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After a month-long hiatus from publishing, the Portland State Vanguard is back—with an update! We will be reviving our “Letters to the Editor,” a recurring Opinion feature that publishes and spotlights voices from around PSU, as well as the larger community of Portland, Oregon.
This is a section devoted to spotlighting the opinions and feelings of our readsers, rather than the writers and contributors in our newsroom, and we welcome submissions from anyone. We’re particularly interested in perspectives related to current Portland events and community issues, as well as circumstances that impact the Pacific Northwest overall. We’d also love to hear your thoughts on stories we’ve covered—if you have a strong opinion about something we’ve reported, write us! We’ll happily read your submissions.
To share your letters for publishing consideration, email your thoughts to opinion@psuvanguard. com with the heading LETTER TO THE EDITOR, followed by your subject line. We look forward to hearing from you soon.
Sincerely,
The long and hotly-contested debate about gun control is an extremely polarizing subject that can get emotional for many passionate advocates of both positions across the United States, and Oregon is no exception. Just make a quick search on the internet and you will find multi tudes of stories involving shootings and arguments for and against gun control.
In the recent climate of heightened awareness of school shootings after the Uvalde school shooting, it is not that uncommon to find passionate arguments in favor of gun control, especially in Oregon, which has been a source of recent high profile school shootings and attempts at school shootings. School shootings such as the ones that occurred in the Reynolds and Parkrose School Districts have generated political momentum for legislators to create more gun control laws.
This political activity in favor of gun control has resulted in the creation of Measure 114, which will change the laws surrounding the ownership of firearms and the requirements to obtain and purchase firearms. Measure 114 has developed a fierce foundation of support within Grant High School, where many students walked out of class in vocal support of the measure.
Like all controversial topics, there are people who oppose Measure 114. In an interview with KGW News, Kevin Starrett, the executive director of Oregon Firearms Federation, commented on his opposition to the measure. “Ballot Measure 114 will virtually eliminate your ability to protect yourself and your family,” he said.
“You may not obtain a firearm for your protection without the permission of your local police chief or sheriff... At a time when violent crime is skyrocketing and police are not responding, this measure will have a devastating effect on our poorest communities and put those in high crime areas in even greater jeopardy.”
In an interview with Portland State Vanguard, a gun shop owner who has requested that both his shop and name be anonymous presented his view on Measure 114. He said that he is “extremely sympathetic to gun control,” and described himself as a “surprisingly moderate position from such an unexpected source.”
Despite the role that Measure 114 will play in regulating his livelihood, he said that he was in favor of the proposed legislative change. “I understand that I’m supposed to be progun ownership and I do consider myself to be a supporter of gun rights overall, but I think it is unreasonable to be so adamantly against gun control that it makes us look unreasonable by comparison,” he said. “But just like government regulations
doesn’t automatically mean you’re a socialist country, some gun control measures don’t mean that we have an anti-gun culture or that even the requirements to purchase act of gun is oppressive… as for Measure 114 itself, I find myself moderately against it. I think a few tweaks to the Measure and I would actually find myself supporting it quietly.”
Despite this, he did have concerns about Measure 114 from the perspective of self-defense. “I think the most interesting part of this measure, however, is the 10 round magazine cap,” he said. “Most self-defense situations end very quickly, but a 10 round magazine cap could effectively limit the successes of the defender. What if there was more than one person attacking me at my home, for example? If I’m being attacked in my home by three invaders who will probably have more than 10 rounds in their guns and I’m limited by my 10 round magazine, I’m at the mercy of those unfavorable odds… more importantly, how would this even be regulated for existing guns? Selling them on my side of the deal is easy and I can just sell magazines that have been legally modified to only accept 10 rounds, but for the guns that already exist, cops aren’t going to knock on doors just to check your magazine. A class A misdemeanor will hopefully persuade law-abiding gun owners to get their magazines
legally fixed, but for the guns that are illegally owned? A class A misdemeanor isn’t going to mean shit to them when they already got murder planned out.”
He went on to explain his stance on gun crime and gun control as a whole. “Gun control is a necessity, I believe,” he said. “Measure 114 says there will need to be safety training and it requires background checks and I agree with those. There should even be training on the procedures of what to do after you’ve used your firearm to defend yourself. People know the law when it comes to owning and buying guns, but not enough people know what to do after you’ve discharged the gun. I also want there to be more mental health checks. A lot of people who’ve never had a single issue with the law their entire life and who can easily pass background checks will buy a gun from my store and shoot themselves with it in suicide. I’m not in the business to sell death, I’m in the business of saving lives.”
“I’m not opposed to some gun control,” he continued. “But Measure 114 isn’t addressing the real problem, and I hope that legislators will take a serious look at what would actually be effective in letting people become responsible gun owners, and more importantly, helping make sure that unnecessary gun deaths are prevented.”
ANALISA LANDEROS
Last year, Literary Arts welcomed over 3,000 people to its annual Portland BookFest (PFB). With events split between virtual panels and live discussions, the local nonprofit found its footing in its first year out of quarantine. As November quickly approaches, Literary Arts is once again looking to broaden its reach and bring its namesake to even more of the public with this year’s BookFest.
This year’s Portland BookFest will take place entirely in-person from Nov. 4–7 at its usual venues, including the Portland Art Museum and South Park Blocks, and will follow its regular schedule of events. This year added times and spaces that offer even greater opportunities for discovering new work to read, new writers to enjoy and aspects of storytelling you might not have explored yet.
Exploring that storytelling with others is an integral part of the festival. “One of the foundations of the festival is that it’s a one-day intergenerational celebration of literature and storytelling,” said Amanda Bullock, Director of Public Programs at Literary Arts. “Reading and writing can be very solitary activities. You’re typically doing either of those things by yourself,
quietly, so I think both for the authors and for the audience—to just be together around these shared interests is really powerful and really important.”
“One of the biggest advantages of a festival is the density,” Bullock said.
“There are so many events, and there’s so many authors, and there’s a book for everyone. [The festival] includes a wide range of books, from pretty serious nonfiction, [to] biographies, to cook[books], to best-selling fiction authors, to debut fiction, to poetry.”
PFB is not only a valuable event for Portland’s historied book community or those with more casual literary interests—festivities are not just reserved for readers. Attendees can stop for drinks at the whiskey lounge, enjoy a cheese tasting at an upcoming Cover-To-Cover event or explore the art museum, where themes of written work are paired with visual art and pop-up readings are hosted during the weekend of the festival.
However, for those that have an interest in the literary elements, attendees can anticipate a wide-ranging lineup of guest speakers. Live events include—to name a few—New York Times-bestselling author of The Collected Schizophrenias,
Esmé Weijun Wang, in conversation with acclaimed actress Selma Blair, whose bestselling memoir Mean Baby released in May; Lan Samantha Chang, author of The Family Chao in conversation with Silvia Moreno-Garcia, author of The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, about the family relationships at the center of their latest fiction releases; poet CJ Evans, author of A Penance, and Saeed Jones, award-winning author of How We Fight For Our Lives, will discuss their latest poetry collections, Lives and Alive At The End of the World respectively; and Casey McQuiston, author of I Kissed Shara Wheeler and Emiko Jean, author of Tokyo Dreaming, will be in conversation about writing young adult romance and their newest releases.
For those unable to attend in person this year, the events are audibly accessible post-festival. “Literary Arts has always offered virtual programming because we have this radio show and this podcast... [and we] audio record all of the festival events for potential later broadcast on The Archive Project,” Bullock said. “[We have] been doing that work eight years now. And we’ll continue to offer our events that way. So that’s one reason
we’re not doing virtual events as part of the festival anymore.”
People can, however, attend online writing craft workshops throughout the festival weekend that focus on varying things, from character development to writing poetry. Events exclusively for writers in middle and high school are also available. Further workshop options are also available for writers of all ages to attend in person.
These are just a handful of the events under the umbrella of PBF Cover-ToCover, the festival’s partner running from Nov. 1–6. “We invited organizations all around the city to submit their [proposals] to be included in a whole week of events,” Bullock said. “So it’s [Nov. 1–6], there’s stuff happening all over town. Literary Arts is not presenting the events ourselves, but we’ve said, ‘yes, this is a cool event.’”
Regardless of how attendees participate, the support the festival receives each year is something that goes to show the vast cultural value of carving out community spaces like this. “[By showing up at events like this], you’re saying arts and culture and literature and storytelling are important,” Bullock said.
This week at Portland State’s 5th Avenue Cinema— Portland’s only student-run theater—our film curators have chosen to screen an experimental film titled Decasia.
The 2002 movie is a combination of old reels of film, and the entire film is silent aside from its original score. The director, Bill Morrison, found and selected old decaying portions of film that add up to a one-hour experience. Decades of decay can be seen, even in the digital version of the movie. Morrison did not accelerate the natural decomposition of the film prints, leaving an eerie reflection on mortality before the viewer. A part of the footage was copied from the University of South Carolina’s Moving Image Research Collections, and another portion at the Library of Congress, which now houses the film. Additionally, Decasia was the first film from the 21st century chosen for preservation by the National Film Registry in 2013.
Cadie Godula, one of the five curators at 5th Avenue Cinema, was the one who chose this film. “We don’t show a lot of experimental stuff,” Godula said. “We show weird stuff, but not unconventional narrative stuff because this isn’t a narrative.” You can see a lot of intriguing and strange films at 5th Avenue Cinema, but rarely a film like this.
Only three weeks earlier, you could have caught a similar film—The Adventures of Prince Achmed. The difference is that The Adventures of Prince Achmed had a narrative but no sound, while Decasia has a score but no narrative.
“You could probably argue there’s some sort of rhyme or reason to why everything is connected, but there’s also a score to the film,” Godula said. “The score fits with the content of the visual and makes it feel like one thing.” Of course, it’s not uncommon for music to help carry the viewer through the film, but the music of this film basically holds all the nonsequitur silent scenes together. “It’s a beautiful score—it’s like an hour long, and there’s no dialogue, which sounds a little intimidating because we don’t play a lot of that kind of stuff here, but it’s a very meditative film.”
However, there are moments where the distortion can be a bit disturbing. “It gets creepy because the visuals with the score play off each other so well, and there’s human faces that will just appear and distort,” Godula said. “It makes you feel uneasy. At a certain point when you’re watching it, you kind of realize, ‘wow, everything is going to die eventually.’”
The film provokes this thought through its presentation of the decayed film. Godula said that film is something people assume will be around forever. “In some ways, that’s true because there’s so much physical film out there, but there’s also a lot of film that is just gone because of chemical erosion,” she explained. “It’s a weird meditation on the transient nature of film and arts.”
Although the film was put together and published in 2002, all its content is from decades earlier. “It’s a compilation of decaying nitrate film from the 1950s, so it’s technically an older movie, but it was made in 2002,” Godula said.
She explained that nitrate film is extremely flammable. “That’s what they were making prior to the 1950s, and they realized it was way too dangerous because things were exploding,” she said. “It creates its own oxygen, so you can’t just put it out. It also decays a lot faster than what we have now, which is polyester, and what came after it, which is acetate.”
The decay of the film is what gives Decasia its character.
“The film itself looks like it’s melted, and you can’t technically project it because it’s all fucked up, but how they made this film is they scanned everything with an optical scanner that gave it this really strange warpy effect,” Godula said. “Even the digital version has some distortion because it’s all fucked up.”
She said that many archives in museums still have these old nitrate films, but many of them are not kept in the right conditions, so they start to decompose. “The actual plastic and chemicals start to decay and warp the plastic, so you can’t play them anymore, but it looks super cool,” she explained.
Godula said that she learned of the director through this film, and this is his most well-known work. “From what I know about him, he’s part filmmaker, part archivist-person-artist, and he focuses mainly on working with physical film and doing a lot of found footage film, which is technically what this would be,” she said. She went on to explain that Morrison is not very well-known among people outside the arthouse community. “As I started getting more into physical films, like celluloid, I was like, wow, this is actually really cool because it’s so focused on the formal elements of film as an object and not what the pictures are, if that makes sense,” Godula said. “It’s focusing on the chemicals and the distortion of the film when the chemicals start to erode, and I just found that very beautiful and enticing
because it’s very unique.”
Experimental films such as Decasia are hard to compare, but Godula found similarities to Man With A Movie Camera. “It’s a very early film of a guy walking around with a camera filming shit,” Godula said. “That’s it. He’s just walking around.” The 1929 film featured complex and innovative shots of Russia. “There’s some kind of narrative thread, but it’s mostly showing like, ‘wow, this camera’s cool because it’s the ‘20s, and everyone’s like ‘this is insane,’” Godula said. She thought that Decasia is sort of like Man With A Movie Camera and Blair Witch Project combined due to its found footage structure and visual eeriness.
“One scene that had me like, ‘holy shit, this is crazy,’ was a bunch of school children walking across the camera, and there’s nuns on either end of the line of kids,” Godula said, noting how insignificant it sounds. “But it’s about how the film has been deteriorating. I think the silver iodide crystals—the thing in black and white films to give its ‘color’ essentially—I don’t know what the hell happens, but the blacks and whites switch, and it flips back and forth like that, inverting itself, and it’s really trippy to watch because you’re trying to figure out what it is.”
“This film is for people who are more patient with experimental film because there’s no dialogue, and it’s like an hour long of these warpy pictures,” Godula said. Decasia can be watched with your brain off because the visuals alone are enticing, but you may also find that the film provokes you to go down a rabbit hole of thought. But Godula warns, “I think if you like narrative films a lot, if you love dialogue and you’re like ‘I want to see character development,’ don’t see this maybe—you might be disappointed. But also, expand your palette, dawg. It’s good to sometimes see movies that you might think you’ll hate, just to see—just to make sure!”
“We try to be mindful in our programming, to offer a variety of films for people to watch and to learn more about and to be more exposed to different things that sometimes you can’t find streaming,” Godula said. “Streaming is not everything. They don’t have it all—make your own choices about the movies you see and go to a movie theater.”
Catch a showing of Decasia only this weekend at 5th Avenue Cinema on Friday or Saturday at 7 p.m. and 9:30 p.m., or watch the Sunday screening at 3 p.m.
Affordable health care is a necessity, but not everybody can afford it. This needs to change because as human beings we all deserve to have access to services that will treat us when we are sick or injured. We can obtain this affordable health care through Measure 111, a measure on the Oregon ballot this fall.
Ballotpedia reports that this measure seeks to add a section to the Oregon Constitution establishing a right to “cost-effective, clinically appropriate and affordable health care for every Oregon resident.” The amendment tasks the state with balancing the obligation of ensuring the public’s right to health care while still funding public schools and other essential public services as well.
I believe this amendment should have been proposed much earlier. Even though it would officially make affordable health care a legally guaranteed human right, it has always been a right on the most basic level. Why hasn’t this kind of amendment been passed sooner?
According to Ballotpedia, “the amendment has been introduced at least eight times in the last 16 years.” The fact that it took so long to be voted on and codified into law is unacceptable. Those in power should have pushed this measure out and voted on it as soon as it was suggested. The fact that this was not passed sooner has caused many people to live and suffer with serious health problems while having no access to the help they need.
Measure 111 will help to fix this by mandating a lowering of the cost of insurance. This is an urgent matter, as many people struggle to pay for their insurance. A report by Tatiana Parafiniuk of the Register Guard found that “most Oregonians, about 94%, have health insurance, according to a 2019 report from the Oregon Health Authority. In 2019, 49.3% of Oregonians had private group health insurance, 25.4% had Medicaid through the Oregon Health Plan, 15.2% had Medicare, and 4% had individual private insurance, leaving about 6%, 248,000 people, uninsured.”
“Those who oppose the measure are concerned establishing the right before setting up the mechanism for insuring those uncovered could set up the state for inaction on the new obligation or leave the state vulnerable to lawsuits when it fails to cover the gap,” Parafiniuk’s report continued.
While this is important to consider, voters need to decide whether they want to take the risk. In truth, the decision comes down to whether one believes that the state can successfully implement health care more equitably, accepting the possibility of failure. In the end, I hope we make the right decision not just for each of us individually, but also for the state as a whole.
CASEY LITCHFIELDI know, I know—we are all getting sick and tired of the election talk. Election season has been in full swing and seems to grow longer each cycle as more money and more vitriol seep into the already toxic process.
Here in Portland, the city council race between incumbent Jo Ann Hardesty and Rene Gonzalez has garnered quite a bit of attention.
The framing of the choice mirrors that of much of the country—Portland has seen a hollowing out of the central city and downtown corridor in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns and remote working. The cost of living has continued to skyrocket across cities but is now also buoyed by rising inflation and interest rates, making rent and the prospect of homeownership out of the reach of an already precarious and struggling working class. This has also exacerbated the crisis of houseless people.
Then there is the right’s favorite talking point—crime and violence. These factors, as well as their attendant economic stressors across other sectors of modern life, have indeed brought an increase in crime—violent crime in particular—locally and nationally Gonzalez placed the blame for much of this at the feet of his opponent and leftprogressive policies in general.
“We are at an inflection point in the story of Portland,” his campaign website states. “We cannot sit back idly and watch the city we love struggle without working to help solve its problems. If you’re like us, you agree that rising crime, declining livability, and City Hall’s ineffective ideologically driven policies are ruining the city we used to proudly call home.”
This is a standard strategy long-employed by Republicans and centrist Democrats. Former President Richard Nixon famously declared a ruinous and patently racist war on drugs and launched the tough-on-crime messaging and policy that has plagued United States politics ever since.
Democrats also seized on this messaging. The American Civil Liberties Union reports that former President Bill Clinton joined in on the fear-mongering with his 1994 Crime Bill that led to a massive expansion of incarceration in the U.S., the building of more prisons, an expansion of private for-profit prisons, minimum sentencing legislation across the country and harsher punitive measures across the board.
Democrats like President Joe Biden still use their support of such legislation in the past to counter Republicans, even going so far as saying that the bill “worked in some areas. But it failed in others... The violent crime rate was cut in half in America.”
So the big, bad boogeyman of crime—and a candidate’s punitive harshness in response to it—is a potent scare tactic in past and present U.S. politics. But does Hardesty bear responsibility for the increase in severity of these problems over the past four years?
She was elected in 2018 on a wave of progressive outrage in response to the rightward lurch of former President Donald Trump’s election. Then in 2020 we entered into an unprecedented global pandemic; a near-complete economic shutdown; global supply-chain failures; a public loss of faith in the police with the police executions of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others which lead to uprisings in Portland for well over 100 days; climate change-induced massive wildfires, and— well, you also lived through all of this.
By my own estimation, Hardesty is the most progressive elected politician in Portland—and probably anywhere in the U.S. She worked as a community organizer for the Black United Fund of Oregon, then was the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Portland Branch and the Albina Ministerial Alliance, and then served as director of Oregon Action—now known as Unite Oregon.
If this pedigree in grassroots organizing and championing of social justice and civil rights were not enough, she was a chief proponent of a real, meaningful alternative to policing— Portland Street Response, a service that provides unarmed health professionals who can then respond to people experiencing a crisis. Not to mention that she also pushed through successful ballot measures in 2018 for the Portland Clean Energy Community Benefits Fund and in 2020 for the Police Accountability Commission
Some have tried to hold her feet to the flame for saying that she believed the Portland police were the ones setting fires at the downtown Black Lives Matter and police abolition protests in 2020. She promptly apologized for her statements, admitting her anger and emotions got the best of her. Former Portland Police Association President Daryl Turner
pounced on this, and it has also served Gonzalez as a talking point against her. I commend her for taking a conciliatory tone and apologizing at all after the brutality that we saw from the police on the streets that summer.
The current election season is hell-bent on convincing us that police reform—and particularly calls to defund or abolish the police—are the cause of the breakdown in social order and rising crime. Of course, there is not one shred of evidence that this is true, and Street Roots reports that the slight reduction in the Portland police budget in 2020 was shortlived, as now in 2022 they have seen a record budget increase to $249 million.
Even our slimy Mayor Ted Wheeler has called bullshit on the Portland Police Bureau, admitting that the issue at this point is not funding—it’s finding candidates who want to actually be police officers in a city that rightfully resents them, and then getting them past background checks.
Hardesty is not a panacea for all of the ills that Portland faces. No politician is. The problems facing Portland predate her and are part of broader historical injustices that are playing out across the country.
Gentrification and speculative land accumulation have pushed low-income people onto the streets and will continue to do so. The COVID-19 pandemic tugged at the fraying threads of a decaying social system that was already failing many—especially people of color—by design. Anger and acting out are understandable and rational responses to a world in tumult. We are terrified by the chasm of uncertainty and insecurity—any behavioral psychologist will tell you this.
What Hardesty does offer is to be a voice for people who rarely ever have one in the halls of power. She was the first and only Black woman elected to Portland City Council, a city that has resolutely treated its Black community horribly. Beyond her identity, she also stands up to the most powerful and violent institution in our city, the Portland Police Bureau. These are people vested with the authority to use deadly force who have continually run afoul of the U.S. Department of Justice over disproportionate use of force and brutality, as well as a failure to adhere to its own directives.
Gonzalez offers nothing new—just classic fear-mongering about crime, an unflattering deference to his biggest donors, calls for more investment in policing and a cozy alliance with the big-business interests of the Portland Business Alliance and property developers in downtown Portland. Throwing more violent cops at our problems is not the answer. We need compassion, innovation, community investment, public oversight and grassroots movements for and by the people.
I am an anarchist. As such, I believe that directly engaging in the democratic and horizontal sharing of power through general assemblies rather than voting in representational systems of power is how we can best serve all of our community members and deal with systemic problems across our society.
In the meantime though, local elections have real consequences upon the lives of many, and especially on those most at the margins. Hardesty is the only person running for city council who is even remotely in alignment with the values that I hold dear. She will have my vote, and I hope she continues to give the gentrifiers and police hell.
