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About East Oregonian : E.O. (Pendleton, OR) 1888-current | View Entire Issue (June 15, 2019)
VIEWPOINTS Saturday, June 15, 2019 East Oregonian Where exactly am I? I ’ve taken up the hobby of topon- ymy, the study of the way in which places are named. I have uncov- ered some rather interesting factoids that I would like to share with the reader. The longest place name still being used in everyday speech, (in this case Maori) is the name of a hill in New Zealand: “Taumatawhakatangihanga- koauauo-tamateaturipukakapikimaun- gahoronukupokaiwe-nuakit natahu.” My Maori is a little rough around the edges, but I think an equivalent in English might be: “That-little-nob- with-the-twisted-yellowpine-by-the- bend-in-the-Southfork-where-Jerry- caught-the-lunker-the-day-he-was- wading-and-fell-into-the-hole.” Toponymy is a slippery and inex- act science because human activity constantly redefines the landscape. Nations invade, borders shift, attitudes change. What is now Perfect Sunset Subdivision was once That Bog on Farmer Brown’s South Forty. Riggins, Idaho, used to be called Gouge-Eye, Idaho. In an effort to provide a bit of per- manence to the study of place names, we toponymists have developed an onionskin approach to nailing down what a particular place is called at any given time. We look at a place name as a series of increasingly specific layers of meaning. The layers can be polit- ical, cosmic, personal, geographical, any number of permutations convey- ing the fact that we humans have the ability to speak, and are, therefore, capable of locating ourselves through the use of language. Using this system, let me illus- trate where I am right now: I am in the known universe, in the Milky Way galaxy, in the Solar System, on the planet Earth, in the northern hemi- sphere, on the North American conti- nent, in the United States of America, in the Pacific Northwest, in the state of Oregon, in the foothills of the Blue Mountains, in the county of Umatilla, in the Athena-Weston School District, in the city of Athena, three blocks north of the Athena Quick Stop con- venience store, on East High Street, in the garage behind a house located at 534, in a cell-sized room called my writer’s shack, seated in a chair in front of a computer, facing the west wall, 5 feet away from where my dog barfed two days ago. This layering system, this gradual closing of the aperture of meaning, is quite different from a global posi- tioning system, where a more formal, impersonal, universal, and mathemat- ical language is used to express loca- tion in terms of latitude, longitude, degrees, minutes, and seconds. TOPONYMY IS A SLIPPERY AND INEXACT SCIENCE BECAUSE HUMAN ACTIVITY CONSTANTLY REDEFINES THE LANDSCAPE. Employing the GPS, Northstar, one is able to shoot a radio beam at the sky, have it bounce off of a satellite back to us, and pinpoint, within milli- meters, where we are located relative to a particular map of a particular por- tion of the planet. My writer’s shack in GPS lingo is at 45 degrees, 48 min- utes 51 seconds north by 118 degrees, 29 minutes, 12 seconds west. This is a highly accurate way to deliver weap- ons or determine ownership of a piece of real estate, but it lacks the essential linguistic element needed to commu- nicate with other humans. The basic tenet of toponymy is not “Where am I” but rather “What is the current name of the place where I am.” Are you still with me? OK, now let us introduce a Zen-ish element into our studies, the notion that change is the only constant, that imperma- nence is the law of nature, and that the moment you nail down what to call the place where you are, just as you define the final layer, something changes to make the determination invalid. “You can’t stick the same foot into the same river twice,” said Thales a few millen- nia ago. Toad Suck, Arkansas, (hon- estly) just ain’t the same place it once was. As an illustration of this imperma- nence, consider the angular momen- tum approach to understanding our place in the cosmos as taught to me one starry night on a hillside in Sonoma County, California, about 50 years ago. If you are riding with me on this planet, you are on a big ball that rotates once in what we call a day. A day is composed of hours, minutes, seconds and various smaller incre- ments that only matter if you are a bar- rel racer. The circumference of the earth at the equator is 24,901 miles. So, even when you think you are safely perched on a barstool, you are heading in an eastward (relative) direction at about 1,000 miles per hour. What we call Earth is hooked by gravity to a hydrogen-fueled ball in one of many solar systems. One orbit of the Earth around what we call the Sun is about 590,000,000 miles and is completed every 365.25 rotations of the earth, one year, meaning that we are going approximately 18.695 miles per second, or 67,305 miles per hour in that (relative) direction. Our solar system orbits around the center of a spiral galaxy known as the Milky Way. It completes one obit every 226 million years. In order to do so, you, I, the Sun, Mama Earth, the rest of the planets and various other chunks of space trash must travel 135 miles per second, or 486,000 miles per hour in that (relative) direction. Got the idea? (Yeah, I know….this deep thinking tends to creep me out J.D. S mith FROM THE HEADWATERS OF DRY CREEK too. As my Dad used to say, “Some- times I get the feeling that there are smarter people than me.”) The knowl- edge that everything is in a constant state of flux need not be scary. It can have its comforting moments. The next time you tell a kid to sit still and stop fidgeting and the little twerp ignores you, think about what you are asking. Or the next time the guy across the table from you is patting his foot or shaking his leg, imagine that he is more in tune with the cosmic race- track than you are. Or the next time someone enquires about where you are from, just look at the sky and ask “When?” ——— J.D. Smith is an accomplished writer and jack-of-all-trades. He lives in Athena. Voters, your foreign policy views stink M ost of human history has been marked by war. Between 1500 and 1945, scarcely a year went by without some great power fighting another great power. Then, in 1945 that stopped. The number of battlefield deaths has plummeted to the lowest levels in history. The world has experienced the greatest reduction in poverty in history, as well D aviD as the greatest spread of B rooks democracy and freedom. COMMENT Why did this happen? Mostly it was because the United States decided to lead a community of nations to create a democratic world order. That order consisted of institutions like NATO, the U.N. and the World Bank. But it was also enforced by the pervasive presence of American power — mil- itary, economic and cultural power as well as the magnetic power of the democratic idea, which inspired dis- sidents worldwide. Building any community requires exercising power. America’s lead- ers made some terrible mistakes (Vietnam, Iraq). The nation never got to enjoy the self-righteous sense of innocence that the powerless and reclusive enjoy. But the U.S. having been dragged into two world wars, leaders from Truman to Obama felt they had no choice but to widen America’s circle of concern across the whole world. This was abnormal. As Robert Kagan writes in “The Jungle Grows Back,” “Very few nations in history have ever felt any responsibility for any- thing but themselves.” Overall, this history should be a source of pride for all Americans, but it is not. Researchers from the Center for American Progress recently completed a survey of Ameri- can foreign policy views. They write: “When asked what the phrase ‘maintaining the liberal international order’ indicated to them, all but one of the partici- pants in our focus groups drew a blank. Voters across educational lines simply did not understand what any of these phrases ... meant or implied.” That by itself is not a problem. The liberal order was built by foreign pol- icy elites, from George Marshall to Madeleine Albright. The problem is that voters are now actively hostile to the project. Instead of widening the circle of concern, most Americans want the U.S. to simply look after itself. The CAP researchers asked 2,000 registered voters what U.S. foreign policy priorities should be. The top priorities were protecting against terrorist threats, protecting jobs for American workers and reducing ille- gal immigration. These are all neg- ative aspirations: preventing bad things from hostile outsiders. The lowest priorities were promot- ing democracy, taking on Chinese aggression, promoting trade, fight- ing global poverty and defending human rights. The things Americans care least about are the core activ- ities of building a civilized global community. After Iraq and other debacles, many Americans are exhausted by the global leadership role. Many have lost faith in the nation’s leadership class. They say correctly that we have a lot of problems here at home. But a big part of the shift is caused by the fact that many Americans have lost faith in human nature and human possibility. Even after the horrors of World War II, most Americans said that people can be trusted. Building a community of nations seemed like a doable proposition because most peo- ple are basically good. Even today, people who express high social trust are much more likely to see Amer- ica as an indispensable nation, much more likely to believe American val- ues are universal values and much more likely to support the policies that preserve the liberal world order. But social trust has collapsed over the decades, especially among the young. Distrustful, alienated peo- ple don’t want to get involved in the strange, hostile, outside world. There are two types of low-trust voters. On the right there are the Trumpian America Firsters, who want to cut immigration and break alliances. On the left there are the New Doves. These are young people who express high interest in human rights, but having grown up in the Iraq era, they don’t want the U.S. to get involved in protecting them. A survey of American voters by the Eurasia Group Foundation reported, “People under 30 years old were the most likely to want the United States to abstain from intervening in human rights abuses.” The America Firsters and the New Doves may think of themselves as opposites, but they wind up in the same place: America should not be abroad preserving the liberal world order. The CAP study estimates that less than a fifth of voters are traditional internationalists. The Eurasia Group study estimates that only 9.5% are. America is withdrawing from the world; the results are there for all to see. China is cracking down on dem- ocratic rights in Hong Kong. Russia launches cyberattacks everywhere. Iran is destabilizing the Middle East. The era of great power rivalry is coming back. We’re in a dark spiral. Americans take a dark view of human nature and withdraw from the world. Wolves like Putin and Xi fill the void and make bad things happen, confirming the dark view and causing even more withdrawal. We need a leader who can grap- ple with failures like Iraq, build a younger, credible leadership class and embody an optimism that pulls us out of the dark spiral. ——— David Brooks is a columnist for the New York Times. A5
