Occupy Portland, part 4 - You Know . . . Maybe They Really ARE Fighting Dirty

Take a look at the photographs in this column. Doesn’t it look like something significant happened here in Portland yesterday (Friday, October 28)?

A huge sound stage was set up in Pioneer Square, often referred to as “Portland’s Living Room.” A band made up of the youthful classical/jazz/Latin/swing band Pink Martini (they make their homes in Portland and they’re big in Europe), guest vocalist Storm Large, and some musicians from the Oregon Symphony formed the core of the event.

They performed three of their songs and led the crowd in singing almost a dozen classic pop, musical, and folk songs. Twelve different speakers, including two rabbis, three Protestant ministers, an Imam, two U.S. Congressmen, the state AFL-CIO president, and several activists and organizers addressed the crowd, to much cheering and applause. Starbucks handed out free coffee and chocolate at three different stands around the square.

The entire event was intended to express support for Occupy Portland, and the entire Occupy Wall Street/Occupy the World movement. It certainly did that . . . loudly and clearly.

But was there a breath of it on the news that night? I channel surfed steadily between the three network stations at 11 o’clock, and I didn’t find a single bit of video coverage, let alone discussion of the event.

Instead, along with other scary stories about a little girl dumped by a school bus driver a mile from her home, an assault at a Max light-rail station, and a man who claimed to be selling magazines door-to-door but raped a woman in Vancouver, Washington . . .  KATU (ABC affiliate), KOIN (CBS affiliate), and KGW (NBC affiliate) focused on people’s fears about what might happen on Saturday, when the Occupy Protesters have said they would occupy another city park, in a more gentrified neighborhood of downtown known as The Pearl.

There was also a tasty bit of insinuation in a news report that someone had found what might be human excrement on the steps of the federal courthouse building … that “could” be the work of an Occupy Portland protester. Here’s news for you that the TV stations missed in the past and forgot to include last night: Portland Clean & Safe, a service of the Portland Business Alliance, cleans many pounds of human excrement off city streets and buildings all the time, and that was happening for years on end before Occupy Portland showed up.

The same goes for drug deals and drug busts -- constantly going on, at various places around the city, year after year, but somehow the one or two that have occurred at the Occupy Portland camp (usually with the assistance of Occupy Portland security volunteers helping the police) get the coverage and get played to death in the public comments areas of the newspaper’s and TV stations’ Web sites.

Let me tell you a little of what you missed, and what the media apparently aren’t going to tell you. Rabbi Emanuel Rose, rabbi emeritus of Temple Beth Israel (he presided over my wife’s conversion to Judaism 14 years ago) said, “A corporation is a person [according to the courts], but a person without a heart.” Imam Mikal Shabazz of the Oregon Islamic Chaplains Association said, “We are not controlling Wall Street; we have been bought and sold. … we have been made into chattel,” and he added, “I pray on Friday, but I think every day.”

The Reverend Bill Sinkford of First Unitarian Church said the 99 percent knows the system’s not fair, but the 1 percent know it too, so that’s 100 percent. The opposition to Occupy Wall Street keeps asking for specific proposals, so they can undermine them, and figure out how to use them to their advantage; and he urged the crowd to stay in that place that knows “it’s not fair!”

The Reverend Bill Lupfer of Trinity Episcopal Cathedral talked about how his Japanese in-laws accepted him despite our mutual history of parents who were at war. “We’ll never [change the world] by creating a new enemy and feeling good about it; it never works,” so “Be that person who reaches out first to include others.”

“Next year, some of these people [who got federal bailouts] should be going to jail, not to the Hamptons,” declared Peter DeFazio, U.S. representative for Oregon’s Fourth Congressional District. He told the rally that he would be introducing a bill in Congress next month to tax profits on investments. DeFazio also led the crowd in a chant of the line from the movie “Network”: “We’re mad as hell, and we’re not gonna take it anymore!”

“It’s time to stop the war against the middle class,” agreed his colleague, Earl Blumenauer, from the Third Congressional District. “Change your bank, go to a credit union.” Kathleen Sadaat, community activist and author, told the crowd that the Occupy movement demands that “economic justice needs to be extended to all,” and “We are the majority, and we are tired of business as usual.”

Making change will require us to join hands and work together, Sadaat continued: “It requires us to stay in the room. … It requires us to speak the truth, and listen to the truth that others speak. We will have our feelings hurt; stay in the room.”

There were candidates and politicians even in the audience: I glimpsed Suzanne Bonamici, the front-runner to replace David Wu, the disgraced and resigned First Congressional District representative; Eileen Brady, co-founder of New Seasons grocery chain, who’s running for mayor; and Steve Novick, a brilliant environmental lawyer and political activist who ran a spirited campaign for U.S. Senate in 2008.

In between the speeches and throughout, Storm Large and Pink Martini led the crowd in sing-alongs of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” “9 to 5,” “America the Beautiful,” “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” “Home on the Range,” and “This Land is Your Land.” The sun came out periodically, and the rain held off until it was all over.

But on the news tonight, not a word. One station directed viewers to its Web site for photos of the (and I quote) “Pink Martini Occupy Portland Performance,” but that was it. No mention of the spiritual and congressional leaders’ speeches, the communal songs, the wildly positive and inclusive spirit of the event.

Now, I’m not usually given to paranoia. I like to think of myself as a sensible person who sniffs at conspiracy theories. After all, I’ve been a paid journalist for a daily newspaper myself, and I know the errors in coverage that happen in the media tend to be more the result of naïvete, lack of imagination, and lack of resources or organization.

You can’t avoid the suspicion that the big corporate ownership of these news outlets is deliberately trying to quash the fact that there really is a huge middle-class and labor based support for the Occupy movement. And they keep running stories about possible vandalism, the rare drug arrest, and the vagaries of the homeless people who have accreted to the Occupy Portland camp, as if that was all the movement is really about.

This stinks to high heaven. It’s despicable. And I’m afraid it’s part of the whole program to screw you and me to which Occupy Portland ( and Wall Street, and the rest of the world) are trying to open everybody’s eyes.

• Go to Occupy Portland, part 5 - What Am I Doing Here?

• Go to Occupy Portland, part 1 - First Impressions
• Go to Occupy Portland, part 2: This is Bigger Than You Think
• Go to Occupy Portland, part 3 - Democracy is Messy