Welcome to Know Your History.


I am taking a little opportunity to re-post a delightful time capsule that was originally posted in North End Noise (incarnation 2 or 3). This wee time capsule that feels very relevant today. 

Enjoy your reading. 
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Arise, Little Beirut:

"If we're out in the streets, and we have that right in a democracy, we're there to make a point. We're there to be counted, literally." – Tom Hastings -professor of nonviolence and conflict resolution at Portland State University to The Oregonian – 2003

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Staring at the people around me in the North End you could see the tension that was building to a point of agitated unrest. I walked down the aisle into the fading sunlight beamed out across pasty faces and untanned arms. Here in the countenance of many that surrounded me on all sides was the rising tide of apprehension that comes with the fear of stepping over the line. No one truly knew what would happen over the next 33 minutes, but we were boldly looking off into the realm of the unknown.

The concession stand boycott eliminated beer for many fans, and yet people were still drunk. Stern expressions abound alongside tight smiles showing the duality of steel purpose and recognized faces. There is no relaxation to be had here. A churning bit of stomach, the gripping of nails, an exorcist burst of noise from behind as the dam must burst and frustrated fans attempt to make this about the team, about them, about anything but fucking silence. The noise comes in waves like a smoldering fire sending up embers that threaten to burn everything down.

Thirty-three minutes of silence.

If you believe in a god, it’s time to pray because it’s 10 minutes in and the absence of what traditionally happens in the stands every home game is more gripping on the nerves than coming down from any kind of stimulant, legal or illegal. There’s plenty of stimulants and depressants in this group, right now. Beer, whiskey, marijuana, caffeine, cocaine, adrenaline… anything to get tuned up, tuned in and fucked off. You could bottle and sell the pure intensity flowing through the collected stands right now to hawkers on Canal Street. In my section there’s probably more prescriptions for Lipitor than lithium. Stone faces, biting lips, crossed arms, loud conversations and nervous laughter, ye gods make this end. The last time the atmosphere at home felt this tense there were security guards trolling for fans to eject, and raving lunatics on the front edge of a cutting atmosphere so doomed that it felt like the sky would fall.

Solidarity in Cascadia. Madness in Little Beirut.

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When then Vice-President Dan Quayle visited Portland back in 1990 for a $2,500 a plate fundraiser, Portland wasn’t universally known as a twee city where the youth of the United States would retire to enjoy their handlebar mustaches, doughnuts, beer and coffee bars. People gathered from across the west to Portland like the lost children of old. In his book Fugitives and Refugees, Chuck Palahniuk describes a sea of indigent artists, hippies, half-mad writers, dopers and freak people hell bent on scraping by with whatever weirdness pooled out of them in an inexpensive city. People gathered, roughly 300 in number, to protest the Vice President. This wasn’t the first time that Quayle or other politicians were targeted. There was unrest. There was direct action. Someone shit on a picture of the Vice President. Flags were desecrated.

People of that generation were growing up with the specter of more failed wars and policies. The bastards were up to their same tricks. The Fear was strong with their group and they used it to mess with nearly everyone they could find. Failed coups in Latin and South American countries, illegally selling arms to Iran in order to fund a guerilla war in Nicaragua in order to destabilize the country, using the CIA and roughly 40 billion dollars with Saudi Arabia to fund the Mujahideen in Afghanistan which directly lead to the madness that was Osama Bin Laden.

The US government was working overtime on actively ignoring the Aids crisis, overthrowing the government in Panama and devoting an unending amount of tax dollars to the catastrophically failed War on Drugs (still ongoing). Meanwhile, the first Gulf War was protested in Portland in 1991 by a diverse collection of freaks, peaceniks, Reedies, capable youth, old heads, hippies, anarchists, and agitators who found themselves fighting the same generational battles that their Berkley forbearers did before being crushed under the wheel of modern life. But I’m going off on a tangent here.

During this era of protest and unrest over 28 years ago, a member of the Bush administration dubbed Portland the moniker of Little Beirut.  Perhaps it was the presentation of aforementioned suit clad Reedies who, while protesting the Vice President, used ipecac to force out Red, White, and Green vomit after no one told them that the contents of their stomach would turn blue food coloring into green projectile.

Certainly this wasn’t anything new, as when Ronald Reagan came to deliver a speech at the University of Portland in 1984, political activists lined up with coffins and photos of the victims of death squads in El Salvador. This was direct action with angry men and women, commitment on a heavy scale for a heavy world.

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Two years ago you could very easily imagine the imminent threat of fascist white supremacists in Portland. In the shoes of Ricky John Best, Taliesin Namkai-Meche and Micah David-Cole Fletcher we all walked.  Riding on a max train and seeing the doors close, in the weeks after the attack, there was an eerie sense that it could have been any of them, any of us, at any time. The paranoia that terrorism and racism brings infects the very mundane things you do every day with a new feeling of discomfort. There was a tension to the Rose City, bad psychic energy all around.

These men were everyday people with a diverse background who confronted hate, racism, fascism and white nationalism directly. Ricky John Best and Taliesin Namkai-Meche paid for this stand with their lives. This was two years ago.

These are the times of tiki torch wielding fascist white supremacists. The times of American people screaming, “blood and soil,” and men who openly speak the politics of hate and repression. Make no mistake, these people have always been here. This hate is nothing new, they are just emboldened into showing themselves and attempting to mainstream this culture of hate like it once was.

This is the long festering underbelly of American life that many like to pretend doesn’t exist. Out of the web and onto the streets they come, time and again. In Charlottesville they run down protestors in the streets while being praised by the sitting President as, “Very Fine People.” In Portland they conspire to attack people in the streets and bars. Sometimes they arrive in town the day before their protest, eat Korean fusion food, go to the park the next day to yell racial slurs, paint themselves as victims, and then receive a police escort out of town. In Seattle they seek violent attacks, show up armed to soccer bars and assault people in the street. These are the times of fascist white nationalists and bigots that target places like the Hispanic community of El Paso, the synagogues of Pittsburgh, or the churches of Charleston.

We cannot call ourselves better than this when this is currently our present and our past. There is no guarantee that the future will be better. However, doing absolutely nothing will guarantee that it won’t be better.

All Americans now attend mass events as a matter of protest whether you like that or not. The simple attempt at back to school shopping is now a political statement against people who want to terrorize and inflict psychic pain. 

The history of Oregon isn’t easy and it isn’t pretty. However there’s a direct connection to direct action. This is our tradition and we must carry it on. Those in the stadium and those on the streets feel the connection to Little Beirut.

When you do something, anything at all, it will inevitably make someone upset. You eat the wrong doughnut in this town and 5 people will inform you of your wrongness. There isn’t a package that will make your stand acceptable to everyone in the world, much less your random friends on Facebook that you keep around. For some people, there’s never going to be a right way to indicate that you are standing up for your friends and neighbors. 

The goal of direct action and confrontation is to make things difficult and to finally have THAT conversation, even if that conversation is uncomfortable. Protest is not about making everyone on all sides feel better, and it is not about patterning yourself and your life in a palatable way for people who refuse to understand why you simply won’t just follow the rules and behave appropriately. The fact that silence itself could be considered so egregious shows the ability of the voiceless to be counted.

To be counted is, in itself, something that soccer supporters know all too well. We show up to games bedecked in team clothes with flags, banners and songs and the knowledge that we literally can do nothing on the field to change what will happen.

We don’t show up because we think that somehow we will be pulled from the stands to play. We show up because we love the game. We show up to be counted among the faithful and to bear witness to the events in front of us. We show up to be there in person and to sing, to chant, to boo and cheer. We show up to be with our friends and family even though they were strangers some time ago. Sometimes, even, we show up to be silent. In silence we are still counted and we show our faith to our team, friends, loved ones and the strangers that form our neighborhoods.

Speaking to people within the community you begin to understand that this action isn’t just about a ban on a symbol. It’s more about an idea. Within this idea lives the thought that soccer supporters don’t just exist to consume, attend, cheer, leave on schedule and play by the rules; but rather that we exist to fight for each other, to live for each other, to support both the team and the town. 

The league and team cracking down on this symbol is them cracking down on the very identity of standing for the players on the field and the community in which we live. We show that we are against racism and white supremacists not just when it affects us but when it affects the players on our team or the people we do not know. When the Flores family is directly impacted by racism on the streets of Portland we know that sports and life and the communities we support are all connected. We know that soccer is a mirror that shows the life we live in our communities every day.

When you understand that idea, you will understand that it isn’t just about the Iron Front, but about the idea of fighting back against an attempt by the league and the Timbers own front office to censor fans and sanitize the support that they sold to advertisers and other fans.

Flying the Iron Front is a rejection of racism, fascism and white supremacy. Flying the Iron Front is the sign of the rejection of the policies of hate. It is a sign of inclusion and acceptance of the other in our midst. This is welcoming not only your neighbor but the 18 year old player from Argentina who is coming to a new place and a new life. This is telling the 28 year old soccer player from El Salvador and the 12 year old refugee from Somalia that we reject the ideology currently sputtering in this region and country that says they do not belong.

Standing silent, together, in the cooling evening we can show our strength by not giving the performance that the league so desperately wants. We stop so the league and front office can’t package our singing and dancing into clips that border on trained performances. It is a reminder of strength, of unity, of solidarity.

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Now there is a minute left until we hit the rocket ship, blast off and head to the edge of the Milky Way.

Now there is a minute left until we all step over that line into the unknown.

It’s finally time to prepare after what seemed like an inexorable wait.

Suddenly, we are nearly there. 

The time on the clock, moving ever slower towards 33 minutes, ticks onward with only 20 seconds to go. 

Counting internally, it is impossible to not acknowledge the time. 

10….. 9….. 8…..

Hundreds of green clad people in the stands are counting out loud.  People are looking around at their loved ones, strangers, enemies and friends; and honestly there isn’t one person that knows what is going to happen after this ticking bomb of stress, angst, anger and aggression is finally let loose. Nerves, already exposed due to past weeks of rancor, persistent games and events, are now completely shredded. Fans ready themselves by clutching flags and displays as the white noise of nervous chatter starts to grow in intensity.

Now is the time when we hold fast. When the moment arrives with a clock strike and one era is going to end while another will begin.

Drummers pick up mallets and sticks, fans ready their voices, people stand up on chairs and look around wide eyed in The Moment with absolute pure anticipation pulsating through their veins. Just before the chaos it seems like a collective inhale happens.

And then, together, we step across the line into the unknown.

Arise, Little Beirut