Category: Uncategorized

It was right around noon on Tuesday, Aug. 9. We had just reached Clarendon Lookout after an exhausting vertical scramble through the heat and humidity. Sweat was pouring off me; my heart was pounding. And there, perched on the rock before me, was a young couple who had arrived shortly before us, looking like they had just stepped out of an L.L. Bean catalogue.

She was chatting away on a cellphone. After she hung up, she apologized and introduced herself and her husband as “Bug and Ms. Priss.” Way back last spring, they had left their home in Memphis in order to hike the entire length of the Appalachian Trail, from Georgia to Maine, some 2,000 miles. As you can see from this, “thru-hikers,” as they are called, have become something akin to marathoners – that is, it’s a Herculean feat, but a lot more people do it than used to be the case. More than 500 a year, in fact. (The thru-hiking experience was documented to hilarious effect several years ago in Bill Bryson’s excellent book “A Walk in the Woods.”)

Unlike most of the thru-hikers we met, Bug and Ms. Priss seemed almost normal. After three and a half days on the trail, our band of three adults and four boys looked pretty bedraggled, but Bug and Priss seemed as though they had done little more than stroll up a hill for a picnic. It turned out that – other than being in far better physical shape than we were – they had stopped by a relative’s house within the past day or so and had gotten cleaned up. Priss told me that they hoped to reach the end of the trail, at Mt. Katahdin in Maine, by mid-September or so, and then relocate to the Carolinas.

Before they moved on, they urged us to look up their trail journal online. If I’d had the presence of mind, I’d have asked them a few questions about how – and why – they would do such a thing. I’d have taken their picture, too. But I did manage to swipe a photo from their site, which I’m sure they won’t mind. I e-mailed them some questions a few days ago, but they haven’t responded; in fact, as you’ll see, they haven’t updated their journal for a bit.

You will see that Bug and Priss are, in fact, Bryan and Bethany Love. Their journal notes that they’re thru-hiking this year to mark their fourth wedding anniversary. Bryan’s first entry, from last August, begins with this:

BRYAN: Currently, I’m a 31 year old pharmacist at a very large hospital in Memphis. I started in my current position fresh from my residency with the intention of only staying a few years, then moving back to SC. Seven years later and I’m still in Memphis. Before continuing on with my professional career, I want to take some time off. What better way to take some time off than to take a little “walk in the woods.” I know most of my colleagues & friends couldn’t understand my desires to spend 4-6 months walking to Maine. Luckily for me, my wife understands completely and is looking forward to the trek also.

You’ll also find photos and even some notes on their gear.

What I find fascinating about this is the need to take part in media of some form even when going through such an elemental, off-the-beaten-track experience as thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail. Of technological necessity, this is obviously a new development. I’ve been backpacking since 1968, and the first time I ever brought a cellphone into the mountains was in 2001. Now it’s common, and you see people chatting away wherever there’s a cell signal.

Since Bug and Priss didn’t respond to my e-mail, I can’t tell you exactly how they’re able to blog from the AT. But their e-mail address suggests that they’re using a tiny Pocketmail computer, which taps into the cellular network. Photos, I imagine, are taken on their cellphone. And thus are the Loves able to engage in some DIY media even while hiking from Georgia to Maine.

Our goal, on the other hand, was simply to hike from Bromley Mountain to Mt. Killington in five days – a 50-mile backpacking trip in southern Vermont encompassing the final stretch of the Appalachian Trail in Vermont before it turns east toward New Hampshire, with Vermont’s own Long Trail continuing north to the Canadian border.

On Saturday, Aug. 6, I headed up with three other adults and four 14-year-old boys – all of us from my son’s Boy Scout troop. The trip had been a year in the planning, and for me, at least, it was pure nostalgia: I had gone on two such trips when I was in scouts, and a third as a 21-year-old helping out my old troop. Of course, at 49, I knew the hiking was likely to be more difficult this time around.

Day One was warm but not particularly humid. That, combined with the fact that we were fresh, made for a relatively easy day’s hike, even though it was supposed to be our toughest day on the trail. We spent our first night at the Griffith Lake Tenting Area and our second – following a very easy day of hiking – at Little Rock Pond, a beautiful, deep lake in which some members of our party went swimming. (Not me, though I wished I’d brought swimming trunks.) Little Rock Pond was presided over by Rick, a student at Unity College in Maine who’s majoring in adventure education.

By Day Three, Monday, the weather had turned humid again. And after a fairly easy morning, we had a brutal hike in the afternoon, staggering up an unheralded peak called Bear Mountain. At this point, our backpacks were weighing us down, and there wasn’t much we could do about it: a good deal of the weight was water, and it would have been dangerous for us to carry any less than the two to three liters we were each lugging.

It was also on Day Three that we met “Doc,” another thru-hiker and by far the most colorful character we encountered. A Floridian by way of Woonsocket, R.I., Doc was hiking the entire AT for the second summer in a row. It was unclear what he did for a living, though he mentioned something about working in a veterinary hospital. Doc was middle-aged or older, and he smoked a lot of cigarettes – not exactly conducive to effective hiking. In fact he tended to keep pace with us, whereas most of the other hikers blew past us with depressing vigor. Talkative, profane and filled with wild stories, he told us about growing up amid the gang wars of New Haven and New York City, and of hiking over Mt. Washington at night, bombed on vodka. He was an interesting and engaging guy, although a little Doc tended to go a long way.

We camped for the third night at the Minerva Hinchey Shelter, the only night I decided to stay inside rather than set up my tent. (The shelters along this stretch of the AT are three-sided structures with a roof, but open in the front.) Around 9:30 p.m., someone whom I took to be a thru-hiker made his way into camp and parked his malodorous head about six inches from my nose. The next night, at the Governor Clement Shelter, I was back in my tent.

By far our most difficult stretch was from 3 p.m. on Monday, when we started up Bear Mountain, until 1 p.m. on Tuesday, when we reached the peak of Beacon Hill, a bit beyond Clarendon Lookout. (Beacon Hill refers not to Boston, but to the fact that there’s an airplane beacon on the summit.) These were three extremely difficult uphills, all the harder because they are minor summits that don’t get much attention. In other words, it’s a lot easier to bust your hump when you know ahead of time that you have a tough hike ahead of you.

As we did on Wednesday, Aug. 10, our last day on the trail. That’s when we climbed Mt. Killington, at 4,235 feet the second-highest peak in Vermont. The AT actually skirts around the summit, but we scrambled to the top along a steep, rocky side trail. We had several hours of hiking in front of us, but it was all downhill from Killington. The feeling of accomplishment was palpable.

My apologies for not posting any photos of our hiking party. The four boys, obviously, are all minors, and I don’t have permission to post their pictures. But it was quite a feat for them and an even greater feat for the adults. Only one of us (not me!) was in good physical shape, and none of us enjoys the resilience of youth at this point in our lives.

What I keep thinking about, though, is how much the experience has changed over the past 30 years. It used to be that when you took part in a backpacking trip, you were cutting yourself off from the world – there simply wasn’t any way you would hear about anything, from national catastrophe to personal tragedy, until you emerged from the woods. Now, it’s a given that you’re going to stay in touch.

Maybe not to the same degree as Bug and Miss Priss. But, in fact, all of us were calling our families, and one of the adults even left in mid-trip after he learned that his wife was sick. I checked my voice mail and returned a work-related call. It’s a wired nation, and that applies to the woods and mountains just as much as it does to cities and towns. Is it better? I’m not sure. But it’s different.

There isn’t one, according to a new study that gets an airing in today’s New York Times.

National Education Association president Reg Weaver has a letter in today’s Boston Globe that is disingenuous at best. Following the contretemps over the op-ed published in the Globe earlier this week criticizing the NEA’s campaign against Wal-Mart – an op-ed that turned out to have been indirectly subsidized by Wal-Mart (click here and here) – Weaver writes:

WEAVER: Michael Reitz is not the first to characterize the National Education Association as supporting a boycott of Wal-Mart (“Why target Wal-Mart?” op ed, Aug 16). This is just not true. The NEA, which represents 2.7 million educators, voted to support the “Wake Up Wal-Mart” campaign to educate its members about the retailing giant’s antiworker practices and how its profits are used for anti-public education activities. The effort is about educating, not boycotting: Consumers are simply reminded that when they shop, they have choices about where to spend their money.

Not a boycott? Here is some information on the anti-Wal-Mart campaign that I found on the NEA’s website. Yes, the wording is circumspect, and supports Weaver’s claim that the campaign is not a boycott. Except that the very first sentence begins, “The NEA Executive Committee approved the Association’s participation in ‘Wake-Up Wal-Mart,’ a major national effort organized by the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW) …” And the NEA provides a link to the “Wake-Up Wal-Mart” website.

Follow the link, and the very first thing you will find is a graphic that reads, “Send Wal-Mart ‘Back to School’ this summer. Pledge to buy your school supplies somewhere else.”

Drill down a little more deeply, and you can sign an online pledge. It begins: “Because Wal-Mart is failing America, I … pledge to send Wal-Mart ‘Back to School’ this summer by buying my ‘Back to School’ supplies somewhere other than Wal-Mart.”

The American Heritage Dictionary defines “boycott” as follows: “To abstain from or act together in abstaining from using, buying, or dealing with as an expression of protest or disfavor or as a means of coercion.”

By any reasonable definition, the NEA, by taking part in a campaign that asks people not to buy school supplies at Wal-Mart, is participating in a boycott. For NEA president Weaver to deny that is to deny reality.

In light of yesterday’s Boston Globe screw-up, you should read this excellent article (PDF) by Morton Mintz from the current issue of Nieman Reports. Titled “Why Won’t Journalists Follow the Money?”, the article laments media laxity when it comes to identifying industry-funded special-interest groups as – well, as industry-funded special-interest groups.

You’ll note that the Globe’s Beth Daley gets a silver star.

In other developments, the online version of Michael Reitz’s column now begins with this:

Clarification: A column that appeared yesterday by Michael Reitz of the Evergreen Freedom Foundation that criticized the National Education Association’s boycott of Wal-Mart should have noted that the foundation has received grants from the Walton Family Foundation. Sam Walton founded Wal-Mart.

And the Globe today runs a letter (scroll down a bit) critical of Reitz’s column that was written by North Andover resident Bill Callahan, who is described as “a high school teacher and a member of the Brookline Educators’ Union, an affiliate of the National Education Association.”

Ah, full disclosure – it’s a beautiful thing.

I’m starting to get hit with spam in the “comments” sections. No, I’m not talking about nasty posts – I mean, get-rich-quick crap is getting uploaded to this site. I remove it when I find it, but I don’t want to spend all my time doing that. Unfortunately, I may have to require people to register with Blogger.com before they can comment. Sorry about that.

The Boston Globe op-ed page today carries a column that criticizes the National Education Association’s endorsement of a union campaign to boycott Wal-Mart. The piece was written by Michael Reitz, whom the Globe identifies as “the director of the Labor Policy Center for the Evergreen Freedom Foundation, a nonpartisan, public policy research organization based in Olympia, Wash.”

Among other things, Reitz charges, “The NEA even criticizes the Walton family, the founders of Wal-Mart, for contributing to ‘anti-public education efforts like private school voucher initiatives and anti-public educations PACs.'”

Unfortunately, you will not be surprised to learn that the Globe – and not for the first time – has failed to perform due diligence with respect to an outside op-ed contributor. In five minutes of Googling, I was able to learn that the Evergreen Freedom Foundation (EFF) is anything but “a nonpartisan, public policy research organization.” And it turns out to be no surprise that the foundation is particularly exercised about Wal-Mart.

Here is a 2002 article posted on the website Media Transparency, which tracks “the money behind conservative media.” Although I wish the data were a little more up to date, I think it’s sufficient to prove EFF’s hyperpartisan nature. Here are three major donors to the EFF that should help to establish Reitz’s bona fides:

1. The Walton Family Foundation, which is the charitable arm of – yes – the Wal-Mart fortune left behind by the late founder, Sam Walton. According to Media Transparency, the foundation gave Evergreen $300,000 between 1998 and 2000, and has also given millions to other groups that support EFF’s conservative education agenda, such as tuition vouchers. No wonder Reitz expressed such shock and horror that the NEA “even criticizes the Walton family.”

2. The Sarah Scaife Foundation, controlled by the notorious right-wing financier Richard Mellon Scaife. The Scaife Foundation, Media Transparency discovered, gave Evergreen $150,000 from 1998 to 2000.

3. Boston business figure William Edgerly. In light of Tom Palmer’s eye-opening piece about the Pioneer Institute’s woes – published in the Globe Ideas section this past Sunday – the following excerpt from Media Transparency’s report is pretty interesting:

MEDIA TRANSPARENCY: Foundation for Partnerships Trust, funded and run by William Edgerly, CEO emeritus of State Street Bank and Trust of Boston. The foundation gave Evergreen a total of $70,000 in 1998 and 1999; at the time of the grant, Edgerly was chairman of Advantage Schools, a for-profit school operator run by former Pioneer Institute executive director Steve Wilson that clashed with the Massachusetts Education Association over operation of schools in the state. Edgerly is on the board of the Pioneer Institute, a Massachusetts member of the State Policy Network.

Weitz’s success in placing his anti-NEA screed in the Globe was something of a coup for Evergreen: it currently leads the “What’s New” page on the organization’s website. And so the Globe has provided Evergreen with some undeserved credibility.

From time to time, the Globe’s policy of accepting paid advocacy ads for the op-ed page comes under fire, even though such distinguished papers as its corporate big brother, the New York Times, do the same thing. On July 21, for instance, the Boston Herald tweaked the Globe for its efforts to market that valuable real estate.

But at least with an ad, you know what you’re getting. Running Reitz’s Evergreen piece was far more insidious, because the reader was given no warning about the agenda behind the op-ed. Needless to say, full disclosure should have been provided. But I suspect that the Globe editors would rather have killed the piece than admit it was funded with money from the likes of Wal-Mart and Scaife.

The Boston Globe Magazine today publishes a letter that takes issue with Charlie Pierce’s characterization of Howard Dean’s infamous scream. The letter-writer, Carol S. Williams, of Clarendon Hills, Illinois, complains that Pierce falsely described the scream as “real.” She continues:

WILLIAMS: A newsroom tape editor invented The Scream – clip, crop, snip to remove the context of his rally until he looked like a madman – and then it was broadcast over multiple days, hundreds of times. No candidate could survive that, and it worked as planned. So the media, not the voters, selected the Democratic nominee. And here you are perpetuating this myth.

Williams’s view is common among Dean supporters, many of whom continue to believe that Dean’s presidential campaign was done in by the media. But is she right?

First, let’s consider what Pierce actually wrote. In his Dean profile of July 24, Pierce had this to say:

PIERCE: For someone who had driven a lonely road with him from Iowa City to Ottumwa, it was like watching a creation myth in real time. A presidential contest, working through its own curious internal dynamics, was designing a Howard Dean of its very own, one that was beyond the control of the actual Howard Dean. The Scream wasn’t even instantly iconic. Accounts in the next day’s newspapers – including the Globe and The Washington Post – described Dean’s most famous sound bite as merely a candidate trying put a brave face on a surprisingly dismal showing, and fighting to make himself heard over a raucous crowd.

It took a couple of days of relentless repetition for Dean to become defined by the moment. Now, The Scream stands with Edmund Muskie’s “melting snowflakes” in 1972 and George Romney’s 1968 “brainwashing” on the subject of Vietnam in the annals of campaign self-destruction. Suddenly, Howard Dean’s mix of issues was no longer “eclectic.” It was eccentric and risky. His brutal candor was no longer “appealing.” It was mean. He wasn’t energized. He was unhinged. A doppelganger Howard Dean stalked the actual one for the rest of the campaign.

Judging from this, I’d say Pierce’s assessment is identical to Williams’s. It’s more likely that Williams was reacting to the beginning of the subhead – “With one spontaneous scream, Howard Dean went from Democratic front-runner to political laughingstock” – which Pierce, of course, almost certainly didn’t write.

Now to the matter of whether Dean’s scream really was a media creation that destroyed his candidacy. All I can tell you is that Mrs. Media Nation and I were watching coverage of the Iowa caucuses that night, and saw Dean deliver his march-through-the-states rant in real time. And I can report that we both had the same reaction: Oh, my. He’d just had his rear end handed to him, finishing third in a state that he had allegedly led for months. John Kerry and John Edwards were surging, with the battle to take place on Kerry’s turf, in New Hampshire, the following week. And Dean was bellowing like a nutcase in front of a national television audience.

Did the media make too much of the scream over the following week? Of course, and that overcoverage may well have hastened Kerry’s rise and Dean’s collapse in New Hampshire. But on that night in Iowa, Dean came across as a sore and angry loser. That wasn’t a myth. That was reality.

The New York Times reports that Google is being forced to downsize its plans for digitizing as many books as it can get its hands on because of copyright concerns – even though the service would offer no more than a snippet of text from works whose copyrights were still in effect.

Sadly, former Colorado congresswoman Pat Schroeder plays the well-compensated lobbyist-Luddite.

Former Democratic political consultant Michael Goldman, co-host of the Bloomberg Radio program “Simply Put” (WBBR Radio in New York, AM 1130; the rebroadcast can be heard locally from 8 to 10 p.m.), passes along two striking poll results from Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire.

The first shows John McCain with a huge lead among New Hampshire Republicans some two and a half years before that state’s first-in-the-nation primary. No surprise there: New Hampshire gave McCain a huge win over George W. Bush in 2000, demonstrating that the Granite State’s libertarian-flavored GOP is seriously out of step with the national Republican Party. (Too bad.)

More striking, though, is the second poll, of likely voters in the 2008 Massachusetts Republican primary. At the moment, McCain has a lead of 46 percent to 22 percent over our home-state governor, Mitt Romney.

What does this mean? Not much this far in advance. But in Massachusetts, at least, Romney’s supporters can’t seriously argue that McCain has higher name recognition than their man does. It’s clear that Romney still hasn’t made enough of an impression on his adopted state to garner much support, even among his fellow Republicans.

I’m hardly the first person of my generation (I’m 49) to make the observation that I almost never watch the three major networks’ nightly newscasts. Lifestyles have changed dramatically over the past 20 to 30 years. It’s far more convenient to tune in National Public Radio while I’m commuting than to sit down and try to watch a 6:30 p.m. headline service. If there’s big news, I’ll watch CNN’s “NewsNight with Aaron Brown” at 10 p.m.

Still, Peter Jennings’s death matters, just as Tom Brokaw’s retirement mattered and – yes – just as Dan Rather’s “did he jump or was he pushed?” departure mattered. My sightings of all three tended to take place during big news events, election nights and the like. Jennings and Brokaw were very good at what they did, and I’d give Jennings the edge for a somewhat more intelligent approach. Even Rather, an unsettling presence, stood for real news values. Yet the Jennings/Brokaw/Rather troika embodied not the golden age of television news but its decline.

Network news audiences are half the size they used to be. Unlike the true giants of an earlier era, like Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, the Big Three of recent decades represented an early attempt by network news executives to put telegenic faces in front of the camera. Jennings flopped as a twentysomething, pretty-boy anchor, then turned himself into a real journalist. Brokaw was a veteran of “Today,” hardly a paradigm of hard-news excellence. Rather, though hardly unskilled, was best at calling attention to himself, as when he memorably snarked at Richard Nixon during a televised news conference.

What you did sense with all three of them, though, was that they had standards, and that, ultimately, they would not be a part of the more perfidious schemes their profit-obsessed corporate bosses might come up with. (Not to be overly nostalgic; they all stood by while foreign coverage was gutted, didn’t they?) Brian Williams and whoever ultimately replaces Jennings and Rather (Charlie Gibson seems to be the early favorite for Jennings’s chair) may become equally skilled journalists. But will they have the clout to resist further news cutbacks?

With NBC News in the best position of the post-troika era, having made an astoundingly smooth transition to Williams, it will be interesting to see whether the other two networks decide to move away from the nightly news model and come up with other ways to appeal to a shrinking audience. Obviously Jennings will be missed; and he’ll be missed even more if Disney decides this is the perfect opportunity to lighten up.