SATURDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2021
Baker City, Oregon
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EDITORIAL
Governor,
photos &
masks
As the governor of one of just six states that still re-
quire people to wear face masks in most indoor public
places, Oregon’s Kate Brown has ample reason to be
scrupulous with her personal mask-donning habits.
More scrupulous, certainly, than she was while at-
tending an event in Washington, D.C., recently. Brown
posed for group photographs in which none of the
subjects was wearing a mask.
An adviser to the governor said Brown “remained
masked during the event except when giving her
acceptance speech, eating or taking pictures with at-
tendees.” The adviser also noted that attendees were
required to show proof of vaccination.
But the indoor mask mandate that Brown has
imposed in Oregon has no exception for vaccination
status, so that requirement at the event the governor
attended doesn’t excuse Brown for exhibiting a clear
double standard.
A photo of a maskless governor is not egregious
hypocrisy.
But Brown’s willingness to skirt the mandate that
she expects her constituents to comply with dimin-
ishes her credibility at the very time she is looking to
extend that mandate beyond its current expiration in
February 2022.
If Brown and other state offi cials intend to con-
tinue a policy that the vast majority of states have
concluded is no longer necessary to protect their
citizens, then she ought to demonstrate, by her own
actions, the importance of that policy.
In the meantime, residents in Baker County and
elsewhere who haven’t already been vaccinated
against COVID-19 should do so. It’s a proven way to
protect us against the worst effects of the virus.
— Jayson Jacoby, Baker City Herald editor
OTHER VIEWS
Russia tests Western military resolve
Editorial from St. Louis Post-
Dispatch:
Vladimir Putin wants the world
to forget what happened in 2014.
That’s the year he amassed troops at
the Ukraine border to assist Russian-
backed separatists fi ghting the Kyiv
central government. They wound up
shooting down a Malaysian jumbo jet,
killing all 298 aboard. Also in 2014,
Russia staged the conditions for Putin’s
illegal seizure and annexation of
Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.
Putin wants the world to forget
2014 in order to argue that NATO, not
Russia, poses the greatest threat to
world stability. It’s precisely because
of Russian expansionism that NATO
is weighing Ukraine’s entry into the
trans-Atlantic, mutual-defense pact.
Putin is trying hard to portray Rus-
sia as the victim when, in fact, it is the
clear aggressor. He’s in the process of
amassing an expected 175,000 Russian
troops near Ukraine’s border. The Biden
administration warns that Russia is
preparing to do to the rest of Ukraine
what it did to Crimea.
Why should folks here care about
stuff happening half a world away? It
matters because these are the real ingre-
dients of a major, full-blown superpower
military confrontation. At a minimum, a
Russian invasion would provoke massive
new economic sanctions — even more
punishing than the ones still in force
against Russia since the 2014 retaliation.
New sanctions would likely target
Russian gas exports to a heavily depen-
dent Europe, prompting severe global
economic repercussions. Russia could be
expected to launch an all-out cyberattack
on Western computer networks. Putin
also has demonstrated his willingness to
use ground-based weaponry to disable
communications satellites or simply blast
them out of the sky, as occurred on Nov.
15 when a Russian anti-satellite missile
test scattered 1,500 pieces of debris into
the same orbits used by U.S. spacecraft
and the International Space Station.
Russian leaders have a history of siz-
ing up their American counterparts and
calculating the most opportune moment
to go on the offensive. They seem par-
ticularly prone to test U.S. resolve during
Democratic administrations, such as
the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan under
President Jimmy Carter. The Crimea sei-
zure and Russian deployment of troops
to prop up the dictatorship in Syria made
President Barack Obama look weak and
ineffectual.
Russia seems unimpressed by more
threats of economic sanctions. But it does
understand clear U.S. statements of a
willingness to use military force, if neces-
sary, to bring Moscow to heel, as occurred
during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.
It’s unquestionable that Putin is
testing U.S. and European resolve. If
President Joe Biden hopes to restore his
international stature and recover from
last summer’s disastrous Afghanistan
withdrawal, he must make clear in his
phone conversation with Putin that
a NATO response won’t be limited to
economic sanctions.
‘The Beatles: Get Back’ leaves me wanting more
Peter Jackson has fulfi lled my
dream as a nearly lifelong fan of The
Beatles, and I’m furious at the man
for doing it.
Jackson has whetted my ap-
petite, but it’s an insatiable hunger
that neither he, nor anyone else, can
ever begin to satisfy.
Little wonder, then, that I harbor
a certain antagonism for the director
despite my gratitude for the gift he
has bestowed on all fans, the com-
mitted and the casual, of this most
famous, and best, of all rock groups.
I am, to be clear, indulging in
hyperbole by claiming to be angry at
Jackson.
Disappointed, sure.
But that’s not Jackson’s fault.
And my regrets in no way dimin-
ish what he has accomplished with
his nearly eight-hour documentary,
“The Beatles: Get Back,” which
debuted over three consecutive days
starting on Thanksgiving.
It was a revelation.
Watching it was one of those
experiences that so drastically
revamps your thoughts about some-
thing familiar that, in the minutes
and the hours of afterglow you can’t
be quite certain that your subcon-
scious hasn’t presented you with a
particularly vivid dream.
“Get Back” is also a milestone
in the history of a band to which
millions of words, and thousands of
images, have already been devoted.
I’m not sure I’ve ever sat for so
long looking at a television and been
so utterly unaware of the time pass-
ing, of how the quality of the light
streaming through the windows had
changed since I sat down.
To write that I was engrossed in
this documentary fails to convey the
level of absorption.
I have in the intervening days
listened to several of my favorite
Beatles-related podcasts, all of them
hosted by people whose knowledge
of the group is so encyclopedic
that my own, by comparison, is
that of the second-grader against
the amassed wisdom of a tenured
professor.
And even these experts, who I
expected would quibble with Jack-
son on the sorts of pedantic details
that interest only the most insular of
snobs, were, in some cases, moved to
tears by what they had watched.
Jackson assembled his documen-
tary from 50-some hours of fi lm, and
something like 150 hours of audio
recordings, all made during January
1969 while The Beatles were work-
ing on the project titled “Get Back.”
The initial plan — egregiously
optimistic, as it turned out — was
to record John, Paul, George and
Ringo as they worked on songs for a
new album and also prepared for a
TV special and their fi rst live public
performance since August 1966.
That’s when The Beatles, fatigued
by the demands of touring, and
feeling stifl ed by the inability to even
hear themselves play against the
cacophony made by thousands of
hysterical fans, stopped performing
concerts.
They gave up the stage for the
recording studio.
At the London studio owned by
their record company, EMI, The
Beatles, with the able assistance
of producer George Martin, as-
sembled the densely layered songs
that made up 1967’s “Sgt. Pepper’s
Lonely Hearts Club Band,” “Magical
Mystery Tour” and, the following
year, the two-LP “The Beatles” — far
better known as the White Album.
JAYSON
JACOBY
But the January 1969 sessions,
which started at Twickenham
Studios and then moved to The
Beatles’ own Apple Corp. studio,
were different.
The idea, aptly expressed in the
title of Paul McCartney’s song, “Get
Back,” was that the group would
eschew the studio trickery that
enlivened such tunes as Lennon’s
“Strawberry Fields Forever” for the
more basic approach they used to
record earlier albums.
Which is to have the four musi-
cians in one room, playing together.
This is precisely what Jackson
gives us.
For hours, in glorious, rich color,
with high-fi delity audio.
“The Beatles: Get Back” is not
a glimpse into the creative process.
We don’t get brief looks behind the
curtain.
There is no curtain.
The experience is immersive,
almost bewilderingly so.
We are invited into the studio, so
close to these artists that it seems
we ought to be able to smell the tea
and the cigarette smoke (an entire
fi eld’s worth of tobacco goes up in
ashes in this documentary; it’s a
wonder that lung cancer didn’t get
them all), to feel the reverberations
of Ringo’s kick drum.
Among the magical aspects of
music is that someone must create
its melodies by employing the rela-
tively modest palette of 12 notes.
(I don’t mean to shortchange the
lyrics, of course — John, Paul and
George certainly didn’t.)
And it seems to me that all music
fans must at some point ponder how
certain of their favorite songs came
to be. This yearning surely must be
greater for The Beatles than for any
other group.
It was, then, riveting to watch, for
instance, as McCartney introduced
not only to his bandmates, but in ef-
fect to the world, songs such as “Let
It Be” and “Get Back.”
These tunes are ingrained in our
culture after half a century that it
can seem — and in particular for
someone like me, born in 1970, the
same year The Beatles broke up —
that they have always existed.
Except now I have seen what
amounts to their births.
I have watched McCartney
extract those peerless melodies from
his fertile mind, his fi ngers play-
ing across the frets of his bass or
the keys of a grand piano with the
carefree casualness unique to true
genius.
And yet, even as I marveled at
the effortless musicality of each of
these men, even as I appreciated
even more than before the scale
of their talent, paradoxically they
seemed so much more human and
less like fi ctional, which is to say
mythical, characters.
This, perhaps more than
anything else, is Jackson’s greatest
achievement.
By immersing viewers in the
humanity (and the humor) of these
four men he has, it seems to me,
actually embellished their already
extravagant legend.
I still marvel at what they cre-
ated, still feel intense gratitude that
their songs exist, available at any
time to enrich my life as only the
fi nest works of art can.
But now I have also seen them
at work.
And work it surely was, their
toil no less because they were as-
sembling songs rather than, say,
buildings.
I have shared, in a small way,
their joy at their own creations, and
I believe anything that makes a
person feel closer to the art he loves
can only enhance that love.
Which brings me back to my beef
with the esteemed Mr. Jackson.
As I watched, and reveled in,
“The Beatles: Get Back,” I was un-
able to banish the thought, hopeless
though I knew it to be, of what it
would be like to watch The Beatles
put together what to me are their
greatest songs and albums.
Many of the tunes included in
“Get Back” ended up on the 1970
record titled “Let It Be.”
It’s a fi ne album.
But to my ear it falls short of at
least fi ve others — “Rubber Soul”
from 1965, the aforementioned “Sgt.
Pepper’s” and the White Album, “Ab-
bey Road” from 1969, and the great-
est of them all, 1966’s “Revolver.”
Alas, none of those recording ses-
sions, or any others in The Beatles’
career, was documented, aside from
an occasional snippet of fi lm or still
photographs.
“The Beatles: Get Back” must,
then, remain unique.
I am eternally grateful to have
had even that singular experience.
But I’ll never stop wondering
what it would have been like to
watch the creation of a masterpiece.
Jayson Jacoby is editor of the
Baker City Herald.