I was surprised to discover that my great-grandfather had been a Klan member. It was in his obit in the Grants Pass paper listed as group like the Masons or Elks. He had come to Oregon in the early 1850s by ox-cart and as he grew up he fought for a livelihood in Merlin and Grants Pass. He was past his most active years as a logging camp victualer and a hotelier in Josephine County when the Klan vogue came on.
I soon discovered retired PSU Professor Horowitz as the premier authority on the Oregon Klan. Although not quite the Jaycees it was for a time another civic organization of more or less sanctioned Babbitry. Its membership was comprised of people looking to rise like my great-grandfather, chiropractors, insurance men, small businessmen, realtors, and etc. Uneducated small-timers wanting to do better and acquire a certain level of popular prestige
The Klan’s primary targets were "the black crows" aka parochial school nuns, Jews, Yellow Perils, and any poor black sod they could scrounge up. They were also teetotal moralists against corruption, physical, moral, political. But, it was mostly anti-Catholic as best I recall. It fell apart when the fellow responsible for the renaissance of Klan significance and legitimacy was found out dragging jailbait across state lines in Indiana or someplace Midwestern. Excuse the use of an archaism for females below the age of consent, but I thought that it added to the squalor of the tale.
As a final note, a judge croaked by surprise on a Bend street in the 50s or 60s and he was discovered to have the most comprehensive Klavern notes evah. The judge had been whatever a Klan Klavern secretary is called. I think I got that right. I wish to testify that I have always been polite to Catholics in spite of my heritage.
"It has long struck us, as students of ethnic machine politics in places such as Detroit and Chicago and Southern California, that there are never-to-be-mentioned-out-loud animosities among most 'people of…' "
Precisely! That's why I've been railing against the most absurd of all progressive bundling of conflicting and unrelated nationalities, "AAPI".
AAPI stands for "Asian American and Pacific Islander. The term encompasses a diverse group of identities, including people with a heritage rooted in all Pacific Islands and all parts of Asia, including South and Southeast Asia." https://www.dictionary.com/e/acronyms/aapi/
Originally coined by the US government, presumably for demographic purposes, AAPI is now firmly established in the progressive identity-group lexicon. Believe it or not, the web is replete with references to the "AAPI community."
Accepting that there could be such a thing as an AAPI community would require the same high level of reality denial as nominating Will (aka Lia) Thomas for the honor of female athlete of the year.
So great are the historical animosities between and among some of the components of AAPI that decency prevents me from going into them lest I reopen old wounds. Likewise, Easter Island in the Pacfic is almost twice as far from its fellow AAPI member Beijing as it is from Washington, DC. These are hardly the building blocks of a true community.
But it's self-evident that "community," as used by progressives, is a political fiction, a phantom constituency of none. Pull back the curtain and the "community" is reduced to a handful of leftist politicians, activists and their most gullible friends. It’s real only to other progressives such as most Portland-area elected officials and their bureaucracies, the progressive media and the inattentive public.
It says a lot about progressives' tunnel vision that they fail to see how vulnerable the AAPI conglomerate is to a leftist critique. After all, who else but a colonizing imperialist would look at a disparate collection of nations and ethnic groups and lump them together as one for administrative convenience?
It came as a shock to my college sophomore sensibilities (I had a National Geographic world map in my dorm room with Tahiti circled) when I found out that the "Pacific Islanders" weren't actually pacific. They were just as willing to kill as any other warrior culture. They were, after all, humans and humans have a kill-gene that no amount of progressive blubbering with remove.
When somebody like Tusitala “Tiny” Toese comes along, the media are mystified. How could a native Pacific Islander become a Proud Boy?
It used to be said that a newspaper editor knew the pulse of their community. Here in Portland, some editors don’t want to find a pulse. They hire marketing consultants to tell them what to do. Consultants like to define people with demographic boxes, which are limited. In reality, people are infinitely diverse.
There's an old expression in the legacy news biz: "Protect the presses." Time was, the $-multi-million investment in Goss Metroliner offset presses ensured that no competitors would come along and challenge the monopoly of--let's say--the Oregonian. The fixed costs were too high for anyone but a Warren Buffet to play that game--and remember, Buffet dumped his investment in the Washington Post.
You see it in the O's frantic attempts to maintain ink-on-paper (ditto the Trib and WillyWeek), and the lack of imagination--or even basic good sense--in their web products. The O's and Trib's ditching of Comments was just one more tell: They don't get it. They could have parlayed Comments into real-time, creative engagement with their readers and become something more than morons yelling through megaphones at their readers and become centers of the exchange of ideas and let their readersbecome, in effect, reporters and eyes-on-the-ball.
Which is anathema to the progressive world-view...and what will ultimately kill them. The O's daily circulation is down, folks, and it ain't never coming back.
The future belongs to platforms (a detestable word) such as Substack. I would happily pay $5 a month to get deep, thorough, investigative reporting on City Hall. Someone will do it...and they'll clean up.
There are, according to the last memo Substack management sent to writers, publications on the 'Stack pulling in $-millions. Alec Berenson, the go-to guy for Covid news, once dropped that he has 1.5-million subs. Do the math.
The NY Times and the Washington Post still get to choose from the cream of the cream of the Ivies. That's why all of their reporters who speak on podcasts sound like hot-house flowers in their early 20s who grew up in a major East Coast urban center with accomplished upper-middle parents and who have never known anyone who didn't go to college, much less attend public school. They've purged juvenile tics such as "like" and "you know" from their speech, but apart from sex-related differences in tone and inflection, they all have the same chirpy, self-satisfied and know-it-all manner of delivery.
Every hothouse-flower navel-gazer, every West-hating (read: parent-hating) dilettante, every twenty-six year-old basement idler, every shallow, entitled modern hedonist, is "anti-bullying" in the sense wrought by a few generations of ingrates living in a society with unprecedented, unrivalled comfort, security and freedom, built on the labor and sacrifice of those of every sort who went before. That anti-"bullying" credo, the grand legacy of the Sixties in a nutshell?
If it feels good, you have the right to do it; if it doesn't feel good, you have the right not to do it.
With guidance from our nobly resentful non-white, non-cishet American identitarians, let's invert E Pluribus Unum. It should not be, "out of many, one", but "out of one, many". Heck, a house divided SHOULD fall. No house at all is better....well, so long as access to anonymous orgies, streaming services (those are different) food stamps and historical fabulism remains unimpeded.
Ill prolly say something insightful later but I have a newsflash:
The U.N. has identified excrement issues with the houseless as remisnicent of Jim Crowe. The quotation below supplied by Takimag:
"Catarina de Albuquerque sounds like a New Mexico drag queen. But in fact she’s the U.N.’s “sanitation czarina.” And last week she penned an op-ed for the L.A. Times in which she castigated Americans for not allowing the homeless to defecate wherever they please."
I was surprised to discover that my great-grandfather had been a Klan member. It was in his obit in the Grants Pass paper listed as group like the Masons or Elks. He had come to Oregon in the early 1850s by ox-cart and as he grew up he fought for a livelihood in Merlin and Grants Pass. He was past his most active years as a logging camp victualer and a hotelier in Josephine County when the Klan vogue came on.
I soon discovered retired PSU Professor Horowitz as the premier authority on the Oregon Klan. Although not quite the Jaycees it was for a time another civic organization of more or less sanctioned Babbitry. Its membership was comprised of people looking to rise like my great-grandfather, chiropractors, insurance men, small businessmen, realtors, and etc. Uneducated small-timers wanting to do better and acquire a certain level of popular prestige
The Klan’s primary targets were "the black crows" aka parochial school nuns, Jews, Yellow Perils, and any poor black sod they could scrounge up. They were also teetotal moralists against corruption, physical, moral, political. But, it was mostly anti-Catholic as best I recall. It fell apart when the fellow responsible for the renaissance of Klan significance and legitimacy was found out dragging jailbait across state lines in Indiana or someplace Midwestern. Excuse the use of an archaism for females below the age of consent, but I thought that it added to the squalor of the tale.
As a final note, a judge croaked by surprise on a Bend street in the 50s or 60s and he was discovered to have the most comprehensive Klavern notes evah. The judge had been whatever a Klan Klavern secretary is called. I think I got that right. I wish to testify that I have always been polite to Catholics in spite of my heritage.
History is never quite as simple as the adolescents running this town think it is.
"It has long struck us, as students of ethnic machine politics in places such as Detroit and Chicago and Southern California, that there are never-to-be-mentioned-out-loud animosities among most 'people of…' "
Precisely! That's why I've been railing against the most absurd of all progressive bundling of conflicting and unrelated nationalities, "AAPI".
AAPI stands for "Asian American and Pacific Islander. The term encompasses a diverse group of identities, including people with a heritage rooted in all Pacific Islands and all parts of Asia, including South and Southeast Asia." https://www.dictionary.com/e/acronyms/aapi/
Originally coined by the US government, presumably for demographic purposes, AAPI is now firmly established in the progressive identity-group lexicon. Believe it or not, the web is replete with references to the "AAPI community."
Accepting that there could be such a thing as an AAPI community would require the same high level of reality denial as nominating Will (aka Lia) Thomas for the honor of female athlete of the year.
So great are the historical animosities between and among some of the components of AAPI that decency prevents me from going into them lest I reopen old wounds. Likewise, Easter Island in the Pacfic is almost twice as far from its fellow AAPI member Beijing as it is from Washington, DC. These are hardly the building blocks of a true community.
But it's self-evident that "community," as used by progressives, is a political fiction, a phantom constituency of none. Pull back the curtain and the "community" is reduced to a handful of leftist politicians, activists and their most gullible friends. It’s real only to other progressives such as most Portland-area elected officials and their bureaucracies, the progressive media and the inattentive public.
It says a lot about progressives' tunnel vision that they fail to see how vulnerable the AAPI conglomerate is to a leftist critique. After all, who else but a colonizing imperialist would look at a disparate collection of nations and ethnic groups and lump them together as one for administrative convenience?
They love talking about "community" while alienating most the country.
As always, Ollie, you nailed it.
It came as a shock to my college sophomore sensibilities (I had a National Geographic world map in my dorm room with Tahiti circled) when I found out that the "Pacific Islanders" weren't actually pacific. They were just as willing to kill as any other warrior culture. They were, after all, humans and humans have a kill-gene that no amount of progressive blubbering with remove.
When somebody like Tusitala “Tiny” Toese comes along, the media are mystified. How could a native Pacific Islander become a Proud Boy?
It used to be said that a newspaper editor knew the pulse of their community. Here in Portland, some editors don’t want to find a pulse. They hire marketing consultants to tell them what to do. Consultants like to define people with demographic boxes, which are limited. In reality, people are infinitely diverse.
There's an old expression in the legacy news biz: "Protect the presses." Time was, the $-multi-million investment in Goss Metroliner offset presses ensured that no competitors would come along and challenge the monopoly of--let's say--the Oregonian. The fixed costs were too high for anyone but a Warren Buffet to play that game--and remember, Buffet dumped his investment in the Washington Post.
You see it in the O's frantic attempts to maintain ink-on-paper (ditto the Trib and WillyWeek), and the lack of imagination--or even basic good sense--in their web products. The O's and Trib's ditching of Comments was just one more tell: They don't get it. They could have parlayed Comments into real-time, creative engagement with their readers and become something more than morons yelling through megaphones at their readers and become centers of the exchange of ideas and let their readersbecome, in effect, reporters and eyes-on-the-ball.
Which is anathema to the progressive world-view...and what will ultimately kill them. The O's daily circulation is down, folks, and it ain't never coming back.
The future belongs to platforms (a detestable word) such as Substack. I would happily pay $5 a month to get deep, thorough, investigative reporting on City Hall. Someone will do it...and they'll clean up.
There are, according to the last memo Substack management sent to writers, publications on the 'Stack pulling in $-millions. Alec Berenson, the go-to guy for Covid news, once dropped that he has 1.5-million subs. Do the math.
The market awaits.
The NY Times and the Washington Post still get to choose from the cream of the cream of the Ivies. That's why all of their reporters who speak on podcasts sound like hot-house flowers in their early 20s who grew up in a major East Coast urban center with accomplished upper-middle parents and who have never known anyone who didn't go to college, much less attend public school. They've purged juvenile tics such as "like" and "you know" from their speech, but apart from sex-related differences in tone and inflection, they all have the same chirpy, self-satisfied and know-it-all manner of delivery.
And then there are the obvious diversity hires.
Studs Terkel must be spinning in his grave.
Every hothouse-flower navel-gazer, every West-hating (read: parent-hating) dilettante, every twenty-six year-old basement idler, every shallow, entitled modern hedonist, is "anti-bullying" in the sense wrought by a few generations of ingrates living in a society with unprecedented, unrivalled comfort, security and freedom, built on the labor and sacrifice of those of every sort who went before. That anti-"bullying" credo, the grand legacy of the Sixties in a nutshell?
If it feels good, you have the right to do it; if it doesn't feel good, you have the right not to do it.
With guidance from our nobly resentful non-white, non-cishet American identitarians, let's invert E Pluribus Unum. It should not be, "out of many, one", but "out of one, many". Heck, a house divided SHOULD fall. No house at all is better....well, so long as access to anonymous orgies, streaming services (those are different) food stamps and historical fabulism remains unimpeded.
Ill prolly say something insightful later but I have a newsflash:
The U.N. has identified excrement issues with the houseless as remisnicent of Jim Crowe. The quotation below supplied by Takimag:
"Catarina de Albuquerque sounds like a New Mexico drag queen. But in fact she’s the U.N.’s “sanitation czarina.” And last week she penned an op-ed for the L.A. Times in which she castigated Americans for not allowing the homeless to defecate wherever they please."
https://www.sanitationandwaterforall.org/about/about-us/governance/chief-executive-officer
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-07-11/public-bathroom-access-cities-homeless-trans