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About The daily Astorian. (Astoria, Or.) 1961-current | View Entire Issue (May 4, 2015)
OPINION 6A T HE D AILY A STORIAN Founded in 1873 STEPHEN A. FORRESTER, Editor & Publisher LAURA SELLERS, Managing Editor BETTY SMITH, Advertising Manager CARL EARL, Systems Manager JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager HEATHER RAMSDELL, Circulation Manager Seeing Astoria through their eyes I The bounty of cruise ships begins t is still a thrill to see a gleaming white tall cruise ship cross the Columbia River bar, traverse the shipping channel and dock at the Port of Astoria. After many years of hosting cruise ships in spring and fall, Astorians greeted the day visitors with extraordinary hospitality. It was a good day for museums, shops and restaurants. If this were a year-round thing, DV FUXLVH VKLS WUDI¿F LV LQ FHUWDLQ tropical places, this might all be- come predictable. But the cruise ship shoulder seasons — as ships move between the southern routes and the Alaska trade — provide a bright accent to life at the mouth of the Columbia River. The cruise ships are a perfect jolt to our tourism. Thousands of visitors arrive, but not in cars. At day’s end, they leave. The Port of Astoria gains much-needed reve- nue from moorage fees. If you have traveled by cruise ship, you know that Astoria is not the usual port. For one thing, Astorians are not jaded. The town is eminently walkable. Some cruise ship passengers have been seen walking up Coxcomb Hill to the Astoria Column. Astoria is a real place, with a storied past. Nearby is one of the icons of the West, Fort Clatsop. JOSHUA BESSEX — The Daily Astorian The Crown Princess is one of the many cruise ships that will dock in Astoria this year. It arrived Thursday. The Astoria Cruise Ship Hosts do yeoman’s work in preparing for these visits — 18 this year — set- ting up shuttle bus stops and virtu- ally escorting the day visitors. Among the many changes that have made Astoria a more vital SODFH WKH FUXLVH VKLS WUDI¿F KDV been an unexpected boost. Best of all this bounty of visitors in spring and fall allows us to see our place through their eyes. THE DAILY ASTORIAN • MONDAY, MAY 4, 2015 The nature of urban poverty he would make the neigh- cushion, not a ladder. borhood a model of urban Saying we should just spend more doesn’t real- restoration. He gathered ly cut it. What’s needed ately it seems as though public and private ac- is a phase shift in how tors like developer James every few months there’s we think about poverty. Rouse and Habitat for Hu- another urban riot and the na- manity. They raised more Renewal efforts in Sand- tion turns its attention to urban than $130 million and town-Winchester priori- tized bricks and mortar. poured it into new homes, poverty. But the real barriers to new school curricula, new And in the midst of every storm, mobility are matters of job training programs and David there are people crying out that we new health care centers. social psychology, the Brooks VKRXOG¿QDOO\JHWVHULRXVDERXWWKLV Townhouses were built quality of relationships in issue. for $87,000 and sold to residents for a home and a neighborhood that ei- This time it was Jon Stewart who $37,000. ther encourage or discourage respon- spoke for many when he said: “And The money was not totally wast- sibility, future-oriented thinking and you just wonder sometimes if we’re ed. By 2000, the poverty rate in the practical ambition. Jane Jacobs once wrote that a spending a trillion dollars to rebuild area had dropped by 4.4 percent. Afghanistan’s schools, like, we can’t The share of residents who lived in healthy neighborhood is like a bal- build a little taste down Baltimore owner-occupied homes had risen by let, a series of intricate interactions way. Like is that what’s really going 8.3 percent, according to a thorough in which people are regulating each on?” study by The Abell Foundation. But other and encouraging certain be- The audience applauded loudly, the area was not transformed. Today haviors. In a fantastic interview that Da- and it’s a nice sentiment, but it’s not there are no grocery stores in the really relevant. neighborhood and no vid Simon of The Wire gave to Bill The problem is restaurants. Crime is Keller for The Marshall Project, he The real not lack of attention, rampant. Unemploy- describes that, even in poorest Bal- timore, there once were informal and it’s not mainly is high. barriers to ment Despite lack of money. Since all these rules of behavior governing how 1980 federal anti- efforts, there are too cops interacted with citizens — mobility poverty spending has many young men when they’d drag them in and when exploded. As Robert are matters leading lives like they wouldn’t, what curse words Samuelson of The the one that Gray you could say to a cop and what of social Washington Post has led. He was appar- you couldn’t. But then the code dis- pointed out, in 2013 a kind-hearted, solved. The informal guardrails of psychology. ently the federal govern- respectful, popular life were gone, and all was arbitrary ment spent nearly man, but he was not harshness. That’s happened across many so- $14,000 per poor person. If you sim- on the path to upward mobility. He ply took that money and handed it to won a settlement for lead paint poi- cial spheres — in schools, families the poor, a family of four would have soning. According to The Post, his and among neighbors. Individuals a household income roughly twice mother was a heroin addict who, in a are left without the norms that mid- the poverty rate. deposition, said she couldn’t read. In dle-class people take for granted. It Yet over the past 30 years the RQHFRXUW¿OLQJLWZDVUHSRUWHGWKDW is phenomenally hard for young peo- poverty rate has scarcely changed. Gray was four grade levels behind in ple in such circumstances to guide In addition, U.S. public spending reading. He was arrested more than a themselves. Yes, jobs are necessary, but if you on schools is high by global stan- dozen times. dards. As Peter Wehner pointed out It is wrong to say federal efforts live in a neighborhood, as Gray did, in Commentary, in 2011 Baltimore to tackle poverty have been a failure. where half the high school students ranked second among the nation’s The $15 trillion spent by the govern- don’t bother to show up for school largest 100 school districts in how ment over the past half-century has on a given day, then the problems go much it spent per pupil, $15,483 per improved living standards and eased deeper. The world is waiting for a think- year. burdens for millions of poor people. The Sandtown-Winchester area But all that money and all those ex- er who can describe poverty through of Baltimore, where Freddie Gray periments have not integrated people the lens of social psychology. Until lived, has not lacked for attention who live in areas of concentrated the invisible bonds of relationships either. In the late 1980s, Baltimore’s poverty into the mainstream econo- are repaired, life for too many will then-mayor, Kurt Schmoke, decided my. Often, the money has served as a be nasty, brutish, solitary and short. By DAVID BROOKS New York Times News Service L Men wielding power in hellish times By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER Washington Post Writers Group North Coast has major W homeless population L ASHINGTON — Wolf Hall, the Man Booker Prize-winning historical novel about the court of Henry VIII — and most dramatically, the con- ÀLFWEHWZHHQ7KRPDV&URPZHOO ook at a map of homeless- Oregon, at least in our most pop- and Sir Thomas More — is now ness in the U.S. (tinyurl.com/ ulous northwest corner, tends to a TV series (presented on PBS). p23ox4k) and a geographical pattern is instantly apparent. The problem is most acute on the West Coast including Hawaii, plus New York state and Massachusetts. Alaska and Vermont also have comparatively high percentages of homeless people, somewhat belying their reputations for rug- ged self-reliance. Some usual poverty hot spots get off easy in this analysis, with perennial underdog Mississippi having the least homelessness in the nation, at just 74 per 100,000 residents. Oregon is near the top of the homelessness Top 10, with the fifth-highest proportion — 306 per 100,000 resident lack a home. Hawaii is first with 487, New York second with 408, followed by Nevada, 372, and Massachusetts, 315. In sixth place behind Oregon in California, 294, Washington, 261, Vermont, 249, Alaska, 242, and Maine, 205. All these 2014 estimates are based on federal data. There actually is some good news behind these statistics. In Oregon’s case, we can take some comfort in a 31 percent decline in homelessness between 2007 and 2014. The rate fell by 21 per- cent in Washington, 18 percent in California and 16 percent in Nevada. It rose in all the other Top-10 states — by 51 percent in Vermont and 40 percent in Massachusetts, for example. There are several explanations for these distinct regional differ- ences. Housing in Mississippi is inexpensive — though also often substandard — and the expendi- tures on utilities and other com- ponents related to housing are also relatively low. Housing in be quite expensive. The Portland Tribune and other Portland news media have recently been report- ing on declining housing avail- ability and rising costs that are driving new construction into in- creasingly remote suburbs. Astoria and the North Coast also are seeing increases in home prices, along with significant homelessness in relation to our population. In 2014, What can be done to help alle- viate this problem, which is dam- aging to those directly impacted and to society? Portland is ad- vocating for a bill in the current Legislature that would give cities the ability to work with develop- ers to encourage more affordable housing units in new construc- tion. The online news source Vox meanwhile reports that in some setting the most effective answer is to simply give homeless peo- ple a permanent place to live. In Utah, which has a homeless rate of 105 per 100,000, a state pro- gram costing between $10,000 and $12,000 per person puts roofs over the heads of chronically homeless people. This compares to $20,000 in public costs to care for and treat homeless people on the street. In Florida, the annual cost of homelessness was pegged at $31,000 per person for law en- forcement, jails, hospital care and other services. Bearing in mind long-term community concerns about not rolling out a welcome wagon for new homeless people, we must pay more attention to get- ting our problem under control. Otherwise, as more people move to Oregon, the progress we have made will surely disappear. It is maddeningly good. Madden- ing because its history is tendentiously distorted, yet the drama is so brilliantly con- ceived and ex- ecuted that you almost don’t care. Faced Charles with an imagi- Krauthammer native creation of such brooding, gripping, mordant LQWHQVLW\\RX¿QG\RXUVHOIUHDG\WR pay for it in historical inaccuracy. And Wolf Hall’s revisionism is breathtaking. It inverts the conven- tional view of the saintly More being undone by the corrupt, amoral, ser- pentine Cromwell, the king’s chief PLQLVWHU 7KLV LV ¿FWLRQ DV SROHPLF Author Hilary Mantel, an ex- and anti-Catholic (“the Catholic Church is not an institution for respectable people”), has set out to rehabilitate Cromwell and defenestrate More, most especially the More of Robert Bolt’s beautiful and hagiographic A Man for All Seasons. Who’s right? Neither fully, though Wolf Hall’s depiction of More as little more than a cruel her- etic-burning hypocrite is particular- ly provocative, if not perverse. To be sure, More-worship is somewhat overdrawn, as even the late Cardinal Francis George warned at a 2012 convocation of bishops. More had KLVÀDZV+HPD\KDYHEHHQDPDQ for all seasons, but he was also a man of his times. And in those times of merciless contention between Rome and the Reformation, the pursuit and savage persecution of heresy were the norm. Indeed, when Cromwell achieved power, he persecuted Catholics with a zeal and thoroughness that sur- passed even More’s persecution of Protestants. Wolf Hall’s depiction of Cromwell as a man of great sensi- tivity and deep feeling is, therefore, even harder to credit. He was cruel and cunning, quite monstrous both in pursuit of personal power and Photo courtesy of PBS Damian Lewis plays Henry VIII in the PBS series “Wolf Hall.” wealth, and in serving the whims and FHVVIXOSLHFHRI¿FWLRQZHDUHIRUFHG to ask: What license are we to grant wishes of his royal master. Nonetheless, Cromwell’s modern to the historical novel? For all the learned answers, in reputation will be enhanced by Mark Rylance’s brilliant and sympathetic reality it comes down to tempo- cinematic portrayal, featuring a still- ral proximity. If the event is in the ness and economy of expression that recent past, you’d better be accu- is at once mesmerizing and human- rate. Oliver Stone’s paranoid and izing. The nature of the modern audi- libelous JFK will be harmless in 50 years, but it will ence helps too. In this take that long for the secular age beset by When stench to dissipate. throat-slashing reli- On the other hand, gious fanatics, we are Cromwell does anyone care that far more disposed to Shakespeare diverges despise excessive pi- achieved from the record (such ety and celebrate the pragmatic, if ruthless, power, he as it is) in his Caesar or Macbeth or his modernizer. Henrys? Which Cromwell persecuted Time turns them was, as the chief engi- Catholics to legend. We don’t neer of Henry’s Ref- feel it much matters ormation. He crushed with a zeal. anymore. There is the the Roman church, historical Caesar and looted the monaster- ies and nationalized faith by subordi- there is Shakespeare’s Caesar. They QDWLQJFOHUJ\WRNLQJ7KDWPD\ÀDW- live side by side. 7KH¿OPUHYLHZHU6WDQOH\.DXII- WHUWRGD\¶VUHÀH[LYHDQWLFOHULFDOLVP But we do well to remember that the mann said much the same about centralized state Cromwell helped David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia midwife did prepare the ground, over vs. the real T.E. Lawrence. They the coming centuries, for the rise of diverge. Accept them each on their the rational, willful, thought-con- own terms, as separate and indepen- trolling, indeed all-controlling, state. dent realities. (After all, Lawrence’s It is perhaps unfair to call Crom- own account, Seven Pillars of Wis- well (and Henry) proto-totalitari- dom, RIIHUV PDJQL¿FHQW SURVH EXW an, as some critics have suggested, quite unreliable history as well.) So with the different versions essentially blaming them for what came after. But they did sow the of More and Cromwell. Let them seed. And while suppressing one live side by side. Wolf Hall is ut- kind of intolerance, they did little terly compelling, but I nonetheless PRUHWKDQUHGH¿QHKHUHV\DVDQRI- refuse to renounce A Man For All fense against the sovereignty not of Seasons. I’ll live with both Mores, both Cromwells. After all, for centu- God but of the state. However, Wolf Hall poses ques- ries we’ve accepted that light is both tions not just political but literary. wave and particle. If physics can live When such a distortion of history with maddening truths, why can’t lit- produces such a wonderfully suc- erature and history?