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Wednesday, March 14, 2018 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
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Jonah
Goldberg
Letters to the Editor…
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To the Editor:
To clarify the misreading of my previous
Letter to the Editor:
I support “Butte” as the best alternative for
our roundabout art as I stated here previously.
It echoes the colors of our forests, the shape of
cinder cones, the experience of driving among
ponderosas — even the “field iron” of home-
steads and ranches. At no point did I mean to
suggest that the roundabout art should resem-
ble a high tech bicycle or anything else, as one
respondent implied.
Sisters aspires to be a town known for art.
We have a world-renowned residency here, and
there are rumors of another. This is an oppor-
tunity for us to step up to the current art world
rather than to present ourselves exclusively as
a venue for local genres and safe choices.
It really comes down to what art is. The
Impressionists were roundly derided for their
ground-breaking work in the 1860s because it
was new and no one had seen anything like it
before. Now they are among the most-loved
artists ever.
“Art does not reproduce the visible; rather,
it makes visible.” — Paul Klee, painter.
True art pushes limits, explores ideas and
materials, transforms the tried and tired into
evocative, imaginative forms, and encourages
thought and discussion; “Butte” does all this.
The big-city/small-town dichotomy is false.
Thoughtful, expressive, meaningful art is at
home anywhere and everywhere.
And if selection depends on the artists being
local, that should have been a strict requirement
in the Call for Entries. Artists don’t make pots
of money, and we spend unbelievable amounts
of time and energy — uncompensated — to
submit proposals to selection committees. Art
should be judged on its merits, never on where
the artist lives.
Joellyn Loehr
s
s
s
See LETTERS on page 29
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In 2001, Linton “Lin”
Wells, a former Navy offi-
cer turned in-house Defense
Department intellectual, was
asked to offer his thoughts
for the Quadrennial Defense
Review.
Here’s an extended
excerpt:
• If you had been a secu-
rity policy-maker in the
world’s greatest power in
1900, you would have been
a Brit, looking warily at your
age-old enemy, France.
• By 1910, you would be
allied with France and your
enemy would be Germany.
• By 1920, World War I
would have been fought and
won, and you’d be engaged
in a naval arms race with
your erstwhile allies, the
U.S. and Japan.
• By 1930, naval arms
limitation treaties were in
effect, the Great Depression
was underway, and the
defense planning standard
said “no war for ten years.”
• Nine years later World
War II had begun.
At any period in our lives,
even modest predictions
about the future are very
unreliable. Outside theoreti-
cal physics, time moves in
a linear, arithmetic progres-
sion: i.e., one day at a time.
Life works differently. I can
predict what the date will
be 100 years from now with
perfect accuracy, but I can’t
begin to tell you what life
will be like.
And yet, many people
make straight-line projec-
tions about politics, technol-
ogy and all manner of things.
“Trend X has been going in
this direction for the last few
years,” people say, “so trend
X will continue inexorably
into the future.” Intellectuals
are often guilty of this kind
of thinking, partly because
they make a living looking
for patterns and trends.
Writing in 1946, George
Orwell argued that reflexive
belief in the “continuation of
the thing that is happening”
amounts to a kind of “power
worship.” At various times,
everyone was sure the Soviet
Union, Nazi Germany, or
the Ottoman and the Roman
empires would endure for-
ever, because no one could
imagine beyond the bars of
the iron cage of the moment.
Similarly, every era has
been infested with busi-
ness gurus who couldn’t
foresee the demise or decline
of Standard Oil or IBM
or, these days, Amazon or
Google.
Sometimes people put
their faith less in the idea of
power and more in the power
of an idea, convincing them-
selves that there is an unseen
algorithm guiding events.
Marxism was a classic ver-
sion of this. The impersonal
forces of the universe guar-
anteed that utopian com-
munism was the last exit of
history.
But other ideas have
similar power. When Orwell
wrote “1984,” it was widely
believed that the state — Big
Brother — would use tech-
nology to oppress people.
Later, people became con-
vinced that technology would
keep Big Brother at bay by
liberating people. With the
rise of the Internet, this idea
has taken hold in much of
the West. The truth is that
neither proposition is an
iron law. Technology helped
spread the Arab Spring, but
it is also helping China throt-
tle freedom. (And how did
the Arab Spring turn out?)
Speaking of China, it
was also widely believed
that market forces, once
unleashed, would unwind
authoritarianism. Why?
Because that’s how it worked
in the past. That’s not what’s
happening in China, which is
why President Xi Jinping is
fast on his way to becoming
president for life.
Shortly after the fall of
the Soviet Union, Francis
Fukuyama heralded the “End
of History” because liberal
democracy had proven itself
the only legitimate form of
government. Since then,
authoritarianism has had
something of a renaissance
around the globe.
When he founded
National Review, Bill
Buckley wrote that part
of its mission would be to
“stand athwart history, yell-
ing Stop.”
The passage, widely
misunderstood, contained a
powerful insight: We cannot
outsource life to the clock-
work of the universe. There
is no teleology, no “right
side of history.” We make
the world we want to live in,
and we have a responsibility
to do that work.
© 2018 Tribune Content
Agency, LLC
Opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer and
are not necessarily shared by the Editor or The Nugget Newspaper.