Mondoweiss

The Most Important Obama Question (What Does His Movement Want?)

I'm headed into the woods. Annual Adirondacks trip for a few days. But here's my question. Obama is leading a popular movement. This is the first real progressive political movement of my lifetime, excepting the McCarthy spasm when I was a kid (and yes, followed by the cultural revolution...). I was angered by Hillary's "celestial... everything will be right in the world" mockery in her yellowjacketed speech the other day. She is just like Malcolm Hoenlein saying, Why change anything, that will lead to mischief. Obviously Obama's people want change.

Still haven't gotten to my question. What do these people want to change? Forget about Obama. He's just a guy we can believe in, for various reasons. Seems alright to me. As he says, it's not about him. And what does this progressive movement want? Journalists should be interviewing these people. I'll try to interview some of 'em in the woods.

(And yes, I think many share my hobbyhorse. I was at two dinner parties recently where the mood of the table was impatient re Palestinian freedom. And what does it mean that two things Obama has had to renounce publicly--the Walt/Mearsheimer ad on his website, and Zbig Brzezinski's endorsement of the book--involve the same hot-button issue?)

2 Comments on '60'

I'm a devoted "60 Minutes" watcher and had two strong impressions from the last two weeks.

1, Last week LaDainian Tomlinson, the Chargers' incredible running back, said that he spends the day before a game in fear of injury. Playing a game of football is like being in a car wreck, he said, and he worries whether that day is going to bring a season- or career-ending injury. Let alone concussions. The Times' Alan Schwartz has done passionate, important reporting on this issue. I hope the comments on "60," by one of the league's top performers, mean that things might change... 2, Tonight in a report from New Guinea on rarely-seen bird species, Robert Simon, who spent 10 days in the bush, kept cooing over the fact that no one had caught these scenes on film before. With the suggestion that no one had seen these birds doing their mating dances before. I think this is somewhat racist. 3 years ago I was in New Guinea and on a trek through the mountains, my guides brought me to a village for a Tolai fire dance. The thing went on all night long, men jumping in and out of the fire. Well, they were all wearing amazing, outlandish bird costumes. Strange wire-and-paper headdresses and tail feathers. Birds are revered in New Guinea, and the people who live there have been observing them for eons. 

Bill Clinton's Environmental Misdemeanor

In its piece on candidates wooing the Des Moines Register for its editorial endorsement, how pleasing to see that the Times led off with a description of Bill Clinton's visit, stating: "as his sport utility vehicle idled outside, former President Bill Clinton held forth on a sofa in the publisher’s suite." Not just an s.u.v., but an s.u.v. left running. Kudos to Jeff Zeleny for reporting piggish behavior.

Why Does a Hooked Fish Vomit?

I went fishing for the first time in a year or two yesterday, on Cape Cod. There's a lot of pleasure in it: the getting up early, the hanging with a guy you like for a few hours, the risk (of navigating through fog), the water, the geography. And yes, the blood pursuit, which has always attracted me. That said, I wonder if I'm not getting too sensitive for fishing, or if the world hasn't changed to make it seem too barbaric.

I caught a few fish and was struck by how incredibly beautiful the fish are in the water and how ghastly the process is of removing them from their element. They're only a couple of pounds, and yet against overwhelming odds, they fight you to their utmost, and hold their own for a minute or so. Then you see the white curving flash of their scales, their twisted agonized bodies, close to the boat. One of them managed to break the line at this point, and more power to him. A few others I got on the boat. Even the ones we threw back left blood on the deck, and then too, at that last moment, in the water or being lifted in, they vomited. Spewed their last meal of minnows on to your hands or into the net, on to the deck. Some instinct, my brother-in-law said.

I thought the vomiting was resignation. That they'd fought for the last few minutes and somehow always thought they were going to win. And then they at last realized they weren't going to win, and used their most extreme measure, of disgorging everything they'd eaten. It reminded me of the moments at the end of the bullfight when the bull at last realizes it's going to die. It's been denying this the whole time, and thinking it's going to win. It's a proud, amazing creature in that time, then it's bested and it slumps and loses its belief in itself. In the life of the bullfight, that's a horrifying, humiliating interval, after the bull's spirit is broken. The actual murder of the bull is anticlimactic. Or maybe in the fish's case it is just completely terrified.

Anyway, I went home disturbed. I ate my fish--that of course was our rationale--and brought up my discomfort at dinner. A group of people began arguing about what the fish does or doesn't feel, a conversation I wanted no part of. A niece of mine, who doesn't fish but eats them, said that her response to the brutality of the process is to name the fish. Sort of Native American.

When I said that the world may be changing, I mean that we are evolving, growing more sensitive to the destruction of animals. Witness the Michael Vick case. Twenty years ago I doubt there would have been an outcry. When we were on the water yesterday, we saw a bunch of Vietnamese guys in a boat with too many rods. And my brother-in-law said that the Vietnamese are often accused of poaching, taking undersized stripers. So add the deplenishment of the seas, and of course the wanton expenditure of cheap oil,  to the cruelty.

Black Snake Mimics Rattler to Scare Off the Nosy

Yesterday I was hiking through the woods moving a little too fast and almost stepped on a black snake, about 5 feet long, traveling on its own through the woods in the opposite direction. I'm fascinated by snakes and stopped to look at it. It didn't appreciate it. It coiled itself as rapidly as you flex your arm, balancing its head in the air over its body. When I bent near it, it began rattling the tip of its tail, rapidly, against the leaves, so that it made a buzzing. Did it twice. As if to say, I'm poisonous. This is the second time I've seen a black snake do that. As a warning, I find it to be plenty effective.

Rattlesnake

I live in the Hudson Highlands and over ten years have seen three live rattlesnakes in my walks. Today was my most dramatic sighting.

I was bushwacking up a sharp incline at about 800 feet, through leaves and branches and loose rock, when one of my dogs stopped ahead of me and I heard a noise like air escaping a tire after someone had icepicked it. For a moment I wondered if the dog had opened some sort of gassy seam in the earth and then I thought, it's a rattler.

I climbed a lot closer and there it was, looped in a lazy coil, half on leaves and half on rock, as though interrupted in its progress down the hill, bright green with brown diamonds, its tail held high in the air and quivering like a lacquered green-brown Chinatown novelty, making that buzzing gassy sound. It didn't pause an instant, but kept at it for the next five or six minutes as I climbed the hill above and out of earshot. It was fat, and its green look seemed related to the sudden spring we're experiencing. Its head, balanced low above a turn in its body, looked like a bright divot of moss.

The sound freezes your blood. I tried to get back to trails and couldn't not examine the ground every step I took. A guy nearly died of a bite in 2005 a half mile from where I saw this snake. Still, it's magnificent to see an animal hold its ground like that.

The Lesson of the Oregon Tragedies: Sit Tight in the Car/Cave?

The latest reports from Mt. Hood leave almost no hope that the two lost climbers are alive. The bottom line on the two outdoor tragedies in the state this month is: 4 males dead or missing, 3 females alive and well. The three females are the members of the Kim family who stuck with the Saab on Bear Camp Road on December 2, when James Kim went off to try and find help, and died of exposure.

"There is a teaching there in the woman and kid and baby taking the soft path, and living," Rob Buchanan, a contributing editor at Outside magazine said to me at the time.

Maybe that's the teaching in the Mt. Hood disaster too. It looks like after Kelly James dislocated his shoulder summiting Hood, Brian Hall and Nikko Cooke parked him in a snow cave below the summit and went off to find help. The weather turned on them, a full-on storm on treacherous Cooper Spur. The evidence suggests that they fell hundreds of feet and their bodies are buried. The only one to be found is James, curled up dead in the cave, from which he had made a distress call on his cellphone a week ago. It does raise the question: Should Hall and Cooke have waited in the cave with James? Would they have gained anything? Of course I can imagine how they felt: impatient to take action, impatient to get down off the mountain. Especially if they lacked fuel. The same feeling that drove James Kim after a week to leave the Saab that saved his family's life. Propelled by maleness, I would have done the same.

I hope the outdoors experts weigh in on this question...

Why Aren't American Alpinists Looking for Osama bin Laden?

Till he died on Mt. Hood, Kelly James led a rich, daring life. He did "high-end modernist" landscape design and loved climbing mountains. He proposed to his now-widow at 14,000 feet, on Mt. Rainier. The two men he climbed the challenging north approach to Hood with last week were also veteran adventurers. But the evidence that Hood River County Sheriff Joe Wampler just described at his news conference—two abandoned ice axes, a climbing rope cut with a knife, a glove—suggest that the two died in a fall days ago.

Still the search continues. It's a national spectacle on 24-hour cable. And where there are eyeballs, there's money: Wampler said that he has all the resources he could want from the federal government and state to try and find them. You see the military helicopter behind him.

We've never had anything near this sort of media spectacle about the search for Osama bin Laden, who they say is hiding out in mountains about Hood's height or less on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Supposedly we're looking. But in the war Bush likes to compare this one to, WW2, the 10th Mountain Division drew on the talents of a lot of privileged skiiers. This time around you'd think that our alpinists would rather risk their lives in Afghanistan than in the Cascades. I wonder if anyone's even asked them. Our priorities are out of whack.

Some Psychological/Marital Thoughts on the Last Oregon Tragedy

Yesterday's investigation by The Oregonian of the Bear Camp Road tragedy two weeks ago is haunting on a couple of levels.

First there's the family drama. The Oregonian reports that the Kims "drove past signs that said the road was impassable in winter, getting out of the car, Kati Kim later told authorities, to move boulders that blocked their path." Wow; they were blue-state achievers. Then after coming to a fork in the road and taking the wrong turn—right, on to Logging Road 34-8-36—the Kims traveled "21 miles on the logging road as it corkscrewed into the forest." Scary.

The greater pity, to me, is: I have to believe that there was tension between the Kim adults as they drove into the forest; that one of the Kims was pushing to continue on and the other was doubtful. That's what happens in my marriage when we get lost on a back road. One is always for going on (me). The other is always saying, "Let's turn around." There's tension and rage and fuming vindication. Of course, how many of us get punished this way?

The bigger lesson is even scarier: When you're in a crisis, you can't trust the authorities.

Yesterday's Oregonian shows that Josephine County Under Sheriff Brian Anderson didn't take his (inexperienced) search-and-rescue director's call on Saturday December 2, because he was watching the Oregon State game on his day off, and that he showed up to an emergency meeting the next morning 45 minutes after everyone else. At that point the family had been marooned in snow more than a week.

Yet (as the newspaper failed to point out) it was that same Brian Anderson who we all watched on TV a few days later, when James Kim's body was found.

"I'm crushed," said a grief-stricken Undersheriff Brian Anderson, the Josephine County undersheriff who announced the discovery of James Kim's body Wednesday, then had to turn away from reporters to regain his composure.

That's the stuff of a noir movie. The same guy who is crying and turning away from the cameras on national television December 6 can't be bothered on December 2 'cause the football game's on. And meanwhile the authorities are ignoring the tracks someone's spotted on the logging road, aren't digging up cell-phone records, and do nothing to summon the heat-seeking helicopters on the ground.

I read this lesson personally. Every time I've been in a crisis—a friend's cancer diagnosis, a mortgage that's not going through on time—I trust the authorities, I cling to them a little emotionally, in a Stockholm-syndrome kind of way. My wife doesn't. She assumes a certain degree of incompetence; and believes you have to stay on these people. She's right, I'm wrong.

I pity anyone in the Kim family who believed the Josephine County authorities when they were assuring them, "We're doing everything we can..."

In the Last Oregon Tragedy, Shameful Official Conduct

Now when everyone is gazing at Mt. Hood, let's not forget the last outdoor tragedy in Oregon. Today's The Oregonian prints a bravura piece of reporting about why local authorities failed to find the Kim family on Bear Camp Road 2 weeks ago. The story documents a series of bonehead maneuvers inside the Josephine County Sheriff's office——and explains why it took a week for anyone to check cell phone records that might have saved James Kim, and how it came to pass that a guy who owns Burger Kings found the lost mother and girls by flying his own helicopter up a logging road many knew to be suspicious but that had gone unchecked.

Among the shocking findings: One top county official was too wrapped up in an Oregon State football game to come in and look for the lost family, a week after they went missing. And for two days as James Kim staggered dying in the forest, and authorities knew his whereabouts, no one thought to deploy helicopters that were available that had heat-seeking equipment that might have located him. (The same technology used in the last couple days on Mt. Hood.)

Here are some excerpts:

Rubrecht, a 32-year-old former police dispatcher, was named Josephine County's search coordinator in 2001 with no prior experience in the field... "I'm not afraid to tell anybody that [this case] was overwhelming -- beyond anything I'd ever handled before," she said.

[Dec. 2] Rubrecht tried to phone her boss, Josephine County Undersheriff Brian Anderson, who was watching the Oregon State-Hawaii game. He said he chose not to take the call, noting that it was his day off.

[Dec. 3] As the authorities deliberated, a local helicopter pilot set out on his own... John Rachor grew ever more certain over the weekend where the Kim family was stranded. At 10:30 a.m., he lifted off in his own four-seat helicopter, convinced he could find them. Rachor, who runs a string of Burger Kings, asked no one where to look. He said he flew straight to Bear Camp Road and logging road 34-8-36.

Three days later, James Kim's body was found.