A Day Late and a Dollar Short
In which a delightful trip to Portland becomes a metaphor for the continuing failure of liberal governance.
This was originally going to be one day late, hence the title. Before I could get it ready to go out, however, I had an equipment failure that made it impossible for me to add any of my usual graphics — header, footer, lil’ branch. I thought this was going to set me back for a day or two—no big deal; owing to the continuing decline of Amazon it wound up setting me back a week. Then I had a sudden piece of writing work land on me — a quasi-ghost-writing gig — which sucked up several more days. Finally so much time had passed that I figured I may as well just wait a few more days and publish on my regular schedule. So if you were feeling a certain emptiness two weeks ago today at about this time, you now know why.
Just back from a five day trip to Portland, Oregon. Under ordinary circumstances, I would postpone the publication of Red Clay Bestiary until next week,1 but since getting back from Portland is itself not an ordinary circumstance, I shall forthwith strive to provide you with a sequence of words worth reading. Though, between you and me, a large proportion of those words will have to do with Portland. If you are an anti-Oregonian, consider this fair warning.
It wasn’t my first rodeo. I went to Portland for a software conference long about 2014 or so. I don’t remember the exact year, but it was shortly before weed legalization there, meaning I had to rely on alcohol alone to subvert the purpose of the trip. And God knows what an unpleasant companion alcohol can be. One evening found me at a dive bar playing pool until the wee hours. I was drinking whiskey and Cokes, like a child. Far too many of them, if it even needs to be said.
But not so many that I didn’t know I was flirting with disaster. And so came the moment that I knew I’d had enough. I gestured to the bartender to close my tab but, owing to the fact there’s no agreed-upon hand signal for conveying this sentiment,2 the message got mangled over the wire, and instead of a slip of paper with a place for my John Hancock, I watched in horror as she pushed yet one more glass of the foul toxin across the surface of the bar toward me.
I drank, duly.
The next morning found me, a casualty of pour, a anthropomorphic cranial throbbing trailing the shadow of a man like so much toilet paper adhered to a shoe heel; a nimbus of misery, shimmering with the premonition of vomit and cold sweats. A real kater, as my German brethren would say. I didn’t make many conference sessions that day and the ones in which I was present are as fuzzy to me today as the Voynich Manuscript. Not my finest moment, but conferences, software and otherwise, are for me just this weird liminal space between doing and learning without much flavor of either of those neighbors. I arguably shouldn’t have been there in the first place.
That was a while ago, and I’ve changed a lot. I don’t drink much anymore—not that I could have ever hung with the likes of Lemmy Kilmister, but now I drink considerably less. Of course, Portland has changed too: it led the first waves of weed legalization, and as far as I can gather from the sparse Portland drawer in my mind’s card catalog, they have since managed to legalize practically everything else as well, except, inexplicably, fluoride in drinking water. The entire left coast seems to have bought into this project to varying degrees, and the results are a blessing and a curse.
It must be said, before I begin shitting on the place, that it’s really a wonderful city, and my wife and I were tempted enough by its charms to find ourselves idly speculating on our way home how we might engineer a removal of our persons to its environs, in a permanent domestic sense. How we might move there I mean. It possesses a vibrant, eminently walkable downtown, a great offbeat, funky aesthetic, and a loose, relaxed attitude about life and the many ways in which uptight people can turn it into a massive unpleasant chore. I am, in short, a massive Portland stan
However… The homeless problem is un-fucking believable.
At times I found myself wondering if anyone in Portland occupied a house or an apartment; whether possibly every person I spotted on the street was in fact homeless. It’s obvious enough in the case of the army of wizened and withered figures who roam the landscape pushing shopping carts full of aluminum cans. But what of the becoming woman crouching on the sidewalk in a stunning full length red dress with a Japanese-character print, her hair neatly wound into a bun pierced with a chopstick—apparently picking nits from the hair of the simian form of her companion, a dusty gray man in ragged clothes, his jagged smile showing fewer teeth than the fingers on his grubby hands. One could be excused for thinking it’s all an elaborate put on to confuse visitors such as myself.
It seems like it must be. Portland is not just a blue city, it is practically an archetype of a blue city. and the virtues for which it stands – tolerance, inclusion, human dignity…well, there is simply no serious moral framework in which these are somehow vices, and yet…
Why does this problem continue to fester?
Some of the frustration I find in myself stems from the fact that this is decidedly not an intractable problem. Most developed countries deal with it far better than us, and we could borrow from them. It’s not like trying to figure out protein folding or whether the standard model of the atom is correct. Solving homelessness simply requires putting people into homes. Build homes; put people in them. What could be simpler?
Yes, homes cost money. But so does cleaning trash and shit from the sidewalks. The cost of the violence and property crime perpetrated by seriously mentally ill people roaming a city with no shelter and no source of support—that’s also high. The cost to tourism and simple quality of life in a city plagued with homelessness has got to be severe. Is it not worth the expenditure of some money to make one’s city a more livable place? I mean, who among us has never bought a goddamn plant to make our homes less cell-like? Does sprucing up make us suckers?
We were in town for our anniversary, and we spent a bit of money and got a little fancy. Does this mean that I earned the guilt rained down upon me at every street corner by a man or a woman telling me an interminable story about how they had a kidney removed, but then the hospital kicked them out and they were going to get a job but they need money to catch a train to some suburb for training and they had the money but they had to spend it to refill the IV bag they are pushing around on a rolling stand, etc., etc. etc.?
What I’m saying is, it’s rather hard to enjoy a fucking jelly donut when a guy is panhandling every single customer as they walk away with their sweet treat. So what does this mean? Do I not deserve a donut if I fail to dispense cash to every homeless person who approaches me, individually? Or must I callously eat my donut in front of a starving audience like an 18th century French aristocrat?
In truth, nothing about this situation is the fault of the people standing in line for donuts. It’s the fault of their leaders and of the system which binds both the man with a donut and the donut-less man in the same sorry moral puzzle. Just like climate change, it’s not up to individuals to solve this problem, however much those in power would like us to believe that it is. It’s a social problem that merely manifests in individual interactions. It hurts individual individuals, but it can only be solved collectively.
And solve it, we must. Nicholas Kristof, writing in the New York Times on Saturday,3 argued that Democrats have to fix problems like these, and now, if they truly want to set the U.S. back on track. The reckless and spiteful troll currently holed up at 1600 Pennsylvania will be gone one day, but whether that’ll be a good thing or not depends entirely on what happens after. Anything short of a massive overhaul of our entire system of governance is liable to leave in place the very vulnerabilities which Trump has exploited, along with a handy guidebook for exploiting them. To prevent someone even worse from taking advantage is going to require deep reform of all three branches and maybe even the Constitution itself. It’s hard to imagine a more tendentious project—to achieve it Democrats will need to offer examples of the successes of their philosophy. At the moment unfortunately the failures are much more visible.
If the answer to Trump is Portland, well, as much as I love the place, a lot of folks are only going to see those homeless people.
Someone told me the other day that the pendulum will swing back. It’s a popular idea, fueled by the schizophrenic back-and-forth of both presidential and congressional politics over the last 30 years or so. And it is true that when people become fed up with the dysfunction of one government, they go seeking another. In the United States, with its two party system, this means toggling back and forth.
But this is not a physical law. It is a phenomenon which emerges from a specific set of circumstances, and those circumstances have changed. Political sentiment in the United States may well swing back to Democrats. Indeed, it may already have done so. What is new and different here is the (continuing) breakdown of institutions. The pendulum cannot return to its prior position once the string is cut.
What Democrats must do is to propose an entirely new dynamic. If they cannot achieve it, the best we can hope for is a brief return, a flicker of normality before United States plunges once again into the abyss. Can the Democratic Party as currently composed effect such a change in the dynamic? Well, of course not. It will take a super majority and more to make most of the changes that are most desperately needed. How do you get a super majority? Well, if I knew, I would be in politics. But I know how you don’t get it: by begging.
Leaving this sentence in for your amusement at my complete lack of scheduling prowess.
I can tell you with airtight certainty that drawing one’s finger across one’s throat as though threatening a murder is not effective.
Saturday a million fucking years ago.