.”

Vigilantism has stained American history from the beginning. And it wasn’t just against Black people lynched in the South. It was a weapon wielded in a

14 INLANDER AUGUST 6, 2020

campaign of ethnic cleansing, argues Eastern Washington University history professor Larry Cebula.

In 1884, a member of the Spokane Tribe of Indians, accused of raping a White woman, was dragged out of the county jail by a group of locals and hanged. He was innocent, it turned out. But the local administrator of Indian Affairs appeared to shrug it off as little more than a public relations problem, writing that the innocent lynched Indian “no doubt deserved his fate.”

Vigilantism isn’t necessarily about weak law enforcement, experts say. Vigilantism doesn’t seem to rise or fall

Today, we’re in another pandemic, another race-relations crisis, experiencing a mounting dread that things are falling apart and nobody’s able to fix them. History has a nasty habit of repeating.

“People are more likely to turn to themselves if they feel their institutions are not really working for them,” Obert says.

For proof, just talk to your neighborhood gun store.

“Toilet paper was what started this,” says Jeremy Ball, general manager of Sharp Shooting, a local shooting range and gun shop.

From the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, Sharp Shooting, like gun stores across the country, has seen record sales, driven by both longtime and firsttime gun owners. There were 71 percent more firearm-related background checks conducted in June nationally than in the same month last year.

“You go into Costco and you couldn’t buy toilet paper,” Ball says. “That sunk in to people. If you can’t buy toilet paper, what else can’t you buy?”

It triggered people, he says, to start thinking about self-protection and self-reliance. And to that, add the emotional impact of the governor-imposed stay-home orders and the news broadcasts showing shattered shop windows and police precincts on fire.

“Your life can be turned upside down really, really quickly,” Ball says. “The looting and the rioting stuff was another way that gas was thrown on a fire that was already raging.”

But Ball stresses the importance of knowing the law.

In Washington state, you can use your gun to intervene to save a life or prevent serious injury. But unlike in Idaho, you can’t legally use it to defend property.

“It’s a really, really crisp delineation,” Ball says. ...continued on page 16

“Your life can be turned upside down really, really quickly. The looting and the rioting stuff was another way that gas was thrown on a fire that was already raging.” with crime rates or incarceration rates. Obert suggests it’s more about perception — about the sense that the rules are changing and the public doesn’t trust the government to go far enough to enforce those rules.

“It’s more common in situations where you have lots of social changes happen,” Obert says.

Look at 1919, he says. Take the influx of demobilized soldiers after World War I and combine it with the stress of a global pandemic and the interracial tensions accompanied by a wave of Black migration.

The result? A big surge in vigilantism.

It became known as Red Summer. Over two-dozen cities erupted into riots as White mobs — often incensed over false rumors of Blacks assaulting White women — roved the streets, destroying Black businesses, burning down Black churches and massacring Black veterans. By September, 43 Blacks had been lynched — including eight burned at the stake.

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LAW AND ORDER “TRIGGERED,” CONTINUED...

“That’s not legal in any way, shape or form.”

You see someone stealing a car, he says, and even if you have a gun, all you can do is wave. That rich couple in Missouri who were waving their guns around at Black Lives Matter protesters in June?

That wouldn’t be legal in Washington, he says.

But the law gets a lot blurrier when it moves from the page to the parking lot. In a video recorded in late June, an accused shoplifter outside the Manito Shopping Center pleads with the couple who has her at gunpoint that it’s illegal for them to point their guns at her. They don’t care. So is stealing, they say.

“Get your ass in there and sit down,” says the armed man. He gestures with his silver handgun for emphasis as he holds open the accused woman’s car door.

“I am not a cop,” he says. “I’ll f---ing shoot. I’m a Democrat. I can shoot you. Democrats get away with everything.”

But when the cops arrive, they only charge the woman who’d been held at gunpoint for shoplifting. It’s her name that shows up in the paper, not the duo who confronted her with guns. The police still haven’t released their names.

The armed man may or may not have been a Democrat, but he was correct about one thing: He got away with it.

Former Spokane City Council President Ben Stuckart, who urged voters to support funding for additional police officers last year, was deeply disturbed by the incident. He’d been in that same shopping center an hour earlier.

“If that was OK behavior, I didn’t want to shop there anymore,” Stuckart says.

Stuckart filed a complaint with the police ombudsman, arguing that the armed couple should have been charged.

“If that’s going to happen more and more, I don’t know if I’m comfortable living in a place where people are brandishing guns on each other,” he says.

Spokane Police Department spokesman Sgt. Terry Preuninger

16 INLANDER AUGUST 6, 2020

says the matter is now part of an Internal Affairs investigation, so he can’t comment about it, but he suggests there’s more to the story.

Both Preuninger and Spokane County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Mark Gregory are wary of using the term “vigilante” at all, arguing the term is too vague and negative.

Say someone chases down a thief and takes back an old lady’s purse.

“Is that being a ‘Good Samaritan’? Or is that being a ‘vigilante’?” Gregory asks. “When they turn around and try to punish that criminal and beat the crud out of them, that’s where I would start to look at more ‘vigilantism.’”

Preuninger says it’s actually perfectly legal to, say, track down a person who stole your car or phone and ask them firmly for it back.

“There’s no law that says you must involve the police,” he says.

You can legally exercise a citizen’s arrest if you watch a person commit a crime, but how that arrest takes place can get into murky territory. Preuninger says there was a recent case in Spokane where a couple tracked down a burglar, stole the burglar’s girlfriend’s purse and called the police — but only after taking him to their house and zip-tying him to a chair.

“They ended up going to jail for a more serious crime than the burglary committed against them,” Preuninger says.

And there’s one more wild card: the jury.

Defense attorney Rob Cossey says a lot of people were shocked in 2017 when a Spokane jury acquitted his client, former National Guard soldier William Bushnell. Bushnell had been knocked out while trying to stop a man assaulting a woman on the street. But when he came to, Bushnell pulled out his handgun and fired twice into his assailant’s back, killing him.

But even though Bushnell had been the one intervening, and even though his assailant was walking away, Cossey successfully convinced the jury it was self-defense.

“He felt threatened,” Cossey says. “He thought he was protect-

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Daniel Walters, born and raised in Spokane, has been writing for the Inlander since 2008. In that time, he’s written about conspiracy-theoryaddled legislators, online disinformation and why Spokane’s property crime rates are so high. He once got a bicycle thief arrested by snapping photos of the theft and sharing them on social media. He can be reached at danielw@inlander.com.

ing the woman as well.”

The “self-defense” argument is why the killer of Trayvon Martin was acquitted, and why Ahmaud Arbery’s killers might be acquitted, too. You can’t shoot someone for stealing your bike. But if you confront someone stealing your bike, and he, say, reaches for a baseball bat, then the case gets a lot messier.

At times, even Cossey has been surprised by how juries rule in these cases. In 2013, when an SUV was being stolen in Spokane, the car owner shot and killed the fleeing car thief. But the shooter claimed “self-defense” and a jury ruled, 10-2, it was a justifiable homicide.

“If you talk to 10 lawyers, nine of them are going to say that’s not self-defense,” says Cossey, who wasn’t involved in that particular case. “But the jury disagreed.”

Cossey saw it as jury nullification — where a jury believes a defendant broke the law but acquits them anyway.

If a vigilante doesn’t have the support of the law, in other words, it might not matter as long as he has the support of the public.

THE MONSTERS IN FORKS

By the time Spokane resident Shannon Lowe — on a Twilight-themed camping trip with her family — pulled into the Forks Outfitters-Thriftway parking lot on June 3 in her big white school bus, her family had already been marked as the enemy.

They were greeted in the parking lot by a welcoming party armed with accusations and semi-automatics. One member of the crowd stepped onto their bus.

“He said he thought we were a part of this terrorist group and we had come to town and were going to burn and destroy it, and he had come to protect it,” Lowe later told the Peninsula Daily News.

When they set out for their campsite, they were followed by multiple vehicles. As they tried to set up camp, they could hear gunshots, whooping and chainsaws.

They were frightened. But when they tried to flee, they found that locals had intentionally chopped down trees, blocking the road.

A picture of Lowe’s bus stopped by the trees on the road began circulating on Facebook, with locals celebrating that they’d thwarted potential terrorists.

“That’s when I realize, ‘Holy shit something really stupid has happened,’” says Matthew Randazzo, the former investigative journalist who broke the story.

“If you talk to 10 lawyers, nine of them are going to say that’s not self-defense.

But the jury disagreed.”

In late May, social media platforms and internal law enforcement communications were abuzz with the false rumor that radical activists from “antifa” — an umbrella term for an assortment of individuals and loosely organized groups dedicated to the militant opposition to far-right groups — were coming in white vans and buses to wreak destruction upon their communities.

Randazzo, who used to lead the local Democratic Party in Clallam County, says a lot of people in the Forks area were positively excited for the excuse to “fight back.”

“Forks, let’s get ready to lock and load,” one local declared on Facebook.

Lowe’s multigenerational, multiracial family had unwittingly driven their big school bus directly into a viral right-wing urban legend.

Lowe’s bus was white. Her partner’s skin was Black.

And even though Lowe didn’t believe race had anything to do with the harassment she received, Randazzo argued that factor can’t be discounted. He’s a known White liberal in the area. Nothing like that had ever happened to him.

This wasn’t just a phenomenon in Clallam County on the Olympic Peninsula. Heavily armed right-wing activists showed up in Spokane, too. They marched through the streets of Coeur d’Alene and Sandpoint, proclaiming their show of force would deter the rioting and vandalism experienced by other communities.

Not everyone was thankful for their presence. Spokane elected officials — including conservative Spokane Mayor Nadine Woodward — signed a letter condemning the presence of “armed vigilantes.” Sandpoint Mayor Shelby Rognstad wrote an op-ed in a local newspaper condemning the “rise of vigilantism.”

At one Black Lives Matter rally, Rognstad says, three teenage girls at the rally were terrified after armed men photographed them, took pictures of their license plate and one of them began tailing them when they were driving away.

“They turned around and came back and came to me because they were scared shitless,” Rognstad says.

But Brett Surplus, an Idaho state senate write-in candidate who helped organize some of the armed patrols in response to Black Lives Matter protests in Coeur d’Alene, argues that citizens taking up arms didn’t represent vigilantism at all.

“Patriotism is what it is,” Surplus says. He’s a former cop and sheriff’s deputy himself and argues most businesses were grateful.

In other cities, he says, agitators “want to try to push ...continued on next page

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LAW AND ORDER

In June, on Spokane’s South Hill, an accused shoplifter is confronted by an armed couple who hold her at gunpoint. YOUNG KWAK PHOTO

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and press the police because they know that the police have their hands tied under legalities and whatnot.

“Citizens and patriots are saying, ‘We’re not going to let it get to that level,’” he continues.

“We’re not going to let you press our police.”

Nicholas Rush Smith, an assistant professor who studies vigilantism at the City College of New York, says that sort of mentality is actually a common feature of vigilantism.

“Vigilantism exists on this blurry periphery: Upholding the law, trying to help the state do its job, but can end up violating it,” Smith says.

“Vigilantes often think they’re in some sense helping the state.”

Often, the vigilantes have the implicit support of a tight-knit community. To this day, nobody has been arrested for chopping down the trees in Forks. The local sheriff has struggled to get the locals to cooperate.

“Not a single person actually informed on the perpetrators,” Randazzo says. “To this day.”

Randazzo worries that, in many similar towns, right-wing vigilantes have been effectively handed the power to harass and threaten anyone with impunity.

That’s not to say vigilantism is always rightwing: After Seattle activists declared what was initially called the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone — six police-free blocks around Seattle’s abandoned East Precinct — volunteer “sentinels” formed a sort of vigilante police force. Some of them were armed. The radical experiment in selfgovernance ended when a 16-year-old boy was killed in a hail of gunfire after apparently stealing a Jeep. It was the fourth shooting in the zone in the span of only a few weeks.

Meanwhile, the images of violence and destruction in left-wing havens like Seattle and Portland have dominated right-wing media circles, inspiring militants on the right. Some predict — or even relish — the prospect of a second civil war.

Surplus doesn’t go that far, but he also says we may be “edging closer and closer and closer” to a potential “breaking point.”

Randazzo predicts that things are going to get a lot uglier.

“I think we’re going into an era where we’re going to see more paramilitary reaction, more street violence, more radicalism,” he says. “We’re entering an extremely dangerous phase of American

politics.”

It would be easy to blame President Donald Trump. He spreads online conspiracy theories, accusing even an elderly victim of police brutality of being an antifa saboteur. He revels in extrajudicial violence, urging a rally crowd in 2016 to “knock the crap out” of anyone getting ready to throw a tomato, promising he would “pay for the legal fees.”

But Randazzo says Trump is a symptom, not the cause of what’s been happening to our country. He sees a multitude of factors, from our modern clusters of isolation, to the breakdown of the middle class, to the way the internet fosters “little bubbles of paranoia.”

Every big democratic communication advancement comes with a price. Gutenberg’s printing press stoked the fires of 17th century witch hunts. Sensationalist newspapers fanned the flames of racist lynch mobs a century ago.

And today, with Facebook and Twitter, everyone is their own inquisitor, their own tabloid newspaper editor, able to publish anything — from rageinducing cell phone footage to false antifa rumors to pizza shop sex-trafficking hoaxes before a global audience.

“If any time there’s fake news that’s promoted on social media, people react to it by taking up arms, we’ve got a real public safety problem here,” Rognstad says.

TWITTER, DO YOUR THING

Miller, the biker, had no idea that pulling open the door of that Camaro would make him famous. But the footage spreads like wildfire. It’s not just local TV that shares the video: So does the Daily Mail and the New York Post. (“This terrifying scene was straight out of a zombie movie,” the Post declares.) So does actor Charlie Sheen and Perez Hilton. (“I’m gonna guess these were a bunch of crackheads on a meth binge,” Hilton speculates.)

Miller publicly apologized for frightening Allen’s family. He helped the Sheriff’s Office identify one of the other suspects in the incident.

And though the sheriff’s investigators wrote that he had “placed himself and others at risk” by his actions, they cleared him of any criminal charges.

But Miller suggests the video made him a ...continued on page 20

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target. He claims he landed in the hospital after someone on the street recognized him, accused him of being a “racist piece of shit that terrorized that family” and attacked him. It’s a hard claim to verify. Miller says he didn’t call the cops.

“If more want to come, they can be my guest and come,” Miller says, referring to anybody who wanted to attack him. “But I guarantee they’re going to get the dirty end of the stick.”

That’s the old form of physical vigilantism — fists and blood, pavement and payback. He’s used to it. A few years ago, when his van was stolen, he says, the cops were no help. So he got it back by tracking down the thief and threatening her inside a Walmart to stay put while a buddy found his vehicle in the parking lot.

But lately, he’s become acquainted with vigilantism’s more modern incarnation.

Miller lets the Inlander scroll through the torrent of messages in his Facebook inbox.

“All the way from Sweden we know you piece of shit, you racist, uneducated motherf---er,” one recent comment reads. “I hope people continue harassing you and your white trash family and I hope your whole family of hillbilly grandkids suffer from all the evil in this world, because they’re growing up to be the same piece of shit you are.”

On Miller’s Facebook page, commenters revel in the idea that they were dishing out their own righteous retribution.

“So apparently there’s no justice in Spokane. There will be next time I drive through Spokane,” one commenter writes on Miller’s Facebook page. Another writes that “you will face that video and your consequences forever in the Hell that is about to rain down on you.”

Now, that is vigilantism, says Gregory with the Sheriff’s Office.

“This internet mob mentality of ‘we’re going to already convict this person. We’ve decided he is guilty. We’ve decided we are going to punish him,’’’ Gregory says. “That’s when it starts getting really scary and dangerous for the community.”

Social media’s great power is how it allows anyone, anywhere, to light a torch or grab a pitchfork. Suddenly, everyone can try to hold racists and rapists accountable when the cops or the HR departments won’t. It’s seductive. In So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, a book exploring the damage done by mass online condemnation, British journalist Jon Ronson writes about the thrilling flash of satisfaction that comes from joining the crowd of outrage.

“Hierarchies were being leveled out,” he says.

“The silenced were getting a voice. It was like the democratization of justice.”

But it also means that a bad joke, an insensitive Instagram photo, or a misread hand gesture can whip up a global fury that can destroy a person’s life. Some get death threats. Some get fired. Others attempt suicide.

By their very nature, the targets of these shamings often come across as unsympathetic.

Miller is no exception. He has a criminal record marked by drug use, meth dealing and domestic violence allegations. He shares Facebook posts arguing that immigrants need to learn English and embracing the Confederate battle flag.

But he’s not particularly rich or powerful or lucky. He’s effectively homeless, living out of his van. He’s recovered from a stroke. He says he has a Nike shoebox full of doctor-prescribed pills and is constantly in agony.

“They want to kill me, they can go ahead,” Miller says about the people angry at him.

“They’re doing me a favor.”

The trouble is, it’s not just him. There’s collateral damage. The mob finds the Facebook pages of Miller’s daughter and sister and leaves messages demanding to know if they’re a racist like Miller.

And on Twitter, the online vigilantes seem particularly elated to find what appears to be Miller’s phone number in a three-year-old comment on his Facebook page. They screenshot it, share it across Twitter accounts in multiple languages. The implication is clear.

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“Maybe we should give this guy a call,” one tweet says.

And so they do. There’s only one problem.

It’s not his number, at least not anymore.

By 2020, it had become the phone number of a 13-year-old girl.

Spokane resident Miya Monroe remembers her fiance’s little sister coming to her terrified.

Rage, intended for Lawton Miller, rained down on the girl from across the globe. She received threats, harassment and interracial pornography, all meant for Miller.

“She had people calling her at all hours of the night. I think she had something like 500 phone calls in one hour,” Monroe says. “It freaked her out.”

Monroe says the girl tried to explain to the callers that she had no relation to that Miller guy, but they didn’t believe her, telling her things like “You’re probably his granddaughter. Tell him to off himself.”

Desperate, Monroe created her own Twitter account and pleaded with people who’d posted the girl’s number to stop calling.

“She is terrified,” she writes repeatedly. “We have no connection to this man! Please stop!”

It’s a particularly dark side of vigilantism: The mob harasses the wrong number, confronts the wrong car, traps the wrong bus, lynches the wrong suspect.

The good news is we’ve beaten back vigilantism before: Vigilantism can decline when whatever panic is driving it loses steam. But it can also decline when more faith is restored in the criminal justice system.

“I think people have shown that as there was criminal justice reform, that led to a lot of decline in vigilantism,” Obert says of the 1920s. “Giving people a sense that justice is being pursued by the government.”

That can mean the police more actively crack down on vigilantism, driven in part by demands from activists. But that can also mean that the law adopts the demands of vigilantes — satiating

YOUNG KWAK PHOTO

their bloodlust. In some ways the racism and cruelty of the Red Summer was simply absorbed, transforming into the criminal justice system so many activists are protesting today.

Today, Allen, the driver of the Camaro, doesn’t want to talk about the incident with the Inlander. He wants to move on. Talking to the press doesn’t help his family, he says. While he earned some money by selling the rights of the video to a company called Viralhog, he writes on Facebook that it’s a fraction of the cost it would take to repair the damage done to his car.

Everyone involved is left with more cynicism.

To Miller, the lesson is to never help someone.

“There could be somebody on the side of the road bleeding to death and I would not stop,” he says.

Allen isn’t any happier.

“For all wondering what the outcome was... it disgusted me,” Allen wrote in June on Facebook.

“I gave up on justice.”

He’s aghast that the Sheriff’s Office thought Miller was only helping and wouldn’t charge him.

The stranger who joined in and started slamming his bicycle into his car was never found.

The Sheriff’s Office recommended the woman and her boyfriend who’d mistakenly accused Allen of stealing his own car face charges of disorderly conduct — but that’s only a misdemeanor.

“What a slap on the wrist for a lifetime of trauma you caused my children,” Allen writes.

“My son is OK, but this really changed my daughter.”

Of the thousands of others who’ve watched the video, some take away lessons about racism or drug addiction or homelessness. But there’s one lesson from the confrontation that, at least judged by Facebook metrics, is by far the most popular on Allen’s original post.

“Need a gun my dude,” one commenter concludes.

The comment is liked or loved over 300 times. n

AUGUST 6, 2020 INLANDER 21

dining • shopping • culture Businesses are working hard to serve customers and stay safe: Support them and you support our region’s recovery.

chambers of commerce, and then the Downtown Spokane Partnership and said, ‘We’ve got to get together. Our business community across the board is going to need us.’”

Those organizations understood that support was going to take many forms. For example, GSI helped secure and distribute personal protective equipment, or PPE, to businesses that were in need of supplies like masks and latex gloves.

They also worked with the Spokane Regional Health District to communicate the recommendations and guidelines to the business community — even as those guidelines shifted in response to medical experts’ evolving knowledge of the virus.

“At the core of it, we know that people want to feel safe,” Benson adds. “And with a public health crisis like the one we’re facing, the businesses and organizations have a responsibility in that, as do the consumers. So how do we work together to build that confidence?”

Key to striking a balance between economic health and public health is raising awareness. With the help of targeted features like the one you’re reading right now, Inlander General Manager Jer McGregor felt that the paper could serve as a conduit for that kind of info.

“The Inlander has been around for 26 years. We have long-standing relationships with many of the businesses most affected,” he says. “And I asked myself, ‘Aren’t we supposed to step in and create some of that collaboration and ask to support organizations that we know need our support?’”

a Community Effort The negative and far-reaching effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are by now painfully obvious. That pain has been acute in fields like entertainment and hospitality, where good business simply depends on people gathering.

For the restaurant industry in particular, the venues that have remained open are operating with an estimated 60 percent to 70 percent loss in revenue. A drop like that is hard to withstand when their profit margins — typically in the region of 5 percent — are already so thin.

But the same hardships that have tested their mettle have also given rise to some heartening displays of resourcefulness and compassion. More often than not, they start with a

single question: What can we do to help? And it’s not just the restaurants themselves who are asking. Fellow businesses, advocacy organizations, elected officials, community leaders, neighbors and customers are too.

As a champion of regional economic development, Greater Spokane Incorporated (GSI) was looking for ways to step up as soon as the scope of the pandemic became clear back in mid-March.

“We were asked to lead the business recovery conversation from the get-go,” says GSI CEO Alisha Benson. “One of the first things we did was call our peers at Visit Spokane and our other partners, the West Plains and Spokane Valley

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22 INLANDER AUGUST 6, 2020

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FRESH THIS WEEK Regional restaurants are understandably invested in every aspect of the recovery effort, too. Owners like Mark Starr of David’s Pizza have looked beyond their own walls to see how they can pool and leverage their combined strengths. Along with roughly 20 restaurants, Starr formed the Spokane Hospitality Coalition in early July. Its self-declared mission is “to keep our community safe and save local businesses” during COVID-19.

“Everybody is here for the same purpose,” says Starr.

“Everybody wants to see us succeed: the city, the Spokane Regional Health District, and of course the bars and the restaurants. And ultimately we want to succeed for the sake of the public. That’s why we’re in the businesses that we’re in.”

Chad White, a chef who owns four local restaurants including Zona Blanca and High Tide Lobster Bar, is also channeling his energy into the Spokane Hospitality Coalition.

He pulls no punches about the challenges he and his industry are facing, but he believes that unified, community-wide actions, such as complying with mask mandates, can help businesses survive while keeping customers safe.

“It’s been rough,” he says.

“It’s hard enough to operate even without a pandemic. But the reason we’re still in business is because the majority of our community is supporting us. That’s been the biggest positive.” ◆ To learn more about how you can support the mission of the Spokane Hospitality Coalition, visit save509.com or find them on Facebook.

Watch for new businesses featured each week patio tables while still allowing for maximum spacing. Inside, tables are either spaced for social distancing or protected by barriers. Customers can use their smartphones to quickly scan QR menu codes for touchless ordering. The full menu is also available for takeout (check their website), as are cocktails, cocktail kits and $10 growler fills. 1931 W Pacific Ave. 509-363-1973. wedonthaveone.com

INFIELD CAFÉ

INFIELD CAFÉ ALLIE’S VEGAN PIZZERIA

VEGAN COMFORT FOOD • SOUTH HILL Although Allie’s isn’t offering dine-in service at the moment, this vegan restaurant — popular for its cashew mac ‘n’ cheese and “hot mess” pizza — opened its outdoor patio space to diners in early July. Takeout orders can be placed in person or by phone with optional curbside pickup. Delivery is an option, too, via the local delivery service Treehouse. On Sundays, don’t forget to check out the new Sunday Market & Breakfast. It features two local urban farmers and a menu that includes breakfast burritos and frosted cinnamon rolls. 1314 S Grand Blvd. 509-321-7090. alliesvegan. com

BLISSFUL WHISK BAKED GOODS • SPOKANE VALLEY Made-from-scratch pastries, pies, cookies, cakes, puppy treats and even ice cream have made the Blissful Whisk a favorite of sweet treat connoisseurs. As their indoor space is small, they’ve now set up outdoor tables and umbrellas at recommended distances. For added convenience, they’ve also launched a website that showcases their full line of baked goods. Customers can order and pay in advance, then pickup with curbside delivery. Looking for an easy project for bored kids? The Whisk now has take-home kits so you can decorate their sugar cookies or cupcakes in your own kitchen. 1612 N Barker Rd. #101. 509-242-3189. blissfulwhisk.com

DAVID’S PIZZA

PIZZA • DOWNTOWN SPOKANE The Elvis (spicy Thai peanut sauce, seasoned chicken, peppers) and the Da Vinci (feta, basil pesto, tomatoes, garlic) are just a small slice of the many handcrafted pizzas that David’s dishes up for hungry customers.

Of course, there are also more traditional pies like the New Yorker (lots o’ mozzarella) and the Pepperoni for more less adventurous palates. As a founding member of the Spokane Hospitality Coalition, David’s has pledged to uphold rigorous standards for workplace sanitization and public safety — including ample table spacing and employee health screening. 803 W Mallon Ave. 509-483-7460. davidspizza.com

THE ELK PUBLIC HOUSE PUB FOOD • BROWNE’S ADDITION The Elk is Spokane’s original public house, and its patio space is a prime spot to enjoy its fare. There’s currently expanded outdoor seating around the west side of the building, which has allowed The Elk to keep all its

AMERICAN • SPOKANE VALLEY Just because you’re missing Minor League baseball doesn’t mean you have to miss out on the stadium atmosphere, too. The Infield Café is serving classic ballpark concessions like burgers, hot dogs and bomb pops for curbside pickup or lunchtime dining on the Avista Stadium infield. Along with offering plenty of outdoor space for social distancing, the café is doing cashless transactions and optional pre-orders. Each week features a unique special item like the Buffalo chicken tender basket or the Hawaiian burger. You’ll need to place your order for the special in person or over the phone; hours can change weekly, so call ahead. 602 N Havana St. 509-343-6886. spokaneindians.com

ITALIA TRATTORIA ITALIAN • BROWNE’S ADDITION Known for its warm, welcoming vibe and its fresh, seasonal Italian cuisine, Italia Trattoria is working with the state’s reopening guidelines to maintain everything its loyal patrons love about it. There’s expanded patio dining, and the garage doors are open when the weather permits. Indoor tables have barriers, and all this is supported by ongoing sanitization and noexceptions mask requirements. If takeout is more your thing, you can still order one of their choice wines to accompany your homestyle meal. 144 S Cannon St. 509-459-6000. italiatrattoriaspokane.com

SAFARI ROOM GRILL & BAR • DOWNTOWN SPOKANE Somehow the Safari Room manages to blend the exotic, the opulent and the traditional. It’s a place where you can choose from a huge selection of top-shelf liquors and premium drinks while standing alongside a herd of stained-glass giraffes. At the same time, its menu prides itself on down-home Southern food, like house-smoked barbecued ribs and pulled pork, as well as a selection of fire-roasted flatbreads. Besides adhering to stringent cleaning and mask practices, The Davenport Collection is now offering touchless QR code ordering outside all its restaurants. 111 S Post St. • 509-789-6800. davenporthotelcollection.com

THE SWINGING DOORS SPORTS BAR • NORTH SIDE The Swinging Doors has taken its cleaning efforts to the max. This familyowned sports bar (39 years and counting) hired extra staff and a janitorial service with “forensic cleaning” to make sure their dine-in area is regularly sanitized. If you’d rather get takeout portions big enough to feed a small sports team, try their Bogey Box. It’s six burgers and two pounds of fries with the option to add sodas, beer, ciders or seltzers. Ordering it directly with in-house or curbside pickup is the way to go. They ask folks to please understand that their generous free birthday steak offer is temporarily on hold. 1018 W Francis Ave. 509-326-6794. theswingingdoors.com

ABOUT Back to business • These weekly pages are part of a local marketing effort in support of the hospitality

sector brought to you by leading institutions and businesses to help promote the Spokane County economy, supported in part by Cares Act funding. With the goal of balancing commerce and public safety, you can follow along here in the Inlander, and via the links below, as local restaurants, shops and more share their stories and invite your support.

Questions? Contact us at backtobusiness@inlander.com more to come • Through the end of the year, watch

the Inlander for special Back To Business guides, along with special editorial sections, sharing more recovery stories and community business features.

Safe business practice resources KindnessNotCovid.org • Financial resources for businesses InlandBizStrong.org

AUGUST 6, 2020 INLANDER 23

Making comedy online is natural for Deece Casillas, but nothing can replace the laughter at a live show.

COMEDY

SPACE for LAUGHTER Spokane comedian Deece Casillas tries to work past COVID to help people laugh

BY JEREMEY RANDRUP

C

omedy works best in a room that’s tight and full.

Unfortunately, so does COVID. And so the comedic rhythms of stand-up comics like Spokane’s Deece Casillas have been interrupted by the pandemic.

“A big empty room with people spread apart is bad for comedy,” he says.

Originally from California, Casillas is a comic who has been working out of the Spokane area for just over a decade, putting together skits and shows around town.

During this time, he’s been building up his podcasts The Social Hour and The Social Minute. As COVID has driven him and other comics online to do comedy, he’s been spending his time fully on those projects.

“It is a little different. There’s not that immediate gratification of ‘I said this joke and the audience laughs,’ but I’ve been doing sketch comedy for a long time,” Casillas says. “Knowing people are watching it and getting reactions, you know people are enjoying it.”

In the absence of working on live standup shows, Casillas has gone all-in on trying to bring more funny content to his fans through media platforms including

24 INLANDER AUGUST 6, 2020

YouTube and Facebook, where he posts episodes of his podcast or skits every other day. Casillas is usually joined by other comedians, discussing a range of topics in a laidback and casual atmosphere.

Other comedians have tried to continue doing stand-up comedy through Zoom, the video-conferencing platform, but this seems to be more of an afterthought for Cassillas, who finds his current way of producing content preferable.

“The Zoom stand-up shows seem like a nightmare to me,” he says. “Comedy is live, but you also need people there with you, having a good time. There’s an energy and a vibe with it that just gets disrupted over online when you just have people staring at you through a screen.”

Nobody’s laughing, so there’s no indication of a joke landing or not. This is one of the many challenges that comics face when stripped of the ability to do their work in person.

“I’ve seen a lot of comedians just kind of disappear.

It’s unfortunate,” Casillas says. “As comics, we can be

YOUNG KWAK PHOTO

awkward and isolated, but we’re also very social, like extroverted introverts.”

Casillas, like other comics, was used to being out almost every night, laughing and making others laugh. It was a social momentum that allowed comics to feed off of each others’ energy while providing inspiration for future material.

“Part of writing as a comic is that things happen during your life and you pull experiences from that,” he says. “In social isolation, not a lot is happening besides the ubiquitous things that everyone is experiencing, like COVID and Black Lives Matter protests.”

One day, comedy will make its return to normalcy as people interact in person more and fill the comedy clubs. Whenever that day comes, Casillas is hopeful, yet realistic in his outlook for how the whole industry will be affected.

“The audience will be grateful, comics will be grateful, everyone will be grateful,” he says. “We’ll have a better perspective of what we have in the ability to go out and enjoy a night of laughter instead of the chaos we have been more accustomed to these days.”

As he waits for that day to come, Casillas continues working feverishly on his internet content, putting out work that he enjoys while keeping in touch with his audience. He’s also taken this time to consistently plan out his future running for mayor of Spokane in 2023. What originally started as a joke turned into a real prospect once Casillas got more and more involved in public work like community outreach, particularly for the homeless in Spokane.

“I used to say it as a joke for years,” he says. “But I’ve been thinking about it and decided to run. I’ve been spending time figuring out what to do for people.”

Casillas wants to work for people, whether that’s making them laugh through comedy or helping their voice be heard through politics. To him, COVID is just another obstacle in the way of that. n Find the latest editions of Deece Casillas’ The Social Hour and The Social Minute at socialhourpod.com.

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CULTURE | DIGEST

THEY GOT THE BEAT New Showtime documentary The Go-Go’s is a straightforward music doc with the predictable arc tracking the rise to fame of the first all-female band to write their own songs and play their own instruments to hit No. 1 on the charts, followed by their ego- and chemical-fueled downfall. But the great archived footage and photos from the band’s prefame days in the Los Angeles punk scene, and strikingly honest new interviews with the band members, freshen up what could have been nothing more than a long Behind the Music episode. You’ll definitely fire up “We Got the Beat” and “Our Lips Are Sealed” when you’re done watching. (DAN NAILEN)

Some Bubbles Are Better Than Others

L

BY WILSON CRISCIONE

ast night, in the middle of a pandemic, I watched a live NBA game on TV. Where the players were playing, inside a so-called “bubble,” there were no fans, besides pixelated faces on a giant screen above the court. There was little sound, besides the announcers and some noise pumped in when the designated “home” team scored.

There was, however, basketball. A team to cheer for.

A team to cheer against. Referees to scream profanities at from my couch.

I was skeptical any sports could return without a COVID-19 vaccine or cure. As case counts spiked in Florida, the NBA created an Orlando bubble — some kind of fantasyland where everyone would wear masks, get tested regularly and follow social distancing guide-

THE BUZZ BIN

THIS WEEK’S PLAYLIST Some noteworthy new music hits online and in stores Aug. 7. To wit: WASHED OUT, Purple Noon. Singer-songwriter Ernest Greene has a serious summer vibe working, especially on new single “Time To Walk Away.”

MARY CHAPIN CARPENTER, The Dirt and the Stars.

Fifteen studio albums in, Carpenter’s still making intensely personal-yet-universal music.

JASON MOLINA, Eight Gates. An allegedly final batch of solo recordings from the Songs: Ohia and Magnolia Electric Co. frontman who died in 2013. (DAN NAILEN)

26 INLANDER AUGUST 6, 2020

lines. So far it’s worked. The virus hasn’t infected any players inside.

Still, I doubted I could care about sports the same way I once did. If a team wins inside a fanless bubble, does it mean anything? I’ve always hated “sportsball” jokes from people who don’t understand sports, but I started to see their point. Why should anybody’s safety be risked for a game? Why should we care about sports when, outside the bubble, there are many more important issues?

In a way, I’ve spent most of my days in a bubble since March. It’s not as fun as the NBA’s. Inside it are me, my two cats, my makeshift work desk and the lingering angst over whether leaving this space will cause me to catch COVID-19. Time drags on. It felt like four years ago when the NBA had to pause the season because a player tested positive, leading every other sports league to follow suit.

So I watched the first night of games with some reservations. Yet despite the weirdness of a game played without a crowd, I was surprised at how much felt the same.

As soon as the game started, I stopped thinking about the pandemic, or about the fact that it had been days since I left my apartment. I got caught up in the narrative, remembering that my team, the Los Angeles Lakers, needed to win this game if they were really the championship contender I thought.

I cheered when we scored. I yelled when the other team did. And when Lebron James made the gamewinning shot, I leapt out of the couch and jumped up and down with joy, neglecting to consider how it might wake my downstairs neighbor.

For a moment, I forgot I was in a bubble. n

GET THEE TO A NUNNERY Warrior Nun on Netflix is a coming-of-age story-meets-XMen-meets-The Da Vinci Code. I was initially excited. Worst case, it’s going to be hilarious. Best case, it’s going to kick ass. Unfortunately, this show falls somewhere in the middle as a 19-year-old woman’s brought back from the dead by a clandestine group of young warrior nuns to fight demons and safeguard spiritual relics. Surprisingly, the show is light on Jesus and Christian dogma, but heavy on teenage insecurities. The main character’s narration makes it almost unbearable. It’s not my cup of tea, but there’s promise for fans of supernatural action flicks. (QUINN WELSCH)

ALL MY CHILDREN Don and Mimi Galvin and their 12 kids settled in Colorado Springs nearly 50 years ago, and their quiet suburban home became the epicenter of chaos: Six of their sons were diagnosed with schizophrenia, a mystery to medical professionals and the Galvins themselves. New nonfiction book Hidden Valley Road is a fascinating, empathetic look at a family attempting to maintain a clean-cut, Catholic veneer amidst unbelievable anguish, and at an anomalous case that led to breakthroughs in research linking mental illness and genetics. Author Robert Kolker digs into this harrowing history with a style equal parts analytical and novelistic. (NATHAN WEINBENDER)

RUN ALONG While Bloomsday organizers had hoped to run Sept.

20, that didn’t pan out, and Bloomsday 2020 is now being held “virtually.” Those already registered don’t need to do anything. You’ll get a commemorative race number in the mail, and after you log the time it took to run or walk any 7.46 mile/12 kilometer route, completed Sept. 18-20, you’ll also get your finisher T-shirt.

If you don’t want to do the run in this format, log in by Aug. 8 to defer your registration to 2021 when, hopefully, we’ll all gather at the starting line in downtown Spokane once again. (CHEY SCOTT)

Lamb and pork albondigas are part of chef Chad White’s new vision on Arbor Crest’s menu.

YOUNG KWAK PHOTO

WINE

MEDITERRANEAN

MOOD

Arbor Crest Wine Cellars debuts a new menu created via a collaboration with chef Chad White

BY CHEY SCOTT

A

n escape to the scenic and historic grounds of Arbor Crest Wine Cellars in northeast Spokane is now even more akin to a transcontinental trek to Italy’s iconic Tuscany region.

Earlier this summer, the winery debuted a new Mediterranean-inspired menu created by award-winning Spokane chef Chad White, featuring scratch-made hummus and charcuterie platters alongside colorful, fresh salads and entrees like a whole-roasted Idaho trout.

The new selections, prepared in a remodeled kitchen on Arbor Crest’s historic estate grounds, fully replace the winery’s previous onsite food offerings, which consisted of some similar but mostly premade dishes, says winery

general manager Shelby Enevold. Renovation of the new kitchen in the winery’s main tasting room finished in late May, and the new dining options debuted July 2.

The complete new menu is currently available to guests age 21 and over by reservation only, with seatings offered Wednesday through Saturday from 5 to 8 pm unless the estate is hosting a private event. At times when the full dinner menu is not available, guests can still order hummus, charcuterie and fruit platters from the tasting room.

“This property has a Mediterranean vibe to it, and I wanted to touch on flavors extending from Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria all the way to Italy and Spain, so I wrote a

menu that I thought would fit,” White says.

Included on the new menu are suggested wine pairings for each dish. The hummus and fungus, a housemade spread with local mushrooms ($8), for example, complements Arbor Crest’s pinot noir. For the bone marrow ($16) entree with herbs, roasted potatoes and beets, try the Avansino red blend. The apricot salad ($9), meanwhile, is elevated by the winery’s rosé or Sangiovese.

“We spent a lot of time really going over the menu and what pairs well, and how to communicate that to guests,” White says. ...continued on page 29

AUGUST 6, 2020 INLANDER 27

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Since the new menu’s debut, Arbor Crest is no longer allowing guests to bring their own picnic foods to the winery. For its popular summer concert series, which has been on hiatus so far this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the winery plans to eventually operate its own outdoor food stations in place of the local food trucks it’s hosted during those events in past years.

“Some of the food guests can expect is a kebab station,” White says of the plan for such large events. “We’ll be making shish kebabs over charcoal and serving it with tzatziki and crudo, and we’ll have a hummus station.”

T

he collaboration with Arbor Crest is one of White’s first forays in the area outside of his own restaurants — downtown ceviche counter Zona Blanca, two locations of High Tide Lobster Bar, and the food side of TT’s Old Iron Brewery & Barbecue in Spokane Valley — as part of a focus on his new Chad White Hospitality Group.

Joining White as a creative partner on the Arbor Crest project is his longtime friend and recent San Diego transplant, chef Hanis Cavin.

“We worked together quite a bit in San Diego, and he has been a friend of mine for many years,” White says. “He was looking for a change of pace… this was a perfect opportunity and he has been involved with [the Arbor Crest project] every step of the way since we started.”

White’s partnership with the established local winery, founded in 1982, first began last summer when he did a pop-up dinner there serving food from High Tide. White and winery general manager Enevold are also old friends and former high school classmates, which also helped establish the relationship.

“This location is one of the most beautiful in all of Spokane, and sitting outside on the lawn eating Mediterranean food, you almost feel like you’re in Tuscany,” White says. “I was more than excited to partner with them to bring that element to this already amazing venue.”

So far, response to White’s menu has been overwhelmingly positive, even as the winery has seen fewer guests through its doors this summer season due to the pandemic.

“I would say any time we launch something new our guests are excited,” Enevold says. “I think launching something new during such a challenging period provided an extra level of excitement.”

“The menu, in my opinion,” White adds, “has probably been the best fit menu for Spokane that I have done yet, besides barbecue, because we took a basic knowledge of what is available here in the Northwest and what flavors are coming from the Mediterranean and how can we make this approachable for everyone.”

Seasonally, White plans for the menu to change based on regionally available ingredients and the annual flux in winery guests.

“During the fall and winter months we’re going to have more hearty dishes, keeping people warm and comforted, but once again trying to stay as true to as much local [ingredients] as possible,” he says.

White’s contributions to the Arbor Crest experience won’t end with the newly introduced menu and updates as the seasons change. He says future plans involve a continued collaboration to improve the winery’s culinary offerings to complement both its award-winning wines and hospitality as a popular venue for public and private events.

“We’ll call it a three-year plan to take things from where it was to how we’re going to move into concerts and to offering a unique experience for tastings in the barrel room,” White says.

“And moving into the possibility of taking over catering down the road, keeping those things in-house and really expanding upon the flavor of what Arbor Crest is.” n cheys@inlander.com Arbor Crest Wine Cellars • 4705 N. Fruit Hill Rd. • Open Sun-Tue 12-5 pm, Wed-Sat 12-8 pm; dinner service Wed-Sat 5-8 pm • 21+ only • arborcrest.com • 927-9436

AUGUST 6, 2020 INLANDER 29

The Rental

STREAMING

Permanent Vacation A trio of recent streaming releases helps usher in a new thriller subgenre: Airbnb horror

BY NATHAN WEINBENDER

I

t’s a common truism that horror stories reflect the specific fears and paranoias of their respective eras, intentionally or not. That’s certainly the case with three new streaming horror offerings, which have such remarkably similar set-ups that I’m tempted to coin a new subgenre: Airbnb horror.

OK, so maybe it’s not all that new. It’s really just a variation on the standard slasher movie premise, which you could fill out like a MadLibs puzzle: A group of [pretty, charismatic people, though one of them is usually troubled and/or has a questionable past] heads off to an isolated [creepy locale] for a weekend getaway. They usually drink [liquor of choice] and take some [drug of choice] and, right when their guard is down, they’re menaced by a [spooky threat] that knocks them off one by one.

Whether it’s a masked killer lurking in the woods, a demonic force unleashed from the

30 INLANDER AUGUST 6, 2020

basement, an unexplained phenomenon or a combination of the three, the formula is timeless.

Murder, rinse, repeat.

Airbnb horror isn’t much of a departure from this tried-and-true template, except its isolated locale is the type of place that doesn’t seem scary.

It’s not an abandoned cabin or a cursed summer camp or a creepy roadside motel: It’s that beautiful three-story house you booked for a weekend stay through an app, with big picture windows and a bright, open kitchen and gorgeous views of a beach or rolling hills or a dense thicket of woods somewhere in Vermont.

I’ve been watching a lot of horror in the last few months — maybe it’s a weird response to the hopelessness of current world affairs — and I can’t help it: I start projecting all the uncertainty of 2020 onto the bloody and brutal stories on the screen.

This was no truer than a recent binge of three new streaming horror releases — The Beach House, The Rental and You Should Have Left — which are all about isolated getaways that turn surreal and violent real quick. Despite having nearly identical first acts, they’re all remarkably different in their intentions, and while all three films were written, produced and shot long before international lockdowns, they inadvertently manifest the fears currently dominating our collective conscience.

Let’s break ’em down one at a time.

I’ll start with You Should Have Left, an awkward title that almost sounds like a first-draft version of Get Out. Of these three films, it’s the one that deviates most from the template I laid out above, but it still boasts a lot of the hallmarks of Airbnb horror.

Consider: It begins as Kevin Bacon, playing

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The Beach House a dude with a questionable past, travels to an isolated modernist house in the Welsh countryside with his wife (Amanda Seyfried) and young daughter. They’re hoping for a relaxing weekend, but this house has other plans: It has unusual architecture — hallways that seem to go nowhere, hidden rooms, mysterious doors, that sort of thing — and scary Polaroids pop up around the place and then vanish.

Discussing too much more would veer into spoiler territory, but the whole thing turns out to be an allegory for midlife crisis that channels distinctly male, upper-class anxieties. But none of it would have happened if they’d never booked that vacation home.

Another disastrous getaway takes place in The Beach House, but it’s way more insanely timely. A boyfriend and girlfriend spontaneously head to his uncle’s seaside cottage for a weekend getaway. The tiny town is virtually vacant; no one will bother them. Once there, they discover that an older couple, supposedly friends of the aforementioned uncle, had already been given the go-ahead to stay for the same weekend.

But after they all take edibles (should be relaxing, right?), a weird fog descends on the house, and it causes the older folks to act… strangely. That’s right: It’s an airborne pathogen, turning those exposed to it into zombies, and the only way to avoid it is to stay indoors and stay away from people. Sound familiar?

Even your cozy little seaside villa isn’t safe!

The Rental is the best movie of this bunch,

and it is, thus far, the definitive 2020 example of the Airbnb horror film. It’s the directorial debut of actor Dave Franco, who does a serviceable job behind the camera and ratchets up tension through the intrapersonal drama before plunging us into an ice-bath of startling slasher violence.

The Airbnb in question is a stunning house right on the beach, with a wraparound deck and a jacuzzi and a cozy living room. Two couples book it for the weekend, and even though the property owner (underrated character actor Toby Huss) creeps them out, they’re focused on blowing off some steam. But some unspoken tension bubbles to the surface, everyone takes MDMA, an illicit affair begins, and someone discovers a hidden camera in the shower.

And that’s all before the killer with a claw hammer shows up.

This might seem like a timeless premise, but The Rental has 2020’s fingerprints all over it.

Because of social distancing, so many of us are disappearing into the open air of the wilderness, hiding out in Airbnbs for a weekend to escape the stresses of the world (and other people). But in this case, all those anxieties and problems follow right along behind you, and there’s no one around to help you.

Pretty scary stuff. n You Should Have Left and The Rental are available to rent on Amazon and Google Play.

The Beach House is streaming on Shudder.

You are not alone.

You matter.

Everyone deserves to lead happy and healthy lives free from abuse, yet older people and those with disabilities are mistreated more often than you think.

Speak to someone who can help.  Free & Confidential Support Call us at 509-747-8224 to speak with a Victim Advocate. @lutherancommunityservicesnorthwest

@lcsnw509 @LCSNorthwest #HealthJusticeHope

AUGUST 6, 2020 INLANDER 31

ARTS GETTING CRAFTY

While nearly all of the region’s summer festivals have opted to take a hiatus for 2020 due to the pandemic, the Pend Oreille Arts Council’s 48th annual Arts & Crafts Fair in downtown Sandpoint this weekend is still on. Organizers hope to keep everyone safe with guidelines that all visitors use hand-washing stations, keep 6 feet between themselves, wear a mask and don’t touch anything on display. Those eager to get out of the house and attend an in-person event will be treated to a wide selection of locally made wares, from sculpture to ceramics, fiber art to photography. Proceeds support the council’s programming in the Sandpoint community. A complete list of this year’s participating vendors is on the event’s website.

— CHEY SCOTT Pend Oreille Arts Council Arts & Crafts Fair • Sat, Aug 8 from 9 am-5 pm and Sun, Aug. 9 from 9 am-4 pm • Free • Downtown Sandpoint, Second Avenue and Main Street • artinsandpoint.org/arts-crafts-fair

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Submit events online at Inlander.com/getlisted or email related details to getlisted@inlander.com.

32 INLANDER AUGUST 6, 2020

SPORTS CRASHING THROUGH

The Stateline Speedway is turning into an arena of twisted metal when the Malicious Monster Truck Rally arrives this weekend.

Spectators can witness mega-trucks with names like Identity Theft, California Kid and Skelator compete to become the most ferocious monster truck on the track. The gates open with a pit party before each of two weekend shows, where attendees are able to ride along on the trucks before competition kicks off. Don’t miss Megasaurus, a new truck making its debut on the tour; the 30-foot tall vehicle breathes fire and transforms.

— JEREMEY RANDRUP Malicious Monster Truck Tour • Fri, Aug 7 and Sat, Aug. 8 at 5 pm • $8-$45 • Stateline Speedway • 1349 N. Beck Rd., Post Falls • raceidaho.com • 208-773-0100

ART QUARANTINE ON A CANVAS

Although art galleries and public art shows have been on hold since March, that doesn’t mean artists themselves have been any less creative. See for yourself during a mostly virtual Terrain exhibit called Art in the Time of Quarantine, featuring the work of 26 local artists, all made in lockdown and available for purchase via auction. The entire enterprise is predicated on some much-needed optimism: Each piece is meant to depict what the world will ideally look like post-pandemic, and benefits from the auction will support both the participating artists and Terrain itself. Art in the Time of Quarantine continues until a virtual closing reception on Aug. 27 at 6 pm. Meanwhile, the Terrain gallery will be open at limited capacity and with social distancing precautions in place Thu-Sat from 6-8 pm, and on First Friday evenings.

— NATHAN WEINBENDER Art in the Time of Quarantine • Fri, Aug. 7 through Thu, Aug. 27 • bit.ly/TerrainGalleryAuction

stunning aquamarine eyes the central YMCA. Yes, I see you. How could I look into those beautiful eyes and then look away?

I was sad and lonely until you swam into my life. Life surprises you when you least expect it.

RK + SM I just want to let you know that even though we are at a crossroads in our relationship, I will never forget you and you will always be in my heart. As we sit in different rooms, you at your computer and me on the floor mat, I can’t deny that there is tension and uncomfortable energy between us. I am truly sorry for everything I’ve ever said out of anger and I want to thank you for all the time that we have shared! I love you, baby!!!

I SAW YOU HANDSOME GUY AT NORTHERN QUEST I saw you, in non-smoking on July 27th, You had on a green mask with little black lines all over it. I was wearing a purple hoodie. You moved one machine over, to play the Quick hit with the Hawaiian lady & tigers directly next to me and got a bonus right away; you said something about how I must be good luck. I said well Maybe you were the good luck! We laughed and chatted for a little. I had to leave and you said “Good luck, beautiful.” I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you, and while my memory is awful, I would know the mask you were wearing if I saw it again. I’ll be at Northern for the drawing on Thursday the 30th. I really hope I see you there! But on the off chance I don’t see you, I surely hope you see this. If you’d like to grab a coffee or something sometime, shoot me an email and we can connect!

Kalinda509@gmail.com send a pic of the mask in the email so I know for sure it is you!

Good luck handsome! Until we meet again.

IDAHO BIRTHDAY CLOWN GIRL Stumbled across your profile on one of the dating apps. Immediately - and I do mean IMMEDIATELY - messaged you and thought, “Oh, I hope she writes back!” Alas. But I do want to thank you. You’ve given me a great idea for a romantic comedy screenplay. (I still hope you write back, though, although I’ve abandoned that particular app.)

LOVELY WOMAN To the woman with the

DORY THE NURSE You were the nurse for my grandmother on 7/29 at sacred heart. I came to visit her and was completely swept away by your beauty and fun attitude. I had asked you if I could have breakfast with my grandmother, but you recommended that I didn’t because of everything going on. I was wearing the mandatory yellow gown and white hat. I would love to have a socially distant cup of coffee with you sometime. If your up for it, please email me at bonwelltw@gmail.com

JEERS RE: GUN NUT WHILE SHOPPING Hmmmm, so you’re mad because someone was holding in a public place?? If you lived in Texas you would notice that EVERYONE has a gun. It’s a constitutional right for anyone with a weapons license to carry. So unless they were waving it around and threatening you, they weren’t breaking the law. So please unbunch your panties lady!

GUN NUT KAREN It’s called conceal carry.

You seriously would have an aneurysm if you knew how many people carry in public.

I’m sorry that the big, bad, scary gun made you feel unsafe and angry. Especially when you didn’t get your foot stomping snowflaky way in regards to management. Long story short, honey, you need to chill TF out.

WHITE PRIVILEGE I doubt my words will make any difference to those who feel slighted and possibly threatened by the Black Lives Matter mantra. But try to open your

SOUND OFF

minds to what can’t be denied. Since we white Europeans landed on this country we have dominated over those who were here before us. Natives slaughtered. Their way of life completely controlled. The introduction of Africans to America was nothing more than a purchase. Human cattle or horses or oxen.

Humans. Black human-beings with feelings,

“

racism. Also, jeers to Nadine Woodward for becoming a politician with the intention of furthering her TV-personality “brand” and her real-estate holdings. You are not qualified to lead in any capacity. Cheers to the patient, kindhearted service workers who are as polite as possible while morons pretend to be brave and patriotic

prior to potential school opening? What about temperature checks prior to entry by anyone, students and all staff on a daily basis? When someone tests positive, which will occur, whether it is a teacher, essential staff, or student, who gets quarantine, the whole class? The entire office staff? The building? Then it affects their entire family.

Cheers to the patient, kindhearted service workers who are as polite as possible while morons pretend to be brave and patriotic by disregarding the well-being of their own neighbors.

thoughts, pain and hope, considered to be less than other humans. And didn’t we White Lords of the Land get used to it. If you think about it, it hasn’t been that long since slavery was abolished. But generational mindsets are passed down. The Civil Rights Law of the sixties didn’t just flip a switch and “poof” ending centuries of domination. Hell, the confederate flag is still a symbol for some.

The basic message. Black Lives Matter. Not the constant rhetoric, not the politicizing, not the talking heads needing to fill time, but a statement. Black Lives Matter. They haven’t.

We White Americans have always mattered you pompous ass. Don’t you understand that Black Americans have always been considered second or third- class. They didn’t matter. Now they do. Get over it.

POOR MANAGER As a manager, you foster a culture of fear and retaliation. We are tired of this. Perhaps you could make it your “mission” to make our work life just a little more tolerable.

BE BETTER Jeers to the anti-maskers and their graying goatees and overly dyed bobcuts, to the COVID-hoaxers, the QAnon conspiracy theorists, the pseudo-Christians voting against abortion but silent to the suffering of the living, the Blue Lives/All Lives Matter crowd, and the 2nd amendment gang that forgot what fascism looks like and were manipulated and bolstered by propaganda and their own latent/disguised

1. Visit Inlander.com/isawyou by 3 pm Monday. 2. Pick a category (I Saw You, You Saw Me, Cheers or Jeers). 3.

Provide basic info: your name and email (so we know you’re real). 4. To connect via I Saw You, provide a non-identifying email to be included with your submission — like “petals327@yahoo.com,” not “j.smith@comcast.net.”

by disregarding the well-being of their own neighbors. Cheers to the hospital staff who will bear the burden of these “patriots’” “bravery.” Cheers to anyone who understands that, however divided we are at this time, we are still in this together, and there is no reason to be deliberately awful to members of your community to “make a stand against tyranny,” or “exercise your right as a free American.” You were ASKED to wear a mask, and it wasn’t enforced. It was mandated, and you still refused and it’s still not being enforced. Meanwhile feds are taking people away in unmarked vehicles like Communist China, and I don’t hear a word of resistance about that. Put a mask on, you misguided scofflaws.

LEFT HAND DRIVERS For those of you who forgot or missed this on your driver’s test the left-hand Lane on the interstate is a “Passing Lane.” To camp out in that lane at 60 miles an hour all the way from Maple Street to liberty Lake is just dangerous, worsening the rush hour traffic. It’s also a ticket-able offense. These people also seem to have non working turn signals. Get a clue!

SPOKANE PUBLIC SCHOOLS VS COVID-19 The odds favor Covid-19. I’ve heard SPS is going to follow CDC guidelines, however no answer is provided with regard to what are the guidelines or what occurs when someone tests positive. Shouldn’t all teachers, staff & students be tested

”

I’ve listened to all three webinars, these same questions have been asked and never fully answered! Covid-19 continues to rise in Spokane County and to even consider placing thousands of community members in SPS, not to mention their loved ones at home, is beyond a reasonable judgement with regard to the health of our community members, especially our innocent children, asymptomatic or otherwise, which can transmit covid-19. All staff members and children are at risk for a debilitating virus or even death if extreme safety guidelines are not strictly followed and enforced. That doesn’t seem to play out well state nor nationwide. The question therefore must be asked, can SPS provide a safe environment to ALL who enters a public school? Covid-19 will prevail, SPS will shut down and as in war we’ll pray for the casualties. May God Forgive Us For Our Sins. n

THIS WEEK'S ANSWERS G I F S A S I A B O X W A A S P A G H M A M A S O R E L G E N E R I S T L U C T H E H E A E R O S L U N K A S E A G A R Y

W A L L E

O C T E T

W R E S T

N A D I A

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M E E D R S

S O D P O I O S W S P H E N I A O N W A T E N H A S W A L U E Z N E Y P I D O N S S

O N A P A R

S E N I L E

A G E N T S

L O S T

T R I O

Z I N N

L U S O Z E U I T

NOTE: I Saw You/Cheers & Jeers is for adults 18 or older. The Inlander reserves the right to edit or reject any posting at any time at its sole discretion and assumes no responsibility for the content.

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AUGUST 6, 2020 INLANDER 33

CONGRESS

Throwing Punches Congress continues to write federal cannabis legislation. But who will pass it?

BY WILL MAUPIN

T

here’s no end in sight for the fight against federal prohibition, but late July’s flurry of congressional activity shows that cannabis reform advocates are only gaining steam.

It started with Hawaii Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard’s amendment to a bill that would allow members of the military to use CBD — which the Inlander covered in last week’s Green Zone section. Gabbard’s amendment, and the bill it was attached to, passed the House with relative ease. Ten days later, on July 30, Democratic Rep. Earl Blumenauer of Oregon introduced an amendment restricting the Department of Justice’s ability to interfere

with cannabis markets in states where it is legal.

In his statement on the floor of the House, Blumenauer referenced how much has changed since California, in 1996, became the first state to legalize medical marijuana.

At present, a majority of voters, in both major parties, support federal legalization. Congress and the current administration have both been unwilling to take that step, however, and the Democratic Party platform under Joe Biden stops short as well.

“In the meantime,” Blumenauer said to Congress, “until that day of reckoning comes, we must pass this amendment to assure the federal government does not interfere with state-legal cannabis activities, and that we extend those same protections to tribal interests.”

Ultimately, Congress did choose to pass Blumenauer’s amendment. Thirty-one Republicans voted with the majority, and it passed 254-163. Congress then passed the larger bill it was attached to — H.R. 7617, an appropriations package for the Department of Defense — by a vote of 217-197. In that vote, though, no Republicans voted with the majority.

A party-line split like that doesn’t bode well for the

The House of Representatives, if not the Senate, is warming up to cannabis. legislation as it heads to the Republican-controlled Senate.

In his statements before the vote, Blumenauer alluded to the potential futility of sending cannabis legislation to the upper chamber.

“We passed the SAFE Banking Act on the floor of this House earlier in the Congress with 321 bipartisan votes,” Blumenauer said. “Sadly, it is still languishing in the Senate.”

While it’s too soon to know if either piece of legislation will have any tangible impact, it’s safe to say neither will be a body blow to federal prohibition. They’re punches that might not even land, but that they’re being thrown in the first place shows just how rapidly the tide is changing in the fight against prohibition, especially in the House. n

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My friend won’t stop talking about her new crush, and it’s driving me up the wall. I was annoyed, but now I’m getting increasingly angry, and I don’t appreciate this toxic feeling rising up. It’s all her and her new love all the time. If she asks anything about me or how I’m doing, it’s an afterthought. I try to avoid conflict, so I haven’t said anything. I keep hoping she’ll realize she’s behaving really selfishly. What will it take to get her to recognize this and start being a better friend? —Upset

There’s actual friendship, and then there’s calling somebody a friend but using them as a giant ear-shaped trash can.

Not surprisingly, being treated this way has left you feeling angry. Like many people, you’re uncomfortable with anger. Anger is often characterized (wrongly) as a “negative” emotion. Sure, the expression of anger — ours or that of somebody around us — can make us feel stressed out, uncomfortable, and even poisoned.

Uncontrolled anger can get us in trouble (sometimes for 20 years to life).

However, anger, like the rest of our emotions, is actually functional. Over millions of years, our emotions evolved to be the factory foremen of human behavior, motivating us to behave in ways that solved problems humans dealt with on a recurring basis, such as finding a mate, avoiding a beat down, and getting a friend to be more give-and-take than take, take, take.

Evolutionary psychologist Aaron Sell, who researches anger, explains that it is one of a few emotions that serves to regulate not just our behavior but also that of others (as do shame and sadness). When we express sadness, for example, like by sobbing, it evokes empathy in others, which makes them want to reach out and give us a hug and maybe even let us use their shoulder as a substitute for snotty Kleenex.

Sell calls anger a “recalibrational emotion” and explains that it functions as a bargaining tool for us to negotiate for better treatment. When we notice that another person doesn’t place enough value on our “welfare” (meaning our interests, our well-being), anger rises up in us, motivating us to take action to get the other person to correct — that is, recalibrate — the imbalance, to treat us better.

Anger does its recalibrational work — that is, incentivizes better treatment — through two tactics, explains Sell: the potential for the angry person to inflict costs (sometimes just through the scary ugliness of aggression) or to withdraw benefits (such as the various social and emotional perks of being somebody’s friend). Either of these tactics suggests to the person doing the short shrifting that they’ll be worse off if they continue to put too little weight on the angry person’s interests, and this can motivate them to mend their selfish, neglectful ways.

In other words, in anger, you’ve got a fantastic tool to protect you from being taken advantage of...that is, if you use it instead of trying to suppress it.

Because anger is triggered automatically, stifling it won’t make it go away; it’ll make it go away and get bigger and uglier. It’s likely to leak out at inappropriate times (like in sniping hostility when you speak), and there can be an eventual out-of-proportion explosion, often at some seriously minor perceived “slight,” like the person you’re angry with not passing a condiment quite zippily enough.

Healthy assertiveness, on the other hand, requires the expression of what I’d call “timely, judicious honesty.” “Timely” means expressing that you have unmet needs relatively quickly — as soon as you can after you realize there’s an issue.

Being “judicious” means taking an emotionally strategic approach: framing the discussion with how you feel rather than how someone’s wronged you. In practice, this means evoking the other person’s empathy (saying, “I feel bad when...”) rather than using language of accusation or blame (“You do this rotten thing...”), which makes a person feel attacked and motivates them to fight back instead of listening.

The third step, “honesty,” is expressing, “Here’s what I need...” and seeing whether the other person says they’re up for providing it. Then, of course, there’s seeing whether they actually will (perhaps with a reminder or two from you if they automatically fall back into their old ways).

If you accept responsibility for being delinquent in expressing what you want from your friend, it should help you cool off enough to do that now in a civil way. If it turns out she isn’t genuinely interested in your welfare — that is, in being a real friend to you with all the give-and-take that involves — you can downgrade her accordingly (like from friend to “someone I know”). Of course, you really couldn’t be a better friend to her right now — that is, unless you had your jaw wired shut for a month. n ©2020, Amy Alkon, all rights reserved. • Got a problem? Write Amy Alkon, 171 Pier Ave, #280, Santa Monica, CA 90405 or email AdviceAmy@aol.com (www.advicegoddess.com)

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40. Brainstorm 41. “Me neither” 42. Country south of Martinique 46. Invites to one’s home 47. Statement revealing unwanted pressure stems from NBA legend Bill?

51. Nestlé bars filled with tiny bubbles 52. Canal to the Red Sea 53. Blockhead 54. Streaming service that launched in 2019 ... and this puzzle’s theme 60. On the briny 61. Stonehenge figure 62. Move like molasses 63. SpongeBob’s pet snail 64. Prom attendees 65. Exec, slangily

DOWN 1. Chatterbox’s “gift” 2. Prefix with metric 3. Repair 4. Glimpsed 5. 2008 Pixar film that takes place in 2805 6. Largish jazz combo 7. Take forcibly (from) 8. Large body of eau 9. Some mag. workers 10. “Us, too!”

11. Commensurate (with) 12. Suffering from Alzheimer’s 13. Customer service workers 18. They follow oohs 21. “Oh, hogwash!”

22. Air Quality Index factor 23. Whittle (down) 24. “Truer words were never

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ACROSS 1. Loopy little films?

5. “I’m ready to be dazzled by your presentation” 10. Sammy with 609 homers 14. Big part of a Risk board 15. Like wealthy landowners 16. Universal donor’s type, briefly 17. Go a few rounds with a cocreator of “The View”?

19. Great ____ 20. Blonde or brown brews 21. Swing by unannounced 22. Figurine of comedian Patton made out of pasta?

28. Half of a 1960s folk-rock group 29. Areas of expertise 30. Cy Young Award winner Hershiser 31. C.S. Lewis’ fantasy world 34. Group that came of age ballroom dancing?

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spoken!”

25. Powerful wind 26. “Failure ____ an option” 27. Express viewpoints 31. First name in 1970s gymnastics

crash of Oceanic Flight 815 38. Smallish jazz combo 39. “A People’s History of the United States” writer 36 37 38 39 Howard 42. “____ 17” (1953 film) 41 43. Where Springsteen was born, in song 46 44. “My Fair Lady” lyricist 48 49 50 45. “If you say so” 46. Vague, as a memory 52 48. Just one Time?

49. Longtime hair lightener 55 56 57 58 59 brand 50. They get more 62 annoying as they grow up 54. Toxin mentioned in 65 Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” “DISNEY PLUS” 55. Livid state 32. Tormented 56. Not neg.

33. Narrow coastal inlet 57. Teammate of Babe 35. Anne and Condoleezza 58. Rapper Lil ____ Vert 36. Extremely uptight 37. 2000s TV show that begins with the 59. Complete collection 32

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AUGUST 6, 2020 INLANDER 37

COEUR D ’ ALENE

SCENIC VIEWS

cda4.fun for more events, things to do & places to stay.

There are so many ways to stay cool this summer at Silverwood Theme Park

Applied Science

The (very cool) science behind keeping cool this summer

L

eave it to science — and North Idaho — for an easy-to-follow guide to losing heat, also known as staying cool, which can happen one of four ways: conduction, convection, evaporation, radiation.

Hold something cold in your hand, such as a cone of mint chocolate chip from locally owned ABI’S ICE CREAM, and you’re experiencing the scientific phenomena known as conduction: when heat transfers through direct contact. Want to do your own experiment? Try Coeur d’Alene’s newest sweet spot: GELATO BY THE LAKE at Sherman and Second. Eating — or drinking — something cold literally chills you from the inside so cool down with an iced mocha at CALYPSO’S COFFEE ROASTERS or EVANS BROTHERS COFFEE. When the temperature goes up, get yourself down… downstairs, that is, where the air is naturally cooler. Browse the boho chic jewelry, bags, and home decor at FABRICA VIDA BOUTIQUE, a hidden gem at 414 Sherman Ave. Nearby, HONEY EATERY AND SOCIAL CLUB does select evening meals downstairs in their very cool subterranean space.

SILVERMT.COM 38 INLANDER AUGUST 6, 2020

Sit outside and catch a cooling breeze from the lake and you’re also

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experiencing convection. Sometimes SEASONS OF COEUR D’ALENE opens the table-height windows in the bar to catch a breeze, but in the hotter parts of the summer partake in their air conditioning while sipping a cocktail — chilled, of course — and something from their amazing menu.

Convection can occur with air or water.

So, consider a bike rental from COEUR D’ALENE BIKE CO. for a ride along the lake or downhill on a mountain bike or get airborne for a ride in the sky from COEUR D’ALENE PARASAIL, followed by a dip in the lake!

A day at SILVERWOOD THEME PARK offers scientifically proven coolness: the breeze created as you’re hurtling down the tracks of Tremors roller coaster or the thrilling chill of Thunder Canyon water ride. Better yet, get wet… and cool at Boulder Beach, their huge water park.

Another scientific phenomena called evaporation, also known as sweating, is a natural response to heat and occurs when you’re most active. But it’s too hot to play, right? Not at TRIPLE PLAY, where laser tag, bowling and the arcade await — an air-conditioned playground! Jump

in and cool down at their Raptor Reef water park, which is a welcome 10 degrees cooler than your body.

Knowing that the human body radiates heat is all you need to treat yourself to something summery from any number of shops in downtown Coeur d’Alene. Instead of trapping it in like you’d do for winter, find something flowy like a sundress from GARMENT DISTRICT or MARMALADE FRESH CLOTHING? A handsome short-sleeved logo shirt from the Coeur d’Alene Resort GOLF PRO SHOP will be a treasured reminder of good times in the Lake City. And don’t forget about the kids! LUCKY MONKEY TRADING COMPANY has witty graphic T-shirts like the “squatch mountain” T that are cool in so many ways.

C O E U R

D ’A L E N E

Upcoming Events Yoga Cruise AUGUST 6 & 13

Add a little more zen to your life with a morning cruise on Lake Coeur d’Alene. The 90 minute scenic cruise features a 50-minute yoga class, brought to you by CDA Power Yoga. $26.50; Thursdays, 9 am; visit cdacruises.com for tickets.

Woody Boat Parade AUGUST 8

While the annual Coeur d’Alene Classic Boat Show has been canceled this year, organizers decided to still have some woody boat fun! Members of the Antique & Classic Boat Society will cruise down the Spokane River, showcasing their beautiful oneof-a-kind wooden boats. The boat parade kicks off at 8:30 am at the Cedars Floating Restaurant (Blackwell Island) and ends nine miles downriver at Reynolds Beach & Dock (Post Falls). Viewers are asked to respect social distancing and wear facemasks as necessary while watching the parade from your boat.

Ride and Dine AUGUST 7

Escape the summer heat and enjoy panoramic mountain top views at Silver Mountain. Every Friday in August Silver Mountain is offering its Ride and Dine special, which includes a gondola lift ticket, a bike ticket (if you want one), dinner and live music.

This week’s featured musical artist is Christy Lee. Packages range from $35.95 per adult to $51.95 (which includes a bike ticket). Visit cda4.fun for details.

For more events, things to do & places to stay, go to cda4.fun COEUR D’ALENE

AUGUST 6, 2020 INLANDER 39