Portland’s protests at this point seem to me to have devolved into a sort of stew of noble competing clusterfucks. (Understand here that I “follow” events via social media; I am not in the action downtown.) Wednesday night, even aside from the crowd chanting “fuck Ted Wheeler” while someone on “stage” chided them because he wanted to hear what Wheeler had to say, generally seemed to be something of a roiling mess of tensions between the sentiment of the crowd and that of the people with the public address system. Thursday night apparently was struck by what one correspondent on the ground called “fence politics”, which included Black protesters arguing with each other over tactics, and confusion among the Wall of Moms as to the right course of action. Meanwhile the baffling rise and fall of Rose City Justice now has them returning from their spa retreat of self-reflection to become the beneficiary of some sort of beer fundraiser? (Their activities since retreating I admit I’m not versed in; have they been active again or not so much?) Even more meanwhile, I have conflicted feelings about this E.D. Mondainé op-ed for The Washington Post, not least because it went to a national paper rather than a local one, but mostly because Mondainé’s plea to move the fight to boardrooms, schools, city councils, halls of justice, and “smoky backrooms of a duplicitous government” seems to ignore that it was people on the streets that dramatically moved the Overton window on Black Lives Matter, economic justice, and police abolition. While I get that people are going to fear either distraction or backlash or both, the momentum to get things done in boardrooms and backrooms itself will peter out absent ground mobilization. Here I plead ignorance again: is Mondainé’s local NAACP chapter organizing its own demonstrations to keep up the pressure in whatever forms it thinks will be more message than spectacle, or only chastising the people who are literally standing up in masses for the things Mondainé wants to get done?
Bix dot Blog
The unsupported use case of Bix Frankonis’ disordered, surplus, mediocre midlife in St. Johns, Oregon.
No fear, no hate, no thoughtless bullshit, and no nazis.