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.
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