The Dream of the '90s Died in Portland

A typical night in Portland 2020. The sun is down and a few hundred people, nearly all in their 20s and 30s, start to congregate, by twos and threes, at a prearranged location, usually a city park but sometimes at the U.S. Immigration and Customs building, or City Hall, or, as they are tonight, on the strip of downtown that is home to local and federal courthouses and the city's central police station, known as Justice Center. The drumming starts, there are some Black Lives Matter slogans shouted but mostly it's calls of "FUCK THE POLICE," none of whom are in evidence. They almost never are during the nightly protests, or not until things get hot, when windows are smashed and, for what will end up being nearly 200 nights in a row, fires started.

On this night, I do see one officer. He is sitting alone inside the lobby of the back entrance to Justice Center. Beside him is an industrial fan. When I ask why, he explains that the night before, a group of protesters sloshed in a giant bucket of diarrhea into the room where he sits. The fan is to try to get the stench out. Behind me, five teenagers stand at the curb gawping.

"What happened? What happened?" they ask. They're not black bloc—the darkly clad anarchists roaming the streets—but random teens with random energy who came downtown, maybe, to see what all the fuss was about, to lightly taunt a police officer before running off. The J.V. team.

In their stead there soon appears a young couple. They are outfitted in the black bloc uniform of head-to-toe black; the boy carries a steel baton and wants me to know it. There is nonetheless something patrician about them, as if under different circumstances one might encounter them at cotillion. The uniform conceals their identities, but it can't hide the sense of entitlement that allows them a cheap laugh at the cop, at the fan. What I want to know is, why do they think throwing human shit as a tactic is OK?

"Do you believe that property is worth more than human lives?" asks the boy.

"Do you believe the police should be allowed to murder people?" asks the girl.

I do not mention that, at this point in the year, there has been only one deadly police shooting in Portland. I do not mention it because, after 15 years of living in Portland, I know the city's fledgling anarchists do not deal in facts, that they instead keep a set of platitudes up those black sleeves.

"We've tried for 20 years to do it another way. It hasn't worked. Nothing changes except with violence," says the boy, who is maybe 22. Then he flips me the bird.

* * *

The dream of the '90s is alive in Portland
Sleep till 11, you'll be in heaven
The dream of the '90s is alive in Portland
The dream is alive
—Portlandia

Around the turn of the century, Portland was the new belle on the block, not despoiled like San Francisco or in bed with high tech like Seattle. Oregon was not known nationally for much more than Nike and pinot noir and former Republican Sen. Bob Packwood, but maybe (with the exception of Packwood) that was OK. Maybe the city could debut as a fresh canvas, eco-friendly and affordable, a place to achieve your achievable dreams.

A lot of people were willing to take the chance, including my family. We moved from Los Angeles to Portland in 2004, and for a while, everything seemed on the up. The city in 2009 was, according to The Wall Street Journal, attracting "college-educated, single people between the ages of 25 and 39 at a higher rate than most other cities in the country." New residents built the city they wanted to live in: farm-to-table restaurants and 40 million brewpubs and too many bike paths and aggressively progressive politics. When then–Illinois Sen. Barack Obama swung through on the campaign trail in 2008, more than 75,000 people lined Portland's waterfront to see him.

Portland had entered the national stage. Was it a little bit goofy, a little bit twee? Sure, but also energetic in the way a young city can be, with people cutting what seemed to be genuinely new paths. Would the dudes slinging Korean barbecue out of an old R.V. take it brick-and-mortar? Who knew? Who cared? The dynamism of what-could-be hung in the very air.

Air, it turned out, a lot of people wanted to share. Soon, some who'd come to Portland expecting the city to deliver their dreams grew restless. They couldn't find their footing, or couldn't settle on who they were supposed to be, or both.

"I sometimes think we're the scatterbrained generation," a 26-year-old barista with a degree in anthropology told me for a 2010 article I wrote called "Is Portland the New Neverland?" "You have so many choices, and you know what you end up doing? Nothing. You become the D.J.-fashion-designing-knitting-coffee-maker." (...)

Out of instability, good things nevertheless grew—including Portlandia. The comedy series debuted in 2010 and served up the city at its most parodic, with real-life Mayor Sam Adams playing a bumbling mayoral assistant and restaurant diners demanding the life story of the chicken they were about to eat.

The show riffed on slacktivism and five-hour yoga classes and men whose only "safe space" was Reddit. It was often genuinely funny. Who didn't like to laugh at themselves?

As it turned out, a lot of Portlanders. 

by Nancy Rommelmann, Reason |  Read more:

Image: Scott Green/©IFC/Everett Collection; Right: Photo, John Rudoff/Sipa/AP Images)