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
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