Naming Names in Portlandia
Forget Portland’s budget crisis, which comes after decades of profligate spending, which wasted millions of taxpayer dollars. Forget the big-and-small business exodus from downtown Portland, with street traffic now mostly comprised of the homeless, the drug-addicted and/or mentally ill, and hipster/miscreants. Forget the floundering public school system and resultant need for severe cutbacks.
Portland has a naming crisis, which has already wasted, and will continue to waste money due to the restorative justice of dumping legitimate names for places and then having to reassess those names, either decades, or mere months later.
There was once a major street in Portland: NE and SE 39th Ave. In 2009 it was renamed Cesar E. Chavez Blvd. in honor of the noted Latino labor activist. Trad-cons resisted by continuing to call the busy arterial by its numerical name, but Cesar E. Chavez Blvd. it became. Some never-to-be-tallied seven-figure amount was needed to update everything that must be updated, both in the public and private sectors, when a street name is changed.
Recently a series of credible allegations of sexual and emotional harassment, abuse and assault, have surfaced against Chavez, rendering the man some likened to a Hispanic Martin Luther King Jr. a posthumous Me Too pariah. Progressive leaders are currently fielding calls to scrub Chavez and appropriately rename the old 39th Ave. The prime candidate forwarded to emblazon the hundreds of new street signs that line the seven-mile thoroughfare is Latina activist Dolores Huerta. Both strengthening and complicating the narrative is the fact that Huerta has admitted that she suffered actual sexual assaults from the farmworker’s rights icon that resulted in the births of two children. Three Portland public schools are already in the process of sending Chavez’s name into the dustbin of their histories.
Which brings us to Custer Park in Southwest Portland, named back in the pre-woke era for the progressively-infamous General George Armstrong Custer, who fought Native-Americans in the Indian Wars of the late-1800s and lost his life at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
It wouldn’t do to let Custer’s name stand, so a committee was formed, and thousands of dollars spent, to come up with a new name for the pastoral suburban park. This is where Portlandia’s naming crisis moves from the sad and tawdry downfall of Chavez into the realm of pure, unintentional, moronically-woke humor.
The name chosen by the committee is: Scht Wiwnu Park. Roll that around in your mouth. The direct translation is “the path of the huckleberry,” but even in ultra-liberal Portland the populace is recoiling. With the groundbreaking complete and the new signage installed, “Shit we knew” Park has already become the nickname of record.
Cultural recognition is a worthy goal. Native-Americans and Hispanic-Americans should be given due consideration when the name-game begins. What we have with Cesar Chavez Blvd. is a problem that couldn’t have been foreseen. Over at Scht Wiwnu Park is a problem that could’ve been foreseen.
Both problems will likely be “fixed,” but as always, with progressive-minded decision makers running the show, certain things can’t be fixed.