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About East Oregonian : E.O. (Pendleton, OR) 1888-current | View Entire Issue (Oct. 3, 2017)
Page 4A OPINION East Oregonian Tuesday, October 3, 2017 OTHER VIEWS Founded October 16, 1875 KATHRYN B. BROWN Publisher DANIEL WATTENBURGER Managing Editor TIM TRAINOR Opinion Page Editor MARISSA WILLIAMS Regional Advertising Director MARCY ROSENBERG Circulation Manager JANNA HEIMGARTNER Business Office Manager MIKE JENSEN Production Manager OUR VIEW Finding the sense in the senseless There is no way to make sense of How can we, as you and I and everyone else, overcome the causes the senseless. On a Sunday evening in Las that impel some people to the Vegas, a 64-year-old man rains madness of massacre? How do we spot the signs — presumably of death on an outdoor country music festival. Firing hundreds of rounds, social isolation or of beyond-the- norm anger and he commits a well- unresolved rejection planned massacre. To say the Dozens die. — that foretell impending violence? Hundreds more shooter’s A lesson of the are wounded, act defies 2015 shootings some critically. Thousands more — comprehension at Umpqua College concertgoers, family, is to state the Community in Roseburg is friends — will find that lots of people their lives forever obvious. saw oddities in the altered. To say the days and weeks shooter’s act defies comprehension beforehand, but no one put them all together. Without becoming the is to state the obvious. Millions of Americans own guns. Big Brother of George Orwell’s Few use them as instruments of “1984” or the authoritarian society of Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit mass chaos and carnage. Millions of Americans are in 451,” we — family members, friends, teachers, colleagues — their 60s. Few commit slaughter. must become better at noticing and Millions of Americans struggle better at alerting, even when we with mental illness — murder don’t know whether our little piece is not a sane act, even though amounts to anything, or whether jurisprudence sometimes judges there even is a puzzle to be solved it as such — yet few resort to by authorities. homicidal violence. As for firearms, they reflect a And so, it is useless to societal truth. Bad things come automatically blame firearms or from good things carried to mental illness or whatever else for extreme. Used properly, a firearm Stephen Craig Paddock’s butchery has a legitimate, worthwhile role. undertaken from the 32nd floor Used wrongly, a gun can become an of the Mandalay Bay Hotel and instrument of evil. Casino. In our society, instruments of Yet surely, we can all agree that casual carnage are easily available, something is dreadfully wrong — from bomb-making instructions deadly wrong — in our culture. on the internet to high-capacity, Something enables mass violence high-power guns that can be to proliferate. Something allows obtained illegally when not legally. humans to take out their societal More laws will not change that, at and personal grievances with least not soon. deadly precision. Neither will new laws change We exist in a culture that our society’s fascination with, and increasingly has become “us vs. glorification of, mass violence. them,” from politics to standard Books, movies and video games of living to personal vendettas. celebrate violence as the perceived However, blaming anyone, from solution to one’s problems and a the president to the neighbor next measure of one’s machismo. door, will achieve nothing. Rather, Even if we cannot make sense of we as an American people must get the senseless, how do we stop the it together … and bring ourselves senseless? together as one. Speaking ill of Hugh Hefner H ugh Hefner, gone to his people tend to celebrate, they showed reward at the age of 91, was a the rot in larger things as well. pornographer and chauvinist His success as a businessman who got rich on masturbation, showed the rotten side of capitalism consumerism and the exploitation of — the side that exploits appetites for women, aged into a leering grotesque money, that feeds leech-like on our in a captain’s hat, and died a pack rat vices, that dissolves family and religion in a decaying manse where porn blared while promising that consumption will during his pathetic orgies. fill the void they leave behind. Ross Hef was the grinning pimp of the The social liberalism he Douthat sexual revolution, with quaaludes for championed was the rotten and Comment the ladies and Viagra for himself — a self-interested sort, a liberalism of father of smut addictions and eating male and upper-class privilege, in disorders, abortions and divorce and syphilis, which the strong and beautiful and rich take a pretentious huckster who published their pleasure at the expense of the vulnerable Updike stories no one read while doing flesh and poor and not-yet-born. procurement for celebrities, a revolutionary The online future his career anticipated was whose revolution chiefly benefited men much the rotten side of the internet — the realms of like himself. onanism and custom-tailored erotica, where The arc of his life vindicated his moral the male vanity and entitlement he indulged critics, conservative and feminist: What has curdled into resentment and misogyny. began with talk of jazz and Picasso and other And his appreciation of male-female signifiers of good taste ended in a sleazy difference was rotten, too — the leering decrepitude that would have predatory sort of been pitiable if it wasn’t still appreciation, the Cosby- so exploitative. Clinton-Trump sort, the sort Early Hef had a pipe that nicknames quaaludes and suit and a highbrow “thigh openers” and expects reference for every the girls to laugh, the sort occasion; he even claimed that prefers breast implants to have a philosophy, to female intellect and rents that final refuge of the the charms of youth to scoundrel. But late Hef was escape the realities of age. a lecherous, low-brow Peter No doubt what Hefner Pan, playing at perpetual offered America somebody boyhood — ice cream else would have offered in for breakfast, pajamas all his place, and the changes day — while bodyguards he helped hasten would have shooed male celebrities come rushing in without away from his paid harem him. But in every way that mattered he made and the skull grinned beneath his papery skin. those changes worse, our culture coarser This late phase was prettied up by reality and crueler and more sterile than liberalism television’s “The Girls Next Door,” which or feminism or freedom of speech required. kept the orgies offstage and relied on the And in every way that mattered his life story girlfriends’ mix of desperation, boredom and proved that we were wrong to listen to him, charisma for its strange appeal. The behind- because at the end of the long slide lay only the-scenes accounts were rather grimmer: a degraded, priapic senility, or the desperate depression and drugs, “dirty hallway carpets and the curtains that smell like dog piss,” the gaiety of Prince Prospero’s court with the Red chance to wait while Hef “picked the dog Death at the door. poo off the carpet — and then ask for our Now that death has taken him, we should allowance.” examine our own sins. Liberals should ask Needless to say the obituaries for Hefner, why their crusade for freedom and equality even if they acknowledge the seaminess, have found itself with such a captain, and what his been full of encomia for his great deeds: Hef legacy says about their cause. Conservatives the vanquisher of puritanism, Hef the political should ask how their crusade for faith and progressive, Hef the great businessman and family and community ended up so Hefnerian all the rest. There are even conservative itself — with a conservative news network appreciations, arguing that for all his faults that seems to have been run on Playboy Hef was an entrepreneur who appreciated the Mansion principles and a conservative party finer things in life and celebrated la difference. that just elected a playboy as our president. What a lot of garbage. Sure, Hefner You can find these questions being asked, but they are counterpoints and minor themes. supported some good causes and published some good writers. But his good deeds That this should be the case, that only prudish and aesthetic aspirations were ultimately Christians and spoilsport feminists are willing incidental to his legacy — a gloss over his to say that the man was obviously wicked and flesh-peddling, smeared like Vaseline on a destructive, is itself a reminder that the rot pornographer’s lens. The things that were Hugh Hefner spread goes very, very deep. distinctively Hefnerian, that made him ■ influential and important, were all rotten, and Ross Douthat joined The New York Times to the extent they were part of stories that as an Op-Ed columnist in 2009. Hef was the grinning pimp of the sexual revolution, with quaaludes for the ladies and Viagra for himself. OTHER VIEWS AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez Moises Flores raises an American flag outside of the Thomas and Mack Center in the aftermath of a mass shooting at a music festival Monday in Las Vegas. Let Obamacare repeal rest in peace San Francisco Chronicle Unsigned editorials are the opinion of the East Oregonian editorial board of publisher Kathryn Brown, managing editor Daniel Wattenburger, and opinion page editor Tim Trainor. Other columns, letters and cartoons on this page express the opinions of the authors and not necessarily that of the East Oregonian. YOUR VIEWS State of Oregon is sliding into socialism Gov. Kate Brown and our socialist controlled legislature has turned Oregon into North America’s version of Venezuela. HB 3464 strengthens Oregon’s claim to the greatest sanctuary state in the Americas where serial rapists, like Sergio Martinez who has been deported 12 times, was released and later charged with the rape of a 65-year-old woman. HB 2177, Brown’s “motor voter” law, is the first in the nation that allows voting without proving citizenship, ensuring socialist control of Oregon. HB 3391 is a new tax on Oregon’s health care, providing sex-select abortions for foreigners at Oregon taxpayer expense. In case Oregonians get upset at their state being molded in Brown’s image, SB 719 will require gun confiscation of those deemed not responsible to “possess a deadly weapon.” In May 2015, 15,000 doctors left the Venezuela health care system because of shortages of drugs, equipment and poor pay. The current dictator Nicolas Maduro’s response to food shortages: “Let them shoot rabbits.” Most Oregonians will not wake up until it is time to shoot rabbits. Stuart Dick Irrigon T he law President Trump and Republican lawmakers deride as Obamacare could at this point be rechristened McCaincare, Collinscare or even Kimmelcare. Graham-Cassidy, the latest attempted repeal of the Affordable Care Act, officially expired Tuesday without so much as a vote, thanks in large part to the likes of Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Susan Collins of Maine, who reprised their roles as the moderate conscience of their caucus, and late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, who was moved by his son’s congenital heart defect to, as he put it, take a break from “talking about the Kardashians.” Nine months into the GOP’s total control of the federal government, the obsessive campaign to dismantle the ACA has succeeded mainly in expanding the ranks of its unlikely defenders in the face of grim alternatives. It’s a measure of the depth and illogic of this obsession that Republicans have yet to give it up completely. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who oversaw a grueling series of failed votes to undo the ACA in July, urged his colleagues to move on to tax reform but vaguely claimed that they were “not giving up” on health care. One of the champions of the latest bill, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, promised to return to it after “taking our show on the road” to build support. Some lawmakers were even pushing to tackle health care and taxes — a pair of “unbelievably complex” subjects, as the president once noted — simultaneously. And Trump maintained that “there will be a repeal and replace.” Rushed into consideration with just days left for approval by a simple majority before a procedural deadline, Graham-Cassidy would have replaced ACA subsidies and Medicaid funding with grants to the states, likely returning tens of millions of Americans to the ranks of the uninsured. As McCain and others noted, it skipped the hearings and analysis typically applied to major legislation as well as any attempt at bipartisan support. It also cut short an effort to craft legislation that would actually address some of the ACA’s flaws. That remains the obvious way forward for senators who can bear to abandon their assault on Obama’s signature reform. LETTERS POLICY The East Oregonian welcomes original letters of 400 words or less on public issues and public policies for publication in the newspaper and on our website. The newspaper reserves the right to withhold letters that address concerns about individual services and products or letters that infringe on the rights of private citizens. Submitted letters must be signed by the author and include the city of residence and a daytime phone number. The phone number will not be published. Unsigned letters will not be published. Send letters to 211 S.E. Byers Ave. Pendleton, OR 97801 or email editor@eastoregonian.com.
