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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Friday, May 20, 2005

ENDING THE PARTIES AT THE STATE CAPITAL

...I have absolutely no idea what to make of this: the Oregon Senate, on a relatively bipartisan vote, passed Senate Bill 161, which would end party labels in all the top state-level elected offices by making just all kinds of posts from the governorship to legislative positions non-partisan. This would be a first in the nation, outdoing even Nebraska in the number of state government positions for which party affiliation would not be listed. It is not thought that the Republican-dominated House, unlike the Democrat-dominated Senate, will even entertain the proposal, and that doesn't surprise me a bit...

...there are all sorts of egalitarian-sounding reasons that can be offered for such a change, but faithful advocates of the traditions and values of the two-party system must be laying in dark rooms right now with cool wet washcloths on their foreheads. The idea of robbing the power of the parties and lobbyists has a certain attractiveness to it; witness the unhappiness of the Deschutes County Republican Party over Ben Westlund's sponsorship of a civil union bill in the legislature (Westlund, by the bye, voted for this nonpartisanship bill). It would seem to be somewhat difficult, however, to totally remove the influence of state parties from the mix without marching all the county party officials of both parties onto Greyhound buses and wishing them good luck and a good life in their new homes in Havre, Montana. Another obvious concern would be that the absence of party structure could create a legislature of constantly shifting coalitions functioning with all the grace and comity normally seen in places like Greece. It is an interesting proposition, but given the desperate hunger with which the Republican party has tried to capture control of all the levers of Oregon state government in order to more effectively dictate to the people of the state how they are going to lead their lives (Republicans, and Oregon Republicans in particular, being powerfully interesting in making sure that the state's citizens conduct their private lives in a manner that meets with their approval), it is extremely unlikely, courtesy of the Oregon House, that we will need to bother ourselves with worrying how this Senate proposal would work itself out in practice....
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:25 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, May 18, 2005

REFLECTING ON THE 25TH

...it's 8:32 a.m. PDT right...

...now...

...and I thought that would be the most fitting time to begin typing. This morning it is raining, occasionally heavily in Central Oregon; twenty-five years ago it was a beautiful sunny Sunday morning that cried out for a bike ride around the small town of Battleground, Washington. And it was right about now, just about 8:40, that I looked to the north and then looked again when it registered in my brain that I couldn't see Mt. St. Helens 30 or so miles away when I had clearly seen it just a few minutes before. I began to make out the frosted edges of what appeared to be a cloud plume rising up impossibly high into the sky above where the mountain should be. I never before or after that day rode that old 10-speed Schwinn as fast as I pedalled to get back to my place in the upscale trailer park in which I lived at the time (lawns, man, and landscaping...of a sort; paved streets and carports). I turned on my TV, screaming and beating on it for the 15 more minutes it took for one of the Portland stations to break in on Sunday morning programming to report that "something seems to be happening" at Mt. St. Helens. "Look out the f..king WINDOW, you moron!", I shrieked at the unlistening news anchor fella, who looked as though his plans for the day hadn't included either being up that early or sitting in the studio...

...and so began a day that ended 57 lives and sent those of many others caroming off in odd unpredictable directions that they never could have guessed if you had posed the question on May 17, 1980. Curmudgeonly old Harry Truman and his lodge full of cats - along with all the other recreation-based businesses, a Forest Service work center comprised of a bunch of cool old buildings that used to be Spirit Lake Ranger Station, a campground, more than 50 recreational cabins, and the pristinely beautiful Spirit Lake itself - were gone. One hundred fifty square miles of forested landscape - including half of my assigned work area - lay flattened by blast effect or fried by pyroclastic flows or washed away by lahars (mudflows) from the melted glacial snow on the mountains flanks or just plain buried under a couple of feet of fresh volcanic ash. Downstream homeowners on the Toutle and Cowlitz Rivers stepping outside to get the Sunday paper found the paper box, the road, and pretty much everything else between them and the river was gone, having unexpectedly been replaced by a churning chocolate maelstrom of mud, broken trees, shatters buildings, chunks of bridges, and other odd pieces of flotsam. The transition in realities was abrupt and brutal. On that first day, two coworker friends and I packed an enormous quantity of beer and chips out into a field behind my trailer park to watch the show and become gloriously drunk. The next morning, a tall burly Washington State Patrolman at a roadblock found himself listening to three poorly dressed, obviously hung-over hippy-types in a ratty old pickup trying to convince him that they worked at the federal land management office just down the road inside the newly-designated closure area (we didn't dress for success, we dressed to crawl through brush out in the woods all day; that was our job but it didn't lend itself to creating a recruitment poster image of Smokey's ideal "agency man"). It's amazing how suddenly a federal driver's license can start to look so amateurish and fakey when you're trying to convince someone that it's legitimate identification. Had we known what our work-life would hold for the next few years, we may well have not presented such a spirited case to get to work that day. Suffice it to say, from a purely selfish ego-centric point of view, one volcanic eruption per career is sufficient...

...I've tended to think of the St. Helens eruption as being something personally of my own, which is an easy trap to fall into a few hundred miles removed from the scene and in a place where, for those who live here, it was something on the evening news and not a lengthy personal reality. In truth, however, thousands of lives were changed to greater or lesser degrees, whether it be the small band of federal employees who dealt with the eruption and its aftermath, the woods workers caught up in the eruption or its aftermath, the downstream residents to the west who's appreciation of the river outside the door changed dramatically, the families of those who were lost, or the residents of eastern Washington, who in many cases found themselves plunged without warning and without even initially knowing why into a hellish "midnight at noon" scenario full of sand raining down from the dark sky to accumulate up to a foot deep in some areas and billowing dust clouds whose unknown glassy abrasiveness destroyed vehicle engines within a couple of miles. The 25th anniversary of the eruption is notable and fascinating for lots of people, but for those who experienced those direct impacts, this anniversary divisible by five is a suitable enough moment to reflect on the experience and where we ended up as a result of having lived it...

Photo's courtesy of University of San Diego History Dept., Weyerhaeuser Corp, and US Geological Survey, respectively.
Posted by: Jack K. / 3:29 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, May 17, 2005

RULES TRIUMPH OVER REASON

...I won't be making sport of the administrative staff of Kingwood High School in Houston, TX, because they are Texans. Even though the temptation is overpowering, the simple fact is that various sorts of bureaucratically amuck nonsense spills out of schools all across the nation; recall if you will the dust-up in Puyallup, Washington, last fall barring witches costumes on elementary school children to protect the sensibilities of local Wiccans. The well-meaning folks at Kingwood High has wandered off onto the same slippery terrain where reason has no mass and logic can't find footing. For whatever reason they have a rule that eligibility for the top-10 academic spots for graduating seniors (which apparently is something of a prize) requires having been registered for class by the 20th day of the student's junior year. And then we have the case of Karen Scherr...

...rules are rules, quoth the school. It's staff seems to live in the sort of 'zero tolerance' world that would suggest you might be better advised to run off to join the circus rather than confess to an overdue library book. No matter that this young woman has been enrolled every other year since kindergarten and was undoubtedly seen around the halls by school officials for the better part of two school years after the 20th day of her junior year; years of disgustingly superb academic excellence (I say this as a person who didn't come close, despite my parents' exhortations) - including the effort to keep up on school work during her treatment - was granted the same respect and recognition as if she had spent half her time doing joints out behind the football bleachers and the other half doodling cheap animae knockoffs in her notebooks. One can only imagine the bureaucracy involved in getting a child back into school after a sick day (legal representation may be involved). The idea of an "honorary valedictorian" award is silly enough, but what is truly sad is how much better an understanding her fellow students have of the situation than do the alleged adults running the show. The students know that anything but the real thing is just a joke, a meaningless honor stripped bare of meaning because of the goofy intransigence and inept decision-making processes of the school staff. Perhaps the worst news for Texas' ruling party is that these students are being exposed to the sorts of formative experiences that turn people into liberals; they aren't objecting to personally being treated wrong in the traditional conservative way, they're objecting to unfair treatment being directed at another person...

...at least the school is according the students the privilege of this one last lesson before they spread their wings and leave the nest: Never underestimate the stupid venal rigidity of people who have the power to make rules. This lesson may not necessarily make better people out of these students (you know, by providing them a "how not to" model for how to move through life), but at least it will help plant those first promising seeds of cynicism that they will need to get by out there in that cold cruel world...
Posted by: Jack K. / 1:46 PM 0 comments

Sunday, May 15, 2005

SHAKING THAT THANG IN TEXAS

...as a flag-loving, gun-owning, God-fearing, patriotic American citizen, I always try to engage in an activity practiced by most of my fellow like minded Americans of trying to find some way to make fun of Texas. Texas, as most of us non-Texans realize, is a state that has taken a military defeat, a few oil wells, a TV series, and a handful of successful NFL seasons and multiplied that meager fare into a sense of self-worth that is all out of proportion to any actual contribution to the history, culture, or construct of the United States. It's always good sport, therefore, to find the random needle now and again with which to prick that particular bubble. Unfortunately, the Texas State Senate appears to be on to us, however, because they are refusing to take up the "sexy cheerleader" bill passed with so much local acclaim in the State House. This is a crushing blow for true patriots in the other 49 states, and there is nothing partisan about it. The bill, which would apparently require that female high school cheerleaders wear multiple loose layers of mens work clothing and stand still with their hands at their sides while conducting cheers using only Minnie Mouse vocal inflections, was actually proposed by a Democrat and not one of Tom Delay's twisted little minions, but that doesn't matter because the State Senate leaders said that there's enough important stuff to get done that this little bit of legislative censorship probably won't really have a place in the agenda....

...aside from the fact that certain randy old state legislators will have to find some other way to combat the stirring in their loins that the sight of girls young enough to be their grandchildren leaping and strutting around the court or field seems to whip up, this refusal by the Texas Senate to take up this not-so-very-important but humorously vital piece of legislation just simply robs us true-blue Americans of another opportunity to render to the state of Texas the degree of respect that it truly deserves. This is a tragic day for America...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:27 PM 0 comments

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