Recently, President Bush visited Medford, Oregon, where he
showcased his timber management plan for the national forests in
light of this summer’s horrific fire season. He toured a new burn
and there gave an impromptu press conference. Later in Portland,
while the president attended a fundraiser for Republican U.S.
Senator Gordon Smith, the downtown streets were thronged by roughly
a thousand demonstrators of the sort the Beaver State is famous
for, protesting the new timber policy and the president’s upcoming
plans to seek the resignation of Saddam Hussein. The Darth
Vader-like garbed Portland police had their hands full, resorting
to tear gas, rubber bullets and finally nightsticks to control the
unruly crowd, many in bizarre costumes or black terrorist-like head
masks. The scene was reminiscent of a bad acid trip at an old
Halloween night Grateful Dead show. Just another day in a city that
President Bush-41 used to call “Beirut.”
What is it about Oregon? Is it something in the air?
Oregon, especially urban Oregon (Portland, Salem, Eugene,
Medford, Ashland), seems to be a demographic extension of such
Loony Left outposts as San Francisco-Berkeley (Baja Oregon?);
Boston; Seattle; Boulder, Colorado; Ann Arbor, Michigan;
Burlington, Vermont: fertile ground for the germination of much of
the PC wackiness we’ve seen over the last couple of decades.
Take Eugene. The home of the University of Oregon has had for a
generation a distinct countercultural bent. The late author and LSD
pioneer Ken Kesey grew up in nearby Springfield, and drove the bus
home (literally) in the late '60s. In his later years his farm
became a Hippie Lourdes of sorts, as the unwashed multitudes
dropped in to drop out. Nowadays, Eugene is a noted capital of
anarchist-chic, and home to such groups as the Ruckus Society and
Earth First!, the obviously bored sons and daughters of upscale
Baby Boomers who strive to take their parents’ political idealism a
bit further by breaking things, notably windows at McDonald’s and
Starbucks. The Ruckus Society kids were a big presence at the 1999
World Trade Organization (WTO) riots in Seattle. The Earth Firsters
are known for vandalizing equipment at remote logging sites, and
driving railroad spikes into trees that will break bandsaws at the
local lumber mill. Dangerous stuff, that. Oh well, it turns out
that Michael Bakunin was a spoiled rich kid too (see Edmund
Wilson’s To the Finland Station; Farrar, Straus and
Giroux; 1972 paperback edition, page 312.).
Portland is interesting. It’s very enthusiastic about public
transportation and “smart growth.” Smart growth is where liberal
municipal powers-that-be curb suburban development, gentrify city
centers, and promote “greenbelts” around city perimeters. This
sends local home prices skyward (witness another smart growth
mecca, the San Francisco Bay Area, with the highest average home
price in the country: $410,000). The economist Thomas Sowell has
written that liberals on the one hand decry the lack of “affordable
housing” for low income folks, while on the other work hard to
ensure that the market will not provide what is needed. All this is
rooted in the radical Green hatred of automobiles (and especially
SUVs), those planet-destroying gas guzzlers that carry those
millions of boorish and materialistic commuters in from the sterile
suburbs everyday. Maybe Portland’s forward-thinking citizens will
soon outlaw cars in favor of horsedrawn trolleys.
Portland is also home to the Oregonian, a newspaper
that is America’s answer to Britain’s Guardian, and to
Craig Rosebraugh, a “vegan” and otherwise exemplary Bakunist, who
until recently was the media liaison for the Earth Liberation Front
(ELF), a shadowy group of eco-terrorists responsible for the 1998
arson of the $12 million Two Elk Lodge in Vail, Colorado, not to
mention the torching of the occasional medical research facility
where people in lab coats torture white mice. Mr. Rosebraugh
remains under FBI surveillance, and was even subpoenaed to testify
before a congressional committee examining eco-terrorism (much that
has even occurred since 9-11). Though the fact that the FBI and the
Congress are both hot on the case ensures that Rosebraugh and the
ELF will be in business for some time to come.
When it comes to “assisted suicide,” Oregon is in the forefront
of enlightened thinking, an American version of Holland. Since
1994, Oregonians have had a “Death with Dignity” law, where anyone
suffering from a terminal illness with — by a doctor’s official
estimate — less than six months to live, can self- administer a
“Kevorkian” style lethal injection.
In Oregon, folks have the right to die. They just can’t build a
home in the suburbs.
