Cape Disappointment by Chris Larson

NSP Meditations , ,

Not too long ago, I was contacted by a Portland artist named Chris Larson, about an extraordinary new art project, a publication of his photos of Cape Disappointment. He told me he had read the gigging book a while back and was inspired to reach out to me because of that book and my published love of Oregon’s beaches. He sent me a copy of his incredible book of photos and I am here to say that I have seen nothing like it in my literary life. It is large form, about the size of a coffee table book. Indeed, it is return of the coffee table book but without the hard cover! I urge everyone to check out this project and order your copy and support this artist.

https://www.chrislaellarson.com/art/cape-disappointment

Corona Virus Thoughts #26

Corona Virus Thoughts, NSP Meditations

I doubt anyone reading this really wants to read anything that calls more attention to the incredible stupidity exhibited by many Americans during the Pandemic. I’m sick of reading about it and I’m sick of writing about it, but here I am writing on the subject again.

One day, it will end, the writing that is.

It was fun watching a pro football game and rooting against the team because their superstar quarterback was an arrogant and monomaniacal anti-vaxxer. It adds a whole new twist to being a fan of football, so like you want to root for Washington State University football to win because they fired their kooky anti-vaxx coach.

The Oregonian ran a lengthy Sunday feature on residents of Southern Oregon who refused to get vaccinated and suffered deadly and totally preventable consequences. It was a solid piece of reporting and it should have elicited some sympathy from me but it did not. I’ve become callous and I don’t like that feeling at all.

I scheduled my appointment for a booster shot. Dad already got his.

Violence and intimidation as a political tool have returned to the forefront of American life. Anti-vaxxers storm school board meetings and accost health care workers. Where is that going?

Thanksgiving is almost here. Think how many unvaccinated Americans will gather with friends and families, boast about their status, revel in their superiority and “being in the know,” and then contract the virus and die by Christmas. What a Christmas gift. It’s going to happen all over the country.

To think almost all of the anti-vaccination insanity could have been avoided if Trump had just acted like a normal human being.

I read where 10,000 Marines will not meet the deadline for vaccination. I told Dad about this. He’s a former Korean War combat Marine and is incensed by this gross dereliction of duty that endangers national security. He believes they should all be given dishonorable discharges and have their pensions revoked if they earned one.

The right thing to do is staring millions of Americans in the face and they won’t or can’t do it. Won’t because of stupidity. Can’t because of brainwashing. They should ask themselves one simple question: what would Perry Mason do?

Consider all the American families permanently ruptured by the Pandemic and the vaccine. It’s happened on one side of my family.

The next big media event will feature stories of unvaccinated kids dying from the virus and teary interviews with their unvaccinated parents. I don’t even think I’ll work up sympathy for that.

The Inspiration of Henry Kaiser and Vanport

NSP Meditations , , , , ,

“This achievement has been largely forgotten by Oregonians,” wrote Peter Marsh in his fantastic 2021 book Liberty Factory: The Untold Story of Henry Kaiser’s Oregon Shipyards.

That achievement helped win WW II and might prove instructive today as a strategy for Oregon and the rest of the nation as they address the homeless crisis, which of course primarily comes down to this obvious fact—there isn’t enough housing—and attempts to provide it are frustratingly slow despite that in many places, like Portland, the money was allocated years ago. YEARS.

Wait, forget instructive. Kaiser’s achievement might offer the inspiration and solution.

Let us consider Henry Kaiser, the former shipping magnate and founder of a health care empire.

After Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and America entered WW II, America needed transport and war ships and needed them fast. It was a national emergency.

Henry Kaiser built the ships, including the famous Liberty ships, approximately 1500 of them, at his Portland and Vancouver shipyards on the Columbia River.

There was a critical need for housing to house the Kaiser shipyard workers to win WW II. It was a national emergency after all.

Henry Kaiser built the housing on 650 acres in a flood plain of the Columbia River. He bought the land. The housing he built became Vanport and became Oregon’s second largest city in less time than a college football season.

Portland City Hall initially balked at Kaiser’s Vanport initiative, probably because it boggled limited imaginations of employees and threatened to expose their sloth. But Kaiser had the ear of FDR and FDR sent Eleanor to Portland and she told City Hall to get out of the way. They did. This was Eleanor talking! There was a world war going on!

Do we ever need an Eleanor Roosevelt in charge of the homeless crisis in America today? This is a federal issue. It’s a national emergency. The federal government is charged with promoting the general welfare. The general welfare of America is corroded when hundreds of thousands of Americans are living on the streets and in the woods.

Henry Kaiser built 10,414 apartments and homes in 110 days. That became Vanport and 44,000 shipyard workers and their families eventually lived in a community that included amenities such as the first large scale child care center in the world and an extension college that later became Portland State University.

I should also add that the Vancouver Housing Authority built housing for 35,000 people working for Kaiser’s Vancouver shipyard across the Columbia River in roughly the same amount of time.

It was a monumental accomplishment of private initiative to house people in a national emergency and not a single monument to Kaiser exists in Portland. As of this writing, not a single print newspaper in Portland has bothered to review the book and get this story back in play. Moreover, I suspect no one governing the homeless crisis in Portland or associated with the Homeless Industrial Complex has ever heard of the incredible Vanport story, except for the fact that a flood wiped out the city in 1948 and killed 15 people.

Let me address a few points:

Yes, the housing was substandard. Yes, it was built in a flood plain. Yes, we didn’t have land use and construction regulations at the time. And yes, we didn’t have a hundred agencies and organizations involved because they didn’t exist at the time. There was basically one entity, more of a force, Henry Kaiser and his dedication to build ships to win the war. Well, that and to turn a profit, which he certainly did.

But Vanport was housing nonetheless with running water, plumbing, electricity and sanitation. It wasn’t tents or pods or shelters or shanties or RVs buried in squalor. It was built in less than four months!

In some instances, the City of Portland and Portland voters have allocated funds or approved tax measures to build low-income housing and erect emergency shelters four years ago and construction hasn’t even started. What is going on?

Vanport housed people who wanted or needed to work. American needed these people. It makes a difference in a person’s life if your country needs you. Not Wal-Mart or Nike or McDonalds, but your state or country. I mean, what if an Oregon politician framed it that way? And went down to the encampments and started talking, not making speeches, but acting like he or she was on the front lines of a crisis, a state of emergency, and asked the residents to get involved?

Tom McCall would have done it. So would have Bud Clark and Vera Katz. Certainly Barbara Roberts.

A final point: Once an American with immense wealth who wanted to become wealthier got in the business of building ships and emergency housing to serve the country. He cut through red tape and marshaled extraordinary material resources and human will in response to a national crisis. He built houses because we needed housing and he built them with lightning speed. He had a President and a President’s wife behind him.

Take from that what needs to be taken. There is a lot there.

This essay also appears as part of my New American Diaspora newsletter that I hope readers will subscribe to read my pieces about Oregon’s homelessness issue. You can subscribe here:

https://mattlove.substack.com/

On Buying A Recliner

NSP Meditations

Dad’s recliner gave up the ghost so I was tasked to buy him a new one. I looked up some furniture stores online and picked out a Lazy-Boy shop not far from home.

I stupidly arrived an hour early on a Sunday morning and thus had an hour to burn. I drove to a nearby Goodwill and perused the books. I bought Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell and A History of The PeloponnesianWar by Thucydides.

Back to the Lazy-Boy show room. I still had 15 minutes to kill. The sex shop across the road boasted a banner that read: Give the Gift of Orgasm, but it was closed, too. So, I opened up Thucydides and started reading. It occurred to me that I was probably the only person in the history of recliner-buying who read Thucydides in the vicinity of a sex shop while waiting to buy a recliner.

The doors opened! I closed the book and entered the store. I was immediately met by an elderly white-haired man who asked how he could help me. I told him I needed a new and basic recliner for my old man and I didn’t want WI-Fi or cup-holders or space age fabrics or a remote control to operate it. I wanted a lever and two settings and I didn’t want to spend more than $500.

He said he understood. He directed me to follow him. Ten minutes later I closed the deal and was surprised how pleasant the experience turned out to be.

Delivery was set for Wednesday. I’d put the old recliner on the sidewalk and doubtless a day later I’d see a resident of the nearby homeless encampment relaxing in it. (That was a joke. It’s going to the dump.)

Football vs. Repentance

NSP Meditations, Pioneer Pride, Sports , ,

Not too long ago, I was volunteering at a church-affiliated social service organization in my home town of Oregon City when I was overcome by the memory of one of my last Sunday mornings spent inside a church, some 40 years ago. I had stopped going years before this particular morning, and no longer remember why I went. Wait! Now I do. I was taking my grandmother to church because my mother was away on a trip. The incident that triggered the memory so arrested me at the time that I wrote a little piece in my journal about it and then typed it up 25 years later. I never finished it…until now…just in time for football season.

(Started in 1982)

“…as we stand and sing…”

Reverend Jim Bland had just finished his usually unceremonious sermon. He descended from the pulpit and stood directly in front of the communion table awaiting some poor soul to repent. Bland, looking somewhat tired, seemed almost distraught. His lesson on the evils of greed had run overtime and he was hoping, as all the other men, that nobody would come forward today; the N.F.C. championship game was starting in 15 minutes. The song of encouragement dragged into the third verse and its inspiration was wilting in the voices of the 200 that sang it.

Bland’s face suddenly stiffened with attention. Within seconds, he would have to administer sound religious advice without any proportion or previous knowledge. I turned around and saw what triggered the rigidity in Bland’s face. A wormy, black-haired, middle-aged man ambled up the aisle with everybody’s probing eyes searching for clues. He was attired horribly in a checked polyester leisure suit that was no doubt sacrilege in two Almighty’s eyes. The song ceased rather abruptly and the song-leader whispered boringly into the mike, “Please be seated.”

Bland sat the man down in the first pew and conversed with for what seemed like an eternity. Dammit, the kickoff was only a few minutes away! I prayed the man would be brief with the explanation of the crisis. If he was to be baptized, the pre-game would certainly be lost and maybe the entire first quarter.

Finally Bland broke away and climbed the steps to the pulpit. He nearly tripped on the plastic foliage surrounding the elevated platform, but he managed to get there intact. “Friends,” Bland droned, “today Ed Wilson has come forward with a special problem. He would like to say a few words. Ed.”

Bland disappeared quickly from the podium and collapsed into the first pew. Ed started up the stairs bypassing the mic located at the communion stand which was usually used for people addressing the congregation. Obviously Ed was really hurting since he ignored this custom. His trembling hands seized the mic violently. Wilson wanted everyone to know that he was in command. After 30 seconds of restless silence, Ed spoke. His voice had an Irish quality about it. The tone was nervous yet deathly serious. C’mon you broken down man. Spill your guts, repent and get the hell out of there—the Cowboys were battling San Francisco.

“Everybody. I have sinned…”

(Completed in 2021)

I must jump forward in time almost 40 years to complete this story of Ed’s repentance and the cause of me missing part of one of the greatest games in NFL playoff history. As I recall, it went on forever and he apologized over and over to his wife Myrna, who was sitting in one of the pews behind me. I sorely wanted to turn around and look at her, but did not. How could I when Ed was putting on a show up there! I got the feeling that Reverend Bland, and that was his real last name, was desperate for it to be over. I think he actually went up to Ed at one point and whispered something in his ear, like, “Wind it up! I don’t want to miss the damn game!”

Ed never specified the reason for his spectacle of public repentance, but this being a Christian church with a somewhat evangelical bent, we all knew the reason. At least if I was going to miss the first half, Ed should have told the sordid story with a little sizzle to it.

He finally wound it down by calling Bland back up to the pulpit. Ed asked him to lead a special prayer of forgiveness and then Bland went on forever!

By the time we got out of there and taking my Grandmother to her Portland home, then driving back to Oregon City, it was well into the third quarter. I whipped up a TV dinner and went down to the basement to watch the game with my beagle Tex on a mammoth Zenith floor console.

As it turned out, my beloved Cowboys lost to the 49ers on the greatest catch in NFL history. At least I didn’t miss that!

I wonder if Ed’s repentance worked.

So that completes a vignette I started in the early years of the Reagan Presidency.

Skid Road: One the Frontier of Health Homelessness in an American City (A Review)

NSP Meditations , , , ,

I recently read Skid Road: One the Frontier of Health Homelessness in an American City by Josephine Ensign, a professor of nursing at University of Washington, formerly homeless herself, and long-time worker on the front lines of Seattle’s homeless crisis.

This is a brilliant, brilliant book focusing on Seattle’s unique history with homelessness and one that energized my thinking on how Portland and the rest of Oregon is addressing this seemingly intractable issue. I urge everyone interested in the subject to read this book. It should be required reading for those connected professionally to what the author calls the Homeless Industrial Complex, one that pays her extremely well.

What did I glean from this book?

Seattle has a bewildering number of agencies addressing the crisis and developed an astonishing number of initiatives, policies and programs over the past century. Nothing has really worked. I repeat, nothing has worked on a large scale level. But Seattle keeps trying because it must and because the numbers are growing with no end in sight. WW II isn’t coming to reorder the American economy and eliminate the Hoovervilles.

Some of the strategies used 200 years ago to combat vagrancy, homelessness, pauperism, are still be used, such as giving indigent mentally ill people passage to another locality. England did it with the colonies. Nevada did it with California. The Oregon Coast did it with Portland and Eugene.

Official and unofficial tiny homes have been around for well over a century. They used to be called shacks. Seattle once had a community down by Lake Union called Shacktown. It was razed to make way for progress.

Ensign makes the point that the modern homeless crisis is particularly a West Coast issue. Seattle, Portland, Eugene, San Francisco, Los Angeles, all have some of the highest real and per capita numbers in the country. Why? What is it about the region that makes this so? Is it governing? Is it the dream of going West? The climate? Is it the benevolent nature of people in this region who want to help? I mean, if you are homeless, you aren’t going to Omaha, Mobile or Minneapolis. Ensign also reports that most of the people who are homeless in a certain area are from that area. Every homeless person I’ve met and interacted with is from Oregon.

People lived on abandoned boats in and around Seattle, just like they do now in the Portland area.

Charity is a loaded word. Charity for all is revolutionary, although Lincoln called for it in his Second Inaugural Address.

A striking quote from the book: “Social workers are a recent development in the machine age. They are the ambulance corps of the capitalist system and as such they have one objective in all that they they do.” According to Ensign’s interpretation of this statement, that one objective is: Make people work. Get them functioning for capitalism. Nels Anderson wrote the line in 1931 before the New Deal and a rudimentary safety net had been established.

The official and unofficial names of the homeless have changed over the decades: bindle stiff, hobos, tramps, paupers, vagrants, bums, winos, transients, homeless, unhoused etc. The author never addresses this but it is an interesting point to consider. Does a new naming provide new initiative? Or do we just waste time debating semantics, as what so often happens with the Left?

Homelessness was once exclusively single men, but in the 80s families, women and runaway teenagers began showing up on streets all around America.

Forced labor was once a policy to combat homelessness. Vagrants were even auctioned off to private Seattle companies to work on projects.

Without faith-based organizations on the front line, the problem would be exponentially worse.

There have always been discussions of the deserving poor and undeserving poor.

The banality of the bureaucratic language used by the Homeless Industrial Complex employees drains all the energy out of initiative. You read it in their editorials all the time. It’s like they have a computer programs that generates nostrums and buzzwords.

Everything that’s been tried will be tried again but will be redressed with fancy new names and a stamp of innovation.

There is one solution. Get them housed. That’s it. Everything then flows from that.

There is no flash and flair with Ensign’s prose and that is welcome. This is clinical history and it moves fast. She inserts herself every now and then into the narrative toward the end of the book, but it is unobtrusive and interesting. She even makes the candid admission she helped develop a new program to serve street youth and it never got off the ground after two years of planning and spending.

Some more thoughts inspired by reading Skid Road:

American capitalism produces an acceptable or unacceptable (depends on who you talk to) number of victims and puts them on display in form of the homeless population as a warning or encouragement.

Do we look to the causes of homelessness or do we concentrate on policy and program solutions? Can you do both at the same time?

Is the poor farm going to make a comeback? What about an updating of the 1862 Homestead Act?

Ensign’s advice is to develop empathy and search for the stories of the homelessness beyond the numbers and beyond the Homeless Industrial Complex’s agenda and limited thinking.

We’re in an emergency right? Shouldn’t we act like it? Seattle and Portland declared a state of emergency on the homeless issue in 2015. What will empathy get us in a state of emergency? Many progressive people I know have exhausted their empathy for the homeless. If that number grows, we might really well be in trouble. Interestingly enough, there are many Americans and their politicians who believe exhibiting a lack of empathy is exactly what the problem needs, you know the old bootstrap saw.

A truly wonderful and educational book. I highly recommend it to anyone who still feels that empathy and wants to continue helping. Spread the word.

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