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A Journalistic Wilding
First Outside magazine took it to task for not being “hippy” enough for the writer’s taste, insinuating that Center for Biological Diversity director Kieran Suckling had somehow sold out because he was drawing a $20,000-a-year salary.
Now the New Yorker magazine denounces the Tucson environmental group for being snotty intellectual preservationists using the federal courts to keep honest people from making a living. In a November 22 article titled “No People Allowed,” writer Nicholas Lemann called the Center “the most important radical environmental group in the country and a major force in the life of Arizona and New Mexico,” and described Suckling as “trickster, philosopher, publicity hound, master strategist, and unapologetic pain in the ass,” all of which is pretty much true.
But Lemann couldn’t overlook personalities to see the larger context of unbridled industry and development in the Southwest.
The story starts with the poor postal worker who sees a wolf at his White Mountain campsite and just has to shoot it. The piece ends by saying that the Southwest Center is composed of outlaws, and what happens to outlaws in the Old West is that “in the end, they get dealt with.”
Along the way, Lemann shirks off the development and groundwater battle in Sierra Vista by saying, “You could live in Sierra Vista without realizing there is a San Pedro River.” (Lemann apparently believes that to be of value a river should feature human-powered paddle boats.) The New Yorker writer also finds good ol’ boy wisdom from a rancher who had a MacArthur Foundation genius grant.
Lemann struggles with distinctions between wilderness and what’s merely wild; but then, New York is where the word “wilding” came to signify a vicious and unprovoked attack.
After the story came out, Suckling got a call from 60 Minutes.
“When they found out we weren’t against humanity, they were less interested,” Suckling says.
An F in Media
At a press conference last week, state Superintendent of Public Instruction Lisa Graham Keegan announced that she had passed the AIMS test, even if many Arizona high school students had not.
But there had been a snit about the way in which the test scores were released. Several news entities had filed public records requests to get the scores, and were anxiously waiting. When the Department of Education decided to make them available, they summoned the press and said that the information would be embargoed for two days, a practice that Education spokesperson Patricia Likens claims is standard with test results “so that media outlets can get through it all and find out who they’re going to interview and . . . so that schools have a chance to look at the data before they have to comment on it.”
The notion that the media needed a cooling-off period to think quietly about how to report the news is novel — not that we’re capable of being quiet, let alone of thinking — and it rubbed some the wrong way. Channel 3 showed up late for the press conference and refused to abide by the embargo. Likens asked the Channel 3 reporter to give the test results back, and whether the tug of war that ensued was literal or figurative is up for interpretation.
Dennis O’Neill, Channel 3’s news director, sent the reporter with an admonition: “We never had an agreement on an embargo. You can’t embargo public records. We’re going to go with it tonight.” O’Neill thought that the embargo was an attempt by the department to give the Arizona Republic time to compete with the electronic media, which both Likens and the Republic deny.
Embargo or not, the news was out that evening.
“There was nothing in the report that was so secretive or so earth-shattering or so difficult to understand that any reporter needed time to figure it out,” says O’Neill.
So what’s the big deal? The Department of Education doesn’t know, either.
“We’re not talking about a murder-one conviction that’s coming down and we’re going to hold it before we announce it,” Likens says. “We’re talking about test scores.”
The Republic thought KTVK’s misdeed was important. It reported Channel 3’s embargo-busting prominently in the first AIMS story that was posted on its Web site: “The scores were made public two days early because Channel 3 (KTVK) refused to abide by an embargo placed on the results by the state Department of Education.”
The story that appeared in print the next day also mentioned Channel 3’s offense.
The Flash can’t fathom why the Republic — or any medium — would believe that a two-day embargo is a good idea. Unless it’s to allow educators time to spin.
Meteors and Morons
The best place on Earth to view the Temple-Tuttle meteor storm last week turned out to be eastern Europe, where those who ventured beyond the city lights were rewarded with 2,000 streaking arcs an hour.
The Flash watched the action over Arizona skies, such as it was, in the desert around Table Mesa.
Unfortunately, there were more bullets flying through the air than blazing chunks of space debris. Gunfire was intermittent throughout the wee hours of Thursday morning, and the occasional streak of orange through the sky was celebrated with much beer chugging and machine-gun fire by the well-armed, well-lubricated crowd of a couple hundred that gathered north of the city along Interstate 17.
Funny thing about gunfire — it sounds a lot better in the desert than it does in your neighborhood. This Strobe of Brilliance could only hope that, dissatisfied with the minor shower visible in the Southwest (about one meteor every two or three minutes), the M-16 and SKS wielders hadn’t decided to create their own meteor storm by firing into the air (no casualties were reported).
Combined with the pop, pop and brrrat of small-arms fire, the orange and green flashes of meteors burning up low on the horizon, which resembled anti-aircraft explosives, lent the viewing area a festive, Chechen atmosphere.
One viewer’s impatience in waiting for the heavens to fall was perfectly elucidated in this sound-bite testament to immediate gratification: “Come on, God, goddammit!”
Political Sewer Side
Sure, he’s got a temper. But at least Senator John McCain‘s not a wussy germophobe like Reform Party hopeful Donald Trump, who won’t shake hands on the campaign trail for fear of getting cooties.
That, as far as the Flash can tell, is the underlying political lesson to be learned from the photo of McCain and Steve Forbes in a recent edition of Time magazine. The picture depicts the two shaking hands.
But check out where the two are blissfully grasping hands. As near as the Flash can tell, it’s outside a row of portable potties! The Flash has been in enough plastic privvies to know that despite man’s relatively lofty state of evolution and society’s great inventions and technological leaps, no one has yet crafted a poo loo that doesn’t reek. And last we checked, the mobile pee-pee teepee didn’t offer hot water and antibacterial soap for washing up.
All of which begs some questions: Why are these presidential hopefuls hanging around the lawn john, anyway? They can’t have been for a Forbes function (hahahahaha, get it?), ’cause there would have been doormen — and bidets. And don’t most normal people (those with a sense of smell, anyway) avoid loitering in front of ambulatory crap traps? If they must use them, don’t folks flee post-waste? Did McCain and Forbes each actually use the refuse receptacles, then join up outside? Maybe McCain lunged for Forbes’ hand and Forbes reciprocated, fearing a case of McCainesque diarrhea of the mouth.
Because we know politics is all about image, we figured there has to be a purpose for this little display of gentlemanliness outside the colon salon. First, both candidates are obviously setting themselves apart from The Donald, who says he won’t shake hands on the campaign trail because he shudders to think of the germs jumping from hand to hand. In his 1997 book, he reveals that “nothing bothers me more” than sitting at a nice restaurant “and having a man you’ve just seen leaving the men’s room, perhaps not even having washed his hands, spot you and run over to your table with a warm and friendly face, hand outstretched.”
Forbes’ advantage in this moment of cutting-edge urinalism is this: He can show he’s not just a spoiled rich kid; he’s willing to get down and dirty and hang out near the fecal facilities, just like ordinary folk.
McCain’s message is just a continuation of his central theme: He’s tough, courageous, blah, blah, blah. Not only can he survive torture at the hands of his Vietnamese captors, he’s willing to take on Big Tobacco, Big Election Contributors. Hey, he’s even willing to face the vile germs lurking in and around the grungiest of head sheds. And he’ll gladly clasp the hand of anyone else willing to do so.
Trump that, Donald.
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