Let Us Now Praise Joe Gallivan
Is this the last great reporter in the town's Legacy Media?
If you’re not reading Joseph Gallivan’s stuff, then you should be. You’ll be keeping company with the last serious journalist left in our town’s progressive “preaching to the choir” legacy media.
His latest post in the Tribune…
STREET LIVES: Portlandian's dopesick blues
…is one of the vanishingly few pieces of reporting that can accurately be called “objective,” now long gone in the era of the “narrative.”
Such narratives being propaganda for some reporter of middling intelligence to regurgitate orthodoxy on a mission to beat other middling intellects into submission to a quasi-religion.
Gallivan has been doling out his Street Lives for some time at the Tribune—not otherwise known as an avatar of great (or even competent) journalism. Officially he’s a business beat reporter for the Business Tribune, one of the many subsets of the Pamplin media empire. (“Owner and Neighbor Dr. Robert B. Pamplin, Jr.”—although Willy Week’s Nigel Jaquiss, in a recent hit piece, revealed that, “His two doctorates are from an online, for-profit school and Western Seminary on Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard.” So there.)
The Street Lives series dares to go where few, if any, local homeless beat reporters venture: to the streets, without slipping into faux compassion or connecting the woes of the feral to some variety of cosmic victimhood.
Gallivan doees something truly startling: he asks questions and prints the answers. He sets a scene meticulously as a surgeon sizing up an incision and then lets the story unreel in true “I am a camera” style.
Consider these two lede grafs authored by Gallivan and the Oregonian’s homeless beat reporter Nicole Hayden. See if you can figure out who is grinding an axe…
They call him Utah on the street.
Chris Bennett, fentanyl consumer and occasional trader, came to Portland from Salt Lake City almost a year ago. He flies a sign reading "HOMELESS NOT WORTHLESS" on the concrete median on Northwest 16th Avenue at the Glisan Street traffic light, near the Mission Theater. He sleeps in a tent at Northwest Couch Street and Ninth beside the North Park Blocks, in the village that was assembled when campers were swept west from Old Town towards Powell's City of Books.
…versus…
Lulu Thomson can’t easily explain the ways the world broke her heart. The memories are hard. Some days she can’t talk about the abusive relationships she fled but other times the stories tumble out of her.
The 22-year-old can easily recount, however, how the city of Portland’s anti-homeless practices have forced her to endure a constant battle to survive during six years on the streets.
Props if you guessed that Hayden wrote the second screed, which only got more lachrymose as it filled column-inches.
Gallivan’s refusal to bawl in public, or twang our compassion-strings, is evident in the rigor of his photographic gloss: an un-prettified portrayal of his subject that has an uncanny resemblance to the depression-era work of work of one of the nation’s greatest photographers, Walker Evans.
Here’s another comparison: Evans….Gallivan…
This is a kind of honesty, of facing facts, that none of our leadership seems to be able to handle without taking refuge in blame-games and boo-hoo lest the ACLU or some variety of patronage-seekers and “advocates” make a fuss (and line their pockets). Better to build “affordable” apartments and cram the problem indoors, or behind the walls of a Bidey-Bye village. Crate ‘em up and stow ‘em away!
Maybe it’s just a coincidence that this kind of reporting comes from a former subject of the Queen of England, Gallivan being probably the only local scribbler graduated from Oxford University. It shows, in the variety of stuff he manages to find interesting, worth observation. His latter dispatches, beyond the world of profit-and-loss, ranged from an art review…
Amanda Wojick's show Small Shields and Other Shapes, on now at the Elizabeth Leach Gallery through June 4, is intensely, almost aggressively abstract. Wojick makes paper shapes which tapes together in patterns. She then traces them on steel plate which she cuts with a plasma torch. After that, she paints or powder-coats the steel in bright colors and sometimes sticks tiny pieces of paper on the sculptures.
…to an affectionate drop-in…
Portland's The Sports Bra is a sports bar showing only women's sports on television. It's been full since it opened at 2512 N.E. Broadway on April 1. Launched on a whim and a pun (and a crowd fund) by Jenny Nguyen, The Sports Bra already is proving popular with women, men and other genders.
And, oh yah, he’s written a couple of novels, and for nine years-and-counting has done interviews with artists and gallery people on KBOO. He sums it up pretty well on his LinkedIn page…
I mastered forms such as the long profile, the preview, the review, the Q&A, the think piece, the spot news piece, the column, the pitch, the press release, the benefit statement and, finally, the list.
And he should add to that: “The only reporter in local media who actually reports. With no wink-wink nudge-nudge.”
Joseph Gallivan’s straight reportage is more honest than Nicole Hayden’s melodrama.
The problem remains that the media have helped turn homelessness into a lifestyle. This profile of "Utah," as well as an earlier profile in the Trib of a woman who helps homeless and housed drug addicts obtain food and other stuff, makes the lifestyle seem normal, even sustainable.
Utah's story, frankly, is more interesting than that of a mini-mart store clerk who spends his workday watching guys like Utah come into his store and take whatever they want. Utah is having an adventure. The store clerk? No adventure for him. None of Utah's freedom, either. The clerk works for a living.
On an unrelated note, "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" has been on my mind, courtesy of the abortion fight. Subsequent journalists tracked down the children of the poor, white sharecroppers to see what their lives were like. The boys fared better than the girls. Some of the boys made it into the middle class. The girls? Their lives were defined by pregnancy. Pregnant with poverty.
I pick up the litter in my 'hood partly because I'm a bit of a do-gooder. It's an old-age hobby that affords me a perspective on the human condition I can glean from talking to the drug addicted and mentally ill. Perhaps the keenest insight I've gained is that most drugs make people very stupid and when they're not inebriated, they're much more sensible. Everyone has a story, of course, which is usually a mix of self-pity and anger. Few people are unscarred by their childhoods and parentage. Still, it's always a choice how we cope with our unhappiness. If you do it as consciously as possible, you don't damage yourself nearly so much and you're probably not as unhappy. But if you opt for a quick release, which then becomes a habit, you've unleashed the hounds of hell from your own personal kennel.
Enabling drug addicts is not compassion so much as self-delusion. The Woke do this compulsively because their totalizing ideology means that the world is divided between Good and Bad and Right and Wrong. Just like with the religious fundamentalists. but without the otherworldly elements. The net result is that their secular religious hysteria is a compound of selective confirmation bias and wishful thinking. They might even get a "genius" grant from the MacArthur Foundation or a faculty appointment to an elite school. The incentive system on the woke left involves social acceptance and validation. not rigorous scholarship or skepticism.
Still, our Woke Supremacists know they are smart because everyone they listen to believes exactly like they do. You can ignore your city's social dysfunction and mayhem and revel instead in your righteousness. What underlies this new religion is an old religion, and that's knowing in the core of your being that you are saved by your your own light.
We who are skeptics and heretics can marvel at this brave new world of absolute certitude. Communism lasted for generations not because it was a success but because its foundational beliefs gave meaning to people who own lives lacked any. That's what Portland offers to its disaffected hipsters who detest the pointlessness of their random pleasures. Are we really going to pretend this is just the best we can do? No! We want the Truth and the license it gives us to dominate others. If you don't like it, please save your breath because we know we're right and you're wrong.
The left's victimology is its whole point. There are good people (say, non-binary and unhoused BIPOCs) and bad people (cis-gender white males). This organizing principle is all you need to know to understand our primary human drama. How did we ever live without this?
Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.