My adopted home town of Portland, Oregon is once again in the international headlines, and this calls for a little primer.
I'm going to cover a lot of ground in this piece, and I suspect there may be some folks reading it who have no idea who I am, so by way of establishing a little bit of credibility to start with, for those people: I'm a professional touring musician, I've been involved in that way and in other capacities with the labor, environmental, antiwar and Palestine solidarity movements for many decades, both across the US and internationally. I've lived in Portland since my eldest daughter was one, 18 years ago. My fan base is largely young, American, and leftwing, disproportionately including a lot of the sorts of folks who are currently protesting in front of the ICE building, the folks who were protesting in very similar circumstances for much of 2020 and 2021 at the Justice center, and the folks who have tended to be part of what was for a long time commonly known of as the Black Bloc.
Intro over.
Are you alright?
Since the Israeli military started slaughtering every child, woman and man in Gaza in October, 2023, I've been very distracted with news coming out of that part of the world. I do also pay a lot of attention to what's happening in the US, but I rarely get any news through partisan sources like Fox or MSNBC, who mostly editorialize idiotically. I'm much more interested in reporters on the ground reporting, and doing the interpreting of it all by means other than the liberal or conservative punditry channels.
So although I was aware Trump was sending hundreds more ICE officers to Portland and was talking about sending in soldiers as well (which is now apparently happening), for me this was a news story that I was hearing alongside stories of the latest massacre of starving children in Gaza City, the prospect of a war starting between Russia and NATO, and the worsening housing crisis up and down the west coast and so many other places.
For many people, though, Trump's latest pronouncements involving sending troops to Portland to protect ICE, along with angry protests and police brutality in front of the ICE building, have completely dominated their news cycle, as well as their social media.
My social media is still largely a Gaza solidarity echo chamber. But looking at the hash tags and such, I see what many people are probably seeing much more of, and the many "are you alright?" messages I've received from people from all over the world over the past couple days make much more sense.
Looking at the memes about Portland people are sharing from various perspectives, like social media posts generally, they're almost always extremely simplistic and inaccurate, wherever on the political spectrum they're coming from.
From the right I see a lot of characterizations of Portland as a dangerous, dysfunctional place. From the liberals I see lots of stuff about how Portland and the whole region is paradise on Earth.
The major social media platforms all use algorithms that promote sensationalistic content, regardless of its accuracy. Content that provokes an emotional reaction. So we are of course seeing lots of footage of the incidents of police violence in front of the ICE building, and not the hundreds of thousands of people peacefully sleeping in quiet, tree-lined neighborhoods in much of the rest of the city.
Whether it's the media or social media, there is so much incentive to show those same scenes of violence over and over again, along with the "Portland paradise" ones -- with commentary, of course. The reality is not especially reflected in this kind of coverage, however.
War zone vs. paradise
By the standards of the EU, China, or Japan, every major city in the USA is a war zone. More people were killed by gun violence in Portland last year than in the entire nation of Germany.
But beyond the violence is the poverty. The poverty is what makes every major city on the west coast look like a refugee camp, but one without basic amenities.
The poverty is often very relative. It's increasingly very easy to be too poor to afford housing in this city. My own family's rent has tripled since we moved into this apartment building 18 years ago. We are far from alone in that. Those lacking in the kind of increased resources we have managed to come up with to stay housed in this city are living on the streets all around us.
I'm actually not sure how those people making the "Portland paradise" videos even managed to find such panoramic scenes of beauty to film around the waterfront area without getting lots of tents and people lying on the sidewalks in the picture.
Across the US since 2020 the rents have increased by 30%, I believe is the statistic. Portland has easily kept up with that trend, and rents have gone from high to unaffordable, for so many. The disruption in the social fabric of the city has been easy to observe, with family after family leaving our neighborhood (inner Southeast) and moving to the exurbs and beyond, while others increasingly move into the vehicles and tents that line our streets.
The housing crisis and accompanying social disruption in Portland and across Oregon, Washington, California and beyond lies squarely on the shoulders of the Democratic Party leadership -- these are basically one-party states, and have long been thus. The opportunity to regulate the housing market has been there the whole time, the examples of how this can be done are staring us in the face in various other countries that do housing so much better than we do, but everything just continues to deteriorate, with all the campaign promises made by Democratic Party leaders year after year continually broken, lofty goals never met.
So, although large parts of the city do resemble a refugee camp, very much including much of downtown, it probably doesn't resemble a war zone, at least by Texas standards. To the extent that it does, this has very little to do with Antifa, and a whole lot to do with the housing crisis, and the inability of every level of government to end it.
In any case, if you focus your attention exclusively within a two-block radius of the ICE building, it certainly looks like a scene where someone could get killed any minute now, just like the Justice center did in 2020, where people were, in fact, both maimed and killed -- before, during, and after Trump administration #1 sent federal goons to Portland back then.
The Antifa equation
As much as I'm seeing the paradise vs. war zone memes, I'm seeing the familiar virtuous protester vs. criminal rioter memes all over the place.
As is so strongly encouraged by the medium of social media, the memes are usually very simplistic, with many people going with the idea that "antifa" just means "antifascism," and downplaying the elements of violence or property destruction as rightwing propaganda. Other equally simplistic imagery seeks to portray anyone involved with protesting ICE as violent agents of chaos and destruction.
At various times and places, such as in Portland twenty years ago, protests would often involve art and music and other efforts to represent in inviting ways what people stood for. This tendency has all but disappeared in the modern era now, and when we're talking about what is happening now at the ICE building and what was going on five years ago at the Justice center, we're talking largely about a few dozen masked, black-clad young folks chanting slogans and shouting obscenities at the police, as well as in some cases mocking and trying hard to goad the police into attacking them.
Even having any kind of sustained presence of a few dozen people shouting at the police requires a huge amount of media and social media coverage. In 2020 what I discovered here in Portland was at least half of the folks involved with the protests were protest tourists, coming to the city because it was the place to go if you wanted to be in the center of the action, as portrayed by the blanket media/social media coverage what they called the racial justice movement was getting then. Many had not been in town more than a couple of months.
The way the more liberal ends of the media were portraying protests in 2020, if some windows got smashed and some dumpsters got burned, that was just par for the course. They'd call that a "mostly peaceful" protest back then.
Once upon a time, the element among those inclined to be protesting in the streets in these particular sorts of ways did not represent a majority view among protesters, and could often be reasoned with to adopt different tactics that we all agreed upon. With the age of social media this changed, and what became known as "diversity of tactics" became a pretty dominant idea. Diversity of tactics means if someone wants to throw rocks at the police or burn dumpsters while other people are trying to do nonviolent civil disobedience, that's OK, it's diversity, so it's good. Who's against diversity?
With this idea becoming prevalent and being backed up by groups like Rose City Antifa here in Portland, protest movements that crop up tend to get stifled pretty quickly by this atmosphere, where you never know if some yahoo thinks that the event you're organizing needs a smashed window and a burning dumpster to add to the scene. Under this kind of influence, protesting against authors or journalists some people don't like seemed to become much more commonplace here than protesting against greedy corporations or authoritarian or imperialist policies of the government.
So we are then left with the idea that being a protester means dressing in black, often wearing a mask, blocking the streets and yelling obscenities at police. And then we are left with people feeling like they either need to say, with feeling, "I am Antifa, too," and perhaps even go and engage with this kind of protest themselves, or people denouncing Antifa for being terrorists.
Forward motion
What we used to know in this country, and what most of the rest of the world still knows now, is for a social movement to grow and have impact, it needs to be a very inviting one, with a vision for the alternative society it seeks to manifest. It needs to communicate well, which means it needs to be a very artistic, musical movement, and it needs to be the sort of movement that will genuinely cause the opposition to question what they're doing, in a way that shouting obscenities at cops will never do.
If we could manage to form a movement like that, that doesn't get bogged down by provocateurs or other factors, then we'd need to grapple with basic questions, and have answers for them that aren't just oppositional in nature. For example, many of the folks protesting at the ICE building really do believe in what the rightwingers say they believe in when it comes to taking down national borders. The liberal politicians running the city would rather avoid the issue by not enforcing immigration laws.
Now would seem to be the time for a third position to come to the fore from somewhere that is rooted in some way in practical thinking rather than just moralizing, involving people who understand how immigration has always been used as a tool by the capitalists to divide the working class in this and other countries, just as creating an underclass of super-exploited undocumented workers has been a divide-and-conquer tactic, and a very profitable one.
Rounding up the undocumented workers and deporting them all, along with whoever else the administration decides to target, is yet another tried-and-true, longstanding divide-and-conquer tactic that goes back to the days of the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Anarchist Exclusion Act, and the Palmer Raids.
All we're going to get from the vast majority of the media and social media most of us are regularly exposed to is more black-and-white thinking -- immigration good or immigration bad, Antifa good or Antifa bad, pick your strawman and hold on tight.
How we form the kind of movement that can communicate effectively, that harnesses art and music effectively, that can grow instead of eat itself alive, is a complicated question, especially in the face of obstacles like corporate and (anti-)social media being so prevalent and powerful. But the first step in the process of changing the paradigm, presumably, is understanding what paradigm we're operating with right now, and the one we're operating with now, it seems to me, is broken.
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