Well, of course I am no longer a resident of Portland, but as someone who both appreciates that city’s “progressiveness” and also finds it to be annoying and generally quite a facade. I thought that the news today was quite interesting. Last year we elected Sam Adams mayor. I did not vote for him: A) because he seems a bit shiny and fake to me (like Al Gore) and B) because he worked to much with Vera Katz who I blame much of Portland’s shallow and short-sighted “development” on.

But I did appreciate the fact that a somewhat large city would elect a gay person as mayor. I think that he is the first openly gay mayor of a “large” American city.

Regardless, he won in a landslide easily defeating his primary opponent (who, no, I didn’t vote for either) and now, not 3 weeks after he has taken office the newspaper’s and the attorney general are asking for him to resign! Why? Because a few years ago he (at 42 years old) had a sexual affair with a 17 year old (which, I believe, is illegal and rather improper). Not only that but as he was priming himself for his mayoral campaign these rumors started to flow. He not only denied tham and had the teen in question deny them, but he did that standard politican clat-trap crap of calling it all lies and a vile smear campaign and all of that. Now it has come out publically that it was all true! He is going to issue a public apology, but I mean, come on. Dude. you broke the law. Like the Governor of Illinois, you should be stripped of your office and sent to the slammer.

I do feel bad for the gay rights folks in Portland (well, and beyond) who have the bad splotch of his actual character to soil that exciting milestone of his election.

Sadly, politians are people. People who will generally lie or say whatever they need to say to get  where they want to get. What’s the old adage? Anyone who wants to be a politican probably isn’t a good person to be a politican…

So for some reason, I was just stumbling around looking for local blogs and I came across this one: Rob Kremer. As I looked around the stuff was so naive and/or sinful that at first I assumed that it was intended as tongue-in-cheek. But, of course, I soon realized that the guy was serious. One of those prickish shoeshine boys of the far-right (how far right? Not only is he in cahoots with the nearly incomprehensible Lars Larson, but he also seems to think that Sarah Palin has some worth). Sadly, these folks do have some success as getting the more lemming-like masses to accept their greed, fear and hostility as common sense. But they should leave me out of it.

Anyway, I know, they’re flopping about all over and who cares? Well, I don’t really either. But then the description of his blog is an irritating piece of hogwash that I find rather offensive. As he seems to be trying to imply that all of us (Portland) Oregonians are shallow, knee-jerk, greedy Republicans like himself:

“Portland, Oregon is occupied territory. It was invaded years ago by a non-native species of political animal from back east who took over our political and cultural institutions in order to try out their utopian socialist dreams on our great state. This blog will chronicle the insurgency that is trying to free Oregon from the occupiers’ grip by shining a bright light on their most egregious scheme.”

Yes, I too am sicker than sick of all these folks who’ve moved into my hometown and, rather than embrace it for what it was, have forcibly molded it into a strange, sickening and unnatural creature. Filled with condos, boutiques, arm dogs, and arrogant snooties that were never a real part of this quiet and poor little town. Under the umbrella of anything is good as long as it: looks hip, wastes government money and slowly wears down whatever positive regulations and ways we had established. People are chomping at the bit to get rid of the urban growth boundary, they obviously don’t understand what a “deposit” bottle is, and they think that buses are for the dregs of society so if they can’t have infrastructure sapping lightrail/streetcar lines all over the place, then they’ll just drive their cars (drive like complete a-holes, I might add), and ride bicycles in a fashion that almost makes me embarrassed to have been a full-time cyclist around here for 15 years… And I just feel that one of these days some of these jerks are going to start thinking that they should be able to privately own the beaches.

Of course, when our wonderfully cheap abodes started going up at 20%+ a year (due to people realizing how horrid they had made California so they thought they would buy out the naive locals and spread the sprawl up here), the easy living withered away and it was obvious that something horrible was about to happen. But now, fifteen years later? I never would have imagined houses costing four times as much (or more, much, much more), than they did then, all the nice old apartments being converted into condos, the wasteland of sterile and shallow pretension that is the Pearl district. And the population booming to such an extent that native Portlanders are less than half of the population. As this wears away our old ways, it has some bad effects. Yes, aside from having to put up with these people everywhere and not being able to easily afford to live anywhere anymore… The thing that first got people starting to talk about Portland was building the bus mall downtown and banning cars from most of it. Such a anti-car and pro-mass transit and pedestrian development was widely hailed. Now, after all those years and all that effort, they are spending vast sums of money to add lightrail to the buses on the mall (as most of the “new Portlander’s are too fancy for the bus) and cars! It really ticks me off and it a terrible step back to the bad, pro-car (pro-pollution, pro-traffic and anti-people) planning of the sixties. Then this week I’ve been noticing that (downtown even) they are adding “pedestrian crossing buttons” to the streetlights downtown. So now we won’t even have the right to cross the street unless we get there before the cars going in our direction start moving so that we can hit the button. No more “a greenlight brings a walk signal that means that all traffic going that direction can move”. Now a green light means cars can go. People can go, if they happen to get there in time to hit the button.

It’s a terribly anti-pedestrian (and anti-people, as all of us are pedestrians sometimes, though only a lucky few of us are pedestrians all of the time), and I find it all to be a rude insult and a slap in the face to Portland. Honestly, I know there is no stopping this deluge now (short of my long wished for complete recession), so all I want to do is get the hell out of here and never come back (going to some quiet little place that I won’t change anything about), and have these people change the name of this damned city!

I blame most of it on Vera Katz, and her “hollow out the coffers and strip the services if we can spend the money on something that looks good in magazines instead” policies. But too late to worry about that. And yes, I say to hell with progress. Sure it generates more money, but all that does is require more money and it’s a dumb worldview that just spirals to everything costing more and making more and producing more and it just makes everything worse, drives people into debt and filled the world with landfills filled with garbage that no one needed anyway.

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Yes, another cop-out headline from our local daily, the always vapid “Oregonian”. This time it was “Al Qaeda trains kids to Kidnap, Kill”! Well, yes, all governments (and similar groups) train young people to kidnap and kill. That’s what foreign affairs and national security are all about. Threatening others with death. It is so prevalent throughout our history that I would assume that everyone knows that “everyone does it” and would stop thinking that you could judge the enemy for it. Yes, a lot of forces use people younger than we would, but using the young and ignorant as cannon fodder is wrong regardless of how young they are. But the three great plagues that feed off of us: Nationalism, religion, and business, don’t care about age. In fact, they all try to start indoctrinating us as young as possible. Religion has always enlisted the young and now that they are prey to business by way of advertisements and products aimed at them at young and younger ages, well, why not have them suffer and inflict the horrors of nationalism?

More to the point, the Oregonian seems almost thoughtless in its dull repetition of hollow news. Todays headline is one point, attempted fear-mongering with so little meat on its bones that I doubt anyone will bother to read whatever kind of one-sided hogwash they’ve thrown together (including, of course, me). But I am reminded of another recent “story”. Last year, somewhere in the midwest, a bridge collapsed. The next day, the Oregonian headline was something akin to “Are our bridges safe”. They don’t actually pay people to put such drivel on there, do they? As they use to say back when Bob Packwood was news, “if it matters to Oregonians, it’s in the Washington Post”. Plus, bar none, they have the worst newspaper website that I have ever seen. Terrible to navigate and virtually no connection to the content that is actually in the paper. But I suppose that is a minor issue.

Honestly, if one wants to read a newspaper with actual objective and relevant news, it seems that we are still stuck with naught but The Christian Science Monitor.