white-tailed deer

STRIKE ONE: KVETCH KVETCH KVETCH

When the going gets tough, they say, the tough get going.

Not in Vermont, especially rural Vermont. There, when anything changes, the supposedly tough whimper.

The latest example of this phenomenon occurred last week when roughly 100 members of the Champion Land Leaseholders and Traditional Interests Association met in Ferdinand, in the core of the Northeast Kingdom, to talk to Mark Maghini, who is sort of their landlord.

Well, not really talk to him. At least as reported in Orleans County’s Chronicle, it was more like screech at him.

And why? Because…(steel yourself for the horror about to be expressed) everything is not the same.

Oh, and also because weeping and wailing have become the default position in the subculture of some segments of rural Vermont.

To elucidate, for those unfamiliar with the saga of what are still called the Former Champion Land, Maghini is the manager of the Nulhegan Basin Division of the Silvio Conte National Fish and Wildlife Refuge, the owner of some 26,000 acres that once belonged to the Champion International Paper Company.

A few hundred people lease small plots of this land on which they have built camps, as they did when Champion owned it. As it happens, the terms of their leases are much more advantageous to them now than in the Champion days (largely because they moaned and groaned, and were immediately placated by a cowardly Vermont State Legislature, but let’s let bygone wails be bygone wails).

What ails them now?

First, under the new rules, they won’t be able to use or possess alcoholic beverages while hunting. What would happen, one of them asked, if he was bringing beer to his camp and a deer cross the road. Would getting out of the vehicle to go after the deer by a violation?

Of course not, Maghini said in a telephone interview.

“Get out of the truck. Go after the deer,” he said, as if any explanation were needed. Clearly this was a crowd looking for something about which to complain ever though there was nothing about which to complain.

Refuge visitors won’t be allowed to hunt from the road any more, either. Nor is anybody else, at least not in this state (see Page 17 of the most recent hunting regulations).

But the problem, as one of the meeting-goers put it, was that “we can’t do what we have been doing for a lifetime.”

Oh, please. There are two things these folks should do up. Grow and shut. The world changes. The land they lease is now owned by the Federal Government, which has designated it a Fish and Wildlife Refuge. The primary mission of the Refuges is “to conserve the abundance and diversity of native plants and animals.” But as a matter of law and policy – oh, and by the way, in the interest of the economy of northeastern Vermont – they also try to attract visitors.

Who are less likely to show up if they worry about getting shot.

Okay, federal regulations can always be dumb, and one of these seems to qualify. If motor vehicles are allowed on the roads, why should bicycles be banned?

Maybe they won’t be for long, Maghiri said, under a “comprehensive conservation plan” now in the works.

The Leaseholders are a small sliver of the body politic, but a somewhat larger sliver of the local cultural mythology. These are (at least so they want us to think) the traditional Vermonters of yore—self-reliant, rugged, adaptable.

Perhaps we’ll have to adapt to the reality; they’re a bunch of crybabies.

STRIKE TWO: SMILE, YOU’RE (MABYE) ON TV

More than any generation before us, we command the resources for self-realization…But do we want to be artists, philosophers, pioneers of the natural sciences? No, we want to be celebrities—Hilary Mantel

But does the Burlington Free Press have to lead the way.

The Freep routinely goes bananas any time a Vermonter even approaches celebrity, like appearing on a TV reality show. But Sunday, it outdid itself, devoting 50 square inches – 40 percent of the “news” (that is, not advertising) space on the front page to tell us that a guy who used to go to Middlebury would be playing against the New England Patriots that day.

Not that Steven Hauschka is really a celebrity. Or really a Vermonter. He grew up in Massachusetts. But he did start kicking footballs at Middlebury and he is the place-kicker for the Baltimore Ravens who would play (and lose to) the Pats Sunday afternoon.

Meaning he might be (oh, contain the excitement) on TV.

Not that it wasn’t a story. (Sort of) local kid (sort of) makes good. And it was nicely done. But it belonged on the sports page, not all over Page One.

Oh, and is it turned out, Hauschka kicked no field goals Sunday, or even (so it seemed after a quick look at the game account) attempted one. No TV time after all.

STRIKE THREE: LAW? WE DON’T WORRY ABOUT NO STINKIN’ LAW. WE’RE THE NEW YORK TIMES.

The paper of record came to Vermont last week, right up to the Northeast Kingdom, to write about that moose. You know, the one that’s being fed doughnuts in an impoundment in Irasburg.

Cute story by Katie Zezima of the Boston office. Mentioned the doughnuts. Quoted the old farmer who’d brought the moose to the impoundment and the guy who owns it. Got into the chronic wasting disease danger.

Just one little omission. Never mentioned that the rescue, transportation and confinement of the moose are all, undeniably, against the bleepety-blank law.

Actually, a not-so-little omission. Not, at least, in a serious newspaper, which The New York Times is.

Was?

Thanks to the….let’s just call it the less than impressive performance of the Wild Blue internet provider company and the firms to which it contracts out its customer service – DSI Systems Inc. of Des Moines and Installation Management of Lincoln, Maine, the News Guy still has no Internet connection, and will not until Tuesday at the earliest.

(Memo to all three companies: If you’re not going to show up as scheduled, you could call a guy and tell him you’re not going to show up as scheduled. Delay is excusable. Being inconsiderate is not).

Tuesdays being the News Guys teaching days at the University of Vermont, Wednesday’s post, if there is one, will probably be a brief one. But expect a doozy for Friday.

Before leaving you all today, though, something must be said about that truly bizarre lead story in Saturday’s Burlington Free Press, the one about how more jobs might be created if Vermont, emulating Oregon and New Jersey, banned self-service gas stations. (No time to do the link from here at the Step Back café in downtown metropolitan Barton

).

Not necessarily a bad idea, not only because it would create (as the story reported) more than 5,000 jobs but also because (as the story ignored), gas station owners would have to pay those people, so they’d have to charge more for gas, so people would drive less. (Markets work).

(And maybe for the same reason other goods should be more expensive, such as processed, fatty, sugar, food, either by taxing it or at least by not subsidizing it quite so much).

But bizarre (back to the Freeps story here) because the idea comes from nowhere.

Well, nowhere except the Freeps. The story does not cite any organized (or, for that matter, disorganized) effort to do away with self-service filling stations. There is no anti-self-service-gas station movement in Vermont. No politician’s campaign pushes the issue. No petition drive urges it. No organization calls for it. Yet there it is as the lead story on the front page of the state’s biggest newspaper.

Newspapers, to be sure, should be fonts of new ideas. But these usually come on the editorial pages or in columns. The Page One lead story is news, also known as “what happened yesterday,” or at least what is going on in general these days. Devoting the lead story to this proposal suggests that the idea is something other than the brain-child of somebody at the Free Press. But that’s all it is.

So what happened? The following is just conjecture, and anybody who knows better is invited to submit actual information, but here’s one guess:

Some Freeps bigwig took a vacation in Oregon or went down to New Jersey, found out he/she couldn’t fill up the tank self-service, and began to think….hmmm! Maybe this wouldn’t be bad for Vermont; it would mean jobs.

So the bigwig comes back, sends an email to an editor and/or reporter, who realizes that the bigwig – being a bigwig – can’t be blown off, and gets to work, and as the nonsense flows downhill, a perfectly good reporter, Dan McLean, risks embarrassing himself by having to write this peculiar story to lead the paper.

Here is the news about the News Guy that was originally going to be made public last week, but got delayed because…well, you know how these things are.

As the perspicacious among you have no doubt already noticed (and the rest of you-you know who you are!-get sharp) a new icon has appeared on the Newsguy page.

Look up and over to the right, just to the right of the fedora with the press pass. It’s a link to the News Guy’s new partner, the Stowe Reporter, the weekly that covers Stowe and its Lamoille County environs.

If you live around there, give it a click.

Or if you just want to know what’s happening in and around Stowe. And maybe even if you’re not that interested in Stowe. A couple of weeks ago, for instance, the Reporter had a story that should have been (but, we will not be shocked to learn, was not) picked up by the state’s daily newspapers. It turns out that, at least in the Morrisville Office of the Department of Children and Families, the number of children in foster care has gone up 57 percent in  five years. That ought to be statewide news.

So the News Guy is pleased to be entering into a partnership with the Stowe Reporter. We’re linking to its online version, which in turn is linking to us.

Here’s what’s in it for us (Who knows what’s in it for them? The folks there will have to speak for themselves): The arrangement gives the News Guy more exposure in the Stowe area, and in fact several new subscribers from that part of the state have recently signed on. The Reporter has skills that the News Guy lacks. It knows how to promote itself, and therefore presumably its partners. It knows how to sell advertising, from which the News Guy might someday benefit.

(But not yet, and, in all likelihood, minimally. Meaning donations are still welcome, the News Guy having not attained the long-sought financial Nirvana known as breaking even. Look below the “Stowe Reporter” link, under “pages,” and find “donate.” Just click. It’s easy).

Whatever happens financially, journalistically this is an exciting and positive development for this web site, which will nonetheless strive to avoid whatever dangers might arise from becoming respectable.

Any doubts that the News Guy needs help should have been extinguished by careful readers of last Friday’s post (just below), which mentioned “the spruce and fur forests so important to northern New England,” and noted that they mightbe replaced by maple and “beach” trees.

Interesting concept, the “fur forest.” It would, presumably, be made up of trees from which one could harvest the kind of material now found only on  mink, otter, beaver, and similar beasts. Great! Then we wouldn’t have to kill these creatures for their pelts. The development of fur forests would please the animal rights crowd.

For the nonce, however, those who want these furs will have to get them from the skins of dead animals, while the rest of us continue to live among spruce and fir trees.

There are beach trees. They are trees that grow along the beach. The trees that threaten to replace the firs and spruce, though, are beech trees.

That same post began by talking about the kind of world we would all leave to our “descendents.” To the purists among us, you are descendent when you are walking down the stairs. You are your grandmother’s descendant, even when you are walking up the stairs.

The dictionary (American Heritage Second College edition) is less finicky, regarding either spelling as a correct variant of either word. So this was not, strictly speaking, an error.

But you know what? The dictionary is insufficiently finicky here. Distinctions should be maintained. From now on in this space, progeny will be known as descendants, not descendents.

Any discussion of journalistic errors in this state this day is compelled to deal with the really bad story that lead the Burlington Free Press Saturday.

This story was B-A-D Bad, with a capital B. And a capital A-D, too. It was not good. It was…well, you’d have to call it…the right word would be bad. It wasn’t good. It was a bad story.

Many of you no doubt read it. The story explained that many Vermonters were buying carbolic acid (phenol) because it was considered the most effective weapon to use against invaders from the planet Zelfugghhia, hordes of whom were expected any day now.

Oh, no, wait a minute. That wasn’t it. Sometimes we get confused.

Actually, the story was about how Vermonters, like Americans elsewhere, were buying more guns and ammunition because they think President Barack Obama plans to make it more difficult, if not impossible, for them to buy guns and ammunition.

True, and it wasn’t as though reporter Matt Ryan got anything wrong. He accurately quoted gun shop owners and he cited the statistics on background checks indicating that gun and purchases have been rising.

Fine. But here is what else belonged in the story: The plain fact that the likelihood that Obama (or anyone else) is about to outlaw guns is roughly comparable to an invasion by creatures from the planet Zelfugghhia.

In fact, the story presented a wonderful (but ignored) opportunity for the Free Press to convey a civics lesson, explaining to these gun-buyers how America works.

Obama, you see, is merely the president. He can propose laws. He can not promulgate them. Only Congress can pass laws, and it can not do so secretly. Nor can Obama propose them secretly. He can’t file legislation. Only members of Congress can do that. So Obama or someone on his staff would have to urge one of those members to introduce a bill. If he did, we would all know about it. He has not.

Right now, there  are 11 bills in Congress relating to guns. Only four (three sponsored by Democrats, one by a Republican)  tighten restrictions on gun ownership. None of those four has gotten out of committee.

That means they ain’t goin’ nowhere.

Nor has the Obama Administration endorsed any of them.

Absent this information, the story fails to be truthful. It is, then, dishonest.

Were it actually honest (as opposed to merely being not dishonest), it would also have dealt with the political efforts designed to make some people think that Obama is trying to take away their guns, and the serious (in some cases fatal) consequences of these efforts.

In what is obviously a step to keep their members riled up and contributing, organizations such as the National Rifle Association and Gun Owners of America have been – to put it mildly – exaggerating Obama’s hostility to gun ownership and owners.

The NRA screed is excessive but not totally irrational. A an Illinois State Senator, Obama was a stronger advocate of gun control than he is now. With no political considerations, he might revert to that viewpoint. But of course there are political considerations, and at any rate he never supported banning guns altogether.

The Gun Owners of America, on the other hand, are so irrational that they might be worrying about that invasion from the planet Zelfugghhia. At one point their web site charges that the Inter-American Convention Against the Illicit Manufacturing and Trafficking in Firearms, Ammunition, Explosives, and Other Related Materials, designed to prevent drug smugglers from transporting weapons across national boundaries in the hemisphere, would somehow outlaw gun clubs.

Of course the folks on the other side of this debate, the pro-gun control set,  also like to rile up its members to keep the contributions coming. So far, though, their efforts have not had any spillover effect. But the gun lobby’s excesses may  have contributed, if indirectly, to the murder in Pittsburgh in April of three police officers, allegedly by someone who feared a government plot to take away his guns,

All that should have been in the story.

For the record, because people get so intense about the gun issue and are so quick to pigeon-hole anyone who comments on it, the News Guy has always held that law-abiding citizens have a right to own guns, and that hunting is a socially and environmentally healthy pursuit, which ought to be encouraged.

He just doesn’t like bad journalism.