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About Baker City herald. (Baker City, Or.) 1990-current | View Entire Issue (Jan. 24, 2020)
FRIDAY, JANUARY 24, 2020 Baker City, Oregon 4A Write a letter news@bakercityherald.com EDITORIAL Weighing in on city zoning The controversy over Verizon Wireless’ application to build a 70-foot cell tower in north Baker City has spurred interest among some residents in a topic that generally draws scant attention: zoning. The city is divided among multiple zones — resi- dential, commercial and industrial being the three main types. Each zone has specifi c guidelines for the types of buildings, businesses and other develop- ments allowed. Many critics of Verizon’s proposed tower — the City Council on Tuesday voted to deny the application, upholding a Dec. 4 decision by the Planning Com- mission — have pointed out that although the parcel where the tower was proposed is zoned industrial, much of the area near Leo Adler Field is residential. Opponents of the tower suggested that the industrial parcel, in a largely residential neighborhood, is some- thing of an oversight. Industrial properties, as you might expect, allow certain types of developments, including cell towers, that are prohibited in residential zones. It happens that the Planning Commission has recently been discussing zoning, and in particular the prospect of changing the zoning for some parts of the city. This, then, is an opportune time for citizens to sug- gest potential changes. The Planning Commission will meet Feb. 19 at 6 p.m. at City Hall, 1655 First St. The meeting is open to the public. — Jayson Jacoby, Baker City Herald editor Your views Citizens should voice opposition to cap and trade The citizens of Baker County should be writing to their representatives in Salem. If a walkout is necessary to stop the cap and trade bill then it should be done. Kate Brown again is trying to force something through not caring what the voters want. It will take a toll on jobs and prices on everything here. Further causing more problems for the seniors here. We can’t take anymore of the tax, tax, tax mentality in government. Richard Wolfe Baker City CONTACT YOUR PUBLIC OFFICIALS President Donald Trump: The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., Washington, D.C. 20500; 202-456-1414; fax 202-456-2461; to send comments, go to www.whitehouse. gov/contact. U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley: D.C. offi ce: 313 Hart Senate Offi ce Building, U.S. Senate, Washington, D.C., 20510; 202-224- 3753; fax 202-228-3997. Portland offi ce: One World Trade Center, 121 S.W. Salmon St. Suite 1250, Portland, OR 97204; 503-326- 3386; fax 503-326-2900. Pendleton offi ce: 310 S.E. Second St. Suite 105, Pendleton 97801; 541-278-1129; merkley.senate.gov. U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden: D.C. offi ce: 221 Dirksen Senate Offi ce Building, Washington, D.C., 20510; 202-224-5244; fax 202-228-2717. La Grande offi ce: 105 Fir St., No. 210, La Grande, OR 97850; 541-962-7691; fax, 541- 963-0885; wyden.senate.gov. U.S. Rep. Greg Walden (2nd District): D.C. offi ce: 2182 Rayburn Offi ce Building, Washington, D.C., 20515, 202-225-6730; fax 202-225-5774. La Grande offi ce: 1211 Washington Ave., La Grande, OR 97850; 541-624-2400, fax, 541-624-2402; walden. house.gov. Oregon Gov. Kate Brown: 254 State Capitol, Salem, OR 97310; 503-378-3111; www.governor.oregon.gov. Baker City Hall: 1655 First Street, P.O. Box 650, Baker City, OR 97814; 541-523- 6541; fax 541-524-2049. City Council meets the second and fourth Tuesdays at 7 p.m. in Council Chambers. Mike Downing, Loran Joseph, Randy Schiewe, Lynette Perry, Arvid Andersen, Larry Morrison and Doni Bruland. Baker City administration: 541-523- 6541. Fred Warner Jr., city manager; Ray Duman, police chief; John Clark, fi re chief; Michelle Owen, public works director. Baker County Commission: Baker County Courthouse 1995 3rd St., Baker City, OR 97814; 541-523-8200. Meets the fi rst and third Wednesdays at 9 a.m.; Bill Harvey (chair), Mark Bennett, Bruce Nichols. ‘1917’ reveals the Great War as no film before “What was it like?” It is, perhaps, the ultimate ques- tion in human existence. A universal one, anyway. Each of us wonders at some point how it would have been to experi- ence some event that for whatever reason we did not, or could not. Sometimes we can at least par- tially satisfy this curiosity because we know somebody who was there and so can put the question directly — to query a parent about what they remember from the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated, or prevail upon an older sibling to describe a rock concert you were too young to attend. But I think this desire to under- stand that which you can never know personally, which is to say viscerally, is particularly acute when the event in question is both historically momentous and so distant in time that no one is still alive who was there. For me the event that most strongly piques my curiosity is the First World War, which ended in 1918. It has been so for nearly 30 years. What happened is that I took a European history course at the University of Oregon. I chose the class, as near as I can remember, on little more than a whim. But the great power of education is to infl u- ence, if not the course of our lives, then at least our interests. In the hours I spent in a stuffy classroom that spring in Eugene I learned for the fi rst time more about the Great War — as it was known until war again engulfed Europe in 1939 — than the super- fi cial elements of muddy trenches and machine guns and daring pilots whose scarves whipped about in the slipstream of the open cock- pits of their rickety biplanes. As I came to understand the sheer futility and horror that JAYSON JACOBY soldiers in that confl ict endured, I reached a point where each new book I read, no matter how well crafted, was unable to enrich the texture of my knowledge. Worse, as I accumulated data and anecdotes, my compulsion to truly know about the war deepened, and my frustra- tion at being powerless to answer that ultimate question — “What was it like?” — began to tarnish the experience of reading. But now I have had an epiphany. I watched the new fi lm, “1917.” And although it would gratify me to be proved wrong, I strongly sus- pect that those two hours I spent in the Eltrym — a period I scarcely noticed as it passed — will mark the nearest I’ll ever get to that most elusive answer. Director Sam Mendes, who dedi- cated “1917” to his grandfather Al- fred, a British soldier in the Great War, has created not only the fi nest war movie I’ve seen, but among the best fi lms of any genre. Mendes did this in large part by eschewing many of the clichés that defi ne feature fi lms about wars, and in particular the tropes of the Great War. “1917” doesn’t include scenes of a massive, set-piece battle where thousands of soldiers brandishing bayonet-tipped rifl es rush across no man’s land, to be mowed down, as corn by the swings of a scythe, by machine guns. (Although such things did hap- pen, dozens of times.) Indeed I don’t recall even seeing a machine gun in “1917.” What I did see, thanks to cinematographer Roger Deakins’ deft work, is an intensely detailed depiction of the experience of traveling through trenches, across the desolation of no man’s land, and amid the rubble of a French village left in shambles by artillery bombardments. Mendes used intimate methods in which cameras frequently were directly behind or in front of the two British lance corporals who are the fi lm’s main characters. Viewers in effect see exactly what they saw, and it is mesmerizing. At the start of the movie, as the pair trudges from the soft green fi eld where they had been resting, into the gradually descending maw of a trench, I felt the sense that they were being swallowed, as it were, slowly but inexorably, by the war. As the corporals, Blake and Schofi eld, hustle along a front-line trench the close up fi lming, with hand-held cameras, made me a trifl e queasy. This is as it should be because, as “1917” made clear, front-line trenches zigzagged often rather than following a straight line. The reason was simple, and brutal — with no long straight sec- tions, enemy soldiers couldn’t jump into a trench and shoot for long distances. The pattern of frequent jogs in the trenches’ direction also tended to confi ne the dreadful ef- fects of artillery shells exploding in or near trenches. (Although the machine gun is the characteristic weapon of the Great War, that being the fi rst confl ict in which such guns were employed to their ultimate bloody effect, artillery was by far the most murderous part of the combatants’ arsenals, causing around 70% of the deaths and wounds on the battlefi elds.) When Blake and Schofi eld prepare to climb the wooden lad- ders that will take them from the putative safety of the trench into the terribly exposed no man’s land I felt, more than with any other fi lm, a sense of the awful anxiety — the incredible difference that comes with stepping on a couple of rungs. As the pair crosses the geo- graphic paradox that is that land between the lines — the distance so modest, the life-changing im- plications of this span of tortured ground so immense — I could hear the squelch of their boots in the mud, the rustle of their khaki woolen uniforms, the metallic clink of their .303 Lee-Enfi eld rifl es twisting in their slings. But unlike other renowned World War I fi lms, such as “All Quiet on the Western Front” and “Paths of Glory,” in “1917” no man’s land is quiet, empty except for corpses and rats. The Germans have recently retreated to a new defensive line — they called it the Siegfried Line, the Allies’ moniker was the Hindenburg Line. This withdrawal defi nes the fi lm’s plot. A general has ordered Blake and Schofi eld to carry a message sev- eral miles to where two British bat- talions — around 1,600 men — are preparing to attack the next dawn on the mistaken belief that the Germans retreated because they’re nearly beaten. In fact the Germans are trying to lure the British into an ambush. And one of the soldiers likely to be killed in this ill-fated attack is Blake’s brother. Historians often describe World War I as the fi rst “modern” war. This term has multiple meanings, but the one that has always seemed to me the most terrible, and all the more compelling as a result, is its impersonality. This was industrial war, a battle not so much between soldiers as between societies and the capacities of their factories, a war in which an individual’s abili- ties, and moreover his bravery, had no more infl uence on the outcome than a single snowfl ake has on the severity of a blizzard. Filmmakers generally have sought to depict this reality by showing, as graphically as contem- porary technology allows, the hor- ror of an industrial battlefi eld — men whose limbs are slashed from their bodies by the steel splinters of shells, men who are, almost liter- ally, atomized by a direct hit. This is an undeniably effective technique. But Mendes, rather than rely largely on ghastly death scenes (al- though there are a few of those in “1917”), immerses the audience in the experience of Blake and Scho- fi eld, two among the millions. And for me this tactic expressed the fu- tility of any soldier, the powerless- ness and the seeming inevitability of pain and death, more succinctly, and believably, than even the most faithfully reproduced battle scene involving hundreds or thousands. I will, of course, never know what it was like to go over the top on the fi rst day on the Somme, when 20,000 British soldiers were killed in just a few hours. I will neither cower from a bombardment in the hills above Verdun, nor grasp the dirty wood of a ladder and know that in a few seconds my life might be ended by a bullet or a shell sent on its way by a man I never saw. But thanks to Sam Mendes I have glimpsed something as never before. I have seen, if not with clar- ity then with something close to it, the unspeakable situations we once as a society stupidly blundered into, and I have felt the humbling humanity of the ordinary men who had the great misfortune of being the pawns. Jayson Jacoby is editor of the Baker City Herald.
