Safety Valve: Letters from readers
Slow down: I live near a school in Wenatchee. I want to remind all drivers that a flashing sign means 20 miles per hour with or without children present. Try reading the sign under the flashers. To protect all our children SLOW DOWN. It is the law. My child is all grown up, however my grandchildren are out there.
Stay on top of power prices
The Washington Roundtable has released its Benchmarks for a Better Washington, a series of standards measuring our state’s economic prospects and quality of life. In several categories, Washington ranks high among states: Private sector job growth, 8; patents granted, 5. In others, our status is modest: Student achievement in math, 12; in science, 15; road conditions, 16. Elsewhere, we are inexcusably low: High school graduation rate, 37; bachelor’s degrees per capita, 38; average commute time, 37; business tax burden, 36; unemployment insurance taxes, 46; worker’s compensation benefits paid, 50. In just one category does Washington rise to the top. We are No. 1 in the nation for the lowest electricity rates, industrial and commercial, at 5.65 cents per kilowatt hour in 2010. By a five-year average of all rates, we rank fifth in the nation at 5.75 cents. Electricity is the highest energy cost for business, notes the Roundtable, a consortium of state business leaders joined to develop public policy. Electricity prices are a key indictor of business costs, and therefore the future prosperity of all Washington is enhanced if we maintain our top ranking. We should guard it, protect it, and avoid policies and politics that threaten to raise rates too quickly and unnecessarily.
We cut the disease fighters
Public health services are mostly about prevention. When they succeed you don’t hear much about it, because nothing happens. There’s not much bragging, posing for photos, sending of press releases and the rest of the hoo-haw that usually comes when government wants us to know it did good things with our money. These days, if you don’t do anything picturesque, you get your budget cut. Not long ago, public health services and prevention, a fundamental function of government since government began, were cut deeply all across the state of Washington. At the time some people pointed out that this was potentially risky and expensive, and that in time we might come to regret it.
They find toxics in our sewers
The headline read “Toxics from everyday life found in Columbia.” It was repeated in publications and broadcasts throughout the region this week. It told of a study by the U.S. Geological Survey that found dozens of chemical compounds, many classified as toxic contaminants, in the outflow of sewage treatment plants and storm drains up and down the Columbia, from Wenatchee to Longview. Some of these chemicals we are sending to the river are indeed things we have grown accustomed to fearing, like heavy metals and pesticides, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and polybrominated diphenyl ether (PBDE, a flame retardant since banned, used in many things, including upholstery and clothing). Some were new to me, like “personal care products,” which turns out to be stuff from shampoos and soaps, or pharmaceuticals like diphenhydramine, a compound in Benedryl and Tylenol PM and other medications that makes you drowsy.
Those cruising days have passed
Cruising is dead. If not, it’s hard to find a pulse. This year’s Apple Blossom Festival was what many have hoped for — a family event, fun for many, deadly dull for the few who miss driving their cars very slowly on Wenatchee Avenue and taking in the sights. This year’s cruising crowd was so close to nonexistent that no outside police support was required and arrests were on par with an ordinary spring weekend. It was a far cry from those halcyon days, when there was no room in an avenue motel, overflow crowds in the Chelan County Jail, and speeds on The Av’ were measured in feet per hour on festival nights. Cruising advocates naturally regret this development and blame the formerly heavy police presence and the uninviting paranoia of the prudish powers that be. Cruisers were scared away, they say, and they are probably right. Others who worked to discourage cruisers, say it was the lousy cold weather and $4-per-gallon gasoline. They are probably right, too.
State can’t help but buy SUVs
If I wanted to think about cars I’d much prefer to take a seat near the corner of Grant and Valley Mall and take in tonight’s Classy Chassis parade, but alas, I couldn’t help noticing a timely article in The Seattle Times that gave some clues on an automotive marketing question that has plagued me: Who would buy one of those? Most of us like cars, and there are a lot of cars out there to like these days, but actually purchasing one is a momentous decision fraught with practical considerations. Our desires and emotions are considerably dulled by the limits of our finances. If you have a lot of money just getting in the way, then things change. The world beyond $30,000 looks far more inviting. Desires can be indulged. But, if you are buying a car with someone else’s money, then your criteria change entirely.
The anarchists have a great day
They must have been in it for the sheer thrill. Dressing up in black costumes and breaking expensive windows with sticks must be a rush. Nothing announces your hatred of capitalism so clearly as the sound of breaking glass. Nothing shows off your revolutionary chic better than a bandana, a black hood and a raised fist with a closet rod from Lowe’s. There’s nothing better than putting a hole in a Seattle bank on television and having the cops show up late to pepper-spray the camera crew. The joys of organized anarchy go all over YouTube. Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn, struggling with the difficult Seattle law enforcement ethic of being tolerant and intolerant simultaneously, did not call it a riot. He called it “The First Amendment uses of 5-foot long, 3-inch-wide sticks” which naturally “is outweighed today by our desire to protect public safety and confiscate weapons.”
We are rising against graffiti
We could just give up, some people might say. It would save money, after all. Let the thugs in training sneak around in the night and spray paint their vile squiggles anywhere they please. Just admit the truth, that we can’t do anything to stop it. It’s like shoveling the walk in a blizzard, a futile battle at best. Just let most of our vertical public surfaces be turned into sprayed bulletin boards for criminal gangs. Yes, it’s very ugly, but it may give us a reputation for tolerance and willingness to accept freedom of expression. Of course, that’s defeatist nonsense. Tolerance of graffiti is not a virtue. Tolerance of graffiti is the acceptance of a community’s descent into chaos, from which it is very difficult to escape. Tolerance of graffiti is indifference to the wanton criminal destruction of property. Worse, it allows property to be used for a beacon message — that there are times and places in our community where the laws of civilization have no constraining effect whatsoever, and that organized packs of criminals intend to make this their place, and make some of us their victims.
Slowing our borrowing binge
We build with borrowed money. Government loves to build, and so loves debt. It could not function without it. The projects we consider useful, lasting and essential — roads, schools, utilities, bridges, canals, dams, buildings — rise from borrowed money. Government has some savings plans, called dedicated funds, that pay for parts of things, but we wouldn’t have much to show for it if we worked on a cash basis. There’s no problem with borrowing. The problems come with borrowing too much. We all know that. It’s not a secret, but we don’t like to talk about it. We want government to build things, and borrow, and politicians are reluctant to see, or tell us, that we have overindulged. They want what we want. This has put Washington among the most indebted of states. On the federal level, it produces a kind of mass insanity. At a glance you would think the primary function of the United States government is to borrow money and dole it out to those in favor.
The schools we have in common
I’ve never been clear on how you identify a “small town.” In most of our urbanized state Wenatchee qualifies, even if it’s not small and technically not a town. It’s their perspective. Maybe it’s not the raw sum of population that makes a town a town, it’s the way people interact. If people share a common experience, if the rich spend some time with the not-so-rich, if they know them at least a little and have aspirations for their children, then it’s a small town. That doesn’t happen easily in big cities. It happens in small towns, and it happens at the school.
The United States turns space over to the Chinese
As the space shuttle Discovery flew three times around Washington, a final salute before landing at Dulles airport for retirement in a museum, thousands on the ground gazed upward with marvel and pride. Yet what they were witnessing, for all its elegance, was a funeral march. The shuttle was being carried — its pallbearer, a 747 — because it cannot fly, nor will it ever again. It was being sent for interment. Above ground, to be sure. But just as surely embalmed as Lenin in Red Square.
Once again, the chair issue rises
First they came for the motorcycle gangs and hippies, and I didn’t speak out, because I didn’t have a Harley or a peasant shirt. Then they came for the cruisers and I didn’t speak out, because I sold my Z28 Camaro and went to bed early. Then they came for the Mardi Gras beads, and I didn’t speak out, because I didn’t know what they were for. Then they came for the plastic lawn chairs on Orondo Avenue, and I didn’t speak out, because I was glad.
Those who can build, got game
It looked like a typical high school sports competition, almost. Saturday, the fieldhouse at Eastern Washington University was packed for a regional three-on-three basketball tournament. It was huge. There were 47 teams from Washington, Oregon, Idaho and California, from as far away as Los Angeles. I have rarely seen competition more intense, strategy more complex, or an event demanding more of mind and body. I know I have never seen competitors or spectators with more enthusiasm. The energy was amped by the add-ons of modern athletics — horribly loud music, dancing cheerleaders, thunderous cheers, announcers prepping for their pro wrestling audition, hyperactive mascots in silly costumes, anxious parents on the edge of their seats. Each shot at the basket was an event, each score a moment of triumph, and every failure keenly felt.
We put great stock in names
Place names are human inventions for inanimate geographic features, rocks and rills and rivers and hills. They can be useful, and descriptive, but they can pack emotion. People develop genuine attachments to their homeland, and its name. So for the sake of surrounding human beings, you don’t change the names of major geographic features for light or transient reasons, for there will be a backlash, resentment and expense. So it is as the state Committee on Geographic Names gives serious consideration to changing the name of Soap Lake to Lake Smokiam.
Do we all fall into the pit?
It all depends on what you think might happen. If Proposition 1 fails, and we do not impose a 0.1 percent sales tax, will all the suffering for the unpaid $42 million Town Toyota Center debt be limited to the people who deserve it? Or, will the innocent bystanders be sucked into the pit with Wenatchee and pay dearly, wishing that Proposition 1 had passed and we had dealt with this while we still had the chance? For some opposed to Proposition 1, this is the rosy scenario: The vote fails and a regional 0.1 percent sales tax will not be. Wenatchee and its gullible citizenry curl up in their well-deserved suffering and begin a generation-long effort to pay for their $42 million arena arrogance. The rest of the fortunate region and its much wiser residents escape and go on their way, free and safe and secure, trying to ignore all that gnashing of teeth inside the city limits.
Vote yes, and the end will begin
Say we vote yes for Proposition 1, then what? Nothing glamorous, that’s certain. We’re voting to impose a 0.1 percent sales tax on ourselves and our customers, not to build big beautiful arena or some other great civic project, but to fend off financial calamity and all the complications that result from what we’ve already done. That makes this tax vote different.
It started in a Wenatchee hotel
The ghost of Elsie Parrish walks among us yet. It was 75 years ago the hardworking chambermaid at Wenatchee’s Cascadian Hotel had a gripe — she wanted the state’s minimum wage for women of $14.50 a week. Her boss refused. She sued, and her case led to the United States Supreme Court and one of the most significant precedents in the history of American jurisprudence. Elsie Parrish and her fight for 30 cents an hour ended an era in which Congress and states often were forbidden to interfere with American business and intervene in the relationship between employer and employee. Elsie Parrish and her case laid the legal foundation for the New Deal and government’s intervention in commerce, ever since. Elsie Parrish stood at the beginning of an era in which government regulation met with fewer and fewer restraints. The Parrish era began in the dirtied rooms of the building I can see out my window, just a block away. It may end in the chambers of the Supreme Court of the United States as it decides the fate of the Affordable Health Care Act. Should all or parts of President Obama’s health care reform legislation be ruled unconstitutional it will be a check on federal powers that blossomed with the help of reasoning fertilized by Parrish’s famous case in 1937. The challenge to Affordable Care Act heard by the court this week has been called the most crucial test in at least half a century, in part because the court could affirm or reject the reasons it said a minimum wage law could apply to a woman changing sheets in a Wenatchee hotel.
Tracy Warner: They love it when we’re angry
You could sense the excitement. The political opportunity was enormous. Gasoline prices were rising, and quickly. So was public anger, which quite naturally would be directed against those who held political power. This would be advantageous to the opposition, even if they knew the price of gasoline was mostly outside government’s power to control. With the right persuasive techniques they could blame $2-a-gallon-gasoline on President George W. Bush, who was after all a genuine Texas oilman.
Cities deep in the financial hole
It’s a city on the river, 80 miles inland from a high-tech metropolis from which money once flowed like water. Once proud of its place in the agricultural economy, the city was more recently famed for its booming real estate market. Home prices tripled in six years. Newly rich millionaires from the west spent weekends there scouting for $500,000 getaways. Builders went into a frenzy. Property taxes soared. Revenue gushed into the city government, and naturally people looked for a way to spend it. City leaders came up with nifty ideas, as recounted in several published post mortems. Revitalize the riverfront and downtown, they said. They built, of all things, a hockey arena for $63 million, a minor league baseball stadium for $20 million, a marina for $22 million, etc. They borrowed the money, but that was fine, because those things would produce enough revenue to pay for themselves and besides, the boom would keep booming and the tax revenue would keep flowing. They passed a lot of money to city employees, with big pensions and health insurance and automatic pay raises.
Going lethal is sad but necessary
It’s a tidbit of a news flash, easily overlooked, but it affects you and your finances more than we care to admit. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, overseer and official protector of endangered salmon, on Thursday granted Washington, Oregon and Idaho “lethal removal authority” over voracious California sea lions camped far up the Columbia at Bonneville Dam. In other words, the states can kill them. And how do sea lions and the coming application of lethal persuasion affect you? If you pay your electricity bill something like a quarter of it is invested in efforts to help Columbia River salmon survive and multiply. Collectively we invest hundreds of millions a year in the effort, billions and billions over the years. The goal of all this is to have many healthy salmon return to the Columbia after their harrowing years at sea, swim upriver, do what they are meant to do, and produce thousands of offspring, each. Now, just as these precious fish are about to realize their life’s goal, thousands are eaten by merciless, fur-bearing predators. The sea lions, relatively recent arrivals, are unnaturally effective in their hunt, taking advantage of the salmon traffic backup at the entrance to Bonneville Dam’s fish ladders. These must be the most valuable fish in the world, in terms of public investment, so this must be the most expensive seafood buffet in history. Our investment is sea lion supper.
A small tax better than big debt
The solution could be so close. This is the idea: Run a newspaper promotion — pass the 0.1 percent tax in April and for every $100 you spend with our advertisers (for purchases subject to sales tax, excluding food and services), we will give you a coupon worth 10 cents off your next purchase of ... Whatever we can get coupons for, shampoo, paper towels, pizza. Just one cents-off coupon compensates for the tax added to a $100 purchase if the 0.1 percent regional sales tax for Town Toyota Center debt passes. That’s 10 cents on $100. I throw coupons worth 10 times that into the recycling bin every week.
All connected, and disconnected
The scene is set in 1958. Every teenage girl in mythical Sweetapple, Ohio, is on the telephone, gossiping about who got pinned and who is going steady with whom, etc. Most, we presume, are in their homes, where the entire family shares a single phone line, one telephone, their only means of outside communication other than the Postal Service or shouting over the fence.
Budgets take on reality by degrees
It’s much easier to pretend. If you wish to be the protector of state spending you know is important to your constituents, to be the one who beats off the bloodthirsty budget slashers, if you inconveniently lack the funds and can’t do the federal government thing and borrow it all, you have to be willing to bend reality. The hangup in Olympia today, the reason there is not yet an agreement on how to rewrite the state’s budget, is the never-ending argument over how much reality will be bent. A willingness to slightly twist facts and rearrange the numbers can be especially important in times likes these, when government is pressed to give more than it takes. Writing government budgets large and small requires flexibility, a few rosy scenarios, a bit of make-believe. Everybody does it. If you don’t want to cut schools again, if you don’t want to cut colleges and universities again, if you just want to make as few people unhappy as you possibly can, you can’t be stopped by the fact that you don’t have enough money. Just change the numbers. You can shift a few hundred million in bill payments over to the next budget, let the lawmakers of the future worry about those, and liken it to “an infusion of cash,” a discovery, a necessary “shift,” an “investment” from the “ongoing trick.”
This is one big hockey game
Many events are set for Wenatchee Saturday, but perhaps the most important starts when the puck drops at 7:05 p.m. at Town Toyota Center. It’s not just any hockey game. It’s about the future, about the permanence of hockey in Wenatchee, about the financial fundamentals of Town Toyota Center and the prospects of sorting out that mess. Wenatchee Wild vs. Fresno Monsters — a big game.
Deficits are best dealt with later
The cynics, doomsayers and anguished constituents can be silenced so easily. All it takes is changing a date on a ledger, just a few pixels rearranged on the spreadsheet. Spend today, pay tomorrow, spend today, pay tomorrow. It’s as good as money. You can call it an accounting trick, a gimmick, an exercise in budgetary sleight of hand, and the engineers shouldn’t be too offended, because that’s what it is. The people rewriting the deficit-ridden budget for Washington’s government are political escape artists. If they can delay disaster with a shift or two on the books, then they will shift. The fix is temporary, but that’s fine. At this point, temporary is good enough.
Pharmacists have rights as well
Let us say it is your firmly held belief and a tenet of your religious faith that human life begins at conception and therefore the intentional destruction of a fertilized egg constitutes a loss of life contrary to the will of God, the moral equivalent of abortion. You and I may disagree with this. Many people do, but that really is not the point. If you hold this belief, can the government force you to abandon it temporarily, force you to facilitate and assist in what you consider an immoral act, in order to keep your job, your profession, even your business? The state of Washington insists that it can. Activists for what are called reproductive rights insist that it can, and more.
We don’t vote on every tax hike
“No taxation without representation.” I am not tired of that phrase. As a statement of principle it is useful, and we should stick to it as best we can. But don’t misread it. It does not mean “no taxation.” It means that representation is a prerequisite. If we are represented, taxation there may be.
Happy to pay half the subsidies
It’s not about generating electricity, not anymore. The owners of those monstrous windmills scattered through the hills and canyons of the inland Northwest can brag about how much power they produce — when the wind blows — but that’s not their primary business. The windmills exist to reap federal tax credits, and to sell energy credits to utilities ordered by law to buy them. In the subsidy-reaping effort they will be happy to produce power that nobody needs or wants, power that can’t be easily sold or even given away. Offer them free electricity to replace their windmills’ output and they will turn away. Who needs it? This creates many complications, and carries a price. Naturally, it is soon to be spread among the Northwest’s ratepayers. The plan is to have you pay for half the windmill owners’ lost subsidies when nature’s abundance might force them to cease making unwanted power.
Don’t worry, we can still speak up
Like a lot of people, I am annoyed by political advertising. The best of it is self-aggrandizing piffle, and the worst is backstabbing, lying junk. My disgust is genuinely nonpartisan, except when I am really, intensely annoyed by candidates with whom I disagree. I am not annoyed to the point where I hope the government will step in and silence these horrible people once and for all. We do not live in a country where government can tell us what we can or cannot say. We certainly do not live in a country where government can forbid us to express opinions on candidates for public office, do we? This isn’t Russia or Britain or China. This is America. We have the First Amendment to the Constitution, the foundation of liberty. Remember, it says Congress shall make “no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” Most of us have been raised with the notion that this is a very good idea.
Walkers deserve a safe crossing
Two small news items, and the reaction to them, deserve a bit of attention this week. They had something in common — brief accounts of an innocent walk on a public right of way interrupted by sudden, unprovoked injury. One was inflicted by a truck and its driver, the other by a vicious dog and its owner. One story recounted the experience of Manuel Mata Perez of Wenatchee, who last Saturday evening had the idea that he could cross South Mission Street safely if he stayed in the crosswalk and held up one of those orange watch-out-for-me flags. He was wrong. A southbound SUV did not stop. Perez was smacked by its sideview mirror and ended up in Harborview Medical Center in serious condition.
Jazz Workshop still works magic
You don’t get many opportunities like this, not if you play trombone in a junior high school band. You took up the instrument because you wanted to join something, and the trombone was shiny and big and loud and the teacher was impressed by your long arms. But you didn’t really know what it was supposed to sound like. You couldn’t remember ever seeing or hearing a trombone outside the school’s band room. Your parents aren’t much help. There’s isn’t anything in their old CD collection without scratchy guitars and overdubbed vocals — a trombone-free zone. When they say “classic” they mean that Led Zeppelin stuff on their iPod. Then, right in your band room, you see a grown man with a horn. He’s from Los Angeles, they tell you, a professional trombonist who has played with everyone from Elton John to Diana Krall. Then you hear him play. In his hands the instrument is transformed. There’s none of the bwaa-bwaa-blat sounds that you make. It sings, sweet and dark, like nothing you have ever heard, more beautiful than you ever imagined. You see the way he holds the instrument, the way he moves the slide. He is so fast, yet so relaxed and precise. The instrument is an extension of his very self. It is his voice.
Safety Valve: Letters from readers
So lucky to have it I keep reading the letters in The Safety Valve regarding prices at Town Toyota Center for Mannheim Steamroller. I don’t know where some of the people got their information. We had what we considered the best seats in the house for a concert such as theirs and they cost $30 apiece. I know if you order over the phone or online there are extra charges but if you go to the ticket office, which is open every day, there are no extra charges and they give senior discounts.
For marriage, change is normal
Why not? When the issue is whether the state should sanction same-sex marriage, that question is a pertinent legal test in a thin disguise. When the state denies one class of citizens a right or privilege it grants another, there has to be a “rational basis,” a good reason why not. Society must have a legitimate, common interest in maintaining exclusivity, beyond mere bigotry and resentment. It must be based on reason, and not irrational fears and frights. With gay marriage, the “rational basis” has withered away with our changing social mores.
We’ll talk about deficits later
I confess, after 45 minutes I walked out on President Obama’s State of the Union address Tuesday, or at least walked away from the television. I missed the part where at last he leveled with the American people. Without reform to beloved entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, without higher taxes and spending cuts, our growing debt will inevitably put the nation at risk. The day of reckoning is so near, with our national debt now exceeding our yearly economic output, that Obama was willing risk his political career to tell us the truth — there are too many promises, and not enough money to pay for them. ... He didn’t?
Stopping us, one pipeline at a time
We were supposed to want “energy independence.” That was the stated goal as taxpayers invested billions in biofuels and battery packs, all to free us from the economic constraints of oil imports. Then the seekers of profit ingeniously found ways to increase production of natural gas and oil on this continent, to the point where “energy independence” was at least conceivable, for what it’s worth. But that wasn’t the “energy independence” they wanted. Then we were supposed to want jobs. Government investment in alternative fuels, renewable energy and electric vehicles was to spawn a green economy, supporting thousands and thousands of jobs, a clean-burning industrial revolution. But, so far, it’s been painfully slow in coming. It costs a lot, making jobs with industries designed solely to collect government subsidies. The green economy has difficulty competing against energy that is cheap and reliable.
The sound of the plow grows faint
Remember those wonderful winter mornings of yesteryear, when your slumber was ended by a city snowplow scraping the pavement outside your bedroom window at 5 a.m.? Well, dream on. Barring emergencies, you aren’t likely to hear that sweet sound in Wenatchee, and probably many other municipalities. Budget cuts do that. They wallop snow removal just like anything else.
Higher education can’t keep up
What is true for the nation is true in the state of Washington. We have an economy strong on technology and manufacturing. Our educational system, however, is weak. Industry requires educated workers. Our schools, colleges and universities do not produce them in sufficient numbers, for myriad social, political and economic reasons. We must import them, from other states, from other countries. We depend on other states to staff our workforce.
A ‘fee’ can look a lot like a ‘tax’
Gov. Chris Gregoire is right. “We can’t wait until roads, bridges and ferries are falling apart to fix them. We can’t kick the can down the road and saddle our future generations with the repairs we failed to make,” she said in her State of the State address Tuesday. Well, yes we can, and we have, but we shouldn’t. It is economically unwise. Despite her unfortunate repeat of the can-kicking cliché (how many cans are already down the road I cannot begin to guess), she is speaking truth. “Our transportation system is the lifeblood of our economy. It moves people to work and goods to market and supports our tourism industry. If we don’t maintain and grow, we come to a standstill.”
Duty is clear, funding is not
In the basics, there isn’t much room for disagreement. Article IX of the state’s constitution does not equivocate: “It is the paramount duty of the state to make ample provision for the education of all children residing within its borders ...” It’s hard to maneuver around words like “paramount” and “ample” and “all,” although many have tried. No one seems surprised or shocked by the state Supreme Court’s ruling Thursday in McCleary v. Washington, upholding the judgment of a lower court. The state has so obviously failed to meet its obligation under Article IX, it is nothing to find a perpetual stream of witnesses to provide the evidence. That some school districts backfill 38 percent of their budgets with local levy funds itself shows there’s nothing ample in the state’s provision. Attorney General Rob McKenna said the state appealed the lower court’s ruling not because it believed it was meeting its constitutional obligations, but because it needed guidance. “The state appealed this case to the Supreme Court to receive clarification and direction to guide the Legislature in meeting its constitutional duty — and this decision is helpful,” he said.
Pessimists see bright days ahead
These are the feast days for pessimists. In January comes despair, always. It is expected, as any good pessimist will tell you. This is the bleak midwinter. The world is all gray and grit and cold. The Christmas credit card bill will soon be here. Only overbearing politics can distract us from worldwide economic and social calamity. The darkness falls, the dawn grows faint. Only the optimists think the glass is half empty. They haven’t looked lately.
Keep those subsidies flowing
It now is federal policy that we buy electricity we do not need, or pay Californians to take it, while curtailing power made far more cheaply, putting the stability of the regional electrical grid at risk, possibly endangering salmon and violating environmental law, all so owners of windmills not have their federal subsidies diminished. This is baffling, but the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission ruled this month that not doing all this amounts to wrongful discrimination against windmills. Though inefficient, expensive and intermittent, windmills find favor among those with power over the overpowered, which means us.
It’s Christmas, but I repeat myself
This is the week for the Christmas column. Sorry, but I think I’ve exhausted the topic. I’ve written about Santa Claus a few dozen times over the decades. A year ago I made reference to the linguists’ theory that the name Santa Claus is an English adulteration of the Dutch character Sinterklaas, who brings gifts to the children on Saint Nicholas Day Eve, every Dec. 5. If you’ve ever heard an English person try to pronounce the letter R, you would understand. The Sinter of Sinterklaas would, at best, come out “Sint-ah,” at least to our ears. Spell phoenetically and Sinterklaas would get to be Santa Claus pretty quickly. I have personal experience, having married an Englishwoman 26 years ago. Helpless in the face of an R, she was forced into linguistic training to pronounce our surname. No, I said, our name is not Wah-nah. It is not spelled W-A-Ah-N-E-Ah. It was several years before she stopped getting mail addressed to Mrs. Walnut or Mrs. Water. She tells of going into a bookstore, asking for the literature department, and being told they have no books on electric chairs. Not electric chairs, she said, “litra-cha.” “ ’Lectric chair? No, sorry.”
It’s not too late to learn to swim
I met my cousin David only once, but I idolized him. He was a 20-year-old student at the University of Kansas. I was in high school. He passed through one spring day in 1970 with a group of college buddies. They were on their way to Hawaii for the summer. They planned to finance the adventure by picking pineapples. David was small next to me, thin, with a shock of brown hair, but we had that faint and slightly eerie family resemblance first cousins can have. I told him he looked a little like my mother. He said I looked a bit like his father. We bonded when he offered me the loan of his 1962 Impala for the duration, if I took good care of it until he returned with his tan, his sun-bleached hair and pineapple-picking loot. It was so cool, I could not believe it.
All they want is to get by
It was a fantasy. We thought Washington’s legislators would arrive for an emergency special session and quickly knuckle down to the ugly nitty gritty of dealing with a $2 billion-and-rising budget deficit. We thought they would take seriously the doomsday cuts proposed by Gov. Chris Gregoire, because this is an emergency and there is no choice but for the state to live within its increasingly meager means. Tax hikes and seeking voter approval for them would be thoroughly debated. We expected thoughtful decisions for tough times, political suicide be damned. Well, what were we thinking? The lawmakers didn’t come close to dealing with a $2 billion shortfall. They mumbled for a while and then went for a very partial, quick fix. That unleashed a torrent of anguished they-kicked-the-can-again editorials, but the truth is they didn’t kick the proverbial can very far down the road. They just gave it a tap.
Parks are looking down, and down
They must keep parks open. Otherwise, the death spiral begins. Revenue to operate Washington’s gloriously beautiful state parks system depends in large part, and soon almost entirely, on the people willing to pay to use them. If there are fewer parks to visit, fewer will pay. If fewer pay, you must close more parks. Close more parks, and fewer pay. If fewer pay, close more parks ...
A bit of stimulus, a lot of politics
Remember the check with the big eagle on it, the one the federal government sent you in 2008? It was a tax rebate, cash in your pocket. Remember how you spent it? Me, neither. It was supposed to be economically stimulating. You were supposed to run out and buy something, and send the money rolling along. In practice, most of us paid bills or otherwise put the cash against money we’d already spent. The economy went on its way, that is, down. The federal deficit rose. Someone will have to pay for the great rebate when we get around to it.
So many from Izard
So many from Izard On behalf of myself, a transplanted Arkie, along with many others I would like to express thanks to Gregory Hinze for telling our story of the Arkansas migration from Izard County, 1935-1960.
Still waiting for the mail to come
I know what it’s like, being one of the old breed. If your livelihood rides with ink on paper, delivered on foot, you are in a precarious position these days. I think about that most days when I glance out my window to see if the mail came. I suppose that marks me. I’m old school. I still feel that sense of anticipation, wondering what the mailman, I mean my letter carrier, might bring me. These days it’s mostly catalogs, of course — or advertising, assorted junk, pleas from charities. Occasionally, there will be something serious, like a bill, or a government communique, or a package with something ordered on the Internet. We’ll get Christmas cards in the next few weeks, but there are fewer every year.
Persuasively unoccupied
Politics is the exercise of power, influence and authority. If you lack authority and power, as most do, then influence is your only chance. A necessary ingredient in becoming influential is the ability to persuade, to convince people your view is correct, that what you desire is good and will promote the general welfare. Persuasive techniques usually do not include vulgar mass shout-fests in the Capitol, occupying this or that, grubby encampments, dodging State Patrol tasers, disrupting the deliberations of officials chosen by voters, or trying to “citizen’s arrest” your legislator. There are times when being annoying can be persuasive. Now is not one of them.
Stop whining and go shopping
“Boo. ... Hey, bub. Boo, I say. Boo, boo.” “I’m awake, and you don’t have to run through that stupid boo-boo stuff. I’m not afraid of my grandfather’s ghost. You have to annoy me every Thanksgiving. I can’t sleep waiting for your annual 2 a.m. Marley’s Ghost bit. And don’t call me Ebenezer.”
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