November 14, 2005 – Pete Ferryman and Kimberly Maus are part of the  happy artificial family which "reports the news" each weekday morning on Oregon's oldest television station.  (Oregon Magazine's Berlin Bureau Chief, Tom Lipscomb, grew up on Council Crest in the Forties, and watched the KPTV station tower go up.). 

Today, from this collection of unprofessionals we learned that Bill and Hillary Clinton are in the Middle East, visiting various sites. What a shame they can't visit the regular Clinton-era White House guest, Yassir Arafat, who at present is dead.  Quite a few such terrorists are dead, now.  It must bother Clinton.  By inaction or action, he subsidized (or pardoned) so many of them during his two terms.  The Nobel Peace Prize winning Arafat was just one of the more obvious of these mass murderers. 

It is this upside-down, topsy-turvey, Alice in Wonderland quality that passes for reality in American old line "journalism," these days . Hidden within hours of this crap, the Channel 12 (broadcast, Portland, Oregon) bunch reported that tuberculosis has appeared in a suburban Beaverton school, or schools.

That’s all there was to the notice.  No specific location, no description of the disease, which if you’d like to know is one of the great killers on the planet.  Of particular interest here is the treatment-resistant variety, or varieties.  This disease, given the proper conditions, can become untreatable.  That is, certain death to whomever catches it.

So, we learned in a couple of innocuous sentences that this ravage has appeared in one or more metro area schools.  Since this mass killer was brought to its knees in America by medicine in the 20th Century, one asks why it came back to Beaverton?  Is there something these KPTV people aren’t telling us?  They seem like such a happy family.  So breathless, so cute, so fun., so nice.  Nice people wouldn’t be careless with your children’s health, right?

Yessir. 

Here is a truth for you.  These "nice" news people so many Oregonians like, for reasons I can only guess at, often leave key elements from their reports if those key elements carry the potential of damaging the liberal view of the world.  Frankly, I don't even know if they know they are doing it.  My impression is that of all their grotesque but happy violations of common sense and reason, the greatest of these is that they are ignorant of their ignorance.

Death in the Classroom

I suspect that the item they have omitted from this piece of news is that the horrid, almost plague-like disease of tuberculosis was brought to Beaverton by a child from another nation, possibly one located below our southern border. If your child gets this version of tuberculosis, we will hope for you that it isn’t the resistant variety. 

For your information, the next time, it might be leprosy.  A scene from the famous film, The Godfather, comes to mind.  Young Vito Corleone has reached Ellis Island, where he is put into quarantine by the immigration center doctors.  He sits alone in his small room for weeks, staring out the window at the Statue of Liberty.  What little Vito (which means "life") brought to America was the worst of the culture of Sicily.  Feuds, corruption and death.  He was not medically  infectious.  In Beaverton, a different immigrant story is probably unfolding.  We don’t know for sure because they aren’t saying.

Are your children attending school with youngsters who were not quarantined before they were allowed to circulate freely in your town?  When they catch a disease that could have been eliminated by an immigration doctor, will you leave the hospital and vote for open borders?  Do you believe the reports that more than fifty hospitals in the American SW have closed their emergency wards because the cost of giving health care to people who cannot speak English has driven them to the point of bankruptcy?

We already know that if you live in one of Oregon's large urban centers it is likely that your views on racial profiling cause searches of Irish grandmothers in wheelchairs at the airport. We know that you are a bit jumpy at the frequency of Hispanic faces appearing when this rape, that abduction or those robberies show up in the news.  It is our guess that quietly you wonder just what the real numbers, here, are. 

In the case of the item which prompted this essay, we join you in wondering just who it was who brought tuberculosis into a Beaverton school.  A citizen who recently visited a foreign land?  Or somebody who crossed our border without our permission, and who among his personal effects carried a package of death for our children?

(LL)

© 2005 Oregon Magazine