January 2011

Though tourism officials continually concoct ever more elaborate draws to the city, true aficionados know that the best reason to come is simply to enjoy the easy life here. Chock-full of excellent local retailers and a few important national ones like Saks Fifth Avenue and Tiffany, downtown Portland also offers that added Oregon value of no sales tax.

Getting to and from the city’s airport or train station is a cinch; both are serviced by mass transit, including the new Air MAX light-rail line. But despite its well-justified reputation for enlightened transit options, to truly see Portland’s rich stock of neighborhoods and take advantage of the spectacular natural scenery, you still need a car.

Winter and spring are rainy, and July Fourth frequently a cloudy disappointment. Nevertheless, the spring bloom of the fertile Willamette Valley is something to behold. Summers are mild and largely dry, but the longest season is Indian summer, lasting well into October with spectacular deciduous colors turning against evergreen backdrops.

“Overrated & Underrated” is back again for its fifth year, and, like so many five-year-olds, it’s an attractive troublemaker.

Attractive because a great many of our readers enjoy it, and a troublemaker because it has always had the power to deeply annoy a few of them. This is not so much because they get miffed by having an exemplar cited as “overrated,” although it certainly raised all sorts of hell when in the feature’s advent, Roger J. Spiller (see “World War II General” in this issue) questioned Robert E. Lee’s generalship. Rather, the complainers seem to feel that the exercise is frivolous. They want history, not mere opinions; and they don’t want “revisionist history.” But, as John Lukacs points out in his fine new book Churchill: Visionary. Statesman. Historian, “Historical thinking and writing and study are, by their nature, revisionist. The historian, unlike a judge, is permitted to try a case over and over again. . . .” All historical thinking involves tinkering with the lenses that shine the light of other days into our lives.

ON THE LAST THURSDAY OF EVERY MONTH, ALBERTA STREET in Portland, Oregon, turns into a long buffet of grass-roots creativity. The energy was equaled only by the diversity on a recent spring night, when a Coltrane-blasting saxophonist led a parade of eco-activists dressed as endangered fish, and steps away, in front of a newly opened eighties-vintage glamour-rock fashion shop, a man blowing a long Aboriginal didjeridoo waved halos of sound over the heads of passersby. Across the street protesters played clandestinely acquired films of medical experiments conducted on monkeys on a TV screen on the side of a van.

Called simply Last Thursday, the event began five years ago as a group opening night for a handful of art galleries setting up shop on a street most Portlanders avoided. Twelve years ago Portland’s major banks were caught illegally redlining the neighborhood, refusing new mortgages for houses or businesses. Street vendors on Alberta Street mostly sold drugs or their bodies. Now the atmosphere is a vigorous blend of neo-sixties and turn-of-the-new-century cultural eclecticism.

THE WORLD CAME CLOSE TO A NUCLEAR CLASH THREE times during the half-century of the Cold War. The first was in Korea when China’s intervention snatched imminent victory from General MacArthur. Only a nuclear strike could save the situation, but President Harry Truman firmly rejected it. The second time came in 1962, at the moment of greatest tension around Cuba, 40 years ago this October. And the last was in Vietnam when many American military and political leaders believed that atomic weapons alone could redress the failure of the war’s progress.

I HAVE THIS STORY FROM A classmate. Let’s imagine that I first heard it at dinner, where he and I sat with eight others at a rectangular table in one of the 10 or so rows of identical tables filling one of the six wings radiating out from the center of Washington Hall like the spokes of a caisson. You know it is winter because we wear thick wool dress-gray uniforms, and a double-breasted gold-buttoned coat hangs on the back of each cadet’s chair, a black scarf draped over the top. Our faces are still ruddy from the outside cold.

Overrated

Most of the generals of World War II are now forgotten. History has already had its say about which will be remembered. Seen from a distance, generals of high repute make a kind of sense even in their own time. Their reputations are explicable. Qualities of character and mind unbidden by the routines of peace are often called forth by the demands of war. How these men met these demands usually fixes their reputations for good or ill. During the war, Lewis Brereton was rated high enough in someone’s esteem to draw a succession of important U.S. Army Air Corps commands, rising in rank from brigadier to lieutenant general— no small feat, since he was a kind of Typhoid Mary in uniform. Wherever he landed, disaster was not far behind.

Underrated Traitors may be evaluated for their effectiveness or for their odiousness. By the first criterion, the most underrated traitor in American history (if he existed) did his work before there was a United States. Gen. James Wolfe’s efforts to take the French citadel of Quebec in 1759 went nowhere until he found a path to the Plains of Abraham outside the town’s gates. Did he thank his eagle eyes or, as recent military historians believe, some unknown helpful malcontent? If the latter is true, that pathfinder changed history. The short battle on the Plains ended French power in North America and, by removing a common enemy, made the American Revolution all but inevitable.

I’m assuming what is meant is an idol who appeals to teenagers as opposed to idols who actually are teenagers. There have been plenty of kid stars whose allure—a sly wiggle, a knowing wink—have over the years excited the bloodstreams of many an adult who ought to have known better: I’m thinking of a tradition stretching from at least Shirley Temple through Brandon de Wilde and Sue Lyon and Ricky Nelson to Leif Garrett and Shawn Cassidy. America, a country in a state of permanent adolescence, has always had a soft spot for the eroticism of certain youths.

Be that as it may, here are my selections, both grown men when they came to prominence.

Underrated The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll devotes eight columns to the Rolling Stones. Bill Haley gets a mere column and a quarter. This is grossly unfair to the man who was the John the Baptist of a whole new business.

Overrated The job of a professional songwriter is to create songs for the rest of us to sing. Around 1960 the old-school pros were giving way to songwriter-performers, among them a young fellow from Minnesota named Bob Dylan. For him and many others, popular song became personal statement. Dylan’s songs belonged to him , by both their linkage to his performance and the nature of his poetry. Despite his immense popularity and influence, his songs have rarely gained lives of their own. A few songwriter-performers of an earlier generation —Hoagy Carmichael and Fats Waller come to mind—saw many of their compositions become standards. Why not Dylan?