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What’s with the attitude?
Twenty years ago there was a well-intentioned but feeble campaign to try to get New Yorkers to be a little less rude in their daily interactions with others. This was called, “Lighten up New York,” and it predictably didn’t make much of an impact. New Yorkers are routinely rude, and are well known for this. Some probably take pride in it. Perverse pride is human, all-too-human.
I have heard the people of the Pacific Northwest called “polite but wary,” and I think this is quite apt. In fact, I take a certain pride in this polite but wary character. Seattle has the reputation of being cold to outsiders (the famed “Seattle Chill”) whereas Portland has the reputation of being slightly more friendly.
I was born in Portland and am mostly quite comfortable here. The “polite but wary” suits me fine, although some people take this as, “polite but not really friendly.” I like this. I like a city in which people form orderly lines and take turns. I want people in public places to be civil to each other, and I don’t want someone I don’t know well pretending that they are a friend.
Recently I have encountered some particularly rude people in Portland, and these encounters have made me pause and think. My first reaction is, “What’s with the attitude?” Where do people get off being spectacularly rude to strangers for no reason at all? My second reaction, which is only an intellectual extension of the first, is to try to understand the sociology of rudeness.
One source of friction in a city like Portland, in which people take pride in their alternative modes of transportation, is the tension between pedestrians, bicyclists, motor vehicles, and other forms of wheeled transportation such as motorcycles, skateboards, and scooters. Unfortunately for the greater good of the city, groups tend to self-segregate on the basis of mode of transportation. This may sound more than a little silly, but to a certain extent (not to an absolute extent) it is true.
The incidents of rudeness that I have recently encountered have involved just this friction between transportation-based communities. Most of the time I travel by automobile, but I also walk, and sometimes I even ride a bike. When I do walk or ride a bike, I mostly abide by the rules of the road. More importantly, I use my common sense. If I am walking or riding a bike, I don’t insist on my right of way with a car because I am rationally concerned for my own safety. I readily yield the right of way for cars, even when cars are driving rudely, because I don’t want to suffer permanent injury over something as ultimately trivial as right of way.
Last night when I was driving in northwest Portland I slowed for an intersection (it was not my place to stop), looked both ways, and then proceeded. Out of the darkness there loomed a pedestrian, dressed in dark clothes, on an unlighted street on a rainy night, and he was obviously quite angry that I didn’t see him. He thumped his hand on the top of my car. This anger struck me as ridiculous, given the conditions. More importantly, it strikes me as really stupid for a pedestrian to try to insist on the right of way with a car, because the car isn’t going to suffer if it comes to a collision.
A few months ago I had an even more disturbing encounter with a bicyclist. I was making a right turn onto ninth from the the Broadway Bridge viaduct. On the downside of the viaduct I passed a bicyclist not long before the intersection. I turned and looked to see that I could make my right turn before the bicyclist continued straight, knowing that the bicycle would be gaining speed on the downhill. I safely made the right turn, but immediately after I did, the bicyclist let out a bloodcurdling scream as she whizzed past.
The context of the situation made it obvious that the rider of the bicycle wanted to make me think that I had injured her, or perhaps caused her to crash, and she wanted to shock me into awareness of bicycles in traffic. Of course, I already was aware, and I did not appreciate that the bicyclist wanted to “teach me a lesson” by pretending to have suffered a traumatic injury.
It would be easy to be xenophobic and attribute the rising rudeness of Portlanders to the influx of “outsiders” who have moved to the Pacific Northwest in recent years, some for the technology industries, some for the outdoor sporting opportunities, some because they heard Portland was a “cool” place for young people to live.
I can’t in good conscience say that I believe this to be the cause, although it is not unrelated to the changing character of life in Portland. When cities grow, however slowly, they change, and this change includes both changes in the composition of the population and the normative consensus regarding public behavior.
I can rationally recognize that the changes are not personal, but it feels very personal when you have an angry encounter. I am sure that in other cities this level of rudeness is routine. In fact, this is one of the things that has heretofore made Portland different: people were not routinely rude.
While many people complain about the homogenization of big box retailers, suburban sameness, and gentrification, I am much more disturbed about the cultural and temperamental homogenization that is making rudeness commonplace in Portland.
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Changing Times
Today I stopped at Everyday Music in downtown Portland. It was nearly empty and quiet as a tomb on a Sunday early evening. Everyday Music used to be a busy place, especially on the weekends. They used to display “missed connections” ads from a local newspaper with “Shopping at Everyday Music gets you noticed!” written above them.
Maybe it was just a slow day. I see they’ve recently opened a store in Seattle, so business must be good. But I also have to wonder if the burgeoning market for downloading music off the internet is now also affecting retailers of used CDs.
Everyday Music has followed a business plan very similar to Powell’s, just a couple of blocks down Broadway from their location. Powell’s became famous for stocking new and used books together on the same shelf. Everyday Music stocks new and used CDs together in the same display, so it’s a similar retail concept.
I was recently thinking about the film project that began with Seven Up! and which in subsequent seven year intervals has been updated with a new iteration. The 56 Up! version is scheduled to be released next year. In the (admittedly extensive) history of this single documentary, the film has probably been made available in no fewer than four distribution formats: film, VHS tape, DVD, and electronic download.
The times, as they say, are a-changin’. No one product, no one business model, no one industry can be expected to persist. There are no longer any commanding heights of the economy. As Marx and Engels famously said, all things solid melt into air.
