Pirate Media™ and Potholes

Ruminating on two blips in reality

Our invocation comes from Tina Brown, legendary editor of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, quoted in the New York Times…

“Things can change very, very quickly in America. It’s one of the reasons I love living in America. It’s an exciting place. The whole mood can change overnight. All of a sudden, people will just turn around and say, Look, I don’t want you deciding how my life is going to go.”

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I stopped by a neighbor’s house today and picked up one of those No ODOT Tax petitions and, after signing it, asked a bunch of my neighbors if they’d like to join me. This was odd, since I firmly believe that the Democratic Party has an unbreakable stranglehold on Oregon (mostly because of Portland’s goofy voters), and that resistance is beyond pointless.

That’s because I’ve lived in a couple of cities burdened with political machines (the classic: Chicago; also Philadelphia under a Mafia mayor), and saw how impossible it was for mere citizens to get out from under the pols’ thumbs, since every avenue of reform is cut off: prosecutors, courts, legislature, everything. In Chicago, for example, there was an official Republican party, but it was kept alive by the Democrats just to clog up the ballot. It’s not quite that bad in Oregon, but no one (except the rustics outside the cities) really thinks there’s a viable political career—which involves winning things—outside the Democratic Machine.

Oregon’s machine isn’t run by a Daley or Boss Tweed; instead it’s a rock-hard coalition of unions looking to elect their putative bosses, nonprofits on the make, racial hustlers, and Eastern moneybags who like to run proof-of-concept experiments on the rubes out in the sticks. This makes the machine resilient and hydra-headed. Maddeningly so.

The optimists among us, however, sensed that the agony of the ODOT funding mess and special session of money that wasn’t there and suddenly was, along with GuvTina’s thuggery, might just connect voters with what’s being extorted from their pockets. Maybe the steady march of increasing taxation and lower services has hit a certain “Enough already” moment.

Which prompted a sudden burst of optimism: Maybe this time something will actually happen on our side of the ledger. After all, when Richard J. Daley died, his Machine staggered on, until the fateful day when a blizzard buried the city (nothing unusual) and the city government didn’t do anything to dig the citizenry out. And then…

Enough, already!

Those moments aren’t predictable; voters are motivated by weird things, but…maybe.

Thus far, there’s room for optimism: the No Taxes campaign has been fast out of the starting gate (despite our governor’s clumsy attempt to derail it with parliamentary maneuvers). Here’s one pirate media example…

Not bad for openers.

Beyond the promising numbers, a few things stood out in the campaign:

First, if you read the social media pitches, most of the petition-signings are taking place beyond the progressive fortress of Portland…

…which suggests that there is more than outrage at GuvTina’s arm-twisting and arrogant “first I’ll go to Japan before I sign the law and let people gather signatures” ploy in play. Granted, it was typical Kotek: direct, brutal, and shifty; nothing new for the people in Salem who have followed her career—such as the purge of the Liquor Control bureaucracy (aka, “Bourbongate”) as a distraction for the scandal brewing with the marijuana barons who dumped last-minute money into her flagging campaign.

Then again, maybe there’s a bigger target for downstaters’ ire: Portland and its malign influence on life beyond the “city that works.” It might have occurred to many of the petition-signers that the lion’s share of the last-minute ODOT dough would go to a gigantic straightening of the notorious I-5 Crush in Portland. Some might even have noticed that a big, $-multi-million “cap” over the freeway would be offered up—free!—to the hinky Albina Vision Trust to build a whole new neighborhood to somehow duplicate a black ghetto that was bought out to build a place for the city’s only major league sports team.

And there’s moolah for the never-to-be-built Columbia Crossing bridge; helpful, mostly, to commuters moving to no-income-tax Washington state. And to hell with any other transportation issues anywhere else in the state.

Or maybe the typical downstater didn’t know any of this stuff, but simply looked at Portland and hated the little city’s pretensions, fondness for anarchy, phobias, trans-this-n-that-ism, and bums threatening to slop over the city limits. Or maybe they looked around at the closed lumber mills and thought: It was urban environmentalists who did this and then walked away and left the wreckage behind for us to clean up. Or maybe they noted that Tina came straight out of the city’s Democratic rotten boroughs—don’t people in Portland ever get their act together and vote against their overlords?

Who knows…maybe it’s all because climate change is frying suburban brains.

Which poses another question: will Portland’s stupid votes slop over and overwhelm down-staters when it comes time to fill in bubbles on mail-in ballots? It has happened before. How else to explain our current crop of people going to Washington (and perhaps even taking up residence in New York, an easier commute)?

Whatever the reason for what’s going on and how it might turn out, there’s no doubt that the numbers are real; it will almost certainly reach its goal of 100,000 (to overwhelm the Machine secretary of state’s inevitable effort to kick out signatures).

Follow-up thinking is already appearing…

…which marks the movement’s hidden bonus: the petition drive has benefited (and been largely created by) the state’s Pirate Media™, the loose confederation of online sites that have cropped up in the past three or four years, and which started as individuals taking advantage of free communications with direct-to-the-reader delivery, coupled with ferocious word of mouth. It’s safe to say that most of the fans/readers are the sort of folks who don’t display their radical lifestyle whims, don’t vote like robots for neo-commies, and who think that “equity” is a license to cheat or extort them and their friends. They mostly shut up and pay taxes that always seem to ratchet up while Portland sucks up resources.

Enough, already!

At this writing, The Oregonian has yet to admit, in print, that there is a widespread petition campaign going on that, almost certainly, involves many more people than the exhibitionists down at ICEcapades. Whose every performance has been leading the paper for over a month.

One of its recent articles…

…made frequent mention of naughty behavior by the hated feds…

Latino and other immigrant communities have reported being terrified as masked, armed agents have pulled people — including U.S. citizens and others with legal status — out of cars and apartments and have made arrests in front of businesses, at parks and near schools. Many of the arrests have been made without judicial warrants and in violent ways.

…although reporter Gosia Wozniacka didn’t actually quantify the “many,” nor did she mention that her main source, the Portland Immigrant Rights Coalition, is an advocacy organization with an axe to grind. Nor did she bother to note that the arrested were in custody because they had violated US immigration laws.

But, implicit in Gosia’s prose was: Portland is a nullification city, which obeys federal law only when it gives a damn. Just like Orville Faubus, when the Supreme Court told him to desegregate the schools in Arkansas. No big deal.

WillyWeek ignored the insurrection, although its former publisher’s nonprofit Oregon Journalism Project, starring ace head-hunter Nigel Jaquiss, was supposed to cover state politics like a blanket. Nigel was more interested in a stalled apartment project in Bend.

It’s an indication that the days when the New York-owned Oregonian and the aging alternative WillyWeek can set the coverage agenda are drawing to a close. The Pirates’ numbers are real. Good riddance.

Veteran readers of this ‘stack are aware that PBOT is viewed around here with deep skepticism, as it slathers hundreds of gallons of paint—and $-millions—on street projects of dubious sanity. And y’all also know that I wonder why no one at PBOT seems interested in paving the city’s notorious 50-miles of gravel streets, an issue that concerns me because I live on one. Just a coincidence.

Damndest thing happened a week or so ago—which made me wonder if someone in the vast, opaque PBOT bureaucracy is a PortlandDissent subscriber. An immense truck arrived early in the morning and dumped oiled gravel here and there…

…while a young woman on a strange-looking device tamped the anthills down into the street’s axle-busting potholes…

It was a wonderful display. Oddly, the block to the south of me—with even more daunting chuck-holes…

…somehow missed the treatment.

But—hey!!!—my little patch was smooth as a baby’s bottom.

For about four days…

Reincarnation!

Enough, already!