All the Troubles in the World

 Ugh. Sooooo late.

A section of the historic carousel in the little Willamette Valley town of Albany

Sorry. Sorry; I know, I promised something right after my latest "WTF is wrong with these people?!?" rant back in June. Had some ideas for that post, too, and then...

Well, life got in the way.

Since then things have changed enough that the central idea of the original post has been blown apart and shattered by the month-and-change of utterly nutty nonsense that passes for U.S. "politics" and "foreign policy" (if such terms can be used to describe the idiocy, stupidity, and the random free-association that dominate both of them), that being what you get when your national government is dominated by an addled moron and his remoras looking for loot, power, plus whatever loathsome ideas are leaking from their heads.

But let me try to get back to where I was originally starting from and see if I can rebuild something out of what I've got now.

Crystal Springs Garden in Southeast Portland

Okay. So. 

The last time I sat down to type I wrapped up that post with... 

"Looking at this Sunday evening's trashfire at the supposed People's House, it's hard not to believe that the white trash is winning. And difficult to imagine how the rest of us can fight our way out of the binding they're working constantly to impose on all of us they hate and despise.

(Next: Okay, well...how's it going out in the People's Republic of Portland, then..?)"

At the time I had a specific Portland thing in mind; this.

"It is in the public interest to avoid supporting animal cruelty, unsustainable environmental practices, and zoonotic disease risks by removing force-fed products from the marketplace. It is also in the public interest to codify values related to the humane treatment of animals, public health, and environmental stewardship. Therefore, the Council finds it necessary to enact this regulation in the City of Portland in order to achieve these goals."

This is the concluding paragraph of Portland City Ordinance 192190, enacted into code on June 4, 2026.

What it does is ban the sale of foie gras.

 

Tom McCall Natural Area, Mosier, Oregon

Okay then.

I honestly have no dog (or goose, or duck) in this fight. I don't have the taste for, or the grocery budget for, the bloated internal organs of domestic fowl. But I also don't think that all the other aspects of commercial poultry production, from the chicken farm through the poultry processing plant, is anything but an enterprise that needs to be punitively overseen and regulated.

Commercial aviculture, like a lot of other commercial food production, is about making foods relatively cheap and affordable. A lot of the things that everyone involved has to do to make that happen, from the farmers/ranchers through the transporters to the meat-packing plants to the groceries, ranges from quick and dirty to downright revolting. There's a reason that parents don't encourage their kids to dream of working in a North Carolina chicken plant. Gross.

But...cheap and available food? Ask any peasant or smallholder or urban laborer in a pre-industrial or early industrial society how they'd respond to knowing that their lives weren't liable to be upended at any given moment by a killing frost or an avian flu or just a series of poor decisions by their lords and masters. Wars. Famines. Shortages that raised the bare-minimum cost of even the most basic foods like bread beyond the means of the common folk - which in most societies in most of human history meant something like 96% of everyone in that society - and meant that you starved, or rebelled (and were killed anyway, after you starved for a bit...).

So I kinda get both viewpoints.

Making intentionally-diseased bird livers by tube-feeding ducks like suffragettes in Holloway Prison?

Ew.

But if you like and want to buy and eat that stuff?

Whatev'. I don't see the point in making law about it, and here's why it did make me swear and take the piss.

Portland City Council has a whole lot of shit it needs to deal with.

We're stony broke, for one thing. Just like always. If you believe what out local pols tell us about it.

Bills don't stop coming in - roads, schools, fuckin' cops (remind me, Siri, what completes the following statement: "Portland Police Bureau is fucking _________"), firefighters, public buildings - while everybody pisses and moans and, most importantly, votes against raising any sort of tax revenue. 

The constant message coming out of City Hall (and the County offices, and fucking Salem, for that matter...) is "OMFG we just have to cut (insert public good here; parks, pools, roads, daycare, mental and physical health service) because we don't have enough money!" 

It's the same we hear from here all the way to D.C.; fuck your medical care, Gramma, don't you see that Elon Musk (fill in the plutocrat name here) needs another trillion bucks?!?! 

So it kinda chapped my ass that, in the middle of this usual annual budget-crisis-oh-woe-is-us-athon that City Council had five minutes to waste (and money to spend, mind you; someone is gonna have to deal with renegade duck liver pate' smugglers and underground foie gras dealers. I'd love to be a fly on the wall as the Central Precinct command group assigns coppers to the undercover Foie Gras Squad) fucking around with poultry guts.

Adorable child meets adorable woman with fanciful ornament, Cathedral Park Jazz Festival

 
Okay, but.

That was before this bullshit blew up all over the front page:

"The (Portland Trailblazer’s) majority owner, Tom Dundon, is trying to iron out a deal with the city for a major, state-of-the-art renovation of the Moda Center that could cost (the public) more than $600 million."

Now this joker Dundon?

He's a reeeeeal piece of work.

A perfect symbol of the Trump Era, a human-shaped cockroach who made his pile off shitty payday-loan-style predatory loan-sharking and now looks for stolen glory off owning sportsball teams. In this case, Portland and Oregon's only "big" major league sport, NBA basketball.

The scumbag has serious fuck-you money - serious as in this $600M is kind of a rounding error of his tax accountants -  and so far his whole "negotiating" approach to this whole I-need-you-proles-to-gimme-money-for-my-basketball-hobby-farm with the public has been pretty much just "fuck you".

Here I have to confess: I'm totally not a basketball fan.

Despite having spent a chunk of my young-adulthood around Philadelphia in the Seventies and early Eighties glory years of the Julius Erving 76ers...not a damn thing. Not so much as a trickle of hooping excitement trickled into me.  

I had to go to my friend Will, Portland native, massive Blazer fan (as in "still remembers vividly every moment of the 1977 NBA Finals and Championship") and stand-up civic and social justice soldier. I figured if anyone would be in the "let's-do-what-we-need-to-keep-the-team" house it'd be Will.

Nope.

It didn't take ten seconds for my friend to express his down-to-the-ground conviction that our new basketball billionaire can fuck right off with his "pay me you scum" shit.

Which, yeah. I totally get. It took me less time that that. Seriously, Oregon and Multnomah County and Portland pols. You're gonna tell me we're broke, we can't afford to find the jack to do so much as the "something" about the horde of homeless gomers you keep freaking out about 24/7, but somehow we can find enough spare change in the sofa cushions to pay this plutocratic fuckstick to keep keeping his basketball toy here?

My ass. 

And, still...here we are. The public, the City Council, the County Commissioners, even the State legislature and the governor, they're all still dicking around with this damn thing, trying to find a way to ease some simoleons out of the public vault instead of telling the Dundon Organization to either pay for the damn arena themselves or shut up and fuck right off.

Random barn along Highway 99W, somewhere in Polk County

 
You want more? Ohfuckyes there's more.

From the statewide ballot in November there was this:

"The People of Oregon therefore propose the People for the Elimination of Animal Cruelty Exemptions (PEACE) Act to amend Chapter 167 of the Oregon Revised Statutes—which currently provides unnecessary exemptions to laws governing animal abuse, animal neglect, and animal sexual assault—in order to reduce the suffering of animals and improve their quality of life."

That's right; the idea was to allow the Good People of Oregon to vote to outlaw hunting, fishing, livestock raising, chicken ranching, pretty much all meat and poultry production, from your "pets or meat" rabbits in the backyard to the King Ranch.

Driftwood patterns, Otter Crest, Oregon

I have no words for how fucking pointlessly stupid that is beyond "Wow, that's amazingly fucking pointlessly stupid." It's like making hamburgers illegal. Or vodka. Or shoes. Even if it was politically do-able, it's economically and socially impossible. 

And, just here in Portland, was this:

"The ballot proposal aims to use 25% of the Portland Clean Energy Fund’s annual revenue to hire 400 officers. That would divert roughly $50 million from climate programs to hire more officers and provide training."

Riiight. Siri, what was that line about the fucking useless Police Bureau again..?

And this, too:

"Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic process where residents of a municipality deliberate and directly decide how to spend a portion of a public budget."

(I got to talk to an actual person who was collecting signatures for this one.

(Oh, right. You might not have these "direct democracy"/ballot measure things where you live. The basic deal is that there has to be a "petitioner", an organization, or individual, who draws up one of these proposed pieces of rule- or legislation-changes or additions.

The language has to be approved by whatever the political authority of the polity you want the thing to apply to - the "PEACE" thing was statewide, so the Oregon Secretary of State's office, the other two were City of Portland, so some suit at City Hall - and then you have to get enough valid citizen signatures to get the wording on the ballot. I ran into one of the people they hired - and these folks are almost always paid temps - and we had a long talk about it.

And I kinda-sorta didn't hate it. But. I had and have real questions and problems with the way the proponents and my signature guy hand-wave away the whole issue of "how to these "PB proposals" actually work in practice?" How do you get the public involved? How does the whole "refine ideas into feasible projects or programs" process work?

My concern is that, watching the U.S. public loll about in the firehose of idiot shit issuing from the government, the government's ass-kissers and fluffers, and the "news media" stenography of the two, without so much as a skeptically raised eyebrow, the chances of this process becoming a nutzoid Skinnerbox of foie-gras-sale and dairy-cow-insemination criminalization seem insanely likely.)

"Corgi Beach Takeover", Seaside, Oregon

 
Well.

What's the sitch on all this political galaxy-brain nonsense?

Two of these proposals  - the PEACE no-chicken-schwarma thing for the state ballot, and the cop-fluffing "Safer Portland" one for the City - died stillborn for lack of valid signatures, and I'm not sure how.

Supposedly both petitions had more than the required minimum when they were turned in to the various elections people, but what I'm reading is that the State and City's name-checks (presumably to ensure that the signatures belonged to living people who are actual citizens of Oregon and/or Portland) tossed so many that the both were 86ed.

(Oh, and the cop-fluffers were bashed repeatedly for their paid harvesters just blatantly lying their asses off about how the funding gimmick actually worked. Which would certainly fit with Portland Police Bureau's methods.)

The PB/community funding one made it, I think. We'll see if it shows up in November.

The foie gras ban is in effect, so no fatty goose liver will henceforth soil our Portland charcuterie anymore. 

St. Johns City Hall (1907), North Portland, Oregon

 
The basketball arena tax-money-giveaway scheme?

Oh, Christ, no; nothing definite and all parties are still dicking around about it. The usual "business community leaders" are still trying to stuff dollars in Dundon's pockets, but every dickish move the team owner makes (and he's made a lot) clarifies the suspicion that, yes, he's just an ginormous dick who can't be trusted. Neil deMause over at Field of Schemes has the deets if you care enough. 

This has all been entirely too verbose, but I hope you get the gist. We really are living through the shittiest timeline. 

We've placed far too much power and influence in the keeping of far too many people who are unscrupulous, or foolish, or ignorant, or greedy, or shortsighted, or simplistic, or some combination of all the above, and we've forgotten that one of the hardest parts of citizenship is that you can't just ignore what those fucking people are up to. Citizenship requires the citizens to stay alert, stay informed, stay involved, and, if it comes down to it, stay - or become - fiercely protective of their rights and duties.

Sometimes...that means a violent - emotionally, politically, and, yes, physically, if it comes to that - collision with the "authorities" that you've elected.

The alternative?

They are your kings, and you are their subjects.

Or their slaves.

Portland Japanese Garden, winter, 2026

(This one was so depressing I didn't have the heart to illustrate it with political imagery. So these are photos from my expeditions out and about my hometown. I hope you like them. At least more than the tales of wretched scum and villainy they illuminate.) 

Oregon! Hey! We're Stupid Here! (Pt. 1)

I love Oregon.We have this beautiful state, rich in all the bounty of nature and human artifice, in the wealthiest nation on Earth, at the height of technological civilization. What could be wrong?

Well. Um. We are.

Oregonians are stupid. In all the ways that people are stupid the world over, we are pig-ignorant stupid. World-class stupid. We're stupid to all fields; we can run stupid, hit stupid and field stupid. We're All-Stupid.Now this hasn't happened by accident. Our "leaders" have helped us down the well-lit, smoothly paved path to abject stupidity. But we've gone ourselves, skipping and singing, because to think and act responsibly, like adults, would have caused us suffering and some hardship. We might have had to sacrifice, or even had to have a difficult discussion about wants and means.

Here's a great example. Take a close look at Tuesday's Oregonian cover.

Enlarge the little blue pie chart in the lower left corner of the box in the center, that goes with the story titled "Oregon fears even deeper cuts". The story, mind you, is about why the coming Great Recession is going to slam my state with the Big Hammer of Budgetary Doom. Now look at the little blue pie chart.

Got it?

Okay. Now; what percentage of Oregon's state income is derived from personal income?
Go ahead, do the math. I'll wait. Hummm hummm de humm. Humm. Got it yet?

Did you get 82% give or take a percent? Then you're right. Eighty cents on the dollar of Oregon's revenue comes out of your and my pocket.

Now here in the Beaver State we have two big offices of the three or four tennis shoe giants in the world: the Nike world headquarters in Beaverton, and adidas' North America office right in my own home of North Portland. Plus dog knows how many other corporations. Okay, now look at the little blue pie. How much do those corporations kick into the pot. Got your calculator?

4%

That's not an error. Four fucking percent. That's it.

This wasn't always so. But for more than twenty years, for the entire time I've been here in Oregon (eighteen years this Labor Day), the "business community" here has worked tirelessly to shift the cost of bridges, cops and junkies onto the individual and off of the businesses.Did you notice the NEXT biggest slice of the blue pie after personal income?

Yeah. The goddam Lottery. Now THERE's a hell of a productive revenue source: The Tax On Stupidity. Thank the Big Sky Beaver that there's no shortage of that here in Oregon!

One change that you DON'T see is the massive shift from property taxes to income taxes. Back in 1990 we passed something called "Ballot Measure 5". This beast capped and then lowered property taxes to a penurious point, a point where counties without real property, especially urban and rural areas, couldn't pay for their schools. The Oregon Legislature has become the default School Board for the state.Meanwhile the usual coalition of business and political conservatives rolled back corporate taxes - the property tax limitations helped immensely; I saved $400 on my tax bill for 1995, while Portland General Electric saved 400 million - and along with the usual tax dodges many Oregon corporations pay the legally mandated minimum corporate income tax.

$10.00

No shit. Ten bucks. The corner shoe store? Ten bucks. Multi-billion dollar Flavr-Pac frozen foods?

Ten bucks.

Not surprisingly, this hugely-income-dependent state treasury is utterly fucked. The economy tanks, people get thrown out of work, get stressed, get sick, get foreclosed, thrown on the street - need help, food, medical care, a place to stay...and the state's got nothin'. Those same incomes were floating the fiscal boat. Economy tanks, income tanks, Oregon tanks.Over the years all sorts of ideas have been suggested to fix this. Every one has foundered on Oregonian's impenetrable solid bone skulls. We want our parks. We want our roads, bridges, zoos, policemen, firefighters, we want our kids to be healthy and smart, we want our businesses to be safe and competitive.

But we don't want to pay for any of this.

And we have a system that ensures that we can have it all, everything we ask for, all the goodies we need, and the Magical Pony Miracle Happy Bunny Wuffy Santa in the Sky will pay for it.

It's called "ballot measures" or "The Oregon System", and that'll be the subject of the second part of this post.

Oregon! Hey! We're Stupid Here! (Pt. 2)

So, having shown that we have no clue as how to pay for what we want, let's take a look at what we want, or at least what this year's ballot measures SAY we want.

Oh, sorry. Ballot measures?

Okay. For those of you from out-of-town, let me explain about ballot measures.

These animals have been part of Oregon democracy since Nineteen-freaking-Oh-Two, when someones called the "Direct Legislation League" (a very "Progressive" Era name if ever I've heard one) bullyragged the Oregon legislature into enacting this process into law. I think it's instructive that one of the first ballot measures enacted was for recalling elected officials; most of the people involved in this business were the ancestors of today's "small government" conservatives. They profoundly distrusted elected officials and had an almost religious faith in "The People".

In Oregon's case the People reciprocated this trust with the sort of touching savagery that has always rewarded those individuals who live convinced of the naive goodness of children and animals: they passed Prohibition five years before the rest of the country voted for perhaps the most boneheaded social legislation in U.S. history.

Mind you, Oregonians haven't always been so stupid. We outlawed the death penalty by referendum back in 1914, got the vote for women in 1912, made the Senate a popular franchise in 1908. In 1930 we enacted Public Utility Districts, a good idea that predated Enron by sixty years. We voted in things like eight-hour days, and tried to get people the right to get a job by taxing the estates of rich people - always a good idea, taxing rich people! - and other social welfare ideas. The history of these things, like most histories, is a mixture of the ridiculous and the sublime.

Until the 1990s.

The Gingrich Counterrevolution exploded here in Oregon in the Nineties in the form of ballot measures. The poster children for this revolt of the elites were these two characters; Bill Sizemore, a theologianwith a checkered history of failed businesses from Aberdeen, WA, and Don McIntyre, a Californian whose property tax limitation Measure 5 is widely credited with breaking the public education bank here in Oregon. They and their organization, "Oregon Taxpayers United", have helped immensely in advancing the now-widespread acceptance of the notion that paying taxes - any taxes - is bad and harmful and the political equivalent of molesting farm animals.

Their moneyman, an Alzheimer's-ridden old bastard named Loren Parks, has fled the state but continues to funnel jack into their campaigns to return Oregon to the Gilded Age.

This year's crop of initiatives is as good as any way to look at the sad state of Oregon public discourse as it has been reduced after eighteen years of Sizemore, McIntyre, Parks and their ilk. Let's look at them, shall we?

There's twelve measures put to the voters this November.

Three of them are what I call "housekeeping" measures; things that someone (usually the Legislature) wants to tidy up some ravelling in the Constitution. This year's housekeeping measures include Measures 54, 55 and 56. The only one that will really impact the state is 56.

Measure 54 brings Oregon's school election laws in line with Federal statutes, Measure 55 rectifies a technical issue associated with redistricting.

Measure 56 repeals the damage done by the moronic Measure 47 of 1996, a Sizemore product which required, amongst the usual "starve the beast" tax cuts, a "double majority" for any taxation-related measures - that is, 50% of all reqistered voters had to turn out and of that 50.001% had to approve the measure. Since getting the American voter to get off his fourth point of contact to vote for anything not involving free sex or alcohol requires a hell of a long lever or high explosive this measure pretty much guarenteed that no revenue could be enacted in Oregon short of divine intervention. M-56 is designed to return our state to that halcyon period when those people who deigned to turn up to vote got to, you know, decide what won or lost.

You see the fine hand of Sizemore at work?

Wait. It gets better.

Measures 57 and 61 are two of these things that look similar but are actually fighting each other fiercely.

Measure 61 sends heroin, ecstacy and meth cooks and dealers, burglars and ID thieves to jail for 3 years. Every one. No exceptions. No deals. Three years hard. Period.

This little treasure is a Sizemore product - a turd for the pocket of every Oregonian. To keep the junkies out of our glove boxes and the burglars out of our garages, we're going to have to spend something like eleven zillion dollars to lock these larcenous bastards up for three years in the Oregon State Home For Wayward Boys.

After which they will emerge, presumably still larcenous (since, after all, if they could have gone to work as a union plumber they would have, right? They're not gonna learn a trade in stir and there's no money in this dog for job training, anyway), presumably still broke (since they still have no job and now, as an ex-con, are even LESS likely to get one), presumably still junkies (since there's no money for treatment, either) and since they need some quick cash for their rent and their crank they're going to get it where..?

Yeah. Duh.

Measure 57 is the Oregon legislature answer to M-61. It still costs an assload, just less of an assload than M-61. It still means money going to prisons rather than bridges, schools and jobs. But, believe it or not, this is the BEST we can hope for, since the predictions are that us idiot Oregonians are going to pass M-61, and only if we ALSO pass M-57, and by more votes, will the latter become law.

Oh, and did I mention that neither one of these dogs has a funding provision attached?

Oh, yeah, Sweet.

Measure 58: or "Fuck Them Beaners", requires a maximum of two years of ESL. No exceptions. You got two years to habla de Ingles, Paco; to sprakh Angleski, Ivan; to whatever the hell "speak English" is in Farsi, Cambodian, Ugihur and Inuit. Then you're on your own. Teachers and everybody else who has to deal with the immigrant communities here hates this one-size-fits-all monstrosity, but we love these punish-the-furriners measures here, and this is just another Sizemore treat that tickles our white boy tummies.

Does anyone know if this works? Does anyone have a hard basis for two years rather then three, four or six? Who cares! It sounds good to the goobers in Vernonia who get pissed off every time they drive by the little panaderia or see the sign reading "Se Habla Espanol" in the payday loan place in the corner.

Chief Petitioner?

Bill Sizemore.

Will it pass? Probably not. But watch - I predict it'll get at least 45% of the vote.

Measure 59 is a real sweetheart. Pass this one and you get to deduct you whole Federal tax bill - every sweet penny - from your state tax return. It'll net me about a couple of hundred bucks. It'll give Phil Knight a couple of million. And it'll bust the state budget like a Southeast Portland sheetmetalbasher going through 40-ouncers on a Friday afternoon. It’s a good idea assuming that Phil needs workman’s comp, unemployment, public health, education or law enforcement before I do.

Chief Petitioner?

Bill Sizemore.Measure 60 substitutes “classroom performance” for seniority as one of the bases for public schoolteacher pay. In the past, this has meant that teacher pay is tied to student performance on standardized tests. Oregon conservatives have been trying versions of this for some time, in hopes that one will stick and cause public school teachers grief.

Back in the 1980’s one of my troops asked me what would happen if we did poorly on the IG inspection we were preparing for. I patiently explained that such a failure would be the result of poor leadership on my part, that it would be reflected on my professional evaluation and I could be denied promotion because of it. And that, as the inevitable result of such a disappointment, I would ensure that everyone else involved in said failure died a hideously painful and horribly prolonged death involving sharp, probably barbed, metal objects as well as open flame.

So let’s say that putting this measure into law will be likely to alter the student-teacher relationship somewhat.

Chief Petitioner?

Bill Sizemore.We’ve talked about M-61. Measure 62 is the brainchild (to use the term loosely) of a fellow named Kevin Mannix, a Republican four-time loser for public office. It snares 15 percent of the state lottery money for law enforcement. While as a measure this dog is not much worse than most and better then some, as an example of what’s wrong with Oregon’s revenue system it couldn’t be better. Imagine a society where the public weal rests on the willingness of the dumbest 10% to squander their wealth on a rigged game of chance;

“Say, Falling Water, what say you give that deer haunch to the tribe is this tree falls in the forest and makes a sound? IF it doesn’t , I’ll give you TWO deer haunches. Whaddya say?”

“Gee, Porcupine Quill, that sounds like a GREAT idea!”

No wonder the Calapooyas went the way of the passenger pigeon. We're hooked on the Lottery like a broken-down dogtrack bettor is on getting two bucks down on that brindle dog with the shortcoupled legs. And the problem is that the Oregon voters don't seem to have a problem with that...

Measure 63 is so bad, so wrong, so completely and utterly "how much crack do you have to smoke to think this way" fucked up that it needs a complete post to itself. I'll do that.

Chief Petitioner?

Bill Sizemore.Finally, Measure 64 is one of these "God I Hate Public Unions!" measures that the Oregon GOP comes up with every so often. It doesn't do much other than make life a little tougher for these unions by preventing them from using public facilities. So the AFSCME folks couldn't meet at the town hall, the firefighters at the firehouse, the teachers at the school if they collect money or lobby for anything.

Update 10/23: My friend Meghan points out (in the comments) that one of the unintended side effects of this measure, though, would be to make it extremely difficult to organize charity fund drives in these same places, thus driving a nail in her EarthShare (and other charitable organizations) donations. I should note that this is a typical feature of these Sizemore initiatives: piss-poor construction. And I mean piss-poor on the order of intending to dynamite the little treestump in your backyard and instead setting off a massive explosion that completely destroys the church and preschool eight blocks away.

Did I mention that I think Sizemore is a total fucktard?

Anyway. Is it a horrible measure? No. Is it the sort of petty, spiteful "I Hate Unions" thing that you expect from some sort of nasty little WalMart manager or officious boss's stooge?

Chief Petitioner?

Bill Sizemore.

I almost forgot Measure 65, which opens our primaries so that nasty people like me can cross party lines and vote in clotheads to run against the people we WANT to elect. This measure's daddy is Phil Kiesling, one of the boggest policy wonks in the state, so, really, who gives a fuck?

Sigh.

So do you get the picture? Oregonians: we're stupid. We want our stuff but we don't want to pay for it, and because this Sizemore idiot says we can, we've let him grab our "direct democracy" by the man-root and lead it around wherever he wants it to go. Of the twelve measures on the ballot this year, three are more or less housekeeping. One is open primaries (repeat after me: Phil, who gives a fuck!?)

Of the remaining eight, six are from the Sizemore mill and one is from his intellectual siderunner, Kev Mannix.

What. The. Fuck?

As Lear in the play - we have mad'st this fool of a Sizemore our mother; "for when thou gav'st them the rod, and put'st down thine own breeches,

then they for sudden joy did weep,
And I for sorrow sung,
That such a king should play bo-peep
And go the fools among."

Because this is Oregon. Hey! We're Stupid Here!