Letter from Portland

Prompt: Friends in Melbourne asked me what was happening in Portland, Oregon. Opinion, not journalism.

Portland, Oregon. July 24, 2020

Greetings from Portland, the current high profile site of the Second American Civil War.

When Donald Trump was elected, I and many of my fellow Californians were aghast and started sharing memes about Calexit – the idea that California, with an GDP in the top six or so in the world, and the largest contributor to the Federal coffers, could actually leave and become its own country. Oregon and Washington State, the kid siblings who didn’t want to be left behind with our dysfunctional parents, tried to hide in our suitcase.

My friend from Birmingham, Alabama, wryly commented “Well, maybe, but they’ll bomb the @$#*outta y’all. They’re still punishing us for trying it”.

And that’s the bit that made me whip my head around. Yes, we were naively joking that we could just leave, at least theoretically. After all, we were the higher-minded Americans, right? We were anti-Trump.

But the Confederate States of America never believed themselves to be the un-Americans, either. Now, I’m not on the side of the Confederacy. Not in the slightest. But it was a sharp reminder that the United States is not a cocktail party that you can just leave if you get stuck in a corner talking to the host’s elderly aunt, or if you really want to eat pizza on the couch in your jammies, especially if the host was stupid enough to schedule the party for the same night as the digital release of “Hamilton” and you’re kicking yourself for not checking that before you RSVP’d and there’s really no question over which you would rather be doing. You’re stuck, so suck it up and grab another drink.

Welcome to the Trump Hotel, California. You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.

Now I am here, in Portland, Oregon, in the middle of the latest installment of the Second American Civil War. Portland is a city of about 650,000 people. Its suburbs are full of Victorian homes. It really reminds me of the Melbourne of my youth, but with less multiculturalism. It is the whitest major city in America. The spiritual home of the Hipster, it is the only place you can consistently get decent coffee over here. It has Melbourne level coffee. And do(ugh)nuts. Portlanders will queue for hours outside Voodoo Donuts, although personally I prefer Blue Star. Portland’s motto is “Keep Portland Weird”. If you have to ask if that’s the official motto or not then you have missed the point.

Apparently Portland is getting some attention in the Australian media.
Hundreds, often thousands, of people in Portland have protested every night since the death of George Floyd. We’re coming up on two months, straight. That was your first wave of Portland news. Now the second wave, the presence of Federal troops, has apparently put Portland back on your screens. I can track the amount of Portland news airing in Australia by the number of messages I get enquiring into my safety and wellbeing. Thank you. I love you all.

I have no personal knowledge of what happens in Downtown Portland every night. I agree with the protestors but I’m a physical coward. There, I said it. I don’t care to catch COVID, be hit in the face with a rubber bullet, or the chest with a tear gas canister, or over the head with a baton. It’s possible that I’ve read and watched more local news reports than have made it to your shores, so here are a few things of interest:

Protests mostly happen Downtown, where the Police building is right next to the Federal courthouse, with a park opposite.

In the beginning, the protestors were mainly younger people, teens and 20s. People would assemble in the park, eat the free food provided by an outlet calling themselves (in true Portland form) “Riot Ribs”, dance, sing, and yell at the police if they came out of their building in riot gear. The night would morph from party to protest for a few hours, then most people would go home.

As a side note: The First Amendment to the Constitution protects the right of free speech and peaceful assembly. Exactly what the citizens of Portland are doing.

Around midnight every night, the more vocal protesters might start throwing objects at the police and would be teargassed or forcefully dispersed. There’s been some graffiti sprayed on the police and courthouse buildings, and some trashcan fires lit. To be honest, Oregon has had legal marijuana for too long for our alleged “violent anarchists” to really build up any head of steam.

The police, the protest organizers and the Portland council scrambled around with some reforms – $15 million was cut from the police budget, chokeholds became illegal, the Police Chief voluntarily resigned in favor of an officer she believed was better suited to community consultation, and a court order prohibited the police from using crowd control methods unless they had a reasonable expectation of danger to life. The Mayor of Portland was calling for the late night violence against the police to end.

Last week the same Mayor of Portland was teargassed by Federal forces when he joined the protests.

What changed? “Federal troops on the streets of Portland” is, I believe, how your media is covering it. How and why?

Weeeeel, it’s not possible to sanitize this: It’s a political stunt to drum up voter support before the election. Trump was going to run on the economy. It’s in tatters. Then he was going to run on his coronavirus response. I’ll pause here so you can laugh. Now he’s running on “law and order.”

Ok, but why Portland and what’s the justification? Be under no misapprehension about this. I have lived in America for twenty years and there are constant incidences of the killing of non-white people by police officers. There are constant protests. These most recent protests are just a bit more widespread and persistent, and we’re all stuck at home and sick and tired of hearing about coronavirus. But in this current phase ideas spread from city to city as protests continue, and one activity that spread was the toppling of statues of Confederate generals. These may be acts of vandalism, and some people may care about that. (They can ask their LGBT+ friends, and they have them even if they don’t know it, to explain the Stonewall Riots to them). Trump did, in fact decry this “erasure of American history”. But history moved ahead of Trump a bit too fast, and soon the Pentagon was renaming training bases that bore the names of Confederate generals and pushing back on his call to “Send troops to quell unrest in cities where Democrat mayors had lost control”. The Joint Chiefs of the armed forces had a bit too much egg on their faces over the Lafayette Park stunt. They stated, forcefully, that they would not support the deployment of the military against United States citizens. Yay, them!

Portland, lacking any Confederate general statues to attack, had the temerity to topple a statue of George Washington. You know, the slave owning first President. Washington was a great general and leader, as was Robert E Lee, but that is just not the point right now in this national discussion about American racism. As a former history teacher I doubt that history is told by the statues we erect, but I do believe our present relationship to history is told by the statutes we continue to allow.

In his Fourth of July speech, celebrating America’s birthday, President Trump declared his moral imperative to preserve …statues. Seriously. Economy is tanked, people are dying, has taken minimal action, offered no hope, and is the epitome of a failure to lead. And he’s celebrating America by declaring that he will establish a “monument park” for all the statues some citizens of America no longer want in their public spaces. Hashtag Priorities. More like hash brown priorities.

Trump signed an Executive Order directing Federal agencies to dispatch personnel to “protect Federal monuments, property and buildings”. This was sort of like an Abbott-style “captain’s call” but without conferring an Australian knighthood on a foreign prince; i.e. a vanity move taken after asking “Who is the fairest of them all?” and being delusional enough to believe that the answer came from somewhere other than a sycophantic mirror. It meant the Department of Homeland Security sent officers from Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Counter Terrorism, and, I suspect, at least a few tax auditors from the Internal Revenue Service. They are “Federal troops,” but not military troops, and not all members of the same force with the same command structure. Some are highly trained paramilitary troops usually deployed against terrorists to protect Americans. Not usually deployed against Americans to terrorize them. Some have been described as “really small and scared” as they repeatedly clubbed and pepper sprayed a navy veteran who had just asked to talk to them. They might have been the tax auditors, but who knows?

And here we get to “why Portland?” Because Portland’s nightly protests – apparently fueled by un-American anarchists who would tear down a statue of The Father of The Country, which are in a small city, really, and a long way from any outside help (except Seattle which, surprise, surprise, was the second city targeted with Federal troops) – had a strategically important fact to them:
The Police station is located next to the Federal Courthouse.

That’s the excuse for sending Federal troops: to protect the courthouse. Because the Federal government has no legal mandate to send troops into an American city other than for Federal business. Legal protests, and even illegal riots, are not Federal business. Trump’s EO made the protection of the Federal courthouse Federal business, and The Acting Secretary of Homeland Security sent this hodgepodge of over-equipped and under-trained and really badly commanded “Federal troops”.

The Mayor of Portland told them to leave. The Governor of Oregon told them to leave. The Acting Secretary of Homeland Security flew to Portland and all the officials on both sides refused to speak with each other. The Acting Secretary posted photos of the damage done by Portland’s anarchists. Yeah, it was some graffiti and a few burned piles of trash. He sounded a bit like the parents of a 15 year old who decide their kid needs to be sent to an intervention wilderness camp in Utah followed by a year in a therapy boarding school because they found a joint in his underwear drawer.

Meanwhile, the nightly protests intensified. The Portland police, who were not allowed to use teargas, flash bangs, and non-lethal rounds watched as the Federal troops, who were not constrained by the order, did exactly that. So the protests that were mostly winding down, wound up again. At least one “Athena,” as the media dubbed her, responded in pure Portland style. Journalists have waxed far too lyrically about this for me to do it justice, but in short a young woman would emerge from the clouds of teargas, naked, and walk alone towards the Federal line and sit on the ground facing them. This may have given them some pause, but not much.

The Federal troops’ commanders continued to act like parents who caught their kid with a joint. I don’t know how much you know about intervention wilderness camps, but this industry exists where parents send their diagnosed as “self destructive” teens to a camp in the wilderness with other troubled teens. Being in nature and learning to build fires is supposed to help them. Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn’t. But that’s not the point. The point is that getting them to the Utah wilderness, when these kids are already defiant, is the hard part. So services exist in which burly men, to whom you have signed over your parental rights, wake your kid up in the middle of the night and bundle them into a car, then on a plane, then drop them in the wilderness with a bunch of kids and adults they have never seen before. It’s sort of like “Scared Straight” for upper-middle class white kids. “It’s the only way to get them to camp,” the industry says, but it’s deliberate and malicious.

It’s designed to do one thing: traumatize your child to make them more compliant.

Burly Federal troops, with no distinguishing insignia, spent a few hours after the protesters had dispersed driving around Portland grabbing young people as they headed home. They threw them in vans with bags over their heads, refused to identify themselves or answer questions about why they were being detained, unloaded them inside a building, read them their Miranda rights (which happens if you are arrested), never formally arrested them, and let them go without any paperwork. A television station busted them for this clearly illegal activity, and it stopped.

It was designed to do one thing: traumatize the protestors to make them more compliant.

At this point, Portland did what it does best and got either weirdly serious or seriously weird, but either way the fight was on.

First came the Wall of Moms. They were done with their kids Anarchist Ethan and his friends Zach, Grace and Brianna coming home with streaming eyes from the teargas and bruises from less than lethal rounds that should be fired at the ground, but were not. One had been fired into a protestor’s head, fracturing his skull. The Wall of Moms turned up dressed in yellow shirts, holding flowers and signs, and wearing swimming goggles and bicycle helmets for protection. The Federal troops’ nightly ritual has settled into streaming out of the courthouse at some point and pushing the crowd back with all the force and munitions that the Portland police are barred from using, then ceding the ground straight back to them.

The Wall of Moms stood between the Federal troops and the regular protesters and stopped them.
For one night.
On the next night the Federal troops came out and teargassed the Moms.

So next came the PDXDadPod.

They turned up and formed a line in front of the Wall of Moms. They wore orange shirts and carried leaf blowers, the signature tool of the suburban Dad, repurposed to disperse teargas.

The Federal troops came out and teargassed the Dads.

The military veterans turned up, next. They wore Black Lives Matter black tee shirts and formed a line in front of the orange-shirted PDXDadPod, which was forming a line in front of the yellow Wall of Moms, which was forming a line in front of the regular protesters.

At this point I like to imagine a conversation between Ethan and Zach, now pushed a city block or so back from the front lines they once occupied:
“What are you doing, Ethan?”
“Trying to download Facebook Messenger”
“What on earth for?”
“Because that’s all my Mom uses”
“Geez, I got my parents onto WhatsApp, at least. Just text her.”
“I did, but she puts her phone on ‘Do not disturb’ after 9pm. Her Wall friends might be using Messenger and she’ll check that.”
“Call her twice quickly. That will bypass ‘Do not disturb’ if you’re on her favorites list.”
“Ok…it’s ringing…Mom, hey Mom?”
“Hello darling, your father and I are a bit busy yelling at fascists right now, can I call you back, sweetie? Hell no, we won’t go! Sorry, dear, I didn’t mean you.”
“Don’t hang up, Mom! Zach and I….”
“Oh, Zach’s back there with you? Lovely. I’ll tell his mother. Marge! Hey, Marge! Ethan says Zach is with him. Safe and sound! Yes, I’ll tell them. Ethan, tell Zach that his mother said she got a mixed dozen at Voodoo donuts on the way here and we should all swing by their place on the way home. They’ll have them on the front porch for social distancing, ok?”
“Mom, listen to me, I need you to help me get up there.”
“What on earth for, darling?”
“Because I can’t see what’s happening, Mom. We’ve been pushed way back and I can’t see!”
“Wait a minute, your father’s asking me something…No, I don’t know, John. I think it’s like when we took him to the zoo when he was six to see the new lion cubs, remember? He kept saying he couldn’t see so we asked some nice people to move and he made his way up the front…No, of course I’m not going to help him come up here, do you think I’m stupid? …No dear, we’re all just a little excited, I know…”
“MOM!”
“Ethan, Daddy and I are (cough cough) being teargassed right now (cough), so can we chat about this later, over a donut? There’s a good boy. Love you!”
(click)
“My parents are so embarrassing!”
“I know, man. Mine too.”

In all seriousness, within all this weirdness, it is increasingly difficult to argue that the protesters in Portland are a rabble of violent anarchists when they are military veterans, dads with leaf blowers and moms with flowers along with their children, their children’s friends, teachers, baristas, county clerks..oh, and the Mayor, who was also teargassed last week. I think I mentioned that already.

The nightly protests against the Portland Police (who are now probably sitting quietly inside their own building eating donuts as all this goes on outside) had devolved to a few hundred people before the Federal troops arrived. That’s still a sizable protest, but the sides were talking. Change was happening. Now, it’s just a bunch of militarized, uncoordinated outsiders facing thousands of ordinary Portlanders, every night, playing out the same little scripted drama, getting nowhere, and making the invaders look like idiots for claiming to bring “law and order” to a city that didn’t want or need their “help”.

This can’t go on forever. And it won’t. I’ve only lived here a few months, but I believe in Portland’s people and here’s my prediction:

One night, the Federal troops will scurry out of their hiding hole, as usual, and find there’re are no black-clad veterans facing them. No orange-wearing dads. No yellow-shirted moms. No other protestors in assorted garb waving signs and yelling at them to leave.

No, instead they will be staring down the barrel of a ten thousand strong flashmob, singing and dancing to “Shut Up And Dance With Me”.

All stark naked, of course.

Because if America is a party that none of us can ever leave, we might as well stay weird and dance.