Skip to main content
Congratulations, Doctor. A decade ago, you started banging the table for a “Make Portland Shitty Again” agenda to reduce the city’s desirability to outsiders and lower housing prices. Well, mission accomplished. We all pitched in and, with a little help from the president, Portland’s name is mud. Not only have people stopped flocking here, some of them are skipping town. So…what’s the next step? Surely this wasn’t the extent of your plan? —Ink-Stained Wreck
A decade ago, I began advocating—mostly as a joke, partly out of spite, and entirely without a permit—that the city adopt an agenda to “Make Portland Shitty Again.” At the time, this bordered on heresy. Portland was America’s own Manic Pixie Dream Girl—who would dare rock such a beautiful pea-green boat?
But now, oh, how the quirky have fallen! Through a combination of civic enthusiasm and poor impulse control (plus a little jackbooted groping from the pussy-grabber-in-chief), Portland’s cuteness has evaporated almost as completely as that of Macaulay Culkin. The crowds have thinned, the national mood has shifted from envy to concern to schadenfreude (actually, a lot of people skipped the “concern” part), and folks who not so long ago planned to move here now text us cautiously—if at all—to ask if we’re OK.
So it worked! You’re welcome. Still, I grant that for some, going from “oversubscribed Disneyland with weed” to “boarded-up Action Park with fentanyl” may not seem like that much of an improvement. (Bitch, bitch, bitch.) Still, Portlanders looking for a plausible redemption arc need look no further than a lady who’s already taught America more about survival than anyone since Gloria Gaynor.
Britney Spears.
The parallels are uncanny. Like Britney, we burst onto the national scene as a cloying, overexposed (but undeniably winsome) America’s sweetheart, propelled to fame in no small part by Portlandia, our version of The Mickey Mouse Club. Even as we were coming to dominate the cultural landscape of an increasingly skeptical America, however, our behavior became erratic—riots, social media meltdowns, cry-for-help head-shaving.
By the early 2020s, we were a city one could easily imagine beating strangers with an umbrella. This was our darkest hour, as a nation sick of our terminal cuteness pounced on our downfall with savage glee. But just as the media dogpile reached its schadenfreudistic* peak, we began to evince sympathy from some quarters, especially after the looming threat of federal intervention—our civil conservatorship—made even our worst detractors suspect that the punishment had outpaced the crime. This was (is?) our “Leave Britney Alone” moment.
The forces of darkness do seem to be receding. So now what? In Britney’s case, the answer wasn’t a triumphant return to innocence. It was a quieter, stranger phase: legally emancipated and emotionally scarred, but no longer a public emergency.
Portland should follow that example. The hope is that we can come to be seen as damaged (and perhaps slightly unhinged) but fundamentally sympathetic: not a city you’d want to be stuck on a desert island with, maybe (and one that sure does seem to post a lot of naked selfies for a middle-aged metropolis), but basically OK when admired from a safe distance. The frogs were a good start: bizarre but harmless. We’re not asking for redemption, just a supervised release (perhaps with a tasteful ankle monitor). And if America doesn’t agree, fuck ’em—they wish they still looked this good naked after two kids.
In the following pages, I present six steps to Portland’s rehabilitation (I was going to write 12, but then I remembered it was time for a drink).
*I assume this is the proper adjectival form; “schadenfreudian” would imply a tendency to laugh when your mom steps on a rake—maybe more, depending on the shape of the handle.
1. Rebrand ”Keep Portland Weird“ as ”Portland Has Seen Some Shit.“
It’s time to stop presenting ourselves as America’s quirky neighbor. Rather, we should start leaning into an identity more like America’s retired drug runner who lives in that disused equipment shed down by the park. Instead of wacky nonconformity, we should project twitchy, dead-eyed competence—less Unipiper, more Unabomber.
Sure, Bogota Joe might seem a little creepy compared to, say, Steve Urkel. (Actually, maybe that’s a bad example.) Either way, though, which one would you rather have reloading the shotgun when the space zombies come?
2. No more cute TV shows ever.
When Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein wanted to make a show about us, we were as excited and flattered as that other Carrie (the one played by Sissy Spacek) was when she was elected prom queen—and we all know how that turned out. Acceding to appeals that target one’s own vanity rarely turns out well. (If you don’t believe me, ask any humor writer who’s up way past bar-thirty writing New Year’s resolutions because somebody promised him it would be the cover story.)
Any video producers caught filming a pilot for any meditation, affectionate or otherwise, on Portland’s civic identity will be beaten savagely with an umbrella until they agree to ply their wares in San Jose, Irvine or some other place that deserves it. Repeat offenders will be telekinetically impaled.
3. Reform charter reform.
The expansion of the Portland City Council from four members to 12 is a good start, but only takes a dozen activists, gadflies and ideologues out of circulation. Charter-reform reform would build on this idea by implementing fully open elections for City Council: Everyone who runs gets in.
People who feel like they should be in charge of stuff but lack the experience and qualifications for a real government job can now spend their days arguing, having social media feuds (on a special private platform the rest of us can’t see), and freeing Gaza with all the other people who feel the same way. Meanwhile, the rest of us get on with our lives.
Councilors will meet in an as-yet-undetermined location (Mall 205? Wapato Jail?) into which they will be locked, like a papal conclave, for the duration of each year’s 364-day legislative session. See you on Christmas!
4. Finding yourself? Don’t look here.
For too long, young (and not so young) people have flocked to Portland like it was the Treasure Island for Finding Your Authentic Self™. When Portland was the civic equivalent of Chloe Sevigny, that made sense, but no longer. Starting now, anyone announcing that they’ve come to Portland to find themselves will be given a bag of trail mix, directions to Burning Man, and an atomic wedgie, in that order.
The new Portland is no place for dewy-eyed seekers of the meaning of life—which, by the way, makes it not that different from the old Portland. Remember, just 60 years ago, Portland was so famously corrupt and mobbed up that its mean streets had to be cleaned up by RFK himself. (That’s RFK Sr., by the way. That high-pitched whine you hear is him spinning in his grave, albeit for reasons unrelated to this article.)
Was anyone trying to make Portland a real-life stand-in for Narnia back then? I’ll bet not. Anyway, everyone knows that the real treasure is the drug habit we developed along the way.
5. Establish official bad-idea corridors.
Let’s be honest, Portland isn’t going to transform itself from The Royal Tenenbaums to Blade Runner overnight. There will be backsliding. But as a mature city that has tasted the bitter fruit of self-knowledge (I haven’t been limber enough to taste it myself since I was 13), we should be able to put guardrails around the sloppiness, like deleting your ex’s number from your phone before a night of heavy drinking.
Certain districts will be designated as Bad Idea Corridors (Hawthorne Boulevard, Foster Road and Marine Drive spring to mind), where poor decisions are expected, tolerated, and efficiently hosed down afterward. If you wake up in one of these zones with a mysterious piercing, a hitherto-unknown social disease, or your very own memecoin, that’s on you.
Ideally, camera crews from the national media would be excluded from these areas, but don’t hold your breath. Still, anything that reduces the scope of our messy-bitch tendencies is progress. We may never reach that Pete Buttigieg-like pinnacle of perfect levelheadedness, but at least we’re not running through the house breaking mirrors while the neighbors livestream it.
6. Adopt a strict anti-aspiration ordinance.
You want to know what people in other cities hate about Portland? Probably a lot of things, but our habit of describing whatever we happen to be doing that day with phrases like “a model for the nation,” “Portland leads the way” and “blueprint for the future” has to be right up there.
Frankly, we walk around like our combined sewer overflows don’t stink, even though these days outsiders probably see us as scarcely able to pour piss out of a boot, urban governancewise. It’s not like Portland has been running like a well-oiled machine lately. With hubris like this, is it any wonder nobody wants to sit with us at the Regional Water Providers Consortium?
Well, message received. City-related communications will no longer present Portland as an exemplar, apotheosis, or ideal to which other cities should aspire. No more adopting a tone like Jean-Luc Picard describing the wonders of the Federation to a planet of cave-dwelling dirt farmers. Going forward, we will speak factually and humbly, embracing modesty in all things. (Except selfies.)
