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About The daily Astorian. (Astoria, Or.) 1961-current | View Entire Issue (March 1, 2017)
OPINION 4A THE DAILY ASTORIAN • WEDNESDAY, MARCH 1, 2017 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 — 2007 The new Home Depot store planned for U.S. Highway 101 in Warren- ton will likely have company soon just across the road. Clatsop County plans to sell 75 acres fronting the highway to a devel- oper who in turn intends to provide the space to Costco and several other retailers. The $8l6 million proposed sale is on the agenda of the county commissioners’ meeting in Seaside. Atlin Investments has been negotiating with the county since last fall. The Seattle, Washington, development company plans to sell about 20 acres of the property to Costco, which plans to build a larger replacement for its existing Warrenton outlet. Bringing life in the commercial fishing industry ashore is no easy task — but they say many hands make light work. More than 60 performers at the 10th annual FisherPoets Gathering in Astoria Friday through Sunday had a lot of deck hands, some of whom had a lifetime of fishing experience. Oth- ers had none at all. With rhymes rocking to-and-fro like anchored boats, and cadence rising and falling like the tide, the poets laid bare the trials of life at sea and toasted the triumphs. At the Liberty, Columbian and River theaters, the Voodoo Room and the Wet Dog, hundreds of people were waiting to celebrate the wisdom gleaned from old boats, big hauls and high seas. One of two Astoria High School teams participating in the Salmon Bowl took fourth place at the regional ocean sciences competition Saturday in Corvallis. But the gold — and a spot at the National Ocean Sciences Bowl in New York in April — went to students from a school farther south on the Ore- gon Coast. Neah-Kah-Nie High School, in Tillamook County, won the state competition for the fourth time in a row. 50 years ago — 1967 Dr. Benetta Washington, chief of the women’s division of the Job Corps, appealed here Tuesday for support of officials and public of the city of Astoria to make the new women’s urban Job Corps Center at Tongue Point succeed. Highway Commission Chairman Glenn Jackson said Tuesday better road access from Olympia to Astoria would help increase the traffic count on the Astoria-Megler Bridge over the Columbia River. This, he told the State Highway Commission, would open up economic opportunity for the entire coast area. The Astoria Chamber of Commerce and the Oregon Trucking Associa- tion have said a reduction in current tolls would increase traffic. Astoria fishermen reported sighting 10 Soviet fishing vessels off the Oregon Coast this week. Dr. E.W. Harvey, administrator of the Oregon Otter Trawl commission, told The Daily Astorian that commission members Eben Parker and Don Nichols reported the sightings Wednesday afternoon soon after they returned to port. Parker saw six Russian craft off the Columbia River mouth sometime Tuesday. He said there was one “5 miles west by north” from the lightship. 75 years ago — 1942 The Daily Astorian/File This is an architect’s drawing showing the new Recreation cen- ter-Armory building when finished, looking northeast from Ex- change Street. At left is a corner of the present City Hall, connect- ed to the new building by runway. The Justice Department, in a move to prevent espionage and fifth col- umn activity similar to that preceding Pearl Harbor, today set in motion a plan to remove the 186,000 enemy aliens residing in eight far Western states. This is no time to support hordes of rats in every city and “bootleg” garbage dumps along the waterfronts of Clatsop County, sponsors of the rat control program in Clatsop County have resolved in setting the zero hour for the rat blitz on March 1. The rate in peace times, it was pointed out at the Thursday conference in the county court room on rat control, is one of the country’s greatest food robbers, eating some $200,000,000 out of the nation’s breadbasket. Many business establishments in Clat- sop County, it was asserted at the meeting, lose from $50 to $75 a year to the rat’s table. But in war times, a community such as Astoria, where troops pass in moving from one section of the country to another, where ships come from overseas ports, and where overseas military personnel may come and go, the rat becomes a grave menace. Trump, archenemy of truth By CHARLES BLOW New York Times News Service D onald Trump’s unrelenting assault on the media is in fact an assault on the implacability of truth, the notion of accountability and the power of free speech. It is also a bit of a bow to the conspiracy theoriz- ing that Trump is wont to do. Last week at CPAC, the politi- cally crippled Reince Priebus deliv- ered a soliloquy lamenting Trump’s negative media coverage, saying, “We’re hoping that the media would catch up eventually.” Trump’s “boss,” Steve Bannon, immediately blasted the notion the way a shotgun blasts a quail rising from the brush: “The reason Reince and I are good partners is that we can dis- agree. It’s not only not going to get better. It’s going to get worse every day.” Bannon continued: “And here’s why. By the way, the internal logic makes sense. They’re corporatist, globalist media that are adamantly opposed — adamantly opposed to an economic nationalist agenda like Donald Trump has.” He later added: “And as economic conditions get better, as more jobs get better, they’re going to continue to fight. If you think they’re going to give you your country back without a fight, you are sadly mistaken. Every day — every day, it is going to be a fight.” The conspiracy theory Bannon posits here is perfectly shaped for the xenophobe: America’s media has economic interests that extend well beyond this country’s borders, and therefore Trump’s “America first” message and policies pose a very real, bottom-line threat to the media’s global prosperity. The threat is so urgent that the U.S. media is willfully damaging the only real asset it has — credibility — by inventing falsehoods designed to damage Trump and insulate its own profitability. As far-fetched as this may sound to any reasonable person, one must always remember that Trump isn’t a reasonable person or even a par- ticularly smart one, which makes him the perfect vessel for Bannon’s pseudo-intellectual vanities. The day after Bannon spoke, Trump himself came to CPAC and reaffirmed his commitment to this anti-media crusade, parroting Ban- non’s language. First Trump said: “A few days ago I called the fake news the enemy of the people. And they are. AP Photo/Evan Vucci President Donald Trump speaks to a meeting of the National Gover- nors Association Monday at the White House. They are the enemy of the people.” He continued in a barely coher- ent diatribe of sentence fragments, incongruous ideas and broken logic. But if you listened closely, you could hear echoes of Ban- non. At one point, Trump said: “We have to fight it, folks, we have to fight it. They’re very smart, they’re very cunning and they’re very dis- honest.” At another he said of the media: “Many of these groups are part of the large media corpora- tions that have their own agenda and it’s not your agenda and it’s not the country’s agenda, it’s their own agenda.” Trump is Bannon’s puppet, whose one sustaining parlor trick is to deliver incoherence with con- fidence. Strangely enough, people find comfort in this kind of imper- fect parlance. Only people with something to hide need be afraid of those whose mission is to seek. Maundering is the rhetoric of the middlebrow. Demagogic language is reduc- tionist language. It draws its power from its lack of proximity to soaring oratory. It can be quaint and even clumsy, all of which can give idiocy, incomprehensibility and untruth a false air of authenticity. So Trump and Bannon spin their folksy tale of media corruption to give Trump a needed enemy in his perpetual campaign and a needed diversion from the enormity of his disasters. This fits Trump per- fectly because not only does he have a gnawing insecurity, but he also views the confrontational nature of news as maleficently targeted. Trump doesn’t seem to regis- ter that lying — all the time! — is not allowed. He doesn’t seem to understand that news, by its very nature, is the publishing of that which those in power would prefer to conceal. He doesn’t seem to real- ize that fawning promotion of pol- iticians’ positions is not the exer- cise of journalism but the promotion of propaganda. Or maybe he does and is enraged at the absence of propaganda. So Trump lashes out with mind- less twaddle, insinuating that the media has fully abandoned the pil- lars and principles of journalism to join the opposition. The fact is that Trump simply wants the truth not to be true, so he assaults its quality. He wants the purveyors of truth not to pursue it, so he questions their motives. And yet, truth stands, rigid and sharp, unforgiving and unafraid. It is our only guard against tyranny and the brave men and women who labor away in its service are nothing short of patriots and heroes. The press won’t pat Trump on his head and give him a gold star for the few things he gets right, and then turn a blind eye to the over- whelming majority of things he gets wrong. That’s not how it works. That’s not how it has ever worked. Trump wants to brand the press as the enemy of the American people when the exact opposite is true: A free, fearless, adversarial, in-your- face press is the best friend a democracy can have. The press is the light that makes the roaches scatter. Remember this every time you hear Trump attack the press: Only people with something to hide need be afraid of those whose mission is to seek. LETTERS WELCOME Letters should be exclusive to The Daily Astorian. We do not publish open letters or third-party letters. Letters should be fewer than 350 words and must include the writer’s name, address and phone numbers. You will be contacted to confirm authorship. All letters are subject to editing for space, grammar and, on occa- sion, factual accuracy and verbal verification of authorship. Only two letters per writer are printed each month. Letters written in response to other letter writers should address the issue at hand and, rather than mentioning the writer by name, should refer to the headline and date the letter was published. Dis- course should be civil and people should be referred to in a respectful manner. Letters referring to news stories should also mention the headline and date of publication. The Daily Astorian welcomes short “in gratitude” notes from readers for publication. They should keep to a 200-word maxi- mum and writers are asked to avoid simply listing event sponsors. They must be signed, include the writ- er’s address, phone number and are subject to condensation and editing for style, grammar, etc. Submissions may be sent in any of these ways: E-mail to editor@dailyastorian. com; Online form at www.dailyasto- rian.com; Delivered to the Astorian offices at 949 Exchange St. and 1555 N. Roosevelt in Seaside. Or by mail to Letters to the Editor, P.O. Box 210, Astoria, OR 97103
