In hopes of doing a good deed and sharing a constituent viewpoint, I gathered up an email directly to Senator Merkley's office. I say "gathered up" because I included a cut and pasted posting to someone's timeline on Facebook, a comment. Obviously such cutting and pasting brings over a lot of invisible HTML, and the submit process barfed, saying what I'd sent was a security risk and could I please just use plaintext. I also linked to this blog post.
My hope was to represent a more Russian point of view from Oregon, given we have an extensive Russian heritage right down along the coast, to Sebastopol, near the Russian River (or along it?) and where I used to work (remotely). Onion domes dot our landscape. Eastern Orthodox Christianity is not alien in Oregon, it's part of our sensibility as homelanders.
However I'm not counting myself as ethnic Russian. I'm fascinated by Cyrillic. I still remember touring the "KGB museum" in Vilnius that time, the token American fatso among what were still not yet fast food fed Lithuanians, looking forward to long lives, getting married in droves.
Maybe the email with the security risk HTML made its way through some channel or other to an office and someone will forward from there. I was sounding pretty anti-NATO in my rhetoric which is really nothing new for me. That has to be OK under free speech rules, so I'm not worried about NATO push back. What can they do? Bomb my house? Maybe in the former Yugoslavia they could get away with that, but Portland is a veteran when it comes to defending itself against Marriott Marionettes.
Besides, I'm a NATO professor (one of my brilliant disguises).
