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About Eugene weekly. (Eugene, Oregon) 1993-current | View Entire Issue (Oct. 13, 2016)
NEWS BY KIANNA CABUCO • We left the 4th district candidate forum sponsored by the City Club of Eugene Oct. 7 hoping that Congressman Peter DeFazio lives a very long time with the “energy and determination for the job” he says he still has. Republican Art Robinson, positively Trumpian in his attack, is running against Pete for the fourth time and promises to continue, lest any moderate R would like to run. Remember that Robinson, recently the chair of Oregon’s Republican party, is backed by Robert Mercer, the Wall Street moneyman who dislikes DeFazio, in part because of our congressman’s support for a transaction tax, a tax that needs to happen. After the forum, Peter told us that the 4th is a swing district and could be at risk in the future. Not this time. • “Grab them by the pussy,” isn’t locker room talk, it’s the language of sexual assault. As Laura Hanson writes in her powerful viewpoint piece this week, don’t rape. Don’t encourage rape. Don’t vote for a man who thinks of and discusses women as playthings and objects. As our cover image by EW graphic artist Trask Bedortha shows this week, with this election we have gone from Hope to Grope. FEMINIST WRITER CHERRÍE MORAGA TO SPEAK AT UO C herríe Moraga, a Chicana playwright, femi- nist activist, poet and essayist, will deliver a lecture at the University of Oregon Oct. 13 about the working class, both past and present. The theme of the lecture has to do with work and what it means to come from the working class. Moraga says she will focus on the national repre- sentation of workers, how we’ve lost unions and how students find work after school. “What I always do for presentations,” Moraga tells EW, is “I use my own writing. So, I will be reading from unpub- lished text relating to that theme.” Moraga’s talk, titled “‘The Last Exhale of Our Mother’s Breath’ — The ‘Work’ of the First Generation Writer,” is presented by the UO’s Center for the Study of Women in Society and serves as the center’s key- note Lorwin Lecture on Civil Rights and Civil Lib- erties. The name comes from a quote in her memoir, The Native Country of a Heart: A Geography of De- sire, which focuses on the “legacy that our family left us.” Moraga says, “When I was a young person, many of my relatives were members of unions. There was a sort of conscious way people identified as a working class … identifying oneself by virtue of working and jobs.” People shouldn’t take today’s privileges and opportunities for granted, Moraga says, especially since previous generations did not have the same opportunities as the current generation. She will also hold an Oct. 14 workshop for fac- ulty and graduate students on activist methods and how to put them into practice politically. Moraga says she wants to try to get people beyond rhetoric and to focus on one par- ticular project at a time. In addition to serving as an artist in residence at Stanford Univer- sity, Moraga co-edited 1980s feminist classic The Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radi- cal Women of Color. She is also the recipient of the Lambda Literary Foundation’s “Pioneer” award, given to “indi- viduals who have broken new ground in the field of LGBT literature and publishing.” Moraga’s keynote lecture is 6 pm Thursday, Oct. 13, in the Crater Lake Room at the Erb Memorial Union, free and open to the public. The workshop for faculty and graduate students is 10 to 11:30 am Friday, Oct. 14, at the Many Nations Longhouse, located behind the Knight Law building on the UO campus. Moraga will focus on the national representation of workers, how we’ve lost unions and how students find work after school. • How many minutes of the presidential debates have been devoted to global warming? Not enough. • There’s something particularly tasty in witnessing the precipitous collapse of the Oregon Ducks football franchise, which this past weekend met a Waterloo at the hands of the rival Washington Huskies in a 70-21 shaming at Autzen Stadium. Pride goeth before the fall, and the puffed- up triumphalism of recent years is now turning inward on our hometown Ducks, whose national success is starting to look like an illusory bubble that mirrors the housing market before the 2008 financial collapse. The Duck program is driven by fear, such as filching senior transfer quarterbacks from smaller colleges to plug the Mariota dike, and swapping in a milquetoast Mark Helfrich after the rotund Chip Kelly dipped out (under allegations of NCAA recruiting violations) for the NFL. The real Ducks are now coming home to roost — an entitled program buttressed by Nike founder Phil Knight, who recently dumped a bunch of money on retrograde Republican campaigns. Oh well, we soggy denizens of the Northwest are ungraceful in victory. We’re better at losing. It’s in our DNA. SL ANT INCLUDES SHORT OPINION PIECES, OBSERVATIONS AND RUMOR-CHASING NOTES COMPILED BY THE EW STAFF. HE ARD ANY GOOD RUMORS L ATELY? CONTAC T EDITOR@EUGENEWEEKLY.COM eugeneweekly.com • October 13, 2016 13
