Pink Martini, Portland Oregon. An Innocence Project Visit. The Constitution and How the Alt Right is Winning

By David Langwallner

I visited Portland Oregon five years ago and gave a talk at an Innocence Project Conference. It was from recollection and and a remembrance of things past a beautiful well ordered city with a caveat to come. A superb tram line. A grid system of utter prettiness. It is amazing how the casual visitor is impressed with superficial things. Ireland was or is a good place to play golf but nasty, vicious, scurrilous, corporate, third world nonsense but a good place to play golf Bob.

Now Oregon has fantastic museums and Pink Martini local residents and icons were playing. Oregon sophistication translated into the glitzy impersonation of European Style. But since America in cultural terms has conquered Europe as even Mr. Godard would accept well no difference. In fact Mr. Godard and the Novelle Vague promoted same.

Now I am a book collector and that leads to some would say aimlessly to the the less well preserved and well maintained parts of town and Portland is far from picture perfect. All families have problems. Portland is now a Norman Rockwell painting. So many people walk the streets aimlessly because the state released those for funding purposes in need of mental treatment on to the streets en masse. To visit the outliers of any city is to see all.  It has more than its fair share of bag ladies and disempowered lives. It also appearances to the contrary has ghettoisation.

Chicago is the most extreme example of same. The carefully protected upper city with the fabulous Whitney Museum with its great Seurat painting is largely safe for a tourist or a visitor. But the nether zone downtown extends for a long reach until you reach the University of Chicago and the buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright. Now I have no interest whatsoever in The University of Chicago, the most dull law school in America ,captured by The Law and Economics Movement whose disgraceful ideas so suit the Republican Party of America and indeed America and where Easterbrook and Posner have a stranglehold on legal opinion and to some extent the bench.

So I walked across that well preserved campus of ideological infamy and down a few streets to see the buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright and have a wonderful tour of his house. Something we should venerate about America.

But of course it is Chicago ideas of wealth maximization and cost benefit that have destroyed America. In fact it is the earliest city of the skyscraper with the Sullivan buildings those cathedrals of commerce and with Conorovirus the chickens are coming home to roost and perhaps now Portland is the center of attention. The eye of the storm. Slow Train Coming to quote Dylan.

Portland saw the murder of Charles Floyd leading to the inception of the black lives matter protests and the right to protest is warped into the American constitution in the first amendment.

The second amendment the famous right to bear arms could also be cited but it is a rare insurrectionist privilege. An extension of The Boston Tea Party you overthrow British rule. But perhaps that is where they are now in terms of a conflict between Oregon and The Federal Government.

This raises the issue of state rights versus federal rights under the dispensation of The American Constitution. Now Federal Supremacy is asserted under the amended Article VI of The Constitution and there is always a residual executive power to intervene in state affairs where there has been a defined breach of order publique and an emergency.

Now Alexander Hamilton, much maligned, and a defender of state rights against federal government wrote frequently about the need to engage in insurrection and indeed usurpation against federal tyranny. If we remember the American system was not that ill disposed towards the UK But towards The tyranny of autocracy.

Much maligned in tradition and the assassination in a duel by the very dubious Burr is that normally the pattern has been that rogue American states have to be chastised. So Eisenhower brought in the troops to enforce racial desperation in the schools after the Brown (1954) decision. Federal emergency powers were needed d to counteract state dereliction and racism.

Now it is a different context and clears for all to see.

Poverty, inequality coupled with Conorovirus accelerating deaths have invalidated the intellectual basis and logical basis for cost benefit analysis and market solutions peddled by Posner and Easterbrook. Oregon is in effect only a sideshow for increasing dissatisfaction with a federal government run by a corporate and bought lunatic supporting a destructive agenda that is destroying American lives even if they voted for it.

Thus the argument is flipped in favor of Alexander Hamilton and state rights to counteract federal tyranny so Oregan has sued and injuncted to prevent the random, arbitrary and arrest by state officials picking people up in the streets like some piss poor Latin American dictatorship for that is what America has become.

The problem is the precedent. America is in fact in Hamiltonian terms on the brink of insurrection and anarchy. It is a civil war based on inequality, poverty mixed with racial overtones. Black lives matter but so do white lives or lives of any description unless they have forfeited same. I think with the accelerating virus and even before Covid 2 that the federal government particularly if Trump stands a chance of losing will engage in a power grab and that Oregano is merely a precedent in this context a try out.

It is noticeable already that the alt right is proposing the sectionalisation of the country and the restriction on travel of those without means and assets. A new sectional disposing of issues and problems without too much fuss or attention.

The garbage of the hard right has now reached epic proportions, a form of social and sexual sanitization on poverty.

Mr.Obahma the Satan of ambiguity of idealism and self enrichment should condemn a little more loudly. But it is not just Barrack Jim Crow racism it is about poverty and the control of an ever weaning state which he facilitated within and without.

Jefferson was right, a slaveholder, in endorsing Hamilton about the need to check tyranny and the right to engage in insurrection against it. What is need now and what is to be done in America? Why should we or I care? It seems to me very important though.

Oregan shows the beginning of the end and the assertion in a time of emergency of strong governance. Trump will win and the constitution and the rights of liberals of all hues suppressed and many Americans will die from Malthusian policies they have endorsed and the Hillbilly Elegy will vote him back in.

It is an odd thing to say and predict and I may be wrong  and this is why we should care but American capitalism is finished save for a narrow few as is Jeffersonian democracy and in what Vidal called The Republic of Amnesia his great adversary William F Buckley has won. But won to China and maybe Russia. Certainly the logical extension of neo liberal corporotacracy and cleanliness extends to Singapore, the now suppressed Hong Kong and the safe but right less people of Chinese capitalist communist feudalism. The new model army of the new world order.

The separate strands of neo liberalism, moral conservatism and human rhetorical evil has resulted in finally the control of what Chomsky calls the triage of evil neo liberalism, American fundamentalism and post truth.

Hippie dissenters in Oregan and soft liberals with the European or pseudo European sophistication of Pink Martini will be crushed, bought off or their concerts attended by only those that can afford it.

Frankly so.