Since moving here from Iowa a month ago, I’ve been getting pretty caught up in the Portland lifestyle, discussing police brutality and gender by day, drinking wine on my roof by night. Hanging out with only liberals, I’ve been getting confused as to whether there’s still people in this state who really approve of Bush and unironically wear American flag bandanas. I asked around the office, “I want to spend the 4th of July with people who LOVE AMERICA. Where can I find such people?” The only British guy in the office knew just where to go. “Saint Paul Oregon Annual Rodeo,” said Matt Davis, with finality. Away I went this morning.
Saint Paul is 40 miles or so south of Portland. Its population is only 300, but for one weekend of the year, it becomes a patriotic promised land where you can eat a log of curly fries larger than your head in the shade of a cheap carnival ferris wheel.
The stands are rife with large animals and the folks who ride them. Big bulls, big belt buckles. Copenhagen Smokeless Tobacco and the U.S. Army both had tents right next to a cotton candy stand and the bull pen.
One of the carnival’s featured artists was a man who carves bears, salmon, horses and eagles with a chainsaw. I asked him which fearsome creature was the hottest seller. “Everyone wants bears. It can even be an ugly bear. Anything resembling a bear will sell.”
Next we snuck into the rodeo by using an ingenious ketchup/mustard mix to mimic the re-entry hand stamp.
And the rodeo began with flag-waving fanfare! Oregon’s small army of Rodeo Princesses led a procession of horses around the rodeo grounds. Some carried American flags, others flags emblazoned with the logos of sponsors. The crowd was having a good time, cheering and clapping the rhinestoned women on. Finally, the national anthem and a welcoming announcement from the loudspeakers including the warning: “If we forget that we are one nation under God, then we will be one nation gone under.”
One thing I didn’t know about rodeos: they’re scary. And violent. Out of its holding cage bucked a horse, kicking its legs front and back as the cowboy’s head flew forward backward forward backward, smacking against the horse’s body until he finally tumbled off. I was terrified. What a Portland liver-bellied city slicker I am. Even the Rodeo Princesses seemed calm and collected during the wildest of rides.
We couldn’t handle it for long. After about an hour of intense ride watching, we retired to the Saint Paul Rodeo Bar – the Tack Room. Above my head was a bison head and an American flag reminding me, “Rodeo: America’s Number 1 Sport.”
Conclusion: There’s a whole lot of American outside of Portland. And don’t you forget it!
“Since moving here from Iowa a month ago.”
/thread.
Where from in Iowa? I was born and raised in Davenport.
I unironically loved America today—and managed to do it within the city limits, by listening to Bruce Springsteen and shooting Roman candles at power lines and eating dangerously rare steaks. And meeting the neighbor’s snake (“Frank”) and watching a dude in a wheelchair light off fireworks and then frantically scoot backward so as not to set himself on fire, over and over again.
I need to quit checking Blogtown at 2 am. I’m only hurting myself. Happy 4th!
Dude, graham, I have spent many a summer in Davenport, my grandparents moved there when I was about 9. I am esp. fond of the used bookstore downtown.
It’s good to see some of you guys getting out side of Portland so you can at least ‘check in’ with a few basic realities that are missing from your day to day “Multnomah County Marxist Utopia”. You know the globally warming world you exist in, where everyone rides bikes, marries whoever and whatever they want, all absolutes are blurred (yeah no more personal accountability or right or wrong!! Wahoo! ) and nothing anyone but President Bush does is ever wrong…they are simply misunderstood victims of intolerance and hate.
Outside this socialist bubble of dumbed down mediocrity and a sheeple mentality, what you find in the real world is this….
1) Take all of your views from “Marxistland” a.k.a. “The People’s Republic of Portland” above, and know that your thinking is not only in the minority but in most cases embarrassingly so.
2) The Nation, (who has voted on it) has rejected your distorted view and endorsement of the current ongoing attempt to hijack the meaning of the word marriage and turn it into something desperate and ugly.
3) Your cause celeb from a few weeks ago i.e. the homosexual agenda “One More Time In Your Face Again” parade, that you saw as a positive thing for our fair city, is viewed by more people than not as proof Oregon has lost it’s moral compass and taste.
4) If you could step away from your mind numbing tunnel vision on any issue that would tend to support absolutes in people’s daily lives, and you yourselves were able to be ‘tolerant’ of the majority’s views and if you had more ‘respect’ for the results handed down by the overwhelming majority of American’s, and were more ‘accepting’ of the fact that as American’s we have the right to NOT accept a lifestyle that the majority of us are repulsed by. Then your views would have more credibility and you would be better positioned to enact the changes you seek. Until you can live up to your own high ideals of tolerance and acceptance then it’s really very difficult to take any sermon (can I say that …) you are preaching week to week here seriously.
If that’s too frightening a prospect for you, then let me ask you this: I ran into the parade of homosexuals a few weekends ago and I was hoping you could tell me how I should interpret something I witnessed during the parade and how it can be viewed as a positive thing for furthering the “agenda” and bringing over new foot soldiers in your war against America. Here is what I saw:
As I was waiting for a chance to cross the street, one of the parade participants, (looking every bit the part…) walked past us while he performed oral sex on a life-sized, anatomically correct, blow up doll. While (he/she) was performing (his/her) lifesaving (no doubt) actions on his “inflate a date”, I looked around and saw several families with small children, who weren’t wearing Che Guevara t-shirts, with shocked looks on their faces and I saw others pick their kids up and turn their line of sight away from this glorious celebration of oral sex. The fact that Portland’s new mayor elect participated and endorsed this train wreck event makes me nauseous. Please tell me why it’s okay for the minority to offend me and my values with conduct like this but it’s not okay for anyone to question the activities of some of the participants offending the values that the majority of American’s share with this lewd display lends itself to giving people a warm fuzzy feeling about the rest of the homosexual agenda? It’s not that other people hate these confused people ….but rather that they hate themselves. Before you declare that I am a right wing religious whack job …please note that I am just a normal person, a father, a husband with no specific affiliation …just a working moral barometer and a good sense of right and wrong.
“I ran into the parade of homosexuals”
Mmhmm… I’m sure that was an accident. You went down there to find exactly what you found.
Now that the post-masturbatory guilt has finally set in, you need a way to mask your self-hate and confusion so you posted that litte rant.
Did it work? Probably for the time-being, but we’ll be expecting another one in a couple of months after you broke down and “ran into the homosexual porn theater.”
Sarah, I know your just trying to frame a narrative, but honestly, the entire populations of Gresham and Beaverton descend on Portland for the Rose and Blues Fests. You can get the Red State experience right here at home, with better music, to boot.
Who said even lefties don’t celebrate? I’m a mainstream Obama Democrat, and was probably the most conservative person at our cookout.
We ate lots of meat, set off lots of fireworks, and the toddler girls at the party wore star-spangled skirts. No tofu or Che Guevara t-shirts there….
Oh, and “Which Way Did He Blow” – Mexicans are the new Americans. While lazy gabachos would rather sit under trees with a baseball cap pulled over their face, or do meth and burglarize houses or steal metal, good hard-working Mexican people do the dirty work your people shun.
Indeed, Jake. I think there are more troubling reasons why we don’t all just move to Beaverton…
http://blogtown.portlandmercury.com/2007/08/why_dont_we_all_just_move_to_beaverton.php
Graham – I spent four fine years at Grinnell College located in Grinnell, IA. It’s a small town located between the skunk river and the raccoon river.
1: Helio Sequence of from Beaverton
2: I grew up in Wyoming. I worked during a lot of summers as a “hand” at a Pro-America Rodeo. I sorted bulls into pens, stripped bucking horses of their saddles and sorted them, fed animals and all kinds of other dangerous stuff 14 year olds shouldn’t be doing. All for $5 a night and maybe, just maybe, a polish dog. I guess I never thought we were that weird as that’s how I grew up but I could see how it could be very foreign to someone that isn’t used to it. I think a lot of Portland people don’t understand how really really rednecky Oregon can be. That’s not a knee jerk reaction to seeing photos of kids eating funnel cake in air brushed t shirts, but rather a statement of fact. People here like their guns, big pickups, and making fun of Marxist utopias. That’s why I moved here. I love guns, and Marxist utopias.
3: lool at the first guys comment
Epic failure on my first bullet point. But, Helio Sequence are in fact from Beaverton. Not Portland.
Hey ‘which way did he blow’, I just did a blog post in which your thoughts are reviewed and discussed. Please join us.
Whoops. Sorry:
http://pleasestopticklingme.blogspot.com/2008/07/trampling-out-vintage-where-grapes-of.html