Bridge of 1917 Remains Deathtrap as Infrastructure Decays

If, in some great museum of American public discourse, there’s a gilded pedestal reserved for the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, then way in the back, in a darkened room that no one tells the docents about, you might find a cardboard diorama of the Benton-Rivers Encounter.

It happened last year on the floor of the Washington state senate. Senator Don Benton, a barrel-chested, goateed 57-year-old, says colleague Ann Rivers started the name-calling that made onlookers and pages gawk. She called him a “piece of s---” and leaned in so aggressively that, he says, he felt physically threatened. In Rivers’ account, Benton stared, laughed creepily and repeatedly called her “weird.” Some weeks afterward, according to a report by colleagues who tried to mediate their dispute, Benton would say Rivers, 48, was behaving like a “trashy, trampy-mouthed little girl.”