I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

MLC IN ITS EARLY DAYS had the sunniest of vibes, reflected in the posts on this website. It had a kind of political consciousness, centered around protest against the war and the establishment, rejection of coercive education. Its very existence was a kind of political statement and has remained so to this day.

Any dark realities early MLC harbored were tucked away in corners. Some make appearances here, and in other outlets such as the MLC Alumni Facebook page—bullying, sexual predation, drug abuse, criminality—but happiness reigned.

Early graduates missed MLC in the Reagan years.

That's when "[e]xtreme ideas and radical ideologies cropped up among the student body. The lack of adult supervision ... meant that budding nazis [such as] Ken Mieske and Steve Strasser could be overlooked."

In November 1988, the pair, along with Grant High homecoming king Kyle Brewster, murdered Mulugeta Seraw in the explosive culmination of a sequence of events understandable as a sort of white supremacist coming-out. Strasser was an MLC student, and Mieske—known as "Ken Death," or "Batman" for his murder weapon of choice—a regular visitor.

The cover of Mannie Murphy's 2021 graphic novel.

In 2021, Mannie Murphy, an MLC student from 1985 to 1997, published their debut graphic novel, titled I Never Promised you a Rose Garden as a remark on the pervasive darkness underlying their Rose City hometown's bloomy exterior. The 220-page work—source of the quote above—made a small national splash, delving as it did not only into the Seraw murder and the resulting local civil trial (which traded Strasser's and Brewster's freedom—not Mieske's—for conviction of national supremacist leader Tom Metzger), but into an intense and shocking web of circumstance linking youth susceptibility, Oregon's history of racism and elite obliviousness, street kids, the life and death of Madras boy River Phoenix, the community coalesced by Gus Van Sant's homoerotic filmmaking—and MLC.

The darkness is part of our history and must not be shied away from. Mannie's viewpoints are extraordinarily personal, closely researched, politically astute, riveting, and essential. The book is available here; a 2021 interview with the author/artist is here; and perceptive reviews are here, here, here, and here.

Excerpted pages from I Never Promised You a Rose Garden.