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About The daily Astorian. (Astoria, Or.) 1961-current | View Entire Issue (Dec. 7, 2016)
OPINION 4A THE DAILY ASTORIAN • WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 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 Water under the bridge Compiled by Bob Duke From the pages of Astoria’s daily newspapers Fake cowboys, real Indians By TIMOTHY EGAN New York Times News Service F 75 years ago — 1941 Today the United States of America is again at war – at war with the imperial Japanese government which, without warning and with delib- erate premeditation, Sunday ruthlessly launched its ships of sea and air upon the Pacific insular possessions of this country in an attack as das- tardly as ever history recorded. A film of military and naval wartime censorship settled down over lower Columbia strategic points today, reveal- ing only that Oregon’s spearhead of defenses against Japan is being honed to a fine edge by the same explosion of morale that brought a lightning declaration of war in congress. Guns at Fort Stevens, Columbia and Canby are being manned around the clock. An armed vehicular beach and high- way patrol is being maintained along both coasts, north and south of the Columbia River. Harbor defenses of the river are asking complete identification of all ships at sea, anywhere in the vicinity of the bar. Colonel Clifton M. Irwin Sunday issued orders for the coast artillery to fire on any ship not complying with orders. A blackout has been called for the lower Columbia tonight, tentatively starting at 11 o’clock and subject to change. Lieutenant Commander George Hasselman of the Tongue Point naval air station said today. The same signals that announced the zero hour for the complete dark- ness that last night blanketed the town and area will be heard throughout the lower Columbia again tonight. Astoria and Clatsop County shrouded in darkness from 6 o’clock Monday night until daybreak this morning, apparently escaped serious accidents or tragedy it was concluded today after a survey of hospitals, police and ambulance patriots. Two automobile accidents were reported but in neither instance was there really serious injury. An air raid warden is hospitalized with a cracked hip bone resulting from a fall down a flight of stairs. Astoria also had its first arrest of a Japanese suspect who was released this morning when he satisfied police he wasn’t a menace to the country. More than 700 Japanese have been taken in custody in the United States by FBI agents, but no arrests in Clatsop County have been made. Authorities are said to have two local Japanese under observation. FBI agents and the U.S. Immigration service recently is reported to have made a census of local Japanese, identifying and locating each one. There are 37 Japanese in Clatsop County at the present time, one in Seaside, 11 in Hammond and the rest in Astoria. When fish canneries are operating, the number grows to 100. American-born Japanese are citizens of this country. Federal law prevents a foreign-born Japanese from attain- ing American citizenship. Some of the local Japanese have been living here most of their lives. One family came to Astoria 40 years ago. Today with their native land at war with the United States, a number of these people have indicated their good will to the American government by purchase of defense bonds. Nothing short of a bomb could bring war home to so many people as impressively as an ARP on his first night of duty. Thousands of people in Clatsop County and the lower Columbia today know that “black out” means “Put Your Lights Out” because they were so told by an ARP. A product of the present war, the three letters ARP stand for “air raid pre- cautions.” In England because of the shortage of news print, the public has come to call the air raid precautions an “ARP.” It is 1:30 o’clock in the morning. A pale glow covers the city from a crescent moon just poking through the mist on the eastern skyline. There is no other light and no sound but the distant booming of the surf and the shuffling of feet in the darkness as a silent group of men gathers in front of a corner grocery store. There are low-spoken greetings. A car glides up, slipping along slowly and almost silently through the night’s dark blanket. The car stops and there are orders. Assignments are given for patrol areas. Handkerchiefs are tied around arms as identification, the badge of Astoria’s “blackout patrol.” Then, two by two, the little group of about 10 men breaks up as mem- bers go off for their three-hour stint of patrolling the blackened and silent city. This scene is enacted several times nightly throughout Astoria as the volunteer ARP patrols keep up their lonely, cold and thankless business of seeing that Astoria stays blacked out. Every block of the city is covered, and in rural areas patrolmen also keep up the lonely watch. Astoria is a weird, dead city in the small hours of the blacked out night. No lights show and the usual sounds of the night — hum of motors on dis- tant roads — are absent. or most of last week, a win- ter storm lashed at the North Dakota prairie camp where the Standing Rock Sioux are making a stand to keep an oil pipeline away from water that is a source of life for them. The sight of native people shiv- ering in a blizzard, while govern- ment authorities threaten to starve them out or forcefully remove them, is a living diorama of so much awful history between the First Americans and those who took everything from them. The authorities have brought water cannons, rubber bullets, tear gas, helicopters and dogs against what has become one of the largest gatherings of tribes, from all nations, in a century. They’ve given the pro- testers, who will soon include a bri- gade of veterans, until Monday to disperse. The Bundys Now flash back a few years to another Western standoff, the Nevada siege of Cliven Bundy, the deadbeat rancher who drew heav- ily armed white militia members to defend a man who stiffed the govern- ment while grazing his cattle on pub- lic land. There, the feds backed off. Bundy and his thugs on the range were praised by Fox News and Tea Party Republicans. His two sons later took over the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, occupying that sanctuary of birds until they were arrested. In October, the Bundys and five others were acquitted of conspir- acy and weapons charges. At the heart of these cases is land — who owns it, and the nar- rative justification for a way of life. The Bundy brothers are comic-book cowboys. One of them runs a valet service in Phoenix. The other has a construction company in Utah. But they look the part; playing the role of principled Western men doin’ what a man’s got to do. For the Indians, the Dakota Access Pipeline, which will run from oil fields in North Dakota to a terminal in Illinois, is an existen- tial threat. “Water is life” is the pro- test name. As planned, the pipeline would pump an artery of oil under the Missouri River — the source of the tribe’s water. The Indians want the pipeline rerouted. New administration The new administration of Don- ald Trump will be heavy with peo- ple who see public land, and Indian Country, as just one thing — a place to drill for oil, move it along, or get out of the way. The story behind the policy is all-important here — what Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., called “the com- plex burden of historical trauma.” Consider how Jon Stewart once described the national holiday just passed. “I celebrated Thanksgiving in an old-fashioned way,” he said. “I invited everyone in my neighbor- hood to my house, we had an enor- mous feast, and then I killed them and took their land.” Now consider what the Bundy brothers said they were fighting for when they took over the Malheur Wildlife Refuge by armed force ear- lier this year. They wanted the gov- ernment to give up turf owned by every American and let a handful of white ranchers “come back and reclaim their land.” This prompted collective whip- lash from members of the Paiute Tribe, whose people have lived in the high desert of Oregon for cen- turies. “For them to say they want to give the land back to the rightful owners — well, I just had to laugh at that,” the tribal chairwoman, Char- lotte Rodrique, said at the time. Rule of law The Indian view is much more than P.C. revisionism, if you believe in the rule of law. A huge swath of the northern Plains was promised to bands of the Sioux in the Fort Lara- mie Treaty of 1868, one of the few times when Native Americans forced the government to terms after defeat- ing it in war. The tribes lost much of that treaty land to intruders, backed by the Army. “A more ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealings will never, in all possibility, be found in our his- tory,” the Supreme Court concluded in 1980. One of the legacies of the great Sioux tactician, Red Cloud, was an apt description of how the big emerging nation treated the dimin- ished ones. “They made many prom- ises,” he said. “But they kept but one: They promised to take our land, and they took it.” The “complex burden” of trauma that Franken referred to includes images of frozen Indian bodies in the snow after the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. And yet, even with that history haunting the present pro- test, many of the natives at Standing Rock are not bitter, and see this stand in spiritual terms. “In the face of this we pray,” Lyla June Johnston, a young Native leader, told me the day after the bliz- zards blew in. “In the face of this we love. In the face of this we forgive. Because the vast majority of water protectors know this is the great- est battle of all: to keep our hearts intact.” LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Electoral duties Good feelings T W he Trump election results are precisely the kind of occurrence that the framers of the Constitution had in mind when they created the Electoral College. The framers antic- ipated that there might be a victo- rious presidential candidate whose character or conduct posed a direct threat to the national well-being. The electors were then to come together and remove the victorious candidate and declare his (or her) opponent the winner, all within the authority granted to it by the Constitution. This is not a fiction. All you have to do is look up Electoral College online and it will tell you what its function is, and what powers it pos- sesses. The fact that it has never been called upon to exercise these extreme powers in the past is no excuse for not exercising them in this moment. There is nothing in Mr. Trump’s past that would suggest a hidden gift for world leadership or diplomacy, nor restraint, for that matter. I don’t have an aversion to comb-overs and fluttery hands, but I do have for a man who cannot control himself around women, be if fondling on one hand, or abusing on the other. He is not fit to be a president, or a guest in your home, if you value your daughters. To think that there can be any dis- cussion about his qualification for president is mind-numbing. Perhaps after the Bush years we are inured to outrage. It is time we re-ener- gized those capabilities and declared Trump a national embarrassment, and remove him from consideration as our First Citizen. Electoral College, do your job. JACK GUYOT Astoria ould you like to do some- thing this holiday season that makes you feel good and doesn’t cost anything? Goodwill could really use your clean, used newspa- pers. They go through a lot of paper at this time of year, wrapping break- able items. Instead of throwing your papers into the recycle can, throw them into a paper bag, and when you are over by the Goodwill drop them off. A good feeling will be had by all. DIANA TALARSKY Warrenton Bad forestry plan T he manner in which Oregon’s forests are grown and har- vested affects the water quality for all of us. In addition, the indus- tries of fishing, farming, the safety of schoolyards and residences are impacted. The 2017 proposed for- est plan is not enough to cool the streams running through coastal timber country. During a presentation by the Oregon Department of Forestry Nov. 16 at Clatsop Community College, it was made apparent to most attending, that the measures described in the plan will not be adequate to cool any fish-bearing streams to the temperatures needed to preserve or enhance the salmon populations. The 20- and 40-foot “baby buffers” leave too few trees to shade the water. And leaves, a laughable two or three trees within the cut area for wildlife. In addition, it ignores the non- fish-bearing creeks, which contrib- ute from their upstream location, pouring their nonshaded, warmed water into the sun shielded, cooler fish-bearing streams below, heat- ing them up — thereby canceling out the cooling effects of the buf- fer zones. The plan makes no sense. The diagrams in the displays were con- fusing and graphically inaccurate. It’s as if the Department of Forestry is doing the least it needs to do to satisfy salmon habitat requirements for the federal government and environmentalists. Spray operators for the timber companies are not regulated or held responsible when spraying herbi- cides over tree crops. Much like the Army Corps of Engineers, they are held unaccountable for their actions, and are not able to be prosecuted. Wind drift, miscalculations of weather and chemicals poorly com- bined will occur, without parties being able to collect damages or have regulations changed for safety. In addition, the herbicide 2,4-D states on its material data safety sheet (MDSS) that it’s hazardous to fish. So why is it being used near fish-bearing streams? Buffer zones should be 75 to 100 feet if they are really serious about recovering salmon. And different herbicides or agricultural weed suppression tech- niques need to be used. Please email or write the Ore- gon Department of Forestry on this issue using the subject line “Private Forest SSBT Rulemaking” to ripe- rianrule@oregon.gov or Oregon Department of Forestry, 2600 State St., Salem, OR 97310. PAMELA MATTSON McDONALD Astoria
