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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.