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Wednesday, November 28, 2018 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
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Jonah
Goldberg
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.
The Nugget reserves the right to edit, omit, respond or ask for a response to letters submitted to the Editor. Letters should be
no longer than 300 words. Unpublished items are not acknowledged or returned. The deadline for all letters is noon Monday.
To the Editor:
Re: “The meaning of art in 2018,” The
Nugget, November 7, page 14
This article is one of the finest summaries I
have ever read. If only everyone in this coun-
try could see, feel, and express as Chris Morin
does, we would have a society to be proud of.
Thank you, Nugget News.
Jerold Chapman
s
s
s
To the Editor,
I attended the Sisters Christmas parade on
Saturday. I was surprised that there was no
music. No marching band, no cheerleaders or
dance team, and no sports teams representing
our Sisters Outlaws.
It was a noticeable missing.
Angelena Bosco
s
s
To the Editor:
Regarding the Jim Anderson article on
the unusual “four-eared” rabbit published
November 2 issue of The Nugget, more infor-
mation and clarification is needed on my part.
Perhaps I was too brief in my description; I am
providing a more detailed accounting of my
experience with “Wabbit.”
I did have one opportunity to get closer than
10 feet as Wabbit had hopped into nearby lilac
bushes to “hide.” The shrubs have no foliage
lower on the trunk which allowed me to get
within three feet and was able to look down. I
could see that the larger ears, although having
an abnormal deformity, were in fact the “real
ears” as I could see the ear canals. The two
smaller “ears” in front of the ear canals were
no more than ear-like growths resembling a
smaller ear thereby giving the appearance of
See LETTERS on page 9
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“America First!”
— President Donald
Trump, November 20, 2018
That’s how the president’s
official statement giving the
crown prince of Saudi Arabia
a pass for authorizing the
gruesome murder of journal-
ist Jamal Khashoggi begins.
The president goes on—
with even more exclamation
points. The very next sen-
tence declares, “The world is
a very dangerous place!”
And so it is.
This was the argument
made by the original 1930s
isolationist movement, a
bipartisan campaign against
getting entangled, again, in
Europe’s wars.
The isolationist idea,
which came to be known
as America First, has roots
going back to Washington’s
farewell address and his call
to avoid entangling alliances.
It was grounded in the idea
that America was an excep-
tional place that had turned
its back on the bellicosity
and ancient hatreds of the
Old World.
A “shining city upon a
hill” should not descend
into the muck of the world
beyond its shores. As
President Hoover put it,
“It was a belief that some-
where, somehow, there
must be an abiding place
for law and a sanctuary for
civilization.” And that place
would be America. Or, as
Norman Thomas—head of
the American Socialist Party
and a founder of the America
First Committee—argued,
America needed to lead by
example because “America
lacked the wisdom and the
power to play God to the
world.”
The America First move-
ment, and isolationism
generally, got uglier as the
imperative to fight the Nazis
grew more obvious for most
Americans, but not those
whose isolationism derived
less from a lofty principle
and more from a bias for the
German cause. By the eve of
World War II, isolationism
had become a dirty word,
and after Pearl Harbor and —
later — after the Holocaust, a
filthy one.
President Trump adopted
“America First” when a
reporter used the term in an
interview. Clearly ignorant
of the historical baggage the
label carried, he made it his
own. Some of his advisers,
clearly aware of the same
baggage, encouraged him to
do so anyway.
I am no fan of the origi-
nal America First Committee
or the broader isolationist
movement it represented.
Nonetheless, I find it remark-
able how Trump has man-
aged to debase the term
America First.
President Trump’s state-
ment is a mockery of the
best sentiments of America
First. His argument for why
we should turn a blind eye to
the Khashoggi murder, even
as the Saudi regime plans to
execute the men who car-
ried out the crown prince’s
orders, is that we are too
entangled in our alliance with
Saudi Arabia to care. They
are a “great ally” because
they have “agreed to spend
and invest $450 billion in the
United States.” He even goes
on to list the defense contrac-
tors who benefit from Saudi
largesse.
Nowhere in Trump’s
statement does he offer any
meaningful condemnation
of Saudi behavior or sug-
gest that there is a limit to the
portion of the American soul
Saudi petrodollars can buy.
His defenders praise the
president’s “frankness,”
which is fine. But frankness
means telling the truth, and
that means the truth is that
the president frankly doesn’t
care much about anything but
the Saudis’ wallet and their
praise for him. A statement
condemning their behavior
could have been frank, too.
Ronald Reagan often mod-
eled such frankness.
As Sen. Rand Paul, a man
largely in the tradition of the
original America First, put
it, “I’m pretty sure this state-
ment is Saudi Arabia First,
not America First.”
It’s fine to defend
America’s economic inter-
ests, but it’s ugly to suggest
that American interests begin
and end with arms sales and
military alliances.
America has an interest
in standing up for more than
a balance sheet. Progressive
historian Charles Beard, an
America Firster, argued that
the U.S. government must
“surrender forever the imbe-
cilic belief that it was her
duty to defend every dol-
lar invested everywhere and
every acquisitive merchant
seeking his private interests
everywhere.”
That was America First.
This is something different.
Opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer and
are not necessarily shared by the Editor or The Nugget Newspaper.
