OPINION
6A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2017
Founded in 1873
DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor
JIM VAN NOSTRAND, Managing Editor
JEREMY FELDMAN, Circulation Manager
DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager
CARL EARL, Systems Manager
OUR VIEW
Hanford’s waste
spread under a
cloak of secrecy
itadel of Secrets is one way of describing Washington,
D.C. The dirty little secret about Washington’s secrets is
that we all might be better off with fewer of them.
Writing Aug. 27 in The New York Times Magazine, Beverly
Gage quotes the late U.S. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who
believed that it is easier to keep secrets when you have fewer of
them.
The biggest shroud of secrecy in the Pacific Northwest lies
over the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Because of its extraordi-
nary moment of creation, during World War II, and its mission
— to develop material for the unproven concept of an atomic
bomb — Hanford’s very existence was a huge secret in the des-
ert of southeast Washington state.
There is link between secrecy and the incompetence it hides.
Of our government’s secrecy cult, Gage writes that, “This
secrecy was a useful tool, but it became a crutch too — a way
for federal employees to cover up mistakes or to inflate their
own importance.”
As the dark side of nuclear secrecy, Exhibit A is Chernobyl,
the Soviet nuclear power plant, which in 1986 had the most
disastrous accident in history. The Chernobyl reactor was an old
Russian design, without safety features and deep backup. Its
accident created a large disaster zone. Months later, The New
York Times Magazine published a devastating gallery of photos
from that zone.
Like Chernobyl, Hanford’s N-Reactor lacked a backup, steel
and concrete containment system. It was subsequently shut
down.
With the fall of the Berlin Wall, Hanford ceased manufac-
turing plutonium. That was also the point when Hanford’s veil
of secrecy was lifted. Mark Heater of Hanford’s media rela-
tions office confirms that in February 1986, the Department of
Energy released 19,000 pages of documents relating to Hanford.
In that decade, our region became aware that Hanford was
a vast and leaking dump of hazardous nuclear waste. One
of those underground waste plumes was headed toward the
Columbia River.
It would be comforting to say that Hanford is a much
more open secret these days. But Anna King cautions other-
wise. As the Richland-based correspondent of the Northwest
News Network, no journalist is consistently closer to Hanford
than King. She says: “I don’t know if the shroud of secrecy
has come off Hanford. Their whole mission is to not let out
information.”
An astounding amount of money has been spent on cleaning
up and containing Hanford’s poorly stored waste. It is the draw-
back of nuclear energy writ large. What does a nation do with
the waste? Behind a wall of secrecy, the scientists and techni-
cians who ran Hanford for decades gave us a disastrous answer
to that question.
C
Apprenticeships can
help provide key skills
resident Donald Trump can do no wrong in the eyes of
his core supporters and no right for a majority of other
Americans, so it’s noteworthy to see that his executive
order expanding “industry-recognized” apprenticeships is meet-
ing with approval across unusual political fault lines.
There is a risk doubling federal funding for apprenticeships
to $200 million will come at the expense of other job training
programs — it would be shameful to see cuts to things like the
Tongue Point Job Corps Center. But there is no question that
apprenticeships are a key way of providing workers with the
specific skills that employers want.
An Aug. 28 article by the Brookings Institution (tinyurl.com/
Brookings-Apprenticeships) reviews the good case that can be
made for the president’s proposal. In essence, there needs to be
stronger connections between what American students learn and
what the job market has to offer. The U.S. lags far behind other
global economies in supporting apprenticeships, with those we
do offer heavily concentrated in the building trades.
Under the Trump administration’s plan, blueprints for appren-
tice programs will be designed by employers, unions, educa-
tors and others so that nationwide training is tailored to on-the-
ground needs. Industry is assured that successful apprentices can
get to work and be immediately productive.
“Barriers of ignorance, snobbery, and special interests stand in
the way of expanded apprenticeships. But President Trump has
created the opportunity for real progress in this area. Let’s see if
it can be seized,” Brookings said.
This seems to be an initiative we all can root for.
P
In defense of the truth
By CHARLES BLOW
New York Times News Service
T
he U.S. Department of Justice
confirmed in a Friday court
filing what we all knew
to be true: that
Trump’s slander-
ous assertion on
Twitter in March
that President
Barack Obama had
Trump’s “‘wires
tapped’ in Trump
Tower” just before the election was
in fact a total fabrication.
According to the filing, both the
FBI and the Justice Department’s
National Security Division “confirm
that they have no records related to
wiretaps as described by the March
4, 2017 tweets.”
To some this lying may seem
small, just another defect among
many, but to me it is so much more.
Honesty is the foundation of char-
acter. The truth is the common base
from which all else is built.
And yet, this man feels com-
pletely unbound by it. He has no
respect or reverence for it. For him,
honesty is an option, one that he
feels no compunction to choose.
Before Trump’s bigotry,
race-baiting, misogyny, corruption,
bullying and vindictiveness, there is
the lying. One could even argue that
the lying is a core component of all
the rest.
Of the statements by Trump that
the fact-checking site PolitiFact has
checked, just 5 percent were deemed
absolutely true. Another 26 percent
were just “mostly true” or “half
true.” But a whopping 69 percent
were found to be “mostly false,”
“false” or “pants on fire,” the site’s
worst rating.
Indeed, it seems that every major
publication has taken a stab at trying
to chronicle and explain Trump’s
lying.
The Washington Post calculated
that Trump made 492 false or mis-
leading statements in his first 100
days — “That’s an average of 4.9
claims a day” — and that there were
only 10 days without a single false
claim. There were five days with 20
or more false claims.
But Politico may have been the
most insightful. In an article there,
Maria Konnikova pointed out in
February that all presidents lie — all
people lie — “but Donald Trump
is in a different category.” She
continued:
“The sheer frequency, sponta-
neity and seeming irrelevance of
his lies have no precedent. Nixon,
Reagan and Clinton were protecting
their reputations; Trump seems to lie
for the pure joy of it.”
Citing the work of Harvard psy-
chologist Daniel Gilbert, Konnikova
gave this glib assessment of how the
brain deals with all this lying:
“Our brains are particularly ill-
AP Photo/Alex Brandon
President Donald Trump speaks about tax reform at the Loren Cook
Co. in Springfield, Mo., on Wednesday.
equipped to deal with lies when they
come not singly but in a constant
stream, and Trump, we know, lies
constantly, about matters as serious
as the election results and as trivial
as the tiles at Mar-a-Lago.”
She continued: “When we
This is not
simply about
a flawed man,
this is about
the function of
our democracy
and American
positioning in
the world. ...
Without truth,
everything
falls apart, or
more precisely,
nothing can be
established.
are overwhelmed with false, or
potentially false, statements, our
brains pretty quickly become so
overworked that we stop trying to
sift through everything. It’s called
cognitive load — our limited cogni-
tive resources are overburdened. It
doesn’t matter how implausible the
statements are; throw out enough
of them, and people will inevitably
absorb some. Eventually, without
quite realizing it, our brains just give
up trying to figure out what is true.”
Trump is quite literally over-
whelming our human capacities with
his mendacity. It is not only hard to
imagine that any person could lie
this much — let alone the leader of
the free world — it is also impossi-
ble for us to keep pace.
There a strong impulse, I believe,
in each of us struggling against
fatigue, to register the pattern and
manage expectations. We begin to
build into our processing of politics
the caveat: Yes, the “president” lies.
That’s not new. That’s just what he
does.
But we must resist that impulse.
It makes normal, or at least rational,
something that is neither normal nor
rational.
Trump’s incessant lying is
obscene. It is a collapse in morality;
it is an ethical assault.
This notion that Trump is damag-
ing the sanctity and purity of truth,
that truth in the Trump era operates
on a floating scale, that for the
Trump apologists truth has become
a minor inconvenience, should have
us all objecting in earnest.
It seems odd that we have to
defend the merits of truth, and yet
we do. We must.
This is not simply about a flawed
man, this is about the function of our
democracy and American position-
ing in the world. How is one sup-
posed to debate policy with someone
who almost never tells the truth?
How can a liar negotiate treaties
or navigate international disputes?
Without truth, everything falls apart,
or more precisely, nothing can be
established.
I vacillate between rage and
sorrow that our country has come to
such a pass. And yet, what is done is
done. America made a colossal mis-
take, and it cannot be easily undone.
It is cold comfort that most of the
country now believes that Trump
isn’t a steady or moral or compas-
sionate leader and half believe he
isn’t honest, according to a Fox
News Poll released last week.
But that acknowledgment doesn’t
change the fact that we must develop
a societal strategy for protecting the
true in a post-truth world, and the
first step is that we must never stop
saying: Donald Trump is a liar.
WHERE TO WRITE
• U.S. Rep. Suzanne Bonamici
(D): 439 Cannon House Office
Building, Washington, D.C., 20515.
Phone: 202- 225-0855. Fax 202-225-
9497. District office: 12725 SW Mil-
likan 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.