SATURDAY, MARCH 20, 2021
Baker City, Oregon
4A
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EDITORIAL
Getting
the most
from the
money
A considerable sum of money is coming to Baker
County and to its cities.
The nearly $5.5 million from the American Rescue
Plan Act — the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill that
President Joe Biden signed last week — brings to the
county both great opportunity and great responsibility.
Baker County is slated to receive $3.13 million.
Baker City will get $2 million. Haines and Huntington
will receive $90,000 each, Halfway $60,000, Richland
and Sumpter $40,000 each, and Unity $10,000.
Sen. Jeff Merkley said this week that local offi cials
can use the money to offset costs the county and cities
have incurred during the pandemic, and to help local
businesses and organizations. County Commissioner
Mark Bennett said he believes helping beleaguered
businesses should be a focus. He’s right.
The county in particular, as the lead agency for the
local response to COVID-19, has taken on additional
duties and, inevitably, costs. But as Bennett noted, the
county also is eligible for fi nancial aid from several
sources, including the Federal Emergency Manage-
ment Agency. Major revenue sources for the county
and for Baker City — property taxes and, for the
city, water and sewer service — have been relatively
steady.
But businesses, and in particular those in the hos-
pitality industry, have not fared so well during a year
of closures and restrictions over which they have no
control. Some nonprofi t service organizations have suf-
fered too. Last year the city and the county doled out
more than $900,000 in federal COVID-19 aid to local
businesses and groups. Local governments should use
a similar process to distribute the larger amounts of
money from the American Rescue Plan Act. This can
be diffi cult, as the real need undoubtedly exceeds the
available aid. But local offi cials need to be diligent in
examining those needs so as to ensure the money has
the greatest possible benefi t.
— Jayson Jacoby, Baker City Herald editor
Your views
Voting law changes
reminiscent of Jim Crow
In the aftermath of an election
that was declared fraudulent without
evidence, legislatures in many states
are introducing 200+ changes to voting
laws that make it more complicated
and/or inconvenient to vote.
It’s reminiscent of the South’s Jim
Crow laws instituted after the 13th
Amendment abolished slavery and the
15th Amendment guaranteed the right
to vote to all citizens, including former
slaves. In spite of having lost the Civil
War, Southern states instituted Jim
Crow laws, which perpetuated racial
segregation and discrimination for
decades, the aftermath of which the
U.S. is still wrestling with.
Below I quote from a speech by the
most famous man to escape slavery,
Frederick Douglass, 1818-1895. On
July 5, 1852, in Rochester, New York,
Douglass, a decade before the Civil
Letters to the editor
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War, addressing his speech to propo-
nents of slavery, gave his impression
of “The Meaning of July Fourth for the
Negro”:
“What, to the American slave, is your
4th of July? I answer: a day that re-
veals to him, more than all other days
in the year, the gross injustice and cru-
elty to which he is the constant victim.
To him, your celebration is a sham;
your boasted liberty, an unholy license;
your national greatness, swelling van-
ity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty
and heartless; your denunciations of
tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your
shouts of liberty and equality, hollow
mockery; your prayers and hymns,
your sermons and thanksgivings, with
all your religious parade, and solem-
nity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud,
deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a
thin veil to cover up crimes which
would disgrace a nation of savages.”
This letter may be considered a
continuation of my letter published
in the Baker City Herald last Sept. 8,
in which I pointed out how many U.S.
presidents (10) had slave servants in
their households and how slave labor
was used to construct the White House
and the Capitol building in Washing-
ton, D.C. Compensation for the slaves’
labor was paid to the slave owners, not
a cent to the slaves.
Gary Dielman
Baker City
CONTACT YOUR PUBLIC OFFICIALS
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.
Councilors Lynette Perry, Jason Spriet, Kerry McQuisten, Shane
Alderson, Joanna Dixon, Heather Sells and Johnny Waggoner Sr.
Baker City administration: 541-523-6541. Jonathan Cannon,
city manager; Ray Duman, police chief; Sean Lee, 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.
Baker County departments: 541-523-8200. Travis Ash,
sheriff; Noodle Perkins, roadmaster; Greg Baxter, district attorney;
Alice Durfl inger, county treasurer; Stefanie Kirby, county clerk; Kerry
Savage, county assessor.
Baker School District: 2090 4th Street, Baker City, OR
97814; 541-524-2260; fax 541-524-2564. Superintendent: Mark
Witty. Board meets the third Thursday of the month at 6 p.m.
Council Chambers, Baker City Hall,1655 First St.; Andrew Bryan,
Kevin Cassidy, Chris Hawkins, Katie Lamb and Julie Huntington.
State Sen. Lynn Findley (R-Ontario): Salem offi ce: 900
Court St. N.E., S-403, Salem, OR 97301; 503-986-1730. Email: Sen.
LynnFindley@oregonlegislature.gov
State Rep. Mark Owens (R-Crane): Salem offi ce: 900 Court
St. N.E., H-475, Salem, OR 97301; 503-986-1460. Email: Rep.
MarkOwens@oregonlegislature.gov
President Joe Biden: The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania
Ave., Washington, D.C. 20500; 202-456-1111; to send comments, go
to www.whitehouse.gov.
Oregon Gov. Kate Brown: 254 State Capitol, Salem, OR
97310; 503-378-3111; www.governor.oregon.gov.
The lingering filth attached to the Holocaust
Until I read the book, I would
have claimed, and with consider-
able confi dence, that my feelings
about the Holocaust were rigid.
Mine, I would have asserted, was
the familiar mixture of disgust and
horror and a sorrow so deep that no
word can convey its unfathomable
essence.
But while I was reading “Aus-
chwitz: A New History” by Lau-
rence Rees, I came to understand
that another emotion was perhaps
almost as powerful as those others.
Hatred.
I don’t mean to suggest that I had
never felt angry while reading other
accounts of that inhumane episode
in human history.
Of course I had.
I don’t believe anyone, save
perhaps a sociopath, could learn
about the Nazis’ atrocities and not
succumb to at least a brief rage at
the reality that such a crime could
be perpetrated.
But the anger that Rees’ book
provoked was a different sort, one
that changed my perspective not
only about the people guilty of these
crimes but, sadly, about those who
are utterly innocent.
Rees’ work, as the title implies,
focused on the most infamous of the
camps, Auschwitz in Poland, the
JAYSON
JACOBY
tiny plot of land where 1.1 million
people, most of them Jews, died.
I’m still not sure why I felt differ-
ently after reading his book, which
was published in 2005.
Rees, an Englishman who
worked for the BBC and has writ-
ten four other books about World
War II, didn’t reveal any new and
shocking aspects of a story which
has been well-plumbed by histori-
ans for decades.
The author himself neatly
summarizes the basic thrust of
his work, writing in the introduc-
tion that “Auschwitz, through its
destructive dynamism, was both a
microcosm of the Nazi state and the
logical consequence of it.”
Rees’ book relies heavily on inter-
views with more than 100 people,
including some fortunate enough to
survive Auschwitz, as well as some
Germans who worked there.
Among the themes in “Aus-
chwitz” that are not revelatory is
the ordinariness of some of those
who contributed to the Holocaust.
This concept is captured most
adeptly, and famously, by Hannah
Arendt, who wrote of the “banality
of evil.”
Rees delved into this idea at the
level of the individual — a former
SS guard, for instance, who was
complicit in mass murder but who,
decades later, was a pleasant per-
son for Rees to pass an afternoon
with.
But Rees also examined what
seems to me a much more troubling
notion — that some malignant
attribute of German society during
Hitler’s reign made possible the cir-
cumstances which can still induce
nightmares most of a century later.
This fl aw — it can hardly be
described otherwise — is the infec-
tious agent that made Auschwitz,
and the Holocaust, the “logical con-
sequence” that Rees writes about.
The very idea, of course, that
genocide could be “logical” is abhor-
rent.
I think it was Rees’ moderation
— he largely eschewed the most
graphic descriptions, which are so
terribly available to more sensa-
tionalistic writers — that affected
me as other, superfi cially similar
books did not.
His writing, because it is dispas-
sionate, was all the more convincing
in arguing the thesis that what
happened was inevitable.
What bothered me most, though,
as I neared the end of Rees’ book, is
the realization that the Holocaust is
a malevolent force which can affl ict,
to some degree, even those who are
repelled by it.
As I was reading the fi nal chap-
ter I thought about the summer of
1986, part of which I spent in what
was then West Germany.
I stayed with two families. I
suppose I must have met, in more
than a passing sense, a few dozen
Germans during the visit. Without
exception they were fi ne people,
friendly and accommodating to
an immature 15-year-old whose
language skills were modest.
But not until I read Rees’ book
did I ever think of those Germans
in the context of the Holocaust. This
is an indirect connection, to be sure;
few of those I met that summer
were even alive during the war.
What I mean is that I wondered
— and I seemed helpless to avoid
the comparison, distasteful though
it was — whether any of those Ger-
mans might, like their forebears, be
unusually prone to participating in
industrial murder.
This is terribly unfair.
And I believe the answer is no.
Yet the stain that the Holocaust
left on Germany, and on Germans,
is indelible, it seems to me.
This is why, of course, the
country’s leaders have passed laws,
including one that makes it a crime
to deny the Holocaust, that would
rouse free speech advocates in
America to high dudgeon.
I can’t, as an American, fathom
the lingering guilt in Germany.
Yet after reading Rees’ book I re-
alized, in a way I never had before,
that events so horrifi c that they
render even superlatives useless
can carry a bit of their fi lth forward
through the decades, fl otsam that
fouls, however slightly, the reputa-
tions of people who don’t deserve
any such association.
The story of Auschwitz must
never be forgotten, of course.
And for that reason I appreciate
the scholarship of historians such
as Rees.
Yet it saddens me that after
reading such a fi ne piece of work I
was so incensed that I connected,
in even the tiniest way, the acts of
long-dead criminals to living people
who happen to live in the same
country.
Jayson Jacoby is editor
of the Baker City Herald.