Oregon's amputated Civil War memory

While Oregonians celebrate the coming of "The Civil War” football game on Saturday, we will continue to blindly forget that the words "Civil War" have chilling meaning.

In is now believed that some 700,000 Americans died in our American Civil War. That’s a number larger than the population of Portland. Imagine a city erased by death.

And yet we persist in calling a football game “The Civil War.”
 
For decades Americans and fought and died abroad in what were civil wars: in Korea, in Vietnam, in Iraq. Today they fight and die in Afghanistan. Tomorrow young Americans could join the civil war in Syria. As I write the fighting going is going on in Gaza, a battlefield in an endless, intermittent civil war between Palestinians and Israelis.

And yet we persist in calling a mere football game “The Civil War.”

To Duck and Beaver fans and other Oregon sports spectators, I commend reading THIS in today's New York Times:

The article closes with the following words:

Amputation was the most common Civil War surgical procedure. Union surgeons performed approximately 30,000 compared to just over 16,000 by American surgeons in World War II. One postwar British traveler noted that amputees were “everywhere in town and farm communities through the South.” The men who had survived the surgeon’s knife were a visible reminder of the Civil War for decades.
No longer. Today's veterans more often suffer from the torment of memory. The haunted have taken their own lives by the thousands.

Yet today, in Oregon, we and the media have amputated the darker meaning of “Civil War” from our minds. We are victims of our own ignorance and insensitivity.

Oregonians, it is well past time for us to come up with a joyful, playful name for our friendly, passionate rivalry — and to end our "Civil War."

Thorns and Roses for Oregonian's PERS inequity scoop

"Top PERS payout: $41,342 a month"

There's a story to "occupy" your mind and your conscience.

And the top pensioner is none other than Mike Bellotti, the former University of Oregon football coach. What's that say about values at Oregon's, ahem, "institutions of higher learning"?

Why is it there's a whiff of Phil Knight to all of this? "I'm a billionaire. Why shouldn't Bellotti be one too?" On the state dole, no less....

How will this tale of greed register with all those Duck graduates saddled with debt and unable to find work? It's enough to drive a person to demonstrate and occupy a campus. Oh, wait, that was happening, even before The Oregonian broke the story.

Talk about "higher education."

Too much of the text of the Oregonian story is about how very, very, very difficult it was for the newspaper's attorneys to wrest from PERS the damning data about the top-most pigs at the PERS trough. Yes, it is outrageous that PERS fought tooth and nail to hide the list from the public. And yes, it is great that The Oregonian the Salem Statesman Journal fought back and prevailed.

But try to find in the story something about how it came to pass that Bellotti and a bunch of other high-paid state employees (many OHSU professors and administrators) got such largesse. It's not in the story.

Who is responsible for such inequity? It's not in the story.

How do they justify it? It's not in the story.

Will it be reported on later? One would hope.

Related: The Huffington Post has listed the University of Oregon on the top-ten list of campuses with the worst professors. Could that have something to do with what football coaches are paid in Eugene and what professors aren't?

Could it be that the more competitive you are in the NCAA football, the lower you fall in academics?

And, if so, is Stanford the exception that proves a rule? How so?

Just askin'.....

Translating football fame into academic excellence

On the front page of today’s Oregonian, we learn the University of Oregon is reaping huge rewards from the massive media hype about the Ducks’ playing for the national collegiate football championship.

To quote the lead, the Ducks’ football superiority is “burnishing the UO brand and boosting revenue, recruitment and status.”

All of which triggers one of my favorite questions: Is there intelligent life on Earth?

What, pray tell, is the link between a school’s football success and its academic excellence and educational status?

The story quotes University of Oregon President Richard Lariviere as saying that applications to the university have risen sharply because of the media attention given the Ducks’ team.

Out-of-state applications are up 30 percent. In-state applications have grown 20 percent.

No fool he, Lariviere also tells the reporter that the high-profile team “gives us an opportunity to showcase what is really important to us, which is the educational mission. We are working very hard to translate this attention into awareness of what we do here.”

I don’t know about you, but my raw-boned interest in the Duck’s team has zero connection to numbers of Nobel Laureates, US News rankings, tuition costs, tenured faculty, student-faculty ratios, and graduation rates.

Yet presumably those are the very qualities Lariviere would like the “translation” to lead to. (If you do manage to make the translation, alas, UO doesn’t translate all that well in academics. But that’s another subject.)

I suggest the president consider exactly whom he is asking to make the translation.

In short, who are these applicants who suddenly want to attend UO because of the football frenzy in Eugene?

Could they be someone like Potential Future Duck over there. He’s in medialand, submerged up to his belt line on the sofa, beer or sugary beverage in hand, nachos within reach. He’s deep into Duckmania. The game and the Ducks glow on the screen.

“Wow, did you see that sack (or catch or run or touchdown)? Check out those cheerleaders!! I'm applying to the University of Oregon!”

I don’t know what kind of “translation” Potential Future Duck is doing, but I don’t think it is the one Lariviere has in mind.

I hope there’s a question on UO’s application form that asks: “Are you applying to the university because of the success of the Ducks’ football team?”

The forms of applicants answering “Yes! Go Ducks!” (or words to that effect) go to the bottom of the pile.

Now THAT could translate into academic excellence.

Devious praise

Here’s a comment that would cheer any blogger. I’m sharing it verbatim:

“Your blog is really excellent. It inspires the readers who has that great desire to lead a better and happier life. Thanks for sharing this information and hope to read more from you.”

Ignoring its ragged prose, I read it with appreciation because it was sent as a “comment” about this very blog.

Then, partly because I screen comments, I read on.

As it turns out the comment is as far-fetched as cheery horoscopes (“Great wealth will come your way!”) or cloying fortune cookie messages. (“You are greatly admired for your wisdom and perseverance.”)

The fulsome praise for The Red Electric comes from “Custom Term Papers” and was generated in response to a post tagged “University of Oregon” and “Oregon State University.” See: "Enjoy the game but not the war.”

Clever, huh?

A search robot seeks posts with academic-related tags, lays on kudos to ensure acceptance from praise-hungry bloggers, and then lures in plagiarism-susceptable undergraduates. Those would be students with the “great desire to lead a better and happier life” … but without the will do the work required to achieve it.

“Custom Term Papers” is here to help.

It gets worse. The phrase “really excellent” isn’t something I’d want to see in any of my students’ written work. Grammarians call words like “really” (and “very”) “intensifiers.” "Excellent" is excellent. It doesn’t (really) need “really.”

Really.

Also, there’s the serious subject-verb agreement problem with “readers who has.”

It’s scary how so many human foibles (pride, greed, ambition, deceit, sloth, error) are exploited by one little encomium.

Enjoy the game but not the war

Each year at this time I remind fellow Oregonians that war involves maiming, misery and death.

Why do I do this?

Because each year, Oregonians, without pausing, refer to their intra-state rivalry as “The Civil War.” (Surely there is a better name. Suggestions?)

The "Civil War tradition" and casual usage of the name lead to such things a “Civil War Appetizers and Main Dishes” (vis. Today’s Oregonian food section.)

The list of “Civil War” paraphernalia, oddities and trivia goes on and on.

So here’s my reminder: the American Civil War (1861-1865) never came with appetizers and main dishes.

Nor did it involve split ends, cheerleaders (with or without split ends) and tailgaters.

The Civil War did come with death; 620,000 soldiers (the most of any American war) were killed. Hundreds of thousand were maimed. Divisions from the American Civil War remain to this day.

You might give our Civil War history passing thought as you settle into the Oregon State/University of Oregon football game Thursday. When “The Civil War” is mouthed — and it will be endlessly and mindlessly—allow the horror of real civil war to flicker ever-so-briefly across your mind.

That number again is 620,000 dead.

If you are having trouble wrapping your head around it, here’s help: the statistic is the equivalent of every man, woman and child in Portland and Beaverton.

And if you think that’s bad, the Russian Civil War (1917-1923) claimed between 15 million and 20 million lives. A staggering toll.

That’s what civil wars can do.

Now go back to the game and your Civil War cheese dip….

P.S. To readers tempted to write "lighten up" or "get a life," save yourself the trouble. You've been heard in advance. Peace.

White Stag worthy words

Randy's right. That would be Portland city commissioner Randy Leonard.

Plastering “The University of Oregon” on the “White Stag” sign is a condemnable waste of public space. Provincial, provincial, provincial!

(And these university people are supposed to be smart and creative....)

Here are some one-liner candidates to greet folks as they exit the Banfield Freeway. After reading each, imagine it on the sign.

“Weird forever!”




“You’ve Arrived, again!”




“The Time is always NOW!”




“Just how awake are you?
Yes, YOU!”




“Endings are beginnings”




“Oregon: A State of Mind”

"Peace is the Way"

Your turn.

What the White Stag Sign should say

How unfair that the University of Oregon now owns the iconic White Stag sign and proposes to replace “Made in Oregon” with (what else?) “The University of Oregon.”

And this in the week following the Ducks' Holocaustic (are we offended yet, sports fans?) gassing (yet?) of the OSU Beavers.

No, this sign, the Crown Jewel of our glittering downtown skyline, belongs to the city — a city of Ducks and Beavers, and ducks and beavers, and the rest of us.

So here’s my suggestion. Let’s accept the sign as advertising (that’s a HUGE concession on my part) and let’s use it to promote BOTH valley universities. That would be an act of great magnanimity for the University of Oregon, but, let’s face it, it’s about time.

“The University of Oregon & Oregon State University” is too long and boring.

I propose a massive message that both Ducks and Beavers agree on;

WIN THE CIVIL WAR!

Imagine it. Each day tens of thousands of commuters arrive at the clogged confluence of I-5 and I-84 to be greeted by the leaping white stag, the Civil War battle cry of our great institutions of higher education, and the teeny “Old Town” at the bottom.

It says it all ... I guess.

* * *

Attention Ducks and Beavers, this just in on The Civil War — the other one. The New York Times today lists among the five best non-fiction books of the year “This Republic of Suffering, Death and The American Civil War” by Drew Gilpin Faust.

Here’s what the Times had to say about the book:

"In this powerful book, Faust, the president of Harvard, explores the legacy, or legacies, of the 'harvest of death' sown and reaped by the Civil War. In the space of four years, 620,000 Americans died in uniform, roughly the same number as those lost in all the nation’s combined wars from the Revolution through Korea. This doesn’t include the thousands of civilians killed in epidemics, guerrilla raids and draft riots. The collective trauma created ' a newly centralized nation-state,' Faust writes, but it also established 'sacrifice and its memorialization as the ground on which North and South would ultimately reunite.'”

Go HERE for the Times’ ten best books list for 2008.

Top Hits: Sarah Palin's Glasses & Oregon's Civil War

Anyone who has blogged has felt the pull between writing you want to write and writing what others will be drawn to.

I abide by the first, but on a few happy occasions I manage to satisfy the second too.

After two years and 851 posts, two topics have attracted far and away the most visits to this site.

The ostensible topics (as defined by my search engine tags) were Sarah Palin’s glasses and The Civil War (the Oregon football rivalry). But the tags deceive because the topics were points of departure to far different content.

Perhaps the lesson is to choose timely, popular topics (and tags) to hang larger, provocative substance to. A kind of blogger’s bait and switch.

In the case of Palin’s glasses, I wanted to pick an argument with Marshall McLuhan and make a point about “cool,” visual appeal. Despite all she wasn't, Palin as visually cool.

In the case of the “Civil War” rivalry, I wanted the reader to consider the unintended power of a sports metaphor.

I got more than 800 visits to the Palin specs post, but I think that most of the visitors were interested in where to purchase glasses like the governor’s. I hope their disappointment was more than offset by a new awareness of McLuhan.

The Civil War post, which is an annual ritual (some would say “rant”) for me in the week before the big University of Oregon/Oregon State game, drew 200 plus visits, which isn’t nearly as impressive as the Palin response. What made the “Civil War” post notable was the unanimously negative response. I clearly struck a nerve.

How dare I question the tradition of calling the game “The Civil War”? For some, my complaint was literally unheard of.

For them, it’s unheard of no longer. Disagree as they might, my view now is part of their consciousness. That’s reason enough to share and disseminate it. I’m pleased they were moved to defend their own.

Try this metaphor on for size

It's curious. When I write about significant problems here, they rarely draw a response.

But when I oppose "The (so called) Civil War," the name of the game, devoted Ducks and Beavers go ballistic. And I'M the one who is supposed to "get a life."

See comments on my post.

OK, let's choose another (mere?) historical event in which multitudes (millions, in fact) were killed. I guess you would call it a real rout, in football terms. Let's suppose that one of Oregon's teams runs away with today's game. Why not call the rout "A Holocaust"?

Offended yet?

First, count to ten.

Think.

Now ask yourself where you draw the line and why.

Extra credit: Who was that sports editor who voted "The Civil War" off the sports page? What could he have been thinking?

"The Civil War" — unworthy of Oregon

Each year in the week before the UO/OSU "Civil War,” I rail against this over-the-top name for a simple football rivalry.

I argue that the universities' stature is lessened because of their rivalry’s appellation.

Today’s Oregonian sports page gave me a “peg” for this year’s lament.

The headline reads, “It’s not civil nor is it war.”

Well, duh, if it’s not civil and not a war, in the name of mere accuracy, LET'S CALL IT SOMETHING ELSE!

The Oregonian's writer, Ryan White, tells those of us who are agitated (outraged?) by this abominable name, to lighten up. It’s only a metaphor. He might have added that “Beavers” aren’t really beavers, and “Ducks” aren’t really ducks.

Problem is, thanks to “The Civil War” and the name's inhumanity, I’m not so sure.

To Ryan, I recommend George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s little book, “Metaphors We Live By.” Metaphors (and words, for that matter) shape how we think about our world. When we say “I fell in love,” we do in a way surrender ourselves to the helplessness of falling.

Metaphors reinforce and even guide how we behave, write Lakoff and Johnson.

“The Civil War,” as a name for a mere intercollegiate rivalry, also cheapens the word “War.” It also dishonors the 500,000 American lives lost in the real American Civil War.

Worse it suggests an ignorance and lack of respect for that event by the faculty, administration, students and alumni of Oregon’s two major universities.

After 9/11, I actually wrote the presidents of the University of Oregon and Oregon State University to urge them to drop the name once and for all because of anguish about real war, violence and terror. To my surprise, the president of OSU wrote to say that the administration had taken the name change under consideration. Nothing became of it.

White’s story in today’s Oregonian refers to an enlightened past sports editor who banished the term from the sports page. Writes White, “The Civil War, he told reporters, was between the North and the South and took place between 1861 and 1865.”

Exactly.

White doesn’t tell us the name of the editor, but it should be inscribed on the tombstone of Oregon's "Civil War.” Metaphorically speaking, of course.

Harvard has heft on Oregon ballot

This morning I went through the voters’ pamphlet and tallied who won.

How’s that? The votes aren’t counted until May 20.

The count I did was of colleges and universities. Which of the four-year undergraduate and graduate programs produced the most candidates?

If my count is correct (than this can be an eye-glazing exercise), the winner is (drum-roll….)

Portland State with 20 followed closely by the University of Oregon with 19.

No real surprise there.

But what happened to Oregon State with a measly 2? (OSU graduates may know something the rest of us don’t — like politics is a waste of time?)

Even Purdue in Indiana produced three candidates, including Will Hobbs, my Democratic choice (and The Oregonian’s and Willamette Week’s) to replace lack-luster incumbent U.S. Rep. David Wu (Stanford, BA; Yale, JD).

I got into this college-counting exercise because as I read the candidates’ statements, Harvard kept popping up with surprising frequency. Fourteen times to be exact, (one being for Barack Obama). In fact, Harvard ranked third, after PSU and UO, as an alma mater in the Portland-area edition of the pamphlet.

Rival Yale wasn’t even close with three (among them Hillary Rodham Clinton).

Stanford came in with a mere four.

Oxford University, of all places, had three (one more than OSU). Oxford’s graduates in the pamphlet are Metro Councilor Robert Liberty, and two state reps. Steve Griffith (R) and Ben Cannon (D). Liberty got a law degree from Harvard, and Griffith earned a bachelor’s from Harvard and a law degree from Stanford.

Oxford’s rival, Cambridge, produced Amanda Fritz, a Portland City Council candidate, a fellow SW Portlander and an avid blogger.

Not to make too much of this, but a couple of observations come to mind.

Many of the University of Oregon and Harvard candidates went to law school on the campuses. If you want your graduates to become politically influential, be sure to have a law school.

The other point is that political candidates are, by definition, aspiring, if not always inspiring. If Harvard and PSU have one thing in common, it’s that they attract aspirants — but in different ways. Harvard gets youth who are obviously aiming high from the start. PSU often attracts those who kick into high gear later in life.

By the way, I didn’t tally community college graduates, but I probably should have. From my PCC teaching experience, I know community colleges attract scrappy older students. My recollection is that community college grads are well represented in the pamphlet.

Enough with the "Civil War"

Each year at this time, I rail against the use of “The Civil War” as the name for the rivalry between the University of Oregon and Oregon State.

The over-the-top appellation was invented by sportswriters back in the ‘20s, a mere 60 years after this nation suffered through a real Civil War.

I won’t go into my litany of reasons for dumping “the Civil War,” except to say that the play on words is stale, obtuse (It hinges on the word “civil.” Get it?) and decidedly unfunny.

Civil Wars, including our own, are blood-drenched, soul-wrenching tragedies. (see Mathew Brady's photograph)

Back in 2001, I actually thought I had some traction on the issue when I wrote the presidents of the two universities following 9/11. You may recall that in that wrenching time of reflection we were allegedly experiencing an “end of irony.”

In the spirit of ending the irony of a mere college rivalry escalating to "war," both presidents responded with moderate interest in my proposal. Nothing came of it. The country was too busy preparing to foment a real civil war in Iraq.

Now, through my Portland Community College teaching and other activities, I have contacts among students at the University of Oregon. I am urging one of them, Daniel Ronan (Wilson High School, ’07), to form “Students, Teachers and Alumni for Ending ‘The Civil War.’” Daniel was one of the organizers of this spring’s Wilson senior prank, the planting of marigolds in the shape of a peace symbol on the school grounds.

He stuck his toe in the war with a recent letter to the editor to UO’s Daily Emerald.

More than getting rid of the name Civil War, I hope this group, if it ever gets off the ground, can come up with a clever alternative name for the rivalry.

I’ve thought of a few over the years. “The Clear Cut,” “The Wet One,” and “Venue in the Valley.”

Don’t like those?

It’s your turn ….

P.S. The Oregonian sports page was in sync with its war metaphor today when it ran a story about injured Duck and Beaver players. The headline read: “The Wounded.” The story tells us that the “wounds” are all part of “a battle of attrition.”

Hey, it’s time for a journalistic armistice.

Peace already.

(To the right: Real Civil War wounded. Photo by Mathew Brady)

A Billion is the new Million

Those of us in our sixties like to tell ourselves that 60 is the new 50 (or 40 or 35).

Well, maybe, but today’s Oregonian reminded me of another “new.”

Consider three front-page stories:

Lorry I. Lokey, who made his fortune starting the PR-mongering Business Wire, gives $74 million to the University of Oregon, bringing his total gifts to the university to $132 million in the last four years.

Let’s write that in its full glory $132,000 times 1000.

Presumably Lokey has kept enough to pay for his room and board.

Moving right along, Danaher Corporation of Washington, D.C. pays $2.8 billion (that’s with a “B”) to buy Oregon technology icon Tektronix Inc.

Let’s write THAT out in full: $2.8 million times 1000.

Finally (and we still are on the front page of today’s paper) the estimated cost to build a new bridge (and improved approaches to it) over the Columbia River is $4 billion. That is 4,000 times $1 million. (Have you ever sat down to count to 4000? Try it. If you count by seconds, it will take you better than an hour. In other words, BOOOR-rinnnng.)

Is anyone blinking at these numbers? (Don't get me started on what each minute of America's Democracy-building presence in Iraq costs. It is shaping up to be a trillion-dollar war. $1,000,000,000,000. That's a million millions.)

I, for one, am having trouble wrapping my brain around bridges that cost $4,000,000,000 and people who can write checks for $132,000,000 to a university, as worthy as that may be.

Sixty may be the new 50 or 40, but I’m stuck in an era when a million bucks was a lot of money. Now it’s pocket change.

Putting U of O Academics before Athletics

Ninety-two University of Oregon senior faculty members are calling for the university's administration to ration back funds for the school's gluttonous athletic department and to start nourishing the university's languishing academic programs.

The professors laid out their case in a letter to the Eugene Register-Guard last week.

Unfortunately, the signers don't adequately address the role of major athletics in anesthetizing alumni in a consumptive/escapist, post-graduation culture.

Just as we need the moral equivalent to war, we need the imaginative/creative equivalent to tailgate parties, bouncy cheerleaders and the 90-yard kick-off return.

One symptom of the problem is the perverse hyping of the annual Duck-Beaver game as "The Civil War." The sad, tired tradition calls for a reminder: Civil war is being waged on the bloody streets of Baghdad. It is nothing to cheer about.

As I've said before, it's well past time for a new name for the game, one that puts the rivalry, the teams and the athletic budgets in proper perspective. The name change, and even the debate about it, would certainly help the cause of academics, knowledge and awareness.

U of O's new School for Spinmeisters

A large attention-grabbing ad “dominates” (as they say) page A13 of yesterday’s Oregonian. These things don’t come cheap. Using experience as a guide, I’d put the cost in the $10,000 to $15,000 range, plus a few extra grand for design and production.

The ad features the following: the smiling face of a winsome young female student, the University of Oregon’s “Zero/Zilch” O logo, and a big, white-on-black headline…

“Heard The Latest PR Buzz?”

At the bottom is the baffling “If UOnly knew” tag line, which is, at best, clever typographically.

But it’s the text of the ad and “the product” that is maddening.

The ad’s body breathlessly tells us The UO School of Journalism and Communications is opening the new Turnbull Center in Portland as a “fast track to hands-on experience and a real job in media” for its students.

If only we were talking journalism here.

For years Portland has needed a first-rate journalism program. Sadly the Turnbull Center, named after the late journalism professor George S. Turnbull, isn’t offering it.

The Turnbull Center’s curriculum, with a few exceptions, is counter-journalism. The center, bankrolled by Lorry Lokey, who made millions by starting a public relations wire service, will be devoted to —surprise, surprise— Public Relations.

Trained in the ways of, but not the higher calling of, journalism, effervescent UO students, like the one depicted, will be taught how to be “public faces,” “damage control specialists,” and “spokespersons” for corporate clients. The ad proudly names a few: Nike, Waggener Edstrom Worldwide and Fleishmman-Hillard.

Missing from the list are any Portland news media organization.

And while not all PR is bad, and some is even helpful to journalists, the curriculum touts the need for “strategic communication.” The ad even announces that the Center is planning a “Masters in Strategic Communication.”

The PR stratagems behind “strategic” are often all too familiar: story spinning, flack-catching, truth twisting, topic changing, media manipulating, best-light casting and question begging.

Meanwhile the State Legislature has convened in Salem to, among other things, bolster higher education in the state. The lawmakers might begin by changing the Turnbull Center's mission to higher pursuits, like good old-fashioned journalistic truth-telling.

P.S. If you want to witness “strategic communication” in action, look no father than the same issue of The Oregonian, page A1. Shades of the film “Thank you for smoking” are the professionally chosen words of R.J. Reynolds spokesman David Howard. In the story, he defends the test marking in Portland of tobacco packets called SNUS. Highly addictive, they contribute to mouth and throat cancer, and Howard claims, as if it’s OK, that they are “only” targeted to adult users.

Just like Joe Camel, huh, Dave? For more on the SNUS Portland targeting see the Portland Tribune's coverage. The Tribune story brilliantly lays out what we in the media literacy movement call media "deconstruction."