Portland
I am the Portland Athena. What I mean is, I would have been the Portland Athena if everything had gone to plan. I had the idea to give the police a display of naked vulnerability days before that yoga-teaching sex-worker claimed the title. What’s more, instead of passively sitting on my fanny with my mangina out, I would have put on a real show. I wouldn’t just have shown my labia and planted my scrotum on the cold roadway: I would have delivered a frolicking ballet of powerful naked wokeness to dazzle the world and bring a tear to the eye of the most hardened fascist. Alas, ’twas not to be.
Let me start at the beginning…
When I put together ‘Anarchy with Elfwick’, a series of five informative workshops on how to protest with maximum efficiency, I live-streamed them on my YouTube channel because of the pandemic. My channel was taken down for copyright breaches. You’d think Starship’s ‘Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now’ would be in the public domain by now.
The first video is ‘How to shout repeatedly into the face of a racist cop without tearing your vocal chords’. I advised my subscribers to use ‘soft insults’ when abusing cops. ‘Nazi scum bootlicker’ is harsher on the larynx than ‘Garbage fascist meatbag’.
My second info-vlog is ‘How to demonstrate the insidious nature of their own oppression to unwoke Black people’. This is for white activists who need to educate Black Trump supporters on how forming their own opinions can be problematic within a systemically racist society.
The third episode deals with the triggering issues surrounding a person’s rights when seized by the fash (the police) during a protest. I cover the most photogenic ways of resisting arrest, along with using your top Snapchat filters to create the strongest impact on social media (‘Dog With Tongue Hanging Out’, ‘Princess Sparkle Flower Crown’, ‘Dancing Hotdog’).
I follow this up with my vlog on how to request police assistance while maintaining a disdainful attitude towards their existence. You may have inadvertently set a comrade on fire while absentmindedly throwing a Molotov cocktail overarm instead of using the recommended underarm bowl. When this happens, you need to know how to attract the attention of a fascist grunt without giving the impression that you respect them in any way. I advise asking for help orally, while at the same time conveying your support for defunding the police through interpretive dance moves.
The final and most inspiring episode covers how to avoid and escape police restraint techniques. For this, my friend Harvey and I watched an entire box-set of Starsky & Hutch over a single weekend with an ounce of medicinal weed. The episode climaxes in a two-hour montage of us demonstrating hold techniques on each other against a kaleidoscopic light display, set to a soundtrack of inspiring Eighties power ballads. Hence the copyright trouble.
After my channel was unlawfully canceled, I decided to take to the streets. I grabbed a couple of disposable face masks and hopped on a tram to Portland’s Autonomous Zone, intent on etching my unmistakable signature on the protests. Before alighting from the tram, I deftly undressed myself to gasps from the binary passengers. I removed everything apart from my face masks. One covered my nose and mouth, the other I expertly draped across my nonbinary nether region.
I closed my eyes for a moment and imagined the police’s confusion as they watched me approach them. Unarmed. Naked. Unafraid. Poems would be written about my stunning act of fortitude, Twitter would explode with tweets about the ‘Portland Athena’, and the Los Angeles Times would publish an iconic photograph of my naked cheeks. This was my moment. I gave a knowing glance towards two elderly women who were looking at me in awe — they were probably retired sex workers — and stepped down from the tram…straight onto a piece of broken glass. The pain was unspeakable. As I blacked out, I saw another woman stripping off and pirouetting toward the police line.
I awoke in the ER wearing a blanket around my nakedness. There was a bandage on my foot and it was leaking blood. I felt woozy, disorientated. A Latinx nurse came towards me and asked if I need anything.
‘Only this, chica,’ I said. ‘If I die here and now, I die a legend. I give permission for a naked statue to be erected of me, so that the memory of my inspiring deeds may kindle the flames of revolution in generations to come.’
‘You’ve only taken the tip off your little toe,’ she replied. I had impressed her with my courage.
‘And one more thing,’ I whispered. She leaned in. ‘Fuck da police.’
She raised her eyebrows over her mask and nodded in a gesture of Black solidarity.
To say I was disappointed when the other Portland Athena stole my naked thunder is an understatement. It was criminal and racist, and it may have infringed my copyright. I shall take this to the Supreme Court and will be consulting with my lawyer when he gets out of jail.
This article is in The Spectator’s September 2020 US edition.
