OPINION
4A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • WEDNESDAY, APRIL 12, 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
A severely limited salmon season on Oregon’s North Coast and off
the coast of Washington has fishermen worried about declining Columbia
River runs and the future of fishing in the region.
At its meeting last week, the Pacific Fisheries Management Council set
the lowest levels for salmon harvest in more than a decade for the coastal
area north of Cape Falcon to Canada. The decision to protect endangered
runs of Chinook salmon returning to the Columbia River and its tributar-
ies means fewer of the river’s fish will be caught.
The mystery of the dying seabirds is being played out on the
North Coast.
Horned puffins, mottled petrels and thick-billed murres are
seabirds that generally stay far offshore and away from Oregon.
But the birds have been washing up dead in high numbers
this year.
The birds are starving, with empty stomachs and breast
muscles shrinking as their ailing bodies burn muscle tissue to
survive, say people who have found and examined the birds.
The die-off is a mystery, but theories range from global
warming to a scarcity of the herring the birds usually feed on
this time of year.
Young herring thrive in colder water, and their smaller
numbers could be tied to warm ocean conditions over recent
years, said Bob Emmett, a research fisheries biologist with the
National Marine Fisheries Service in Newport.
The good news is that Astoria is just the kind of place the state Depart-
ment of Geology and Mineral Industries likes to help.
The bad news is the reason why: The city has all the ingredients needed
for a high-hazard classification for landslides. In fact, the city is one of the
most slide-prone communities on the coast.
It is so well known for its unstable geology that the “Astoria forma-
tion” is a term found in geology texts.
50 years ago — 1967
We believe all the
communities in the
lower Columbia area
from Portland to the sea
and along the coast from
Long Beach to Can-
non Beach should send
a combined and out-
raged protest to Lewis
and Clark College or
whoever is responsible
for the much publicized
stunt that four students
of that institution are
The Daily Astorian/File
conducting.
Startup testing has begun on the
These students have huge recovery boiler housed in
had much ballyhoo the building in right background at
in the Portland press. Crown-Zellerbach’s Wauna mill. The
They are, it says, plan- maze of tanks and pipes at left center
ning a trek over the are evaporators which are also part
“last stretch” or “final of the mill’s system for recovering
one third” of the Lewis chemicals used in making pulp.
and Clark expedition’s
route. They are hiking from the Idaho-Montana border to
Portland. That’s right, Portland.
How many of you knew that the Lewis and Clark expedi-
tion’s route ended in Portland?
Well, it does, according to the Lewis and Clark College ver-
sion of U.S. History, apparently.
We suggest that, when and if these students reach the
so-called Lewis and Clark trail’s end in Portland, they be
dragged bodily to Clatsop County, dunked in the Lewis and
Clark River in front of Fort Clatsop, and then be compelled to
stand in the chilly ocean at Ecola Park while they read the per-
tinent chapters of the Lewis and Clark journals.
Also, we suggest Lewis and Clark College fire its history fac-
ulty, forthwith.
75 years ago — 1942
Here’s the latest rumor from inland about conditions along the Clat-
sop coast.
Mrs. Charles Henrys of Seaside was in Salem recently and was in a
store making a purchase. She mentioned she was from Seaside.
“Don’t you find it lonely down there now?” asked the clerk.
“Lonely? What do you mean?” asked Mrs Henrys.
“Well, it must be lonely down there now that all the people have evac-
uated,” the clerk said.
Even as Astoria was the first Oregon city to have a black-
out after World War II broke, it was the first Oregon city to
perfect its home guard organization after outbreak of World
War I. On the afternoon of April 6 R.J. Pilkington, chairman of
the Citizens Patriotic League of Astoria, called a mass meeting
in the Astoria theater. There 300 Astorians signed the constitu-
tion of the league, whose objects were proclaimed to be to assist
the war, encourage enlistments in the Army and Navy and
guarantee that the dependents of enlisted men would be taken
care of.
More public participation in the education of young people was urged
by Rex Putnam, state superintendent of public instruction, in a talk given
Monday night to Astoria apprenticeship and vocational students at a ban-
quet held in Trinity Lutheran church.
This age of wonkery
By DAVID BROOKS
New York Times News Service
I
f you were a certain sort of
ideas-oriented young person
coming of age in the 20th cen-
tury, it was very likely you would
give yourself a
label and join
some movement.
You would call
yourself a Marxist,
a neoconservative,
a Freudian, an
existentialist or a New Deal liberal.
There would be certain sacred
writers who would explain the
world to you — from Jung to
Camus, Dewey or Chesterton.
There would probably be a small
magazine where the doctrines of
your sect would be hammered out.
People today seem less likely to
give themselves intellectual labels
or join self-conscious philosoph-
ical movements. Young people
today seem more likely to have
their worldviews shaped by trips
they have taken, or causes they
have been involved in, or the racial
or ethnic or gender identity group
they identify with.
That has changed the nature of
the American intellectual scene,
the way people approach the world
and the lives they live.
In his book, “The Ideas
Industry,” Daniel W. Drezner says
we have shifted from a landscape
dominated by public intellectuals
to a world dominated by thought
leaders. A public intellectual is
someone like Isaiah Berlin, who
is trained to comment on a wide
array of public concerns from a
specific moral stance. A thought
leader champions one big idea
to improve the world — think Al
Gore’s work on global warming.
As Drezner puts it, intellectuals
are critical, skeptical and tend to
be pessimistic. Thought leaders
are evangelists for their idea and
tend to be optimistic. The world
of Davos-like conferences, TED
talks and PopTech rewards thought
leaders, not intellectuals, Drezner
argues.
Intellectual life has fallen out
of favor for several reasons, he
continues. In a low-trust era, peo-
ple no longer have as much faith
in grand intellectuals to serve as
cultural arbiters. In a polarized era,
ideologically minded funders like
George Soros or the Koch bothers
will only pay for certain styles of
thought work. In an unequal era,
rich people like to go to Big Idea
conferences, and when they do
they want to hear ideas that are
going to have some immediate
impact — Jeffrey Sachs’ latest
plan to end world poverty or Amy
Cuddy’s findings on how to adopt
the right power stance.
KRT
Officials stand and applaud as North Korean leader Kim Jong Un
presides over parliament in Pyongyang, North Korea.
Drezner does not call this a
decline, just a shift (let us not
underestimate how silly and wrong
some of the grand, sweeping intel-
lectuals could be). But I am struck
by how people’s relationship to
ideas has changed.
It is good to
have people
who think
about North
Korean
disarmament.
But politics is
most real at a
more essential
level.
In the first place, public think-
ers now conceive of themselves as
legislative advisers. Drezner writes
a book called “The Ideas Industry,”
but he is really writing about pub-
lic policy. When George Orwell,
Simone de Beauvoir or even Ralph
Waldo Emerson were writing, they
were hoping to radically change
society, but nobody would confuse
them with policy wonks.
Second, there was a greater
sense then than now, I think, that
the very nature of society was up
for grabs. Call it a vestige from
Marxism or maybe Christianity,
but there was a sense that the
current fallen order was fragile and
that a more just mode of living was
out there to be imagined.
Finally, intellectual life was just
seen as more central to progress.
Intellectuals establish the criteria
by which things are measured and
goals are set. Intellectuals create
the frameworks within which
politicians operate. How can you
have a plan unless you are given a
theory? Intellectuals create the age.
Doing that sort of work meant
leading the sort of exceptional life
that allowed you to emerge from
the cave — to see truth squarely
and to be fully committed to the
cause. Creating a just society was
the same thing as transforming
yourself into a moral person.
For Orwell, this meant being
with the poor and the oppressed
— living as a homeless tramp in
England, a dishwasher in Paris,
getting shot through the neck as a
soldier in the Spanish Civil War.
It meant teaching himself how to
turn political writing into an art
form.
For Italian Communist Antonio
Gramsci, it meant committing fully
to ideas, even if it meant years
in prison, and doing the rigorous
mental work required for a life of
hard thinking. He was as left as
can be, but he believed in tradi-
tional school curricula, the tough
grinding of learning Latin and
Greek grammar.
“It will be necessary to resist
the tendency to render easy that
which cannot become easy without
being distorted,” he wrote.
It also meant joining a tradition
and a team. There were a whole
set of moral tests involved with
obedience to the movement, break-
ing ranks when necessary, facing
unpleasant truths, pioneering a
collective way of living, whether
feminist, Marxist or libertarian.
The 20th century held up
intellectuals like that, and then
discredited them — too many were
too wrong about communism and
fascism. But we have probably
over-adjusted and deprived a
generation of a vision of the heroic
intellectual. It is good to have peo-
ple who think about North Korean
disarmament. But politics is most
real at a more essential level.
WHERE TO WRITE
• U.S. Rep. Suzanne Bonamici
(D): 2338 Rayburn HOB, Washing-
ton, D.C., 20515. Phone: 202- 225-
0855. Fax 202-225-9497. District
office: 12725 SW Millikan Way,
Suite 220, Beaverton, OR 97005.
Phone: 503-469-6010. Fax 503-326-
5066. Web: bonamici.house. gov/
• U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D): 313
Hart Senate Office Building, Wash-
ington, D.C. 20510. Phone: 202-224-
3753. Web: www.merkley.senate.gov
• U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden (D):
221 Dirksen Senate Office Building,
Washington, D.C., 20510. Phone:
202-224-5244. Web: www.wyden.
senate.gov
• State Rep. Brad Witt (D):
State Capitol, 900 Court Street N.E.,
H-373, Salem, OR 97301. Phone:
503-986-1431. Web: www.leg.state.
or.us/witt/ Email: rep.bradwitt@
state.or.us
• State Rep. Deborah Boone (D):
900 Court St. N.E., H-481, Salem,
OR 97301. Phone: 503-986-1432.
Email: rep.deborah boone@state.
or.us District office: P.O. Box 928,
Cannon Beach, OR 97110. Phone:
503-986-1432. Web: www.leg.state.
or.us/ boone/
• State Sen. Betsy Johnson (D):
State Capitol, 900 Court St. N.E.,
S-314, Salem, OR 97301. Telephone:
503-986-1716. Email: sen.betsy john-
son@state.or.us Web: www.betsy-
johnson.com District Office: P.O.
Box R, Scappoose, OR 97056. Phone:
503-543-4046. Fax: 503-543-5296.
Astoria office phone: 503-338-1280.
• Port of Astoria: Executive
Director, 10 Pier 1 Suite 308, Asto-
ria, OR 97103. Phone: 503-741-3300.
Email: admin@portofastoria.com
• Clatsop County Board of Com-
missioners: c/o County Manager, 800
Exchange St., Suite 410, Astoria, OR
97103. Phone: 503-325-1000.