Journalism, despite its occasional intellectual pretensions, is a blue-collar job.

You don’t need a license to practice it.

You don’t have pass a test or fill out a form or in any other way satisfy the edicts of government or industry before you gather information and then convey it to an audience.

It’s sort of like carpentry, except you hammer together clauses instead of boards.

This is as it should be.

The great bloody stain on civilization that is Adolf Hitler’s legacy continues to leak through the decades, leaving splotches in unexpected places.

The Portland Police Bureau, for instance.

Last month, Chief Mike Reese suspended Capt. Mark Kruger for 80 hours without pay and ordered him to attend “Tools for Tolerance” training.

Kruger’s offense, now almost a dozen years in the past, was nailing five plaques to a tree in Portland’s Rocky Butte Park, each marker honoring a German soldier killed during World War II.

(Kruger removed the plaques several years later.)

By JAYSON JACOBY

The loss of any historic building saddens me, but the transformation of a structure from landmark to eyesore seems to me an even worse fate.

This process — and I’ll veer here briefly from an architectural to an automotive analogy — is akin to parking a vintage Ferrari in a drafty old barn and letting the packrats soil the fine leather and gnaw the spark plug wires.

I would rather have only memories and photographs of such a thing, at the apex of its beauty and utility, than to have to watch it decay.

It is, of course, vastly easier to lament such episodes than to prevent them.

Baker City voters value experience in their city councilors.

But not necessarily current experience.

For certain voters, past incumbency seems to be a more valuable political attribute than present.

County Clerk Tami Green this week faxed me a tally of the write-in votes from the Nov. 2 election.

The spreadsheets, which show the vote totals for everyone whose name showed up on more than three ballots, make for interesting reading.

Overall, residents cast 1,021 write-in votes.

Which isn’t very many, really — barely 10 percent of the total votes cast.

There’s a common lament heard around here which has it that those infernal city voters, on account of their superior numbers, run roughshod over us in the hinterlands like a schoolyard bully.

Take last week’s election.

(Or leave it, if you’d rather.)

Almost three in four Baker County voters wanted Republican Chris Dudley to be Oregon’s next governor.

Yet it’s Democrat John Kitzhaber who will be hauling his luggage to Mahonia Hall, and the reason is that a slightly higher percentage of Multnomah County voters said it should be.

And there’s 417,000 of them as against 10,000 of us.

But what if “those city voters” in this case live not in Portland, nor even in the smaller but still substantial urban centers of Eugene, Salem or Bend?

What if they live in Baker City?

What if Baker City were that urban liberal bastion jutting arrogantly from a conservative rural sea?

Well it is.

Sort of.

All right, barely.

Another election has passed, and the predominant sentiment among Americans, or so it seems to me, is that we’re exhausted and could use a vacation.

Preferably to some place in the tropics which is not at present having its topography rearranged by a hurricane.

Our commonest complaints, as we languish in the post-election malaise, are that the campaigns were slimy, and the media’s appetite for the vitriolic stew was insatiable.

This ability of Americans to rediscover our disdain for politics every couple of years, to react to its ugly but utterly predictable excesses with the innocent wonder of a child discovering some previously unknown aspect of the world, tickles me as always.

We came across an amusing scene the other day in the pine woods on the north side of Phillips Reservoir.

Although whimsical is perhaps the more apt adjective in this instance.

There is no surplus of whimsy in the world, certainly. And it seems to me that we would be well off were our lives to incorporate a little more of the fanciful and the silly.

It was a Sunday. The morning was chilly but clear and so we decided to hike  the dirt path that traces the reservoir’s shoreline.

This is a nondescript route by local standards. It is in the main flat, a rarity in a county which would make a swell testing ground for the makers of emergency brakes.

The great paradox of the First Amendment, it seems to me, is that the pure beauty of its purpose must on occasion give aid and comfort to people whose acts are so ugly as to defy description.

I don’t believe, though, that this noble treatise, now well into its third century, is sullied even slightly by its associations with vile characters.

The truest test of any right, of course, comes about when it’s claimed by the sort of people you wouldn’t let into your house.

Or your dog’s house.

Dan Ermovick, the main recreation man for the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest, posed an interesting question to me recently about mountain bikes and wilderness.

Actually that’s redundant.

Pretty much any question that involves bicycles and wilderness piques my curiosity.

That bicycles came to be banned from America’s federal wilderness areas has always seemed to me a peculiar aspect of this country’s admirable campaign to shelter our beautiful places from the more obnoxious trappings of modern civilization.

(Hummers, for instance.)