64. The Absurdity

There are two Portland, Oregons. I live in the real one.

When then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions came to Portland in 2017, this is how well that was received. [Photo by me]

If I could show you my love for Portland, put it all in a film, it would be a rain-soaked reel of moments from my very average life. In one scene, I am a teenager in a crowd outside the U.S. Forest Service office protesting the clear-cutting of a stand of old growth trees, yelling for change because that’s what I was learning the Portlanders I admired did.

As an adult, I was — for a long time — eager to report on protests in my city for national outlets. I understood that they were part of a larger culture here, and I’d show up with a notepad when just about any outlet asked me to go, ready to talk to people, listen to their grievances, capture this slice of what living here is like. Those scenes would go in my reel of memories too.

But then, protests changed. Reporting on them meant watching parents with little kids on their shoulders scatter at the first rib-shaking thud of a flash grenade, the echo clanging off the buildings downtown. Watching police form a protective barrier around a group of right-wing organizers holding “#HimToo” signs, wearing a “Pinochet Did Nothing Wrong” t-shirt. Then, around 2020, protest reporting changed, too: comfortable shoes and snacks were less important than having a gas mask, a helmet, body armor, a press pass¹, a lawyer, a therapist. I spray painted an old bike helmet with the word PRESS. I grabbed a respirator from our garage. The protests changed, but the meager pay did not, so I stopped covering them.

Over the years, The New York Times and The Atlantic and Politico and Business Insider² and god knows who else — I’ve lost count at this point — has dispatched reporters to Portland to walk around downtown, gawk at people living in tents and using drugs, interview some aggrieved business owner, bend the facts around the murder rate and the now-rescinded Measure 110 to subtly or not-so-subtly make the declaration that the Portland of your Portlandia dreams is dead. Not only is it dead, it’s a bad place, they seem to say. A sad place. A perfectly wasted city.

Portland is the 28th most populous city in this country. It should not matter as much as it does at this moment.

We are facing a potential federal invasion, and everyone I know — myself included — has simply been trying to keep their head above water. There could be troops on the streets sometime in our near future, but capitalism doesn’t stop for anything. We are working and living and going on long walks on sunny days, readying ourselves for the coming rain. There are no fires, no anarchy, no chaos, nothing even resembling what Trump and his minions have claimed is happening here. You already know this though.

It’s taken me some time to get my head around what to say about our current situation. And I think it’s because I’ve been trying to figure out how to put into words the way your heart breaks when the incredibly imperfect place you live, and love, becomes the focus of the nation’s most powerful person. How am I supposed to express the way it feels to be shocked into near-silence at the sight of a far-right propagandist from Portland having the full attention of the Cabinet, telling fictional tales of chaos? How can I tell you the hollowed-out feeling it gave me to watch those secretaries nod solemnly? I haven’t found the words.

Friends have showed me the photos and videos of helicopters flying low over their homes. Just yesterday, one was over my house, too. It turns out, the entire city feels terrorized by the helicopters. This is not some tinfoil hat conspiracy.

The other day I was attending an evening reading at Powell’s downtown, eating a slice of pizza across the street beforehand, when a Department of Homeland Security vehicle pulled up. An officer got out and walked into the pizza place, seeming to be looking for someone. The air seemed to electrify, every eye on the officer, people getting out their phones, readying to film, readying for whatever could happen. A group of women of color held each other back at the sight of this man, freezing in the middle of the sidewalk, then turning around and leaving.

This is the real Portland right now. A city on edge. And why?

Since the President trained his eye on our city again, I’ve come to realize that there is a deep chasm between what lived reality is here, and what people want to believe is happening.

These are the two Portlands. I live in Real Portland. The other one is Internet Portland. That is a place I don’t understand.

Real Portland is the place of my memories, the setting for most of my life. I don’t love it here every day, but I also don’t think about it that hard. I know a lot of people like to make fun of Portland and its quirkiness — fine by me. It’s not for everyone.

Real Portland is a place that, right now, is dotted by blushing fall trees. It’s also a place where the longest-standing ICE protester appears to be a man in a chicken suit, where even the mascot for the local baseball team, the Pickles, posed for pictures outside the ICE facility saying “ICE SUX.” That’s really us.

Real Portland is a lot of things: a place with a high tolerance for a way-too-long brunch line to buy eggs you could have cooked at home. It’s a flawed place, like every place. It can be a hypocritical place. A place that loves a performative yard sign but also a little free library and a bike lane and flower garden of heavy roses and dahlias. A place that partied every year on an elementary school lawn to watch swifts fly into a chimney, screaming at the hawks preying on them.

And, of course, Portland is a place with a protest culture that runs deep.

One of the most consistent things that has pushed Portlanders into the streets in the past four decades is racism: a persistent thorn that this state, and region, can’t seem to work out of its paw. In June of this year, when a demonstration outside the ICE building swelled, it was because of ICE’s racist policies.

I think it’s fair to say that protesting is one of the only tools Portlanders — seeing a problem with racism, but having no idea how to dismantle racist systems — feel like they have.

Look back to November 1988, when a group of Neo-Nazi skinheads beat Mulugeta Seraw — an Ethiopian student studying in Portland — to death in the middle of a Southeast Portland street. In the aftermath, citizens took to the streets in protest. In journalist Elinor Langer’s book, A Hundred Little Hitlers, she documented the ways Portlanders responded to this tragedy, capturing both the naivete of Portlanders, and the abhorrence they expressed:

The city was in an uproar. The first bulletins were followed by such intense news coverage it was almost as if racism itself, and not only the skinhead movement, was being discovered… At supermarkets, bus stops and lunch counters the incident was the talk of the town. An innocent Black man was walking across the street when he was beaten to death by three skinheads with bats: that is the way the killing was generally represented. Portland had had a lynching!

Flash forward — 2017: a man hurled a racist screed at a pair of hijab-wearing teenagers riding a crowded MAX train across Portland. When he was confronted by several male passengers, he pulled out a knife and slashed it at them, killing two and injuring a third. It was a harrowing incident. Portlanders, again, felt they needed to speak out.

A massive rally and march occurred; I covered it for The Washington Post: thousands protested racism, but a huge counter-protest also took place. A rally against racism, and a rally for racism… even though the organizers tried like hell to say it wasn’t. Here’s part of that story:

The slayings shocked the city and exposed the long-simmering racial tension here, with roots in Oregon’s establishment as a white utopia in the Pacific Northwest. At the light-rail station where the two men were killed, a memorial of flowers, signs and messages of hope and sadness were scrawled in chalk, including this one: “Portland We Have to Do Better.”

Though drawing outrage and sympathy, the deaths in some ways only amplified the issue, again making Portland a magnet for the fight of political extremes.

In 2018, there was “Multnomah Camp,” a large protest encampment outside the ICE Building that is the site of the protests today. Here’s a bit from my story on that one:

The makeshift city outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement building here has swelled to more than 90 tents, and protesters appear to be willing to dig in for the long haul. It’s been 10 days now, and “Multnomah Camp” is fortified with a wall made of wood and blue tarps and is adorned with signs declaring a simple message.

“Abolish ICE.”

In chalk, the protesters have written “Nazis Inside,” and those inside have looked down on the din from top-floor offices. Thus far, it has been boisterous but peaceful.

As the Trump administration continues its border crackdown on illegal immigration amid fluctuating policies — including a now-abandoned strategy of separating children from their parents, which drew international scorn — this protest has served as a spark to others across the country. Portland, already a protest-prone city, is again at the center of pushing back against the Trump administration and its supporters, this time by going after ICE.

Much larger cities have since picked up on the ICE encampment tactics started here, including in New York and Los Angeles, and protesters here aren’t surprised that homegrown Portland protest tactics are catching on elsewhere. This is a city that thrives on dissent.

And then there was, of course, 120 straight days of protest in 2020 that were largely about racial justice. Portland, by then, had a long track record of violent policing, particularly toward people of color. It was not entirely surprising that those protests became extremely tense, occasionally violent, and that some seemed to veer far afield of the point. There was one night when a group tried to set the Justice Center on fire, then people broke into stores and left with armfuls of stolen items.

This is all Real Portland. Portlanders seem always to be ready to take to the streets over their opposition to racism, but that well-meaning attitude often collides with the firm hands of power brokers and moneyed structures that are unwilling to change things at a systemic level.

And then there’s the other Portland. Portland’s doppelgänger: Internet Portland.

I don’t live in Internet Portland. That’s an online place created by propagandists, and helped along by legacy media outlets. In Internet Portland, nothing real is valid. Reality is manipulated. It is a distorted funhouse image of my home. Internet Portland is somehow both small and silly and easy to disregard, and yet also a buzzing hive of terrorists. It is where the word “leftist” or “liberal” becomes not a connotation for a political ideology, but a demonized term for everything that is wrong.

Right-wing propaganda artists are easy to blame for creating Internet Portland, but I think it’s just as important to look at what the media’s role has been in creating this version, too.

The 2020 racial justice protests were blanketed with coverage — local, regional, national outlets and every flavor of live-streamer imaginable.

Little was written of peaceful protesters; people tried to do those stories, but it was difficult to break through because, of course, the old adage “it it bleeds³, it leads” applies to digital media, too.

I believe many of those reporters thought they were capturing the ways police were violently responding to the protesters, but instead, much of that footage of that year’s one-block protest has been manipulated and co-opted to tell a story of a ruined city. Portland’s local media outlets have become incredibly savvy since 2020, knowing their reporting could be manipulated.

National media has, at least, evolved enough to say “this version of Portland Trump is talking about is not real.” But I don’t think it’s said enough that the protests in 2020 here were not all riots, that citizens were thrown in unmarked vans by federal officers, that a young man holding a boombox above his head was permanently disabled when a U.S. Marshal shot him in the head with a “less lethal” munition. It was the prequel for what’s happening now in Chicago.

So whose version of reality wins this argument? Facts be damned, which Portland becomes the true one? Real Portland or Internet Portland? How did Portland bifurcate into two separate places, and people could pick which one fits their reality?

Internet Portland, where Portland has been aflame for five straight years, was given help by Portlanders and national reporters who actually thought you could make a causal link between the 2020 protests and homelessness — a jump I still can’t quite wrap my head around.

Internet Portland was aided by a police force who called every protest I covered a riot, and made sure those right-wing agitators from 2015 to 2020 could continue their business of creating chaos — and making online content — unharmed.

The largest newspaper in America, The New York Times, certainly has done enough coverage of this city over the years to show its affection for Internet Portland. Example: a couple weeks ago, the newspaper ran the headline “What happens when socialists are in charge?”⁴ — an objectively untrue statement⁵ because, despite having four Democratic Socialists on our city council, the council is 12 people total. Not a math person here, but that means to me they are most definitely outnumbered and, thus, not “in charge.” Even when The Times comes to town to review our restaurants, those reviews come with a caveat that there were protests here in 2020.⁶ I am starting to believe there are people at The Times who think Portland, Oregon created protesting.

If legacy media decides Internet Portland anything less than a complete and total fabrication… that’s a battle no number of beautiful Rose Garden pictures will win.⁷ When people prefer a black-and-white world where you can always point to a bad guy, or a bad city, how do you combat that? What happens when it’s your city in the crosshairs of the Internet?

You break the illusion in the way only Portlanders would think of.

If every livestream of “anarchy” from the one-block “protest” outside the ICE building has a man standing in a frog suit in it, now you’re taking control. When the images get cropped this time, Internet Portland will look like a place of inflatable frogs, a marching band in banana suits, people riding their bikes naked.

In a war of absurdities, in this age of enragement⁸, the battle over facts arrived in the only place that can win it. The most absurd place in America. Portland, Oregon. A place I’m proud to call home. A place where we know what the First Amendment means because we’ve never stopped using it.

This weekend, we saw millions of Americans come out on the streets to participate in the No Kings protests, exercising their right to free speech and protest; The Oregonian estimated some 40,000 people marched here.

The photographs from across the country showed people in inflatable unicorn costumes in small-town Michigan. An inflatable chicken in Asheville, North Carolina. Dancing sharks and mushrooms in Bellingham, Washington. Inflatable T-Rexes in Spokane. Inflatable hot dogs in Seattle.

And frogs. Frogs everywhere. Groups of frogs. Lines of them.

Portland, Oregon was everywhere all of a sudden. Real Portland: where there is no anarchy, no fires, but a preponderance of humor and joy that is so infectious and fit for this moment, it’s spreading around the entire world.

---

I’ve got a couple more book dates on the calendar for Blazing Eye Sees All coming up in November. The first is in Bend, Oregon at Dudley’s Bookshop Cafe on the evening of November 7 from 6-8 pm. There will be limited seating at this one, so if you’re interested, grab a ticket in advance — it’ll go towards buying a book.

The next day, I’ll be doing a pop-up reading at Portland Book Festival. Come to the Portland Art Museum at 3 pm! It’s a quickie, but should be fun.

---

Also, last, but very much not least: I hope you’ve been listening to the new season of Hush. This season is called “Love Thy Neighbor,” and is all about the strange case of Sarah Zuber. I talked about it in last month’s newsletter. New episodes come out on Wednesdays.

1. It might surprise you that in my long experience as a freelancer, news outlets that ask me to do this kind of coverage will not provide me with a press pass. So “we want you there to cover it” but “if you get arrested, you’re not our problem.” Fun! So I tend to say no to these assignments now.

2. There was a version of this newsletter where I rounded up all of the most memorably lame clips from the past few years by these outlets, but as I was doing it I just got really annoyed and sad, so I stopped.

3. Or burns.

4. Can I just add to the absurdity here? The print headline for this story was “In Portland, Socialists Blaze Trail for Mamdani.” Okay, go ahead and just think on that one. For a second.

…

…

How does this connection get made? In what world do Portland politics have any bearing on the mayoral election in New York? Why would the city council of the 28th largest city in the country have any influence at all on New York City? How? Perhaps a better headline would have been “There are elected socialists in Portland.” Which, then, as a journalist, editor and student of this craft, I would say “your story needs to be about something more than the existence of a thing.”

5. In a truly deranged instance of an out-of-town reporter going on a Cletus Safari, instead of speaking to residents who voted those socialists into office, the writer spoke to Jordan Schnitzer, one of the richest men in Oregon, who said the socialists “think business is a dirty word.”

6. See the mention of Maurice, a lunch spot a mile away from the site of the 2020 protests.

7. In the summer of 2022, I wrote about how people thought Portland was on fire then, too! Do people know how fire works? If the city was burning down, do people think we are continually building it up again, only for it to burn down overnight?

8. A term I’ve heard my friend Shann Ferch use, that I love.