Portland is radical. During the pandemic shutdowns a part of the city got cordoned off by some radicals. It got some national attention. There was a big vocal effort to get the police defunded. People were being pulled off the street by paramilitary dudes in uniforms with no insignia into unmarked black vans. There has been some pretty radical progressive drug policy reform and unreform. There is a huge population of people who live outside. Some of them are mentally ill or on drugs or both. Some are hearty people who just can't afford to pay rent and are semi permanently camping or living in their cars. The weather stays pretty nice. My girlfriend lives out there, in the part of Portland that’s affordable. It’s the part where that marginalized segment of the populace can live mostly unmolested by police.
It's not dangerous. You don't get mugged or shot.
The city is, if you were to put it on a country wide scale, very left of center. It's very queer. Its very forward thinking. The strippers are unionized.
Sometimes there are drag races on the city streets in the middle of the night.
When I'm there, my girlfriend and I will play a show or two and we hit the open mics. We try to get our music heard and be on stage.
All of this is to establish a kind of ouvre for this little story to live in.
We were at this open mike and the last act on the list was a dude with a mic and a dude with a guitar doing a kind of free verse hip hop oriented thing.
The one with the mic said they'd met outside earlier, smoking a blunt. They were both black and it was an almost exclusively white audience.
The rap kept coming back around to the line, “I killed one man. I saved many men.”
Spitting that to a room full of middle aged white folks with guitar cases got me almost choked up. It was radical.
It stuck with me.
In light of recent events, it came up as a song part. The song is a little story. It might be an allegory about judgement, the kind of radical judgement that leads one person to decide that it's necessary to kill another person.
Even if it seems situationally to be the right thing to do, even in the best case scenario it leads to more of the same.
And even though this could be interpreted as inflammatory, the intention here is for us all to have a look at what happens if it goes good. Cuz it goes bad.
You can say there's no objective right and wrong and that's all well and good, but consider the consequences at scale.
Try to think of all the effects and for God's sake disregard the idea of glory or riteousness. Those ideas are to blind you to consequence.
Here's this, but also listen to the song Arthur McBride.
Judges
I killed one man to save many men. Now I know I'm gonna go to my grave in sin. I played my hand. It was one of many just trying to change the world I found myself in. When I ran the crowd closed in behind me so the law man couldn't catch me. Now I know I'll never put this thing behind me and Lord knows I'll never be free. I ain't never been free.
Wake up, baby. I don't wanna go. But I've been on every show. They're gonna come for me by morning. I'm gonna take my things and run. Maybe I shouldn't have come. Some hobos took me in. We knew we couldn't win. We stood under a bridge just drinkin’. An old man handed me his flask. He said, “Brother, I just had to ask, what were you thinkin’?”
I said, I killed one man to save many men. Now I know I'm gonna go to my grave in sin. I played my hand. It was one of many just trying to change the world I found myself in. And when I ran the crowd closed in behind me so the law man couldn’t catch me. Now I know I’ll never put this thing behind me and Lord knows I’ll never be free. But I ain’t never been free.
When I woke up I was in front of a hangin judge and they had already built one of those number seven shaped rope swing porches. Outside the parking lot was full with the cast and crew from raging bull with pitch forks and torches. When I stepped out over the crowd I though I was about to be lowered down on to their shoulders. But I didn’t fall that far. I didn’t fall that far.
The judge poked his head out of the window and he said,
I killed one man to save many men. Now I know I’m gonna go to my grave in sin. I played my hand. It was one of many designed to change the world I found myself in.
Remember now, when I ran the crowd closed in behind me so the law man couldn't catch me. Now, I know I’ll never leave this thing behind me and I know I’ll never be free. But
I ain’t never been free.
This song is not for sale.
Here's a link to Arthur Mcbride:
Included photo by
Kevin Gunzenhauser
