P(ushover)-Town

We agree that our city is far and away the world’s greatest. Paris of the Cascades; gateway to the Willamette Valley’s tight-plotted orchards and sprawling vineyards; land of milk and honey and high-gravity Imperial Pale Ale: Portlanders live nestled in one of the most charmed corners of planet Earth.

Every day we’re awestruck by the effulgent beauty of 300-foot firs, glacier-capped stratovolcanoes and diverse species of moss. The drizzly mist of the long winter is a small price to pay for the summer glory of blue skies and red-as-a-cherry rose blossoms.

And how about the people?

No less than the educatiest, open-mindiest, diversiest and party-hardiest assemblage of humanity ever sewn together by bus lines and bike lanes. From the grungiest strung-out Old Town busker plucking a washtub bass, to the tatted-up hipster tossing a can of Hamm’s (Pabst is over) over his shoulder as he pedals his fixie down Alberta, even to the bushy-bearded, Prius-driving father of two who crafts fine distilled spirits in the basement of his Westmoreland Craftsman and trades eggs from his back-garden chicken coop for Swiss chard and boar sausage at the local co-op, we are the best, the bravest and the most interesting people the United States can muster.

But shouldn’t the city’s strident personalities express a concurrent surfeit of ego?

Quite the contrary! By happy accident, our city is one of America’s friendliest. Even in winter’s dankest, darkest depths, Portland is a city of good feelings. Whether it be the pinot noir, the weed or the radioactive runoff from the decommissioned Hanford nuclear facility, something always puts a smile on our citizens’ faces. The barista at Stumptown with the ragged cardigan and Hitler Youth haircut always draws a heart in my macchiato and punches my coffee card twice. There are even guys at gas stations who offer to fuel your automobile while you sit secure on your leather bucket seats and listen to Garrison Keillor’s soothing public-radio show.

Our good humor and concern for others amazes outsiders. When my aunt took a recent weekend escape to PDX from the Rust Belt wastes of St. Louis, Mo., she watched in gape-mouthed amazement as the driver of a Subaru stopped well short of a pedestrian crosswalk and gently waved us through. “He didn’t honk or flash his high beams or even shake an angry fist at us!” she breathlessly repeated as she clung close to my heels.

Back in the Lou, we shoot pedestrians.

Portland, Ore., is a paradise on Earth: a place where passive-aggressiveness passes for aggression; where all manner of wayward self-expression and body modification is encouraged; where motorists do not deliberately run down bicyclists.

But how long can it last?

Portland, your trusting, mind-as-wide-as-the-Columbia-Gorge niceness could be your undoing.

Geographic isolation has long kept Portland safe from the predations of outsiders. But economic dislocation and cheap airfare has made that security a thing of the past. Already the city is being infiltrated by a fifth column of spray-tanned Southern Californians, burnt-out East Coasters and Chicagoland refugees. And each of these nefarious subclasses hide their essential antisocial nastiness under a dissimulating veneer of optimism and flannel shirts. Let your guard down for an instant and they’ll pounce on you like a pack of white-toothed hyenas on a baby hippopotamus.

If Portland is to continue as a Big Rock Candy Mountain to which our nation’s unfulfilled and uncomfortably unemployed youth can go to become self-fulfilled and comfortably unemployed, then we need to get serious about asserting our trademark unassertiveness. This still means “nice,” but a new kind of aggressive-nice, an over-the-top good humor that will make outsiders so ill at ease that they make an immediate beeline back to South Boston.

This columnist therefore proposes that, each day, a contingent of 50,000 Portlanders selected by lottery assemble en masse at PDX airport to greet each disembarking passenger with self-affirming exhortations, baskets of gluten-free marionberry scones and growlers of the hoppiest home-brew. Remember: The really jaded can always tell when something is too good to be true.

If successful, we can continue living in our rainy little stress-free bubble of progressive politics and tight jeans.

That is, until the inevitable day we become the bombed-out salient at the front against Red China’s massive invasive force.