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CLINTON ST. QUARTERLY vol. 3. NO. 4 HELLO AGAIN Winter 1981 STAFF CONTENTS Co-Editors Jim Blashfield Lenny Dee Peggy Lindquist David Milholland Design and Production Jim Blashfield Production Asst. & Proofing David Milholland Ad Production Peggy Lindquist Dana Hoyle Ad Sales Denny Chericone Lenny Dee Pat Sumich Aide-de-camp Randy Shutt Typesetting Cathy Siegner Publisher’s Friend Thanks—Archetype Camerawork Publisher’s Friend Jeff Jacobs Contributing Artists Steve Blackburn Dennis Cunningham Dana Hoyle Nancy Norman Contributing Photographers Mark Albanese Eric Edwards Steve Johnson Milholland Archives Pete Sukalac Ragnars Veilands Thanks be to thee Derek Abrams Tom Clark Yvonne Cooper RAIN Magazine Stan Sitnick John Wanberg Advertisers call 222-6039 The big blow...Friday, November 13,1981 One of the struggles precipitated by the Reagan "mandate” is over the tremendous resources of our part of the country. Though our corporate friends have been overcutting our timber for years (with USDA acquiescence) and our hydropower and water reserves have been consistently sold for pennies on the dollar, people have generally gone along with these practices because they were seen as providing jobs and buoying up the economy in general. Now with hard times upon us, the screws are being turned to free up even more of our resource base to hasty, unconscientious operators who see the Northwest as simply another stop on a global hop from one set of easy pickings to the next. Even such long-term Northwest companies as Fred Meyer, Jant- zen, and Evans Products are now being bought up by outside investors, Georgia Pacific is dodging southward again, and others (Weyerhaeuser, Boeing, Tektronix), large and small, are equally subject to this preying of footloosecapital. This corporate maneuvering is the first round of Reaganomics, a waiting game until the Watt strategy and other elements of the "get the government off our backs” program can be implemented. Where does that leave us, a continent away from the decision centers? Perhaps in a position not so much different from our Central American neighbors, now struggling to obtain their autonomy, as we might like to think. This issue of the Clinton St. Quarterly is largely dedicated to an exploration of regionalism, what we are and what we must do to change the course of our history. This may all sound lofty and unattainable, or unnecessary, or visionary, but consider the alternatives. Exploitation by distant capital, a decaying (or abandoned) system of social services, jingoism and militarist adventurism once again in the ascendency...isn’t it time for serious reconsideration and change, for as Bill Williams says in his article, we are now "simply projecting the present on down the line. ” The last issue, for the record, was Vol. 3, No. 3 (not No. 2 as it stated) making this the 12th CSQ and the completion of our third year of publication. In that period we have been called every epithet under the sun, complimented equally highly, received awards, sold hundreds of subscriptions (to a FREE paper) and generally worked hard to make this a valuable and entertaining periodical. If you support what we're doing, let our advertisers (and potential advertisers) know your sentiments, send those subscriptions (for yourself and distant friends) our way, and pass this on to other interested souls. Happy Holidays. Cover, Jim Blashfield; Insert Photo, Mark Albanese Radicals and Regionalism, William Appleman W illiams.......................... 4 Bob Benson, Patron of our Place, Richard Plagge..............................4 The Regional Motive, Wendell Barry................ 6 Tillamook, Walt Curtis... .9 Seattle and Portland, Martha Gies............ 12 A New Wave in Santa Monica, Micheale Williams................. 13 Farewell, Monroe Doctrine, Carlos Fuentes.......18 On Carlos Fuentes, David Milholland.....19 Future is Now Shopper, Jim Blashfield.........23 The Flight of the X-51, Albert Drake....27 River Beds, Alan Brown.. 37 Sports and Other Ramblings, Lenny Dee. 41 Angst!, Lynda Barry....... 41 In Pursuit of Sun Ra, Robert Hughes, Ragnars Veilands....... 44 The Clinton St. Quarterly is published free to the public by the Clinton St. Theatre, 2522 SE Clinton, Portland, OR, 97202. Unless otherwise noted, all contents Copyright © 1981, Clinton St. Quarterly. , CSQ RETRACTS In the Summer 1981 issue of the Clinton Street Quarterly, we included an interview with Jeffrey Frederick which made reference to a Latvian wedding. Unfortunately the article contained some inaccuracies and caused embarrassment to the wedding party involved. It should have been clear to the reader, as it was to us, that any misconduct described in the article was attributable only to Mr. Frederick and the members of the band and was not intended to refer to the conduct of the wedding party or to reflect upon the behavior of Latvians in general. The statement that an elderly member of the wedding party was dead and any impression that the members of the wedding party did not participate in the party that followed the wedding are not factually supported and we regret their publication. Clinton St. Quarterly 3
RADICALS AND REGIONALISM William Appleman Williams, whose article “Empire as a Way of Life” appeared in the summer Clinton Street Quarterly, recently published an appeal for regional resistance In the September 5, 1981 The Nation. In It he invokes the example of Spencer Kimball, president of the Mormon Church, who In May delivered a “devastating proclamation against the MX missile system,” and against the arms race which has swept up the nations of the earth. While the Reagan Administration understandably dismissed Kimball as a spokesman for a vested Interest, Williams Is troubled that left-liberals and democratic radicals had no different response. Williams states: “I would agree that many of them (Mormons) are sexist businessmen who also entertain and act upon other unpleasant prejudices; but I think that It Is a serious mistake to deny or discount the reality of their commltment...we can learn something Important from the way the Mormons have integrated moral, ecological, pragmatic and communitarian values in a clear policy for a specific region” In the following article, Professor Williams explores the roots of radicalism, and why the radical alternative has lost political currency in today’s America. He challenges us to Imagine a different America, and set about building it on our own home turf. by William Appleman Williams one of the central reasons that the United States is in serious trouble involves the unhappy truth that American radicalism has reached a dead end. A few keen observers understood that point as long ago as the draconian recession of 1937: they EGIONAH Cont. on page 6 Bob Benson: Patron of Our Place by Richard Plagge two huge volcanic cones (Mount Jefferson and Mount Hood) punctuate the distant skyline; beneath uring the middle years of the Great Depression, although they were both very poor, Bob Benson and his father bought 150 acres of near-wilderness land on the southwest slope of the Tualatin Mountains, 15 miles northwest of Portland, Oregon. Bob says he is embarrassed to tell how little they paid for it. Bob still lives on this land, alone now, in the house his father build during World War II, while Bob was away clerking for the army. The outbuildings are crumbling, vines have overgrown the remains of a picket fence which must have once squared off a pleasant little front yard. Just as his father did, Bob runs a few cattle and sells a little firewood—he is still very poor. The land, however, is worth a fortune. From a certain hilly clearing on Bob's land there is a dazzling view: perceived that modern radicalism had exhausted its 19th century capital. American radicals must face and answer the naughty question: do they want to manage an essentially unchanged corporate capitalist political economy as little more than especially sensitive and responsible administrators, or do they want to change the world. If the latter, then I suggest that changing the world Bob Benson them, 30 miles adross the rich soil of the the Tualatin Valley, the Chehalem Mountains snake their mild way across the low horizon. hinges on breaking the existing system into human-sized components of Space, Time, Place and Scale. ■ he cornerstone of my argu- I ment is this paradox: the essence and thrust of 20th century American radicalism has been defined by three 19th century giants—Napoleon Bonaparte, Abraham Lincoln and Karl Marx. Whatever their disagreements, and we mistakenly educated to emphasize the differences between them, those prodigious individuals agreed on these essentials: On Place: the nation state. On Time: the Present defined as the Future. On Space: the world. On Scale: individual human beings as corporate members of various nation states competing to unify the globe. Within that framework, Lincoln’s determination to create a nationalistic and corporate body politic validated Bonaparte’s redefinition of the French Revolution. Nationalism became the ideal and pragmatic way of achieving liberty, equality, and fraternity—or in the American idiom, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. No nation, no viable social system. Nationalistic order or chaos. Evolution from local and regionalism to nationalism— or devolution into anarchy. Once we grasp the impact of Bonaparte (say on Jefferson) and ' Lincoln (say on the Populists), we can see that Marx provided a radical version of an inherently conservative proposition. Do not misunderstand me: Marx deserves all his acclaim. He did the very best anyone could have done within the assumptions shared by his This valley—where, until the epidemics of the 1830s killed most of them, the Tualatin Indians hunted deer and gathered camas roots, where the very first Oregon Trail covered wagons finally came to a halt—is presently one of the fastest- growing areas in the state. Ambitious suburbanites—who have turned the eastern end of the valley into a typical late-twentieth century jumble of jammed two-lane roads and bleakly similar franchise outlets—have made it clear to Bob that selling his land is a duty. Why then does he remain this odd figure, part awkward hermit, part old-world gentleman, who shuffles through spiffy Beaverton shopping malls in rumpled coat and wrinkled pants, when, with a quick land deal, he could transform himself into...a successful man? ob was born in 1915 in Portland, where his parents owned generation about Place, Time, Space, and Scale. Marx’ radicalism was defined by his insistence that the majority—the ordinary folk—should define the terms of corporate citizenship in a nation state creating a better future for themselves and -the world. But the inherent logic of ‘‘Workers of the World Unite” leads inexorably to a super-state organized on Adam Smith’s (that most conservative of political economists) division of labor. Granted the premises, no one could have done better. Nationalism becoming internationalism must be defined from the bottom up or it would be an elitist nightmare. From Marx’ perspective, that was the only conceivable way to transform the nation state from a corporate monster into an international community. Marx proved correct about the ruthless, elegant simplicity of the logic of capitalist industrialization. It is not only, perhaps not even primarily, that the bank controls the terms of trade with the barn. The metropolis sucks people out of their integrated environment and spews them into the morass of the ghetto becoming slum becoming sluburb. The capitalist metropolis is a social vacuum cleaner. It yanks people from their human Place, Time, Space, and Scale. Even more: the sustained and accelerating centralization within the metropolis distorts and even denies any sense- even memory—of a humane set of relationships. But the question is not whether cities are good or evil. The issues concern their size, function, character, and their relationship a rooming house at East Grand and Davis. His earliest memory is of holding his mother’s hand as he toddled across the Sullivan’s Gulch Viaduct. In the early '20s, wanting to leave urban life behind, dreaming of "five acres and independence,” the family bought a small house a muddy half-mile from the railroad stop at Valley Vista, a tiny community located about halfway between where Bob lives now and the notorious Rock Creek Tavern. Bob’s word for Valley Vista’s educational edifice, the two-room Rock Creek School which he attended through sixth grade, is “palatial”: it had a concrete-lined basement, a furnace, a piano, and even a P.T.A. Bob’s parents tried to supplement their income with various ventures: chickens one season, goats the next. Nothing proved to be very lucrative. But then it wasn’t a very lucrative town; to be well-off in Valley Vista Cont. on page 31 4 Clinton St. Quarterly Photograph by Steve Johnson
RADICALS AND Cont. from REGIONALISM p a 9e 4 20th century radicals followed Marx in becoming victims of his fascinating combination of capitalist assumptions and socialist utopianism. The assumptions lulled him into neglecting the rigors of the dialectical process, and the projectionist utopianism led him to believe that a change of class at the center of the metropolis would change the inherent nature of the system. Unhappily, it was wrong and wrong again. For if capitalism leads to increasingly destructive demographic imbalance, and the super-centralization of power, then surely a rigorous radicalism is defined by decentralization and the diffusion of power. And if capitalism moves inexorably toward global hegemony, then surely such a radicalism is defined by regionalism in the international arena. To change rulers without changing the basic structure of the political economy can at best serve only to ameliorate the failures, costs, and limits of life within such a system. What begins as socialism drifts off into a leftish New Dealism or into a kind of nationalized syndicalism of interest groups. And, at worst, we forget about socialism and concern ourselves with surviving within capitalism. But socialism is not more: socialism is different and better. The point is not to damn Marx. The point is to be Marxist about 20th century radicalism. Marx did the magical things: He explained the implacable logic of the capitalist political economy, and he taught us to ask the right questions. And he was adamant about human beings making their own history.I I ny consequential radical alternative must be defined by those primary variables, Time, Place, Space and Scale. Let us put our minds to examining that proposition. TIME. Politely, we 20th century radicals are aging. Hence we must win time in the short run so that our children have long range time to refine our thoughts—and add their own wisdom. Hence we must concentrate our immediate political effort on stopping the momentum of egoistic, nationalistic confrontation which leads on to a nuclear war which will destroy our children and grandchildren. If we fail, we will destroy time. Winning time is the strategic imperative. Radicals must build a constituency on the cornerstone of Time. PLACE. The tactical and pragmatic politics of Time is Place. Given Limited Time, radicals must focus their energy in their local and regional Place. Specifically, radicals in the Pacific Northwest must define and evoke a movement which says to centralized power that egoistic and mindless nuclear confrontation will have to proceed without support from a significant proportion of the population and productive capacity of this nation. We cannot rouse a continent by marches on Washington; but we can shake The Establishment by stopping Boeing, Hanford, and related military bases and operations. Here we can learn much from the nuclear-free Europe movement. Those millions of people, by no means all of them radicals, are saying NO: they are saying that they refuse to acquiesce in the centralized and arbitrary definition of their Time and Place, their Space and Scale, as a ‘theater’ for so-called limited nuclear warfare. Even the lead editorial of the Weekly Manchester Guardian of April 26, 1981 grants the central point: “the orthodox creed for a generation" has produced this result. "The armouries have never been so gigantic. The talks to reduce them have never been so ineffectual. ” That brings us right back to the old homestead. For surely the Pacific Northwest is as much a theater for limited nuclear war as Western or Eastern Europe. Boeing and Hanford are unquestionably as important as any Russian centers west of the Urals. So let us play seriously at this game of ‘limited’ theater nuclear warfare. First we exchange reciprocal missiles into Western and Eastern Europe. Then we launch some from England into high priority targets in the Ukraine, or perhaps further north. (There’s a gentlemen’s agreement, of course, to preserve historic monuments— living as well as limestone, and managerial as well as marble—in Moscow and Washington.) So in the logic of linkage, we lose Seattle and Hanford for Leningrad and Murmansk. Granted: it is all very civilized. Nothing so crude as instantaneous mass suicide. If we radicals take all that seriously, as we should, then we can perhaps recognize the importance of organizing each American ‘theater’ just as Western Europe is being organized. The issue is no longer a matter of ‘Hell, NO, We won’t GO!’ It involves the plans and the willingness to close down operations that make each and J^egional Motive I notice a prevalent tendency among my contemporaries to think of existing conditions as if they were not only undeniable, but unassailable as well, as if the highest use of intelligence were not the implementation of vision but merely the arrangement of a cheap settlement. by Wendell Berry /n thinking about myself as a writer whose work and whose every region a ‘theater’ for limited nuclear war. Beyond that, American radicals must redefine the nature of the unthinkable. The unthinkable as nuclear war was always a shell game without any pea. It has never been unthinkable. American leaders thought about the bomb, built the bomb, and used the bomb—twice. They threatened to use it again more times than we know. Our ignorance defines our impotence. The truly unthinkable is to change the system which has brought us to the brink of collective capitalist suicide. The League night in Richland, Washington life have been largely formed in relation to one place, I am often in the neighborhood of the word “regional.” And almost as often as I get into its neighborhood I find that the term very quickly becomes either an embarrassment or an obstruction. For I do not know any word that is more sloppily defined in its usage, or more casually understood. There is, for instance, a “regionalism” based upon pride, which behaves like nationalism. And there is a “regionalism” based upon condescension, which specializes in the quaint and the eccentric and the picturesque, and which behaves in general like an exploitive industry. These varieties, and their kindred, have in common a dependence on false mythology that tends to generalize and stereotype the life of a region. That is to say it tends to impose false literary or cultural generalizations upon false geographical generalizations. unhappy truth is that American radicals, along with American liberals and conservatives, have always lusted for saving the world. We have no tradition of leaving other people alone in order to find ourselves. We have always defined our purpose as bringing them up to our level. What nonsense, what arrogance, what lack of any sense of ourselves. We have failed to imagine, let alone realize, any conception of how to live. We are terrified of the present and so flee ever forward into the future. We have no comprehension of space and scale. The regionalism that I adhere to could be defined simply as local life aware of itself. It would tend to substitute for the myths and stereotypes of a region a particular knowledge of the life of the place one lives in and intends to continue to live in. It pertains to living as much as to writing, and it pertains to living before it pertains to writing. The motive of such regionalism is the awareness that local life is intricately dependent, for its quality but also for its continuance, upon local knowledge. Some useful insights into the nature and the value of the sort of regionalism I am talking about can be found in the world of Thomas Hardy. In The Woodlanders, comparing Dr. Fitzpiers’ relation to Little Hintock with that of the natives, Hardy writes: Winter in a solitary house in the country, without society, is 6 Clinton St. Quarterly Photograph by Mark Albanese
SPACE AND SCALE. These two elements of a radical alternative are so closely related that they must be explored together. First, they establish the importance of creating a demographic and economic balance, and of defining social equity as the quality of life. Now the quantity of disposable income (to use the contemporary capitalist idiom) is a legitimate if desperately limited bench mark for evaluating the performance of any political economy. That is the essence of what capitalism calls the standard of living. It has become abundantly clear, as we have watched the MOSKLFTS CASIO tolerable, nay, even enjoyable and delightful, given...old association—an almost exhaustive biographical or historical acquaintance with every object... within the observer’s horizon. And he goes on to say that even though a place “may have beauty, grandeur, salubrity, convenience," it still cannot be comfortably inhabited by people “if it lacks memories." And in a letter to H. Rider Haggard about the effects of the migration of the English working people, Hardy wrote that, “there being no continuity of environment in their lives, there is no continuity of information, the names, stories, and relics of one place being speedily forgotten under the incoming facts of the next." From the perspective of the environmental crisis of our own time, I think we have to add to Hardy’s remarks a further realization: if the land is made fit for human habitation by memory and “old association," it is also true decay of a once superb railway system, for example, that radicals have all too easily accepted the capitalist definition of the standard of living grounded in individual income statistic as a basis for thinking about a socialist political economy. Even if one agrees that the concept of individual disposable income is a useful tool for measuring the performance of any system, it nevertheless remains true that disposable income involves social as well as individual pleasures. And radicals have not made it clear enough— not at all clear enough—that taxes spent for first-rate that by memory and association men are made fit to inhabit the land. At present our society is almost entirely nomadic, without the comfort or the discipline of such memories, and it is moving about on the face of this continent with a mindless destructiveness, of substance and of meaning and of value, that makes Sherman’s march to the sea look like a prank. Without a complex knowledge of one’s place, and without the faithfulness to one’s place on which such knowledge depends, it is inevitable that the.place will be used carelessly, and eventually destroyed. Without such knowledge and faithfulness, moreover, the culture of a country will be superficial and decorative, functional only insofar as it may be a symbol of prestige, the affectation of an elite or “in” group. Aipd so I look upon the sort of regionalism that I am talking about not just as a recurrent literary phenomenon, but as a necessity .A.merican radicals must face and answer the naughty question: do they want to manage an essentially unchanged corporate capitalist political economy as little more than especially sensitive and responsible administrators, or do they want to change the world. education (for all ages) and public services from sanitation to transport are likewise disposable income. When people increasingly choose to dispose of more of their income on private rather than social purchases, the quality of life begins to decline along an exponential curve. And, having failed to develop a clear radical conception of the quality of life, and advance it with clarity and vigor, radicals forfeit a great opportunity to confront capitalism with a devastating critique. Our failure to date, I suggest, lies in the particular kind of centralized nationalism and internationalism that radicals inherited and accepted from Bonaparte, Lincoln and Marx. So long as radicals continue to operate—thinking as well as practicing—within that idiom, they will become increasingly irrelevant because they have ceased to be radical. of civilization and of survival. / notice a prevalent tendency among my contemporaries to think of existing conditions as if they were not only undeniable, but unassailable as well, as if the highest use of intelligence were not the implementation of vision but merely the arrangement of a cheap settlement. It would appear that any fact, by virtue of being a fact, must somehow be elevated to the status of Eternal Truth. Thus if we have become a nation of urban nomads, at the expense of human society and at the world’s expense, the common anticipation seems to be that, knocking around in this way, we will sooner or later evolve an urban nomadic civilization that will correct the present destructiveness of urban nomadism. I do not believe it. I da not believe it even though I am sure that my disbelief will be thought by many people to be impractical and unrealistic. I certainly am aware that there have been great nomadic civilizations. But it seems to me that those were evolved in response to natural conditions of climate and soil, whereas our nomadic civilization has evolved in response to an economy that is based upon a deliberate wastefulness. That a desert should produce a nomadic life is perfectly understandable. I l l Hence I want to propose an alternative approach and a different agenda. My basic proposition is this: American radicals must confront centralized nationalism and internationalism and begin to shake it apart, break it down, and imagine a humane and socially responsible alternative. It simply will not do to define radicalism as changing the guard of the existing system. Therefore these propositions. 1. Radicals must initiate and sustain, in each local, state, and regional arena, a dialogue (including running for office) about how to define and implement a balance between resources and population, between town and country, and within each of those elements of the political economy. In that process, radicals must insist, as Jane J. Mansbridge, author of Beyond Adversary Democracy, has so powerfully argued, upon moving to create a human scale participatory democracy. From my experience, many people would like to reassert control over their community affairs. But given the radical disdain of such fundamental politics, they have ceded power to irrelevant conservatives. 2. That dialogue must be explicitly pointed toward restructuring American society into a confederation of regional governments based upon proportional representation and a parliamentary system within each region and the overall confederation. The various regions would duly elect representatives (and their minority shadow counterparts—the “loyal" opposition) to a confeder- .ation parliament charged with the That my own section of Kentucky—well wooded, well watered, having had originally the best of soils, and still abundantly fertile—should have produced a race of nomads is simply preposterous. It could have happened only by a series of monumental errors—in land use, in economics, in intellectual fashion. With the urbanization of the country so nearly complete, it may seem futile to the point of madness to pursue an ethic and a way of life based upon devotion to a place and devotion to the land. And yet I do pursue such an ethic and such a way of life, for I believe they hold the only possibility, not just for a decent life, but for survival. And the two concerns—decency and survival—are not separate, but are intimately related. For, as the history of agriculture in the Orient very strongly suggests, it is not the life that is fittest (by which we have meant the most violent) that survives, but rather the life that is most decent—the life that is most generous and wise in its relation to the earth. © 1970 by Wendell Berry abridged from his volume A Continuous Harmony and reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. Clinton St. Quarterly 7
serious question about foreign policy. How does a regional confederation conduct foreign affairs—including providing for the mutual defense? It would do so duty of producing a new basic instrument of government. That constitution would begin with the Bill of Rights and move on to such matters as the common law, Looking across a storage facility at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. sources, and the negotiation and enforcement of inter-regional economic agreements. Once such a constitution was ratified, the confederation parliament would be primarily concerned with handling interregional affairs and the conduct of foreign policy. The creation of such a system would decentralize power, diffuse and drastically reduce the bureaucracy, and—most importantly—create a far more democratic politics. 3. And so we come to foreign policy, as much the bane of radicals as liberals and conservatives. Most radicals have never broken free of the inane conception of foreign policy defined by ‘isolationism’and ‘internationalism. ’ But stated bluntly, the purpose of foreign policy is to enable a culture to proceed with its self- determined development within its legitimate boundaries. Saving the world is neither a rational nor a morally justifiable objective of any society’s foreign policy: it is instead authentic evidence of nationalistic egomania. Which is to say that if, by the force of its self-contained example, any given culture prompts other peoples to emulate its values, procedures and institutions, then it earns no reward beyond the duty to honor even more carefully its principles and practices. It has no right to create an empire in the name of protecting its foster children. Parents, after all, are charged with freeing—not smothering—their offspring. Elementary. Stop arming the bastards and the people will get rid of the bastards. Sum it up this way. Social revolution is not terrorism. At its very worst, social revolution is a desperate attempt to stop terrorism. At its best, social revolution is an effort to create a new set of moral and institutional arrangements designed to make it possible to live more humanely. The outsiders who intervene in social revolutions always lose. It is not so much that the locals ultimately assert their power. It is that the outsiders lose their self- respect. Not all at once. But down the years, over all the dead bodies, the rationalization of empire in the name of freedom kills the soul. That is as true for radicals as it is for liberals and conservatives. 4. But, given all that, there is a F or surely the Pacific Northwest is as much a theater for limited nuclear war as Western or Eastern Europe. Boeing and Hanford are unquestionably as important as any Russian centers west of the Urals...So in the logic of linkage, we lose Seattle and Hanford for Leningrad and Murmansk. structurally by creating a foreign office ever so closely watched over by a shadow foreign office staffed by the elected members of the current regional minority. Here I anticipate the obvious question or objection. The conduct of foreign policy, we have been taught as an article of faith, requires the delegation of power—including the authority to act quickly and forcefully without general consultation. But my reading of history belies that proposition, except and unless the culture is conducting an imperial foreign policy. My understanding of contemporary technology supports my contrariness. Given a radical reconstruction of American society, the local, regional, and continental institutions could discuss and decide all but one issue of foreign policy with time to spare. The exception, of course, is a nuclear Pearl Harbor. And here, particularly during the transition to a new America, I think radicals would have to be ruthless. We would have to speak a simple, blunt truth to the world—be it Russia, China, Arabs, Zionists or whomever. We are making a true revolution. Do not interfere. We will launch an appropriate counterattack on confirmed evidence that you have initiated any assault that threatens the integrity of our revolution. IV ow of course you can ■ w dismiss all of this as Utopian. I am frankly rather more than less inclined to agree with you. There are not today enough Americans, radical or otherwise, ready to confront Bonaparte, Lincoln and Marx. Indeed, someone ought to write an essay about the transformation of the conception of the frontier: from going out in fear and trembling in the hope of creating something different into simply projecting the present on This is an edited version of William Appleman Williams’ article which appeared in democracy, Vol. 1, No. 4—October, 1981. © The Common Good Foundation. NOW SERVING LUNCH AND DINNER discover SU06OW GALLERY 206 SW Stork Portland 221 -0258 Open Monday thru Saturday, 10-5. down the line. That was, it seems to me, the sad nature of John Kennedy’s New Frontier. Probably even pathetic. No imagination at all. But then that strikes me as the sad state of American radicalism. Not only nd imagination, but no conception of Utopia. Face it: the purpose of a radical Utopia is to create a tension in our souls. Our first responsibility as radicals is to create a knowing, individual and then social, that what we are doing is not good enough. Then we must imagine something better. That defines us as people who offer our fellow citizens a meaningful choice about how we can define and live our lives.ee 8 Clinton St. Quarterly Photograph by Mark Albanese
A Little North Coast History TILLAMOOK BY WALT CURTIS III ISTORY is what happened yesterday, or a hundred years ago. Every U second the past disappears behind us leaving ghostly images. Are we making “history" with our lives? Or just walking through them indifferently? We live in an epic place, Oregon and the Pacific Northwest. Many of us don’t realize it. The paraphernalia of the 20th century has occluded our vision. Lately I’ve been researching a little bit of history. Particularly the area of Tillamook County. It’s amazing what went on there. It should have been Killamook, or Killimuck, or Killamox. That’s how Lewis and Clark spelled it. And the Methodist missionary J.H. Frost. In 1853, the locals applied to establish the county as “Tillamook." Maybe it was easier to say. Or the “kill” in the first syllable made them feel guilty? In 190506, Lewis and Clark arrived and estimated the Tillamook Indian population to be 2,000. Bt 1851, the pioneer Warren Vaughn thought there to be fewer than 200 Indians in the area. Smallpox was the main killer, but other white men’s diseases—such as tuberculosis and syphilis—prevailed. They were spread by selling “firewater,” prostitution and other sexual contact. According to the excellent book, Tillamook Indians of the Oregon Coast, written by Sauter and Johnson (Binford and Mort, 1974): "The decline in Illustrations by Dennis Cunningham Clinton St. Quarterly 9
Tillamook culture could probably be pinpointed in 1792 when Captain Robert Gray discovered the Columbia River. This discovery officially started the fur trade of the ‘Boston’ men who sailed around Cape Horn to the Oregon Country for furs, then on to China, to dispose of these pelts..." It’s as though aliens from another universe suddenly arrived. And infected us with extraterrestrial viruses which our immunological systems couldn’t fight off. We earthlings would die like flies, just as the Indians did. Besides the bones, Alpha Centaurians would go about picking up Coca Cola caps. What the hell were these used for? they'd ask. Could they drive the Toyota—their green and greasy silicon webbed fingers on the wheel? Are you capable of harpooning a whale? or of carving a seaworthy canoe out of cedar? The Tillamooks are classified as Coastal Salish. They spoke Salishan, a different language from the Columbia River Chinook with whom they used sign language. The Tillamooks were related to the magnificent totem pole and wood carvers of British Columbia—the Nootka, Tlingit, Haida and the Bella Coola. (For certain visit the Northwest Indian collection at the Portland Art Museum. Pay special attention to the spooky Edward S. Curtis photos of The Winter Festival. The wooden masks are some of the finest art work ever created on the planet.) Four main groups of the Tillamook lived beside Tillamook Bay, Nehalem Bay and River, the Nestucca River and the Siletz. They dug clams, fished, gathered roots and hunted elk and deer. They lived in wood houses on the water. There were three critical periods in an Indian’s life: birth, the acquisition of a guardian spirit and death. A boy in his teens would be sent into the forest alone, with a knife and a blanket, for 10 days. He would fast and remain there until his vision came. If the spirit he saw were a salmon, he would be a fisherman. A woodpecker or beaver, a canoe building. A serpent, a shaman or medicine man. A shaman would heal the sick by giving herbs or driving the evil spirit from the body. Sometimes an Indian’s soul would leave his body and go to the Land of the Dead. The shaman's job was to bring it back...with a soulcatcher, a wooden paddle with designs on it. Shamen would meet at sacred spots and exchange cures with others. At Cape Meare’s is one such spot: the Octopus Tree. We are fortunate indeed to possess many of their oral traditions in unbowdlerized language. The true spirit of a people lives on in their literature. Their dreams, beliefs, sense of humor, sexual fantasies, fears and hopes—all that and more are contained in the myths. The introduction to Nehalem Tillamook Tales speaks of their annual myth cycle: “Tillamooks told myths only in midwinter, approximately during the months of December and January. If stories were told at any other time, it was believed that rain or even more disagreeable consequences would follow. Myths were not dramatized at the winter dances but were told around the firesides in the homes. Only old people were privileged to recount myths. Children and younger persons reclined on mats as they listened. Children were cautioned not to sit when listening lest they grow hunchbacked." Mrs. Clara Pearson, a full-blooded Nehalem speaker, dictated the tales she had heard, mostly from her father, to Elizabeth Jacobs in September of 1934. This story is excerpted from Nehalem Tillamook Tales. “Wild Woman Kills Otter” Crane was always wanting to catch small trout. He had a basket trap. Something had been stealing from his trap. He could not discover the thief. Wild Woman said, “I can catch him.” She went to that basket trap in the night. She watched. Very soon she heard a splashing noise. There the thief came. She saw, "That is Otter! He likes fish. He is the one who has been stealing fish all the time." She killed him and packed him home. She told Crane, "Now you can go get your fish. Here is the one who has been stealing your fish.” She skinned that Otter, she stretched the hide. She said, "I will make a headdress out of that hide.” That Otter was missed at home. His people knew where he had gone, they knew who had killed him. They said, "We will be revenged on her. We will kill her.” They sent a young man to get all the dangerous ones together. They told him, "You go and tell Grizzly Bear to come, get the Panthers, get Wildcat, bring all of the tribe together. Tell them we will have a Winter Dance. Then everybody will come.” Then they invited Wild Woman. They stationed those mean ones like Grizzly Bear at the doors, they told them, "If Wild Woman leaves to go home, grab her and tear her to pieces.” Wild Woman came with her husband Crane. She was wearing that otter-skin headdress. Everyone sang. They took turns singing. After a while it was Wild Woman’s turn to sing. Now she was to sing, and her husband was going to help her. She knew what those people were planning. Now she was going to use her [spirit] power. She sang, He had just entered the trap, he was swimming in the trap, that Otter. As he was coming in, in that basket trap, Otter was swimming. I killed him with my clitoris, With my clitoris I struck him. In that manner Wild Woman claimed that she had made a club of her clitoris and that was the Instrument with which she had killed Otter. The four brothers of that Otter, they felt very badly. She had called that dead Otter by name, the one she herself had killed. Crane was somewhat ashamed. He did not want to mention his wife's clitoris, he did not want to name that with which she had killed Otter. Wild Woman stopped singing. "Oh, ” she said to him, "what is there to be ashamed of? That was what it was. That Is what I kill with.” Then she remarked, "I am perspiring." She had danced as she sang. All of the time she had thought, "I will show you that you are not going to get me.” She told them, "I am going outdoors and get cooled off. I am sweating.” She went there to that door where those Grizzly Bears were waiting. She ordered them, "Let me by, Long Finger Nails." They did not move to touch her. They believed she was merely going out to cool off and would come back in. That was how she had said it. She went outdoors. She spoke, "From now on, in future, no person will kill anybody at a Winter Dance. He must wait and be revenged in a different manner on anyone who has damaged him.” (She made this law for the Winter Dance.) She ran home. Crane, her husband, flew out of the open smoke hole, he flew home. It was no use then. They had had their chance at her. They would not bother her any more. She had gotten away. This amazing culture thrived on Oregon s shores for more than 10,000 years, living harmoniously with the environment before the arrival of rapacious outsiders. And there were many visitors earlier than Lewis and Clark. T Early Visitors HE Chinook word for white men is "tlehonnipts.” Roughly meaning "those who drift ashore.” There were many Spanish and Oriental shipwrecks. One theory about the name Neahkahnie is that it comes from the corruption of the Spanish word for meat, "carne. ” So many elk browsed on Neahkahnie Mountain that early explorers noticed them. "Ne" is an Indian prefix for "place of.” Carbon-14 dated beeswax, possibly from a Spanish 1705 wreck, has been found. There are many tales of buried treasure. Particularly regarding Neahkahnie Mountain. Did the famed world navigator, Sir Francis Drake, and his crew land on Nehalem Bay and claim it as an English colony? Portus Nove Albionis. Some scholars believe so. A hundred curiously marked “surveyor” stones have been found on Neahkahnie. One had the ‘word "Deos” inscribed on it. The same word Drake used on a map of Central America. Using the English yard as a measurement, many more stones were discovered. (Caliban, could you have been a flatheaded, fish-eating coastal aboriginee? After Sir Francis Drake returned to London town and boasted of his exploits to Shakespeare, was The Tempest born?) An extraordinary claim is made in my handy and entertaming A Hiker’s Guide To The Oregon Coast Trail; "Another interesting find near Neahkahnie Mountain was three bronze handles found in a swamp below the mountain in 800-1,OOO-year-old tree roots. The handles are of Norse origin and add strength to the theory that Norsemen landed in the Pacific Northwest in 1010A.D." One Indian legend mentions Konapee, the Ironmaker of Clatsop Plains. He taught them metal-working. Chief Kilchis, for whom the Kilchis River is named, had Negroid features and was a giant of a man. In the book Pacific Graveyard it is claimed that at least 75 Oriental junks were lost on the Pacific Coast prior to 1875. At the Chishucks site on the Wilson River, an 1820 Chinese coin was found along with a stone face and pottery fragments. There is something magnetic about these shores, that drew men here, and still draws me. L TO the Coast AST summer I promised Julian, a 1&year-old friend, we would go to the beach together. We head out Sunset Highway, west, toward the Coast Range. Julian drives. I am tutoring him. The valves are shot on my green Rambler, make a racket, and the car throws oil. But the radio is blaring. Near Elsie, we turn off the main highway onto a smaller road, partly gravel, and follow the Nehalem River. We stop for Julian to snorkel, but the summer-warmed water is growing algae. Mossy sluggish strings of green gunk trail in the water. Further down the river, we pull off to study the view. I point out to him the spar tree of an old-fashioned high-lead logging operation. Cables strung from the top of it would pull logs to a loading site. The slashed over land is ugly, even though it will heal itself. My eyes search for the skull-like broken top of Saddle Mountain, the highest point on the coast, but can’t find it. This entire area is the setting for Don Berry’s excellent historical novels, Trask and Moontrap. We continue to Nehalem. The day is sunny, the sky blue. Black and white 10 Clinton St. Quarterly
dairy cows and barns greet us. Julian says he enjoys the rich fragrance of cow shit. When he was younger, he worked on a farm in Germany. Before we drive into that great teenage resort town, Seaside, where boys and girls drag the gut in their parent’s cars, I show him the coastline. Every time I go to the Coast it terrifies me at some level. I like it. But the roar of the ocean is so sad. Washing shells, and rocks, and bones, grinding everything into sand. The tall white bleached Douglas fir snags stick up nobly above the second-growth alder and vine maple. Because of heavy winter rainfall, the underbrush is thick like jungle. Neahkahnie Mountain juts into the ocean, with engineered roadside viewpoints. It knifes the weather in two—cloudy to the north, clearer to the south. Descending toward Short Sands beach, and Cape Falcon further on, I have Julian park the car, and we hike through manzanita, salmonberry and salal to high cliffs. This is one of the most spectacular views on the coast, named after a prominent Tillamook chief, Point Higa. It’s also called Elk Point, and their spoor litters the ground. Have you ever heard an elk piercingly trumpet? The sound is as gorgeous as whale song. It’s a lovers’ leap. It's a meditative suicide perch. Wind-tortured pine trees are on the left and a smooth high place on the right were you could fall and die. You body’d plunge into the carved out punchbowl of the ocean below. Seagulls screech and ocean caverns boom, black cormorants dive and nest. The rocks are sculpted, the wind’s strong blowing. Your senses become possessed by the magic of the place. Bemused in natural awe. We meet my friend Margaret Moore, and her sons in Seaside. While the boys cavort, we go to a tavern and talk. She Is starved for conversation with an adult. In a short while, we buy bright red Dungeness crab, and several quarts of beer, and drive to a rented house, near Ecola beach. "Ecola" means whale in Chinook. In 1806, a whale washed ashore and Lewis and Clark got some of the blubber for supplies. Margaret wants to see for herself breath-taking Point Higa. Wire, her oldest son, comes with us. The manzanita is wet, but Margaret—sensitive, intelligent composer and teacher of music—loves the view. She sits rapt and quiet. Her son, as any nervous suburban male, picks up a rock and tosses it into the ocean. Males have to project their force into the womb of the void! I warn him about how fragile the ecology of this point is. I discover in the grass, near the cliff, a small lovely snail. Alive inside a fine, greenish bronze shell. The fragile jelly of his soft body, and two protruding antenna eyes, retract nervously and then cautiously project outward, to the vibrations of my fingers. I set him in a safer place where he won't be stepped on. L The Tillamook Burn EST we forget. Driving back home, with the noisy valves and weak compression, we soar easily over the cool green forested mountains, past Saddle Mountain, Elsie and Timber. Only vaguely do we comprehend that the largest forest fire of the century occurred here. The 1933 Tillamook Burn. Those white bone-like snags on the Nehalem are reminders. It started near Glenwood, in low-humidity August, possibly by two logs rubbing together and spread along the Wilson River. Fanned by the east wind, on August 24th, it exploded like an H-bomb, spreading through Scoggins Valley, from Tillamook to Forest Grove, north to Mist, a distance of 70 to 100 miles. All in all, 300,000 acres were blackened, half the area of Rhode Island. Twelve billion board feet of virgin old-growth timber—Doug fir, cedar, spruce—was consumed. Probably more so than the eruption of Mt. St. Helens, the Tillamook Burn is the greatest natural disaster in Pacific Northwest history. Ellis Lucia writes in The Big Woods: "In 20 incredible hours the fire rampaged...across the nation’s best forest land, burning trees at a rate of 600,000 board feet an hour. Along a horrifying 15-mile front the fire became an awesome wall of orange flame, exploding again and again in the towering tops of 400-year-old firs, creating an inferno unlike anything since Northwest volcanic peaks erupted. "Three thousand fire fighters were helpless as the awesome smoke cloud mushroomed 40,000 feet into the atmosphere.... Darkness came at noon for towns surrounding the cauldron. Chickens went to roost at midday. Ashes rained down on the small towns and upon Portland. Black debris piled two feet deep on the beautiful sandy beaches of the northern Oregon coast, and fell upon ships five hundred miles at sea.” Listening to rock and roll in the car, we don't realize this. We are intent upon returning to Portland and our petty tasks. The weather clears as we cross the mountains, near the cut-off to Vernonia. It’s hot inland, away from the fogginess of the beach. Yet hours later, days later, that clammy, mysterious landscape haunts me, with its effluvia of the past. The grey weather of the Oregon Coast makes me seasick, even when I’m not on a boat. No wonder the North Coast Indians were cannibalistic. The Northern Pacific winter Is a bleak, damp disaster. You might as well call Raven, Killer Whale, Bear your blood brother while hallucinating in a smoky hovel, as the waves batter and slam against the shoreline, in the foggy darkness. Affordable Unique Holiday Gifts & Fashions ‘‘Have you been studying Astrologyfor years and can’tget it together? Then Come See Us!!! Tami & Russ Ward ARCANE BOOK STORE Classes, Horoscopes, Books Tarot Cards, Workshops & More!!! Counseling & Questions Answered. 511 N.W. 21st Avenue 228-0095 CELEBRATION! 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