Category: journalism

CDS Column: The truth about FAKE NEWS

It’s all fake news.

Do you think about where your journalism comes from? When you read a story, do you trust it?

There’s been a lot of talk about “fake news” lately. The acerbic term for the fourth estate coined by the 45th president seems to have captured the hearts of many Americans, people who’ve grown tired of reading stories so disconnected from their lives they seem conjured, concocted, made up.

Having worked in media and as a reporter, I get it. There is a gaping hole in journalism, in the retelling of the everyday. I wouldn’t go so far as to say the news is “fake,” but I couldn’t claim it as “real” either. News is somewhere in between, something gray and messy and incomplete. As journalists and as citizen readers we would do well to remember that.

Pick up a newspaper (chances are you’re holding one now). Where do you go for “the truth”? The cover story? An inside piece? The sports pages? Classifieds? Every section is told through a lens, and that is a complicating thing. Take the cover story, the most important news of the day. It is likely about a serious issue, something where reasonable people stand on differing sides. It is an issue with nuance and complexity, and there on the front page it is told in 1,200 words.

Just 1,200 words. What complicated truth can be told in that? How do you sum up the issues that dominate our political lives today in a dozen paragraphs?

Write 600 words on race in America. Tell the whole story. Make it complete.

Write 1,000 words on abortion. Don’t leave anything out.

Write 5,000 words on poverty. Make it a definitive work.

The truth? You don’t. You can’t. You edit. You cut. You leave out. You offer what you can in the space provided, trusting that good readers will forgive your omissions and chalk them up to brevity rather than bias. Every story, every article and every column does this. Not one can carry a full accounting of the truth. No newspaper gets it all. This isn’t a Sun problem, this is a journalism problem. It is a life problem.

Television, too: 24-hour news, but still we can’t get close to a full relating of the American experience.

And the internet: Infinite space, and yet there is more confusion than clarity.

Whether we’re talking documentaries or books, their hours of words and storytelling are yet incomplete. They only offer a partial telling. There is no truth, no single source explanation of the world and of what happens around us. Every retelling, every explanation, is woefully inadequate.

That is the heart of journalism, the truth of reporting. Every reporter wades out into a world of gray and comes back to lay down a story in black and white. That simplified version then goes out to thousands of people, each of whom looks at it slightly askew.

Is it “true”? No, but it contains truth in it. It may be built of slivers and pieces, but they have been cut and edited, inevitably leaving out as much truth as it carries.

This is not a new phenomenon. This is our ancient heart. This is the fourth estate, a foundational part of democracy. It is the citizen’s ticket into the political area, the piece that keeps them informed to vote and decide. It allows us to be more than puppets to presidents and senators. It is an imperfect system, just like every branch of government. The newsroom feedback loop is no more corrupt than the houses of power — it carries good in it, and at least as much messiness as good.

But if we remember journalism is an incomplete story, if we remember there is no “truth” in the news, that every retelling is incomplete, then we stop seeing it as “fake.” Like all things in American democracy, journalism is not clear cut. It is a quick, messy telling of life, too short and too simple, a first draft of history, homework passed in on deadline. It has its purpose, and when combined with our own experience, it has value.

A newspaper’s truth, after all, is not in stories alone. To get a full view you need to read every part: the classifieds and the crosswords, the columns and the comics. Read the ads as well as the articles. The complete picture, that is where the truth hides. If you read one day’s paper you get only a snapshot in time. But if you read the paper day after day, its depth starts to emerge. The swings and stories begin to balance out. A fuller picture takes hold. The reality of life starts to pile together. A truth emerges from the overlap.

Look at the corrections sections, where newspapers admit their faults. Suddenly the medium seems almost human.

Otherwise it’s all fake news. But only if you believe it.

This column appeared in today’s Conway Daily Sun.

CDS Column: Lift the Lamp

In January I began volunteering for a nonprofit that works with high school students to help improve their writing. As I writer I love talking about writing, and this was a way to give back.

I got paired with a 18-year-old Muslim of Somali descent named Abass.

Abass was born in Ethiopia where his parents were refugees, then moved to South Africa before his family made it to the United States. They lived first in Lowell, Mass., and then they moved to Maine. Because of his time in South Africa Abass spoke English well, so he was in good position when started school. He will graduate this year, and he hopes to study dentistry at college in the fall.

Abass smiles a lot. His face moves quickly from into a grin, and then just as quickly back to normal. He is warm, engaging, makes jokes when he’s nervous and is exceedingly friendly. He teases the girls in his class, the boys in his class, everyone, and they tease him back. He’s playful, a bit of a class clown. He is well-liked.

Abass speaks three languages. His parents, however, don’t speak English, so when it comes to filling out any sort of documentation or legal paperwork (taxes, signing a lease, college applications) he winds up serving as translator, explaining things to them instead of the adults explaining things to him. That has forced Abass to grow up fast, but he hasn’t lost his joyfulness. Even 7,000 miles from the country of his people, he carries hope.

Abass is a Muslim and a Somali. If he were applying for a visa today, he would have to contend with the executive order signed on Friday.

It’s been a long two weeks.

In fact, it hasn’t even been two weeks. Inauguration Day was less than that ago, and the executive orders didn’t really begin unfolding until the following Monday. That means it’s been only nine days. But a lot can happen in nine American days.

It doesn’t seem so in the Mount Washington Valley sometimes. There’s no airport with incoming international flights, no mosques, few Hispanics or other people of color. Here, in the northern reaches of one of the whitest states in the country, feels detached from the conversations igniting our country right now. Building a wall with Mexico might push up food prices, but it won’t change the complexion of our streets. Restricting refugee visas won’t break up local families. These are almost academic arguments here, not something poised to come home to roost in our community right away.

But then I sit down with Abass, and I realize how much these conversations matter.

It is striking how divergent American views can be. We read the same sacred national texts, revere the same icons, and yet come away with strikingly opposing views. America is our religion, and we can become unitarians universalists to the Westboro Baptists. The Westboro Baptists are gathering loud of late.

Our creed, captured so eloquently beneath the feet of the Statue of Liberty, is simple: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

America’s promise is a promise we ourselves were granted. It may have been generations ago, but at one time it was our grandparents, or great-grandparents, or great-great-great grandparents, who wanted to be dentists. It was they who spoke three languages and translated their new homes to their immigrant parents. We are the offspring of refugees and asylum-seekers. We spilled onto these shores, scores of English, German, Irish, Norwegian, Polish, Lebanese, South African, Chinese, Sudanese, people from every country and continent, and slowly we made ourselves American. We made America. We grew in size and in strength, emboldened because of our diversity and our courage and our hope. It was not without challenges and disgrace—the slaughtering of Native Americans, the slavery of Africans and their descendents—but still ever striving upwards towards the promise of Thomas Jefferson: “All men are created equal.”

I see that now, in a young man who has dreams of being a dentist. A young Muslim, from a country on a list, who wants the freedom to strive and flourish.

We live a long way from this fight. It is a more than an hour drive to the room where once a week I sit with Abass and we work to improve his writing. But if he is willing to show up, I will too.

These are our fights. This is our country. There are so many days where I wish I could forget it, where I would prefer to grab my climbing gear, strap into my skis, and forget about the chaos unfolding right now, the sweeping American changes emanating from Washington. But I choose not to. I choose to sit with Abass, to talk to him about verb tense and character development and setting, to ask him about his family and his story and what he would like to write about.

And in those conversations I am met by a smart young man, a man with dreams, a man with hope and passion and drive. We would be lucky to call him an American. We would be lucky to have him as part of our country.

I will not close the door, and I will not sit quietly by as others do. Donald Trump is right, this is the time for patriotism. In my country, “all men are created equal.” I will not remain silent.

“I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

Welcome.

This column appeared in the Conway Daily Sun.

CDS Column: Live, Vote or Drive

How do we keep having these arguments?

Massachusetts voters streaming into New Hampshire and swaying our elections. That could happen, hypothetically. Despite voter ID laws and town clerks who know residents and a robust, tried-and-true electoral process, Massachusetts could be deciding New Hampshire’s votes.

But they’re not. There is no evidence of such fraud. There is supposition, a rumor, something the White House is talking about, but it’s just “alternative facts.”

And yet we keep having these arguments.

Rumors and innuendo are not a basis for policy. New Hampshire knows that. Ours is a state of no-nonsense people. New Hampshire voters are sophisticated. They are accustomed to the political milieu, seasoned from serving on the front line of the presidential vetting process. We Granite Staters are no electoral novices. The Live Free or Die ethos means we belong to fire districts, water precincts and lighting districts in addition to a town, a county, the state and the federal government. Every one of these entities is an exercise in democracy. Each puts out its own annual report, has a board, holds public hearings and requires a vote. If we choose, we might spend half our non-working waking hours ensconced in elections. Not only does the nation trust us to make early judgments on the character and capabilities of those who one day hope to run the country, but we see fit to practice democracy at almost every level and in every corner. Voting is our lifeblood, something rooted in New Hampshire history more deeply than in any other state.

And now our votes have found their way into the national discourse: A flood of Massachusetts carpetbaggers allegedly made their way north to strip Kelly Ayotte of her senatorship and President Donald Trump of a rightful victory. This is the word out of the White House, beginning with the president and repeated by his advisers.

Let’s be clear: The president and his team have brought no evidence to support this claim. None. The White House has a hunch, but offers nothing to back it up beyond words. As with other accusations of voter fraud, it’s an opinion, nothing else.

But this time it isn’t about about California. This time it is about us. It’s about our little state. And this claim hits at our heart — our political process, a sacred part of the Granite State.

Our political apparatus is ingrained into our state identity. When it comes to presidential elections, we have home field advantage. Every great election begins with us. Tryouts here commence a year before the rest of the country. New Hampshire does not play politics, we live it, from the federal level right down to the North Conway Water Precinct and the Redstone Fire District.

As a result, despite our small population and rural character, New Hampshire is no political backwater. Our residents and institutions carry the sophistication needed to govern thousands of scattered municipal districts, as well as the chops required of a state trusted to cast the first vote. We have seen scandal before, and political fraud. Small but well-schooled, we are not naive. This is our game, and we know how to play.

And yet we are left listening to accusations out of Washington that our political apparatus is full holes. Accusations floated without evidence by the president of the United States that Massachusetts political operatives pulled the wool over Granite State eyes.

To sling unfounded accusations at the New Hampshire electoral process is to undermine our electoral heritage. Such slander casts dispersions on our “First in the Nation” position, a role we have carried with dignity for decades. If there is voter fraud, quit teasing and expose it. New Hampshire Republicans and New Democrats alike would stand side-by-side to uproot such perversion. Our coveted electoral position demands it — we all have too much to lose to sit by and let such mischief continue unchecked.

But these claims are baseless. There is nothing behind them. They are all bluster, no truth.

But baseless claims are hard to fight. There is no arguing a shapeless provocation, empty of evidence. How do you prove fraud when all fraud is supposed, not exposed?

The White House casts suspicion on the sanctity of our political heart, on the laser-cut accuracy of our selection process. This dispersion sullies not only the electoral count, but also our presidential primaries, every federal ballot cast, the state election, every local election, each precinct and district. In a word, the president has put the Granite State on notice — without evidence — that our democratic processes do not hold water. We are not a cup, he says, but a sieve.

But it is these claims that are the true sieve. We in New Hampshire wear democracy close to our skin. We live it, know the taste of it, the feel of it. It’s a dance we’ve practiced before. And we also know the smell of something rotten. These accusations are rotten. Without evidence they can only be called lies. And New Hampshire has no room for lies, nor “alternative facts.”

Cast dispersions on New York elections if you wish, Donald Trump, or on California or Texas. Pick any of 49 other states, but leave our Granite process alone. We know politics. We know elections. Step forward with evidence, or be silent.

This column appeared in the Conway Daily Sun.

Friday Feedback

As a columnist, it often feels like I’m sending my thoughts out into the darkness. If they make a splash, I never hear it. It was different when I was reporting full-time. Back then I’d be in front of the selectmen every week, and if someone didn’t like what I wrote I’d hear about it almost immediately.

As a columnist, however, it’s different. You get pulled aside in the grocery store sometimes, but only if people know who you are. They read your stuff, but at the end of the day you don’t have much of an idea how people react.

And then today happens. I was looking for a few stories to send to an editor, so I went onto the Conway Daily Sun website and plugged in my last name. The following letter popped up:

To the editor:

Reading a recent edition I couldn’t help but think about the time that has passed since The Conway Daily Sun started publishing in 1989. Mark and Adam should be proud of their creation. I worked on their cars in the 1990s and got to know them well enough to respect them and their efforts.

I, for one, want to thank them for producing a quality product and giving it away. I look forward to them continuing to “stir the pot.”

I read Erik Eisele’s column “We the people” with great interest and another recent column by Eisele, “Conway Daily Firestarter,” where he wrote about being close to his audience and the commentary and feedback that comes with that. He is a courageous individual, and I commend him for his honesty.

In “We the people,” he identifies three subject areas; money, religion and government. Difficult to argue that they are primary issues in most people’s lives.

I believe his last two paragraphs offer a concise explanation of the problems that have festered in the three subject areas and the only solution that has any hope of success in the survival of this noble experiment.

Personal responsibility begins with the understanding that “We the people,” all of us, collectively have the obligation to make this work. It starts with a conversation.

Peter O’Brien

Fryeburg, Maine

In the media world today budgets are tight. These columns don’t pay a ton, but they are a chance to write what I see, to write about things I think are important. It feels nice to read those things are important to other people as well.

In the same search, meanwhile, I also discovered another recent letter to the editor:

To the editor:

Before I criticize Erik Eisele, let me compliment him on being a wonderful, energetic reporter who covers a lot of ground and does it very well.

Now my complaint about his column, “We The People,” Dec. 7, in which he laments that many human constructs ultimately fail and includes religion as one: First, his presumption that humans created religion reflects an unfair bias against and/or at least a shallow understanding of religion. Even unschooled Native Americans attributed religion to a Source outside or above their nature.

Second, his urban legends generalizations — that the “The Catholic Church has a history of atrocious acts dating back hundreds of years. Countless wars have religious roots, as did slavery…” — aren’t worthy of a seventh grade composition. There have been wars and atrocities between opposing religions but the Crusades, for example, aimed to free people oppressed and attacked in the Holy Land, much as is occurring now. When Crusades exceeded that mantra they did not do so because of the Gospel, but in spite of it. In regard to slavery, St. Paul urged slaves to be obedient so they could survive and be freed, which subsequent emperors encouraged. Spartacus revolted and cost 6,000 lives. At the time of Christ, up to 90 percent of the population was enslaved and it wasn’t because of religion but rather primitive economics. The clear thrust of Judao-Christian teaching is freedom from sin and other subjugation.

So, what difference does religion make? Every day, the Catholic Church feeds, clothes, shelters and educates more people than any other private organization in the world.  The Catholic Church is credited with starting formal education and teaches 3 million students daily in more than 250 colleges and 1,200 high schools and 5,000 grade schools without government support. Catholic nuns opened the first hospitals and orphanages and today one out of six people receive care at Catholic hospitals. During the Civil War most nurses were Catholic nuns. The sisters of Charity ran a hospital in New Orleans where the plasma system was developed, and it has saved perhaps millions of lives.

Religion serves a salutary purpose and urban legends do not.

John F. Donovan

Freedom

Mr. Donovan felt compelled to take issue with my perspective, but he opened with a compliment of how much he appreciates my work as a reporter. That is EXACTLY the sort of conversation I hope to be a part of. I do not expect my writings to always be right. Heck, they probably hardly ever are. But they are meant, as Mr. O’Brien said, to start a conversation. And Mr. Donovan did exactly that. He used my ramblings as a starting point to engage in conversation. America is the richer for such discourse, as no single person has the wherewithal to make the best decisions for a land of 330 million. I couldn’t help for a better exemplification of democratic ideals.

With this much awesomeness, it feels like the weekend…

From the Backseat: What makes a Millionaire?

Is Donald Trump a good businessman?

I mean, he’s rich. But is he rich because his family was rich? Because his dad made a lot of money in real estate back in the day? Or is he rich because his entrepreneurial ventures have been successful?

Is he good at his job? That’s the question.

I know lots of people already have answers. His supporters say he’s clearly a billionaire with a business empire, and therefore my question is dumb. His opponents say he was born rich, and it is his string of failed businesses — casinos, an airline, a university, meat products — that make my question dumb.

But these are partisan answers. I’m looking for something different. I’m looking for a nuanced definition of entrepreneurship, of risking it in business and seeing new ideas take, and then to compare that definition to the president-elect’s record.

I don’t know a lot about being an entrepreneur, but I know it requires a willingness to fail. No one comes up with a brilliant idea first go, and no one learns everything they need to know to be successful in college or an MBA program. It takes experience, and experience is just a gentle word for failure. Success is built on foundations of failure, and it’s only in hindsight that the failures look like inevitable lessons along the way.

Maybe that’s what Donald Trump’s casinos, airline, university and steaks were — a trail of lessons. Maybe Trump was already rich, so unlike some guy selling widgets out of his garage, his failures were bound to be public and spectacular.

The fact is, I don’t know. It’s almost Inauguration Day and I don’t have a clue. That wasn’t how America approached this election. There were those with undying support willing to look past his failures, and there were those who dismissed him completely, laying his successes at the feet of his father.

I imagine it’s more complex than that. Surely, Trump has both made money and lost money. But my question is whether the rate at which he made it leans closer to success or failure.

Then again, maybe Trump’s goal all along wasn’t money, but power. If that’s the case, his past seems to have definitely been worthwhile. There’s no doubt he was successful at getting elected the most powerful position in the land.

That, however, strays from my point. Is Trump, the businessman (versus Trump, the politician) successful? He sold himself as a businessman — and America bought. But is he a good one? It feels like a question someone should have asked, but never did. There must be a business professor out there, or a handful of business professors, who can explain what a normal failure rate for entrepreneurs looks like. There has to be someone able to contrast that with the record of the president-elect. Is he doing well for himself? Did he do poorly? Is he at the top of the game? The middle? The bottom?

These are questions we’ve stopped asking. This election left so little space for issues, so little time for a hard look at resumes. Instead, we scrutinized temperament and character, talked border walls and Muslim bans, bickered about emails and tax returns. We never took a step back to ask basic questions about who was running. We engaged in partisan conversation, and the only clues to whether or not Donald Trump was a successful businessman came from looking at those who support him and those who opposed.

Now, here we are in January, and it’s still not really clear who we elected. That seems a poor recipe for success.

This column appeared in this week’s Portland Phoenix.

CDS Column: Health (Insurance) Checkup

It’s December. Insurance month. I spent last night filling out forms for health insurance, and soon I’ll have to go about making my annual car insurance payment. December is no longer just about holidays, it’s now also about paying hundreds (make that thousands) of dollars for something I hopefully won’t ever need. It’s all part of the joy of modern living: Upside — my heart might stop but there is technology capable of kickstarting it again; downside — that technology isn’t free.

When I think about it that way, a couple hundred dollars a month to pay for health insurance isn’t too bad. I mean, if for a couple hundred bucks we were offered the choice between living in medieval Europe or modern New York, I’d take that deal. Medieval Europeans never got such a thoughtful offer, and internet and cable almost amount to the same amount.

And really, that’s basically what we get — forgo modern health care and things become Hobbesian quite quickly: “the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” So I guess I want to begin from a place of appreciating what I’ve got. I want to start from there.

My car insurance, my other December insurance bill, isn’t expensive. I’ve got one car, and it’s paid for. I live in the Live Free or Die state, which means I don’t even have to have car insurance if I don’t want to, but I feel like I should, that it’s the adult thing to do. My car insurance is the liability kind, which means I pay roughly $250 a year to protect other people from my negligence. That’s it. Not bad. Every year I get a little older, and every year the cost of protection declines. I’m a (relatively) safe driver, so things haven’t spiraled out of control. It’s a formula I like. It’s also a formula I can afford.

My health insurance, meanwhile, costs almost the same each month as my car insurance costs per year. I am young(-ish), active, a healthy person in their mid-30s. I don’t smoke and, as a man, I’m unlikely to become pregnant, which means most of my current health risk is in unforeseen illness or injury. Over time that will change, but right now I’m a pretty safe bet.

And as a safe bet, I cost several hundred dollars a month to insure. As I grow older my medical risks will climb, which means the cost of insuring me will also climb. That’s a formula I understand, one I can’t do a lot about. I’ve even got a window into how much that risk rises: From last year to this year, my insurance went up 7 percent. Looking ahead to next year, I’m facing another 7 percent increase.

I’m not clear what the exact case is, whether my premiums are climbing because this year my age makes me 7 percent more expensive than last year, or if I’m actually the same risk but health care budgets are expected to expand 7 percent in 2017. Probably it’s some combination of the two, but either way 7 percent seems a lot. The U.S. economy didn’t grow 7 percent this year. I did not get a 7 percent raise for 2017. I doubt even my doctor got a 7 percent raise.

So 7 percent. If this is a trend, we’re in trouble: A 7 percent increase compounded over time would make my premiums double roughly every 10 years. If I pay a nice round $200 a month today, I’ll pay $400 a month at in my mid-40s, $800 a month in my mid-50s, and $1,600 a month in my mid-60s, at which point the government swoops in with Medicare to offer some much needed financial relief.

What a model. If mortgages had the same cost implications no one would buy houses.

And 7 percent is an improvement; 7 percent is actually a slower rate of growth than health care premiums have been on in past years. Somehow we’re doing better, but even as we do better things are growing out of hand.

What to do? I know health care is a hot-button topic, one plagued by talk of death panels and government takeovers, but who wants to be paying $1,600 a month for basic health coverage when they’re 65? Maybe that’s the cost of buying our way into the modern era, of avoiding a time when tuberculosis and cholera were common ailments, but this doesn’t seem normal. It doesn’t seem sustainable. It doesn’t seem like something any of us can do for long.

Health care, however, is a monopoly business: You only have one life. You can’t replace it, and you don’t get another one. And for that life people can make you pay what they want.

President-elect Trump, meanwhile, is talking about repealing Obamacare. He’s promised to replace it with “something terrific.” I hope he does. Obamacare helped slow health care premium growth, but it couldn’t slow it to a manageable level. If Donald Trump can do that, if he can figure out a way to live in the modern era without simultaneously edging us all towards bankruptcy, I will applaud him.

But it is important to realize our modern lives exist within a monopolized industry. Health care is a monopoly business, and as with any monopoly, government has to have a hand. And judges can’t just go trust-busting here like they did with Standard Oil. Health care is a complex new version of monopolization, one built on technology and science as much as the Hippocratic Oath. Doctors and nurses and pharmaceutical companies and hospitals and all of it are diverse actors, a non-traditional monopoly, part of America’s sub-7-percent growth. Figuring out how to unwind its intricacies to make “something terrific” that is also affordable will take nuance, thoughtfulness, a delicate touch.

If Donald Trump can do that, I will applaud him.

The next checkup is December of 2017. I hope to see you then.

This column appeared in the Conway Daily Sun.

From the Backseat: Deaths of Despair

Did you see the news? Last week, in the town of Sherman, police arrested three people in connection with a meth lab. It was the 123rd incident of its kind in Maine in 2016. That’s more than double the number last year; in 2015 Maine had 56 meth lab-related incidents.

And then on Friday a Hebron man killed his 27-year-old daughter before taking his own life. Did you see that too?

This is the news today, constant radar blips of “the way life should be.” They are markers an assistant professor at Penn State told me about recently: she calls them “deaths of despair.” And Maine is full of them.

Shannon Monnat is a rural demographer. About a month ago I interviewed her for a story about the heroin epidemic. I came across her research on addiction rates and how they relate to a community’s economic prospects. “Deaths of despair” is the phrase she’s coined for spiking addiction, alcoholism and suicide rates across America.

But rates don’t spike equally. Urban centers are largely spared this crisis. Drug addiction today is a rural problem, and the impact is felt heaviest in the rural communities and small cities that have struggled in the global economy.

Small cities. Rural places. Hmm. Sounds like Maine. Go on…

“These small cities and rural towns have borne the brunt of declines in manufacturing, mining, and related industries and are now struggling with the opiate scourge,” said Monnat. “In these places, good jobs and the dignity of work have been replaced by suffering, hopelessness and despair, the feeling that America isn’t so great anymore, and the belief that people in power don’t care about them or their communities. Here, downward mobility is the new normal.”

Suffering. Hopelessness. Despair. The new normal. 123 meth labs in a year. Murder-suicides. We are watching the effects unfold daily, on the news and in our communities. Each event acts as a radar blip. Misery is a tough pill to swallow, and as a meal to eat every day, it’s poison. But when job prospects seem hopeless it’s easy to sink into despair.

Monnat’s analysis doesn’t end there. Her most recent research looks at the 2016 presidential race, comparing election data with addiction data. And what she found is striking: counties awash in misery, those rural communities and smaller cities plagued by higher addiction rates, came out for Donald Trump.

“Clearly there is an association between drug, alcohol and suicide mortality and Trump’s election performance,” said Monnat, though she cautioned the relationship is a complex one. “What these analyses demonstrate is that community-level well-being played an important role in the 2016 election, particularly in the parts of America far-removed from the world of urban elites, media and foundations.”

“Ultimately, at the core of increasingly common ‘deaths of despair’ is a desire to escape,” she continued, “escape pain, stress, anxiety, shame, and hopelessness. These deaths represent only a tiny fraction of those suffering from substance abuse… Drug and alcohol disorders and suicides are occurring within a larger context of people and places desperate for change. Trump promised change.”

Despair, it seems, has political implications in addition to societal.

This almost shouldn’t be news. Every day we get signals about this despair. Some are small—another drug death, another mill shutdown, another suicide—while others are large, the 2016 election outcome being the most prominent. Sitting in quasi-urban Portland, a small city somehow buoyed by its quaint appeal and its status as a haven for NYC exiles, it might be easy to forget we sit surrounded by misery. But we do. We are a rural and small city state. There is so much misery here that drugs, alcohol, suicide and Donald Trump have become rational choices, the result of living in communities where no other path seems open.

Monnat’s research states America’s problem, and Maine’s problem, succinctly: in “many forgotten parts of the U.S. (often referred to as ‘fly-over’ country by those living on the coasts),” she said, “downward mobility is the new normal.”

Despite our coastline, Maine is one big fly-over state. The evidence to that fact fills our newsfeed.

Maybe it will make tomorrow’s headlines.

This column appeared in this week’s Portland Phoenix.

Portland Phoenix: Just Don’t Fall

duo-lyra-3“Push up. Push up from your shoulders. You’re sagging.”

I can tell I’m sagging. I’m upside-down, balanced on my hands above a concrete floor, my feet pointed at the ceiling like the cone of a rocket ship. And since I flipped into this handstand, my face has been slowly lowering. Push as I might, I can’t halt the descent. My shoulders are spent, won’t budge anymore, and as they fail I can feel my weight tipping. The tower of my body has begun swaying like a felled tree.

“Push! Tighten your butt! Push! Push! Push!” Cory is yelling at me again. He’s always yelling at me, at least when he’s within 10 paces. Otherwise, he’s yelling at somebody else. It’s not a scolding yell, it’s a coach’s yell, the shouts of encouragement that seem almost enough to suspend someone in air upside-down, like his students’ balance hinges on the volume of his instructions. He clearly sees what I’m doing wrong, and maybe a few well-timed shouts can save me.

But not this time. His yells aren’t enough. My balance has shifted, and the spell that somehow kept me standing upside-down on my hands has broken. My legs are now headed over backward towards the concrete, a tumbling fall that at this point has become familiar. I fold at the waist and twist my body, the spin coming just in time to plant my feet safely under me. I pop up, standing rightways again, my face red from exertion and the rush of blood that comes from being upside-down. Cory is nodding and smiling. “Good. Good,” he says. “Now just don’t fall.”

Just don’t fall. That seems like good advice at Circus Maine, where handstands are probably the least hazardous height someone can take a tumble from. “Just don’t fall” becomes even more important once you move to the trapeze, the aerial silks, the straps or the Chinese pole (actually two poles that stand parallel that performers bounce between).

Falling is required just to get going on the giant inground trampoline, but then the faller flies into the air at twice their original speed, suddenly giving “just don’t fall” new meaning.

Even acrobats who stack to form human towers must heed this “don’t fall” mantra. For them, a fall there takes out not only themselves but the rest of the team.

So yeah, it’s good advice, just don’t fall.

The thing is, there’s lots of falling at Circus Maine. It’s a circus school. No one is born knowing how to do a handstand, much less a one-handed handstand, much less a one-handed handstand on stage before an audience where every movement is choreographed in time with music. To get there takes falling, years and years of falling.

“It took me seven years to put my hand-balancing act together,” Circus Maine’s hand balancing instructor Cory Tabino said.

He studied handbalancing at Ecole Nationale de Cirque, the National Circus School of Montreal, for three years, and then he spent three years working for Cirque du Soleil, also based in Montreal. He’s now spent a quarter-century working as a circus artist around the world.

“I went across the Atlantic Ocean four times,” he said, doing his act on cruise ships. “The only place I haven’t performed is Antarctica.”

Now, in addition to being the lead handbalancing instructor and a professional performer (just last week he went to Japan to perform for U.S. soldiers), Tabino is also Circus Maine’s artistic director. And he’s also the head of the professional program. And he serves as a stagehand at live productions. And he organizes signature events in the Circus Maine building on Thompson’s Point. And he coordinates off-site performances for private and corporate events.

Like everyone at Circus Maine, Tabino wears many hats.

“We are the textbook definition of a startup company,” he said.

Circus Maine is a recreational circus school with both adult programs and kids programs, a professional circus training academy and an event production company. They put on monthly cabarets that bring top level performers to Portland, host a summer camp that over the past three years served more than 500 kids, and in October they held their first marquee event, a Halloween party called Mischief Night that paired circus performers swinging on silks in full costume with DJs, drinks and a dance party.

These events are anything but bland: two of the Mischief Night performances were pole dances. Two others were beautiful women in trim costumes hanging above a crowd dancing on a concrete floor. At a cabaret event in October, a couple performed on a suspended hoop in formfitting bedclothes, her wearing a slinky top and shorts that barely held her in. The pair tumbled and swung above the audience bathed in milky light; the whole performance felt like something out of a dream.

“New circus is sexy,” Joshua Oliver, the male-half of the bedclothed performance, said. “It’s very bold. It’s intoxicating.”

An instructor and performer at Circus Maine, Oliver is also the technical director and driving force behind the project. When he talks about circus he gets animated, the excitement shows in his eyes.

“We’re essentially the next generation of high-end entertainment,” he said. “We want to push the boundaries of what is considered acceptable art. I don’t think you will be bored.”

At the heart of this effort is Circus Maine’s purpose-built circus training facility in Thompson’s Point Brick North. From the outside, it’s an old brick mill building, but inside it has a trampoline, multiple lines for trapeze, padded floors and countless gymnastic mats. If ever there was a space to fall, it’s here.

But that learning space can also be converted into a performance space. And that performance space can also be converted into an events venue. The same room that hosts a dozen children practicing back flips every Tuesday night also housed a TEDx event last year in which Oliver swung from a pair of straps suspended from the ceiling in a performance that looked both Olympic and artistic. Circus Maine uses the venue to host 10 shows a year and also run their recreational program serving 120 students. Later this month they will hold their Solstice event, their first full in-house circus production, there, and on New Year’s Eve they will hold another marquee event, a 1920s Great Gatsby-themed “Red Carpet Event,” in the same space.

It’s a movement towards a type of spectacle-infused events that have become common in bigger cities, Tabino said, “but here in Maine we’re really toeing the line.”

Shows are provocative, emotive, fast-paced, beautiful. Performances infuse tremendous physical control and precise movement with an element of storytelling.

“It’s highly athletic,” Tabino said, “but it allows for individual expression.” The artistic angle is the key part. “Otherwise it’d just be gymnastics.”

That such expression is occurring at all, however, is somewhat of a surprise. Fifteen months ago the idea that Portland would host multiple circus shows in a matter of weeks seemed unlikely if not impossible. The Circus Conservatory of America, a proposed professional-level circus academy, had just turned insolvent, and Oliver, Tabino and the other professionals recruited to bring contemporary circus to Portland were out of their jobs.

But circus isn’t a normal career. No one gets into handbalancing, trapeze, juggling or clowning for the money. Contemporary circus is an art, and like any art form, it is the art itself that pulls at its practitioners. They do it for passion rather than the paycheck, performing almost out of compulsion.

Oliver is no exception. “I’ve been on stage since I was 8 years old,” he said. He discovered new circus, the intermixing of gymnastics-style physical feats with performance, in his early 20s, and it has held him ever since.

Modern circus style is an intermixing of Russian technique with French artistic tastes, according to Oliver. “We perform in theaters rather than tents,” he said, and cotton candy and elephants aren’t part of the act. “New circus is been a really important art form, an opportunity to use physical excellence as a voice.”

Circus artists create their own acts, and it takes time. It takes developing your skills and your own creative vision. It’s similar to dancing, but unlike a dancer, a circus artist choreographs their own movement. The person builds the act, Oliver said, and what you see on stage: “That’s her.”

This is a tradition with centuries of history, but it used to be passed down among families. You were either born into a circus family or you weren’t. The modern circus school is a very new thing, and it occurred in tandem with the intermixing of Russian and French influences that eventually became contemporary circus. Schools pulled elements from Moroccan and Chinese acrobats and went to seed in Canada. And it blossomed. Cirque du Soleil is the name everyone knows, and Montreal is now its the global hub.

Oliver lived in Montreal for 10 years. Like Tabino, he studied at Ecole Nationale de Cirque, Canada’s premier circus arts training institute, and then worked in the industry afterward. The Ecole and Cirque du Soleil sit side by side in Montreal, he said, and they form the left and right ventricle of contemporary circus around the world.

Oliver started circus at 22, a late arrival for the industry—at Circus Maine 12-year-olds are already eyeing the National Circus School—and his act includes aspects of the martial arts that were his passion before he found circus. He is powerfully built, and when he walks he glides across the floor, leading with his chest like a warrior headed to battle.

Which seems appropriate, because when Oliver talks about pulling Circus Maine from the ashes of Circus Conservatory of America it sounds like a battle.

“There have been at least three miracles that have allowed this project to continue,” he said. “We worked until we were bloody, and then we worked some more.”

Oliver and Tabino literally dug the hole in the floor that became Circus Maine’s inground trampoline with shovels, pulling out old railroad ties by hand, hacking them out with an ax. Oliver is a builder, and much of the work that went into renovating Brick North was done by his hands.

“I came to Maine to make this project work,” Oliver said. “I tried to build a circus school in Norway and in New Zealand. This was my third attempt.”

So when Circus Conservatory of America sank, Oliver was not ready to let go. He scraped and saved. He asked Thompson’s Point to work with him to keep a school afloat. He put on outside shows to earn extra cash, borrowed and leased and bought equipment and built what he couldn’t otherwise find, renegotiated and collaborated and asked for help.

“We opened in October of last year doing classes,” he said, and at the time the school had 21 students. It wasn’t nearly enough to make ends meet, but they kept pushing, limping their way through the holidays and into the winter.

Then in February, they held a two-hour cabaret that ran several times over a weekend. They sold 900 tickets. Suddenly it felt like ground may have materialized beneath their feet, however unsteady.

Since then Circus Maine has continued to grow. Tuesday nights are now packed with adult hand balancers (my class) falling out of handstands, a youth tumbling class and a youth trapeze class. Afterward is adult partner acrobatics and an adult tumbling class. The monthly cabarets are filling up. Shows include professional performances, and then students take the stage at intermission to grab their first chance at performing. It has a unique feel, somewhere between a family picnic and a broadway stage performance, like Cirque du Soleil descended on a Fourth of July barbecue.

“People are realizing our potential,” said Oliver. “We were international level spectacle performers. Cory and I are plugged into the source. We’re going to turn Portland into the nexus of new circus in the U.S.”

“But,” he said, “we need to create a solid community of circus artists here first.”

And, as I prepare to flip into one more handstand, that’s how it feels. Cory is across the room now. Mathias, another student in his 30s, is muttering something to himself just to my right. He and I have both flipped upside-down at least 50 times in the last 20 minutes, but neither of us seems able to hold it today. A few feet away high school phenoms Sarah and James are balancing on their hands and doing slow splits, lowering their feet inches off the ground before returning upright. Hugh, whose daughter is in the tumbling class, is on the mat flipping up into Cory’s assistant Sierra’s waiting hands. Hugh’s still working on finding his balance point, but he’s gotten much stronger. Kirsten and Ian are flipping on their own, legs waving in the air before they tumble, and Cory is striding between all of us barking instructions: “Tighten up! Point your toes! Hollowbody! Hollowbody! Squeeze your butt! Push! Push! Push!”

And of course, “Just don’t fall!”

But we all know, at Circus Maine it’s safe to fall.

This story appeared in today’s Portland Phoenix.

CDS Column: We the People

I was listening to a radio program in the car this past weekend. The subject was A.I. — artificial intelligence, computers with the capacity for thought and reason and the analytic power to surpass us a thousand-fold. The commentator was saying something about how the most important development we could engineer into artificial intelligence would be safeguards to ensure A.I. maintains moral behavior even as its abilities outpace our own. That was a prerequisite, he said, the only thing that could make artificial intelligence viable.

It sounded like a great idea. But we humans have a knack for creating things outside of our control. Take money, for example. How many lives does money rule? How many people think they never have enough, that they spend all their time chasing it and it just goes on outpacing them, never quite allows them to sit quiet? The next job might finally be enough, maybe. Just a little more work will make ends finally meet.

Money didn’t exist before us. It’s a thing humans imagined into being, and now it runs lives. It transformed from being a helpful means to facilitate the exchange into something that keeps people in a race no one wins. How did that switch happen? When did it occur? Was it always that way, or did that relationship develop over time?

Regardless, the scorecard begins: Humans, 0; our creations, 1.

Then there’s religion: Ostensibly a celebration of our existence on Earth and the unexplainable power we call God (whatever version), religion is not only a foundation for kindness, generosity and warmth but also for exclusion, hatred and genocide. Regardless of your thoughts on God, we humans created religion. And somehow we allowed it to take control of our morality and bend it to terrible purposes. The Westboro Baptist Church reads the same Bible as millions of peaceful Christians. ISIS reads the same Quran as millions of peaceful Muslims. The Catholic Church has a history of atrocious acts dating back hundreds of years. Countless wars have religious roots, as did slavery. Yes, religion does wonderful things — just look around at the holiday spirit surrounding us today, the food pantries and the charitable organizations founded in its name — but here again, one of our creations has grown beyond our control, spurring us to do terrible things.

Again: Humans, 0; our creations, 2.

And then there is government, another of our creations. This is the one that makes me laugh most. “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union …” In a moment of sheer brilliance, a group of rich, white, land-owning men crafted a country from thin air. There was no history, no common heritage to justify bonds of nationalism, and the original ties were both tentative and exclusionary — they left out women, the country’s native inhabitants and millions of slaves. Imperfect foundations to be sure, but there was something in the seed of that idea.

And that seed grew. The restrictions dissolved slowly, first for white non-landowners. Then slaves became human. Then women became voters. Then black citizens earned “equality.”

Clearly, this is among the least-nuanced American history ever put in print, but the original brilliance of America’s founding ideas were not bound to themselves. They had capacity for expansion, to grow as America’s definition of its people grew. The country was as resilient as the people who lived inside its borders.

Something great happened here, something unique. We are the inheritors of that legacy.

But then we get to the tricky task of governance, the implementation of these brilliant ideas. Today, we live in an age of dwindling trust, where the people and Washington sit on opposite sides of a chess match.

But this is an illusion. Government, like money and religion, is something we conjured. It grew from our hands, and it cannot grow bigger than us. It is an instrument created by men, designed (in our case) to be wielded by its citizens. If we have lost trust in it, it means we have lost trust in ourselves.

Government has the power to oppress us only when we let it go to seed, when we forget it is ours, borne from us, an extension as our rights as citizens, rights we named for ourselves. Its power is derived from our willingness to come together collectively, our agreeing to “form a more perfect union,” and that perfection is a reflection of our vision. “Live Free or Die” is a mantra as communal as it is libertarian, for example, our collective agreement to use government to protect our individual rights.

So what is broken government? The fetid mess that is Washington is nothing more than our willingness to allow something we were entrusted to run wild. We are essentially bad dog owners, the kind that ought to leash their pets but don’t. Who besides us let Washington run free?

We are “the People.” We came together to form this union. It has the power over us that we give it. And yet somehow we’ve fallen into a narrative where the great American experiment in democratic rule has grown beyond our power to control. We must “starve the beast,” “clear the swamp,” to combat a government gone feral.

Such claims are hollow. They pawn blame onto the spectre of “government” without taking on the responsibility of our part in creating it. If “government is broken” then the blame rests with ourselves.

The truth is managing a country of 330 million is hard. It is complex and messy. Government isn’t broken, it’s just tired of been ignored. It runs wild only out of ignorance, not malice. It needs a willing master dedicated to training it, and that master is us.

We, the people, we form this union. The sooner we stop running away from that fact the better. We’re the best safeguard this government’s got.

This column appeared in today’s Conway Daily Sun.

CDS Column: Conway Daily Firestarter

Do you know of Friendsgiving? It comes once a year, and it’s a holiday that serves as refuge from family holiday drama. It’s traditional observance is a day or two after Thanksgiving, and it looks a lot like Thanksgiving only calmer.

Mine came on Friday this year. I went to the house of close friends and gorged myself on turkey pot pie, turkey soup, cooked carrots, brussel sprouts and a host of other leftovers that littered the kitchen. Some of us finished a Halloween puzzle while others watched Roger Moore race across the TV, jumping speedboats and judo chopping as James Bond. The kids ran around wild-eyed, and after dinner a handful of us pulled out musical instruments for a jam session. It was what the holidays are supposed to be, with more relaxed laughter than Thanksgiving, among chosen-family not just blood relatives.

About halfway through dinner the host’s sister flashed me a smile. “I hated your column the other day,” she said as she spooned soup into a bowl. “You totally missed the point. It was bad enough that I got mad at you, and I haven’t read any of your stuff since.”

I laughed. “At least you read it,” I said. “Which one was it?”

“I don’t remember,” she replied. “But I hated it. I stopped reading after that. At this point it’s been a little while.”

We eventually sorted out the offending piece was one I wrote prior to the election. It was about locker room talk and how male culture looks at sex. I’d missed an opportunity to talk about power dynamics and the nature of sexual assault, she said. I’d totally blown it. She was calm and articulate as she explained, and all her points were valid.

“I can see that,” I said, nodding as she talked. “Yeah.”

That is one of my favorite parts about writing for a small town paper — walking into International Mountain Equipment or Front Side Grind or the North Conway post office or any of my other usual stops and having people pull me aside.

“I read your piece in the paper the other day,” is how the conversation usually starts, and from that launch point it can go anywhere. Some people love it: “Best thing you’ve written!” they’ll say. Others hate it: “Why did you even write about that?” Some point out points I didn’t have space for. Others point out points I’d never thought of. All of it is lively discussion, usually with a handshake to start and a laugh or two over the course of conversation regardless of its beginning.

There is something about writing for a small newspaper in a small town that keeps you honest. There is no avoiding your neighbors, and your neighbors are your readers. If I write something a reader doesn’t like that reader may very well see me in Hannaford, or Cranmore, or out to dinner. There is no anonymity.

I remember being a kid and going to the grocery store with my dad. We lived in a small town on the Maine coast, and he always used shopping visits as a time to catch up with people. I would stand there bored as he blabbed on, me nagging and pulling at his hand.

Now when I walk through the grocery store I’m twice the offender my dad was: I slowly make my way between handshakes and cart conversations, maybe chatting with friends but more likely getting “feedback” on some piece I’ve written.

And I love it. It’s the point of the writing, the stories, of having something to say. I have reporter friends who have realized they have to avoid the grocery store all together if they ever want to make it home for dinner.

At the outset of any conversation I am almost always driving blind. A reader has something to say, but I don’t know what piece of writing they’re talking about. After a while they all blend together, and sometimes I forget what I just wrote, much less what ran two months ago. But usually my interlocutor can navigate me to the point I was making. Other times I just do my best to carry my side of the conversation despite being totally lost. Tricky business, but oh well.

Other times the notes arrive as emails rather than in person. The feeling is still the same: “You read it? Thank you, thank you, thank you!” I’m not sure why I’m always surprised, but I am. I’m also grateful.

One occasional commenter is another Sun columnist, and no matter what his emails say I take it as the highest compliment. He could have read and then stuffed the Sun in his wood stove. So many of us do. But he didn’t. He thought it worth a word.

Again, honored.

THAT is part of what makes writing worthwhile. Writers write for readers as much as we write for ourselves. I write columns about politics, economics and social issues because I want our community (and our state, and our country) to be its best. They are not meant to chide or lambaste, but to elevate. Maybe my ideas aren’t always complete, and maybe sometimes my thinking is downright wrongheaded (as my Friendsgiving friend gently explained), but they are intended to be sparks, little flashes that light conversations. And hopefully those conversations continue at work, at the grocery store, around the holiday table. They get people talking about issues, sharing diverging viewpoints, debating, discussing. It becomes a conversation between neighbors, community members, people who don’t see eye-to-eye but otherwise believe the person they’re talking to is reasonable, smart, engaged.

People call us the Conway Daily Firestarter. They say it for all the wood stoves we fill. Yes, that may be true. But those aren’t our only sparks.

And again, as always, thank you for reading.

This column ran in today’s Conway Daily Sun.