Do Your Part
Portland, "White Lotus," snottiness as tactic
I spent part of the weekend trying to find out what was happening on the ground in Portland, what with reports of Proud Boys and antifa and Christian preachers and a turncoat DA prepping for what was billed as Ideological Showdown Redux but which looked to me like people trying to get the feeling again.
The pandemic took many things and it gave things too, including giving the nightly rioters in Portland (and elsewhere) a way to feel both punk rock and purposeful. I’ve written previously about how getting out into the streets summer/fall 2020 provided a “nightly spurt of relief,” relief that, as the pandemic went from a novel thing you subversively navigated to a reality we all trudged through every day, provided less hotness, you were now having the affair in public; as actor Steve Zahn put it in White Lotus, “It doesn’t matter how much role-playing you do, sex just turns into one of those food challenges where they gotta eat like a bowl of live worms.”
I am always hoping for the live-worm stage when it comes to confrontation among groups, while at the same time having the human attraction to conflict, to the unknown, to what is fulminating now and comes next. It is also my job to do this, and something I can really really really get het up about not seeing in last year’s reporting on Portland, on this year’s reporting on Cuomo, on any issue where people see an advantage to smelting down stories and pouring them into molds that build the ideological fence. To which my first reaction is, oh fuck off, until Nice Nancy shows up and wonders, why so swayable? What are people afraid of? And do they take responsibility for making others afraid and what this ushers in?
I thought of this last night, and what my responsibility might be, when I saw some people on Twitter stoking the embers of last year’s conflict in Portland. They all have reason to keep the narrative going, as well as to present themselves as wholly innocent. Getting into weeds of why each person believes as they do is both too constellatory and too boring and maybe sad to get into here. But there is a dereliction of duty, 100%, on the parts of journalists who corrupt facts in order to scare to people into supporting their chosen position, and I will fight them, every day.
I also saw last night people I admire having been swayed by reporting that, if not corrupt, is incomplete. I’ve written about how this happens. But since Portland again seems to be trying to nudge its way onto the stage and since we do not know what will happen, until I am there again next week I offer some context thus far. Look at the pieces or don’t. Believe them or don’t. I am doing my best here.
“The Dream of the 90’s Died in Portland” offers some semi-current context…
“Destruction and Hope in Portland,” which ran earlier this month in Persuasion, brings us up to date as of late June. “Good Luck, Portland,” from Tablet in August 2019, shows how the city primed itself the city for what happened in 2020 and how young people especially were looking to form a team. A clip:
Young people, bless them, have a way of circumventing even the best of times and, like the milk from the goat they kept in their front yard, things turned pretty sour pretty quick. Those who’d come to Portland expecting a plug-and-play lifestyle of cheap rent and a part-time barista gig while playing in a band found the model did not work, though whose fault this was remained unclear.
Engineers need to be confident in their commitment to facts, one degree off and disaster.
Revolutionaries require no such fealty, require the opposite: say the lines, do what we tell you, all will be well. It never ends well. That those demonstrating in Portland think of themselves as revolutionaries, and some of them do, is remarkable, in that their weapons are so fragile (and, per live worm reference, may they stay that way).
The day after Biden was elected, I marched though downtown Portland with antifa & co. After ignoring the Black Lives Matter organizer who urged them, "Stop standing separately and get the fuck over here!", I watched them break the windows of a dozen businesses. They did this by rote: window, break, whatever.
As I kicked through a pile of glass, I was stopped by a very small young man.
“You work for Andy Ngo,” he told me. I told him, I did not; that my name was Nancy Rommelmann and I reported for Reason—
“You’re his photographer,” he said, or something to that effect, in the nasal pitch I had grown used to hearing all summer, a lot of the black bloc kids being very young and affecting a tone my friend Michael Moynihan sometimes calls “the NPR voice.”
The young man went on: He knew who I was, he had never heard of me, I was a fash, I was a fake reporter. He said all this with a little cat-grin, his back against the freshly-smashed windows of Wild Fang, and I thought, there’s little I like less than passive-aggressive snottiness, but also, how lame that this dude could not string together two coherent ideas, while knowing also, of course, that this was the tactic.
[“Note that the woke girls literally never respond when the parents, calmly and reasonably, push back,” Michael said last night, as we were texting about White Lotus.]
I grew bored of the little dude and turned away, directly into a scrum of five or six of his friends, who encircled me and, each with their phones filming me, starting talking at once: I was a fascist, I was a Nazi, I was nothing, who did I think I was, low laughs, snicker snicker, the scene deflated for me faster than the one with little dude and I turned away, directly into the path of an Oregonian reporter, who said it was good to meet me and started instantly to talk shop, upon which the five or six slinked away, the advent of actual industry or one-on-one conversation apparently being too intimidating. Or maybe they found it boring, or had taken as an article of faith to find anything that required difficult and sustained and quiet action boring, thereby freeing them from doing that work.
Peter Savodnik wrote a magnificent article about how many of us have abdicated the responsibility of doing the difficult and sustained and quiet work. I’d love to cut-and-paste all of, “After the Fall,” which published this morning on Bari Weiss’s Substack, but a clip will give you a taste:
We were relieved we no longer had to have difficult conversations — one could simply ghost or delete or block — but we started to think this might not be healthy. Difficult conversations, after all, were important and good, and they instilled character. They made us more real. We yearned for the days before high-speed and we talked endlessly about the importance of authenticity. The truth is, we just missed it.
Then we discovered that almost everyone under 30 had no idea what we were talking about. This was when we knew we were in trouble.
Go read the whole thing.
No baking this week, but I will tonight be talking food, over on the Paloma Media YouTube channel (go subscribe, won’t you?) with Jeff Miller, chef/owner of Rosella, whose opening during a pandemic has been, whew doggie, I’ll let him tell you, but a taste.
That’s tonight, Monday, August 22 at 8pm EST. Until then, all the kisses xx