The Utne Spectator / Invasion of the Watermelons
Morrison, Micah
THE UTNE SPECTATOR INVASION OF THE WATERMELONS Minneapolis I is been called "the left-wing Read- er'ss Digest," and Eric Utne's idea of publishing "the best of the alternative press" six times a...
...A t the most emblematic of the weekend's panels, reporters and editors addressed "Challenges and Limits of Advocacy Journalism...
...You're not a conservative," facilitator Victoria MacDonald told me as I left, "you're a coyote...
...That's my subversive mission...
...Five plenary sessions examined environmental and communications strategies...
...A libertarian told me that the radicalism represented by Lerner and the others was a matter of some uneasiness on the environmentalist scene...
...Michael Lerner, the yarmulke-wearing editor of the lefty Jewish journal Tikkun, working the crowd on the Jewish Sabbath, brought the audience to its feet with an eloquent, angry attack on capitalism and the "irrational by Micah Morrison market forces" at the root of ecological problems...
...And there was a literature table of hallucinatory length, covered with a shifting array of hundreds of pamphlets, print-outs, and magazines...
...The pose that there is "no truth, no objectivity" of course is a deeply fraudulent and cynical one...
...Mark Hertsgaard, a black-clad media critic from Rolling Stone and National Public Radio, agreed that there is no such thing as impartial reporting and modestly noted that "the media is in an absolutely pivotal position in the race to save the planet...
...Can't I be both...
...He is working on a book about the Yellowstone fires and environmental politics for Harper & Row...
...THE UTNE SPECTATOR INVASION OF THE WATERMELONS Minneapolis I is been called "the left-wing Read- er'ss Digest," and Eric Utne's idea of publishing "the best of the alternative press" six times a year has turned out to be one of those simple strokes of magazine genius...
...All the panelists, again with the possible exception of the man from Time, clearly had a very high opinion of themselves and their mission...
...The attempt to shape a coherent strategy met, as usual, with little success, since there is a huge worm turning inside the apple of American leftism...
...48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1990...
...The tone of the weekend was set by Ralph Nader in a luncheon address entitled "Media and the Solar Age," in which he lamented the conservative bent of the Washington Post, described a "decentralized" form of solar energy fueling America, and sketched anew his paranoid vision of vastly evil corporate manipulation of society and the planet...
...All pretense to fairness and honest reporting was thrown out the window...
...Lerner's fevered performance, and the audience's reaction to its implicit violence, reminded me of my old acquaintance, the lunatic Israeli, Rabbi Meir Kahane...
...What the left means is: we are in possession of the truth, and everything else is a tissue of lies...
...This seems to be the recipe for the success of the Utne Reader, too: a witty mix of oddball items, news-youcan-use, liberal pieties, plus a dose of hard-left politics...
...Micah Morrison is TAS 's roving correspondent...
...The central assumption: The End is Near...
...The planet is at the end of the rope...
...The energy was impressive, as were the flashes of wit and fun...
...Ted Turner's CNN emissaries were, as they say, a major presence...
...Not only was the sky falling in and the planet careening toward de"struction—yesteryear's imminent peril of nuclear war having been neatly swapped for today's imminent environmental catastrophe—but the real problems were capitalism, racism, classism, bourgeois consumption of material goods, apathy and ignorance...
...They're called watermelons," the libertarian said of Lerner...
...Unfortunately, that's not the kind of story you'll read about in the Utne Reader...
...I want to be the little subversive person in television...
...There is no such thing as objective reporting," said Boston Globe reporter Dianne Dumanoski, to general agreement...
...Nation editor Victor Navasky was there, as was self-styled "Texas populist" Jim Hightower, futurist Hazel Henderson, President Lester Brown of Worldwatch Institute, Berkeley city council member Nancy Skinner, and a host of advanced jedi from such starships as Greenpeace, Earth First!, Rainforest Action Network, and the Sierra Club...
...Debate ranged from the apocalyptic to the anguished and the absurd...
...Yippie anarchist gazetteer Paul Krassner was there...
...From May 17 to May 20, here in the heartland, Utne orchestrated the "Early Warnings" conclave, billed as the "first gathering of the global alternative press" for "an international conference on media and the environment...
...Nader was nonetheless full of pep, having emerged from "the Dark Ages" of the Reagan years to continue the battle against "increasingly homicidal institutions...
...Captain Ecology was there, in a green frog suit and cape...
...The people, in short, are stupid and must be led by the noble advocacy journalists of the left...
...As to the dreams of the left, the only way the environmental movement will hit the critical mass lusted after by the attendees—that state of grace located in an almost entirely mythic version of the 1960s—will be if the United States suffers an ecological disaster of the magnitude and drama of Chernobyl...
...There were, everyone agreed, not enough "people of color" there, but there was a computer room for exercises in networking and there was, courtesy of conference attendee cable-TV channel VH-1, an eco-action music video featuring prophets Oliver Stone, Martin Sheen, and Jackson Browne...
...The Utne Reader is wildly successful, and Utne himself continues to demonstrate that he has his finger near the weird pulse of liberal-leftism...
...The central question confronting the gathering: Is the "mainstream media," also known as the "corporate media," an ally or an enemy...
...I am a tree, my roots are deep," a woman suddenly declared at a workshop, proceeding to tell of her rewarding struggles against chemical dependencies and her trip to Nicaragua...
...The media are enemy and ally...
...In addition, there was nothing really "global" about this event—the collapse of Communism was the Great Unmentioned—and it was dominated by incessant attempts to cement the environmental movement to every cause the left has championed...
...With the exception of Time's science editor Charles Alexander—cast as the apologetic liberal, browbeaten by the panel, and at one point shouted down by the audience for daring to suggest that the media have not undergone quite the "corporate consolidation" the gathering assumed—the assembled journalists espoused an aggressive left-wing agenda...
...Eric Utne's weekend in Minneapolis turned out to be another attempt by the left to devise strategies to broaden the environmental movement and bully its liberal media cousins into submission...
...Out on the fringes of the environmental movement, there are eco-terrorists who would not shrink at such a scenario...
...I do have an axe to grind," said Barbara Pyle of CNN...
...Greer' on the outside, red on the inside...
...We are running out of time," said Barbara Pyle, Turner Broadcasting System Vice-President for Environmental Policy and CNN Environmental Editor...
...A sampling: High Country News, Liberation News Service, Hazardous Waste News, Vegetarian Times, Family Circle, Giaologues, Hemp for Ecology, Animals' Agenda, and mypersonal favorite, Nude & Natural, featuring environmentally aware naked bowling...
...Facilitators" from the Council of All Beings were there and gave your correspondent a briefing on engaged Buddhism, meditative transfer to states of flora and fauna, and the growing New Age eco-religion of Gaia, a form of earth worship...
...Flocking to the Twin Cities were some 300 environmental activists of moderate and radical stripes, graying illuminati from the sixties, New Age types, journalists, editors, plus a sprinkling of freelance troublemakers, artists, masseuses, and the marginally sane...
...Twenty-three workshops probed ecoactivism in the media, on the land, and in the body politic...
...I've become even more crafty about finding the voices to say the things I think are true...
Vol. 23 • July 1990 • No. 7
