It was Republican Governor Tom McCall who shepherded our landmark land use laws, coastal protection, and Bottle Bill through the legislature, and rebounded from retirement years later against right-wing “property rights” activists to preserve that legacy, during his final bout with testicular cancer which had rendered him, in his own words, “one-ball McCall.”  Republican senator Mark Hatfield was a lonely and eloquent voice against not just Vietnam but also Desert Storm, and for all his flaws, which included being a closeted gay man unwilling to stand up for gay rights, he not only represented Oregon values when it counted the most, but also brought home the bacon like there was no tomorrow.  Even ol’ Bob Packwood, that scamp, whom I had the pleasure of meeting once as he shamelessly flirted with the girls in my history class, had an equally complicated record that I rarely supported, but his staunch support for women’s rights, including the right to legal abortion, would put many of our current Democratic senators to shame.

What has happened to our country since those days, had someone tried to predict it to me at the time, I would have dismissed as insane nonsense, but not anymore.  The first cracks appeared with the election of Reagan, which happened to just precede my eligibility for the draft, and lo and behold, the hated Selective Service was brought back, and registration therewith had even been made mandatory for those of us who might be available for what little college aid was left in The Great Communicator’s wake.  The first shoots of the aggressive militarism that finally bloomed into one of those stinky flowers they grow in Asia when George W. Bush came into office were clearly, an unapologetically, planted at that moment.  Then came the War on Drugs and the ruinous tax cuts and military buildup.  Then came, perhaps worst of all, the relentlessly marketed idea that Government Can’t Do Anything, which has now seeped into our pores like the toxic gunk with which we continue to be assaulted.

Now, this ought to have been a pretty tough sell for the kids of my generation.  We had, after all, just put a man on the moon, among other things, that looked pretty good to most observers.  And locally, I personally saw many great public endeavors reach fruition, like the Fremont Bridge in the picture, which mesmerized me as it rose from the ground with its fantastically high and numerous concrete monoliths, but to top it all off, they floated the middle piece down the river and lifted it into place, and the danged thing fit perfectly.  Mission Accomplished.  No Michael Browns were evidently involved.

It’s sad, really, that as we live in and begin to assess the supposedly progressive presidency of Barack Obama, we see that government has lost, almost completely, its ability to do great things, and thus its inability to inspire.  In our militarized austerity of the last few decades, we do see nothing but the waste, incompetence, and self-dealing Republicans love to crow about even as they engage in it most lavishly themselves, and are paradoxically taught that this is just the way things are.  And for people who don’t remember the  quite recent past, of whom there are way too many (mostly in the media…), there has been little evidence to the contrary.  What few bridges we’ve built, even as we’ve burned so many, either lead to nowhere or are in Baghdad; I hope the ones we built in a more rational era last a while.  We could, back then, do a lot of things we just can’t anymore.