(post title taken from Jonathan Bernstein [@jbplainblog]'s "A Plain Blog About Politics", which is excellent and should be daily reading for anyone who can get past the third line of a politics process story)
A handy maxim I learned in college was this: when you passionately love a topic, come to a point where you've read everything you could find about it, and think there is still more to be said, you really need to start doing some of the writing yourself. The exception to this rule was of course if the topic was assigned, and then the writing probably needed to start a couple of days ago. I've reached that point with life in western Oregon. No, this is not an assigned topic. Some of the things I anticipate bubbling up on here include the regular stuff I think about and bore friends and family with, including midcentury liberal Republicanism, soccer, Blazers basketball, Oregon beer and wine, special love for the southern Cascades and the Siskiyou Mountains, contemplative practice, stateside Catholicism, natural history, appreciation of good local reporting, local politics, food policy, bike policy & bike commuting, issues facing Oregon local governments, law and courts, the tragic soul-suck that is Seattle sports, history of NW cities, and of course soccer.
As far as cards on the table, I should put down a few.
- My partisan preferences lean pretty uniformly at present toward the Democratic Party, and I'm devoutly religious (As an illustration, I remember to pray for the salmon when I say my rosary).
- I am a hardcore soccer fan, and despite deep misgivings about the MLS in its present structure, spend an unseemly amount of time following a sport I never played and never cared much for until 2006. When I root, I root for the Portland Timbers. Although I developed a passionate hatred of the EPL when I lived in Italy, I'll pull for whichever teams have the best American players (presently Everton and Fulham FC). I am a Romanista, but that was before Daniel de Rossi cheapshotted Brian McBride in the 06 World Cup.
- I love local Oregon issues, and have a borderline autistic gift for remembering inane geopolitical trivia and history. My 16-month old son had been on all three trans-Willamette River ferries before he turned four months old.
- I love Oregon beer. The same 16-month old has gone with me to at least five breweries (Full Sail, Bridgeport, Terminal Gravity, Rogue Newport, Caldera) throughout the state. I also loved wine until I recently began repaying my student loans. Now that I'm poor again, decent pinot is just a noble (pun) aspiration.
- I'm relatively active in politics. I held a town hall for Congressman DeFazio in 3rd grade. I usually compete with other nerds to pick races in the state. I don't hate the other team. I vote for Republicans some times, and consider former Govs Tom McCall and Mark Hatfield two of my heroes. That said, most of the current Oregon GOP leadership is depressingly pathetic and regressive, and I think they deserve to be in superminority status in perpetuity in the statehouse until moderates start beating out the kooks.
- In terms of where I get my news, I get too much. We subscribe to local papers, read the Catholic press, listen to NPR, etc. I'm the only person my age I know who reads a real newspaper every day. I subscribe to the Atlantic and read the New Republic regularly Not a fan of Maddow or Olbermann, particularly. The liberal partisan stuff is generally just as disgusting as the conservative partisan stuff, if not as pervasive and overloud.
- I read the sports page first every day, and that's probably the main topic that is going to get discussed here.
- I'm devout and also a longtime baseball fan, but in the same way the calcifying hierarchy makes being an American Catholic in public life a depressing affair lately, the country-club-ification of baseball is killing my love of the sport. I was a big fan of Moneyball when it came out- I LOVE SCIENCE - but the overreliance on skills learned in college to jack up OBP/ OPS at the expense of unpolished adoloscent athleticism, together with the divestment in promoting baseball in urban areas is killing the game. I can remember following Giants baseball since the 1987 season, and this is the franchise's first year without an African-American player. For the franchise of Bobby and Barry Bonds, Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Ellis Burks and Daren Lewis, that's embarrassing.
- Why are there no female cardinals? Wouldn't appointing a suitably right wing, retrograde mother superior of a traditionalist order be a logical starting place for adapting to the 18th century and giving women a voice in church leadership? What am I missing?
Beer, faith, soccer, healthy stands of douglas fir, state senate campaigns and hatred of Seattle- what more could you ask for in a blog?
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