Somewhere between a rock & a hard reality

Somewhere between a rock and a hard reality

by sonya hammond

Thanks to the idiosyncratic antics of El Niño, the Oregon coast recently unveiled some surprisingly intact tree stumps. This aroused the interest of the scientific community which found the pristine condition of the stumps both remarkable and inexplicable.

Actually, it's quite simple to explain. This is Oregon, a State where practically anything in its original condition is not only eventually liable to turn up, but in some cases already has. Some recent examples:

Crawling out from under what most people not working with several thousand cells short of a brain would consider an insurmountable rock, former congressman Wes Cooley has suddenly found himself worthy of reconsideration as a United States representative. This misapprehension must be based on a conviction that Oregon voters suffer from terminal amnesia.

Cooley seems to feel that serving a two-year sentence of community service work constitutes total absolution for attempting to win an election with false credentials, and should somehow reassure us that we will not be subjected to any further fantasies of heroic deeds that never were.

He cites the continued respect of his former congressional colleagues, most of whom thought his legal problems 'absurd', as inspiration for his latest run for office, although as a rationale for candidacy this is analogous to Spiro Agnew including Nixon as a reference on his resume.

Cooley asks us to concentrate on his 'integrity' while previously in office, as though anything he might have claimed on a Voter's Pamphlet had been written while engaged in some other line of work. He evidently assumes Oregon voters are eager to augment a Congress already teeming with unconvicted self-serving opportunists, with a convicted low-level felon [an apt designation in more ways than one.]

It seems doubtful that any of this will come to pass, and that Mr. Cooley's besmirched hat in the ring will simply louse up the congressional race for some other Republican candidate, leaving Cooley free to complete his sentence and crawl back under his rock.

If local scientists have any sense, they won't bother to investigate it, although Cooley's emergence in his original condition is as inexplicable as a preserved tree stump.

Unfortunately, there is more than one rock in Oregon:

Recently Bob Packwood again slithered out from under one, to be warmly welcomed by a gathering of the Republicans of the Oregon Coast, a group more committed to a forgive and forget policy than recognition of sexual harassment.

While not currently running for office, Packwood let it be known that this reprieve was not engraved in stone, and received a standing ovation after a speech that featured excerpts from his diaries which apparently do include a few items other than the sordid details of his real or fantasized sexual encounters.

His Republican admirers passed out old Packwood campaign buttons, one assumes under the delusion that they might be recycled for some sane cause.

It may be difficult to believe that Bawdy Bob would give up a lucrative lobbying job for the low-paying uncertainties of political life, but never underestimate the lure of power to someone who figured it gave him the right to exercise it over any woman who came within groping distance, and who operated under the illusion that his high school exercises in seduction were worthy of recording for posterity.

It is even more difficult to believe that if old Bob makes good on his threat to return to Oregon and eventually decides to run for anything more high-profile than sewer inspection, voters in any significant numbers would rush to the polls to give him another shot at embarrassing an entire state.

But should he try, his former constituents have reserved a nice heavy rock for this example of an unfortunately preserved dinosaur.

But before Oregon runs out of rocks:

The Oregon Citizen's Alliance deserves an extremely large pile of them ... preferably located on some offshore island in the Persian Gulf.

Lon Mabon, this group's founder and self-appointed authority on the moral values of Oregon society, recently held forth on a local talk show to explain the latest OCA campaign to get two of its grievances of choice on our ballots.

After the failure of their 1996 attempt to ban abortions after the 12^th week, this time out the OCA has constructed a compromise measure that would ban 2^nd and 3^rd trimester abortions, adding the reluctant qualification "except to save the life of the mother". The theory behind this ploy is, Lon admits, that trying to ban all abortions is not currently 'politically possible' in Oregon, although that is his ultimate goal.

Another OCA goal is redefinition of language. This measure specifies that "the more traditional and respectful term, mother, is to be used over the more sterile and disrespectful term, 'pregnant woman' when referencing a woman who is with child."

This clever twist of semantics is no doubt meant to invest motherhood [and pre-natal guilt] on a woman at the moment of conception, although Webster defines a 'mother' as 'a woman who has borne a child'.

That deviousness aside, passage of this legislation would arbitrarily make the term 'pregnant woman' disrespectful, thereby deleting accurate description from our vocabularies. As far as the term being 'sterile', however, one can only marvel at how mixed a metaphor can get.

Continuing in semantic attack mode, the other piece of loony OCA legislature requires a constitutional amendment to define the word 'family', limiting it to a male, a female and their progeny. In the gospel according to Lon, legal sanction of the male/female relationship is not required for 'family' qualification, as long as they have a child.

Persons of the same gender, thereby unable to procreate ... the only basis of 'responsible' social behavior ... have no right to 'family' status and are simply persons of 'lower nature' who have 'chosen to give in to 'wrong impulses'.

Scientists might want to investigate this resurgence of OCA determination to redefine everything in their own image. Somewhere in their arrogance, there is a remarkable resemblance to tree stumps ... dead, useless, and completely inexplicable.

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