Vices of Stumptown

Portland is proud of vice. Gluten-free lap dances and Shanghai tunnels all. Less proud of all the human trafficking that still goes on.

I returned to Portland for the holidays. The New York Times seems to believe that “difficult conversations with family” are now a mandatory component of holiday visits, and (if I’m giving myself too much credit) out of real holiday caritas, I’m prepared to go fantasize about myself like Saint Anthony.

Okay, there are a couple of vices I think Portlanders have. To the extent it’s appropriate, I’m going to try to heal them. And, to learn from the Desert Fathers, healing your hometown’s vices should be a matter of self-purification as much as anything. I plead personally guilty to both of the mistakes I list below, and offer my own experiences as a specimen, although I think both mistakes evince a way in which the young men of Portland have been encouraged in misguided efforts. I’ll do my best to provide what I think has been my own route to self-forgiveness and to strengthen the pride I feel in the values the city taught me.

There’s a unifying, and I think timely, theme here. Portland, start taking yourself seriously. The city has an intellect that it seems to be in the unfortunate habit of suppressing. For a while, I think we suppressed intellect for the sake of being cute, non-judgmental, and all that. There have been some pretty serious problems in the last two years that seem to have put an end to that. Mingus Mapps I have to call out as a real hero of reason in the last few elections, but outside of his example I sense a real fear of speaking up. Let’s try to find a bit more confidence in the new year.

1. Theater of Constructed Novelty

Portlanders like to share new discoveries with the community. Sometimes the thrill of showing off a new discovery shows a lack of imagination or intellect about what it means to “discover” something. Or perhaps it shows an unwillingness to learn about the world for fear of losing the potential to be “open-minded” about new things. Portland is, the burghers would like to believe, the most open-minded city in the world. It’s full of people who make it a commitment to learn from every culture, to be well-traveled, and to be welcoming to all persons from all parts of the world. Portlanders (including myself) have punished ourselves to I think a gratuitous degree whenever a “discovery” ends up being a result of exoticism. I think it’s straightforward enough to try to heal this one by holding ourselves honestly to intellectual standards appropriate the to intellectual abilities we constantly pride ourselves on.

Residents often imagine Portland as a little sober utopia that’s innocent to the mistakes of the outside world, and it’s surfaced in the last decade what a dark side this tendency has. You can see a penchant for utopianism in the state’s history — specifically, the government tried to exterminate the existing residents in the 1850s and to constitutionally ban in the 1880s any new ones who aren’t white — and in commercials like the famous “enjoy your visit, and please don’t stay.” We’ve also long been a place where newspapers and magazines have been wildly competitive and salacious enterprises, even by the standards of the publishing industry. With Portland’s most recent boom of 2010–2020, the city has become more diverse and there have been several viral stories about the racist excesses of our penchant for the exotic, as well as a number of embarrassing examples where parochial Portlanders’ idea of “exotic” ends up just being immigrant communities in Portland. The predictable reaction has been self-flagellation and competitive shaming by the white burghers, whose newfound love of decrying possible cultural appropriation has become the stuff of much satire.

I refer specifically to the 2015-era meltdown about the cultural appropriateness of white chefs “discovering” Mexican or Asian cuisines. Noting that Chinese communities have existed in Oregon since the 1860s, sizable Mexican communities have existed in Portland since World War II, and sizable Vietnamese communities have existed in Portland since 1970, there’s a very understandable knee-jerk reaction to seeing a white person running a place like Por Que No and to think “come on, do you really think you ‘discovered’ Mexican cuisine?” Rick Bayless, for example, tends to sustain this line of criticism. I should point out that this episode ended with the likes of Reason Magazine descending on Portland and trying to put on a familiar Fox-News-style spectacle, and with The Oregonian going out and interviewing a bunch of local chefs who largely agreed that the issue for the restaurant business is of course a matter of making money, not about whether or not wealthy white people feel bad for how they represent other cultures. The self-punishment was largely counterproductive, but I agree that there’s a very valid criticism here: what leads us to be myopic enough think that minority cultures are a “discovery”?

Is it illegal or immoral to start tweeting about how much you love a certain cuisine while getting some pretty key details wrong, or even for e.g. a non-Vietnamese person to open a high-end Vietnamese place catering to a wealthy white audience? No. But yes, a lot of Portlanders beat themselves up about it because they hoped they had discovered something. It stung to realize that of course no community is going to be impressed with you for “discovering” their cuisine — worse than doing something wrong is to have done something that’s simply not novel. And I think the meltdown was largely a collective embarrassment by the wealthy white burghers of Portland that, yes, many of us had been seeing minority communities as some kind of novel discovery. Naturally, the Puritans we are, we turned to each other with competitive shame.

The attitude about other cultures goes further — as a personal example, back in the 2010 I was lectured by the white cashier at Uwajimaya about how there’s more than one Chinese language, you know, but they’re considered dialects for political reasons. Wow, I thought. What a worldly person it makes one to go and fill oneself in on language families of other continents! Seeking the same reaction I had just given, I immediately begin trotting out this fact at parties. Sure enough, friends and family would give applause to the performance. Wow! The world “out there” is so complex and look at us for being intellectually humble about it. Surely, we must have realized that the desire to produce entertaining novelty was motivating us to go around othering communities that have been in Portland for generations.

Is it a bit hard on people who may genuinely have learned about the Sino-Tibetan language family for the first time? Is it a bit hard on people who simply never experienced Vietnamese food until eating at an upscale place that had modified it to their tastes? Perhaps — it’s not that Portlanders should beat themselves up for not knowing everything, and indeed I think that the effort to be intellectually humble, and to react immediately by expressing concern about cultural appropriation evinces some effort to genuinely do the right thing (however inward-looking and perhaps not directly relevant to affected communities it may be). Very specifically, my (self-)criticism is that intellectual humility has to be delineated from seemingly intentional provincialism.

Put another way, we let the desire for novelty and the desire to demonstrate our open-mindedness drive us to either feign or outright prefer ignorance of other places for the sake of being entertained. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been told things like, “well, we can’t just make generalizations about China…” Well, you can, and if you’re taking Chinese culture seriously, you should. Facts won’t ruin your opportunities to how off how open-minded you are. Let’s do it: China (all of it!) is on the continent of Asia; China has been a heavyweight producer of electronics in recent decades and is a huge supplier to Apple thanks to Tim Cook; China has been 90% rural for most of its recorded history. These facts don’t somehow become untrue in edge cases and it would be very strange for wealthy, educated Portlanders (who already spend an unhealthy amount of time on the Internet) to somehow not know them or to sound surprised to learn them.

It’s like John Mulaney’s impression of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. “Yeah, Ice. He’s a pedophile. You work in the sex crimes division. You’re going to have to deal with that.”

To move the criticism in a positive direction, consider the following. Intellectual humility and openness to new experiences are real virtues that I remain proud of. In so many instances growing up in Portland I was exposed to foreign languages or ideas or cuisines in a way that was so eagerly curious and so encouraging — it’s an almost fraternal feeling to sit with friends and be in awe of the vastness of the world. I grew up in a significantly smaller and less diverse city, and without a lot of time spent interacting with minority communities. A mandatory component of a new civic identity is recognizing the plurality of communities that make up Portland, and the basic commitment to curiosity and sharing discoveries is a virtue that can unite us in civic fraternity.

2. Weaponized Pessimism

Portlanders care about the environment, but we despair about the environment in a way that is outright toxic. It made me prone to horrifyingly misanthropic tirades and crippling anxiety back in college. In this I felt explicitly encouraged — so many friends and family concerned about our carbon footprint, and for years I was encouraged as the kind of righteous crusader who would try to vote with my wallet and research the sustainability of different supermarket brands’ business practices and complain when food was not organic. When I got too old, they made a veritable saint out of Great Thunberg. It turns out that the supply chain is too slippery and opaque for this to make a huge difference, and it’s hilariously elitist to chide other communities for purchasing essentials that one declares unsustainable or to ask everyone to boycott a corporation just to start a moral crusade. To a degree, this has died down and I see a lot more “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” posts on social media, but even then there is a core of despair and the encouragement to despair that I think is really not helping anyone.

Look, I’m quite proud of many of the city’s initiatives. Managing to rally an entire municipality in the United States was a tough feat back in the 2000s, and I don’t doubt that New York City and San Francisco were nudged or inspired by what Portland proved feasible. Certainly the city has done a lot to try to clean up the Willamette, and to turn brown sites into dense neighborhoods, and to set an urban growth boundary and to strongly encourage alternative transportation. We seem to be close to outright banning cars or at least letting automobile traffic get intentionally bad as a strategy for making the light rail more convenient. I understand that it’s extremely discouraging to watch the rest of the country lag behind, or to watch the wildfires continue to get worse, or to know that no amount of imitating Amsterdam and Copenhagen and Vancouver is going to change the basic commitment of Americans to their cars.

It’s worth going a bit deeper into the state’s history — we’re the only one on the West Coast not to really have a gold rush. There’s a longstanding sense of being a bit more oriented around the land as it is. It was Reed, not the University of Washington, where Gary Snyder and his Beatnik pals hung out and got into Zen Buddhism. The state is also a former squatter democracy, unlike California where rancher-aristocrats under Stanford had a common political project of sticking it to the East Coast, and instead has been run by absentee tycoons like John Jacob Astor or the Weyerhaeuser family until the 1970s. A deeply atheistic or millennarian strain runs through the place, proffered by Wobblies and gurus and pietists. Occult stores have always been a mainstay in Portland. Like the once-cartoonish racism, our obsession with despair is a big thing we’re working on.

There is, as with other Portland attitudes, a bit of a reckoning that’s happened with the environmentalism. We’ve tried to acknowledge that it’s a bit strange to speak of “protecting” land that was often violently seized from its former residents, and that it’s hypocritical to demand that developing nations cut their emissions after the United States has polluted hand over fist to build the level of wealth stored in the country, and that conservationism itself is an institution that does little to hire from the communities most adversely affected by a changing climate or by damage to ecosystems. We’ve had to acknowledge that Oregon has, to no one’s surprise, a history of conservationism deeply intertwined with an obsession with racial purity and with setting up reservations to forcibly move pre-Euro-American residents. This reckoning is, in my estimation, overdue. The overlay of a specifically Protestant kind of guilt onto an issue as important as the environment is humiliating.

There’s this idea one gets from certain house parties in Portland, the ones where older men take one aside and bemoan that the frogs are disappearing and that Weyerhaeuser just can’t be stopped from wiping out old-growth. You have to wonder if these folks are actually trying, or if all of the in-this-house-we-believe-sign-displaying and conscious consumption is actually for nothing. Apparently so. Read your Gary Snyder, your Les Knight, your Blaine Harden. Read Conor Dougherty’s investigation about the connection between baby-boomer environmentalism and outright NIMBYism. Listen to how we resort to insisting that we don’t even want to have kids — as a way to “help the environment” or to “not force them into an inevitably terrible future.” In governance, despair is irresponsible. If we’re going to fix the city, which we must try to do, we have to overcome this bad habit.

As one of many alternatives, there are a few science-fiction-sounding arguments to be made about an energy future that doesn’t involve just slowing or ceasing human activity. Much as conservationism becomes NIMBYism, the green energy crusade becomes what I’ve heard termed “energy Lysenkoism.” Fusion is a real technology that we’re working on, solar is becoming more affordable, and various forms of carbon sequestration are starting to look somewhat promising to the point that we may perhaps want to start speaking of the “carbon cycle.” There’s no principal reason that we can’t use plentiful cheap energy and genetically-modified organisms to photosynthesize hydrocarbons from atmospheric nitrogen to fix the global PPM at Bill McKibben’s fabled 350. In my former life as a climate activist, I came to the hard realization that our environmental problems are political and not technological. This seems not to get discussed, and if it does, it tends to get shot down as “more capitalism and not enough justice for all.” We should be capable of solving separate problems with separate solutions amenable to separate constituencies. Portland’s political situation suggests that this is not yet the case.

But beyond the scientific alternatives or questions of responsibility, it’s obviously just bad to live in despair. Come on, people. A lot of the despair comes from either homeowners whose new worth has been precariously buoyed by the city’s rapid growth for the last few decades or by renters who tend to converse in the language of left-leaning activism. The activists should read Building Resilient Organizations as a good example of how they’re undercutting their own goals. And Portland isn’t a small city without problems anymore! Folks had better start walking the walk. The homeowners I think should ask themselves how the Epicurean promise of Oregon has failed to deliver a life free of despair. Would they perhaps be better off renting? Selling to a high-density developer and living in a cheaper city? Brookings and Klamath Falls and Grants Pass await you. Portland has, I think more than elsewhere on the West Coast, long held a reputation as the place to run away and lick your wounds. Great. It’s been fifty years since the migration picked up, and it’s been exactly fifty-four years since the Summer of Love. We can give people their space, but we have to stop encouraging them to live with despair.

As an alternative, let me borrow from what I know about Late Rome. When systems change, you have to learn about them. One of the worst parts of conscious consumerism is the demand that the consumer somehow get all the information about how products are produced — this is, combined with Portlanders’ penchant for “discovering” and sharing novelties, a source of theater more than of anything else. If we’re going to take the environment seriously, and we should, we have to commit to some degree to really learn about the ecosystem we’re trying to live in. It’s particularly hard for a West Coast city with a relatively transient population (San Francisco has this much worse) but the only was to get good solutions to our problems is to understand them and to disenchant ourselves. Learn the history of the forests. Learn the history of the Columbia River and the history of electricity in Portland. Learn about the sawdust-fired power plant that used to occupy the Pearl District. Opinions about what to do should and will always vary, but the facts shouldn’t. And we can only act when we’re sitting, equanimous, with the facts.

Moreover, I do believe that a virtue of Portland is that it can be capacious enough for people to live their different lifestyles and to take care of themselves in different ways. But I don’t think that precludes the possibility of the good life, and I think the city is realizing that self-care doesn’t give license for bigotry or self-deception. It’s entirely possible to live, let live, and ask that citizens walk in the truth.

Conclusion

I don’t live in Portland these days. It’s probably a lot to ask of people whose shoes I no longer walk in to please stop being so obsessed with entertaining and despairing. But I’m going to try to ask it of myself, at least. In an effort to be a role model, I will:

• Emphasize the importance of living well and freeing oneself from despair, and indicate that I have been persuaded by good and well-known arguments;
• Continue to express a curiosity in the history of Portland with emphasis that I believe it’s crucial for imagining a future, and continue to proactively and tactfully educate myself about the history of its plural communities with an eye toward developing a more robust civic identity and common narrative;
• If so pressed, express that I believe it is downright irresponsible to go around peddling self-flagellation and despair and that I won’t be an enabler of it;
• When sharing new facts that I have learned, do so with a sense of humility and honesty that my intention is truly to enjoy the spirit of discovery with my interlocutor, indicate why I think it’s an interesting and novel contribution, and suggest that it is no detriment to my excitement if the interlocutor is already familiar with my discovery;
• In light of a lot of anxieties that have emerged in the last few years, encourage friends and family to speak up and give them nonjudgmental space to reason through what they think is going on, and encourage them to ground this interpretation in honest intuitions and real experiences rather than coarse narratives.

I hope that I will be humbled by the city and I hope that there are many new ideas waiting for me. It may take some time for the city to reckon with what forty years of growth followed by a bit of a stumble have created, but I have to say I’m excited about the creative possibilities. The first step toward creation is unlearning and disenchantment, and I dearly hope I can be an asset in that process.