John Webster

It's wildfire season again, and again residents of the Inland Northwest have begun to watch rural and suburban homes go up in smoke. Here in Spokane County we have learned from terrible experience how to prevent such disasters, but we have been slow to take the simple steps that determine whether homes will survive. After the 1987 Hangman Hills fire and the 1991 firestorm, a committee of experts prepared a set of fire-prevention recommendations. Most have been implemented, and for that Spokane County commissioners deserve a salute.

There is more than slick scripting behind the pearly white smiles of unity at the Republican National Convention. There also are hints of real change in the air. Somewhere backstage - could it be in Bob Dole's suite? - a steel will has been at work, drawing partisans with sharply differing beliefs toward a common purpose. The blow-dried gabbers in the network TV booths, who know a thing or two about scripting, suggest the unity's a facade. Certainly, the Republican Party's divisions are deep and deeply held - as they long have been in the Democratic Party, recently fractured by President Clinton's embrace of Republican welfare reform.

The government has changed the paperwork, jolted the bureaucracy and redefined the goals. But out in the hot sands of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, some of the most dangerous garbage ever produced still simmers, corrodes and seeps toward the blue waters of the nearby Columbia River. Maybe this time, the hiring of a new custodian will lead to actual improvement in Hanford's radioactive mess. There is reason for hope, and there is reason for concern, as well.

When we are young, we must eat our spinach, and when we reach adulthood, we must vote. However, so many citizens are saying "yuck" that it's a remarkable election when more than half of us go to the polls. That's a serious problem, but it won't be solved with dour sermons about the need to do our duty no matter how difficult it is. Voters deserve more credit than they get from those who insist the only response to a noxious choice is to make it. Voters know democracy is difficult. Voters also know that democracy is sick.

Spokane doesn't have to sit helplessly when drug-dealing gangs turn violent. Nor does the community need to panic. To its credit, the city is doing neither one. Police Chief Terry Mangan has developed an aggressive, realistic response to a recent turf war among gangs. Affected business people and property owners are doing their part as well, working with police on tactics that will make the trouble spot - the 1100 block of West First Avenue - less hospitable for druggies and more hospitable for those who intend to arrest them. Will it work? It did three years ago during an earlier turf skirmish. Authorities intensified police pressure and made numerous arrests under tough federal drug laws - and the problem abated.

Jack Ward Thomas, the first wildlife biologist to head the U.S. Forest Service and a hero of the Sierra Club set for his work to save the spotted owl, has committed political heresy. Or has spoken the truth, depending on how you look at it. Testifying before a congressional subcommittee the other day, Thomas said, "We have a forest-health problem." It is, he said, "a very large problem that we have to collectively address in some intelligent fashion." Decades of misguided management policies have left some of the West's inland forests at risk of catastrophic fire. Some stands are diseased, bug-infested, dying and packed with tinder.

Once upon a time, the U.S. Postal Service was the poster child for governmental ineptitude. Then came welfare, the kindly narcotic that helped make a social wasteland of America's inner cities. And here in the Northwest, who could imagine bigger bungles that the abandoned nuclear plants of the Washington Public Power Supply System or the billions squandered on lawyers and studies in the name of cleaning up still-contaminated Hanford? But now comes a scandal uniquely painful for the Northwest, because it involves so many aspects of our economic and environmental heritage: Our region's electricity ratepayers have forked over nearly $3 billion to save wild salmon runs, yet many runs are nearly gone. Meanwhile, a banquet table piled high with loosely monitored dollars provides an orgiastic feast for biologists, engineers, hatcheries, construction firms, regulation-writers, fisheries police, agencies, lawyers and the producers of long-winded studies. Salmon-saving is an industry, a political cause celebre, a basis for interest-group fund raising and a discouraging failure.

Teddy Roosevelt would have loved Kerri Strug. When Roosevelt was a boy they called him "Teedie." He was a frail, sickly asthmatic. By force of will he defied his illness, built a barrel-chested physique and rough-rider spirit, flinging himself into brutal sports, grueling horseback trips, war, battles with powerful corporations and all the other challenges that made him one of America's best-loved presidents. Teeth snapping and spectacles flashing, he summed up his life philosophy this way: "Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat."

No Americans want nuclear waste in their neighborhood, but nearly all Americans have used the electricity nuclear reactors produce. It is a scandal of our century that we built nuclear reactors but failed to dispose safely of their byproduct - spent fuel that will remain extremely dangerous for more than 10,000 years. Next week, at long last, the Senate is expected to move toward approval of a plan.

Even as you read these words, 27-year-olds with marketing degrees are sitting at computer consoles in faraway cities, editing commercials designed to scare you out of your wits. To save you time so you can enjoy the summer just a while longer, here's a sneak preview of their messages: Republicans are a pack of Jerry Falwell clones who want to pillage the environment, ruin Medicare and cut taxes for country clubbers and big corporations. Democrats are a pack of pot-smoking ACLU lawyers who want to give condoms to school children, enlarge the government-bureaucracy unions and destroy free enterprise with regulations and taxes. Are not. Are too. Are not ...

Being a one-man constitutional convention who deems himself wise enough to rewrite the charter for Spokane's city government, Steve Eugster might be considered bold enough to defend his work - any time, any place. But his James Madison persona seems to be in conflict with his other life, as a process litigator. In March, he asked the City Council to waive signature-gathering requirements and place on the fall ballot his plan to switch Spokane from a city-manager government to a strong-mayor government.

Last fall, a three-fourths majority of Washington's voters stomped an initiative that would have allowed unregulated casinos on tribal lands. Now, the nation's huge gambling industry is trying via legal loopholes and slick corporate flackery to slip a tribal casino into Airway Heights, miles from the nearest reservation. If this scheme works, the Spokane area eventually would regret the casino's arrival.

If the spending of money was all it took to save the Pacific Northwest's wild salmon runs, they'd be flourishing. Over the years, the region's electricity consumers have spent billions on hatcheries, fish ladders, reservoir spills, dam modifications and scientific research. Yet the salmon runs are vanishing. So it is fair to examine how salmon recovery dollars are appropriated and spent. Panels of leading regional fish biologists have done so, and one of their conclusions is disturbing: The same organizations that spend the salmon recovery dollars also wield effective control over how much money each organization receives and how it is spent. Scientists familiar with this incestuous process charge that the money is going not to the best interests of the fish or to original scientific inquiry, but rather to perpetuate institutional agendas of those who spend it.

Where would you like your kids to go when they finish high school - college, or prison? If the long-range trends in Washington state government continue, children of the baby boomers could have an easier time getting into the slammer, or onto welfare rolls, than they will have getting into a public university.

Politics isn't holy war. It's the alternative to holy war. And it isn't holy, at all - except in its result: the peaceful coexistence of people who vehemently disagree. Those who wish to serve as president of the United States need enough integrity to be trusted when they lead - and enough flexibility to find a middle ground. It's a contradiction that bedevils everyone who has held the job: principle vs. compromise. A leader needs both.

Cancel the panic. The price of gasoline is going down. Before we all forget the sight of presidential candidates racing to save us from a market cycle, let's think about what the fiasco says about our country and its leaders. It says that we are shortsighted, economically illiterate, susceptible to conspiracy theories and led by politicians who'd rather pander to our ignorance than tell us the truth. We also have our good qualities, such as a free-market economy that repairs its own ills and is the envy of the world, if not of Americans themselves.

The pioneer capitalists buried in Spokane's Riverside cemetery had vision. The city they built had more than dams, smokestacks and mansions. It was a city of gorgeous parks and tree-lined boulevards. These public riches, which we treasure today, were created at considerable cost to the men and women whose granite monuments now stand, weathered and mysterious, in the cemetery's quiet lawns. What the founders left to us is a living monument - an outdoor recreation ethic that sets our community apart. Since the turn of the century this love for public gathering places spread from parks to golf courses to an environmental world's fair to Bloomsday and, most recently, to the Centennial Trail. The trail is the undertaking that will test the vision of those who lead our community now.

The city of Spokane needs good leadership - strong, responsive, visionary, accountable. On that much, all of us can agree. How to attract it? That's the hard part. Roger Crum's resignation as Spokane city manager means city government has an opportunity to recruit fresh talent to its top leadership post. But the search for a new manager is going to begin under such a cloud of uncertainty that it is difficult to see how top talent can be attracted. Steve Eugster, a Spokane lawyer who has made it his hobby to snipe at city government, is collecting signatures on an initiative that would replace the council-manager form of government with a strong-mayor plan like that used in Seattle and a number of other cities.

Politicians kiss babies, but parents raise them. That's a thought worth stowing away as the campaign season arrives. Saturday in the nation's capital, 200,000 people attended a Stand for Children rally on the Mall in front of the Lincoln Memorial. The event had a partisan agenda which its sponsors tried, sort of, to downplay.

Mining and logging aren't the only industries with a stake in this region's energetic debate over ecosystem management. Environmental propaganda-making has become a booming industry, as well. Which is fine. It's a free country. But it is not at all fine to use tax dollars to pay for the propaganda that environmental groups produce. It's wrong. Voluntary contributions, not involuntary taxes, should pay for special-interest group campaigns.

Call in the lawyers. Johnny just yanked Petunia's ponytail and his first-grade teacher wishes to attempt (shudder) discipline. Did Johnny receive prior notice that he mustn't yank ponytails? Will discipline embarrass him or hurt his self-esteem? Will the teacher's questions violate his Fifth Amendment rights? Does the teacher discipline boys and girls in equal numbers, and if not can she submit proper documentation and justification to human rights authorities? If the teacher hauls Johnny out of the classroom for a few minutes, will that violate the poor little dear's rights to an education and to due process of law including the right to appeal? In Spokane schools, grown men and women recently spent hours of time and pages of legal analysis wringing their hands over these very questions.

Suddenly, Whitewater is more than a convoluted real estate deal that few Americans understand. It is more than a conspiratorial obsession used to spice up Republican fund-raising speeches. A jury has decided that it is a case of white-collar bank robbery. A robbery that involved former professional associates of the president of the United States. It is comparatively easy to prosecute robbers who use guns. It is not so easy to convict thieves who own the bank, whose weapons are falsified accounting documents, labyrinthine loans, phony corporations.

At the risk of being sued for politically incorrect speech, we would like to suggest that the fair housing advocates who've been badgering local landlords and Realtors lately are hurting their own cause. Their heavy-handedness is a perfect example of the regulatory excess that makes people applaud proposals to eliminate the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. That's unfortunate. Spokane does need fair and affordable housing. But assaults on small business people who provide it can make the housing shortage worse by driving would-be rental houses off the market.

Louder than a thousand chain saws, huffier than a herd of Birkenstocked eco-preachers, the debate over salvage logging is about to resume. And in an election year, no less. Well, bring on the battle. For all of us who live in forest-fire and logging country, it's needed. To remember why, think about the wildfires of 1994 and about the loaded lumber trucks that keep rolling across the Canadian border, past quiet U.S. forests, closed U.S. mills and busy U.S. courthouses, on their way to pricey U.S. lumberyards.