They Did the Meme (Updated)
they are the meme
The street journalists Tara Faul and Kevin Dahlgren, who I’ve mentioned before, spend their days documenting the overlapping crises of homelessness, mental illness, and drug addiction in hellscape Portland. Screenshot below; click this link to play the video and read the rest of the thread.
They see, and document, a constant parade of death and misery.
Documenting the death and ruin, they end up intervening in some of it.
Now, here’s the hugely respectable New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, a very important Pulitzer Prize recipient, explaining from the heights of his journalistic perch what’s really happening in Portland:
This is as flawless a summary of the progressive cathedral classes as you could possibly manage: “‘Hell’ does not serve Pinot Noir this good.”
Portland street journalist: Portland is a public graveyard
Progressive New York Times columnist: Akshully, the Pinot Noir is exquisite
It’s time to shove these people onto a barge and tow them out to sea.
Like Karen Bass describing the open-air drug market of MacArthur Park as a sylvan paradise full of happy children and wonderful families having picnics, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek explained this week that Donald Trump is bizarrely intervening in a utopia, and for crying out loud look at this facial expression:
No one has ever been more lost than this. Your average good urban liberal is more insane than a psych ward full of psychotics. Akshully, the Pinot Noir is delightful. We are burdened with the existence of high-status people who have departed from earthly reality, and we can’t afford them.
“They are fighting over who gets to define what is real.” As I said a couple weeks ago, our current conflict isn’t left versus right; our current conflict is left versus “the plainest forms of observable reality.” It can’t go on. When some highly placed fool looks at graveyard Portland and tells you that akshully, the Pinot Noir is just delightful, he’s telling you that you must break him. He must be shoved aside. Like Karen Bass and Tina Kotek and Gavin Newsom, he is the angel of death, and you tolerate his babbling at the cost of your own destruction.
UPDATE:
I live in Portland with my family (as in, I've raised kids here, all my and my husband's extended family live in or around Pdx), always lived here. The pinot may be great, but the bums aint drinking it. Well, they certainly WOULD if offered.
You've got multiple little worlds here in Portland (neighborhoods, sorta, but mostly street by street), and you can certainly keep yourself MOSTLY away from the bad parts, the unsavory visuals, if you really try. And the fancy wine aficionados REALLY TRY. Although, if you go downtown, you can only miss it through willful ignorance (steps over body, "wow, they need to get these sidewalks fixed, the concrete is buckling").
But we live among otherwise reasonable people who pretend that rv's leaking sewage, filled to the utter brim with garbage, spilling out onto the sidewalks next to parks where children actively play and soccer games regularly occur, is somehow not so much an urgent problem. It can be backgrounded for them. It's somehow "capitalism", "unsolvable", "end of the Roman Empire," or other learned helplessness notions. They remain indoors or walk in curated areas. They don't engage with ideas, alternatives, reason.
The worst part, to me, is the fact that they tell themselves they are being kind, giving completely incapacitated drug addicts old RV's (to drive around?!), ignoring the mental illness and massive drug use, forgetting all about the people trying to keep their kids safe, healthy, mentally well. And if you are poor, lower middle class (the "raising kids" class), or have to go out into the world to shop, work, or otherwise engage with reality, you are simply unable to ignore it. People continue to throw away their votes, knee jerk, on useless heart string tuggers and things don't just stay the same, they get worse. They get normalized.
Most people I know simply live with the cognitive dissonance and lean even more into luxury beliefs and progressive ideology. Here's where I mention I used to be democrat myself. It's the downhill direction and it's easier, safer politically. The people in charge who are supposed to fix this literal shit are not living anywhere near it and would lose all sweet sweet power if they so much as acknowledged there was a problem. So, Kotek, looking like Woody Allen with a haircut, says things that make no sense to anyone paying attention but calms the nerves of the politically sensitive.
We soldier on, because there's so much to love about Portland, really, it's just beautiful here. All our family is here, and where the heck are we gonna go anyway. Too expensive to move, jobs are location specific, and our kids have friends and jobs and school here. It can be done, we aren’t floating in toxic waste, but it gets lonely. Hard to find friends that you can be open and honest with. I’ll take a democrat who just likes to argue at this point. They don’t want to, they just want to ignore and pretend. Wow. Must be nice.
Totally disgusted, but not surprised, by the reaction of the local "leaders" to Trump sending troops. The Portland police have not only refused to enforce the law, they call Antifa members as friendly witnesses when they're sued for not enforcing the law. (Result: The Portland police don't have to enforce the law.)
One of the videos was full of 3-second cuts. Oh wow, everything must be great because there's still a store that has all its windows! Cancel the order!
Meanwhile, none of those "leaders" show up around 11 pm at the ICE building -- and neither do the local media stations. If it takes Trump to get the nation to pay attention to what's going on, fine by me.
What's going on in Portland is a CHOICE. The leaders of Portland WANT it to look that way.