dkSez : : : : : : Don Kahle’s blog

I suppose it had to happen. I find myself thinking like a newspaperman again. I sat down this morning, expecting to write about how Hillary’s showing in yesterday’s Pennsylvania primary hurts Jim Torrey’s bid to unseat Eugene Mayor Kitty Piercy. The fact that the Democratic primary race is continuing, and now likely will continue through May, means that more Democrats will be voting in our non-partisan mayoral primary. That was what I was going to write about, until I remembered that UO Professor Nathan Tublitz is giving a neuroscience lecture at noon on Friday, seven hours before George Lakoff is coming to campus with a lecture entitled “The Brain and Its Politics.” Both of these lectures will be happening the day this essay appears, so I once again went with the compelling time peg. Next week will be soon enough to link the national political scene with the local one, but writing about Lakoff and Tublitz on the day they are both giving public presentations — that makes me look downright relevant. I hope I can shake that tendency before it becomes habitual. I think that urge to sound (temporally) relevant is a large contributor to the “echo chamber” effect that often appears on op-ed pages.