Landlady lent me a hard drive with a bunch of entertainment on it, including two seasons of a TV show I never heard of called Portlandia. I watched – or tried to watch – a couple of episodes at random, and not even Seinfeld had the power to make me so automatically hostile.
Portlandia is a comedy show, or it’s supposed to be, with a bunch of sketches sending up all the yuppie, PC bullshit that allegedly is Portland. And even when it’s being lampooned I get impatient and angry.
Thing is, I’d never really heard of any of this before. I’ve never wasted a minute hating on Portland. Never been there, never gave it much thought. But I sure hated that show.
See, I can’t watch this video all the way through. I don’t even want it on my blog. I want to find these people and hit them. Repeatedly. With something sharp and heavy.
Which is why it’s really funny that when Claire wrote a couple of posts about her vacation on the Oregon coast, and all the bullshit she had to put up with therein, I knew just what she was talking about. 🙂
And I LIVE there now… Actually, one thing that should be noted about Portland is that it is at least partly constraned to the city itself (although the several other sizeable cities out here are just as virulently liberal). The actual ‘weird’ that is Portland itself runs headlong into thevarious surrounding areas, which are all filled with dockworkers, fishermen, and agriculture types. Once you get out of ‘town’, where we spend 97% of our time, nobody seems to think twice about my OC pistol or full size truck. Its as good an example of the Two Americas concept as you are likely to find on the Left Coast.
Definitely the two Americas concept.Most of Oregon is rural or coastal,and full of good people-fishing, hunting,working.But Portland could be part of San Francisco-lefties,druggies,hippies(do people still say “hippies”?).
Another case of city people vs. real people.
There is a lot of truth and a lot of opinion disguised as truth. Yes there are a lot of hippies, non-hippie left wing radicals, homeless, people who choose not to work and live off the dole, stupid laws and stupider politicians and bureaucrats, traffic problems, rains all winter (September to May), drugs, crime, etc. in Portland. But for the normal people who live there (those with jobs, kids, don’t do drugs, etc.) it’s just a large to medium sized city. Reasonably livable with an assortment of nice to strange restaurants and stores. It’s a nice city with lots to do and absolutely beautiful parts of town and interesting places to go. Oregon doesn’t have a sales tax (yet) so it’s nice to buy something for a dollar and not have to dig for the extra 9 cents. Having said all that I do consider myself better off living 60 miles South of it in a small town.
I keep telling people…Portlandia isn’t sketch comedy.. it’s a *DOCUMENTARY*.
I should know.. I grew up there.