After Haiti, Oregon

Although the amount of energy devoted to the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake is heartening, I sometimes wish that impulse were operational closer to home. I have always found it fascinating that Oregon’s rural poor, who are poor indeed, never seem to need any help as far as most of the same Oregonians are concerned who leapt so publicly to the help of Haiti, when it became a cause celebre. Perhaps if Oregon’s rural poor had the decency to be more picturesque we’d have plane-loads of doctors rushing in to help. Or perhaps the Haitians, also a conservative rural people, offend liberal sensibilities less because the beliefs they share with their Oregon brethren, but far less with their urban benefactors, are hidden behind a foreign language.

PIRATES! A Sitcom

P I L O T !

EXT. COLD OPEN – DECK OF A PIRATE SHIP

A dashing young man stands in the bow of a ship, impeccably dressed in a piratey version of the fashion of the latter half of the 17th century, including frilly shirt and enormous hat. He’s also wearing an eyepatch and an earring. He draws a cutlass and effortlessly puts to flight two villains attempting to attack him. He jumps onto a hawser and swings out across the deck, sweeping up an unrealistically buxom and unconvincingly innocent lass in his arms, depositing her on the bridge and swinging back, now unaccountably clenching a knife in his teeth. He drops onto the deck in the midst of a group of ugly pirates, slips, falls on his face and jumps back up, screaming, the knife now halfway to the back of his head.

My Op-Ed in the ODE

My op-ed on the debate about the hosting of the anti-Semitic Pacifica Forum by the University of Oregon has been published by the Oregon Daily Emerald.

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Update: I was shocked at the crudity and intellectual poverty of the comments. I felt naive when I read them. I shouldn’t have been surprised that public discourse at the UO shares the tenor of the screeching news programs and scurrilous reality shows that I had thought the exceptions but which are clearly the rule. But I was. Ick.