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.