Until last night, the only time I was teargassed was in November of 1969, so I guess I was due. In 1969 it was Nixon who gassed me in Washington, D.C.; last night it was Trump who made my eyes sting in my home, Portland. Not the kind of lifetime bookends I would have chosen for myself, but it is what it is.
I hadn’t participated in the more than 50 straight days of protests here in Portland until last night. I visit my 93-year-old mother twice a week, so I have been very careful about Covid-19. But Trump’s deployment of secret police in my city solely for the purpose of providing video footage for his campaign ads was too much for me, and yesterday I felt like I had to show up in person down at the Hatfield Court House, which Trump’s stormtroopers are “protecting.”
The fundamental thing that people need to know about what is happening here in Portland is that the skirmishes are limited to the evening and early-morning hours and to a single city block in downtown Portland. Ninety-nine percent of daily life here is completely normal. Portland is not being vandalized, looted, or set ablaze.
I got town to the courthouse about 8:30 last night. The courthouse is an ideal location for a protest because, although it is smack in the middle of downtown Portland, there is a park across the street. So for the past fifty-eight consecutive nights protesters have gathered in that park. So the protests predate the presence of Trump’s secret police—those goons arrived a little over two weeks ago.
The rationale for the arrival of this motley crew of untrained, brutal thugs was the protection of the federal courthouse building. The damage to the courthouse before their arrival was graffiti. Some small fires were also lit in the street in front of the building, but there were no conflagrations inside the building—no arson. This is still the case today. The “damage” to the courthouse is still limited to graffiti.
We don’t know how many fascist police Trump has sent to Portland to battle this wave of graffiti. He refuses to say. What we do know is that the size of the demonstrations, which had been winding down, has exploded exponentially since their arrival. This is surprising to exactly no one. Two nights ago, 4,000 Portlanders protested. Last night’s crowd was estimated to be about 5,000—the largest one yet.
I got to the courthouse about 8:30 last night. There were probably a couple of thousand people there. The secret police have set up a metal barricade in front of the courthouse, and it had been decorated with flowers and BLM posters. I brought some swim goggles, water, and a bandana, but I felt severely under-prepared as I scanned my fellow protesters. Most of them were wearing ski helmets and ski goggles. Some had full-on, pro gas masks. Several were wearing leaf blowers, which they have been using to blow tear gas back toward the secret police. The food kitchens in the park that had been destroyed the night before by the secret police were back up and running—barbecue AND vegan. There were groups of nurses in their medical scrubs, teachers, more children than I would have expected, and a really fine contingent of drummers.
One important point: many in the black community (Portland’s is small—about 6% of the population) have expressed their concerns, often angrily, that the nightly skirmishes had obscured the original Black Lives Matter focus on addressing systemic racism in the police force. It is a totally legitimate concern, and there is a lot of truth in it. I can tell you that Black Lives Matter was the theme last night, and that black organizers were leading the crowd. It’s also true, of course, that it’s important to protest the invasion of your city by secret police, so there was a strong message of “Feds out of Portland,” too.
Around ten o’clock a speaker addressing the crowd pointed out that the tactic of confronting the secret police on their federal turf night after night was questionable. She spoke of the need to spread the protest out to other areas in Portland that were not under federal control. She told us that organizers had learned that the secret police were being housed in the Marriott Hotel several blocks away, down on the river, and within minutes most of the crowd, including me, was marching over to the Marriott.
We surrounded the Marriott on two sides and filled the circular driveway in front of the hotel. I couldn’t see any guests in the lobby, and nearly all of the windows in the hotel were dark. This tactic made a ton of sense to me. If the Marriott truly is housing the secret police (several folks on Facebook are claiming this, but I haven’t seen it confirmed in the regular media), then targeting them and hurting Marriott’s business is not only legitimate but important. And moving the focus to the Marriott moves the protests off federal territory and the turf of the secret police. Trying to shut down the Marriott would certainly being about a confrontation with law enforcement, but it would most likely be with the Portland police (who showed a lot of brutality before the arrival of the feds) and not the secret police.
But we didn’t attempt to shut down the Marriott. Around 11:00 we marched back to the courthouse, where we joined a large crowd in the park. There were about 5,000 protesters at this point.
Most of the confrontations with the secret police have happened between 11:00 p.m. and 2 a.m., so at this point we were in that skirmish time zone, and you could feel a heightened awareness in the crowd. Protesters shined bright floodlights into the front of the courthouse. Green lasers were flashed against the sides of the courthouse and nearby buildings at spots where protesters thought that secret police were stationed.
At around 11:30, a really loud boom went off in front of the courthouse, and then another. Protesters were setting off fireworks. Some of them were launched skyward at the sides of the buildings. I was toward the back of the crowd after the march to the Marriott, so I couldn’t see what was happening right in front of the courthouse. More fireworks, and then I saw a cloud launched in front of the courthouse and billow into the air. I couldn’t tell if it was smoke from the fireworks or tear gas, but the crowd booed loudly. About two minutes later, a much larger cloud appeared and wafted toward the crowd, and people began hustling past me, away from the courthouse. I was just getting my goggles out of my pocket when my eyes started watering and I realized that the cloud of tear gas had reached me. I turned and started moving toward the back of the park. Just a few minutes, I thought, and then I’ll be out of this, but then a much stronger cloud of tear gas reached me from another direction, and for a second I thought that I was disoriented and was heading INTO the gas, not away from it.
That tear gas really does the job. It’s very nasty shit. People were wretching and moaning and rubbing their eyes. I must have been stumbling around, because a good samaritan came up to me and asked me if I’d like my eyes cleaned out. “Yes, please,” I said and he had me tip my head back and blink while he poured saline solution in my eyes. I doused my bandana with my water bottle and wiped the stinging gas off my face with it as I got further way. The Covid mask I was wearing kept from breathing very much of the gas.
On Fifth Avenue I passed a four-person, constantly flowing drinking fountain. A suburban-looking father and his two sons, who looked to be about ten and twelve, were washing their red eyes with handfuls of water from the fountain. “See, boys,” he told them. “That’s how it’s done.”
I headed out of the park, found my car, and went home. I found out today that the secret police did emerge and clear the area, but not until much later—around 2 a.m.
Did we score any tactical victories last night? Not really, but the feint to the Marriott is a tactic that should be followed up on. We don’t need to target the courthouse every night.
Are the secret police any closer to leaving Portland? Nope.
Then what’s the point?
Protests are not like wars. Their value is not based on body counts or territory taken. Protests are statements—they are the antithesis of silence, which is tacit approval and a different kind of violence. Most of all, their power is in their ability to outlast even the most repressive response.
A reporter from the Portland Oregonion spent last night inside the courthouse with the secret police and wrote an article about her experience in today’s paper. She wrote that “Federal agents said they are wearing of the nightly protests.” She interviewed one of them.
“We’re just not getting anywhere,” he said. “If they just stayed off the fence and weren’t being aggressive towards us, we’d just be inside twiddling our thumbs. … I don’t think there’s an end in sight. They don’t want to stop but we can’t leave this building until they leave us alone. The ‘give’ has to ‘give’ on the outside of the fence.”
This the fundamental delusion of so-called “moderates” who criticize the protesters when their city is invaded by the secret police—claiming that the protesters are playing into their hands while ignoring that their city has been invaded by a secret police force and acquiescence and passivity in the face of that means that the fascists will have won.
This is also the fundamental delusion of the committed fascist—that if more and more pressure and violence are brought to bear, citizens—who have stood up to protest exactly that violence—will respond by giving up.
We can do this forever, and we will until the “give” happens on the other side of that fence—inside that courthouse. That courthouse is OUR courthouse, not the secret police’s, and we will outlast them. Iit is we who will one day bring THEM to justice—in a courtroom iinside that very same building.