Coming February 6, 2024 . . .
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop
Coming February 6, 2024 . . . MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
Looking for the roots of the city’s violent summer. By David Shipley @ Bloomberg.com, Sept. 17
In May, I went back to Portland, Oregon, my hometown. It was the week George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis.
Protests in Portland followed, as they did around the country. Unlike the rest of the nation, though, what began as peaceful and constructive political expression devolved into something else entirely. In fact, a cruel inversion took place over the summer: The proximate (and righteous) cause was increasingly buried by violence [....]
One video shows a man being pulled from a truck and beaten. It’s shocking enough, and then you realize that the scene is unfolding in the heart of downtown, and not in some frontier county, and that it goes on for 20-plus minutes without any sign of intervention. [....]
The boards cover Tiffany and Co., Zara, 7-Eleven and bunch of local stores — selling luggage, legal supplies, men’s suits — that have been around since I was a kid in the 1960s. Some of the wood is mottled composite, some of it is serpentine-grained, nearly all of it is covered with graffiti. The slogans signal how far things have gone off track; only a fraction of them refer to George Floyd or Breonna Taylor or the other names Americans have been calling out for remembrance [....]
Well before it was enveloped in smoke, Portland was a city in retreat. Even its 110-year-old elk statue had gone into hiding.
Not that long ago, Portland had a visionary, progressive and capable government. It was activist in the best sense — it took action and managed change [....]
Comments
After a short vacation/break due to heavy smoke from wildfires, I posted how the protesters were back at it Friday night, over here on this other thread
by artappraiser on Sat, 09/19/2020 - 3:16am