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