Is my hometown f*ing serious?
Oregon Public Broadcasting reports that 1.5 million dollars has been designated to replace the historic David P. Thompson elk statute downtown.
I remember growing up with the elk statue! It’s near the college campus where I lived with my Mom when I was small. I was also a witness to the destruction of the elk statue over the past three years. Protestors really did some crazy stuff to mess up that elk, let me tell you.
Here’s a photograph I took at a protest in May 2020: in this photo protestors are roasting pig’s heads over an open fire that they lit on the stone base of the statue.
Do we need a new elk?
While I loved the elk statue, and it made me sad to see it get totally destroyed, I understood the anger of the people who were doing it, and why they felt that destroying a piece of property might be an acceptable way to express that anger.
Personally, I’m not really big on the “tear down statues” method of protesting. I get why it happens, but something like an elk (it’s an animal, dude) seems pretty benign to me. The elk was pretty to look at, and I’m pretty sure that the local elk population isn’t guilty of anything bad.
It didn’t seem fair to me that the elk face the wrath of the protestor’s anger when it wasn’t really the elk’s fault or the fault of the artist who made the elk.
I’m not opposed to replacing the elk. I kind of miss it. But one million dollars seems like a lot of money for an elk statue. Money that could be going to say, things like helping the homeless get off the street or deal with their drug addictions and mental illness.
Or maybe the money could go to pushing for the kind of criminal justice reform which is needed in order to prevent the kind of misplaced rage in the populace which caused the destruction of the elk in the first place.
Remember the tram?
The one point five million approved for the elk reminds me of when the OHSU aerial tram was built in Portland. Essentially, the tram is a giant and terrifying way for the local hospital to give people more access to parking.
The tram cost A LOT of money, and it didn’t really have the full support of the community. It was marketed as something that would It was marketed as something that would look good as a part of the Portland skyline. But not everyone was into it.
People who live underneath the tram even went as far as to put up a sign that said “Fuck the Tram.” They felt that it encroached upon their privacy and other rights.
Is the elk another tram?
As OPB reports, ten years after the tram’s construction, the tram costs millions of dollars, much of which came straight out of the pockets of local taxpayers. It was controversial at the time of its construction and remains so today.
“Accusations of mismanagement and subterfuge flew,” writes OPB’s Randy Gragg of the funds used to build the tram. The people who designed and built the tram ended up going way over budget. Gragg also notes that the affordable housing in the south Waterfront neighborhood went unfinished as the tram was finished.
Is the new elk statute another expensive and ridiculous boondoggle put in place by the leaders of the city of Portland to make it seem like everything is going well when it isn’t?
Wouldn’t the money be better spent feeding the homeless?
Esoteric Epistemology 