OPINION
4A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2016
Founded in 1873
DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor
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
Water
under
the bridge
Compiled by Bob Duke
From the pages of Astoria’s daily newspapers
10 years ago this week — 2006
The wrapup of the local Lewis and Clark Bicentennial commemoration
earlier this year didn’t mean the end of work for the group that organized the
event.
The bistate volunteer group Destination: The Paciic has reformed and is
oficially leading the campaign to establish a National Heritage Area on the
lower Columbia River.
The group hopes to maintain the momentum of the three-year national
bicentennial and the attention it brought to the region in order to win federal
approval for the heritage area designation.
Most days, students in the Tongue Point Job Corps Center’s
culinary arts program surround their instructor as he slaves over
the grill to demonstrate the latest in food preparation.
Soon they’ll do it themselves.
Administrators hope culinary arts training at the one-time
U.S. Navy base will rival the esteemed programs of Western Culi-
nary Institute by next summer, with modern features such as
instructional mirrors, individual work stations and computers for
research.
Workers started construction of the 17,000-square-foot build-
ing — a long awaited $4.5 million project — in July.
Bacteria that exhale toxic gases have begun to lourish on the ocean loor
along the Oregon Coast where they are among the few life forms that can
survive the suffocating waters of a long-lasting “dead zone,” ocean research-
ers say.
Although such microbes are common in the deep ocean where waters typ-
ically hold little oxygen, scientists at Oregon State University cannot recall
them blooming so strikingly in shallower waters closer to the shore.
But oxygen-starved water pooled near the coast appears to be giving them
a new foothold.
50 years ago — 1966
Tourist II, built in 1924, served during World War II as a minelayer
at the mouth of the Columbia. The vessel, purchased from Capt.
Fritz Elfving in 1941, was sold as surplus at the end of the war,
back to Elfving for a profit of $1,000.
Mayor Harry Steinbock Friday appealed to Gov. Mark Hat-
ield for help in resolving the “urgent problem” of paint splatters
on automobiles from painting work on the steel structure of the
Astoria bridge.
In a letter dispatched Friday, Steinbock said hundreds of auto-
mobiles have been sprayed in varying degrees with green paint, to
a distance of as much as three miles from the bridge. He said more
than 1,000 claims have been submitted to insurance agents here.
Russell Lawrence Lee, 10, was killed by a conveyor chain at the top of
the large storage bin for chipped wood fuel at the Astoria Plywood mill Tues-
day afternoon.
The accident was discovered when a brother of the boy told John Reith,
foreman at the mill, that another boy had told him Russell had been caught
and crushed by the chain.
City police, trying to determine how the accident happened, said the boy
apparently had climbed a ladder to the top of the storage room, looking for
pigeons.
Gov. Mark Hatield said today the Oregon Fish Commission will begin
immediately a survey of perch stocks off the coast. The survey will attempt
to determine the effect of recent Russian ishing activities on ish population
in coastal ocean waters.
Information from the survey will be used by U.S. representatives to a joint
Russian – U.S. ish conference in Moscow in November.
75 years ago — 1941
Jack Reed, veteran skipper of the Astoria Yacht Club, today
has another trophy to stow in his trophy locker. He won the Class
A race in the Astoria Regatta, inishing irst on Thursday and
Saturday.
Jim King, skipper of the Portland boat Lillian, was second in
this race, and the Billy Lou, sailed by Paul Starr of Clatskanie,
took third.
Seven boats from the cutter Onondaga and the Point Adams and Cape
Disappointment units of the Coast Guard patrolled a total of 402 hours during
the 1941 Astoria Regatta on the Columbia River and registered 80 assist cases
during the three-day water show, it was learned.
Among the assist cases performed by the coast guard were four ishermen,
transported from the north side of the river to Astoria hospitals, for removal of
ish hooks and treatment of lacerations, one of which was described as “serious.”
The Astoria school board last night, upon recommendation of
Superintendent A.C. Hampton, agreed to order a spring vacation for
Astoria school children in the week, March 23 through the 27 upon
recommendation of Rex Putnam, state superintendent of education.
Putnam proposed the vacation to allow teachers and adminis-
trators to attend meetings of the Oregon State Teachers associa-
tion and the annual conference of the city superintendents.
The immigrants turned away
By TIMOTHY EGAN
New York Times News Service
G
ive me your extreme-vet-
ted, your ideologically cer-
tiied, your elite. Send only
the smartest, the best-connected, the
richest to our shores. No losers, no
freethinkers, and no ugly people,
please.
In the hate speech that Donald
Trump gave on immigration in Phoe-
nix on Wednesday night, he all but
deported the Statue of Liberty, lay-
ing out one of the
darkest visions of
the U.S. experience
that any major-
party nominee has
ever given. Despite
the media misread
by some who presented the speech
as a pivot, it got rave reviews from
neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan support-
ers, and prompted some of Trump’s
few Latino advisers to resign in pro-
test. “Excellent speech,” said David
Duke, the former Klan leader.
Trump’s America
In Trump’s America, those work-
ing in the shadows are not the lawn
cutters, Sheetrock hangers, fruit pick-
ers or nannies we see in every com-
munity, but the criminal dregs. Under
his rules, this country would have
closed its doors long ago to those
who made the United States the great
experiment, unique to the world. He
would have shut off the low of peo-
ple whose best and perhaps only asset
at the time was desire for a better life.
So, the Kennedys from County
Wexford, the family that eventually
gave us the irst Irish Catholic presi-
dent — not worthy of entry. Famine
rejects! No prospects. From a nation
whose people were already illing
New York’s jails in the 1850s.
At the door into Trump’s Amer-
ica, he would “select immigrants
based on their likelihood of success
in U.S. society, and their ability to be
inancially self-suficient,” he said.
Sorry, Sicilian peasants. Not many
of them could pass a Trump screen
for “merit, skill and proiciency.” Not
many of them could even read, or
speak the language, let alone operate
an Industrial Age machine.
The Republican nominee laid
out a test for political correctness, in
the most authoritarian sense of the
term. “I call it extreme vetting,” said
Trump. “Right? Extreme vetting. I
want extreme.” What’s he talking
about? He said “an ideological certi-
ication” would be required.
Sorry, Albert Einstein. So, the
German-born Jew knew a thing or
two about physics, what with his
Theory of Relativity. But he had
some uncertiiable political views.
He could never get past Trump’s
vetting after saying things like: “I
am convinced that there is only one
way to eliminate these grave evils,
namely through the establishment of
a socialist economy, accompanied by
an educational system which would
be oriented toward social goals.”
He sounds like nothing but trou-
ble. On top of that, his native coun-
try accused him of treason. There’s
something there, folks. You have to
wonder why Einstein’s property was
seized and his books were burned.
When Germany sends its people,
it’s sending the treasonous, peo-
ple whose ideas don’t always match
ours. Get him out.
That goes for Andrew Carne-
gie as well. What kind of man gives
away all his money after making one
of the great fortunes in the world?
A dangerous one. Trump’s political
police would have turned the Scot-
tish-born Carnegies away before they
ever got anywhere near Allegheny,
Pennsylvania.
Andrew Carnegie’s father was
a loser; couldn’t hold his job as a
weaver. The old man was part of
Britain’s Chartist Movement, a
bunch of wild-eyed dreamers espous-
ing worker rights and universal suf-
frage. On his mother’s side, same
thing — one of the leading political
radicals in Scotland was her father,
Thomas Morrison.
Don’t be fooled
We shouldn’t be fooled, as the
hapless Mexican president was, as
much of the political press was, by
Trump’s stunt last week — trying to
hold his hatred back long enough to
get a statesman photo op. His true
feelings poured out in Phoenix.
Look around you — at
O’Shaunnessys and Riveras and
Naccaratos and Goldbergs and Chens
and Khans. Those families would
never have left their old countries if
they were living in comfort, if they
could easily demonstrate “merit,
skill and proiciency.” What forces
someone to leave a home, fam-
ily — everything — is desperation.
And then, more often than not, hav-
ing seen the worst that life can offer,
those families become the best.
What religion would Jesus belong to?
By NICHOLAS KRISTOF
New York Times News Service
ne puzzle of the world is that
religions often don’t resem-
ble their founders.
Jesus never mentioned gays or
abortion but focused on the sick and
the poor, yet some Christian lead-
ers have prospered by demonizing
gays. Muhammad raised the status of
women in his time, yet today some
Islamic clerics bar women from driv-
ing, or cite religion as a reason to
hack off the geni-
tals of young girls.
Buddha presumably
would be aghast
at the apartheid
imposed on the
Rohingya minority
by Buddhists in Myanmar.
“Our religions often stand for the
very opposite of what their found-
ers stood for,” Brian D. McLaren, a
former pastor, notes in a provocative
and powerful new book, “The Great
Spiritual Migration.”
O
Jesus was a radical
Founders are typically bold and
charismatic visionaries who inspire
with their moral imagination, while
their teachings sometimes evolve
into ingrown, risk-averse bureau-
cracies obsessed with money and
power. That tension is especially pro-
nounced with Christianity, because
Jesus was a radical who challenged
the establishment, while Christianity
has been so successful that in much
of the world it is the establishment.
“No wonder more and more of us
who are Christians by birth, by choice,
or both ind ourselves shaking our
heads and asking, ‘What happened to
Christianity?’” McLaren writes. “We
feel as if our founder has been kid-
napped and held hostage by extrem-
ists. His captors parade him in front of
cameras to say, under duress, things
he obviously doesn’t believe. As their
blank-faced puppet, he often comes
across as anti-poor, anti-environment,
anti-gay, anti-intellectual, anti-immi-
grant and anti-science. That’s not the
Jesus we met in the Gospels!”
This argument unfolds against a
backdrop of religious ferment. The
West has rapidly become more sec-
ular, with the “nones” — the reli-
giously nonafiliated, including athe-
ists as well as those who feel spiritual
but don’t identify with a particular
religion — accounting for almost one-
fourth of Americans today. The share
is rising quickly: Among millennials,
more than one-third are nones.
The rise of the nones seems to
have been accompanied by a decline
in public interest in doctrine. “One
of the most religious countries on
earth,” Stephen Prothero says in his
book “Religious Literacy,” referring
to the United States, “is also a nation
of religious illiterates.”
Only half of American Christians
can name the four Gospels, only 41
percent are familiar with Job, and
barely half of American Catholics
understand Catholic teaching about
the Eucharist. Yet if Americans sus-
pect that Joan of Arc was Noah’s
wife, or wonder if the epistles were
female apostles, then maybe the solu-
tion is to fret less about doctrines and
more about actions.
“What would it mean for Chris-
tians to rediscover their faith not
as a problematic system of beliefs
but as a just and generous way of
life, rooted in contemplation and
expressed in compassion?” McLaren
writes. “Could Christians migrate
from deining their faith as a system
of beliefs to expressing it as a loving
way of life?”
That would be a migration away
from religious bureaucracy and back
to the vision of the founder, and it
would be an enormous challenge. .
“Because I grew up in a very
conservative Christian context, we
were always warned about chang-
ing the essential message,” McLaren
told me. “But at the same time, we
often missed how much actually had
changed over time.” Christianity at
times approved of burning witches
and massacring heretics; thank good-
ness it has evolved!
As society has modernized and
people have grown more skeptical of
accounts of virgin birth or resurrec-
tion, one response has been to retreat
from religion.
McLaren advises worrying less
about whether biblical miracles are
literally true and thinking more about
their meaning: If Jesus is said to have
healed a leper, put aside the question
of whether this actually happened
and focus on his outreach to the most
stigmatized of outcasts.
For good and ill
This may seem an unusual col-
umn for me to write, for I’m not a
particularly religious Christian. But
I do see religious faith as one of the
most important forces, for good and
ill, and I am inspired by the efforts
of the faithful who run soup kitchens
and homeless shelters.
Perhaps unfairly, the pomp-
ous hypocrites get the headlines and
often shape public attitudes about
religion, but there’s more to the pic-
ture. Remember that on average reli-
gious Americans donate far more to
charity and volunteer more than sec-
ular Americans do.
It is not the bureaucracy that
inspires me, or doctrine, or ancient rit-
uals, or even the most glorious cathe-
dral, temple or mosque, but rather a
Catholic missionary doctor in Sudan
treating bomb victims, an evangeli-
cal physician achieving the impossi-
ble in rural Angola, a rabbi battling for
Palestinians’ human rights — they ill
me with an almost holy sense of awe.
Now, that’s religion.