Isaac Laquedem

Someone in the City reads Isaac

As I discovered today when I noticed that the Parks Department's description of Powers Marine Park includes a sentence about Ira F. Powers taken from a comment I had made last year to my post about the Mark of Stark Street, who lived on a portion of the former Powers estate.

It's not the City bureau that I expected would be first to look to me for information (I had my heart set on PDC), but one must start somewhere.  I hope my facts are right.

A shot in the arm for an Oregon baseball team

Have I missed the explanation of why it's so important for Congress to make sure that major league baseball players don't take steroids to improve their job performance?

I've advocated that Oregon advertise the fact that it doesn't have a sales tax, to attract retailers to set up their mail order operations here.  And we've got some national mileage for being the first state to legalize assisted suicide.  Let's use the same principle to attract a major league baseball team: legalize the use of anabolic steroids by major league baseball players who live in Oregon.  Oregon:  things look different here, subcutaneously as well as orally.

George Kennan (1904-2005)

For fifty years, students of American foreign policy have learned to associate the name of George Kennan, an American diplomat from 1926 to 1953, with the word "containment," referring to America's policy toward (against?) the Soviet Union that developed after World War II ended, largely in reaction to Mr. Kennan's "Long Telegram" of 1946 and his article "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," attributed simply to "X" when Foreign Affairs published it in 1947.  Mr. Kennan argued in the Long Telegram that the Soviet government was afraid of the world, opposed to the United States, and wanted to destabilize the world.  In the "X" article, he argued that the United States should seek to "contain" Soviet power through what he called "counterforce," meaning (as he explained later) diplomatic and political work rather than straight military force.

Mr. Kennan, who died on March 17 at the age of 101, saw his theory adopted and co-opted by the military, who took "containment" to mean "containment by military force."  In the words of The Economist, "the generals and politicians took his words and ran with them."  The American involvement in the Vietnam War was one of the results.

Mr. Kennan left the State Department in 1953 when John Foster Dulles told him that he would not get another assignment, and except for a short stint as the ambassador to Yugoslavia, never held another diplomatic position.  Yet his basic ideas survived to make him the most influential American diplomatic theorist of the last half of the 20th Century, a fact perhaps better recognized overseas than here, although the Washington Post and New York Times both carried full stories on his death.  The Economist allocated its one weekly obituary to him.  The Times of London wrote an extended story also.

I surmise that the overseas news sources, certainly the Times of London's report, understand Mr. Kennan's historical importance.  I think the Times reporter believes that Mr. Kennan's thought remains relevant today; without once mentioning the current war in Iraq, the reporter describes Mr. Kennan's first book as follows:

Examining one conflict after another, he argued with persuasive eloquence that amour propre and petulance had led America time after time into the wrong wars. As a result, he wrote, America had difficulty “employing force for rational and restricted purposes rather than for purposes which are emotional and to which it is hard to find a rational limit”.

The reporter had also written:

“The American idealisation of our democracy as a model for all the rest of mankind”, he [Mr. Kennan] said, was “wholly unrealistic, vainglorious and silly.” It was not up to America to liberate any nation from internal dictatorship, though it could help to create favourable international conditions and present a good example. * * * He regarded it as deplorable that when other nations failed to abide by these supposedly universal ideals, America succumbed to pique, and attempted to enforce them, whether appropriate or not.

Mr. Kennan was willing to be patient, something others in the diplomacy business might well learn from.

Beaverton posts a different "Don't Walk" sign

You've undoubtedly seen at major intersections opposing aluminum brackets at the ends of where a crosswalk would be, each bearing a sign saying "CROSSWALK CLOSED," to prohibit pedestrians from crossing on one side of the intersection.  Not that I think that Beaverton dislikes pedestrians (see prior post), but today I saw a variant of that sign that I believe is uniquely Beavertonian.  At SW Murray Boulevard and Weir Road, a three-way signalized intersection where Weir enters from the west and sidewalks run along both sides of Murray, two aluminum brackets stand facing each other across Murray Boulevard, each bearing the permanent sign, "SIDEWALK CLOSED."  They're fine new sidewalks, too, without a nick or hole in them.

I  thought about getting out of my car and walking on the sidewalks as a protest, but there was nowhere convenient to park my car.

Does Beaverton drive you crazy?

The land use bug struck me, not fatally, as I attempted to drive through Beaverton recently, not through the tidy grid around which Beaverton formed (the section along Hall and Watson for the first mile or so south of Farmington Road) but to get to a friend's house in the middle of the suburban spaghetti between Hall, Scholls Ferry, Murray, and Brockman/Greenway.  (Similar principles rule west of Murray also.)

If you have tried in vain to visit a friend who lives in this modern Labyrinth, you might have concluded, as I have, that this mess represents a lack of planning.  Quite the contrary:  Beaverton planned it this way, requiring developers to build these intricate networks of streets to nowhere.  The city code even sets out a system for naming the sneak dead-ends, mandating equine names (Rawhide, Trapper, Scout) in one area, geologic names (Opal, Talus, Tephra) in another, and bird names (Teal, Gull, Grebe) in another.

The city's purpose, as I understand it, was to discourage car traffic cutting through residential neighborhoods.  The city has achieved that purpose.  But what else has it achieved?  It's forced developers to build neighborhoods that can't be served by mass transit and made it difficult or impossible for people to walk from their houses to schools, bus stops, and neighborhood shops.  Compare these street layouts to those in Beaverton's subdivisions of 25 to 50 years ago:  Ridgeview Heights (along Belaire Drive off of Hall Boulevard), Hyland Hills (along Hart Road between 130th and Murray), and The Royal Woodlands (off Royal Woodlands Drive west of Jamieson Road).  They're all laid out with pleasant, gently-curved parallel streets, and yet these three areas have only one "cut-through" street among them, Hart Road. 

If the government wants to encourage us to drive less, it's not enough to make driving inconvenient; it must also make transit and shank's mare convenient.  Beaverton failed.

Terri Schiavo and the Supreme Court

Perhaps the reason the Supreme Court ducked hearing the Terri Schiavo case is that they were busy making sure they had their own health care directives ("living wills") in force, to ensure that her tragic situation won't happen to them.

My dream job is vacant

Sadly, the reason is that its long-time incumbent, Bobby Short, died yesterday.  Alas, my voice and fingers will never be smooth enough to take his place at the Carlyle.

Too embarrassing to watch

Today's Oregonian reported that Paul Allen will shut the Cucina Cucina restaurant across from the Rose Garden at the end of the Trail Blazer season.  The story made me think again about the Blazer organization's firing the team's coach, Maurice Cheeks, which I said at the time was a mistake. 

I don't know how good Mr. Cheeks was as a coach.  The team was not doing well, though it has been doing even worse since he was removed, but it's a statistical fact that every year about half the teams in the league don't have winning seasons, not all of which can be the fault of their coaches.  I'm not criticizing the organization's decision on sporting grounds.

The thought that struck me was that firing Mr. Cheeks was one more in a string of decisions that have made it embarrassing for Portlanders to admit that they follow the Blazers.  The tickets offered by the Noble Employers go begging most nights.  Friends with tickets tell me that they rarely go to the games and often try to give their tickets away, finding few takers.  Even the skyboxes go begging.

It called to mind something that I've been told about Japanese consumers: when a scandal strikes a retailer, the retailer's business will drop off substantially, apparently because consumers become ashamed to be seen shopping there.  I think the same thing's afflicting the Blazers, and high time, too.

Another Stan Terry story

I'd previously written about Stan Terry, the Multnomah County pinball king of the 1950s and 1960s, whose bid to be elected mayor of Portland was tossed out because he lived in Lake Oswego.  Mr. Terry was a character in many other ways; a Mausoleum Club member recalls fondly that when Lake Oswego wouldn't let Mr. Terry use one of his properties as he wished, he obtained a flock of sheep, dyed them red, white, and blue, and grazed them on the property more or less in downtown Lake Oswego. 

When city hall asked him to remove the sheep, who were doing what sheep are known for doing (think of methane here), Mr. Terry cheerfully replied that the red, white, and blue sheep were his way of showing his affection for our country, and no puisne city government was going to halt his patriotic display.

He and the city came to some agreement, and the sheep returned to greener pastures, presumably bleached.  It's a shame that he didn't run, at least once, to be mayor of Lake Oswego.

PERS General Electric, III

As PERS needs to earn 8% on its assets to keep up with its guarantee to Tier 1 participants, and gets into trouble through the Money Match program if it earns more than 8%, it occurred to me that PERS could fund a state and local purchase of PGE by lending the $2.35 billion in the form of a perpetual bond paying 8% interest.  As the revenues of PGE would provide the funding to pay the bond, and the greater part of those revenues come from customers in the City of Portland, the City would achieve its goal of buying PGE, albeit through the farebox instead of the stock exchange.