OPINION
4A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • TUESDAY, MAY 24, 2016
How to age in the key of humor
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
Shipyard vital to
Lower Columbia
If DEQ is patient, there is a solution
J
oe Dyer is a remarkable Astorian you’ve never heard of.
A marine architect, Dyer founded the Astoria Marine
Construction Co. in 1926. His obituary notes that during
World War II he employed some 1,000 people at shipyards in
three locations to build minesweepers for the U.S. Navy. That
construction continued during the Korean War.
Like so much of what hap-
As Edward Stratton
pened domestically during reported last Friday, a reloca-
World War II (think Hanford tion committee aims to ind
Nuclear Reservation), the a prospective home for ship-
sudden industrial buildup yard repair in the estuary.
led to considerable pol- This coincides with the Port
lution that remains today. of Astoria’s need to move
Thus the successor of Dyer’s shipyard repair off Pier 3.
The likely outcome of
company is dealing with
the Oregon Department these shifts is Port-owned
of Environmental Quality, land on the Skipanon River
which wants the site cleaned in Warrenton. But Port
Executive Director Jim
up.
For more than six decades Knight notes preparation
following the war’s end, could take as long as two
AMCCO has been essen- years. Knight points out
tial to the ishing leet in there is suficient space at
this river and beyond. In a that site for Astoria Marine
series of photographs taken Construction and another
in 2013 and published by the operator.
Columbia River Maritime
Assuming that AMCCO
Museum, Michael Mathers has the inancial resources to
captured the atmosphere of wait, it would make sense for
this enormously productive the state DEQ to be under-
shipyard.
standing and patient.
The last
irst drowning
he
Columbia-Paciic
region on Sunday suf-
fered our irst beach drown-
ing death of 2016. We must
resolve to make it the last.
The scenario was all too
familiar. A 12-year-old play-
ing in the surf with a friend,
having fun, in too deep
and carried away. Visiting
Washington’s
Paciic
County from Warrenton,
she wasn’t a tourist, but
otherwise the tragedy was
one that has played out with
punishing frequency over
the decades.
With about 43 miles of
ocean beach, the Long Beach
Peninsula and Oregon’s
North Coast are magnets
for hundreds of thousands
of inland visitors. More
is clearly needed to avoid
drownings.
It is time for both
Washington and Oregon to
dramatically step up efforts
to avoid fatalities on what
lawyers might call “attrac-
tive nuisances.” This is the
concept that the owner of
a dangerous attraction has
a moral and social duty to
T
protect children from its
dangers.
Actions should include
clear, simple, attention-grab-
bing safety messages con-
veyed throughout the region
telling visitors exactly what
they can do to stay safe.
Outreach to regional news
media — already done
for example to discourage
swimming in rivers swol-
len by spring runoff — must
frequently remind parents of
the need to closely supervise
children and adolescents on
ocean beaches.
Other steps might include
funding routine oficial
beach patrols, which would
coach beachgoers on safe
practices and ticket those
who fail to supervise those
in their charge.
State parks oficials and
lawmakers will plead pov-
erty. This has lost any valid-
ity. Beaches are key money-
making assets and must be
funded as such.
If common humanity isn’t
enough motivation to enact
proactive safety measures,
lawsuits will be.
Editorials that appear on this page are written by
Publisher Steve Forrester and Matt Winters, editor of the
Chinook Observer and Coast River Business Journal, or staff
members from the EO Media Group’s sister newspapers.
By TIMOTHY EGAN
New York Times News Service
H
is back hurts. His memory
is slipping. He can’t cook,
but then he never could.
Igloo-making is no longer one
of his diversions.
The wit is sharp, quick as ever,
but now he’s prone to ... what’s the
word? Oh, and he has Parkinson’s
disease.
Michael Kinsley is aging so you
don’t have to. The editor in him, the
one who held the reins at The New
Republic, Harper’s and Slate, and
grasped for a few hours the chance
to helm The New Yorker, would
reine that. Here’s how he puts it, in
his guidance to the 74 million baby
boomers entering the years of living
less dangerously:
“But when it comes to the ulti-
mate boomer game, competitive
longevity, I’m on the sidelines doing
color commentary.” His chronic dis-
ease, which gives him many of the
symptoms of old age but which he
believes is no more likely to bring
him to an early death than slipping
on a bar of soap, has presented him
with “an interesting foretaste of our
shared future.”
Kinsley, who coined a new dei-
nition of a gaffe — when a poli-
tician tells the truth — and once
described 38-year-old Al Gore as
“an old person’s idea of a young
person,” (today, Paul Ryan), is in
public service mode, out with a slim
book on aging. “Sometimes I feel
like a scout from my generation,
sent out ahead to experience in my
50s what even the healthiest boom-
ers are going to experience in their
60s, 70s and 80s.”
Full disclosure: I like Kinsley.
I would call him a friend, even if
his trademark misanthropy pre-
vents him from returning the sen-
timent. But here’s the thing: I
loathe books about baby boomers.
I hated the yuppie thing. I despised
the era when my generation acted
as if we were the first people ever
to have kids. And I can’t stand
the Viagra-taking, booty-shaking,
Timothy
Egan
Michael
Kinsley
I can’t stand
the Viagra-
taking, booty-
shaking, aging
rocker phase.
aging rocker phase. I don’t doubt
that boomers will “reinvent” old
age, because that’s what boomers
do to every age.
But along the road to Bernie
Sanders grumpiness, can somebody
slap some sense into these people?
Enter Kinsley. At age 65, his Par-
kinson’s has given him a premature
taste of the stumbling, the cognitive
slips, the limits that will inevitably
deine life’s actuarial last trimester.
He can no longer drive. A woman
at a dinner party offered to cut up
his meat.
When I met Kinsley in 1996, he
had just moved to Seattle to start
Slate, the online magazine. There
were many reasons to hate him:
Harvard graduate, Rhodes Scholar,
wunderkind editor, talking head on
CNN’s “Crossire,” his visage on
the cover of Newsweek, under the
headline: “Swimming to Seattle:
Everyone Else is Moving There.
Should You?”
I gave him six months before
he left. Surely he would die out-
side the biosphere of Beltway blo-
viation. A decade later, he was still
here in Seattle. He found true love,
his wife Patty Stonesifer — who
has done much good in nonproits
and philanthropy after doing well at
Microsoft. I always thought of him
as a highly evolved brain inhabiting
an uncertain body, an E.T. with wit.
But then he learned to backpack in
the Cascade Mountains, to snow-
shoe, to swim in Lake Washington
in winter, and yes, to build an igloo
— all with Parkinson’s, which was
diagnosed when he was 43.
In his book, Old Age — A Begin-
ner’s Guide, he tries on altruism, sug-
gesting that boomers’ ultimate gift
to the future would be to pay off the
national debt, and do it before the last
of that g-g-generation turns 65, in
2029.
Nice try. Never going to happen.
Kinsley’s contribution to the wave
of new books, shows and miracle
antidotes to aging is his approach.
Where others would groan, wince,
cry or whine, Kinsley is looking
for the joke. So, after undergoing
nine hours of deep brain surgery,
he thought of what he could say to
assure his friends he had not lost any
of his analytical skills.
“Well, of course,” he said,
post-op. “When you cut taxes,
government revenues go up. Why
couldn’t I see that before?”
Easy for him to say. No, actu-
ally, it’s not. His Parkinson’s meds
allow him to seem relatively symp-
tom-free for hours, but then he starts
to stiffen, like the Tin Man in “The
Wizard of Oz,” in need of oil. And
Kinsley admits to some loss of his
mental acuity in recent years.
He notes that 28 million boom-
ers are expected to develop Alzhei-
mer’s or some other form of demen-
tia — nothing to laugh at.
“Dementia seems like an espe-
cially humiliating last stop on
the road of life,” Kinsley writes.
“There’s no way to do it in style or
in dignity.”
But perhaps there’s a way to ind
some grace notes through humor.
I saw Kinsley this week, before
a packed house at Seattle’s Town
Hall. He was in typical form. Asked
at the end of the evening what his
audience should “take away” from
the distilled wisdom of his book, he
paused, giving that owlish, quizzi-
cal look of his and said, “Several
copies.”
The other election from hell
By CHARLES M. BLOW
New York Times News Service
S
ometimes people are sur-
prised, or even unsettled, by
how sanguine I can be about the
coming election.
I sometimes say that it’s not that I
have some magic foresight about the
outcome — I don’t make predictions
like that; anything could happen —
but it is rather that I have been here
before.
One of the
irst elections
I ever voted in
had candidates
who were even
more lawed
and was even
more of a cir-
cus. Hard to
believe, I know,
but it’s true.
Charles
And there
Blow
are eerie simi-
larities that I can’t shake.
The Democrat, who had occu-
pied the white-columned home of the
executive during an earlier period of
prosperity, had testiied more than 15
times before grand jury investigations
and had twice been tried, but never
convicted, on felony charges.
The Republican, a divorcé, was
a well-known racist and demagogue
who tried to disavow his past and who
once said his plan to deal with illegal
immigration was to heavily fortify the
Mexican-American border and round
up and deport all illegal aliens.
As Bill Turque wrote in News-
week at the time, the Republican was
“attempting to run from his past by
repackaging himself as a populist.
His affable, game-show-host looks
and just-folks manner have been
insidiously successful in blunting the
impact of a past pocked with racism,
Jew-hating and revisionisms.”
Turque wrote that for thousands
of “whites angry with hard times and
high taxes, his is the ultimate ‘no bull’
campaign. His coded distillations of
white economic and racial resent-
ment are by now the most thoroughly
decoded in American politics.”
The New York Times reported at
the time that the Republican’s “evo-
lution from a lifetime at the fringes
of racial politics to a new life as an
aspiring national politician is largely
the result of his symbiotic relation-
ship with broadcast journalism.” A
Democratic leader complained about
the media’s role in the Republican’s
ascendance: “The media have made
him a legitimate candidate.” The ven-
AP Photo
Former KKK Grand Wizard and
presidential candidate Duke Da-
vid speaks in 1991.
AP Photo/Bill Haber
Stephan Edwards, left, talks with
his father Gov. Edwin Edwards
on election night in 1991, in New
Orleans. Edwards had just won a
first primary victory forcing a run-
off with challenger David Duke.
There is no
way to uncook
the gumbos.
erable Ted Koppel said at the time that
television and the Republican candi-
date “were made for each other.”
A former newspaper editor called
the Republican’s support “impene-
trable,” cautioning that the Democrat
depended on winning over members
of his own party who had recently
despised him. Some in the polling
and pundit class even worried about
a “hidden vote” for the Republican,
which would come from a group who
wouldn’t publicly say they supported
him, but would vote for him on Elec-
tion Day.
There were lingering questions
about the sincerity of the Republi-
can’s recently professed Christianity.
Writing about one of the Republi-
can’s previous races, the author Tyler
Bridges said that at his rallies sup-
porters “were angry” and “they thrust
their ists in the air, stomped their
feet, and chanted his name over and
over.” Bridges wrote that the rallies
had an “us-versus-them atmosphere”
in which “supporters frequently heck-
led reporters.”
One of the most memorable
bumper stickers from the campaign
was for the Democrat and read, “Vote
for the crook. It’s important.” (Ironi-
cally, both candidates would later be
convicted of crimes following FBI
investigations.)
The year was 1991. I was a col-
lege student in my home state of Lou-
isiana. And the race was a guberna-
torial runoff between the Democrat
Edwin Edwards (who reportedly once
counseled Bill Clinton on how to deal
with the Gennifer Flowers scandal)
and the Republican David Duke, a
former grand wizard of the Ku Klux
Klan (who this year endorsed Donald
Trump). It was the irst gubernatorial
election in which I voted.
Indeed, Edwards was such a bra-
zen, unrepentant skirt chaser that he
joked to a reporter during that cam-
paign about similarities between him
and Duke: “The only thing we have in
common is we’re both wizards under
the sheets.”
People called it the “election from
hell” or the “race from hell,” depend-
ing on the person and the conversa-
tion. Voters had to choose the lesser
of two evils. Some people were ner-
vous and scared.
I’m recalling it now because the
current race is reminiscent of it and
because I think the outcome and last-
ing legacy of the Louisiana race may
be instructive. In the end, Edwards
won with a coalition of blacks and
afluent, “business-oriented con-
servatives” in a record turnout for a
state gubernatorial general election,
but Duke did win the majority of the
white vote.
Though he didn’t win, Duke’s
imprint on the state was real. As
The Times reported in 2014: “Two
decades later, much of his campaign
has merged with the political main-
stream here, and rather than a bad
memory from the past, Mr. Duke
remains a window into some of the
murkier currents in the state’s poli-
tics, where Republicans have sought
and eventually won Mr. Duke’s vot-
ers, while turning their back on him.”
Whether or not Trump loses in
November to “crooked Hillary,” as
he has dubbed her, he may well be
an important part of the future of
his party. He has given his Republi-
can supporters permission to vocalize
their anti-otherness rage, and that will
not easily be undone.
As a Louisiana boy experienc-
ing a confounding sense of déjà vu,
let me assure you: There is no way to
uncook the gumbo.