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About The nugget. (Sisters, Or.) 1994-current | View Entire Issue (June 19, 2019)
2 Wednesday, June 19, 2019 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon O P I N I O N The blast crater of Watergate By Jim Cornelius Editor in Chief Letters to the Editor… The Nugget welcomes contributions from its readers, which must include the writer9s 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 Unpublished items are not acknowledged or returned.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: T. Lee Brown9s column of June 5 entitled <The Old Ways= leaves her hoisted by her own petard. Her anger, discomfort, and judgment stem- ming from a conversation she overheard a few years ago at Sisters Coffee hinges on a word or phrase, redacted for publication, that readers are led to conclude was an ethnic pejorative. Ms. Brown is quick to establish that the conver- sation was among <white men= and is equally quick to speculate unkindly about them. I won- der, would the remark have been less offensive had it been spoken by an Asian teen? A Middle Eastern woman? An African-American child? If not, why even mention the race and age of the speakers? Camo, guns, the Great Emboldening 4 through a chance encounter in a coffeehouse, Ms. Brown evokes stereotypical negative imagery to paint these men with a broad and ugly brush. The column brought to mind my own very different experience at Sisters Coffee a few years back. During the summer of 2015, my husband and I spent several weeks in Central Oregon. We9re native Midwesterners and had lived the past 10 years in St. Louis. For reasons that intrigue social scientists, St. Louis has remained one of the most segregated, racially volatile cities in the U.S. During summer and early autumn of 2014, the city garnered national attention when, in separate incidents less than 90 days apart, two black teenagers were shot and killed by police officers. Riots erupted throughout the city, including our neighborhood, and violent unrest continued until winter. As the anniver- sary of the first shooting approached and addi- tional violence was anticipated, we were more than happy to be elsewhere. One morning in early August, we snagged a table near the (much-missed) upright piano. See LETTERS on page 21 Sisters Weather Forecast Courtesy of the National Weather Service, Pendleton, Oregon Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday Monday Sunny Mostly Sunny Mostly Sunny Mostly Sunny Partly Cloudy Partly Cloudy 73/42 62/39 70/42 76/45 72/43 68/42 The Nugget Newspaper, LLC Website: www.nuggetnews.com 442 E. Main Ave., P.O. Box 698, Sisters, Oregon 97759 Tel: 541-549-9941 | Fax: 541-549-9940 | editor@nuggetnews.com Postmaster: Send address changes to The Nugget Newspaper, P.O. Box 698, Sisters, OR 97759. Third Class Postage Paid at Sisters, Oregon. Editor in Chief: Jim Cornelius Production Manager: Leith Easterling Graphic Design: Jess Draper Community Marketing Partners: Patti Jo Beal & Vicki Curlett Classifieds & Circulation: Lisa May Proofreader: Pete Rathbun Owner: J. Louis Mullen The Nugget is mailed to residents within the Sisters School District; subscriptions are available outside delivery area. Third-class postage: one year, $45; six months (or less), $25. First-class postage: one year, $85; six months, $55. Published Weekly. ©2019 The Nugget Newspaper, LLC. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. All advertising which appears in The Nugget is the property of The Nugget and may not be used without explicit permission. The Nugget Newspaper, Inc. assumes no liability or responsibility for information contained in advertisements, articles, stories, lists, calendar etc. within this publication. All submissions to The Nugget Newspaper will be treated as uncondition- ally assigned for publication and copyrighting purposes and subject to The Nugget Newspaper9s unrestricted right to edit and comment editorially, that all rights are currently available, and that the material in no way infringes upon the rights of any person. The publisher assumes no responsibility for return or safety of artwork, photos, or manuscripts. The House Judiciary Committee indulged in some bizarre (and lame) the- atrics in bringing Watergate co-conspirator-turned-star- witness John Dean to <tes- tify= on the <historical con- text= of the Mueller Report earlier this month. The mere fact that 4 47 years after the break-in at the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate Hotel in Washington, DC 4 we reflexively attach the suffix <gate= to scandals of every stripe is sufficient evidence that we are living in the long shadow of the events of 1972-74. Dean9s appearance was a bit of personal synchron- icity for me, because I had just spent about six hours of travel time on a deep dive into Watergate with a variety of podcasts and documenta- ries. Why? Can9t really say 4 except that I was nagged by a sense that the faultlines which have become a chasm in our political culture were first ripped open by the interrelated calamities of the Vietnam War and Watergate. And I didn9t feel like I knew enough about it. Watergate loomed like a toxic grey shadow in my childhood. I was too young to have any grasp of the events, but I remember Nixon9s resignation, which happened when I was eight years old. I remember my parents 4 particularly my mother 4 being utterly dis- mayed. For about a decade after Watergate, she insisted that Lyndon Johnson had done worse (probably true) and that Nixon had been persecuted by <the liberals= and the press. Well& It wasn9t until a tranche of Oval Office tapes were released in 1987 that showed Nixon in his own words to be foul-mouthed, petty, antisemitic, a crook and a liar, that she acknowl- edged that pushing him out of office was the right and necessary thing. The tragedy is that Nixon was probably the best-pre- pared and most qualified man to ever hold the office. He9d served in the military, had practiced law, served as a congressman, a senator, a governor of a major state and as Vice President of the United States. He was, by all accounts, truly brilliant in his ability to suss out geopolitical and strategic trends, and his <opening to China= and détente with the Soviet Union were signifi- cant and lasting triumphs. He also carried around a super-sized chip on his shoulder because he wasn9t cool like Kennedy, was mean as a rick of rattle- snakes, and had a para- noid streak as wide as a California interstate. His morose self-pity wasn9t just grotesque 4 it was a major character flaw and it helped to bring him down. At every turn in the Watergate scandal, he chose to do the wrong thing. Character is fate. The Watergate para- digm is all over the current circus in Washington, DC. Trumpster Roger Stone has a tattoo of Nixon9s face on his back. Seriously. The President himself has Twitter instead of tapes, and a Nixonian tangle of charac- ter flaws without the com- pensating brilliance. For their part, the Democratic Party wanted so badly for the Mueller Report to set the table for a Watergate- style takedown of Donald Trump that they were gob- smacked when they discov- ered that the special counsel wasn9t going to hand them a <smoking gun.= Many in the media would love nothing more than to be in on the kill, but they lack the journalistic chops of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein 4 and they don9t understand that bloviating in cable TV panel discussions isn9t the same thing as the careful, unglamorous work Woodward and Bernstein and other reporters did back in the 970s. The spectacle gives cre- dence to Karl Marx9s old saw that history repeats itself <first as tragedy, then as farce.= Watergate looms gigantic 4 yet it is little understood. It9s well worth taking some time to dig into the story, because we9re living in the blast crater of that third- rate burglary and shabby coverup right now, and will likely be for decades to come. Opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer and are not necessarily shared by the Editor or The Nugget Newspaper.