The Wahkiakum County Eagle - Established as The Skamokawa Eagle in 1891

To The Eagle:

The Roman Empire lasted for 503 years, 17 hours and 23 minutes. There is a lot of scholarly debate about the decline and fall but it apparently went on for about the last 400 years. Along the way it got split in two and the western half was hassled a lot by Germanic tribes like the Visigoths and Huns. The eastern part lasted a little longer, but got torn up by the Persians and then scuttled by the Muslims. The whole mess started when they quit being a republic and became an autocracy, ruled by executive order and incompetent bureaucracies. Sound familiar?

The average Roman or outlying villager had no idea that the whole thing was falling apart. The city guy knew the plumbing wasn’t working too well, and the rural folk struggled with irrigation and other agricultural issues when not being picked clean by armies passing through to protect them from various threats. They also had some dry spells and famines, but luckily none of the rulers dreamed up a global warming cult to enforce the obvious solution which would be sacrificing virgins and stopping animal flatulence.

Our current leadership is working hard to emulate the decline and fall routine, which is why the response to yet another school shooting is gun control rather than modest security provision like fences, gates, and visual monitoring. That, plus a start on rebuilding the institutional safety net for the mentally ill and those heading in that direction. We have our own Visigoth and Hun problem down on our southern border which could be solved by the technically simple action of building and manning a fence, giving us breathing room to survey those already here and rationally sort out the good eggs from the bad, but that’s not gonna happen.

Locally, the Corpse of Engineers (no, that’s not a misspelling) can’t find four million bucks to repair a short stretch of a pretty good dike that they helped damage, but can find four million bucks to build a much longer rudimentary dike which serves no purpose but to sorta protect a state highway. Seems like a more likely solution would be to have one million bucks worth of large rock from the local quarry dumped in by local contractors to see if that stops the mudslide, but that’s too easy. Meanwhile the emperor of Oregon has implemented a plan to turn the whole Lower Columbia over to the sporting class, forcing our commercial fishing folk to head for Alaska as refugees. We note that they are providing first class transportation out of here for the Columbian white-tailed deer, who have apparently forgotten how to walk, but haven’t even offered Greyhound bus tickets to the fishermen.

About the only fun thing going on around here is a contest to name the ferry. How about “Titanic?”

Howard Brawn

Puget Island