Remove Portlandia

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One of the greatest journalists working today is a young man named Andy Ngo who lives in Portland, Oregon. If I were in charge of journalism prizes, he would be the first winner.

In a city has no longer publishes a daily newspaper, Ngo began several years ago documenting the activities of Leftist groups at Portland State University, and then later branched out to cover other leftist activists throughout the city and beyond as the woke revolution has progressed.

Many of these people he covers are nasty and violent, of course---the nastiest people in the city---and Ngo has put himself in danger repeatedly simply by showing up at riots and using his cell phone to record raw footage. Leftists know this unfiltered view puts them in a bad light, making a mockery of their claim to being "non-violent and peaceful", which the mainstream media dutifully parrots.

Ngo has been the target of several violent attacks on his person and receives constant death threats. Ngo is non-white, so if he were on the "woke" side, these threats and attacks would be national news, thrust in the face of conservatives as proof of their wretchedness and bigotry. Instead the media ignores them altogether or makes excuses for the attackers. To the left he is a "grifter" or a "troll", since his reporting undermines their moral legitimacy.

The word "grifter" here, by the way, is leftist code-speak that implies that the only people allowed to make a living off the news are those who work for large corporations.  It is the kind of slur that almost everyone on our side is used to.

Google will make sure you have the "correct" opinion about him as well, if you search for him.

Fortunately Ngo is indefatigable and very brave. A couple weeks ago it was revealed that he went undercover in the Seattle Autonomous Zone. Some of the widely-shared clandestine footage of the activities inside the Zone came directly from him, although he did not reveal this until he was done. Had the people there found out who he was, he might not have made it out alive.

Last night we were watching some footage Ngo recently shot of downtown Portland from the ongoing Antifa riots in front of the Justice Center and the Mark O. Hatfield Courthouse. These videos were taken in the daytime with few other people around, and they show only the aftermath of the previous night. It would be far too dangerous for Ngo to be there after dark when the riots are taking place.

I haven't been following the local Portland television stations, as I don't live there anymore, but I would be shocked if they showed their local audience this kind of footage on a regular basis, even though the studios of one of the biggest ones is just a few blocks away. The only report I've watched from them after the riots was one where a local Persian restaurant owner pleaded with the rioters to leave her business untouched. I broke out laughing when she mentioned that she was a minority who supported them. What does this imply about what she believes about businesses owned by white people?

Of course people who work on television, both on the local and national level, are not journalists but actors working in propaganda theater. We have all known for decades that people who go into broadcast journalism are among the most incurious and ignorant of folks. The main talent of these people lies in being able to get people to pay attention to them on camera or on the radio, as well as making unsophisticated non-media-savvy people look like fools when they want, to arouse the ridicule of the viewers against targets they are supposed to hate.

People who continue to be fans of this televised drama that poses as reality television aren't interested in any truth that is happening in the real world, but only in the gripping ego-stroking fictional narrative they are being shown. If they were interested in truth, they would have opened themselves up to contradictory points of view. But that is forbidden. As a journalism professor at Colorado State once told me almost forty years ago, truth comes from the clash of ideas.

Liberals used to embrace this principle, exalting it as the foundation of democracy, and unafraid that such clashes would produce a conclusion that supported their own righteous beliefs. That professor I mention was a World War II veteran who had worked for years as a hard-scrabble reporter for one of the Chicago dailies, working his way up to an editorial position. I learned a tremendous amount about writing from him in the month-long summer course I took from him in 1981. He was about as liberal as they got, but by today's standards he would be hopelessly out of touch in expressing the idea I quoted.

As we watched this footage from Portland, we were struck by the rank ugliness that has enveloped this part of downtown Portland, a quarter that is very recognizable to both of us.

I noticed, however, an utter absence of any type of pathos about this in myself. At another time in my life, even when I wasn't living in Portland, I might have moaned about how the city I loved was being ruined by strife. O Portland! What has become of thee? But I felt nothing like that. Likewise I felt no pathos when seeing footage of New York, another city I once loved.

I have so many wonderful memories of these places but I feel so little attachment to them now. Moreover, I feel almost no attachment to any cities at all, in the U.S. or elsewhere. We currently live on the edge of the Phoenix metro area, and yet for all practical purposes, everything that happens in Phoenix may as well happen hundreds of miles away. Phoenix to me is the closest airport.

This situation is an enormous change in me from earlier years. At one time in my life I was fascinated by cities, and loved experiencing and exploring all types of urbanity. I wanted to see cities become magnificent again, as they once had been in America. I assumed I would always want to live in a great city and experience its offerings every day. Now I have no interesting in going into any city, let alone Portland.

Yet neither do I have antipathy towards them or the people who choose to live there. I am not like a Leftist who needs to see things destroyed that he does not want to experience himself. I wish no one ill who lives in Portland. In fact I sincerely wish them well. I hope it all works out for them, the way they are handling things.

During the recent riots in Minneapolis and elsewhere, most of us of both sides were taken aback by the abrupt demands by Leftists to dismantle their police departments. I suspect that many Leftists believed that folks on our side are opposed to such demands. Certainly they were some on our side who are, but as for me and many others, we fully support these demands for those communities, without reservation.

For example, I was very much rooting for the Seattle Autonomous Zone. I was thrilled when they set it up, and I was glad that it lasted as long as it did. Likewise, I am also in favor of Minneapolis getting rid of its police department, in a completely unironical way. If any city wants to abolish its police department, that is fine by me, so long as I don't have to live there.  I might feel sorry for some people who live in those cities who might suffer the consequences of this action---at least for those who can't easily move. But all of us have had plenty of warning about this, and plenty of time to get out.

Of course I know Leftists will in no way credit my support of these demands as suggestive that I am an ally or a good person. To them, I'm not supporting these demans for the right reason. I'm not submitting to them out of fear and respect for their power, but gladly saying go for it.  If they knew how many people on my side actually want them to follow through, it might make them question what they are doing.

I will keep following what happens in Portland, of course, but only from afar. I don't ever need to go back there. Like New York and other places, it is a closed book for me.

If there were one last piece of input I could offer to people in Portland, it would be to raise this question: given all the effort to cleanse the city of hated monuments that supposedly suggest white supremacy, why is it that the sculpture Portlandia---an ostensibly Caucasian woman bending down to extend benevolent guidance to those below her---is still allowed to stand? Surely it is time for it to go. Its era has passed.



Edit: as a comment, I would add that once the statue is removed, the name "Portlandia" will remain as a nickname for the city, but fittingly everyone will assume it originated with the fictional television series