OPINION
6A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 23, 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
Water
under
the bridge
Compiled by Bob Duke
From the pages of Astoria’s daily newspapers
10 years ago this week — 2006
The officer shouted at the suspect to stop but he wouldn’t obey. He
just kept coming.
“Then he pulled a cellphone out of his picket and I shot him right in
the heart,” said Russ Warr.
But the “bullet” was a paintball, a police officer was portraying the
suspect, and Warr, a member of the Astoria City Council, was participat-
ing in a role-playing scenario during the 2006 Citizen Police Academy.
The exercise illustrated how difficult it is to make split-second, life-
and-death decisions, Warr said. If he hadn’t fired and the cellphone had
turned out to be a gun, in real life, the officer could have paid for that
decision with his life. Warr said he now has a much greater understand-
ing of how the police department operates and “a real appreciation for
the obstacles and frustrations officers run into on a daily basis.”
Replacing old equipment at the Wauna Mill with faster,
state-of-the-art machinery isn’t enough.
If the mill is going to keep up with overseas competition,
Mill Manager James Jordan says its workers and work pro-
cesses also need to be leaner and more innovative.
So, over the past three months, the mill has undergone
a “Rapid Transformation” process, shedding 33 salaried
workers through severance offerings, losing hourly position
to retirement, reassigning responsibilities and retraining its
roughly 1,000 remaining employees.
Astoria cross country runner Aurora Olson recently competed in the
USATF Region 13 Junior Olympic Championships, and qualified for
nationals Dec. 9 in Spokane, Wash.
Olson placed 30th overall in the Regional event, held Saturday in
Seattle.
Running in the 3,000-meter Midget Girls division, Olson finished in
12 minutes, 48.05 seconds.
Olson is a sixth-grader at Lewis and Clark Elementary School who
runs for the Astoria Middle School team.
Competing for Oregon Cross Country’s A team, Olson will run again
in the National Championships in Spokane. She is coached by Astoria
Middle School and assistant high school coach Brett Dixon.
50 years ago — 1966
SEAVIEW
—
Washington
Coast
Highway association
held first meeting in
two years on the Pen-
insula Saturday after-
noon to discuss a
future bridge cross-
ing over Willapa har-
bor from the north end
of the Peninsula to the
Tokeland area.
It was noted that the
state has about 22 miles
of Highway 101 along
the ocean. If the bridge
is built, members felt
that it would be a giant Heck Harper, cowboy musician and
step in opening up the television star, will be grand marshal
Washington coast.
of the Christmas parade sponsored
A former resident of by the Chamber of Commerce retail
the Peninsula, now liv- merchants’ bureau Saturday at 1 p.m.
ing in Portland, Joseph
Woerndle, 86, made a special trip to attend the meeting.
Having read in one of the local papers about the associa-
tion, Woerndle wanted to join the organization and “hoped he
lives to see the bridge built.”
The Pacific Marine Fisheries Commission Friday asked the federal
government to take steps, including negotiations with Russian and Jap-
anese governments, to preserve Pacific Coast Fisheries stock.
The resolution, which is an outgrowth of concern over offshore fish-
ing by foreign countries, was passed unanimously.
It suggested that Russian and Japanese governments be asked to sus-
pend or cut back their North American coastal fisheries until adequate
studies of the resource could be made.
75 years ago — 1941
The port of Astoria dredge Natoma narrowly escaped sinking
in the old Hammond mill pond at Garibaldi Monday when her
discharge pipe burst inside the hull of the craft and quickly filled
a bulkhead with sand, gravel and water, it was learned today.
Only the fact that the Natoma was digging in shallow water
saved her from the third sinking of her career.
Applicants for naval service at shore stations and coast patrol today
were being interviewed at the Astoria naval section base on pier No. 2
following the arrival of the former John Barrymore pleasure yacht, now
a navy patrol vessel.
Built in 1930 was a marine joy of the “great profile,” the navy has
removed trimmings from the boat until today the USS Amber is just like
any other navy vessel. She has taken on “war paint” very convincingly,
so skillful was the “makeup” in the navy yard. A gun is now mounted
forward, and the stern is host to a rack of depth charges.
Authoritative sources today expressed fear that Japan’s
answer to American demands that she withdraw from the
axis and get out of China may be a Japanese attack on Thai-
land within the next few days.
A jolt of blue-collar hope
By DAVID LEONHARDT
New York Times News Service
N
EW CASTLE, Del. — The
nearby factory that made
Dodge Durangos closed eight
years ago. The General Motors Box-
wood Road Plant
— open since 1947
— closed the next
year. So did the oil
refinery in Dela-
ware City.
In the span
of a year during the financial cri-
sis, once-prosperous northern Dela-
ware had to confront post-industrial
devastation.
It’s sort of the devastation that
now has the country’s attention. Don-
ald Trump won the presidency with
huge margins in places left behind.
He lost the popular vote but won
26 of the 30 lowest-income states,
including the old powerhouses of
Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan.
These places are stuck in what
I call the Great American Stag-
nation. Tens of millions of peo-
ple have experienced scant prog-
ress for decades. Median net worth
is lower than in the 1980s, and mid-
dle-aged whites, shockingly, aren’t
living as long as they used to. Ending
this stagnation is the central political
problem of our age: It fuels Trum-
pian anger and makes every other
societal problem harder to solve.
Promising
I came here to New Castle look-
ing for a jolt of hope after the terri-
bly dispiriting presidential campaign.
I came to see one of the more prom-
ising attacks on the Great American
Stagnation.
In the wake of the financial crisis,
Delaware’s new governor, Jack Mar-
kell, and other officials did obvious
things, like using stimulus money to
stem the damage and even managing
to reopen the refinery. But Markell,
who’d run as an insurgent Demo-
crat, understood that nostalgia alone
wouldn’t help families pay their
bills. So he began looking for ways
both to save old jobs and to create
new ones. His answer wasn’t origi-
nal — but that’s OK, because it was
right.
In his almost eight years in office,
he has made his No. 1 priority lift-
ing the skills of Delaware’s citizens.
He worked on traditional educa-
tion, expanding high-quality pre-K
and helping low-income teenag-
ers go to college. And he worked
on what academic researchers like
Robert Schwartz call “the forgot-
ten half”: the many students who
won’t graduate from college but who
also need strong skills to find decent
jobs. Their struggles are a major rea-
son that America’s workforce is no
longer considered the world’s most
highly skilled.
Too early to say
It’s too early for a final verdict in
the state, but the signs are encour-
aging. High school graduation rates
have jumped. Educational attainment
is above average — as are incomes.
The jobless rate is 4.3 percent.
New Castle, on the Delaware
River, is telling, because it has
focused on skills while staying true
to its blue-collar roots. It’s home to
the state’s largest high school, Wil-
liam Penn, which has long educated
the children of workers from Gen-
eral Motors and the refinery. By
2011, enrollment had fallen by nearly
20 percent as students fled for other
options.
“People came out and said, ‘The
high school is not serving the com-
munity,’” the former principal, Jef-
frey Menzer, told me. “They wanted
more career opportunities, more
hands-on stuff.”
Markell makes a similar point:
“A lot of kids who drop out of
high school — they don’t drop out
because they’re not intelligent. They
drop out because they think what
they’re learning is not relevant to the
rest of their lives.”
Picking a path
William Penn reorganized itself
into 20 “majors,” and every student
must pick one, be it manufacturing,
computer science or agriculture. (The
state has a broader version of the pro-
gram, called Pathways to Prosper-
ity.) One goal, of course, is to prepare
students for a career. When William
Penn tried to start a nursing major,
the state pushed back, pointing to
a glut of such programs — and the
school started a medical-diagnostics
major instead.
But having a major can also help
students who don’t know what they
want to be when they grow up. It
connects book learning to real life. It
can help launch them into college or
a certificate program and avoid the
epidemic of academic drift. No won-
der enrollment at William Penn has
improved.
Kiara Roach, a senior, told me
that she didn’t care about her grades,
or do very well, until she became
passionate about cooking. (As she
told me this, I was enjoying a moist
pork sandwich in a teacher cafe she
helps run.) Mike Rodriguez, who one
day hopes to start a heating-and-cool-
ing business, said: “I get bored in
class. I like standing up and work-
ing on something.” Jacob Sobole-
sky, a junior, told me: “There’s only
so much you can learn from word of
mouth.”
Many people in New Castle,
not to mention the industrial Mid-
west, feel a deep cultural connec-
tion to craftsmanship — to making
things and working with their hands.
They’re not inspired by working in
cubicles or comfortable offices.
At the same time, they can’t sim-
ply do as previous generations did
and graduate from high school into
a good job. They can’t bring back
yesterday’s economy. They need
blue-collar skill-building to thrive.
The country has failed to provide
nearly enough of that skill-build-
ing, and we’re all living with the
consequences.
Time to engage in a little listening
By DAVID BROOKS
New York Times News Service
I
’ve been thinking a lot about the
best imaginable Trump voter.
This is the Trump supporter who
wasn’t motivated by racism or big-
otry. This is the one
who cringed every
time Donald Trump
did something
cruel, vulgar and
misogynistic.
But this voter
needed somebody to change the sys-
tems that are failing her. She needed
somebody to change the public
school system that serves the subur-
ban children of professors, journal-
ists and lawyers, but has left her kids
under-skilled and underpaid. She
needed some way to protect herself
from the tech executives who give
exciting speeches about disruption
but don’t know anything about the
people actually being disrupted.
She is one of those people whom
Joan C. Williams writes about in
The Harvard Business Review who
admires rich people but disdains pro-
fessionals — the teachers who con-
descend to her, the doctors who
don’t make time for her, the activ-
ists whose definition of social justice
never includes the people like her.
This voter wants leaders tough
enough to crack through the reign-
ing dysfunction, and sure enough,
Trump’s appointments so far rep-
resent the densest concentration of
hyper-macho belligerence outside a
drill sergeant retirement home.
This voter wants a philosophic
change of course, and Trump offers
that, too. The two party establish-
ments are mired in their orthodox-
ies, but Trump and his appointees
are embodiments of the national-
ism espoused by Pat Buchanan, the
most influential public intellectual in
America today.
Buchanan’s organizing world-
view is embodied in visceral form in
the person of Steve Bannon.
“The globalists gutted the Ameri-
can working class and created a mid-
dle class in Asia,” Bannon said in his
Hollywood Reporter interview. The
new political movement, he said, is
“everything related to jobs.”
He vowed to drive conservatives
crazy with a gigantic spending pro-
gram to create jobs. He vowed to
use that money to create a new New
Deal that will win over 40 percent of
the black and Hispanic vote, creating
a neo-Jacksonian majority that will
govern for 50 years.
It’s not my cup of tea, but I can
see why some good people might be
willing to tolerate Trump and Ban-
non’s personalities in order to pur-
sue it.
Emotional pause
Thinking about this best voter has
helped me take an emotional pause.
Many of my fellow Trump critics
are expressing outrage, depression,
bewilderment or disgust. They’re
marching or writing essays: Should
we normalize Trump or fight the
normalizers?
It all seems so useless during this
transition moment. It’s all a series of
narcissistic displays and discussions
about our own emotional states.
It seems like the first thing to do
is learn what this election is teaching
us. Second, this seems like a moment
for some low-passion wonkery. It’s
stupid to react to every Trump tweet
outrage with your own predict-
able howls. It’s silly to treat politics
and governance purely on cultural
grounds, as a high school popular-
ity contest, where my sort of people
denigrates your sort of people.
The Democratic Party is losing
badly on the local, state and national
levels. If you were a football team
you’d be 2-8. Maybe you can do bet-
ter than responding with the senti-
ment: Sadly, the country isn’t good
enough for us.
Those of us in the opinion class
have been complaining that Trump
voters are post-truth, that they don’t
have a respect for expertise. Well, the
experts created a school system that
doesn’t produce skilled graduates.
The experts designed Obamacare
exchanges that are failing. Maybe
those of us in the class need to win
back some credibility the old-fash-
ioned way, with effective reform.
There will be plenty of time to
be disgusted with Trump’s bigotry,
narcissism and incompetence. It’s
tempting to get so caught up in his
outrage du jour that you never have
to do any self-examination. But let’s
be honest: It wouldn’t kill us Trump
critics to take a break from our nev-
er-ending umbrage to engage in a lit-
tle listening.