Don't get me wrong, I love Portland and its townspeople. (Not crazy, however, about the Warshingtonians who ply our streets in their rigs and lower the area's overall I.Q.) But I've lived within our dysfunctional family long enough to know that many Portlanders are scandalously duplicitous and passively aggressive. "They smile in your face" should be this burg's tagline, as so many present themselves as progressive, open-minded anti-establishmentarians, but will be the first to cling to the skirts of the police when civil society gets dicey. They'll be the first to sabotage others' efforts to simply survive by overcoming possible criminal or addiction pasts. They wax poetic about Portland's "weird" street life, but then whinge and cringe when things get a little too "street." For too many performa-Portlanders there's little room for authentic empathy or compassion for those literally sifting through the detritus of a failing bourgeois monoculture. My personal favorites are the religiously anti-tax nabobs who want effective and pleasing public realms and services but screechily refuse to pay for it. Portlanders are infamous for wanting everything on the cheap, which leaves the munny-boys in power and the street-level schlub-grunts quietly struggling just to get by. Crime and addiction and mental illness do not materialize out of some mystic mist but out of a people's rigid ignorance of simple cause and effect — and out of a selfish unwillingness to participate in the building of a just, equitable society. Just sayin'.