Portland vs Portlandia...when life imitates art!By Ric Wasley June 5, 2017Have you ever watched the hit TV show Portlandia? If not you should. It is screamingly funny and as with all comedy shows, the premise takes the politically correct, kinda’ wacky liberal, over-the-top attitudes of the citizens of that northwestern city and does hilarious skits of what happens when you take the often contradictory rules of the Uber-left to their ultimate absurdist conclusion. And like all good comedies it is funny because such ridiculous behavior could never happen in real life. Right? Right???? But it has. Last week Portland’s real-life Alt-Left mayor called for the federal government to - and I am not making this up folks - cancel a “free speech rally’ planned and legally permitted by Trump supporters. This duly elected representative of Liberal ‘tolerance’ told reporters; "Although the organizers of the rallies have a constitutional right to speak, “hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment.” Ah, not so fast compassion kid. No less of a liberal icon, the vaunted ACLU, apparently doesn’t agree with you. In fact they said; “The government cannot revoke or deny a permit based on the viewpoint of the demonstrators. Period,” the ACLU of Oregon said in a Facebook post on Monday. “It may be tempting to shut down free speech we disagree with, but once we allow the government to decide what we can say, see, or hear, or who we can gather with, history shows us that the most marginalized will be disproportionately censored and punished for unpopular speech.” Well damn… Isn’t that embarrassing? The historic bastion of tireless support for every left-wing cause says that - what? You can’t eliminate the First Amendment just because you want to practice censorship on people and ideas you don’t like? Awwww… And if that wasn’t bad enough, the other reason for suspending freedom of speech cited by the constitutionally challenged mayor of Portland/Portlandia was that a right wing Trump supporter had committed a violent hate crime. So naturally that means that in the interest of protecting the peace-loving gentle folk of Portland from a potential massacre by ‘Deplorable’s', a necessary dose of prior restraint was demanded. Only problem is, it turns out that the nutcase who stabbed two people while on a paranoid rant was not a hate-filled Trump supporter as he assumed. Nope, according to his many posts the killer, Jeremy Christian, was actually a supporter of Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein. Oops. What a bummer. What is a politically correct, left-wing liberal supposed to do when those ‘inconvenient truths' of reality and the Constitution poke their unwelcome fingers into your rose-colored bubble? Well as a fan of Portlandia I would suggest that the mayor, played on the show by Kyle MacLachlan, call the show's stars, brilliantly played by Fred Amisen and Carrie Brownstein, and repair to one of Portlandia’s myriad of politically correct coffee shops to drown their sorrows in free-trade bean coffee and organic GMO-free alfalfa-sprout muffins. Maybe art will go back to imitating life. In Portland/Portlandia you never know. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/05/30/hate-speech-is-not-protected-by-the-first-amendment-oregon-mayor-says-hes-wrong/?utm_term=.669ee18b54cf
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Ric Wasley is a writer and lecturer, as well as the author of the popular McCarthy Mystery Series. Ric has had a 40 year professional career history in advertising, publishing and marketing in Boston, New York and San Francisco. He has degrees in history and psychology and has been trained in debating, public speaking and stage acting. A large part of his 40 year career was spent in numerous professional and business settings as a presenter and featured speaker at seminars and professional meetings. Ric has been a visiting professor at Worcester Polytech Institute. He also teaches a popular course on marketing for authors at prominent venues such as the venerable “Cape Cod Writers Conference.” Wasley has been involved in both print and broadcast media as well as writing for business and commercial markets for over 30 years and continues to consult for a major media company. In addition to his novels and short stories, he has been published in several literary magazines. Wasley currently divides his time between Boston and his home on Cape Cod where he continues to write, lecture and create worlds where the unexpected thrives.
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