Portland and the Trans-valuation of Values

Via James LaFond's blog, here's Portlander Tony on Saturday's citywide political dispute:

 I believe your pioneering efforts in the art or crowbar fighting have begun to gain some converts here in Portland. Antifa smashed a guy in the head downtown yesterday with a crowbar. Too bad no video. The boys in black masks are getting more violent. The current liberal craze is to dump milkshakes in the faces of people they disagree with. Here in Portland, the milkshakes are made with quick dry concrete. Makes for some nice chemical burns. I am predicting a short term escalation of violence over the summer. Once someone finally gets killed, I think they’ll all get scared and stay home for a while.

There was a trailer parked on Foster by the used tire store on 60th yesterday, being used as a platform for a billboard, encouraging people to go downtown and join the revolution. The funny thing, after the shit downtown was all over, I get off work and go grocery shopping at winco. There’s all sorts of antifa there, doing their shopping, I could just tell, they were dressed like punk rockers (playing dress up), and looked haggard like they’d been running around downtown all day. Anyway, a lot of them were couples. I’m kinda watching them, and they’re all the most prissy kind of men. Asking their girl what the right kind of vegetable to get with all the rice they have at home, following behind their women, bagging the groceries while the women pay the bill, the whole scene was kinda funny to me. Like, a couple hours ago, these dudes were throwing shit at the cops and screaming “FUCK YOU FACIST! I’LL KICK YOUR ASS!!!”, and now here they are, following their women around like servants. 

My impression is that for many "antifascist" protest is a moral holiday, a Mardi Gras of sanctimony.

Hilarious inversion: where drunkenness and debauchery would be indulged, and celebrated, now moral righteousness is indulged, and celebrated.

Drunkenness and debauchery aren't much restricted any more, after all; even celebrated--indeed, debauchery is now a sub-theme of "antifascist" demonstrations. Individual characters appear as if directly from the pride parade. Walking artifacts they are, of their origins in early gay pride demonstrations where their appearance was in fact transgressive. Now that's inverted, and their appearance on the streets of Portland Saturday, as in any corporate-sponsored pride event, is more an expression of power.

The moral holiday releases angst acquired conforming to social convention. The social order these angry antifascists have been conforming to is very much the one they demand, and loudly. Indeed, their problem Saturday was that somewhere in their town a couple dozen "fascists" were openly flouting that order.

They'll never see it (irony isn't really their thing) but I think I do: the very things they demand, sexual liberation, diversity, feminism, drugs, drugs, drugs, are making them sick. They are immersed in it, encouraged by unending propaganda and discouraged from dissent--by such as the shaming rituals they take part in when they march, positively warning them: from this social order there is no escape.
They're trapped.

So they are as ill-equipped to self-diagnose as a pre-modern man enduring a disease yet to be discovered. Like him they look for explanations wherever they can. They don't have to imagine a sympathetic relationship between their deep unhappiness and some aspect of nature.
They have us. And they are turned upon us by the same social order that is making them sick to their souls. By people invested in that order--by the people who profit from our disease.

So yes, my progressive friends. There are people out there who deserve your wrath.

Chillstream, 12/9/18: So Much Losing

My YouTube channel.

The Last Days of Democracy

Somehow I'd missed it, but earlier this week the group Patriot Prayer, a conservative Christian body in the Proud Boys sphere, rallied across from Portland City Hall and were attacked by armed and masked antifa.

Despite being explicitly not white nationalist, the group triggers with its support for Trump and explicit Christian conservativism, drawing violent antifa as surely as a KKK rally.

The demonstration took place a year after the group gathered in the same small park downtown for a "free speech" rally, as this one was billed. That event came off without incident only because of a high police presence cordoning off the conservatives from antifa (openly promising violence) and others barely less hostile. See my video of that demonstration below.

Still, the news reports range from deliberately to unintentionally biased. Everyone deploys the same passive description ("fights broke out") to describe a clear assault by one group on another. Even if the description is plausible--say, the two groups came into contact and individual skirmishes were prompted by both sides--the reality is, the conservatives, left alone, would have peacefully left. As they've demonstrated time and again, when they're allowed. It isn't as if in the absence of antifa and their kind the Patriot Prayer guys would have gone rampaging through the city.

Despite this obvious fact, antifa and the respectable local left invoke, with ramped-up intensity, the standard canard that a "homophobic" or "racist" person or group represents an immediate threat of violence. And then antifa comes along to initiate violence. Progressive hysterics connecting gay-bashing to any resistance to, for one, sexual degeneracy have become accepted wisdom wherever pc reigns, which is everywhere; these hysterics are source and justification for political violence. The Establishment is complicit in political violence, in Weimar-ish street battles.

There are no countering reports in the mainstream media and the lazy normie reader is not roused from his slumber. The report from putatively conservative Fox News is indistinguishable from the others, only it's shorter and the reporter appears to have derived it entirely from social media.

Here's the $PLC take.

Still Life and Live Painting

"Is that the Whiskey Bar back there?" I asked the only other guy to turn up at the wrought iron gate leading to an alley behind the bar I'd found locked earlier.

"Yeah. You don't go in this way though. The front doors open at ten."

"I see."

Someone had told me the event began at nine, so arriving a half hour late to convey a casual attitude was now arriving a half hour early, conveying the bored desperation of a loner, or revealing it, if you want the truth.

We talked for a bit; he seemed to take me for just another regular or would-be regular. Doesn't he see how old I am? Probably, but not just how old. But one thing about Portland, it's less weird here for someone my age to show up at a club. At least I think so, and have been told as much; I haven't any real frame of reference. I hadn't been out to a proper nightclub in over a decade, I surmised.

"Wednesdays are a little weird." He said.

"I don't know. A friend of a friend is doing some thing here, so I came out. I thought it started at nine."

Turned out he was one of the artists for the live-painting event.

"So you know Tasha, then?"

"A friend of hers from work. I've never been here before." I don't know why I felt the need to explain myself.

Another guy showed up, a friend of the first. He immediately starts in about his new tattoo, a calf-job under a sheen of Vaseline. He doesn't know how many tattoos he has. Maybe forty. More and more people claim to have lost count.

"I have no ink." I confess at some point. I've been talking to the second guy as if I belong here--he has no idea who I am and takes it for granted. Turns out he's another one of the artists; he's the third. I help him carry his stuff--an unremarkable pattern on a canvas with which I assume he's going to do something interesting, some effect-lights, materials. I skip the cover charge by playing roadie like this.

"You need a stamp." The first artist said, just after I had decided I would go back up front and do this, and that it would be a good move, for which I would now get no credit.

He doesn't know how to take me, I can tell. No one does. But I'm more at ease having established rapport already, and with two of the performers, such as they were. The place is nearly empty, and that's just as well, too; the music is typical current club dance music, which I have no ability to categorize. Even when I stayed current with electronic music years ago I could not, would not, bring myself up to speed on the categories. I could not tell jungle from house, and still can't. Drum and bass is easy enough, though I don't really understand that it's all built around the "amen chorus". I recognize it when I hear it. The music is as seductive as it is idiotic, throbbing through the empty club.

About a half hour in the turnout was looking to be poor for the night. A pair in animal pajamas danced at one end of the floor, a guy who looked to be in his thirties, wearing a warm-up jacket is doing break-dance moves at the other.

The friend who invited me showed up. She's young, very young. Immediately it's awkward. I had expected a full house: I would see her, maybe not right away, we'd chat a little and that would be it. I would see her a couple of times more in the evening, have the friendly, shallow exchange I was good at, and that would be it. Now, here I am, having arrived early, the place is empty and she can't escape me, maybe she didn't even expect me to show up in the first place. To top it off I went in for a hug, that she did not intend, awkwardly and all but forcing it on her, spilling my beer in the process. I feel compelled to mention the awkwardness. But it's okay. I tell her I've been hanging out with the artists, maybe that will help. It's okay. I'm not a stalker! I'm not a weirdo! She shuffles off with an apologetic air.

Later I see her at the bar and recover somewhat. It's all like a journey back in time; nothing has changed from the days when all this meant something. Nothing is on the line now--I'm just trying to get out of the house--but it feels more fraught than ever. Just like years ago, in my head it's a campaign of reverses, advances, uncertain meanings, like a war with an opponent who may not even care that one's being waged. Nothing changes, even after everything has changed.

The friend of a friend shows up later--I do not know her well--and there's a quick embrace. She sees it; good, see, I'm not a stalker! I'm not a weirdo! I just don't know how to act. I never learned how to act--that is I don't know how to behave--I'm acting all the time, even when I'm alone. Was it still the goal--was it ever the goal--behind all of this, "going out", meeting people, love, sex, relationships, that one should meet someone with whom they no longer had to act? Or was it just me? I don't think I had even the good sense to pursue that hopeless goal with real conviction. If it happened, it happened, I thought, as I thought about everything else. Whatever the case, I never found it.

The first two artists made desultory and indistinguishable changes to the mostly complete canvases they brought in; there was no relation to the music. I had seen something years ago on television where a guy did a quick painting of Jimi Hendrix to a playing of some Hendrix standard (probably "Purple Haze"); by the time the song's over he's finished. I had thought this would be something like that, gimmicky as it was it would be worth seeing. Tasha does much better, opening up a sketch book and improvising ink-drawings from scratch, showing more talent and imagination than the other two.

The place never filled up, but that's okay; I got to talk to a young beautiful woman for much of the night. It's also okay she had nothing better to do and I served as a sort of backstop to a disappointing evening. She tells me all about herself, the way people do to half-strangers; I don't know. I'm consumed with how I'm perceived by everyone, right now it's this person who in a few short months will be gone from my life like countless other people I never really got to know. They so outnumber the true intimates, who are so few and precious, that any single one of them--this charming, beautiful, messed up kid whose only interest for me lies in this selfish need--feels like a dread weight I can no longer carry. I wonder if this is cause or effect of my solitary life.

 She invited me to hang out with some of the other youngsters after, but I thought it would be better to quit while I was ahead. Later I excused myself and fumbled the goodnight, just as I fumbled the hello, knowing the quick hug was probably out, but the awareness of it was there in the air. I don't even like the quick hug routine so much--I just don't know how to act.

I spent the next day in a typical psychological funk--a day shorter than last time--ruminating over how I came off, how pathetic it is that I care, how it probably means nothing to these other people whose image of me is so important and so meaningless at the same time. Plus ca change.

But I will get out of the house more, and drink less.

 

Punk and Politics

I was at the bar at Kelly's Olympian in downtown Portland for three pints of Irish stout before I realized the leftist fundraiser in the next room was already in progress. Unaware of the live show annex next door, I had thought they were going to set up somewhere in the back of the bar. Why I didn't take note of the muffled, loud, obviously live music coming through the wall is just my oblivious nature. I walk about in a bubble; my consciousness barely extends beyond arm's reach even, or especially, when I'm out. But I still long to get out, even if only to trade escaping myself for escaping other people. Sometimes you long to be alone in the midst of the crowd, if only to fool yourself that you're not really alone.

On the televisions at the bar it's all sports, you wouldn't even know it was Oscar night. I'm in that awkward limbo of waiting for someone and feeling as if I need to justify my presence to people who are barely taking notice of me. The bar is unpretentious enough. Occasionally I can't help but look at the television in front of me showing professional basketball. The players look more alien than ever, radiating the same dull and sullen hostility I recall, and though I can't hear it, I know the announcer's repartee is an incongruous, oblivious counterpart of white earnest cluelessness. Baseball is available at the other end of the bar for a dignified alternative, but I'm intent on not sitting here watching television, so I keep looking around, looking to the door, smiling at the waitresses.

After figuring out the show was already in progress I waited through a few more songs before seeking it out. The show was almost over so the Nice White Lady at the door waved me in.

I went inside to find a tight middle-aged punk band playing for maybe a dozen people. They later claimed to have raised a couple hundred for the ACLU.

The angry refrain: "our town", presumably intended for Donald Trump and reactionaries like me, makes the only discernible lyric. I imagine the song might as easily as not be something from their past initially intended to parody the territorialism of working class whites, now being repurposed to rage against the intrusion of Trump and his working class white support.

Territorialism is very much a feature of the politics and culture of the city now. I'm welcome as long as I keep my mouth, mostly, shut. But that's okay. I'm not a proselyte. I'm a witness.

Tonight it's a "live painting" at the Whiskey Bar. Should be interesting.