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Wednesday, August 2, 2017 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
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P
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Jonah
Goldberg
American Voices
Letters to the Editor…
The Nugget welcomes contributions from its readers, which must include the writer’s name, address and phone number. Let-
ters to the Editor is an open forum for the community and contains unsolicited opinions not necessarily shared by the Editor.
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To the Editor:
In response to your July 26, article, “Mayor
under scrutiny over rant”: It’s concerning
that Sisters Mayor Chuck Ryan reached his
“boiling point” over a petite, 50-something
woman who happened to be walking past
his home as she was reviewing her daily
mail.
Then to continue his bullying behavior he
threatens another female resident who con-
tacted him in an attempt to better understand
his behavior.
Although Ryan acknowledges his
behavior was unacceptable, do his
actions reflect the desirable character
we should expect and demand from our
mayor?
Kathy Liverman
s
s
To the Editor:
To live a long life is to be slowly born.
With age we come to a place where we can
see the beauty in almost everything. That said
some days are better than others.
I was cruising along in my ’63 VW, sunroof
back, windows open, crossing the Whychus
Creek bridge, headed into town. Suddenly the
purring of my air-cooled engine was inter-
rupted by a sputter, then another sputter, and
then the dreaded silence of a mechanical
failure.
It was mid-afternoon as I coasted along
Highway 20, took a slow right turn onto
Locust and rolled to a stop in the elementary
school right-turn lane. My slowly born-fully
awake self let out a four-letter word borrowed
directly from my early teens. I had things to
s
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A friend of mine who
attended the Conservative
Political Action Conference
earlier this year reported
to me that the Young
Republican men were
“wearing their ties down
past their [crotches].”
I cleaned up the quote a
bit for the benefit of a fam-
ily newspaper. Though I’m
not sure why I should bother
when a White House com-
munications director has
helped so many staid institu-
tions expand their horizons.
As my National Review
colleague Kyle Smith noted,
the New York Times has a
long history of insisting
that vulgarities do not meet
the definition of news fit to
print. For instance, it is the
Times’ standard practice to
render a colloquialism for
speaking gross untruths that
combines the male of the
bovine species with the fully
processed product of what
it consumes as a “barnyard
epithet.”
But in the wake of
recently hired and recently
fired White House commu-
nications director Anthony
Scaramucci’s profanity-
laced, on-the-record tirade
with a New Yorker reporter,
the Gray Lady went blue.
It printed, sans bowdler-
ization, words and phrases
that surely would have been
just as relevant to its cov-
erage of President Lyndon
Johnson, to say nothing of
Bill Clinton.
My point here is not to
criticize the Times’ double
standards. (There will be
plenty of opportunities down
the road for that.) It’s to note
that politics—or, more accu-
rately, power — has a funny
way of changing standards.
Which brings me back to
those ties. I’ve been around
young conservatives since
I was one myself, and it’s
always interesting to see
how fashion changes. When
the first President Bush was
in office, blue blazers were
a kind of unofficial uni-
form for young men eager
to mimic what then-Bush
aide Torie Clarke called
“the C-SPAN and galoshes”
crowd surrounding the
president.
When the second Bush
was in office, the cowboy
boot retailers near Young
America’s Foundation chap-
ters must have seen a huge
increase in sales.
And now, because the
president of the United
States wears abnormally
long power ties (presumably
to hide his girth), one sees
more and more twentysome-
thing men sporting the new
cravat codpiece.
So about those barn-
yard epithets. It’s hard to
miss how so many rank-
and-file Republicans rel-
ish the president’s crude
taunts and insults. Nor is
it easy to overlook the fact
that the president seemed
perfectly comfortable with
Scaramucci speaking like a
“Sopranos” character.
Not long ago, it fell to
conservatives such as Bill
Bennett, Ralph Reed, Tony
Perkins and Mike Huckabee
to denounce vulgarity wher-
ever they saw it. And while
these men don’t publicly
condone Trump’s language,
they essentially roll their
eyes at anyone who makes
much of a fuss. And among
the rank and file on Twitter,
Facebook, etc., there’s fierce
competition to be as vulgar
as possible, or to be as vig-
orous as possible in defend-
ing presidential vulgarity.
Of course, the president
is not only changing stan-
dards — he’s the product of
them. Over the last decade
or so, a whole cottage indus-
try of young anti-left sensa-
tionalists has embraced the
romantic slogan Epater la
bourgeoisie! Their crudeness
isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.
The rising vulgar tide is
typically justified either by
the need to seem authen-
tic or as genuflection to the
sacred right to fight political
correctness. Never mind that
not everything that is politi-
cally incorrect is therefore
correct. (William F. Buckley
was not P.C., but he had the
best manners of anyone I
ever met.)
And the competition
to seem verbally authen-
tic has spilled over the
ideological retaining wall.
The Democratic National
Committee sells a T-shirt
that reads “Democrats Give
a S*** About People.”
Several leading Democrats
have started dropping
F-bombs and other phrases,
seemingly as a way to prove
their populist street cred.
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Opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer and
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