Ink Tea Stone Leaf

It isn’t difficult to understand. If you cannot tell the difference between the present condition of the city of Portland, Oregon, and an active war zone, then you don’t know anything about either. If you can tell the difference, but you are going to go on equating them anyway, you’re a bad person.

I live about an hour’s drive from Portland, and I go there fairly often. When I go, I am usually there to take in a show, or eat dinner at a restaurant with friends, or shop at some of the city’s fine markets and stores for books, records, or art, or visit one of its fascinating and beautiful museums and parks. Sometimes I’m just there to fly in or out of PDX, one of the finest airports in the whole country. Last year I spent the night in a Portland hotel, because my flight came in too late to make the last leg of the journey until morning. I felt perfectly safe the entire time, because Portland is a remarkably safe and pleasant place to be.

The people who tell you that January 6th, 2021 was a peaceful protest and not a coordinated attack on the U.S. Capitol can’t wrap their heads around the idea that a few protests around a single city block has not made a city of over 600,000 residents, covering 145 square miles of territory, into a hellscape. That’s the charitable assessment: the more uncharitable assessment is that their condemnation of Portland is cynical, mendacious, and hypocritical. Would these people rather confess to being idiots or liars? Either way, they shouldn’t have a say in what goes on in Portland.

Last weekend, the President said he was going to send soldiers to occupy the streets of Portland. He would like us all to get used to the idea that defying him to even the slightest extent means living under a military boot. He told the army’s generals, assembled just the other day for a thoroughly unnecessary meeting, that they ought to use American cities like Portland as practice for occupying cities in foreign countries. This is a thoroughly depraved sentiment, especially coming from an official who based his campaign around the idea that he would not conduct more foreign wars. The President is, however, known to be both an idiot and a liar, and I expect nothing less than depravity from him.

At that same meeting, the Secretary of Defense, who likes to call himself the Secretary of War because he wants everybody to know what a tough little warrior he is, made a speech about how as long as he is in charge, the U.S. military is not going to hold itself accountable for war crimes. In an embarrassing display of chauvinism, he made it clear not only that he is the worst sort of leader for his department, but the worst sort of man: the kind who equates character and ethics with the products of his specifically male glands.

So it looks like the only thing standing between the aspirational war criminals and the people of America’s cities is the vaunted legacy of honor in America’s armed forces, whose oaths and sense of duty will not permit them to carry out illegal and unconstitutional orders. I look forward to finding out how much water that holds. In the meantime, I advise the people of Portland, and any other city large enough and free enough to have this administration’s attention, to be on their guard. I don’t believe there is any order, no matter how illegal or unconstitutional, that the President and Secretary are incapable of giving in the interest of projecting dominance.

I began this post with a defense of Portland, but I want to be clear about what I am saying about it. It is not a perfect city. It is a normal city, where people go about normal business on a day to day basis. It has problems, inconveniences, and crises. It is the responsibility of civil government to manage these things, and to manage them every day, because they do not simply go away if you station a tank squadron at every intersection. It is the responsibility of a city’s people to elect the kind of government they wish to be governed by, and it is not the business of the President of the United States to try to bully the people or their government into submission.

Portland is also a “weird” city, which means that it is a city where people feel free to express themselves openly, and sometimes that means dying their hair blue. I wish every town in America were as proud of being weird as Portland is, rather than committed to crushing that kind of spirited and individual freedom under rigid, military conformity. Whatever problems the people of Portland have, whatever way the culture of the city and the culture of the nation at large are going, the people of Portland are at peace. Leave them in peace.