What may feel eerie, and more as an absence than a presence, is deja vu. What's absent is a secure memory which the current episode clearly resonates with, such as the last time one waited for the bus at this very stop. "Deja vu" is not the correct term in this situation, just as when I show up for work every morning, same bat time, same bat station, I don't say "deja vu!" unless maybe I'm trying to be funny.
My car trip with Derek (Deke the Geek) to Silverton this afternoon, was not so much deja vu as an opportunity to reminisce. Glenn Stockton and I had come to Silverton at least once before, to that building with the Norman Rockwell paintings, blown up big, outside. A community center, right? We passed it on the way out of town, after the lecture, and by way of Mt. Angel.
This time, the Gus Frederick lecture on Homer Davenport was in the Silver Falls Library, two doors down from the museum, which I thought about visiting, but what about the soundstage across the river? That was the more anomalous event. The museum is but an hour away by car, open weekends, from 1 to 4 pm.
Once the lecture was over, around 3 pm, we decided to roam back over the wooden foot bridge to the soundstage, the festival booths, the rides. This was a family friendly beer-oriented festival, one of several to grace the region. Mt. Angle has a big one, in October. Here we were in early August, inaugurating the beer festival season. Not that either of us had any beer. We ended up not spending any money at all, only gas.
Who was Homer Davenport again? I've blogged about him before. He lived during a more civilized age, before the weapons got so much uglier, with psyches to match. We're safe in calling him a political cartoonist, but he was also an influencer, someone with a keen eye for the critical elements within some story of the day, in the public eye.
Davenport also did some "straight" journalism, meaning not so cartoonish, although still with the hand drawings, high quality and precise, because photography was still difficult to include in daily newspapers. In his younger years, he was sent to New Orleans to cover a prize fight featuring a native son of Silverton, who lost. In his older years, he had a front row seat at the Paris, France trial of Dreyfus, of Dreyfus Affair fame.
I filled in that hole in my knowledge, regarding that Dreyfus business, from another angle when viewing the French language film Antisémitismes, by Ilan Ziv. The Ziv documentary weaves together a number of threads, many of them on the theme of demonizing Jewish people as scapegoats or simply as uber-rich. In the case of Germany and Poland, one senses envy, mixed in with various other flavors of unconsciousness.
