Nature/Environment & Ideas & Strategizing Posted by spyder, 17 Sep 2007 06:30 am
A Summer of “You’ve Got To Be Kidding Me!”
One of the metaphors for this summer has been the use of the Bell Curve for describing the inherent properties of each of the tour stops, particularly the qualities of the attendees. Now that may or may not be fair, or accurate for that matter, it was our choice to use it and we (the select group of “professionals” who ventured forth from venue to venue in the quest for the holy grail of production) tended to understand what we meant by our applications of it across the breadth and depth of the western USA.
Thus I offer this assessment of the Big Summer Classic (BSC) weekend held at Camp Zoe (near Eminence), Missouri the first weekend of August 2007:
Given the Bell Curve that represents the quality of an event in relation to the qualities of the people attending, BSC could be categorized as containing only the upper 3% and the lowest 3% of the spectrum of observable and experiential phenomena. There were stunning and amazing moments that represented the very best of what the summer had to offer; there were some of the most heinous and vile of experiences that no human being (or any other species for that matter) should ever have to be in the presence of anywhere anytime. There were brilliant and inspiring people doing good well, and there were some of the stupidest and most idiotic creatures inhabiting human skin.
And that was just a bit of it. Really.
And while I intend to get into more of that in part two, I do want to spend a moment of your reading time discoursing on one of the tragedies that became apparent over the weekend.One of the “thangs” I do at these events is to develop, organize, produce, and present various series of play-shops that cover a wide variety of activities and topics. I invite speakers, artists, performance arts instructors, crafters, poets, songwriters, activists, et al, to offer the attendees opportunities to engage in something other than being spectators of music.
At the BSC I had the chance to offer eco-hikes and cave-tours of the more than 380-acre site located along the Sinking Creek fork of the Current River in the heart of the Ozarks. For guides I contacted some local enthusiasts, a couple of whom are among the nation’s elite as spelunkers, as well as several naturalists.
We didn’t expect too many of the 6000+ folks to engage in this sort of actual physical activity, and the caving aspects were more limited to climbing and walking into cliff-sides, the deepest of which was perhaps 200’. We did expect that some people would enjoy the chance to be out of the high heat and humidity, and since so many of the important spots were along the river, there was always the opportunity to cool down.
By the Friday afternoon scheduled hike/tour, more than 150 people had shown up to participate. The numbers were staggering, in that we used only the program guide, six information kiosk signs, and a couple of announcements over the localized festival radio to let people know. By the end of the festival more than 500 folks had taken the tours and availed themselves of the experience.
So why do I call this all a tragedy? Well, in debriefing the tour guides and talking with participants I discovered that a vast majority (close to 90%) was taking the tours to become better informed about their local environment. People literally begged to be told about various species of flora, fauna, and fungi. They were clueless about the most dangerous threats that literally lurked throughout the site: rattlesnakes (a 44 inch one was killed on the road that previous Monday), copperheads (two were killed over the weekend, one nearly 30 inches long) and cottonmouths (we kept the people off the section of the site in which the swampy land was located).
Some people showed up for the 1.5 hour hikes on hundred degree (and 100% humidity) days without water (some thought bringing cans of beer would be good), and wearing flip-flops; completely oblivious to what the concept of the term “nature hike” might entail. Others, when told that they would be expected to wade across the river (not all that deep, but with some sizeable holes) acknowledged that even though they didn’t know how to swim, they thought it a grand idea to make the effort.
While this was going on, I was also producing a series of social-enviro-economic justice playshops that were very well attended. It became readily apparent that those choosing to attend were doing so because they desperately wanted specific online and textual references that covered a diverse spectrum of activism and critical information. Some came to find out about the global climate crises; some came to learn about their legal rights regarding use of psychoactive substances and what was happening in that regard throughout the country; some came to learn about ecotopias, intentional communities, and permaculture; and still more needed information on food safety, water and air quality, and healthy living. Why oh why did these young people not have this information???
The main issue for me, for those that attended the playshops, was the glaring lack of reliable and intelligent internet access most of them have in their lives. If they did grow up with it, and many did not, they were only connecting through dialup services. Now, as someone who is old enough to know better, even I get tweaked when I am not in an environment that has high-speed/broadband connectivity; I have been observed this summer demonstrating tube-speed rage, cursing the vile and nefarious dialup demons who make accessing many important and useful sites quite impotent and useless.
So I could sympathize to some degree with those who can’t possibly conceive that they could load whole pages full of multi-media windows in less than a second or two. But that wasn’t the core problem from my perspective; no, the issue resolved around the somewhat intentional restriction of information access to the rural masses in the US.
The results show that in paper after paper, state after state, and region after region, conservative syndicated columnists get more space than their progressive counterparts. As Editor & Publisher paraphrased one syndicate executive noting, “U.S. dailies run more conservative than liberal columns, but some are willing to consider liberal voices.”
If the only information sources were all selling the same messages over and over, you might come to believe: that there is no such thing as a global climate crisis, that the US is winning the war on terror and that Iraq was responsible for 9/11, that evil homosexuals are taking over the cities and destroying the country, and that only the GOP is good and can save us all.
I wish I were joking about this, but in conversation after conversation with folks in the “hinterlands” I realized that the ones to whom I spoke were desperately trying to find source material to disprove these claims. The problem didn’t vanish when the kids (yes it is a pejorative term, that I use to refer to the thousands of people I encounter in the summer who are more than half as young as I) were able to go off to universities and colleges.
The semi-rural realms of Midwestern universities were shown to be quite insular, particularly with regard to encouraging students to use the now really powerful internets to reach out and see what is really going on. Unless a student was mentored or advised to investigate some of the claims on their own, most did not “know” what to look for in terms of counter information to the AM talk radio and conservative local newspapers of their upbringings.
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Responses to “A Summer of “You’ve Got To Be Kidding Me!””
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on 17 Sep 2007 at 1:25 pm 1. Oaktown Girl said …
Well, it is at least highly encouraging that these folks are hungry for alternatives to the extremely limited and skewed information with which they are inundated. And it is also encouraging that at least they understand the information they are getting is crap on a stick.
And with all those snakes, why didn’t you just organize a Whacking Day tour like on The Simpsons?
Bart: Whacking Day is a sham. It was originally conceived in 1922 as an excuse to beat up on the Irish.
Old Irishman: ‘Tis true. I took many a lump, but ’twas all in good fun.
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Reverend Timothy Lovejoy: [Reading from his Bible] And the Lord spoke, saying, Whack ye all the snaked that slither upon the ground, and thy town shall be a beacon unto others. So you see, Lisa, even God endorses Whacking Day.
Lisa: Let me see that.
Reverend Timothy Lovejoy: [Putting his Bible away] No.
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Barney: [Barney is hitting the ground with a stick] Take that snake! Ungh! And you too! Snakes! Snakes everyhere!
Lenny: Getting ready for Whacking Day?
Barney: What’s Whacking Day? -
on 17 Sep 2007 at 1:26 pm 2. James Killus said …
In Rocket Boys by Homer Hickham, a major turning point occurs when their science teacher, through considerable effort, manages to procure for them a book on rocketry. One. Single. Book.
This was 1957.
We can bemoan the backwardness that occurs when all one has is a dialup connection to the internet, but the information that is actually available to people these days vastly exceeds what existed in the past. Nor do I really think that the attempts at mind control through media manipulation are any more intense (or successful, for that matter) than in the past. And much as I’d like to say that the stakes are higher now, brutal candor informs me that they are not. The Giant Nuclear Fireball was as great a creature in 1957 as now, probably greater, in fact.
None of this excuses those of us with knowledge from withholding it from the Great Interior, or decreases the urgency of that effort. I’m just wondering at the relative success of efforts directed at feeding hungry minds, as opposed to those who are severely malnourished. The latter may be sick with anemia, rickets, or scurvey (metaphorically speaking) but they don’t know what they are missing, and there’s the rub.
[note to the various Ministers: I’ve uploaded “Rocket Boys meet The Radioactive Boy Scout” for future use. It’s a lot shorter than death rays]
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on 17 Sep 2007 at 1:51 pm 3. spyder said …
whacking you say???? and feeding the unclean????
In their styes with all their backing they don’t care what goes on around,
In their eyes there’s something lacking,
What they need’s a damn good whacking.
Everywhere there’s lots of piggies living piggie lives,
You can see them out for dinner with their piggie wives,
Clutching forks and knives to eat their bacon.The sheer fact that i was being asked time and again for resources and site URLs seems to indicate that those asking had at least considered that there might be more information available elsewhere. As for fifty years ago, the AM radio bandwidth, as well as the newspapers, were a bit more balanced on the whole i would say. But for sheer mass induced ignorance, DROP DRILLS were supremely stupid; especially if one was “informed” about the probable results of a few splashes of megaton yields hither and thon. And certainly there is vastly more information available now, but then there is also vastly more that one has to know as well. Or not i suppose. My point was/is that i was surprised and saddened by the constant requests for what i presumed to be widespread source materials throughout the US.
And indeed one of the central topics of discourse across the summer was in regard to food and related health issues; gluten tampering, E-coli, mad-cow, etc..
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on 17 Sep 2007 at 2:04 pm 4. Seattle said …
There is nothing quite so irritating as writing several paragraphs of response to a post, typing in what you think is the security code, hitting post, then getting a message that you have to type in the correct security code and finding all that you wrote erased. Is there a way to get around that-other than copying everything you type before hitting post? Grrr, I say!
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on 17 Sep 2007 at 2:27 pm 5. Oaktown Girl said …
Seattle - no way to get around that that I know of. Moody computers and computer programs…I think you know a thing or two about that. When that happens, something you have to completely close down your browser and re-open. In which case we thank you in advance for caring enough to contribute to go through all that.
The best advice I can give, and which I highly recommend to everyone, is to start “copying” your comment frequently after it goes beyond paragraph one.
Also, if your comment seems to have “disappeared” after you posted it, do another comment asking the administrators to check the Spam Filter.
But Seattle, I think I can help. I believe you were trying to make a comment on the joys of Whacking Day, yes? And how your heart almost burst with pride when your sons whacked their first snake.
Actually, all whacking jokes aside, I quite like snakes.
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on 17 Sep 2007 at 3:50 pm 6. Seattle said …
LOL I was actually thinking that I would have been surprised to get anyone who came to a music concert in the Ozarks in early August to be wearing hiking boots. There was more, but, hell.
Another thought was that there is more than one reason why the center of the country always has this big red blotch/stripe down it around election time.
But really I’m thinking about my neice who went into the local children’s hospital with Toxic Shock Syndrom on Saturday night. She’s been in the ICU since then, but they have her stable and improving. Kids…one minute their healthy and obnoxious, next minute they’ve got tubes everywhere and and you’re hoping they get to keep all their organs functioning… Oye.
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on 17 Sep 2007 at 3:54 pm 7. James Killus said …
My recollection of the radio bandwidth of 50 years ago is that the top 40 was balanced with easy listening music, and the sole commentary that every occurred was Paul Harvey and radio ministers.
As for newspapers, well, it’s certainly true that the ones in Tennessee weren’t for Goldwater.
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on 17 Sep 2007 at 4:17 pm 8. Oaktown Girl said …
Seattle - best wishes for the speedy recovery of your niece.
Here in the Bay Area, James, it wasn’t that bad back in the day. Stations were locally owned, and most had quality news departments, esp. the actual news stations (as opposed to the music stations). But even most of the music stations had their own news departments, so if anything important was happening locally (fire, major traffic accident, weather/flood warnings, etc) you actually would hear about it.
The editorials were usually given by the station owners, with the opportunity (frequently accepted) for rebuttals by anyone in the community. That, by the way, was what “equal time” meant.
A few months ago I was telling my intern about the days of locally owned music stations. Her jaw dropped as if I told her I’d just seen pigs flying out of the CEO’s ass.
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on 17 Sep 2007 at 4:49 pm 9. James Killus said …
Oaktown Girl, it’s not that bad here in the Bay Area now. But the stations you got on a ride through the mid-west in the late 1950s were about as various as a truckload of bowling balls.
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on 17 Sep 2007 at 5:37 pm 10. christian h. said …
Spyder, thanks for the post - even if a Midwesterner like me must admit at being somewhat miffed. We’re not only flyover country here, you know!
On substance, though, you have a point (I do doubt, however, that it’s better on the coasts outside the big cities). Once you leave Chicago, local media quickly fall into conformity. The college towns are somewhat different - they usually have some independent station carrying Pacifica (for example) in addition to an NPR affiliate - but outside that, it’s bad music beamed in by Clearchannel from god knows where, Christian radio, and right-wing talk.
A couple weeks ago, I went to a meeting of Campus Antiwar Network on our campus here in Chicago. What was encouraging was the fairly large attendance (about 25-30 people, I’d say). But I also made the experience of many there asking “where do we find alternative information”? These students are perfectly capable of googling the answers to my homework questions; yet they can’t find ZNet. Or, to be fair, maybe they can but are sceptical on what to believe (a problem with the web).
Seattle, the first thing to try is to hit the back button of your browser. It should remember your text.
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on 17 Sep 2007 at 7:22 pm 11. Oaktown Girl said …
I’ve got to say I’m surprised about how surprised you were, spyder. A lot of people out there know they’re being fed bullshit, but don’t know where to go get to the stuff that isn’t bullshit, nor even the right kinds of questions to ask about how to find it, or how to evaluate it once they do find it. I think those of us who have spent a lifetime in the “alternative” realms take way too much for granted about how we got to where we are.
Like christian said, people keep hearing that they can’t trust anything they read on “the ‘net”, so just randomly searching around doesn’t strike a lot of folks as being a valuable thing to do. And they’d be correct, unless they know at least the most basic questions to ask, including the difference between corporate and non-corporate media in general.
See, all of this which seems so obvious to us is utterly new territory for most people, even college people. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: that’s why media literacy is so important, people!
I know, I know. You’d think college students would apply their superior analytical skillz to the process, but it just doesn’t work that way very often. Especially these days, when analytical skills are de-emphasized in the schools in favor of teaching to “the test”. Besides, in Bush’s Ameruka, too much thinking and analysis only emboldens our enemies.
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on 17 Sep 2007 at 8:24 pm 12. christian h. said …
Exactly, Oaktown Girl. We just have to keep working on it, especially those of us who have a captive audience (yeah, I’m all for “Indoctrination U” - take that, Horowitz).
If anything good comes out of this wretched war, it’s going to be that it gets more people to wonder about the bullshit they are being fed. We’d do well not to squander the opportunity, if we want to affect change in the future. -
on 17 Sep 2007 at 9:17 pm 13. JP Stormcrow said …
I made a small faux pas at work last week when I referred to a guy who had come in the day before and clearly “spun” us as FirstName “Petraeus” LastName while not in completely “safe” company. I just assumed that even if you were “for” the war any thinking person would see that crap for what it was. But no, I was informed that I should leave “my man” General Petraeus “out of it” and that a “certain negativity” was detected in my tone (this was with a peer at least). They then muttered something about talking to me about MoveOn. I think that is what really is the most galling, the fake outrage and sanctimony (well other than the people dying and lives wrecked …) - in this case right out of Neil Cavuto and Britt Hume’s mouths.
I do think the broadband/wireless access/cell infrastructure (or lack thereof) are apt analogues to the Interstate and other basic infrastructure investments this country was once willing to make. (or dikes and levees.) We could use the informational equivalent of the Rural Electrification Act
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on 17 Sep 2007 at 9:42 pm 14. spyder said …
My recollection of the radio bandwidth of 50 years ago is that the top 40 was balanced with easy listening music, and the sole commentary that every occurred was Paul Harvey and radio ministers.
Well you clearly had different parents than me, James. We listened to all manner of symphony, theater, opera, sports, and the endless CBS ponderings of Murrow et al, and commentary of others on ABC and NBC. Certainly by the later 50’s much of that had switched over to TV, including all the soap operas and game shows, leaving radio to deal with top 40 and Reverend Ike. Yes there was Paul Harvey, but then there still is Paul Harvey. There are also vastly more religious radio stations now than in the past. There were also a plethora of local papers that have now long disappeared or been converted over to the classified rags and shoppers. Little towns had printing presses that covered local news and human interest and such and up until the mid-50’s they were somewhat balanced in coverage. Post the HUAC hearings and so forth, too many people were worrying about a commie behind every printed word and phone call.
My surprise was from the passion of those begging for resources. That degree of intensity was a little scary, and i am sure that is rooted in my usual preaching to choirs, both literal and figurative, on the left/West coast who are informed and invested in doing something about all the messes. I mean here in Spokane this week is the Northwest Greenfest (http://www.northwestgreenfest.com/), utilizing all of the major venues in town for a week of celebration and information dissemination, including a concerted focus on hemp and medical marijuana. Not exactly known as a liberal town, but it is also one that is into being informed.
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on 17 Sep 2007 at 10:03 pm 15. spyder said …
I think that is what really is the most galling, the fake outrage and sanctimony based on self-induced ignorance too. They don’t want to know about it, just want to be able to use the lines handed them by their favorite celebrity talking heads. The Emmy’s were interesting in part last night because of the general tenor of the political climate that was clearly evident. In the past, liberal/left rhetoric was met with majority approval and some very vocal challenges. Last night there was no evidence of any conservative investment in the room. A massive standing ovation for Gore, another for Sally Fields statement, yet another for Helen Mirren’s comment about the good and bad of this nation, and the free flow of banter between Colbert and Stewart. It was as if Fox was bending over sideways to show their own “balance” while still hiding behind fake censorship when the serious cards were dealt. That is a change in the mass media, and not one that came easily i am sure.
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on 18 Sep 2007 at 10:15 am 16. James Killus said …
spyder, I think it’s more a matter of what part of the country you grew up in. There was a classical station in Nashville (FM only, however), but on any drive through the Midwest, you got a nice balance of Country Western and Top 40, with the occassional radio evangelist tossed in. That was it.
And much of the country was lucky if they got two out of three of the broadcast TV networks. In a lot of places I visited, you had a choice of one.
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on 18 Sep 2007 at 10:58 am 17. Seattle said …
I recall my father being horrified when one of our baby sitters introduced us to top 40 radio. Before that it was classical or folk on the turntable all the way…and I never hear talk radio in any form until I was an adult. Instead it was the Merv Griffin show-which was about as apolitical as showbiz can get, as I recall. But I wasn’t paying too much attention at that age.
And no, Christian, the back button doesn’t take me back to my text. : (
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on 18 Sep 2007 at 11:48 am 18. Oaktown Girl said …
I never hear(d) talk radio in any form until I was an adult.
Talk radio didn’t really exist as such until you were an adult, Seattle. It’s a relatively new phenomenon, and people either don’t know that, or forget that, because of how pervasive it is today.
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on 18 Sep 2007 at 2:09 pm 19. spyder said …
I will agree that most of the open landscape of the great west during the late 40’s and 50’s had limited access to a plethora of radio, but they all got Wolfman Jack for the most part, and the ubiquitous Casey Kasem, first in the East and then across the west.
And yes, i grew up in the saturated LA market, starting to watch TV in 1952 or so, with numerous choices of channels broadcasting across the spectrum with national broadcasts filled in with local programming, some of which were quite good. I would also think that LA still has to some degree a greater diversity of media than most regions, but the dominant forums are still conservative AM talk radio, the conservative biased LA Times, and the same five corporate multi-channel television networks. It is substantially worse in the hinterlands in terms of imbalance. I mentioned the MediaMatters report on newspaper columns above. I suggest we review the ThinkProgress report on Talk-Radio as well: http://thinkprogress.org/2007/06/20/radio-report/
The Center for American Progress and Free Press today released the first-of-its-kind statistical analysis of the political make-up of talk radio in the United States. It confirms that talk radio, one of the most widely used media formats in America, is dominated almost exclusively by conservatives.
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on 18 Sep 2007 at 3:31 pm 20. James Killus said …
I’ll also observe that radio and television were more representative of the actual views of the country in the 50s (including the downside; McCarthyism was a grass roots phenomenon), while today it feels (and almost certainly is) more of an indoctrination and thought control landscape.
The sense of “we’re being lied to” took hold in the 1960s. Before that, it was a downright shock to the nation when Eisenhower was caught in a public lie during the Powers/U2 incident. The vast majority of the public actually believed that the President would tell the truth as a matter of course. Nowadays the truth lies murdered in a ditch somewhere; the idea of truth telling even as a workable strategy is seen as hopelessly naive.
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on 18 Sep 2007 at 10:59 pm 21. Zeus said …
I think one of the important but underdiscussed aspects of your observations is that we generally don’t seem to know how to actually do or investigate anything. We’re way out of touch. We have come to think of life purely in terms of spectatorship and absorption of “scenes” of living, rather than living life itself. Living life means knowing how to access and analyze information, knowing how to identify and avoid snakes, knowing what might be required on a nature hike (water, decent footwear).
Are we all idiots? What’s going on here? I think, not unlike our dear GW, that much of this country is functionally retarded, not because they are inherently stupid, but because they have never had to (nor been taught to) use what brains and heart and sould they do have. They’ve just done what they are told, a telling which has gotten progressively cruder and dumbed down. We have become so cooked by our spectator culture into thinking we have either three lives (like the video games) or that all suffering and work is to be experienced or done by someone else. I’ll take that suffering over this weird “Matrix” style existence any day.
When people ask me if I’m a pessimist in predicting this cluelessness comes to bad end, I say, “No, I’m an optimist. That’s got to happen for us to wake up, get a clue, work again (really work, not draw fake dollars from our home equity ATM maching), and actually live life.” Some people think life would be so great if it were like the movies. So we get Reagan. I’m not one of those people. I’ve already learned a thing or two about snakes, even as I realize I may be bitten, even after being aware. I’d rather live life in the raw and passionate then the processed and packaged. It seems like others won’t agree until the package holds in the anaerobic bacteria, and they get real sick. In the meantime, let’s do as Spyder, and develop opportunities to get out into life. Ignorance is an okay starting point, as long as you’re not wedded to it.
Citizen Zeus
