To The Eagle:

Perusing a foot-high stack of mail after a three-week marathon trip (New York for the national wolfhound show, then San Diego for our granddaughter's wedding) the accumulated editions of The Eagle showed that the Trump-inspired brouhaha continued unabated in our absence. First of all, we'll respectfully decline Dennis Gordon's challenge to a debate with a threefold rationale: strategically redundant -- we are already having that debate in these pages; tactically inept -- I'd be foolhardy to vie with the stentorian skills of a professional lecturer; and philosophically -- I'd be cast in the role of defending Trump, whom I distrust as much as anyone.

This duel of letters started with me joining Mike Swift in calling for a little relief from the incessant whining, caterwauling, and name-calling in the media in general and this newspaper specifically. The only bright spot of the election was relief at avoiding both the inept socialist Sanders, and Hillary, who appears to be not only terminally disagreeable but possibly criminally unhinged. Trump got elected by promising to do a few good things (help the working man, control immigration, support our allies) and we should support him in those things and try to keep him from wandering too far off the reservation in others. Mindless invective won't do that.

And my intelligent and articulate neighbor, J.B. Bouchard, keeps tossing out liberal shibboleths that beg debunking so here goes on that: Rachel Carson's book did not call for the banning of DDT or any other pesticide -- only for careful and responsible use. The EPA did ban it here, used their influence to make the ban effective worldwide, causing a resurgence of malaria in Africa, resulting in 80 to 100 million deaths, mostly blacks, and mostly infants and children, making it philosophically if not legally one of the largest genocides in history.

The campaign against nuclear power was based mostly on demonization: Three-Mile-Island, a mishandled mechanical failure incident that leaked radiation amounting to 25-40% of normal annual background radiation into the atmosphere and caused no deaths or injuries, and the accident at the Chernobyl plant which was a poorly designed combined military and civilian multi-purpose facility. Nuclear waste disposal is a problem solved many times over, ceramic capsulation being one method. Building nuclear power plants would have been a solution in itself, since nuclear waste is eminently recyclable, and the problem's not huge -- all the waste generated in the U.S. since the dawn of the nuclear age would fit on two football fields, stacked 10 feet deep. Our own mess at Hanford is a result of political log-rolling, not lack of technical knowledge.

A final note to my favorite (self-proclaimed) Zen-Marxist: Socialism and Marxism are pretty much the same thing, and as an institution has chalked off way more lives than the aforementioned EPA genocide, since its leaders have to resort to starvation (Mao) or outright murder (Stalin) to make their systems work. That program is playing right now in Venezuela which has gone from wealthiest country in South America to starvation wracked disintegration in two decades of socialism. Thanks, J.B., but I'll pass on my slice of that particular pie.

Howard Brawn

Puget Island