The Oak Valley Community Bank at the corner of Highway 108 and Yosemite Avenue in Oakdale is one of those edifices that anchor small towns throughout the nation. Solid, substantial, and featuring an on-time analog clock in a domed tower, the architecture is timeless and traditional, evoking nostalgia for a less complicated, more communal past.
On the opposite corner, the Oakdale Cowboy Museum, housed in a converted railway depot, offers visitors evidence to support the town’s dubious claim to be the “Cowboy Capital of the World.” Cowboys in California?
Actually, before they were planted in uniform rows of almond orchards, the rolling foothills south and east of town provided more than enough cattle to develop a long tradition of cowboy culture, and the annual Oakdale Rodeo still provides proof enough that the cowboy lineage lives on, including the bulls, broncs, and bruises that have typified life on the range since the 19th century. A few miles west, the Mapes Ranch is famous for its motto, “Breed the Best and Forget the Rest,” referring to its history of producing “ton bulls.”
Last week, the New York Times spotlighted Oakdale not for its cowboy tradition but for its descent into today’s maelstrom of alternate news sources. The focus of the story was reminiscent of the notorious Orson Welles “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast in 1938, which convinced many listeners that Martians had invaded the earth. In the 2020 Oakdale incident, a local Facebook news source had spread a rumor that members of Black Lives Matter were coming to town.
The prospect of a visit by a radical group many believe to be funded by arch-villain George Soros — a much-detested liberal — prompted a local saloon owner to hire a posse of militia members, who arrived on the streets clad in tan camouflage and carrying rifles. The event both puzzled and alarmed regional authorities, some of whom feared that men without formal training in civil law enforcement could cause more harm than good. The posse disbanded when no protesters showed up.
Likely due to lost faith in mainstream media, local Facebook pages, along with a broad variety of alternative news outlets, including radio and television programs, podcasts and even new print media have proliferated in so-called “news deserts” like Oakdale and other small towns throughout the nation. Some of the most popular sites feature constant updates on local crime events, a focus that guarantees large followings. Especially in deep red regions like Oakdale and most of the San Joaquin Valley, the most popular outlets tend to be pro-Trump.
More like middle America than coastal California, Oakdale is no less a barometer for national trends than urban goliaths like San Francisco and Los Angeles. There’s always been a sense that real America, the solid, honest, bedrock of the nation’s soul, survives in towns with names like Abilene, Luckenbach, Hughson, Hanford, and Oakdale.
Like Oakdale, many of those small towns are dependent on agriculture. And while new media may offer a maelstrom of confusing takes on everything from Black Lives Matter to the role of vaccines in cases of autism, Oakdale citizens, like their counterparts in other small towns, aren’t going to be searching for alternate media if China decides to stop buying almonds because of newly-imposed tariffs. That fact isn’t likely to be contested anywhere, though blame for the ensuing suffering is virtually certain to be biased and subjective.
Like Midwestern farmers who depend on China to buy their soybeans — some $12.8 billion last year — Oakdale almond growers are watching closely to see how tariffs will affect foreign buyers, including China, Japan, Germany, and India. If and when exports drop due to higher prices, boycotts and competition from other markets, it won’t matter where the news comes from. Facts are stubborn and reality ultimately prevails, though it sometimes takes a while to sink in.
Falsehoods, whether about Martian invasions or protests by Black Lives Matter, eventually die natural deaths. Today’s new media tend to give fictions more and longer lives, mostly because most of us prefer to believe what we wish were true rather than what is. We’re also less thoughtful when we’re afraid or angry, two states of mind easily stimulated by Facebook, X, and sensational podcasts.
Today’s media, even more than radio and television, are impulse-driven. Pithy memes expressing favored biases circulate endlessly because they make us feel good; we’ve come to think that anything that agrees with our conditioned reflexes must be true. Lost in the blizzard of new media, we’ve forgotten how to orient ourselves by checking sources, using empirical methods to assess evidence, and separating factual claims from value claims.
For millions of Americans, the truth has become a fungible commodity, to be traded, bought, sold, and awarded as a prize in contests for political power. New media seek audiences by targeting emotions and promoting “us vs them” contests that take more from wrestling entertainment than from the kind of reasoned political discourse favored by the likes of Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton and Madison, hence the drift away from Constitutional principle towards authoritarianism.
Over time, American citizens learned to evaluate the once new media of radio and television based on the metric of history; media that promoted the lies behind Joe MCarthy’s Red Scare of the 1950s tended to lose credibility, while more objective sources grew readers and listeners. Then, beginning in the 1980s, infotainment began siphoning audiences away from traditional media in favor of sensationalism, hyperbole and outright lies.
Today’s bewildering array of news sources have filled the void left by the diminution of traditional news sources due to the rise of social media. These same new media will have to survive the test of time just as traditional media have. The difference today is that we have two entire generations who know nothing other than news as wish-fulfillment, oftentimes navigating through a rough sea of propaganda, lies, and disinformation that capsizes truth and wrecks sincerity on the hard reef of cynicism.
In the plaza in front of the Oakdale Cowboy Museum is a magnificent bronze statue by Betty Saletta, a renowned local sculptor. The statue is of a mounted cowboy looking backward over his right shoulder, with one hand placed on his horse’s rump. The dedicatory plaque below the sculpture reads, “Yesterday is Tomorrow.” Depending on which silo of today’s alternate realities one lives in, the message may be prophetic, ironic, or prayerful, revealing a longing for imagined days when most of us could believe the news.
Whatever else may be the case, for small towns and large, truth is a community asset, too precious to be squandered for falsehoods, propaganda and lies. If traditional communities survive, it will be because the past they bring from yesterday to tomorrow will be in the form of the eternal verities, especially honesty, trust, and due regard for justice and the rule of law.
In Oakdale and other small towns throughout the nation, political realities are measured by the farmers, merchants and customers who produce the business economy that feeds, shelters, and protects America. That economy ultimately depends on truth and trust, two values that merge yesterday and tomorrow into an enduring legacy and bedrock of a free nation.
Looking backward toward simpler times isn’t going to make today’s world less complex or interdependent. Honest, well-meaning, and neighborly people who place truth above party are the ties that bind communities and the foundation for faith in our brave new world.
Oakdale used to have it’s own localy owned media with its rock’n radio station on KDJK 95.1 FM.
Congress passed the telcom act of 1996 and let corporations buy up all the local media stations without any real limits; Oakdale’s radio station has been bought and sold 3 times since then and now has been moved to Stockton and is a just a tiny cog in a corporate media cluster business that could care less about the folks in Oakdale. Please relate this story when you see any of the media advertising salespersons as you show them the door.
A good column to remind us that it is our responsibility to be a critical thinker and use the brain we’ve been given.
Well said, Eric.
We are in strange and dangerous times that have their roots firmly planted in the 1980s. I wish there was a clear and relatively simple path back the the right path. But reality doesn’t care about my wishes, and all the conditions are ripe for the threat of authoritarianism.
June 3 2020 George Floyd protest in Oakdale CA was on one side of Albers and the counter about 10 Trump2020 guys carrying arms were a confused information response by a call to action and the similarity between the words OAKLAND and OAkdale surmised attendance . Militia were not roaming the streets, some people in a car got verbal then punched then police jumped in . Everybody was on edge and not because of NO Walter Cronkite. The bank and cowboy statue have nothing to do with this history. The news stations posted after the fact and I was there . Many people in Oakdale read . Many people avoided the whole thing and aren’t there more than 20,000 population count? Stupid NY TIMES article ,did they speak to 80 people even ?
If you live in a town with 2% African American population and are named Cowboy Capital of the World and have a George Floyd protest because it was abuse of authority leading to death, you can be proud anybody showed up . Ty social media
“less complicated, more communal past”.??????????????????? Oakdale ????? Racist s***kickers with trucks in the 60s when Hunts and Hersheys and retired cowboys raising beef and horses were the rule.