OPINION
4A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2017
Founded in 1873
HEIDI WRIGHT, Interim Publisher
JIM VAN NOSTRAND, Editor
JEREMY FELDMAN, Circulation Manager
DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager
CARL EARL, Systems Manager
OUR VIEW
Robust editorials,
columns help
blaze policy trails
T
here are many places in the world where people are either
too apathetic or too afraid to publicly express an opinion
about much of anything. This isn’t one of them.
The Daily Astorian has a long tradition of serving as a com-
munity sounding board — a clearinghouse where readers may
argue their cases and tell their stories.
Letters to the editor are among our most-read content.
Editorials representing our views help frame debates among
ourselves and also serve to inform state and federal lawmakers
of community preferences. The Astorian’s editorials have won
many prizes. More importantly, they have helped set the stage
for this area’s economic and cultural rebirth — blazing a trail on
everything from saving the Liberty Theatre to holding the line
against fossil fuel developments on our shorelines. Years ago,
they raised the alarm about climate change and its effects on our
maritime environment.
The Astorian is today beginning a process of revamping and
redesigning its opinion pages. This process is an outcome of the
change in our newspaper and newsroom management.
A team of editorial writers will create the content for this
page. They include Matt Winters, Jim Van Nostrand, Steve
Forrester and Dick Hughes. Winters is publisher of the Chinook
Observer. He is our regional opinion editor.
Van Nostrand is the Astorian’s editor. Forrester is the retired
publisher and editor and the president and CEO of EO Media
Group. Dick Hughes — former editor of the Salem Statesman-
Journal — is part of EO Media Group’s Salem bureau. The
other player on this new editorial board will be Kari Borgen, the
Astorian’s new publisher.
Over the coming months we’ll recruit column contributors
who live here. If you have something you feel passionate about
— or find amusing, curious or bewildering — please think about
writing a column. If interested, write Winters at mwinters@dai-
lyastorian.com.
We welcome feedback as we strive to make our opinion pages
more engaging and reflective of this amazing place. Drop us a
note at the email address above, or call Winters at 800-643-3703.
Banks symbolized a
watershed moment
for Native Americans
D
ennis Banks died Sunday night in Minnesota. The
American Indian Movement founder was 80.
While taking note of his detractors, who saw him as
a vain and irresponsible attention-seeker, the New York Times
said, “To admirers, Mr. Banks was a broad-chested cham-
pion of native pride. … He was a paladin who defied authority
and, in an era crowded with civil rights protests, spoke for the
nation’s oldest minority.”
Is there any reason we on the Pacific Northwest coast should
cast a thought in his direction?
Along with contemporaries including Billy Frank Jr. in
Washington state, Banks symbolized a watershed in Native
American history — a firm determination to begin controlling
their own destiny.
“We had reached a point in history where we could not tol-
erate the abuse any longer, where mothers could not tolerate
the mistreatment that goes on on the reservations any longer,
where they could not see another Indian youngster die,” Banks
said.
Banks and others with A.I.M. occupied the old federal
prison island of Alcatraz from November 1969 to June 1971,
turning it into an enduring symbol of Indian empowerment.
Speaking this week about Banks, Chinook Indian Nation
Chairman Tony Johnson said, “My family and I will be visit-
ing Alcatraz over the weekend. Definitely have had those guys
on my mind. One thing amazing is how small Indian Country
is. There are a lot of people, both friends and family, who
were there during the occupation. Probably also important to
remember is all of the average native people who were there
and made those significant events happen.” A Chinook Indian
from South Bend, Washington, participated in support of the
occupiers at considerable personal risk, Johnson said.
Indian and non-Indian alike, we live on lands that were
home to Native civilizations for many centuries. Banks, no
matter his human flaws, played a significant part in helping
all Americans understand the price his people paid. It benefits
everyone to know the truth and for our Indian neighbors to be
full and honored participants in modern society.
When politics becomes your idol
Thinkstock.com
When politics is used as a cure for spiritual and social loneliness, it’s harder to win people over with
policy or philosophical arguments.
By DAVID BROOKS
New York Times News Service
I
didn’t get to Richard Linklater’s
brilliant 2014 movie, “Boyhood,”
until this past weekend. That was
the movie, filmed
over 12 years with
the same actors,
about a boy grow-
ing up in Texas.
But I did have the
advantage of seeing
it in the Trump era.
It’s a sadder movie now. Different
themes leap out at you, which were
not as prominent in the reviews writ-
ten three years ago.
What you see is good people
desperately trying to connect in an
America where bonds are attenu-
ated — without stable families, tight
communities, stable careers, ethnic
roots or an enveloping moral culture.
There’s just a whirl of changing step-
fathers, changing homes, changing
phone distractions, changing pop-cul-
ture references, financial stress and
chronic drinking, which make it
harder to sink down roots into some-
thing, or to even have a spiritual nar-
rative that gives meaning to life.
You can see why, in the disrupted
landscape depicted in the film, peo-
ple would form the sort of partisan
attachments that are common today.
Today, partisanship for many people
is not about which party has the bet-
ter policies, as it was, say, in the days
of Eisenhower and Kennedy. It’s not
even about which party has the bet-
ter philosophy, as it was in the Rea-
gan era. These days, partisanship is
often totalistic. People often use par-
tisan identity to fill the void left when
their other attachments wither away
— religious, ethnic, communal and
familial.
Last week my colleague Thomas
Edsall quoted a political scientist,
Alex Theodoridis, who noted this
phenomenon: “Partisanship for many
Americans today takes the form of a
visceral, even subconscious, attach-
ment to a party group. Our party
becomes a part of our self-concept in
deep and meaningful ways.”
When politics is used as a cure
for spiritual and social loneliness,
it’s harder to win people over with
policy or philosophical arguments.
Everything is shaped on a deeper
level, through the parables, fables
and myths that our most fundamental
groups use to define themselves.
For years, the meritocratic estab-
lishments in both parties told an
implicit myth. The heroes of this
myth were educated, morally enlight-
ened global citizens who went to
competitive colleges, got invited to
things like the Clinton Global Initia-
tive, and who have the brainpower to
run society and who might just be a
little better than other people, by vir-
tue of their achievements.
If politics is
going to get
better, we
need better
myths, unifying
ones that are
built on social
equality.
President Donald Trump tells the
opposite myth — about how those
meritocrats are actually clueless idi-
ots and full of drivel, and how virtue,
wisdom and toughness is found in
the regular people whom those folks
look down upon.
Trump’s supporters follow him
because he gets his facts wrong, but
he gets his myths right. He tells the
morality tale that works for them.
It should be said that people on
the left and on the right who try to
use politics to find their moral mean-
ing are turning politics into an idol.
Idolatry is what happens when peo-
ple give ultimate allegiance to some-
thing that should be serving only an
intermediate purpose, whether it is
money, technology, alcohol, success
or politics.
As Andy Crouch points out in
his book “Playing God,” idolatry is
seductive because in the first phase
it seems to work. The first sip of that
martini tastes great. At first a new
smartphone seems to give you power
and control. The status you get from
a new burst of success seems really
sensational. But then idols fail. What
seemed to offer you more control
begins to control you.
As Crouch puts it: “All idols
begin by offering great things for
a very small price. All idols then
fail, more and more consistently, to
deliver on their original promises,
while ratcheting up their demands. …
In the end they fail completely, even
as they make categorical demands. In
the memorable phrase of the psychi-
atrist Jeffrey Satinover, idols ask for
more and more, while giving less and
less, until eventually they demand
everything and give nothing.”
Politics these days makes categor-
ical demands on people. It demands
that they remain in a state of febrile
excitement caused by this or that
scandal or hatred of the moment. But
it doesn’t actually transform life or
even fill the hole left by the lack of
other attachments.
If politics is going to get bet-
ter, we need better myths, unifying
ones that are built on social equal-
ity. But we also need to put politics in
its place. The excessive dependence
on politics has to be displaced by the
expulsive power of more important
dependencies, whether family, friend-
ship, neighborhood, community, faith
or basic life creed.
To be a moderate is to be at war
with idolatry. It’s to believe that we
become free as we multiply and bal-
ance our attachments. It’s to believe
that our politics probably can’t be
fixed by political means. It needs
repair of the deeper communal bonds
that politics rest on, and which politi-
cal conflict cannot heal.
LETTERS WELCOME
Letters should be exclusive to
The Daily Astorian.
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. 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.
Discourse should be civil and
people should be referred to in a
respectful manner.
Submissions may be sent in any
of these ways:
E-mail to editor@dailyasto-
rian.com; online at www.dailyas-
torian.com; delivered to the Asto-
rian 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.