Did I assassinate Garfield?
When it comes to pissing off rural America, I think I'm one up on Barack Obama.
Presidential candidate Barack Obama has been under fire for suggesting that rural Americans are bitter. I've got Obama beat. I pissed off an entire rural county and caused some of the bitterness Obama just talks about. In fact, the local paper there reported that some folks would like to give me a Deliverance-style welcome next time I'm in town.
Let's back up for a minute. Last fall, I did a story for Crosscut on Garfield County, one of Washington state's poorest and least populous. It is the only county in the state, in fact, that is losing population. Driving though Garfield's county seat, Pomeroy, I wondered why the place seemed so distressed compared with other towns in southeast Washington. The Walla Walla miracle seems to extend to places like Waitsburg and Dayton, but it runs out of gas on the highway to Pomeroy. My intention wasn't to pick on Pomeroy, which is a charming if somewhat scruffy old-school farm town with a lovely county courthouse. I wanted to understand what the potential was for the rural economy. Could Garfield County, home to controversial Snake River dams, be rejuvenated by saving salmon or growing gourmet crops? It's a topic I explored in stories on Walla Walla and salmon.
The very questions I was asking put Pomeroy and Garfield County at a disadvantage. My premise was that the place looked like a glass half-empty, not half-full. But in my research, I discovered that others, too, were asking these questions. The piece I did was hardly investigative journalism — contrary to the claim of a woman I interviewed in Pomeroy, I did not proclaim that I was doing an "expose" on the place. I don't know any journalist who actually uses that word, and if I had been doing an expose, I wouldn't have announced it. The facts and figures I reported came from public sources, including an economic development report I was handed while I passed through town.
So from my perspective, I was doing basic journalism — albeit drive-by journalism. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised that people shot back. But I was startled by the anger and "betrayal" some felt. Alesia Ruchert, managing director of the Palouse Economic Development Council in Pomeroy, wrote to the local paper, the East Washingtonian, to clarify her role in "the Knute Berger scandal." She was taking heat because I had interviewed and quoted her in the story. She described her reaction to my piece as "heartache" and accused me of taking her comments out of context. She apologized to the whole community for cooperating with me and seemed to rue the day I showed up unannounced on her doorstep.
In my view, I did nothing wrong. I felt bad that she was taking any blame for my story. She did her job professionally, providing a journalist with facts, insight, and additional resources. She also struck me as someone who cared deeply about her community. I was also surprised that she and many of her neighbors read my piece as an attack on their way of life. Ruchert wrote me, "You made us sound like a bunch of uneducated hicks living in a barren wasteland." In return, she painted me as The Creature of the Blogosphere who came from the big city to attack the ways of rural folk:
... I will not again be a source for a piece that serves no purpose but to criticize, belittle, and place judgment upon our community based on the mores of a sub-culture that is all but foreign to the hard-working, family-oriented, responsible, well-adjusted real people of Garfield County.
I thought her critique was interesting for its own mistaken assumptions, that a blogger from Seattle has by definition questionable mores, isn't hard-working, family oriented, well adjusted, or responsible. OK, I'll admit to some moral failings and maladjustment — I'm a columnist — but her indictment strikes me as the flipside of Obama's "elitism," which is rural self-righteousness. News flash: City people aren't saints and neither are the hardy crofters of the Palouse. Her aggrieved tone and moral outrage, however, leads me to believe that she might have a future as a blogger.
I heard from many people in Garfield County after the story appeared. Also former residents and fans of Pomeroy who live elsewhere, people who've grown up, left, and are sad they can't go home again. I also heard from a few who couldn't blow town fast enough. But most who wrote did so to defend their turf and their people.
Collin Morrow, who grew up there and now lives in Bellingham, wrote:
The most genuine, honest, unpretentious people I know, are from Pomeroy. Pomeroy is a sacred place to me, and not just because this is where I grew up. All we hear about up and down the I-5 corridor are traffic problems, high housing prices and various other unintended consequences as a result of this growth. A place where houses are affordable, crime is nonexistent, and traffic congestion is limited to the occasional farm implement should be praised, not denigrated.
He also questioned why I included some statistics about Garfield County's lack of racial diversity. According to census numbers, it's the only county in the state that has no African Americans:
Comments:
Posted Thu, Apr 17, 9:46 a.m. inappropriate
Stegner on writing: I believe it was historian Page Stegner (son of novelist Wallace Stegner) who once said, "People will criticize not what you wrote, but what they think you wrote."
Keep up the slices of wry!
Posted Thu, Apr 17, 10:16 a.m. inappropriate
NOT to the enth degree.
In fact, she was deeply offended. Nobody likes it when a guest comes to their home or their town and begins to point out what the guest regards as deficiencies or begins to make unsolicited suggestions for improvement. No matter the guest's intention - I'm sure most of the time it's innocent in nature - it's rude. I was rude. I apologized. She accepted it. Case closed.
When size is an issue, it can be especially egregious. My height, which made me able to see the defect, was taken as a diss on her short stature. The dichotomy of the city slicker versus the country bumpkin, a tension that has spawned more jokes than anything save a banana peel, is but the ultimate expresion of the same thing.
So I learned...instead of offering my unsolicited "wisdom," what little of it there is, it's best to either keep my mouth shut - a most unnatural act for me - or ask the host for an opinion as to the state of the place. It saves a lot of mea culpas later.
The Piper
Posted Thu, Apr 17, 10:56 a.m. inappropriate
half full/half empty: Do you know the difference between a pessimist and an optomist?
An optomist thinks things can't get any worse...
A pessimist knows they can!
BTW, Deliverance is one of my personal top ten, and if you'd like, I'd love to take you paddling sometime! :-)
Posted Thu, Apr 17, 1:12 p.m. inappropriate
HAPPY MEDIUM: Well, Kurt, you have gone on record as a critic of the overheated Seattle economy (or at least certain manifestations thereof) and now you have bracketed your notion of the ideal economy: cooler than Seattle, warmer than Pomeroy.
That should leave plenty of latitude for economic fine-tuning.
Posted Thu, Apr 17, 11:21 p.m. inappropriate
RE: How to be a good guest: Yeah, I'm afraid Piper's right.
In your defense, Knute, at least you actually took the time to visit this community, talk to the people, write about it, and respond to the criticisms. Who's the bigger snob, after all, the guy who starts a conversation with a somewhat awkward opening line, or the guy who averts his eyes and avoids conversation altogether?
Posted Sat, Apr 19, 11:54 a.m. inappropriate
Oh puhleeze Piper: Hey Mr. Piper,
Well, I guess your experience as a piper qualifies as universal: why stop at equating it with a journalist's? Why not offer important "do's" and "don'ts" to John McCain? I'm sure he'd look good in a kilt. You could teach him how not to squeak when he pinches his lips and blows. If a journalist started worrying about offending the source, we'd all be reading a pre-Gorbachev version of TASS.
And while I am on my high horse, nothing in Berger's story was offensive from the outside. The insiders' rivalries it pricked seem a little bizarre to this outsider: probably just as the fight over a parking garage at the Woodland Park Zoo might seem bizarre to a Pomerite.
Here's the really sad thing about Pomeroy. The lovely historic courthouse pictured above is in real need of restoration. The courthouses in nearby Franklin (Richland) and Columbia (Dayton) counties have been beautifully restored. Perhaps those counties have deeper pockets, because of economic resources generated by Hanford and bigtime wheat farming. Still, it seems to me that local initiative is a place to start, and funds would follow.
On our trips to Pomeroy: we've seen both sides: small-town friendly, and small-town insular, small-minded. It would be a terrible shame if that's all there is. That courthouse needs love and it needs it now.
Posted Sat, Apr 19, 12:31 p.m. inappropriate
OOPS!: Looks like I have some cobwebs in my head too. Of course, Pasco is home to the Franklin County courthouse. Here's a link to the pictures of that restored courthouse, if you want to see what they can do to a historic building: http://www.co.franklin.wa.us/photogallery/gallery.php.
Richland is across the river in neighboring Benton County, and is not the county seat.
Posted Sat, Apr 19, 2:08 p.m. inappropriate
How much shall I put you down for?
The Piper
Posted Sun, May 11, 5:15 p.m. inappropriate
confused: I really don't understand. If there's so much of this need for change in Garfield County, then why isn't it happening? I'm going to High School right now, and I have to do a project on Garfield County's pros and cons -- this article and the one that preceeds it really helped (thank you Mr. Berger!)
But, so many people post these things, or write these articles that say Garfield County is in need of change, but so far nothing's happening? It's kind of unhelpful if you ask me... Garfield County lost about 50 people from 2006-2007, and if it's only 350 away from the pop. minimum to be legally accepted as a county, then that's 7 years -- not much time. I figure when 7 years passes, I'll still be in college. So what can I do? You guys can do something though. I mean, if an adult puts their mind to it, they can work to achieve a lot of stuff...
If there's something I can do to help people like this, then I will. Until then, it's up to the generation with the power to decide whether to help people like the populant of Garfield County. The people with the power is you, so get out there are do something!