Portland Election Guide, 2022

Before I get into this, I want to say a couple of things:

First, on “public safety.” Policing is the one area of the public sphere that gets rewarded rather than punished for not doing their jobs. It’s the definition of a perverse incentive: The less safe people feel, the more police they want. And it is for this reason that police departments in every major city in America have been on an undeclared work stoppage ever since the George Floyd protests. No department (including Portland’s) has seen a meaningful funding cut or reduction in force but every department has decided that it is in their interests to cut down on enforcement, to increase response times, and to otherwise add to urban residents’ feelings of fear and uncertainty during this difficult time. The purpose of these work stoppages is clear: Incentivize people through fear to fill out their ballots in the most reactionary way possible, ensuring that the funding-and-equipment bonanza of the last 30 years continues apace. I urge none of you to fall for it.

Secondly, on the issue of homelessness – there is absolutely nothing wrong with a feeling of disgust, shame, or even fear when encountering some of the most visible and abject poverty that any of us have ever seen on the streets of our city. It shouldn’t be there, it shouldn’t be out in the open. You shouldn’t be OK with it. But it’s important to remember one thing: Absolutely no one in city government is either willing or able to address this problem. Not a one of them are going to remove these blights from your vision. Not a one of them are going to decrease your feelings of fear and anxiety when encountering our 21st-century urban landscape. It is the landscape of a decaying empire, the landscape of collapse. The problems that have created a spike in homelessness are essentially baked in, and anyone telling you that they are going to fix it and make you feel better about it are lying to you. Given these realities, the question is not “what can we do to fix this?” The question is “do we want to alleviate the suffering of the people have been cast aside by our system, or do we want to punish them further?” I know what my answer is, and I urge you to consider which path you think the city should choose before casting your ballot.

Portland local races

Portland City Council, Position 3: JoAnn Hardesty

As of now the Portland City Council stands as follows: We have three reactionary, pro-Police Conservatives who work at the behest of the Portland Business Alliance: Ted Wheeler, Mingus Mapps, and Dan Ryan. We have one squishy liberal in Carmen Rubio who will vote with those other three to avoid having millions of dollars thrown at her in the next election – so functionally she has voted with them when it matters because she wants to stay in office. And then there is one true Progressive on the Council who will vote what she believes regardless of the political cost and regardless of her chance for succeeding. That person is JoAnn Hardesty.

It’s telling that despite being a one-person voting block who is unable to meaningfully enact city-wide policy, Joann Hardesty has received the majority of the ire of the Portland voting public when it comes to the visible misery on the streets of the city. It’s especially telling because she is the only person in office who stands for everything that liberals have claimed to believe in since President Obama was elected in 2008. She’s a woman of color, she’s a true progressive, and she is absolutely unafraid to stand up to powerful interests in the name of doing what’s right. She’s outspoken, she’s hated by special interests, and she is not afraid to show compassion to the people within city limits who most deserve it. And yet we are faced with the real possibility that a large number of self-professed Progressives will turn away from her in this election because they’ve been won over by a racialized smear campaign of fear and uncertainty around her “judgment” or “personality.” They have not been shy about making you afraid of the only black woman to ever be on Portland’s City Council, of making you think that she’s too angry or unstable to be good at her job, or that she’s a poor manager. They know exactly what they’re doing, and if you’re falling for it this late in the game I don’t know what to tell you.

To be clear, Rene Gonzalez is a reactionary Republican and his presence on the council will already add to the Republican majority that exists there. They will not solve homelessness, they will not make you feel safer, they will not even do the bare minimum in terms of addressing the core issue at the root of the problem. What they WILL do is reward the Portland Police Bureau for a two-year-long work stoppage by increasing their funding significantly while ensuring that the people in this city who most need our help are made to suffer immensely more than they are already. Neither of these things will make you safer, neither of them will even make you feel better about yourself as you walk down the street or drive along the interstate. The only thing that Gonzalez and his ilk promise is punishment. They want to punish the people who are causing you emotional pain by their very presence. They want to punish people for the sin of not being able to afford a $2,000/month studio apartment, for the sin of not being able to find housing while on the decades-long waitlist for public housing, for the sin of being mentally ill, for the sin of addiction, for the sin of despairing in a broken world. What this dead-eyed freak wants to you know is that there is justice in the world – that these people will be punished in a way that is commensurate with their crimes against your conscience. He wants you to know that good people – like you – are rewarded. And bad people – like them – are punished. That’s his vision of justice.

And maybe that will work for you. Maybe that will allow you to sleep better at night, knowing that everything is being done to make people pay for the emotional pain they’ve caused you. But one day you may find yourself on the chopping block – cast aside by a system that no longer needs you. And when that day comes you will be living in a world that you’ve helped create through voting for reactionaries like Gonzalez. Don’t be that person.

Measure 226-28 (changes Portland’s government structure): YES

From Webster’s Dictionary:

Liberal (adj) [lib-er-uhl]: “A person who is in favor of changing things in principle but rejects every opportunity to institute those changes in practice – particularly when their own interests are threatened”

“Portland’s city government is antiquated.” “It’s unequal.” “It’s racist.” “It favors the interests of the rich and powerful.” “It has to change.” Everyone has agreed on these simple statements during the whole of my 13 years in this city. This is what elected officials of all stripes have repeated ad nauseum in speeches, tweets, and press releases for as long as I’ve been here. You see, they want CHANGE. They want things to be DIFFERENT. They want JUSTICE. They stand for PRINCIPLES.

But here’s the thing: Now that there’s a proposal that addresses every single one of these concerns in a thoughtful, comprehensive manner, something funny has happened. Those same people are likely to say things like: “It’s too much at once.” “It’s frightening.” “It’s too complicated.” “I would have done it differently (unspecified).” “I’m not so sure about this.” It’s a predictable if disheartening turn of events in the good-faith effort to address the concerns of good-faith people who recognize a broken system when they see it. But immediately after this proposal went on the ballot we got to see how many people actually believed in those principles and how many were just cynically parroting such talking points while benefitting from the system as it stands today. And it appears that there are a lot more people in the latter category than there are in the former.

Listen: If you’re concerned about the wide-ranging nature of this measure, if you’re worried it’s too complicated, if you find yourself confused as to what it will do, I have some advice for you: Read the fucking measure. Better yet, read a short summary of it. You’ll find that it’s wide-ranging, it’s systemic, and it’s comprehensive. It’s a level of fundamental change which is rarely seen in our politics and some would argue is impossible. But one thing it isn’t is complicated. These are common-sense changes, all of which have been instituted in other localities.

You can do it. Read the measure, then find one part of it that you’re actually against and articulate WHY you’re against it. Maybe even articulate why that one bad things outweighs all of the other objectively positive changes in the bill. Don’t just vote against it because you’re not willing to do the work. Read the fucking bill.

Statewide Races

Governor: Tina Kotek

This one is a no-brainer given the circumstances and how close the race is. There’s reason to believe that Kotek would be a significantly better Governor than Kate Brown, and her track record on housing in particular is pretty good. There’s also reason to believe she’ll just be another status-quo Democrat, but I think there’s an actual ideology behind the facade here, unlike our current Governor – who believes in absolutely nothing and did absolutely nothing in 8 years as a result. No room for a protest vote here. Do the right thing.

Measure 111 (make health care a right in Oregon Constitution): Yes

Because Oregon Democrats patently refused to do anything to fix our archaic, built-to-fail Republican-created taxation system despite having a supermajority for four years (in fact, not a single Democrat even brought it up as a possibility), we are stuck in a state with diminishing government resources, basically forever. That’s because both parties want it that way and would prefer to divy up these diminishing resources to an increasing number of inefficient non-profits until there’s only 10 or 11 government employees left. Given that circumstance, one of the more depressingly optimistic scenarios is that sufficient funding for programs can only be achieved by writing them into the constitution so that they can be enforced by unelected judges who can then force the legislature to do their job and fund a functional government. It hasn’t worked with public defenders, it hasn’t worked with mental health programs, and it certainly hasn’t worked with education – but maybe it’ll work here. Worth a shot.

Measure 112 (fully ban slavery in Oregon Constitution): Yes

See above

Measure 113 (Disqualifies state legislators who miss 10+days): Yes

It’s not a coincidence that this measure is finally on the ballot just as the Democrats are about to lose their once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create fundamental, positive change in our state government via a nearly decade-long supermajority in the legislature. Democrats depended on Republican walkouts as an excuse to never be ambitious, to never try anything, and to pretend that they were ever doing anything other than negotiating with their financial backers to water down legislation during this pivotal time in state history. That time has now passed, so they’re finally willing to do something to prevent those walkouts in the future. It’s too little, too late, but it’s still a good thing.

Measure 114 (Gun safety stuff): Yes

All good stuff in here.

Radicals On Campus

I went to College because I was supposed to go to College, and I decided on teaching almost by accident. During my time in undergrad, I worked full time at the grocery store across the river from campus. By the time I graduated, I was managing the dairy department, and I actually loved the work, the schedule – everything. I got to be in my own little corner of the store, making the orders, keeping product rotated, and making sure everything was fully stocked and perfectly faced at all times. I was good at it! I was proud of my work, every day! All things being equal, I could have honestly seen myself doing that kind of work for the rest of my life. But all things were NOT equal: I was at the top of the pay scale for my position at $11.50 an hour (which it would likely still be if I still worked there, 12 years later) and the managers above me on the totem poll actually made LESS money than they had when they started in their positions. The store I worked at was part of the 3rd largest chain in the nation, which has since become the largest. The squeeze of corporate consolidation was very much on, and staying in that position meant – quite frankly – a lifetime of poverty. So I went to school. I got a teaching license. I moved away.

But all of that is a little beside the point I was trying to make when I started writing this post: While I was in school, the charter school movement was just taking off. In the School of Education, every single one of my Professors was on board with the movement, and they were teaching us to be good little reformers too. We watched “Waiting For Superman” in class – actually in two different classes. We learned that the system was broken, we learned that schools were a cause of rather than the result of endemic poverty. We learned that a good teacher was all that some of “these kids” needed to pull them up from poverty, but that the public school system wasn’t producing good teachers. The evidence of the failure of the education system was all around us, and we were all young go-getters who wanted to change things, and “school choice” was the path forward.

Here’s the thing about all of this… it worked! I believed them! I came out of college thinking that public schools were bad because they lacked competition and incentives to be better. I thought everyone who responded to these failures by saying “…But Poverty!” was just making excuses. I thought that more testing and better visualizations of the data from that testing would give schools a path towards improvement. I harangued people who believed otherwise. I see some of my Facebook posts from back then and I’m embarrassed as hell. And it lasted a long time! When Portland teachers almost went on strike in the early 2010s, I was within a hair’s breadth of signing on to cross the picket lines and be a scab teacher to work in the buildings while they were fighting for better working conditions. I thought they were being petulant. I thought they didn’t have the best interests of students at heart. I’m so embarrassed by views back then that it would be easy to pretend that I’ve always been on the right side of this stuff. But I haven’t. I wasn’t just wrong – I was aggressively wrong.

It’s been 12 years since I graduated and got my teaching license after a full round of pro-corporate indoctrination at the University of Montana’s School of Education. In that time, we’ve had 8 years of an education reformer as President with a charter school proponent as Education Secretary. We had incentive programs and grants and extra school funding based on better test scores and an explosion of the number of charter schools and the closing of hundreds of “failing” schools. We’ve had Common Core Standards, an explosion in the number and funding for non-profits whose explicit purpose is to encourage students to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. We had an entire generation of teacher education graduates like myself who had been fully radicalized by the movement. We were on board and we were thrust into the workforce fully intending to make it work.

And where has it gotten us? That’s a big question, but I think that the most generous assessment is that the results have been.. mixed! Some charters have seen success. Others have seen none. Still others have been swamped by allegations of selective admissions processes and outright money laundering. Some students will swear by their charter school experience, and others were completely left behind by it. And that’s the generous assessment!

So even by the most forgiving of standards, can anyone really claim that the movement has been anything other than a failure? Do you remember what they were promising? Do you remember that family in “Waiting For Superman,” and the way they cried when they got admission to the charter school? Do you remember how in the wake of that movie, reformers got everything they fucking wanted and then some, for more than a decade? Can YOU hand-wave away the money laundering, the poverty wages for teachers, the union-busting, the closing of hundreds of public schools, the outright corruption that has taken place in states like Florida and Louisiana? Can you honestly tell me that the Betsy DeVos’s of this world are not an inevitable result of a system that turns education into a commodity and prioritizes “competition” and “efficiency?” Can you tell me with a straight face that further attempts to do the same thing – even with the best of intentions – won’t result in the exact same thing happening, over and over again? But most importantly: Is this what they told us would happen?

Right wingers like to talk about radicalization on College campuses, but the reality is that College campuses keep radicalism at bay. I was a radical-in-waiting while I was in College – someone with real left-wing impulses who looked around him and constantly asked “why is everything so fucked up?” They knew this, and they took those impulses and funneled them in the exact same direction that every other one of our impulses is funneled – towards the private profit of ghouls like Betsy DeVos and the Koch brothers and the Clintons. They showed me a genuinely broken system and taught me that the only way to fix it was to continue breaking it. They turned me into a good little Capitalist who prioritized private profit over public good. And I ate it up because I was young and naive, and I had genuinely altruistic motives that needed an outlet.

It’s hard for me to fathom how anyone can have existed in the working world, in the educational world – in any of it – without having been fully talked out of this shit at this point. To the extent that College is radicalizing, it pushes people to the right, and reality should have pulled everyone back to the left at this point. The writing is on the walls. If anyone is still on board with this movement after all these years, it’s because their political beliefs are a form of religious practice completely unmoved by the material conditions around them. All of this means they’ll be fighting the same losing battle from the same bullshit moral high ground forever and ever. But then again… maybe that’s the point.

Who I’m Voting For, 2020 Edition

In case you were wondering, this is how I’m voting in the upcoming election. I’ve left out state and national races, partly because they’re largely not competitive but mostly because you all know who you’re voting for. So here’s where I stand:

Mayor: Sarah Iannarone

Republicans simply don’t have a path to victory in blue cities like Portland, so they’ve had to run as Democrats in order for city governments (literally all of them) to be co-opted by business interests and police unions. This is a national trend, but Ted Wheeler is a personification of this model of shitty Democratic Mayor: a spoiled rich kid who who actively promotes right-wing policy and then acts like a helpless bystander when the inevitable results of those policies involve widespread community outrage, only to jump in to take the credit when the work of others actually advances progressive policy goals. You may have noticed that there are no Ted Wheeler signs in anyone’s yards, or that he lacks any grassroots support, or that he doesn’t seem interested in running a real campaign. That’s because he doesn’t care about you, he doesn’t want your support, and his campaign relies exclusively on rich donors and a sense of inevitability and elite consensus (see: endorsements) in order to win. Wheeler has spent the entire election cycle openly flouting the strict campaign finance rules overwhelmingly approved by voters in 2018, because he actually doesn’t believe that campaigns should be decided or financed by actual voters. His campaign relies on the model that all big D Democratic campaigns do: They accept large donations and spend that money on high-priced consultants who participate in the revolving door that exists between consulting firms, lobbying groups, and the campaigns themselves. It’s literally just people handing money to each other, with very little politicking actually taking place, as exemplified by the fact that his last campaign manager took a “new” job with the Portland Business Alliance, which promptly spearheaded a well-funded negative ad campaign against his main opponent, Sarah Iannarone.

In addition to Wheeler, there’s a write-in campaign for this office as well, run by a spirited group of supposed left-wing activists who are supporting Teressa Raiford, who ran for Mayor and did not make it to the run-off. I’m not opposed to write-ins as a rule, but I am adamantly opposed to this campaign. The most recent poll had Raiford at 6%, which guarantees that it won’t win and gives it a solid chance of swinging the eleection to Wheeler. But it’s not just that! As much respect as Teressa Raiford has as a Portland activist, her policy platform during her run for Mayor was significantly less Progressive and very much less detailed than Sarah Iannarone’s, particularly when it comes to police reform. Despite her supporters constant claims, she did not come remotely close for calling for police abolition, and actually called for MORE transit and traffic police on the beat. Even then, I can see writing her in as a protest vote IF the two candidates who ARE on the ballot were not significantly different from each other. But the two candidates are VERY different – and one of them is Ted fuckin’ Wheeler. And he’s gotta go. There is a very real chance that this campaign could suck enough progressive energy from Sarah Iannarone’s campaign to hand him the keys to the city for another four years. And we can’t let that happen.

Sarah Iannarone is not perfect, but she knows where her bread is buttered – and it’s not by the Police Union, it’s not by the Portland Business Association, and it’s not by the higher ups in the absurdly corrupt Democratic party – she doesn’t appear to have any national ambitions. Her bread has been buttered by the record number of small donations she’s received, and from all appearances she recognizes that. I’m as skeptical of her willingness to follow through on her promises as I am of any Democratic politician, but I am convinced that she deserves a chance at this and is a significant step up from Ted Wheeler. She knows who her constituents are and will listen to them.

A Ted Wheeler victory is not only an existential threat to Portland, but the state at large. His conservative bona fides essentially guarantee that he will have the red carpet rolled out to him if he wants to succeed Kate Brown as Governor or Ron Wyden as Senator, because the institutional party wants nothing more than to promote bland corporate candidates into the national spotlight (see Buttigieg, Pete). We need Ted Wheeler to lose this election and go away from politics forever. The only way to ensure that happens is by voting for Sarah Iannarone.

City Council, Position 4: Chloe Eudaly

The fool’s errand of focusing on identity over policy could not be more apparent than in this race. Chloe has been on the right side of most every major vote during her four years in office and is was by far the most progressive member of City Council before Joann Hardesty took office. She’s been a steadfast promoter of tenants’ rights, in addition to a noble (if failed) attempt to break the back of city-funded (and inherently racist) neighborhood associations. She’s been on the right side of police accountability, and has even moved further left in that regard in response to the recent protests. She’s a good City Councilor and deserves four more years.

Chloe’s opponent, Mingus Mapps, is a black man who is endorsed and boosted by both the Portland Police Union and the Portland Business Association, two groups who are both actively evil and hate Chloe Eudaly with every fiber of their beings. He claims that he won’t be beholden to them and that he believes in some nebulous and undefinable form of police “reform.” If you believe him, you’re a mark. If you vote for him, do it because you like the police and like big business. Because he’s their candidate. Not yours.

Judge Chloe by the enemies she keeps. Vote for her.

Metro Counselor, District 5: Chris Smith

I didn’t pay much attention to this race in the primary, but as the general election has rolled on, it’s become clear that this is a race between the Democratic Establishment, represented by Mary Nolan; and the activist wing of the party, represented by Chris Smith. You know which way I swing in that battle.

My sister has written a much better thread on WHY he’s the better candidate right here. Go read it!

Judge of the Court of Appeals, Position 9 – Adrian Brown:

I’m not going to pretend to have done a bunch of research on this one. But Adrian has some key endorsements – particularly from Joann Hardesty, who I trust implicitly on issues of criminal justice reform.

Ballot Measures: Vote YES on all of them, with the following level of enthusiasm:

Vote HELL YES:

Measure 107 – Campaign Finance Reform: One of my favorite questions to ask people is: If you could “fix” one major issue in American politics with the stroke of a hand, what would it be? For me, the answer has always been campaign finance reform. This ballot measure opens the door to that solution in Oregon – and while the Ted Wheelers of the world will always try to get around stuff like this, the results of this measure can only be good.

Measure 109 – Legalizes Psilocybin: Oregon could be the first in the nation to do this. Hell yes.

County Measure 26-211 – More Money for Libraries: Along with everything else that isn’t the police, libraries and public spaces of all kind have been de-funded over the past several decades. This goes a long way towards righting that wrong.

County Measure 26-214 – Tuition Free Preschool: It’s hard for me to even imagine a reality where this is available to us. I would love to sent Jonah to a publicly-funded preschool when his time comes!

Metro Measure 26-218 – Massive funding package for public transit: If you haven’t already, you’re going to hear a lot about how this bill is “poorly written” or has complex funding mechanisms with somehow unknowable results. The people who make these complaints are not doing so because they care how bills that increase taxes are written. They are doing so because they don’t want anyone’s taxes to be raised at all. They’re sowing confusing and mistrust because it is their #1 strategy for tanking bills like this, which fund public projects by putting a hand in the pocket of the people who have the most to give. It’s the definition of concern-trolling, and I highly recommend that you do not fall for it.

If you care about climate change, you have to believe in public transit. If you believe in public transit, you have to vote for this measure. It’s opposed by Nike, Intel, and pretty much every big business in the Portland Metro area, which can only mean that it’s a good thing. Vote hell yes.

PPS Measure 26-215 – Money to modernize and repair schools: It sure sucks that this is how we have to fund our schools, but it’s so important to vote yes on this stuff when you have the opportunity to do so!

Vote Yes, but with a shrug:

Measure 108 – Increase in cigarette taxes: It sucks that this is the only way the state can raise any money, and it sucks that this tax falls on poor people and that the only way we can dis-incentivize unhealthy behavior like smoking – which is largely driven by the stress of living under capitalism – is to impose more financial stress on people. I hate shit like this, but can’t bring myself to vote against it. If you do vote against it, I wouldn’t blame you.

Measure 110 – Funds statewide addiction/recovery services: Clearly we need more resources for drug treatment, but I’m skeptical of our ability to create a system that does so in a non-punitive way. That being said, this is still better than more jails, and more importantly it de-criminalizes possession of small amounts of a slew of drugs. So it’s important to vote yes on this one!

Measure 26-213: More money for parks and rec. Here’s the thing with this: It’s actually VASTLY more money than is needed by the department, and the scuttlebutt is that Wheeler will use this money to backfill the police budget and undo the cuts that came around in the last budgeting cycle. But even if that happens… it’s more money for parks, and I can’t vote against it.

Measure 26-217: Police accountability board. Frankly, this is another police reform measure that will inevitably prove ill-suited to the task. The police will ignore it, they will not be held accountable, and we’ll find ourselves having the same discussion, over and over again, as they continue to run rough-shod over freedom of speech and regularly kill unarmed black and brown people. It won’t do the job. But that’s not a good enough reason to not vote for it. (And people accuse me of being a purist!)

I think that’s everything, but feel free to let me know if I’ve left something out.

The Grind

The really cool thing about being a Millennial is how we’ve all had to endure the absolute sickness of the dominant culture when it comes to work. We’ve been completely immersed in it: “You’ve gotta GRIND to find your dreams, work hard and everything will work out for you!” Stay at the office late, adopt the vision and culture of your workplace without question, have a positive attitude, and most of all BELIEVE in yourself! And by the time you’re 35, when you’re on your 11th or 12th job, when you’ve been laid off and fired, when you’ve quit in disgust, when you’ve moved up and moved down, and when you’ve had about 50 bosses – most of whom have been terrible – and when you’re enduring the third major recession of your adult life, how can it all not start to blend together?

After a while you’d have to be pretty delusional to think that the GRIND has anything to do with your career success! After a while it seems like maybe even a positive attitude won’t help you! After a while it seems like the GRIND is really just a sociopathic need to self-promote and slather all over the shoes of every one of the rotating cast of managers that are over your head, and an ability to literally adopt an entirely new belief system at the drop of a hat, the moment someone tells you to. It seems like maybe the grind wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

After long enough, the only thing getting ground down is your dignity, and the closest thing to your dreams that you’re achieving is a dreamlike state where starting a new job begins to feel exactly like starting the last job. The best part is that you really, REALLY have to start asking yourself – what lengths will I go to to keep health insurance for my family, to keep this roof over my head, to not go into crushing levels of debt? What am I willing to do, to say, to believe even? And if I’m not willing to do that, what then?

May 8th, 2019

I’ve been back in the classroom for the last few months, substitute teaching in a few districts in East Portland. It’s been an eye-opening experience to say the least. I knew things were bad, but what I’ve seen over the last couple of months has genuinely shocked me at every turn. The bottom line is this: Despite the best efforts of amazing and dedicated educators throughout the state, public education in Oregon is collapsing. That is not hyperbole. This state is in the middle of an emergency, and the people who govern us are either actively aiding and abetting that emergency or pretending it doesn’t exist.

At all grade levels, classes of more than 30 students are not just an occasional problem – they are the norm. Classes over 40 students are not uncommon, nor has it been uncommon for me to work for a teacher who has over 200 students in their classroom over the course of the day. In this situation, it is literally impossible for teachers to give students the individual attention that they need. This is starting at the earliest grade levels, and the effects are compounding. Ask a teacher of any grade and they will tell you that students are coming to them each year with less knowledge, fewer skills, and more social problems than ever before. As someone who is deeply skeptical of anyone who walk around complaining about “kids these days,” I am here to tell you: They are not making this up. These students have been corralled through this deeply inadequate system year after year, with higher and higher expectations foisted upon them at every turn. These kids aren’t dumb! Amidst all of this chaos, they are starting to call it for what it is: Complete bullshit. They are acting out, they are acting up. You would too if you were them.

In the face of all of this, in the midst of a supposed economic recovery, school districts across the state are cutting staff, cutting services, farming out substitute teaching, bus driving, and other vital services to private companies, and otherwise doing a disservice to students who have already been pushed to the brink over the past three decades. Next year will be worse than this year, and the year after worse than that. When we hit the next recession? Forget about it. It’s game over.

For the last couple months of the school year, I’ve been teaching 6th grade Science at a great middle school with great teachers in a tough district. All of my classes have over 30 students in them – these are 6th graders, mind you. On my first day, each of my classes involved students chasing each other, desks flipping over, food being thrown, even a student who vomited – on purpose – in order to cause chaos and force me to clear the room. In classes of that size, not knowing names and with a general rebellion on my hands, I was un-moored from everything I’ve ever learned about what it means to be a teacher. I was just weathering the storm, watching the clock. It was an incredibly demoralizing experience.

Since then, things have calmed down, but it’s still hard. From the beginning, it’s been clear that my number one goal is to manage student bodies – with that many 12 year-olds in a room, you literally have no choice in the matter. Get them in their seat, keep them in their seat, keep their hands off of each other, make sure no one is leaving while my back is turned, make sure no one is using the sink in the back, make sure no one is on their phone. The students have been telling the principal that I’m really strict, which is the last thing I thought anyone would ever say about me – but it’s a matter of absolute necessity under these circumstances. I’ve become THAT teacher, the one I hated in school, the one with arbitrary rules, the one who doesn’t have time for the students who are falling behind, the one who snaps at students who ask a question at the wrong time. As for student learning, it HAS to be secondary to managing bodies. Without the latter, the former would never happen. It’s not a great position to be in.

Don’t get me wrong; this isn’t a difficult job because these kids are awful humans, or because their parents are bad at parenting. We’ve put them in a literally impossible position. It’s already objectively insane to ask 12-year olds to sit at a desk, inside, and focus on learning for six hours a day; limited to a total of 30 minutes for recess and lunch combined. To do so with 34 of their peers, with little to no individual support is the most ludicrous thing I can possibly imagine. And that’s what they’ve been dealing with since they started school! Of COURSE they are acting out. Of COURSE they are chomping at the bit to get out of their seats, all day. Of COURSE they are crying out for attention in the sea of bodies we are forcing them to swim in all day. Of COURSE they’re going to expend some of their excess energy in insane ways any time a substitute teacher they’ve never met comes into the room and tells them what to do. Any 12 year-old would be doing the same thing – I know for a fact that I would have.

I’m finishing out the school year for another teacher, who was finishing out the school year for another teacher – making me the third teacher that these students have had this year. At least once a day a student asks me “are you going to quit too?” But I’m coming in with fresh legs, seeing other teachers who have been worn down by this broken system over the course of the year. I bonded immediately with them because we are all suffering through a kind of mutual trauma each day. We’ve been placed in an impossible position, communing with hundreds of students who are in an equally impossible position, being asked to get them up to speed even though almost all of them are already several grade-levels behind because of the system we are asking them to navigate, because of the impossible circumstances that they have somehow endured thus far. The teachers around me are amazing, and they’ve been enduring this collapse far longer than I have, seeing the change in students year after year, dealing with larger classes year after year, having their jobs hanging in the balance every time a new round of cuts come around. And yet there they stay, weathering the storm.

The worst thing about witnessing all of this is knowing full well that it hasn’t happened by accident. Politics in Oregon are notoriously constrained by archaic Republican measures put in place in the 80s and 90s designed to make it nearly impossible to for the government to do anything productive – super-majorities are required to raise taxes, which can subsequently be referred to the ballot for a popular vote. If the state raises more money in a given year than they anticipated, that extra money is sent back to the taxpayers, preventing good accounting from actually taking place. Property tax increases have been capped each year, meaning revenue will literally never keep up with demand. To add to this slow bleed, the state has saddled local districts and municipalities with the the burden of paying for a pension program that they put in place, forcing school districts to pay ever-increasing costs for current retirees at the expense of current services. In short, schools are being bled dry from every angle, and its the students and teachers who are suffering. I cannot emphasize this enough: This has always been the goal: to destroy public education and push parents who have the means into private, for-profit schools. We are seeing the plan work exactly as it was intended to.

Republicans are more than happy with this situation – they’ll cry about PERS reform with the full knowledge that every penny owed to current retirees will be paid while they’re busy dismantling benefits for future employees. For Democrats – who have been poisoned by corporate cash and a desire to “compromise” with people who believe in things that are actively evil – the last few years has been a perfect situation for them: They’ve been able to win elections while fervently pretending that they have their hands tied behind their backs. They’ve been able to engage in their preferred mode of governing – tweaking around the edges, rearranging the deck chairs, allowing the water to slowly come to a boil as they dither on and on as their corporate backers prefer. Their motto has always been “We’d love to help you, but we can’t, ” the electoral equivalent of calling a customer service number and having a machine tell you that your call is important. On the surface, they’ll tell you that they believe in the “politics of the possible,” which is a fancy way of saying that they don’t ever want to mention any kind of vision that they can’t guarantee will pass in the next 30 days. This means that they have developed no long-term plans, no platform, no theory of governing. They have no vision, they have no beliefs, and they fundamentally think things are actually pretty good. Governor Kate Brown is the perfect embodiment of this ethos – the Governor who backed her way into office by throwing her predecessor under the bus and has subsequently governed with a distinct lack of vision for four years,garnering no accomplishments and doing absolutely nothing of note during her time in office. She’s the perfect Democrat – one who believes in the status quo, who doesn’t want to put her neck on the line, who probably couldn’t even tell you why she wanted to be Governor in the first place if you asked.

Then the unexpected happened: Last November, Democrats in Oregon encountered their nightmare scenario, winning super-majorities in both chambers and the governorship – enough power to permanently break the logjam and undo the damage that Republicans wrought back in the 80s and 90s. Having never developed a plan for this scenario, having never intended to actually represent their voters, this newfound power has been a real hot potato for them. This entire legislative session they’ve been trying to run out the clock, passing things like statewide rent control that seem great at first, but turn out to be nothing-burgers or even actively bad upon further scrutiny. They’re all just biding their time until the next election, hoping that Republicans can win enough seats to unburden them from the responsibility of having to govern. It’s clear now that they’ve always preferred the artificial constraints imposed upon them by previous Republican legislatures, and they’re anxious to be back in a place where those things can be a catch-all excuse for their persistent moral failures.

Despite their hatred of governing, Democrats did recognize that they had to do SOMETHING about school funding during this legislative session. With super-majorities, they needed only to keep their own counsel and come up with a plan that served their constituents and mobilized their base, right? So of course, the first thing they decided to do was seek the input of… Republicans (?) to craft a new funding package for schools. Once they finished that, they earned some big-time corporate sponsorships. (??????) After that, they entered new negotiations with Oregon Business and Industry. (?????????) At each of these stages, the bill was watered down further and made more complicated. At each stage it became more difficult to understand what any of the authors of the bill were actually trying to accomplish. With each compromise, Democrats earned brownie points and little else. And just in case there was any doubt about whose side they were actually on, our erstwhile Governor simultaneously introduced a plan to literally cut teacher salaries to help deal with pension costs – a move designed to further curry favor with corporate interests.

The result of all of this is a bill called the Student Success Act, which is literally impossible to understand, whose benefits cannot be explained and likely won’t even be seen for several years anyways. The money might provide some relief somewhere down the road, but no one can really explain how or when. In terms of mobilizing any kind of political energy, it seems to be designed to do the opposite. The state Teacher’s Union seems to have gotten behind it, and I’m getting all kinds of ads on Twitter and Facebook from shadowy groups who seem to support it, but it’s clear that it doesn’t do anything to fix the IMMEDIATE problems that EVERY educator is facing in their classroom RIGHT NOW. And if you need a two-day conference to explain how it *might* help in the future, you probably fucked up your bill.

But hey, at least after ALL of that time spent compromising, seeking input from the other side, giving up the farm for Republican and Corporate buy-in, Democrats won’t have to worry about any opposition, right? HA. Actually, the totally predictable has happened: Republicans are bringing out the big guns: Going all fire and brimstone against the bill that has been watered down ostensibly to garner their support. They’re shutting down the state Senate in order to get MORE concessions from Democrats. And those Corporate interests who promised to remain “neutral” on the bill in exchange for even more concessions? I’ll bet you good money they’ll still organize enough signatures to get the measure referred to the ballot even if it does pass. And when this arcane bill – this magical gear-box filled with so many compromises that no one can actually sum it up in any kind of convincing way – is put before the voters, it will be attacked relentlessly as a “sales tax” and will fail because it’s ALWAYS easier for the enemies of complicated legislation to define that legislation than it is for the proponents. Oregon has some recent history with this. We should know better.

So. I’m walking out tomorrow. I’ll be marching with the rest of Portland’s teachers on the waterfront, joining my peers while knowing full well that powers that be are busy attempting to funnel that enormous energy for change into something that’s pallatable to the very people who seek to destroy us and what we do. Knowing full well that the next election cycle will probably bring me yet another choice between a Republican who is actively against me and a Democrat who pretends they can’t do anything to help me. Knowing full well that things will probably get worse before they get better. I’ll march because I don’t know what else to do.

I Did Not Anticipate This

Part of getting a little bit older has been admitting the parts of personality – good and bad – that are basically baked in, either due to genetics or my upbringing. Admitting my own helplessness in this regard has been largely a good thing, but it comes with some obvious drawbacks when it comes to big life changes. So when I found out that I was going to be a Dad in 2016, it was often hard for me to shake the feeling that I wasn’t up to the task of parenting, and that this failure was somehow beyond my control. I always had a pretty good sense that I’d be up to the domestic tasks – the diaper-changing, the nap schedules, the otherwise fatherly participation in the rituals of parenting. But what really frightened me were the elements of parenting that I didn’t have any control over –  Would I really love him enough? Would I resent him for changing my life so acutely? Would I be spending most of my waking hours with him out of obligation instead of love? Despite the raft of literature on parenting (to be clear, I have read none of it), there doesn’t seem to be much guidance on this front.

I know I’m supposed to say “I fell in love with him the first time I saw him.” And that’s true, in a way. Something did click when Simon was born, when it turned out that he was a real, breathing human instead of just a concept trapped inside a belly. And a lot of my other nagging concerns were answered early on: Not only was I good at fulfilling my fatherly duties -changing diapers was oddly satisfying (no one talks about this), and my adherence to a sleeping schedule easily could have been diagnosed as a mental disorder – but my sense of responsibility towards his well-being was rooted almost exclusively in my love for him. After a few months, I found myself thinking, “yeah, I can do this.” I had NO idea what I was talking about. I had NO idea what I was in for. I probably STILL don’t, because as it turns out parenthood is a form of insanity that alters your brain chemistry faster than you can possibly keep track of it.

Right from the start, Simon had this knack for producing ridiculous moments where a kind of love I didn’t know existed in me would just get sling-shotted to the surface, and these moments seem to happen every day. A couple of months ago we brought him into bed early one morning, and after some quiet snuggling, he lifted up his head to look me in the eye, broke into a huge smile, and whispered “good morning,” which sounded like “good moaning” but with a long and exagerrated “o” sound. We recently upgraded to a toddler bed, and the other night I was lying in bed with him at bedtime. At one point I lifted my head up to see if he was asleep, and he immediately reached his hand to forcefully push my head back onto the pillow, with a simple command: “Dada snuggle.” I experience each of these moments like tiny deaths. All of my brain synapses fire at once. My heart leaps out of my chest and punches me in the face. I hardly know what to do with myself.

Then there’s the fear. I thought that as he got older and less fragile, this would dissipate. I could not have been more wrong. The morning after my 35th birthday, Simon climbed out of his crib for the first time, and when I went into his room I could hear him crying but I couldn’t find him, which is the literal plot of 100% of my parenting nightmares. As it turned out he had landed in his clothes hamper face down and was helplessly screaming into his dirty clothes during the 60 seconds when I was looking for him – 60 seconds where I wasn’t there for him, where he was helpless and all alone, where he didn’t know where I was. And while he forgot about the whole thing in about five minutes, I’ve thought about it every day since. A couple of weeks ago he fell out of his chair after dinner and hit his head – a scene which replayed in my head over and over again as I tried to fall asleep that night. The other day, I was downstairs watching a movie after he had gone to bed, when I heard his crying upstairs immediately followed by Laura’s hurried footsteps to his room. And while I “knew” that nothing was actually wrong, that sound – the crying, the footsteps, the running – was enough to make me want to die. Because losing him is never far from my mind. Because every day that he is alive, there is more of him to lose, and more of me that he would take with him.

I know it’s only been two years, which means the verdict on my parenting disposition is far from decided, and my helplessness in the face of all of it is more apparent than ever. He’s at an age where he’s still pretty obsessed with me and his Mom, which is in equal parts amazing and transient – so much can happen in the next 30 years. Maybe someday he’ll decide that he’s a Libertarian, maybe he’ll decide to use his considerable brainpower to get into investment banking or the oil industry. Maybe he’ll decide that his bleeding heart Dad is just a disillusioned kook who isn’t worth seeing during the Holidays. Or maybe as I reach old age, my grip of reality will slip just enough that I start to view him as an enemy. Maybe the physical degeneration of my brain tissue will cause me to disown him because of some imagined slight. Anything can happen, and so much of it is still beyond my control.

But right now, this shit is real fuckin’ good; better than any drug I’ve ever done. And it seeps into every part of my life. I’m constantly stopping myself from over-sharing the most mundane parenting anecdotes with my friends who aren’t parents, because COME ON have you seen this kid? Have you ever watched him eat blueberries? Have you ever heard how he says the words “I love you?” (“Ah wah wah”) FOR GOD’S SAKE, HE POINTED AT A GUY WITH A BEARD ON THE FERRY AND CALLED HIM SANTA, HOW IS THIS NOT THE FUNNIEST THING YOU’VE EVER HEARD, WHY ARE YOU WALKING AWAY FROM ME, WHY WON’T YOU RETURN MY CALLS I JUST WANT TO TELL YOU ABOUT MY SON.

This love is painful. It’s bracing. It fills my every waking moment. It feels like too much to contain. That probably sounds like bragging, and it might be. But have you seen the fucking face on this kid? Have you heard his voice? Have you put him in timeout, only to discover that he feels and expresses genuine regret at the act that put him there? Have you watched him shuffle out of his bedroom in the morning while rubbing his eyes, in a slow-march-to-inevitable-snuggles, on a collision course for you? Have you held his sobbing body after he’s hurt himself? Has he asked you, unprompted, for a kiss? Have you lied down next to him as he’s falling asleep, your face only inches from his, and been 100% certain that he is falling asleep both knowing that he is loved and thinking about how much he loves you in return? No, you haven’t. Not with this kid. Because you didn’t have anything to do with his creation.

That’s MY son, and I’m his Dad. And I couldn’t be happier with this arrangement.

What I Watched in 2018

I do understand that some of these movies were released in 2017, but I watched them in 2018. So shut up.

This is now a movie blog.

Black Panther

Let’s start with a Marvel movie, because we are rapidly heading to a future where these are the only movies that are ever made. The thing is: I really, really liked this movie. And it’s actually hard for me to define WHY I liked it. The plot is typical, predictable, and the ending is just as you’d expect it to be. But man, this movie was good. It made me think a lot about how movies make their viewers invest in the characters, and how much of that work is done in subtle ways – so that by the time a character is in a fight or “dies” in a way in which you KNOW that they’re going to come back, you still FEEL something. And I felt a lot during this movie. The characters were amazing, the action was well put-together, and they took some real TIME with their characters. The main villain was deeply sympathetic and also completely correct, it’s too bad he had a penchant for killing lots of innocent people.

The Last Jedi

I liked a lot about this movie – I thought the buildup (and the music!) that went along with the culminating moment at the end of the movie almost made the bad stuff worth watching.

But the bad stuff… oh man. I mean, they took Finn – the most likeable and interesting  character from the first movie and basically turned him into Jar-Jar Binks. And though  I liked the eat-the-rich message of the scene on the casino planet, the more I thought about it the more I realized that it was a clumsily un-subtle dig at Trump, and it pisses me off that we can’t even have a fucking Star Wars movie that doesn’t re-litigate the 2016 election. I don’t need that, and neither does anyone else.

The very end of the movie, with the Child staring up at the sky and clutching a “Resistance” symbol was a strong indication that there will be approximately 1,500 more Star Wars movies during my lifetime, and we are rapidly heading towards a time when  they will every single one of them will be really fucking bad.

Avengers: Age of Ultron

There is so much going on in this movie that literally the only thing characters can take time to do is explain what the fuck is going on, all the way up to and including their specific motivations for each and every one of their actions. They might as well just kill all the dialog and have a narrator.  It’s too much, and I hope they all stay dead. The end.

Hereditary & Mother!

I put these two movies together because I think they are illustrative of two good filmmakers accomplishing very different goals through the medium of horror.

Hereditary is a movie that is beautiful, terrifying, and brilliant. It made me feel like absolute shit for most of the movie, I couldn’t sleep the night after watching it, and I was thinking about it the whole next day. The filmmaker reached into my soul and pulled strings that I didn’t know were there, because whoever made this movie understood a great deal of the human condition. I’m OK with that, even if it didn’t make me feel good. It made me appreciate the craft of film-making while exploring grief and fear and family.

Then there’s Mother! – the only purpose of which was to break my spirit. In making this movie, Darron Aronofsky wanted me to feel worse than I ever have before while watching a movie. He wanted to cause me pain. He wanted to make me suffer. And yeah, he did a really good job of it. But FUCK him. And fuck Mother! I hated this movie. And I’m now a Republican who believes in censorship. Thanks Darron.

Sharp Objects

Man, this show. It wrecked me in so many ways. Having pretty recently attended the funeral of my biological teenage son in the south, watching a show about…. lots of dead teenagers in the south – with threads of suicide and grief throughout – was maybe not the best move for me. But I found this show to be completely gripping. It’s a show where the atmosphere was SO much more interesting than the story. And that atmosphere is enough to make the show worth watching.

That being said. I partly enjoyed this show because I was able to suspend my disbelief about the whole thing until approximately the last 30 minutes of the final episode. It was at that point that it all came together, with a ridiculous twist that made all of the time they put into developing the characters seem completely pointless. It also brought together something that had been nagging at me throughout the show. I realized that Sharp Objects is – without exaggeration – the most deeply sexist show I have ever watched. Literally every single one of the male characters in this show – even the ones who turn out to be pretty shitty – have an underlying current of earnest nobility running through their veins. They’re all cool under pressure, they all really just want to do the right thing. They all are constantly tempted and led astray by females who want to lead them off the path. The corrupt sheriff is mostly just foolish and protective. The FBI agent falls head over heels for the central character and just wants her to love him back in a devoted monogamous relationship, only to have his heart broken. Even the least sympathetic male character’s central crime is only that he has been deliberately ignorant of the heinous crimes of his wife. These men are just trying to do their best in a world full of damaged women trying to lead them astray.

And about those women: Wow. Starting with the supposedly very young teenage girls in this show, every single woman portrayed is completely fucking broken and devoted to death, destruction, and the tarnishing of male nobility. I’m not even joking here. This caricature runs all the way down to the young girls in this show, who seem to spend 90% of their time wearing absurdly short skirts, riding around on roller skates, drinking, and attempting to seduce older men. The main character’s mother is a child abuser and murderer, and her sister helped her mother both kill and dismember the victims. Even Amy Adams – who is an incredibly sympathetic character – is a deeply broken self-harming alcoholic who has no problem seducing a source for a story and sleeping with a broken 19 year-old boy who had just lost his sister.

The more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve realized that the only way this stuff could have even made it to the screen is if the vast majority of people involved in production and approval had been male – which is undoubtedly the case. Given that, I was shocked to find out that the author of the books that were the source material for this show was a woman. It just goes to show you that the misogyny runs deep.

You Were Never Really Here 

This is worth watching just for Joaquin Phoenix’s performance. The story is ridiculous in a lot of ways, but he’s so fucking good. From the very first time you see his face, you know that he is a deeply broken man who just needs the right kind of pressure to snap. And you watch just to see it happen.

Phantom Thread

A deeply strange movie about weird bourgeois culture, with un-relatable characters and a very slow pace. And yet there’s an incredible 3-minute scene near the end (the dinner scene) that makes it entirely worth watching.

Annihilation

One of the year’s best movies, despite being sabotaged post-production by Sony and released only on a limited basis. It was haunting, beautiful, and stuck with me for weeks after I watched it. While different from the book in several important ways – some of which made sense and others which seemed totally unnecessary – it had the same effect. I was unsettled throughout, thrown off-kilter at every turn, and found myself in tears at the end. Please watch this movie.

Hostile

What a beautiful film in so many ways, with incredible casting to boot. But at the end of the day, it couldn’t seem to decide whether it was a Cormac McCarthy novel or Dances With fucking Wolves. The movie didn’t stick with a single story and didn’t have an identity. By the end of it, I wasn’t even sure if the title made sense.

At the center of this movie is a compelling nugget – the idea that lifelong enemies who have suffered greatly at each other’s hands have to learn how to get along after decades of war. If you’re able to set aside the fact that Native Americans and occupying American soldiers are somehow placed on the same level in terms of atrocities committed, I think this movie could have derived some interesting lessons and powerful moments if it had stuck with that story. But for SOME reason, the writers tried to inject about 17 sub-plots – romances, bromances, kidnappings, and everything in-between. By the time the redemptive moment comes between Christian Bale’s character and the Native Chief who has been his lifelong enemy – it feels almost farcical, because only 10% of the movie has been devoted to leading up to that particular moment – and it’s not even at the end, because the end of the movie is Christian Bale deciding to hop on a train to follow the female lead of the movie to Chicago, because… I guess it’s a love story now? Alright then.

Sorry to Bother You

This movie was great – partly because I really agreed with the anti-capitalist message of it (duh) – and partly because I found each of the characters to be incredibly interesting and likable. That being said, the less subtle the critiques of capitalism got, the less enjoyable the movie became. By the end it felt like Boots Riley was hitting you in the face – repeatedly – with his message. At least it was a good message!

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

The Coen brothers are masters at their craft, and this movie almost felt like they were showing off – which I’m perfectly fine with. A movie with six distinct stories, all of which managed to get me invested in each character and storyline – some with nary a line of dialog passed for most of the story. It’s deeply impressive filmmaking and I really really enjoyed every minute of it.

What Does Kate Brown Actually Believe In?

I can’t claim to be an ardent follower of Oregon state politics. I have however been following the Oregon Governor’s race with an increasing level of interest, because it seems like there’s an increasingly real chance that Kate Brown could be unseated by her Republican opponent, a man whose skin is made up of approximately 40% earlobe tissue and whose eyes have been replaced by LITERAL BEADS -a man whose campaign platform is based almost exclusively on eviscerating the state’s public pension program and gutting regulations on corporations. His name is Knute Buehler, and he sucks.

So why would Oregon, a blue state whose US Senators are two of the most reliably liberal in the nation, elect a man like Buehler over an incumbent Democrat? What is it about Kate Brown’s plan for her second term that has made voters consider putting someone else in the Governor’s mansion? Wait… actually, what IS Kate Brown’s plan? She’ll have the mandate of a second-term governor, and there’s a real possibility of a blue wave that is could boost Democratic numbers in the state legislature too. Surely she must have an ambitious agenda that will drive people to the polls, right? Actually, here’s what her campaign website: says:

• Going forward, Kate will continue helping small businesses across Oregon thrive by cutting red tape.
• Kate will continue to stand with working families by supporting policies that help give opportunities to all Oregonians.
• Our state is at the forefront of a supply chain for an emerging technology, and we can leverage this opportunity to grow our a robust and globally connected, statewide economy.
• Just as families have to keep to a budget to make ends meet, so does state government.
• She convened a Task Force to review and propose options for making up to $5 billion in payments toward PERS costs. Made up of a diverse group of stakeholders, this group is considering the most cost-effective methods to save money while still remaining committed to our Oregon values.
• Kate will continue to protect the progress that we have made to make reproductive healthcare accessible in Oregon.
• Kate will continue to fight for the resources necessary to make sure every student enters school ready to learn, and stays engaged and on track throughout their education.

Two things jump out at me while reading through these. First, it’s clear that she’s not planning on DOING anything during her second term – she’s committed to keeping the lights on and that’s about it. Second, there’s not a single promise that she’s made that couldn’t be just as easily made by a Republican. That’s not because she’s going to implement Republican policies, mind you – it’s because all of her promises are so vague that they could be made by anyone, for any reason. A Republican could just as easily promise you that they’ll “stand up for working families” by voting to end Oregon’s status as a sanctuary state, for instance.  Knute could promise to “fight for the resources necessary” for Oregon students by destroying the state’s public employee pension plan and “re-investing” the money in schools, as he has actually proposed. He could promise to “help small businesses” by cutting the minimum wage. These phrases are meaningless, designed deliberately in a way that avoids taking genuine policy positions or creating a vision for the future.

Listen, I know that Oregon is a uniquely tough state to govern. When Republicans had some level of power in the 80s, they ensured that any Democratic Legislature would have one hand tied behind their back for the foreseeable future by requiring a 2/3 vote in the legislature for any kind of tax increase. The funding model that existed at that point was messy, and remains so, because no one has had the numbers to change it. That makes it hard for ANY Governor to promise ambitious new initiatives that would cost any kind of real money. So the state Democratic party has taken the most extremely Democrat position possible: “We can’t do anything about this right now, so why even mention that we might want to in the future?” So we’re left with an incredibly boring, technocratic, anti-aspirational gubernatorial campaign that inspires nobody and could very well propel a man who will do an incredible amount of damage into the Governor’s mansion. It’s the exact kind of campaign that Hillary Clinton ran against Donald Trump, and those results speak for themselves.

If Kate Brown loses to Knute Buehler, it won’t be because he’s a good candidate. It’ll be because people are struggling across the board and she promised to deliver them nothing to alleviate their suffering. It’ll be because she thought she could coast to a second term without making any policy commitments. It’ll be because she failed to offer a positive vision of a real future where the government can actually help people. It’ll be because she Doesn’t. Actually. Believe. In. Anything. And there’s a real possibility that we’ll all be worse off because of it.

(In case anyone is wondering, I’m still going to fucking vote for her)

I Just… I Can’t With This Shit

Yesterday, President Trump besmirched America. He was weak. He took Russia’s side instead of the side of our vaunted intelligence agencies. It was unprecented, remarkable, a day which will live in infamy. It was.. I dunno, someone toss me a Churchill quote. Yeah, it was that. Definitely a big deal.

It’s hard to overstate the extent to which the media and political establishment’s language towards Russia has changed over the last year and a half. Vladimir Putin has been de facto leader of Russia for the majority of my lifetime, but only in the last couple of years has everyone decided at once that he is an urgent threat, an Enemy Who Must Be Dealt With. It’s so interesting to me how quickly the worm can turn, how much our military and intelligence agencies are still able to create and drive a narrative, and how quickly someone can become a supervillain once we decide that they should be judged as such.

Let me ask you this: to the extent that Russia (a land mass) can behave in certain ways, what exactly has changed about that behavior in recent years? Vladmir Putin has been been an asshole for as long as he’s been in charge of Russia. I actually pay attention to this shit, and I happen to remember the devastation that they unleashed on Chechnya in the early 2000s. I happen to remember when they invaded Georgia in 2008 and displaced hundreds of thousands of people.  Back then, we treated these events like we treat any global atrocity – we wagged our finger, told them to knock it off, and then went to bed.

Has Russia’s behavior changed over the last few years? Is their aggression in Crimea and Ukraine vastly different than the carnage they unleashed on Chechnya and Georgia? Does their involvement in Syria and their disregard for civilian casualties differ that much from our own? Maybe. But I can’t see the degree to which the change justifies our change in posture, our change in language. Because in the last year, we have adopted the language of war. The language of treason and sedition. The language of good vs. evil. And it’s genuinely frightening to me how quickly the American people accept these new narratives, which have the real potential to drive our politics for the foreseeable future at the expense of everything else, at the expense of things that actually matter.

What’s really missing from all of this is a sense of scale. Of all of the myriad of scandals of the Trump Administration, of all of their disgusting misdeeds, this is the only thing that our political culture is capable of funneling our energy towards. People in Flint still don’t have clean water. More than 2,500 migrant parents have still not been reunited with their children, and possibly never will be. Hundreds of thousands of people could die from starvation and disease in Yemen because of a war that our military is actively boosting. Republicans are ushering in a 20+ year Supreme Court reign that will likely overturn Roe Vs. Wade and successfully squash out any legislation that is remotely progressive, even if our sclerotic legislature could actually pass anything in that vein. In the midst of an economic recovery, real wages are literally declining. Health insurance “markets” are crumbling, as they are rapidly regressing to the pre-Obamacare norm, which is to say that more and more people are suffering at the hands of a machine that is literally designed to profit off of that suffering.

Despite all of that, nothing tickles the pickle of the American imagination like a foreign espionage scandal. The tone of media coverage over the past few days has been straight-up manic – like little kids on Christmas morning. It’s a sick conglomeration of our comic-book addled minds and our for-profit media landscape. So many people want to be part of something larger than themselves, a battle between good and evil, the decisive conflict of our times. And since the war on terror has run its course (Did we win? Does anyone give a fuck?), America wants for nothing more than a foreign menace stalking us at all times, hiding under our beds, hacking our very democracy.

Nothing good will come of this. And I don’t just say that as a devoted peacenik, which I proudly am. I mean, how can anyone have experienced the run-up to the Iraq War and not see the similarities here? Like, we’re just gonna anoint a new enemy and everyone’s gonna be cool with it? We’re all going to accept that as our new reality? We’re just going to repeat the words “Russian interference in our election” until we experience another war aneurysm? Do we really have to fucking do this?

Russia is a country that we will never defeat militarily. We will never occupy them. We will never force them into a more democratic government. We will never deliver the smackdown of Vladimir Putin that will cause him to retreat into a pool of his own tears and resign as Russian Premier. What we WILL do is…. well, everything we’ve always done since the end of the Second World War – those things that we do best when we are dealing with foreign menaces:  We’ll engage in aerial bombardment of supposed client states, killing countless numbers of civilians and sending their civilian infrastructure back into the stone age. We’ll overthrow governments. Literally hundreds of thousands of people will die. Oh, and at the tail end of the probability curve, there’s always the possibility of a nuclear fucking holocaust.

And if you think that the Trump Administration won’t sign up for this shit when push comes to shove, boy howdy you’ve got some surprises coming your way.

There’s Politics in Everything

This came up on my Facebook feed recently, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot:

The think tank that my Facebook friend quotes above is called “The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.” If you peruse their webpage, you’ll find reams of policy papers about the necessity of cutting Social Security benefits, but nary a word about the regressive nature of the taxes which fund those benefits, which fall disproportionately on low and middle-income people. Not coincidentally, you’ll also find out that their board is made up almost entirely of former congresspeople who are now working in the banking and finance industry, no doubt pulling in millions of dollars a year. For these people, the most clear and present danger in American society is the possibility that the government may someday decide to actually meet its obligations by raising their taxes to ensure that everyone else has the basic standard of living that our country can clearly afford to provide them.

That stuff is all par for the course, I suppose. But here’s what really gets to me: He claims here that Social Security and Medicare are not  “partisan issues.” Millions of people depend on these programs every day for their literal survival, but this person’s advice – and the advice of the think tank who he’s quoting –  is that these programs need removed from the realm of politics. People need to put aside their petty needs like “putting food on the table” and “paying for cancer treatment” and trust that people in Washington know what’s best for them. It’s not about politics, they say. It’s about making tough choices and voting against your own interests. It’s about doing what’s best for the country. It’s about trusting your betters.

Social Security and Medicare are the most popular social programs ever instituted in this country’s history, full stop. Cutting benefits to these programs is vastly unpopular, which is why they have managed to survive for so long in their current form. The only people who support these kinds of draconian cuts are those who have no stake in the outcome – those who can rest assured that their Social Security check will only be a small percentage of their post-retirement income. These people make up a very small percentage of the American public and have vastly different interests than everyone else, so of COURSE they will tell you that cutting your benefits is not a partisan issue. Of COURSE they’ll tell you that these reforms are “common sense.” Because if they admit that people’s very lives and well-being are in the realm of politics, they’d have to admit that they are on the wrong side and are destined to lose.

In 2012, as part of my graduate program, I went to Washington DC with a group of classmates to learn about the process of making public policy. We visited the Brookings Institute, we met with Democratic and Republican representatives from Oregon, and went to a couple of different lobbying firms. To a person, they ALL talked about the necessity of cutting these social programs – the consensus was bipartisan and overwhelming. These policy discussions have been meticulously channeled into a limited number of possible actions by think tanks who are funded by the very people who benefit from keeping the parameters of that discussion the same. And that manages to filter down to professional-minded people who are interested in being Very Serious, who furrow their brow and talk about the necessity of being balanced, who think that the extreme right and the extreme left are somehow the same thing, who think that the most important thing you can do in politics is to avoid upsetting anyone. And up until this point these people have had a pretty clear hold on the politics of the Democratic party. You can judge the results for yourselves.

Here’s the deal – if you believe that the role of elected officials is to somehow make decisions that are deeply unpopular amongst the vast majority of Americans, but have been deemed “the right thing to do” by a small number of people who have been secluded in the literally delusional centers of power of DC politics for the majority of their lives – than you’re not a progressive. You’re not even a centrist. You’re a monarchist. It is fundamentally conservative to think that people need to put aside their personal wants and needs when they vote and take the word of the people who are already at the top. It is fundamentally antidemocratic to believe that people don’t know what’s best for them when every poll ever conducted on these programs shows that people don’t want their benefits to be cut and actually support raising taxes on the wealthy. It’s fundamentally elitist to believe that everyone needs to follow the advice of the people who are already in power.

On the other hand, if you believe that the role of government is to improve people’s lives, than it should be obvious to you that there is politics in everything. If you believe that the purpose of politics is to advance the interests of the people who do the voting, than you understand that “common sense” dictates that the government should be working to advance the interests of those very people. You have to be able to see that these interests are diametrically opposed to those of the people who are already at the top.

We are in the midst of a class war, and politics is literally the only weapon we have at our disposal. The primary goal of the 1% has been to convince the rest of us to lay that weapon down. They want us to believe that they have our interests in mind, that the budget deficit is somehow more important than putting food on the table or your ability to access health care when you need it. These people are actively work to dismantle every possible guarantee we have of a basic standard of living, and have been doing so for the duration of my lifetime. And they’ve made obscene amounts of money while all of this has been happening.

They are not to be trusted.

They are not listening to you.

They are not on your side.

You have to start advocating for your own interests. You have to start voting for people who do the same.