There’s a famous story about the great Australian foreign correspondent Richard Hughes falling into a drunken stupor during a long session with fellow correspondents, only to wake up with a start and shout “where am I?”

“In the Hilton hotel” a colleague reassured him. “I know that you fool, but which city?”

Your correspondent had a similar feeling the first morning out in this metropolis of the northwest, with its historic districts, funky cafes, tram system not only extensive but free, and a local supermarket that lists the food miles for each product. With a head full of flu medication, wandering beneath the grey skies I truly believed for about half an hour that I was back in Scandinavia. After all, no-one was smiling here, either.

The Pacific Northwest is the site of one of the greatest cultural shifts of the whole whacky postmodern whatever ya want ta call it period. After all California, even prior to the 60s, had a long history of social radicalism and experimentation, Buddhism carried to it from the East, the frontier ethos from the West, a heady approach to love and death coming up from the Spanish south. “California,” wrote Joan Didion, “is the place where a literal interpretation of the King James Bible has been replaced by a literal interpretation of the screenplay of Double Indemnity“, and so it was.

But north of Frisco was a different matter. It was partly the weather, it was partly the terrain, it was the industries – logging, fishing and cattle – it was the weather, again, that made the place rougher, less self-conscious. Not that it was without radical history – indeed Seattle was the site of one of the great general strikes in American labour history, and also of the most vicious crackdown on radicalism in all its forms, with the 1919 busting of the IWW. And Olympia college in Washington state, home of the Evergreen Review which published a lot of the work of the Beats n others, was an early example of a college becoming so radical and voluntaristic in its approach to classes that it became what David Mamet called the “institution of higher learning as s-x camp.”

But it wasn’t until the late 80s, with California dreamin’ a thorough bust, and real estate prices climbing that the Pac-NW started to became something else. Logging and fishing collapsed about the same time as hi-tech start ups began looking for cheaper cities and anything with more character than Silicon Valley, and were able to leverage tax breaks from suddenly desperate states. First Microsoft in Seattle, then Intel here, became the core around which a distinct pomo culture. Or, as a volcanologist of my acquaintance based here (it’s all volcanoes everywhere) remarked “everyone’s got a Celtic tatto and recycles their own sh-t. It gives me the irrits.”

Which is why Oregon, billed as the last big Obama-Clinton showdown, ain’t gonna be. There’s a coupla primaries beforehand – West Virginia and Kentucky – both of which Hillary should win handily, but Oregon is the only place with any heft left. Even then it’s nothing special — 50-odd pledged delegates, another dozen super-Ds — but everywhere else is piddling, and, West Virginia aside, long shots for the Democratic party to win.

Yet of course it will matter only because people want it to matter — only because, with Hillary staying in the race, events and moments must now be created out of this simulation of a contest. We’ve known for months that neither candidate could win on pledged delegates alone, and since then the primary race has become a positioning competition, a thing of image. But like a pack of drongoes, the press has kept to this notion that it was a race for delegates.

With Hill’s deeply disappointing double in NC and Indiana — losing the first more definitively than she should have, barely winning the second at all — talk has now shifted to the point that was obvious weeks ago. She is not staying to try and chip away at Obama; she is staying in in the hope that something will kinghit him — anything from a super-scandal to an assassination — and she will be the last manatee standing. The Clinton mythos, drawn from 1992, is that you never know what will come from sideways to save you, whether it’s H Ross Perot, or Newt Gingrich admitting he shut down the government because he got a bad seat on Air Force One, and that has been in operation all thru the contest. And who is to say it is wrong?

But in any last ditch push for that, Oregon is not going to help. Though it still has a hefty logger and farmer population, by and large they’re Republican, and this is a closed primary. Your average Oregon democrat is well, is some dude with a Celtic tattoo who recycles his own sh-t. Bama will take this state by 15%. This is a place where today’s front page has been taken by the mysterious deaths of protected sea-lions in an upstream eco-reserve. Not Kansas no more.

So what is going to happen? There’s a possibility Hillary will go in the next few days, but it will only happen if her key staff gang up on her and persuade her it’s over, leaving her without a functioning organisation to fight on with. Their various media appearances would indicate that they’re even deeper into the koolaid than she is, but it might happen.

If it doesn’t the most likely result will be a superdelegate roundup after the Puerto Rico primary in early June, with enough of the super-Ds in the Obama camp to take him over the magic 2,025 delegates limit. That may happen before the primaries conclude. Most likely it will only come weeks after they’re done, several thousand phone calls later. And even then she may force it to a floor fight, on the grounds that people can change their minds or fall down lift shafts.

It’s really what politics comes down to, here and anywhere — wear the tattoo and recycle your own sh-t, wondering, today, which city you’re in.

And so it goes…