So by ballot initiative in Oregon and now court ruling in Washington, the coastal Northwest has just decriminalized all drug possession, mostly because of emerging consensus that when they arrest junkies and methheads for junkie or methhead stuff and find heroin or meth on them, prosecuting and sentencing them over it doesn’t seem to make things any better.
>@slatestarscratchpadsaid: Do you have a post where you explain why so much of this political violence is concentrated in Portland?
Well I guess I can make one. Imo, it comes down to “Portland is so white the Civil Rights Movement didn’t reorder culture and politics”
Oregon was born out of the “free soil, free labor” tradition that hated slavery for taking our jerbs, as a white producerist utopia and was really exclusionary
Perhaps more important, there wasn’t much industry or any direct train lines from the Deep South circa the Great Migration – to leave sharecropping for Portland, you’d have to pass through somewhere with better jobs
So Portland’s biggest civil rights initiative was busing the small redlined black neighborhood’s kids all over town until they asked for their local Black Power school back and the white establishment said “sure”
The city’s official narrative is “we ended residential segregation in the 1990s by asking realtors nicely”, the unofficial is “no, that’s just when the ghetto started to gentrify”
So future “identity” claims didn’t have a confrontational model to go off of, and were welcomed in and co-opted by the establishment
So politics never repolarized away from lunchbox labor vs. progressive owners, both of which fit in the current Dem party coalition
So there wasn’t white flight and urban decay, and there’s still an inner-city white working class that identifies as working class, not white
That’s sure under stress from rising prices now, and has no expectation a continuation of the existing trends would work for them
That’s combatitive, there’s almost a European-style labor combatitiveness that, Euro style, overlaps with street politics and soccer fandom
Portland’s been radical, there’s an anarchist axis going from Olympia to Oakland, it got called “Little Beirut” by H.W. Bush, the governor once threw a hippie festival to clear out town for a Nixon visit
The surrounding suburbs aren’t, though, and the rural exurbs especially aren’t, they’re still free soil/free labor really
Because of “Urban Growth Boundaries” (cause no white flight!), rural areas aren’t far out from the city
So because they were never understood as black, an existential threat, “excesses of the 60s-70s” were never really seen as excesses and reigned in.
Like, Oregon has the most extensive free expression protections in the country, which has been interpreted as protecting the right to give naked lapdances
And many understand as protecting anything going as “protest”, meaning they see the government as having COMPLETELY delegitimized itself by making ANY effort to suppress crowds menacing government buildings at night
When I arrived at the start of the 2010s, Portland was very inward-looking. There were around 10 local newspapers but I knew multiple people w/o computers and even TVs
The elite gatekeepers followed national stuff, but they kept The Conversation Portlandy enough that everything in Portland, even the “opposition” was, definitionally, compatible with Portland
And propped up a hippie-academic-gentry-downtown business-landlord power system that congealed in the 70s, even as the city’s center of gravity moved east across the river
Let alone the immigrant, minority, and poor communities on the land east of 82nd
The smartphone revolution fucked that right up, empowered and connected the lower orders and realigned the whole city with national narratives
Oregon might well eliminate its sanctuary state status by initiative and elect a Republican governor to crack down on the homeless this election
Meanwhile the recent developments in Portland city politics are leafy inner eastside neighborhoods getting more NIMBY with growth, development-frontier ones getting more “clean up the streets”, and mayor Ted Wheeler catching national shit for being soft on antifa from Fox News (it doesn’t matter what Arizona retirees think of downtown Portland, tho) and the WSJ (it very much matters what corporations considering locations think of it)
I don’t think this will “turn” the city but the fact that there’s relevant conservative pressure at all is a novelty
“The unthinking unity of the masses, atavistically dedicated to their lifeways in the face of reasoned logic” is… not traditionally a negative from a fascist perspective?
What I really think it is, and I’ve been thumping on this for a bit, is the chanverse reinventing an ethic of aristocratic conservatism, or at least landed gentry.
Like, combine it with memes about the “NEET/wagecuck” binary, and it really does become “people who work for a living are unthinking herd animals, while people who live comfortably off family money, and spend their days discussing and debating among themselves, chasing idiosyncratic hobbies, and playing (often war-simulating) games are an enlightened class of natural rulers”
The NPC meme actually reminds me a lot about the 90s when all my friends and I were playing World of Darkness games about supernatural beings secretly controlling the world. While it cut across demographic and class divides, that appealed the most to kids from fairly well-off bougie families, and they carried that stuff with them as they got older. There was an incredible amount of anti-normie snobbery in that scene since it was where the weird kids got together to brainstorm their own weird-kid chauvinism, and I can think of a couple specific cases where people latched onto this in a really similar way to how the “NPC” thing harkens back to a gamer childhood.
The most obvious match to the NPC thing came from Changeling: the Dreaming, which was a game about playing fae who had access to a secret world of wonder and the imagination and were struggling against the bleakness of the world. It was sort of a metaphor for being young and weird and trying to figure out your life without selling out, so it’s directly analogous. Anyhow, Changeling had these super-normie antagonists called Autumn People who were basically just squares who were so lame and boring that they made the world worse for everyone by being there. But you could turn into an Autumn Person if you sold out to the Man and gave up on your dreams and shit! So this was a powerful image for messed-up kids trying to cope with the expectations of growing up, and to this day I have a friend I speak to infrequently who expresses to me his fears of aging into a life of comfortable futility by asking, “am I an Autumn Person?”
But Changeling was very Theatre Kid, and it wasn’t hugely popular. The game that’s more interesting to me is Mage: the Ascension, which was about occult masters who saw the true nature of reality and gained supernatural powers from their insight and wisdom. Before the Matrix, Mage was where you went for pop cultural “gnostic revenge of the nerds” metaphors. Anyway, in Mage, people who didn’t understand the Cosmic True Nature of Reality were called “Sleepers” and were unable to use magic. Mage had a reputation for being popular among people who felt they were much smarter than everybody else – okay, it was hugely popular, so the playerbase was quite varied, but it especially attracted the same kind of people who liked to imagine living in Galt’s Gulch, for the same reasons. Anyway, what’s fascinating to me is that a lot of these people did grow up to be aristocrats, because I’ve seen many references to Bay Area rationalists and other SoCal technocrats using Mage as a metaphor to describe their own place in society. (For what it’s worth, the guy who’s uneasy about being an Autumn Person is also making something like 180k/y in the Bay Area, in between his midlife crisis gap years to find himself.) Nobody has really talked about this much as far as I can tell, and it’s fascinating to me because with the benefit of hindsight, the stereotype of “Mage fans” – who had a distinct reputation even within WoD players – perfectly prefigured all this subsequent stuff.
The 90s were the last time tabletop RPGs were really big. After that, they were displaced by online gaming. So I can totally believe that the next wave will draw on that metaphor instead.
The World of Darkness thing is interesting because after moving to Portland I realized how specifically PNW parts of it (and FASA’s Seattle-centric Shadowrun, and Seattle-based Wizards of the Coast) had been
Like Werewolf: The Apocalypse was specifically themed around ‘90s PNW ecoterrorism and Battle of Seattle-style altermondialism
And Vampire, how different clans were yuppies and artists and uglies and nature lovers and street brawler anarchists fighting for nightlife dominance…
(and everyone was kinda queer)
I remember one sourcebook talking about the Brujah in a way that was transparently about the mainstream understanding of anarchists as viewed from within the Eugene-PDX-Olympia-Seattle axis, something like “while the true ones are all into discussing philosophy and alternate ways of living, most recruits are drawn by the leather jacket brass knuckles ‘no kings no gods no bedtime’ thing”
easily generated 6 whole sukkahs of tree trimmings this month
could’ve done more if I wasn’t waiting to fill up the green bins I pay to have taken away (to compost for someone else’s profit) each week
should look into connecting with people looking for that, be a neat little intercultural side hustle, like that time I lived in the house before this that a crew of landscaping hermanos showed up and offered to trim the trees if they could sell the dead branches as Halloween decorations
dunno though, the identity’s not so thick here, the one PNW-native Jew I’ve met I had to explain the concepts of “bar mitzvah” and “kosher” to
Something interesting I’ve noticed is that at this point the famed Pacific Northwest coffee culture is really two distinct cultures - the sit-down coffeehouses and the drive-thru “shacks”
It’s not exactly a class divide or a red tribe/blue tribe thing, tho it probably comes from how one customer base is bobos posting up outside the workplace at 3PM and one is Git-R-Done types driving on dispatch or commuting
The sit-downs have recently trended from overstuffed estate sale couches to that retro-austere look and hire post-hipster baristas to set a tone; the shacks are utilitarian but universally seem to hire flirty, attractive young women to the point of specialized topless or bikini sites
The sit-downs increasingly focus on terroir with tasting notes for specific strains of bean and elaborate preparatory methods to bring the inherent flavors out; the shacks have syrups and sugar and more artificial flavorings than a vape shop
It’s not even an avant-garde/normie thing, more like distinct avant-gardes. The coffeehouses will have vegan baristas and lemongrass shot add-ons, but the shacks will have CrossFit girls serving drinks for a ketogenic diet
“You have these far-right elements among the hippies and the new-agers.
Then sometimes they fuse together and we suddenly have this Nazi weed
situation.“
This reminds me of those overdramatic infomercials where someone opens a cabinet door and shit falls out all over them
Reminder that Calico is based in eastern Oregon, so if you’re looking for a signature “look” for your Cascadian or Sagebrush insurrectionary fantasy, it’s helical magazines
On Sunday Preston Page and his fiancée, Jessica Faraday, found their house and car covered in graffiti, and the car was also keyed. The gold paint messages included “CALI - surfs up” and “get California out of Portland.
