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About Eugene weekly. (Eugene, Oregon) 1993-current | View Entire Issue (Sept. 28, 2017)
LET TERS PESTICIDE REFORM It’s fine for writers like Mark Robinow- itz to express their opinions, but opinions should never be presented as facts. In his “Ban Aerial Spray” letter to the editor (Sept. 14), Mark claims that Beyond Toxics doesn’t endorse a ban on aerial spray, which is not true. I wrote a blog ear- lier in September announcing the Beyond Toxics board of directors formally voted to endorse the Lane County ballot initiative to ban aerial spray introduced by the Free- dom From Aerial Herbicides Alliance. Over the years, I’ve also written numer- ous media articles, newsletters and blogs discussing the demonstrable need to pro- tect public health and safety by banning aerial herbicide sprays. Beyond Toxics published the first scientific analysis of herbicide use in forestry in 2013, which still provides a factual basis for opposition to ultra-hazardous use of herbicides. There is great public benefit in Beyond Toxics’ persistent work at the state legis- lature to introduce pesticide reform bills and educate state leaders and state agen- cies about the incontrovertible truth: Aerial herbicide spraying poisons entire ecosys- tems and harms Oregon’s rural residents, drinking water and fish streams. Lisa Arkin Beyond Toxics executive director Eugene KEN, BARBIE & URANUS With regard to the “Dickless Dolls” let- ter (Sept. 14), I sure don’t want to get in- between the “Barbie & Ken” spat. When one considers, though, how far (trans)gen- der issues have come since Mattel “con- ceived” those plastic binaries, it’s a moot point 50 years later, as they can be consid- ered fully inter-changeable and “realized” eunuchs. Flipping to the next page after Letters, I laughed at the irony when my eyes were DESIGN MATTERS confronted by a real-life, cosmetically air-brushed “Barbie” selling that corpo- rate “Mile High Feeling” to Eugene...with “Passion!” But wait! There’s Victor Wooten on page 18, hilariously objectifying himself with a, er, firm grip on the “dick” of his bass? The base of his dick, maybe? His left hand tense with the insinuated anticipation of a two-hander … uh, sorry Victor. What’s he (and EW) trying to “sell”: Music? Sex? His seemingly erect “instrument?” In closing, a re-butt-al from “Uranus” to “Earth” man Dan Moore: It may be “50- 50” in this isolated case, “doll”-face, yet you forget (?) an important FACT: Many men in Vietnam probably were “virgin,” yet so were, and still are, women over the millennia, virgin or not, who have been raped, maimed (physically and psycholog- ically) and/or killed in the planetary War of Rape. Whether during ALL wars, or in peacetime. As the song goes, “We’re in this love together,” and the song remains the same. Sean S. Doyle Corvallis NO CRUEL FOOD We are a nation of special observances. There is even a World Day for Farm Ani- mals, observed Oct. 2 (Gandhi’s birthday). Apparently it’s intended to memorialize the tens of billions of animals abused and killed for food. Like most others, I always thought of farm animals as “food on the hoof.” But when a friend sent me an amazing, endearing Facebook video, it dawned on me that farm animals are much like our family dog, fully deserving of our compassion and respect. My internet search showed that they get neither. Male baby chicks are rou- tinely suffocated in plastic garbage bags or ground up alive. Laying hens are crowded into small wire cages that tear out their BY JERRY DIETHELM Unbranding Kesey Square NO ONE SPENT $1 MILLION TO CALL IT KESEY SQUARE L et’s see, what should we call Kesey Square? Last week the Eugene City Council voted 4-3 to form a committee to explore other names for the popular square and gave it 45 days to make a rec- ommendation. Apparently, like the majority of the public, the councilors weren’t all that sanguine about the pres- ent, official, boring, anodyne name of Broadway Plaza either. But didn’t they skip a key step in the process if they were serious about renaming? With something as thoroughly branded in the public mind as Kesey Square, wouldn’t you need to mount a serious unbranding process first? And how would one go about that? It reminds me of the George Lakoff book, Don’t Think of an Elephant. There would need to be a serious campaign that told people: Don’t think of Kesey Square. It turns out that there are rebranding strategies that could be employed. In commercial advertising, the idea is to back away from the product’s present fo- cus and describe it in more general terms. That would mean moving from the focus on Kesey himself to 4 September 28, 2017 • eugeneweekly.com something more general, like Broadway Plaza, or something new and fresh like Willamette Plaza. The second strategy is a bit more drastic. You have to kill Ken Kesey so that there is a natural revul- sion created that unpopularizes the present name. As they say in the popular action game, Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor, “You can’t unbrand people but you can just shank them when grabbing them or send them against a much more powerful orc captain/war- chief.” Ad hominem attacks, of course, aren’t pretty. And in this case, they would probably just reveal more about the detractor’s ulterior motives, literary igno- rance and hang-ups than sully the famous storyteller. I asked someone who knew Kesey what she thought Ken Kesey would think about all this, and she said, “I think Ken would be most impressed with how naturally the naming of the square occurred, how spontaneous it was, and how sticky it seems to be. I don’t think he’d care at all about the downtown poli- tics that are behind the naming resistance. He’d be personally flattered, of course, but mostly impressed with the unconscious authenticity of the naming pro- cess. The name just happened. No one spent a $1 mil- lion to impress the name of Kesey Square on people's minds. “But even more important, I think he’d be espe- cially proud of the way Peter Helzer’s sculpture has portrayed him. It shows him at his best, and it is easy to admire this older, mature Kesey, who cares deep- ly about stories and storytelling, passing that love on to his grandchildren — and by extension, to us all. There is a charm about the moment that steals into people’s hearts. And so it’s no wonder they call it Kesey Square.” What do you think, I had to ask, Kesey would have had to say about the committee being appointed to confer and recommend about the square’s name? “He’d probably sympathize, remembering all the blind alleys he went down in the struggle to get to the true and authentic in his writing. But then he’d unavoidably have to bring up snipe hunts and how the young apprentice would be asked to fetch a left- handed screwdriver. If they cared what people really thought, he’d say, they’d put it out there for a vote.” Jerry Diethelm is an architect, landscape architect, planning & urban design consultant and a professor emeritus of of Landscape Architec- ture and Community Service at the University of Oregon.
