Wimpy (with Olive Oyl)

Oh the weeping, the wailing, and the gnashing of teeth.

Barely begun though it may be, the campaign for governor already threatens to become among the more petty, petulant, and pettifogged on record.

Not to mention one of the more…well, this isn’t easy to say in these super-sensitive days, and the News Guy does not want to appear unenlightened…but let’s just come out with it, especially because almost everyone involved is of the male persuasion: the campaign shows signs of being cursed by a lack of manliness.

Not in the sense of strutting about and threatening to punch somebody in the mouth. In fact, there’s altogether too much of that, and – here’s what some of these guys don’t understand – that isn’t manly. Keeping one’s cool under pressure is manly. (which is not to say that it is not also womanly, but today’s exercise deals with guys).

Let’s start, because they are by and large the lesser offenders here, with the Democrats.

Whose first reaction (well, OK, maybe whose second reaction) to the first television commercial promoting Republican Brian Dubie was to whine that it was no fair because it was against the law.

It may be. The ad, “Vision for Vermont,” narrated by Gov. Jim Douglas, is a product not of the Dubie campaign but of the Republican Governors Association, making it an “independent” expenditure, legal only if it is truly independent, meaning not coordinated in any way with the Dubie campaign.

Impossible, said the Democrats, in a complaint filed with the Vermont Attorney General’s office. According to the complaint, the commercial “includes footage of Lt. Governor Dubie at private campaign events. Since Lt. Governor Dubie does not publish a public schedule, it would have been practically impossible for the Republican Governor’s Association to know where Dubie would be and schedule a film crew to film him without coordination and collusion.”

That would violate the law. If the Attorney General concludes that the Dubie campaign and the RGA colluded, the ad would be deemed a contribution from the governors association to the campaign. An illegal contribution considering that the ad cost far more than the $2,000 contribution limit under Vermont law.

Everyone – but especially governors and would-be governors – ought  to obey the law. Furthermore, the combination of Vermont Republicans and the RGA do not come to this discussion with clean hands.  Six years ago, Attorney General William Sorrell ruled that the RGA violated state law by failing to register as a political action committee before spending some $300,000 to help Douglas’s re-election. A similar finding against Republicans in the next few weeks would provide a day or two of stories that would hurt the Dubie campaign, a prospect that might explain why the Democrats filed the complaint.

On the other hand, the complaint is based on more conjecture than evidence. The Democrats effectively concede this by saying, “The numerous scenes of intimate, private and staged shots contained in the campaign commercial reasonably infers that Lt. Governor Dubie must have consciously taken action to facilitate or approve the creation of the advertisement.”

First of all, whoever wrote that doesn’t know what “infer” means. In English, the ‘numerous scenes’ suggest or imply; those observing the scenes infer. (Oh, and the grammar’s wrong. One scene infers; two infer.) But forget that. What’s important here is that in that sentence, the Democrats acknowledge that their case is based on a certain amount of inference. Regardless of the outcome of the Attorney General’s investigation, this little spat is unlikely to do the Dubie campaign any lasting harm. Evidence that the average voter gives a hoot about this kind of staff ranges between sparse and non-existent.

But if the Democratic reaction to the Republican ad was whiney, the Republican reaction to a corresponding Democratic ad was downright wimpy.

Like the Republican ad, the Democratic commercial was financed largely if not entirely by the national party’s Governors Association. In this case, though, a separate entity, Green Mountain Future, actually paid for the ad and bought the air time. Green Mountain Future is not a political action committee. It’s a non-profit which may neither endorse nor oppose a candidate.

So the Democratic commercial does neither. It doesn’t mention Democrat Peter Shumlin. It does mention Dubie, but only to say that he supports relicensing the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, which most of the ad criticizes. Then it urges viewers to tell Dubie he’s wrong. This way the ad follows the letter of the law while effectively opposing Dubie.

Well, from the campaign’s reaction, one might have thought that the ad accused Dubie of heinous crimes, moral turpitude, or not liking maple syrup.

“Peter Shumlin and his team recognize his jobs-killing record of taxing and spending is a loser…so they have no choice but to make negative ads,” said Corry Bliss, Dubie’s campaign manager. “Instead of talking about his ideas – or lack thereof – for fixing Vermont’s economy, Peter Shumlin and his team would rather spend thousands of dollars attacking Brian Dubie.”

Oh, poor little Corry-Warry. Somebody doesn’t agree with his boss. So he’s going to lie down and stomp his feet on the floor.

Fer cry-ey, as Harry Vernon would have said, what will Bliss do if anybody really attacks Dubie? Get hysterical and run home to mother? Doesn’t he know that it’s Democrats who are supposed to be “The Mommy Party,” complaining about every real or imagined slight? Republicans are supposed to be the tough guys. Suck it up, fella.

(Harry who? A literary reference. Check it out if you wish)

Beyond the hyper-sensitivity, there were two factual errors in Bliss’s screed. First, in this case there being no evidence at all of collusion, that was not Peter Shumlin’s ad Bliss was talking about. It was Green Mountain Future’s. Or maybe the Democratic Governors Association. But there’s no evidence it was Shumlin’s.

Second, it was not the least bit negative.

Well, OK, it wasn’t positive. It was meant to cost Dubie votes. But by Dubie’s own standards, it didn’t insult him. All it said was that he favored long-term relicensing of the power plant. He does. He’s proud of it. Describing a candidate’s policy position is not negative, at least not if the description is accurate. In this case, it is.

A smarter reply to the ad might have been to question whether its creators were really so sure that most Vermonters oppose relicensing Vermont Yankee, and would therefore be likely to hold Dubie’s support against him. And maybe, rather than accusing the Republicans of breaking the law, the Democrats might have been better off questioning the assumption behind the GOP ad – that Jim Douglas’s endorsement is all that helpful these days.

Well, what’s done is done. But there are 50 days of campaigning left. Ladies and (especially) gentlemen. Could we have a little adulthood? Even, though one is not supposed to talk this way any more, a little manly adulthood these next seven weeks?

Claire's restaurant in Hardwick

Don’t look now, but there’s a whole book about Hardwick.

Yup, that Hardwick. The one in Caledonia County, population 3207 (quasi-official 2008 estimate) median income on the low side for Vermont, home to no celebrities known to Hollywood or Broadway.

But worthy of its own book as The Town That Food Saved: How One Community Found Vitality in Local Food, by Ben Hewitt, a 38-year-old writer-farmer who lives in Cabot. The book was published last March by Rodale Press.

Vitality in local food? Hmmm. There’s a concept that transcends one little town and even one little state. But it certainly seems to be important to the little town of Hardwick, and it may become increasingly important to Vermont. Over the last few years, local small-scale agriculture has been one of the few sectors of the Vermont economy that has expanded and created jobs.

Some see it as an important part of the state and even the national economy in the years ahead.

And some do not. The cover of the current issue of The American Prospect magazine proclaimed, “The Local Food Revolution Doesn’t Stand a Chance.”

Such a conclusion might be expected – and easy to dismiss — from many an establishment journal, especially one close to the corporate world where big commodity farms,  agribusiness processors, their lobbyists, and the lawmakers who direct billions of dollars in subsidies their way feel at home.

But The American Prospect (TAP to its friends) is a highly regarded and generally left of center magazine, not likely to be carrying water (and in this case that would be irrigated water financed by the taxpayer) for “industrialized agriculture.” (Full disclosure: it is also a magazine for which the News Guy has written in both its print and on-line incarnations).

So why does TAP say the local food movement is doomed?

Actually, it doesn’t. Not for the first time in publishing history, a magazine’s cover headline seems to have overstated the findings of the cover story itself. In the article, “Slowed Food Revolution,” writer Heather Rogers does point out the difficulties facing non-establishment agriculture, but never quite proclaims its situation hopeless.

The problems she catalogues are real.

(H)olistic and organic growers,” she writes, “shoulder far higher production costs than their conventional counterparts when it comes to everything from laborers to land. Without meaningful support from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, their longevity hangs in the balance. In the meantime, the USDA showers billions on industrial agriculture. Growers who’ve gone the chemical, mechanized route have ready access to reasonable loans, direct subsidy payments…, and crop insurance, plus robust research, marketing, and distribution resources. Whether organic and holistic growers raise crops…or grass-fed, free-range livestock, they must contend with circumstances made harder by a USDA rigged to favor industrial agriculture and factory food.”

True, or at least true enough, though there are signs that the Obama Administration is moving, if ever so slowly, to help the local food movement. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack even attended the Northeast Organic Farming Association gathering in Burlington last winter, where he said, “like it or not, for better or worse, the organic market has become mainstream.” Last month, the Administration proposed new rules “seeking to increase competition and rein in potentially unfair practices by large meatpackers and poultry producers,” according to a story in the New York Times, which said the move was “aimed at helping small livestock and poultry farmers.”

Besides, not all local agriculture is organic or holistic, whatever that may mean, and some of Rogers’s examples seem extreme. One organic farmer’s eggs, she wrote, cost $14 a dozen, making them tough to sell. But it can be reliably reported that in the Northeast Kingdom one can get locally raised  (though not organic) eggs, laid by chickens who wander around a barnyard, for $2.50 a dozen. That’s more than at the supermarket, but it isn’t outlandish.

Whatever happens to local food production in the future, there is little doubt that it has “saved” Hardwick economically, though Hewitt himself now says he didn’t really think Hardwick had to be “saved,” except, he said,. “economically speaking.” It had, though, “an interconnectedness, where people were able to do for themselves and each other.”

Still, it didn’t have much in the way of jobs or business opportunities until the opening of cheese maker Jasper Hill Farms in nearby Greensboro, Vermont Soy, and Claire’s, a “community supported restaurant” (CSR) which is largely financed by local investors and uses many locally-grown products.

Not that Hardwick has turned into Scarsdale. There’s still at least one boarded up big storefront on the main street. And many if not most of the town residents, it is safe to say, can rarely if ever afford to dine at Claire’s. But so far, Hewitt said, “these businesses are all growing and hiring and have been through the teeth of the recession,” and the town shows definite signs of economic vitality.

Nor, he said, is Hardwick alone. There is the Intervale Center in Burlington, a Rutland area “farm and food link” is coordinating similar entrepreneurship in that area, and “scattered throughout the hills are small scale producers,” clearly more of them than just a few years ago.

Now, in Vermont at least, the local food movement may be about to get some of the official help it needs. Next month, the Legislatively-created Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund, after a year of study and discussion, will “put (its) draft proposals on what the farm and food sector might be like in ten years, out for public comment,” said Janice St. Onge, its deputy director.

St. Onge doesn’t think Vermont will ever be able to “solely feed ourselves,” not as long as Vermonters want orange juice for breakfast. But, she said, “some components can move toward being self-sufficient,” and that self-sufficiency could be economically valuable for the state.

The localvore advocates try to be careful not to over-promise. Hewitt said there were more important advantages to producing and consuming locally grown food than to see local agriculture as a “fantastic engine of economic growth,” which it may not be.

But it could be as solid (if not fantastic) an engine of such growth as any of the other business bonanza ideas thrown around. The conventional wisdom supports subsidizing (bribing?) out-of-state companies to move in. But statistics show that rather few companies move from one state to another, and it is not at all clear that the jobs created are worth the subsidies paid, or the tax breaks granted (which usually end up raising everybody else’s taxes in the town which hosts the new company). So far, at least, local growers aren’t asking for money, just some changes in regulations.

And as Hewitt said, it’s at least as likely that industrial agriculture, for all its government subsidies, is as close to doom as are the small producers of meat and vegetables raised to sell nearby. Certainly in Vermont, the big mass commodity crop, dairy, will continue to decline, in numbers of producers if not in gallons produced.

In 1947, Hewitt rattled off (he obviously has the number in his head) there were 11,206 Vermont dairy farms. There are now about 1,000. There will be fewer next year and fewer yet the year after. But there are likely to be more farms producing cheese from their own animals, raising vegetables to be sold at a nearby farm stand, and supplying local restaurants like Claire’s or the Bees Knees in Morrisville.

It’s hard to believe that there will be enough of these farms and restaurants to help lead a state to prosperity. But until this year, it was hard to believe anyone would write a book about Hardwick.

In 2006, 13 people were murdered in Vermont, a rate of 2.7 people per hundred-thousand residents, the standard measurement for these matters, far below the national rate (5.6 per hundred-thousand that year) and one of the lowest rates in the country.

Kind of high for Vermont, though, The previous year’s rate had been 2.1 per hundred-thousand, based on eight murders. Thing haven’t changed much since. In fact, except for 1993, when for some reason there were 21 murders in the state, the number of homicides fluctuates between the high single digits and the mid-teens, allowing Vermont to uphold its reputation as a safe, healthy, state where, compared with most other states, people do not kill.

A reputation not entirely deserved. Vermonters rarely kill someone else. But they are quite a bit more likely than other Americans to kill themselves.

That same year of 2006 (chosen because it is the most recent year for which reliable suicide statistics are available), when only a handful of Vermonters killed another person, 80 committed suicide, a rate of 13.1 per hundred-thousand, according to the Suicide Prevention Resource Center. Here, Vermont’s statistics are worse than the nation as  whole, where 11.1 people per hundred-thousand population killed themselves that year.

For whatever reason, suicide seems to be a worse problem in Vermont than in the neighboring states. New Hampshire’s 12.2 per hundred-thousand is slightly lower, and still above the national average. But in Massachusetts (7.2 per hundred-thousand) and New York (6.7), the rate is far lower than in most of the rest of the country,

From 1995 through 2006,  the SPRC reported, Vermont had a 13.7 per hundred-thousand suicide rate, with an average of 1.5 suicides a week, making suicide the ninth leading cause of death in the state. It is eleventh nationally.

“Things have not changed that much,” since those statistics were compiled, said Elana Premack Sandler, a Prevention Specialist at SPRC’s Boston office. Vermont remains one of the states where a person is more likely to kill him or her self.

Probably himself. As in most other states, the vast majority of Vermont suicides – 82 percent — are men, meaning that 23 of every hundred-thousand Vermont men take their own lives, making suicide the seventh leading cause of death of Vermont men. The rate for women was 4.8 per hundred-thousand.

As might be expected, older people were most likely to take their own lives. In Vermont, the rate for those over 70 was 19.6 per hundred-thousand (43 for males over 70). But suicide experts in Vermont and elsewhere are increasingly worried about teenage suicides. The SPRC reported four youth suicides in Vermont in 2006, a slightly higher rate than the nation’s as a whole.

As might not be expected, there does not seem to be a correlation between suicide and either income or education. Nationally (this hardly applies in Vermont), non-Hispanic whites are more likely to take their own lives than are blacks or Hispanics.

“Income and socio-economic class does not really enter into it,” said Brian Remer, project manager for youth suicide prevention at the Center for Health and Learning in Brattleboro.http://www.healthandlearning.org/

“There’s a myth out there that people who are poor and down on their luck might be more inclined to take their own lives. It’s more a combination of a lot of different factors.”

The most important of these, he said, is probably “social isolation,” which helps explain why, in Vermont and around the country, suicide is more common in rural areas. Nationally, New Mexico (19.8 suicides per hundred thousand population from 1995 through 2005), Alaska (21), and Montana (20) are the states with the highest rates, Elana Premack Sandler said.

In some of these states, the rate might be affected by the one exception to the general rule that non-Hispanic whites are more likely to take their own lives than are members of a minority group. Not if the minority group is American Indians or Alaska natives. In Alaska, the suicide rate for these two groups is a frightening 45.9 per hundred-thousand.

In these cases, poverty and other pathologies such as alcoholism might contribute to the suicide rate. But Premack Sandler said most experts still regard isolation as the biggest problem.

The same holds in Vermont, said Remer. The suicide rate in rural Essex County in the Northeast Kingdom is higher than Alaska’s – 24 per hundred-thousand. Essex County residents are poorer and less educated than most Vermonters, but Remer said, “suicide rates are probably higher in rural areas because of isolation and the difficulty receiving or getting to mental health services” than to income or education levels. Mental health, he said, “plays a part in about 90 percent of the suicides.”

And while there are no statistics about rural attitudes as such, suicide experts are convinced that the stigma attached to mental illness, which seems stronger in rural areas, prevents some people from dealing with the problems that can lead to suicide.

“The stigma is a big thing,” Remer said. “If a son or daughter exhibits unusual behavior, parents often think, ‘maybe they inherited this condition from me,’ or ‘I’m a bad parent, or people will think I’m a bad parent.’ We know this is not true. Mental illness often has a chemical or genetic base, and people can get real help from therapy and medication.”

Bill Lippert, the Democratic State Representative from Hinesburg who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, noted that though there were “twice as many suicides as murders in Vermont” (actually, more than twice as many), every murder garners a massive headline, but the issue of suicide is generally not receiving the same level of public awareness because there’s still the stigma attached to mental illness.”

But mental illness is only one aspect of the suicide discussion that many experts and activists are reluctant to discuss. The other is the method, though the data are clear. People can take their lives using all kinds of devices including poisons, knives, and suffocation. But in Vermont and nationwide, more than half of all suicides shoot themselves.

That’s what Aaron Xue did last year. He was 15. He apparently was given a gun (or perhaps guns) by another youth, who took them from his home in Essex, where Aaron also lived. Aaron’s mother thinks it should be simple to pass a law that would make it less likely that teenagers could take loaded guns from home. She may be wrong.