The Guy Travis

The guy Travis had biked down to Portland from Seattle that day for a reading at Powell's bookstore. He had just published a book ("The Immortal Class: Bike Messengers and the Cult of Human Power", by Travis Hugh Culley, New York, Random House, 2002), and was holding court at a house on N. Commercial that evening. He was lecturing his entirely bike-messenger-ing audience on various injustices when we walked in.
I could feel myself being categorized, being the only non-crusty in the room. I was still wearing waiter clothes, though yes, I had arrived by bike. When it came to any kind of historical overview of how Portland got to be this way, eyes turned to me because I've been here-for the most part-since 1986.
The naivete at work in the author there was starting to disturb me. He spoke glowingly about how lucky we are to be able to vote. Sure-but that process has become so completely perverted that, well...It is gravely in need of fixing, to put it shortly. He also seemed to be playing into that whole image of bike-messengers-as-working-class-heroes thing. It's a half-truth that I'm really uncomfortable with. For one thing, they ain't exactly poor, and for a much more important other, due to the overproliferation of automobiles, the corporate beast has room in its structure for a class of worker (an Immortal class, turns out) that risks its life to ensure that the great engine of, say, real estate proceeds unimpeded. Then they sit around and get drunk, talking about what brave warriors for the rights of the bike-riding individual they are.
We all recounted our run-ins with irate motorists. The overarching message seemed to be that it was always the car's fault, which just ain't true. Mind you, I have noted that most people who drive shouldn't be allowed to, based on their behavior, and they can kill me, either through negligence or malice, and unless I have a rocket launcher on my handle bars, we have a serious disparity of defensive function. All the same, a fair amount of bikers are jack asses, too, and we all know it. The only difference is that they are nowhere near as likely to hurt anyone other than themselves.
The guy Travis wondered how Portland got to be as bike-friendly a city as it is, and I was sort of called upon to tell the story of how Portland re-imagined itself, back in the '70's. What I didn't really get to say was-not only is livability in the larger sense a good idea, but it also makes really good economic sense. It causes people and businesses to want to relocate to your area...Which is part of the problem.
Their view remained simplistic, though; like somehow corporate monoculture and livability were mutually exclusive. When of course-it's Gentrification 101, I thought-that when you improve an area's livability, it then attracts people who visit, then move there, and in turn bring in the same retailers they're used to everywhere else. I don't know who mandated that every city in America look the same, but it seems to be heading that way, in any case. Then, the people who were so very invested in making their community better are driven out by rising prices and rents, increases in traffic, and the quick death of the local businesses that have sustained (and have been sustained by) the community for decades. You know, the kind of scenario that eventually drives everyone to the 'burbs.
Now it's in its terminal phase in Portland. More skyscrapers are being built, although I thought we weren't going to do that anymore, and largely they're sitting empty. Long time local businesses are swept away by national chains that only put a tiny bit back into the local economy. Now, a bunch of hotels I won't be staying in, parking garages I won't be parking in, and shopping malls I won't be shopping in are sprouting up, taking up all the space.
I usually maintain that sheer self-interest keeps the really bad shit from happening: these people want to make money, so they won't fuck it up too badly, right? They won't make it unlivable, will they? From initial good ideas do so many crap results spring. If they'd kept to the original ethic as opposed to the part that includes short-term profit, it might have been different.
But at least we got bike lanes out of the deal, eh Travis? It's a lot easier to see it as The People wanted a better Portland, so it happened. I pointed out that none of this would have happened without a ton of federal money, and co-operation by local business, but it was drowned out.
So-it was depressing to listen to this simplistic twaddle. When the inevitable question came as to what it was that I did for a living, I told them that I served food. The guy Travis thanked me for having provided the 'middle-class perspective'. To be fair, he was exhausted; to be realistic, he still deserved a smack for that one.
Because-as I said-I almost certainly made less money at that time than your average bike messenger, and besides, bikies come from all walks of life, a majority of them not blue collar by any stretch. They just act that way because it has this weird social cachet due to the peculiar yearning of white people for Soul. Only the upper and middle classes idealize poverty, as far as I've ever noticed, although white trash worship does seem to have filtered back down, too, to the folks who want something to be proud of, as always.
The guy Travis had this habit of being more poetic than accurate. So-he trotted out the expected line about America being formed in revolution, and how it should be a lesson to us all that it's always possible. I didn't want to do it, but I had to say it; "If anything is to be learned from the American revolution, it's probably that nothing happens until the rich people decide that it is to be done." Which made me appear to idealize wealth, I know. That ain't it: I just know my history, and am not in the habit of lying to myself.
Or, for that matter, I'm not so simple as to see corporate influence as bad, per se. My bosses at the Art Museum, for instance, I viewed with a bright loathing because they were shitty bosses with business practices that were questionable at best. But they did accomplish what they came to do: save a good but small museum that was going rapidly bankrupt, how they did it was art tourism at its worst, and everybody's jury remains out on whether or not this was a good thing. Nonetheless, the Portland Art Museum is still there; it wasn't going to be.
We left that evening, and I knew right then and there that nobody was going to be steering the boat of Dissent for a while, at least no one that knew anything at all about what they were fighting. And as always, I was forced to note what kind of person gets a book deal these days, in America.