I have a new favorite columnist in Portland. His name is B. Scott Taylor and he’s a GoLocalPDX MINDSETTER™ (I checked. Semi-legitimate news source GoLocalPDX actually spent the time and money to trademark the hilariously dorky title MINDSETTER™). According to his bio on every column he publishes, Taylor is an “Internet millionaire” and “disruptive force”. There are only two places it’s cool to say you’re an Internet millionaire: the opening sequence of Shark Tank and at the bottom of a blog complaining about kids stealing chicken.
That’s what happened yesterday when B. Scott released an excellent tirade against the moral decline of this city based on his experience buying a sandwich at Safeway (the one in the Pearl, natch. He’s an Internet millionaire, remember?). While there, he watched a “street kid” who “could be a tweeker, but not obvious” steal a dollar’s worth of chicken wings—among other skills, his years of millionairing have taught him how to spot tweekers, even the not-obvious ones.
The chicken was just a symptom of a greater problem, and B. has no problem jumping from there to the “hellhole” that was New York City in 80s. If you lived there/then, as B. reminds us, you know these truths:
1. If you rode the subways you would get mugged.
2. If you parked your car on the street it would get broken into. If you left it there for more than a day, you wanted it to get stolen.
3. If you walked in Central Park at night as a female you were going to get raped.
If private businesses continue to ignore petty chicken theft, it’s only a matter of time before our precious Pearl District has a 100% crime rate like New York had.
Scotty B. investigated the root of New York’s magical turnaround: he once asked a police officer what caused the drop in crime and, shockingly, that guy credited the police! Sure, the Broken Windows theory of criminology is highly contentious and used to back racist policies. And sure, other theories vary widely including the idea that lead paint caused the crime (I asked a painter and he said it was definitely that). But I believe Broseph S. T.—he’s made a lot of money and lived in at least two cities.
Portlanders, we can’t just stand by while this terrible scourge destroys our great condo developments! If you don’t act now and beat up a street kid, you may end up saying, “I didn’t speak up when they came for our chicken wings, because I don’t eat chicken wings. But then they came for my free side of chips and I didn’t say anything because the non-obvious tweekers had taken over the Pearl and were aggressively marginalizing millionaires like me.” It’s time to stand up and fight back.
Originally from somewhere else, Alex Falcone moved to Portland in 2007. He’s a comedian, writer, millionaire in Second Life, eco-juggernaut-hero, stiff breeze, and THINKPLANNER™.
How about we add another tax bracket for millionaires in this state and end up homelessness by putting people in homes.
How did you not bring up the part where he was essentially advocating for extra-judicial violence as a method of dealing with these chicken-scofflaws?
Seriously, that was a crap article, just embarrassing to everyone involved.
And he called the “Guardian Angels” “Guardian Angles.” (You’d think an internet millionaire could afford a proofreader!)
Surely you mean WORDSFIXER™.
I understand the point you’re making, but B. also makes a legitimate point- Portland does have a problem with the voluntarily homeless. He makes this very clear at the end- the kid that stole lunch from Safeway was not someone on hard times, which is the real problem that we’re not address. As a Portland native, I can say that the unfortunate truth is that the city refuses to go all the way on any one stance to combat the problem; we half ass all these solutions and just end up creating a trap for people that legitimately want out of homelessness (we don’t provide sufficient shelter, job training/placement, social services, etc) while we incentivize those that have no intention of every leaving their lifestyle to relocate here (and to other PNW cities up and down the I5 corridor). I have been lucky and have never fallen on hard times like this; a close friend of mine has, however, and his tails from what little time he spent urban camping are harrowing enough for a lifetime for me.
B. isn’t arguing against the homeless. He’s arguing against the punks that assault old men working downtown or that steal from Safeways, a problem that the collective moral of the city can’t even be asked to differentiate from the problem of chronic homelessness and addiction, let alone a problem that we can be moved to fight. It would be great if, rather than snarking it up over your interpretation of his article, you actually posited a counterargument. Snark for snark’s sake is part of the reason that nothing gets done on the issue of homelessness in this city; and while people sit there backbiting, kids and vets are out on the streets freezing.
I hope Alex feels properly shamed for creating homelessness with his whimsy.
How dare you snark it up!
I vote that we save up to build a time machine and send Scott Taylor back to New York City in the 70s and 80s. Or maybe I’ll go back New York City in the 70s and 80s and go to 42nd Street and hang out and watch pornos all day and see if anyone notices that my coins are all dated 2013. Or maybe I’ll just sleep ’til noon tomorrow and then go to the Oregon Theater.
I think we’re set.
Failing the sudden discovery of time travel, Blogtown’s snarkiest will spend entirely too much money on an overpriced, soggy-ass bourgie pizza at Cibo (cut with fucking garden shears of all goddamn things forfuckssake) while Todd gets his rocks off at the Oregon Theater.
I think we’ve done a lot of good here.
GOODDOERS™.
I think it’s worth noting that Safeway itself has this policy in place that tacitly admits that the price of the wings is negligible in the greater scheme of things. It’s a tiny, tiny, so-fucking-small-it’s-not-even-worth-mentioning loss to a huge corporation.
But hey, I’m not an idiot who can’t spell and keeps whining about how he’s a “disruptor.”