Calista's Ignominy, Part 1

Calista's latest effort, Ignominy, is hard to categorize. I suppose it could be called a book of short stories, though some aren't particularly short, or a series of novellas. Maybe it's best simply to call it a collection of absurdist political vignettes with surprisingly complicated human dimensions. I'll write a separate review for each of a handful of stories, starting with one of my favorites, "High Desert."

The story follows a Democratic political consultant, Anne Borland, as she tries to rescue what should have been an easy Democratic campaign for a Senate seat in Oregon. The problem is that the Republican candidate, Grant Sissley, has proven to be considerably more charismatic and eloquent than the Democrat, Jim O'Neal. A fourth-generation hop farmer, Sissley was an early and vocal supporter of gay rights, making it hard to depict him as a typical Republican. After a strong debate performance, Sissley takes a modest but steady single-digit margin in the polls, and Borland is sent by the national party as a "big gun" to take control of the situation.

Borland quickly launches a vigorous "oppo research" project, and before long it has hit gold. The hops that Sissley grows, it turns out, are not the strong, resinous hops used to brew the Pacific Northwest's famous "dank" IPAs. Instead, he favors noble varieties descended from the mild, herby, spicy hops of central Europe. Borland rolls out a "Cascadia Challenge" booth at political rallies, where undecided voters can sample beers brewed with Sissley's hops and beers brewed with more typical Northwest varieties like Citra, Simcoe, and Centennial. A large majority of voters leave the booth shaking their heads, wondering how they could ever have viewed Sissley as "one of us."

Borland is scrupulously fair when she procures the beers for the Cascadia Challenge—the beer brewed with Sissley's hops is a well-crafted pilsner beer that shows off the hops to good effect. But Oregon drinkers consistently reject the pilsner in favor of what, in all honesty, can only be described as a mediocre double IPA.

And herein lies Borland's ethical quandary. Borland is a beer enthusiast and she recognizes that Sissley's hops are a true accomplishment, creating some of the best pilsner she has ever tasted. She knows Sissley's beer is better, and yet voters are rejecting it out of hand. The Cascadia Challenge is everything that is wrong in American politics, trading on voters' ignorance, tribalism, and prejudice, their unwillingness to engage with anything that is different or challenging. This is not why Borland got into politics! In the voters' rejection of foreign-tasting beer she detects shades of the anti-immigrant sentiment that swept Trump into power.

And so the story hurtles toward its dramatic conclusion, with Borland out of control and drinking more and more of the Cascadia Challenge pilsner, Sissley growing increasingly bitter and desperate as his lead dissovles, and the race slipping into the dark territory that has come to grip American politics...