Thinklets

McCain's motives

I’m worried about, Chloe, our little dog. Right now she is under the table, sleeping on my feet. Fifteen minutes ago she was gazing up at me with an expression of rapt adoration. Soon she will awaken and have a drink of water and then check to make sure the front yard is still there.

 

She is doing what she has done every day for the seven years that we have owned her. I’m worried about her erratic behavior. 

 

My husband left for work an hour ago wearing his scrubs, ID badge, a CD in hand for the drive as well as a briefcase of paraphernalia for a night of sewing up lacerations and treating children with ear infections and adults with bellyaches. On the way he called to tell me about something he heard on the radio.

 

He does the same thing every workday. Today, though, I’m wondering if he has selfish motives.

 

This morning our daughter-in-law stopped by with our grandsons. She is always dropping in, calling, and touching base. I often call her the sunshine of my life. Today, however, I’m wondering if her visit was a cheap stunt.

 

I’m a seeing things a little differently today, after watching a few hours of cable news pundits announcing that the United States is facing a crisis as dire as the September 11th terrorist attacks, Pearl Harbor, and the stock market crash of 1929. 

 

Because as Washington D.C. was staring down the abyss yesterday, one familiar face was missing. Senator John McCain -- a man who became infused with a compulsion to serve his country in a filthy communist prison cell 40 years ago and who has been at the front lines of every struggle since.

When America is in trouble, McCain puts everything else aside. He always has. So he flew back to Washington yesterday and was promptly accused of erratic behavior, selfish motives, and staging a cheap political stunt.

 

If that is true, then Chloe, still asleep on my feet, is behaving erratically. And my husband’s long hard nights at the ER are motivated by selfishness. And our daughter-in-law’s cheerful, loving presence in our lives is only a sham, hiding a nefarious agenda that only she knows about. 

 

Because if McCain returning to Washington D.C. during an American crisis of historical proportions, is nothing but a cheap political stunt, then everything is suspect.

 

Including the sun itself when it rises in the East.  

(This piece was originally posted on the Oregonian web site)

Mission improbable

These are trying times. Wall Street sunk like an elevator yesterday as the interminable convulsions of the current banking/housing correction grind along.

 

We’re pretty sure Osama Bin Laden isn’t dead yet – which means he’s still cowering in that cave, waiting for his hellfire missile and wishing he’d never messed with George W Bush.

 

Who knows when touchy Vladimir Putin will decide the next journalist, rival, or sovereign nation isn’t holding its mouth right, dispatch the problem faster than you can say “Polonium 210,” all the while whining about belligerent Poland having the gall to install protective anti-missile shields within their borders. (By the way, what is it about non-aggressive defensive measures that make Putin so crazy? I bet beekeeping suits and safety goggles drive him apoplectic.) 

 

And now, as if there isn’t enough bad news out there, I hear that Jon Voight will portray the father of our country, George Washington, in a new Hollywood motion picture, “An American Carol,” which debuts next month.

 

That’s right. Voight was once again entrusted with the character of a beloved American icon – even after what he did to Jim Phelps, the main character of the 60’s television show, “Mission Impossible.” Voight portrayed Phelps in a 1996 movie called something like “High-Tech Rambo With Ripped-Off Theme Song” that was spuriously touted as Mission Impossible’s big screen reincarnation.   

 

Now I’ve heard it all. Why don’t they just appoint Reverend Jeremiah Wright special ambassador for inner city race relations?  Or place Captain Joseph Hazlewood in command of a nuclear submarine? Or put Representative John Murtha in charge of troop morale in Iraq? 

 

Because, in a fine piece of character evisceration, Voight’s version of Phelps apparently swapped brains with a psychopath in between the television show and motion picture, because when re-introduced on the big screen, he was no longer a dedicated patriot but a cowardly, murderous traitor.

 

 

In Voight’s defense, I suppose that he, along with everyone involved with the Mission Impossible movie and sequels, never actually watched the television version.

 

If so, they would know that instead of all-about-me Tom Cruise monopolizing the screen with mindless fist fights, explosions, and gunfire, The Impossible Mission Force (IMF) of the TV show carried out complex plans, revealed to a thinking audience in deliciously graduated stages as they used ingenious tools to manipulate their quarry’s perception of their world. Then as the villains turned on each other and their schemes imploded from within, Phelps and his team would fade into the background. 

 

Putin, for example, would have been a cinch for the IMF. They could have tricked him into thinking he was on a submarine in the Baltic Sea when al-Qaida attacked Israel and Europe with Iranian nuclear weapons. Poland, however, was spared because of the anti-missile shield that Putin had found so threatening. At least that’s what he thinks until he is discovered inside a plywood submarine mock-up in Moscow, begging the Poles for sanctuary over a fake radio.

 

Or they could manipulate him into a catfight with Russian President Demitri Medvedev after he trounces him in the first round of an IMF-staged “Sexiest Russian Alive” contest.

 

I could think of many other scenarios, but one way or another, by the ending credits I guarantee there would be no more gas pipeline blackmail, bombers to Venezuela, nuclear secrets to Iran, and peace would reign in the Caucasus. And all in one hour, minus commercials. 

 

That’s why I’m still miffed at Voight. I realize that he has made some sensible comments lately regarding presidential candidate, Barack Obama’s big-government liberalism and the importance of not losing our nerve in the war on terror. I realize that he has shown a reasoned perspective of the true dangers and perils that face us – a balanced outlook that is not easy to find in Hollywood these days. 

 

Sensible and reasoned, yes. But sensible and reasoned doesn’t power up any self-destructing Aiwa TP-30 in my book.

(This piece was originally posted on the Oregonian web site)

Bill Clinton: Backseat driver

 

Last week the Democrats got together for a convention, the theme of which was something like “George Bush Bites Heads Off Bunnies.”  Not surprisingly, former-president Bill Clinton was there, once again loudly trumpeting his successor’s many flaws.

 

It’s sad, such animosity. Clinton and Bush are the same age. In another world they could have been buddies. After all, Clinton had that 1970 El Camino-with-Astroturf thing going, which might have appealed to a drunken frat boy the IQ of a doorknob like Bush. (The consensus last week at the convention. Personally, I doubt your typical doorknob could earn an MBA from Harvard, but what do I know? )

 

Think about it, though. Wouldn’t you love to ride along on that one? Clinton is at the wheel, the sun is shining, the road is straight and clear… except, knowing Clinton, he probably breezed past a few signs that read, “Warning! Danger ahead!”

 

Then, after Bush takes the wheel, things would get bumpy, which I would imagine might make Clinton testy (doesn’t everything?), so he starts poking Bush, calling him stupid and incompetent, until someone points out all the warning signs that Clinton passed up, which really riles Clinton, and he denies ever seeing them, and then it turns out it can’t be proved because Sandy Berger stole them all and stuck them in his pants.

 

So, like I said, Clinton and Bush could have been friends. But back to Clinton’s address at the Democratic convention last week, a speech that somehow reminded me of other former leaders in other times and places in history.

 

Like James Buchanan – who earned the distinction of being our worst-ever president by trying to placate the pro-slavery southern states with the following strategy: “We’ll pass the fugitive slave act, toss the Missouri Compromise, and allow new territories to own slaves just like you do. Just don’t secede from the Union…. pretty please?”

 

That plan worked for maybe five minutes, but by the time Lincoln took over, the Union was a seething cauldron. What a shock.

 

Nevertheless, while Lincoln wrestled with his inherited mess, at least Buchanan didn’t have the Clintonian gall to blame him for the Civil War.

 

Similarly, Clinton could only fantasize about achieving the integrity level of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, the foreign policy genius best known for telling Adolph Hitler, “You can keep Czechoslovakia if you cross your heart and promise to be nice from now on.”

 

 At least Chamberlain didn’t taunt his successor, Winston Churchill, after the London Blitz and say, “I had achieved peace in our time! This mess is all your fault!”

 

Saddam Hussein could have won an Oscar for acting like the guiltiest man on earth when he threw the arms inspectors out of Iraq, but Clinton did little, even as Hussein flagrantly violated the terms of the first Gulf War cease-fire, violated multiple U.N. resolutions, shopped for uranium in Niger (Yes he did, calm down.), and played benevolent sugar daddy to al-Qaida and al-Qaida wannabesall over the world.

Clinton similarly coddled Osama Bin Laden, but why rehash that?   

 

Even though Clinton didn’t take effective action while he was president, you gotta give him credit for being a good talker.  He clearly stated that Saddam Hussein was a grave threat that needed to go– just before he kicked the problem down the road. 

 

 So, of course, nowadays he spends his time pronouncing loud, frequent, and public judgments upon Bush for actually dealing with the threat.

 

What a guy.   

 

(This piece was originally posted on the Oregonian web site)

Carter's compassion

A while back a concerned group managed to get the plight of a tiny snail-darter before the U.S. Supreme Court, and a brand new dam was nearly torn down – arguably one of the most ludicrous examples of misguided charity in U.S. history.

 

At least until Jimmy Carter started playing elder statesman, roaming the world championing an even more improbable cause  – The pain and suffering that terrorists endure when their victims defend themselves.

 

Last week, Carter met with leaders of Hamas, kissed and hugged the earth’s latest incarnation of Haman, and laid a wreath on Yasser Arafat’s grave – Another tired rerun of Carter’s futile quest to cast stature upon himself by lending it to thugs and despots.

 

It’s an old story. Like a 20-year-old smart-aleck kid who enters the adult world confident he can show his backward parents a thing or two about life, Jimmy and Rosalynn personified idealism and innocence on Inauguration Day, 1977 – Hansel and Gretel strolling down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the White House, chuck full of foreign policy ideas guaranteed to warm the heart of the toughest East German Stasi agent: Hug a Dictator! Arms for Puppies!

 

Then, four disastrous years later, while the Reagan administration was still sweeping daisy chains and John Lennon Imagine albums out of the West Wing, Carter sat at the peanut farm, inexplicably stunned that the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan, even though they had already exploited his ineffective tenure by gobbling up Africa and South America like a teenage boy at a smorgasbord.

 

To be fair, President Carter could be tough with tin-pot dictators – but only when those regimes blocked big-time thugs like the KGB and Fidel Castro from coming in and setting up bases for revolutionary expansion.

 

Like when he ditched our ally, the Shah of Iran, leaving a nice welcoming vacuum for the fanatical Islamic hardliners who immediately kidnapped our diplomats.

 

Now, decades later, Carter has the gall to position himself as sanctimonious judge to an administration locked in a desperate struggle with the monsters created by his incompetence.

 

It isn’t right, even if it did get him a Nobel Peace Prize.

 

So, this week, he’s at it again, playing the Mickey Rooney role in a garish Busby Berkeley remake that never ends: “Golly, Mr. Meshal, we're only kids now, but someday we're gonna be the guys that make ya laugh and cry and think that there's a little stardust left on life's dirty old pan. Oh, Bush don't understand: he'd put butterflies to work makin' rubber tires!”

 

Hey, Jimmy. Rosalynn called. They need you back at the peanut farm.

Maybe he should try Ebay

Steven Ybarra, California lawyer and Democratic National Committee member, doesn’t care who gets his super-delegate vote, Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama.

 

Forget the usual fuss over issues and experience. What Ybarra wants for his vote is some campaign treasury cash – $20,000,000 to be exact – which he will use to convince Hispanics that voting Democrat is the way to get public treasury cash.

 

You heard it right. It’s an ingenious multi-level marketing scheme – but instead of car wax and laundry soap, Yberra wants to buy and sell votes like an Amway representative on Adderall.

 

For some reason Ybarra thinks that our hard-working and resourceful Latino community is an easy mark for the trademark Democrat victim-voter box and is itching to spoon-feed them petulance and entitlement until they are willing to vote for big-government liberals. 

 

It must be because many of them are recent immigrants. Everyone knows immigrants tend to be unspirited sorts – indolent and inclined to sit around and complain when their needs are not met by others.

 

Yeah, right.

 

People come to America because they yearn for the chance to control their own destiny without the strait-jacket of a suffocating nanny state.

 

My great-grandfather and his brother left their town in Germany and hired a smuggler to hide them on an American-bound ship in the 1880s.  Life wasn’t easy, but my mother has memories of the Oregon City farm that he eventually owned and the farmhouse he built that she lives in to this day.

 

They carried water from the spring, sewed, gardened, and canned. When they butchered hogs, Mom remembers, nearly no part was wasted – memories of which made her the semi-vegetarian that she has been all her life.

 

I never met my great-grandpa, but I remember his self-educated and successful son well. My grandfather, Richard Polehn, was a brilliant, independent man with an ornery streak, prone to declare what sounded like a “reinemach-divel” upon a messy house and chuck all offending clutter out the window. Then, if Grandma fussed, he would suggest that she “go sit on Mount Hood.”

 

There would have been another “reinemach-divel” if Ybarra had shown up at Grandpa’s door, trying to win the German-American vote by creating a bloc of divided, resentful, hyphenated citizens.

 

Yet that’s what Ybarra dreams of for our Latino brothers and sisters. I hope they tell him to go sit on Mount Hood.

Tale of two generations

There has been a lot of talk lately about Barack Obama’s connection to William Ayers, a former sixties radical who feels he “didn’t do enough” when he helped bomb the New York City Police Headquarters, the Capitol building, and the Pentagon.

Ayers, a professor at the University of Illinois, is a bona fide member of the Smarty-Pants Generation – those born while their dads were off taking the cliffs of Normandy, liberating the Philippines, and driving Hitler’s Wehrmacht back to Berlin one scorched inch at a time – many of whom would grew up to stomp on the American flag and embrace Ayers’ famous admonition, “Kill all the rich people. ... Bring the revolution home. Kill your parents.”

Then, like Ayers, many of them became teachers and set about shaping tender young minds.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. I’ve seen many questionable choices when it comes to training our young. Examples of this abound in America’s schools, like last year’s sex and drugs seminar at Boulder High in Colorado.

Among the speakers was Joel Becker (“I’m going to encourage you to have sex, and I’m going to encourage you to use drugs appropriately…”), Andee Gerhardt (sex doesn’t have to be “about love” or even about a “long-term relationship; it feels the same both ways.”), and Antonio Sacre who shared with the captive students all kinds of things, like the first time he masturbated, the first time he had intercourse, and his first sexually transmitted disease.

And people complain about what Abu Zubaida endured at the hands of the CIA. I’m going to recommend adding the phone number for Amnesty International to PeeChee folders, next to the handy metric conversion chart and multiplication table.

Our educational system is rife with aging smarty-pants like Ayers with their deep and abiding contempt for their predecessors  – gorillas and Neanderthals who had the gall to actually tell youngsters some things are wrong.

The founding fathers were okay, though. Those accommodating fellows who wrote the First Amendment just so Americans would have to pay Sacre to talk dirty to their kids.

The Greatest Generation sacrificed to preserve America for their children – a gift they assumed would passed on with pride and honor. How sad that many of them teach their children and your children the opposite.

And so now Ayers holds court in tony Hyde Park, teaching college and blessing the futures of upcoming liberal Chicago politicians.

I’m not worried that he influenced Obama, though. It took him twenty years to figure out that Jeremiah Wright doesn’t like America.

Jeremiah Wright: Leftist in sheeps clothing

Monday morning I caught Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s appearance at the National Press club, and guess what? He thinks America is a murderous, imperialistic force in the world. Also, we had the 9/11 attacks coming.

 

Declaring that he speaks for all black Christians – which somehow prohibits dissent – Barack Obama’s former pastor described his religious philosophy, Liberation Theology, (the love child of Marxism and Christianity) as “the thoughts and understandings of God, faith, religion and the Bible from those whose lives were ground under, mangled and destroyed by the ruling classes or the oppressors.”

 

However, after viewing Monday’s anti-American tirade, peppered with the defiant gesticulations of a hyperactive fifth-grader, (Has America apologized to Japan for not handing over the Eastern Hemisphere?) I suspect former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich, is correct that while Wright claims to speak for God, he is really just another representative of America’s hard left, “closer to a tradition that sees America as the center of evil in the world.”

 

But suppose there really is such as a scourge as American imperialists, roaming about the world in search of new victims to grind, mangle, and destroy? A quick look at history will reveal the fruits of our unique brand of “imperialism.”

 

In the face of Joseph Stalin’s purges, Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, the Hungarian Revolution, Prague Spring, the Killing Fields, and re-education camps; American imperialism offered the Berlin Airlift, the Marshall Plan, and a cure for polio.

 

When Stalin and Zedong-backed communists tried to overrun and enslave South Korea and South Vietnam, American imperialism stood with them against the invaders.

 

While the truly oppressed have risked machine guns, police dogs, gulags, and the savage seas in leaky boats to flee their homelands; American imperialism offers the world asylum for refugees, humanitarian aid drops, natural disaster assistance, and global AIDS relief.

 

When Islamic zealots blow up wedding parties, funerals, religious pilgimages, crowded marketplaces, and school children waiting for candy; American imperialism destroys weapons caches, car bomb factories, and drives terrorists away from the innocents –lending action to President Bush’s declaration after 9/11: “The advance of human freedom – the great achievement of our time, and the great hope of every time – now depends on us.”

 

Any person of color can attest that America isn’t perfect. She is inhabited by the usual cross-section of humans – the noble, the apathetic, the easily led, and the downright evil. But America’s history testifies to her ability to recognize and atone for past wrongs. And despite the rantings of Wright and his left-wing ilk – and despite opinion poll numbers in foreign countries whose liberty was secured by American blood – most reasonable Americans agree we’ve got the best thing going.

 

If Wright knows of a better place, I suggest that he move there.

 

Barack Obama: Junior psychologist

Barack Obama must grow weary of being all things to all men, and sometimes it shows. Like last summer’s clunker when he tried to establish rapport with some Iowa farmers by asking, “Anyone gone to Whole Foods lately and seen what they charge for arugula?”

 

So, it’s no he wonder felt inclined to relax a bit at a private fundraiser given by a gaggle of Marin County patricians – that unique breed of Birkenstock BMW owners who live in biodegradable mansions, study positive affirmation and experiential wisdom, and do care about the price of arugula.

 

“Anyone gone to 7-Eleven lately and seen what they charge for a Super Big Gulp?” Obama blurted to the Chablis-sipping congregants. “I mean, they’re charging a lot of money for that stuff!”

 

No, he didn’t.

 

If he really had said that, he might have secured the allegiance of those very savages he courted so clumsily in Iowa – and possibly even my vote.  But alas, no.

 

Instead, in full-fledged I’m-a-liberal-and-I’m-here-to-rescue-you mode, Obama nurtured a mood of noblesse oblige in the shelter of those more highly-evolved counterparts, by pondering out loud what ails America’s proletariat, causing them to practice such aberrant behaviors as hunting and praying.

 

"You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them,” he said. “And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

 

He was so persuasive, I figured that the American Psychiatric Association might have published diagnostic criteria for the malady he described in the latest DSM-IV.  Possibly something like this:

 

Diagnostic code: 987.8  Embittered Neanderthaliasis: 

 

Repetitive frustrated behavior manifested by those laid off two decades ago, who never retrained or moved on, and are still waiting for a savior to be elected who will confiscate the wealth of their neighbors who did and give it to them, as indicated by two or more of the following:

 

· Prayer, Bible reading, and church attendance. (Do not count if the church’s pastor spreads divisiveness, resentment, and racism like Mount Kilauea spreads lava.)

· Clinging behavior toward firearms.

· Antipathy toward those who are not like them, when laws are enforced selectively in that person’s favor.

· Frequent consumption of thick, bright-orange substances sprayed from aerosol cans.

· The presence of finger calluses indicating habitual dragging of the knuckles.

 

Funny.  I checked the DSM-IV, and I couldn’t find it.

 

The missionary heart

Bob Pierce, the founder of World Vision, once said, "Let my heart be broken with the things that break God's heart."

 

One day last fall God saw Clara, a critically ill Guatemalan woman, and His heart was broken. She had two children, a useless prescription for antibiotics that she couldn’t afford, and two pieces of scrap lumber.

 

The Good Samaritan who found Clara and brought her to our makeshift medical clinic near a Guatemala City shantytown called “the Hole,” told us how Clara used those sticks that day to painfully propel herself down a dirty street in a last desperate search for help.

 

By the time she was carried to us, she was hysterical, feverish, and close to shock with infected legs, both blackened to the knees. 

 

Oscar and Lidia Banegas, Guatemalan missionaries who arranged that medical outreach last September, have broken hearts, evidenced by their passion to alleviate suffering and poverty – the same passion that has burned for centuries and conceived hospitals and schools all over the world.

 

When Oscar and Lidia see children denied education because their parents can’t afford paper and pencils, their hearts are broken. So last year they distributed 800 backpacks filled with school supplies. Then they brought 35 donated computers to Guatemala City and established English and computer training at a local church. When they see hunger and sickness, their hearts are broken, so they assemble and distribute bags of staple foods for distribution and are planning our next medical outreach. 

 

Because Oscar and Lidia’s hearts are broken by the things that break God’s heart, our team was in Clara’s neighborhood last fall, and she received professional care, medicine, and God’s love. As we administered IV fluids and antibiotics, our host ministry, “Living Stones,” located her children and brought them to her. After Clara responded to treatment and began to rally, they provided food for the destitute little family.

 

“The very practice of medicine is an opportunity to live out the Gospel.  Love, mercy, compassion, sacrifice, and healing are all aspects of Christ’s work,” Keith R. Bucklen, M.D., stated in Global Medical Missions.

 

Unexpectedly, a broken heart often contains the most joy. Like the joy of giving an elderly Filipino woman a pair of dollar-store reading glasses and discovering from her tears, hugs, and smiles that you had just handed her the world. It takes so little to give so much.

 

After Karen Watson, a missionary in Iraq, was killed in 2004, the following lines were found in a letter she had written:

 

The missionary heart:

 

Cares more than some think is wise

Risks more than some think is safe

Dreams more than some think is practical

Expects more than some think is possible.

 

(This piece was originally posted on the Oregonian web site)

 

Level of semantic hysteria 'worst in history'

Last week former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, pronounced the Iraq War the “worst disaster in American history,” proving something that I’ve been suspecting for a long time: those darn Democrats sure love their superlatives.

 

It’s especially true this election season. You can’t turn on your radio or television without hearing some form of shrill grammatical extremism: Usually “never/always/most/worst” frequently followed by “in history.”

 

It figures. Immersed as we are in an election-year war of words, declaring something the “worst in history,” has so much more punch than just saying that it “needs improvement.”

 

Nobody mentions that all this hysteria going unchallenged could mean that the level of history knowledge in the United States may well be the worst in history.

 

Ironically, even as they swing wildly from one spurious semantic extreme to the next, Democrats still find time to accuse Republicans of scaring Americans into thinking that crazed religious fanatics want to kill us, because Republicans crave war more than anything – except maybe Wal-Mart hotdogs. (Republicans love Wal-Mart. They always pick a line with an overworked checker, always snarl about the delay, and always choose “no” when asked if the store was clean.)

 

Presidential candidate, Barack Obama, announces every hour that the War on Terror is a Republican delusion, cleverly designed to keep Americans from noticing the truly dire problem that our country faces: five percent unemployment.

 

It seems to be working. Both Democratic presidential candidates are so adept at semantic extremism, that they have got a large percentage of Americans believing that the office of the presidency comes with supernatural powers.

 

Bush, they cleverly imply, could use that presidential power to end poverty, illness, and Cialis commercials; but being as he is the most sadistic president in history, he prefers to let those things continue. 

 

That is when Hillary angelically assures voters that she would use the presidential power to outlaw foreclosures, freeze interest rates, provide healthcare for all, and usher in a thousand years of peace.

 

If she is elected, I’m going to ask her to reverse the course of the Columbia River every year, so the salmon won’t have to work so hard to spawn.

 

Not to be left out, Barack Obama says he would use the power to implement what he calls “shared prosperity.”

 

Here’s how it works: He will require that America’s top wage earners, small business owners, and corporations:

 

• Buy health insurance for everyone
• Raise the minimum wage
• Increase teacher’s salaries
• Provide the “best education the country has to offer,” preschool through college, for all children
• Always make payroll
• Create more and more high-paying jobs
• And never ever lay anyone off

 

Sounds great… except one thing bothers me. If it is so easy, surely someone has tried it before. But in order to know when, you’d have to know your history.

 

(This post was originally published on the Oregonian web site)