Washington has changed in the last few years, our national politics has, and not for the better. We got a full-blown demonstration last month with the debt ceiling/debt reduction fight.There are at least three ways our politics have changed.1. Republicans. Republicans used to be the party of restraint: Slow down; think again; reconsider. They played a constructive role. After the New Deal and the Fair Deal, we had the genuinely conservative presidency of Dwight Eisenhower, which slowed the growth of government and was in some ways more skeptical of foreign entanglements than the presidencies of Truman or Kennedy.The GOP is no longer the party of restraint but of stop, block and knock down.We have gone from Bob Taft, who advocated national health insurance, and Ike, who won a world war and built the federal highway system, to wreckers like Rand Paul and Eric Cantor.There are still a few Eisenhower and Taft Republicans around, but their voices have been muted. They have been driven into the hills.The debt deal, which is only a beginning and far from perfect but is amazingly better than the ugly process that produced it, was passed by moderate Republicans and moderate Democrats, but it was shaped by Tea Party Republicans. They then voted against the legislation that they helped produce. That’s how fundamentally uninterested they are in government and legislating.Barry Goldwater was a legislator. The Tea Party Republicans are not Goldwater Republicans but nihilists, pure and simple — wreckers who don’t know how to build and have no interest in building.If you doubt they have taken over the national party, consider that Mitt Romney came out against the debt deal. His alternative to default? Zip. His own alternative debt reduction plan? Nada.The Republicans are not what they once were. And we have lost something important.2. The press. The national press has also changed. Indeed, it is no longer called the press, or “the working press,” as it sometimes was, but the media.The press informed.Sometimes it educated.The media distracts and entertains with reality TV news.TV journalism is a joke — a combination of gossip and shout-fest. There is no Edward R. Murrow, no Eric Sevareid. No one even a little like them. Just Keith Olberman yelling. And Bill O’Reilly yelling louder.Instead of the sober, rational and calm Huntley and Brinkley, we have Wolf Blitzer in a perpetual whirl of hyperventilation.We have traded Walter Lippmann’s thought for Maureen Dowd’s archness.National commentary is mostly about style and impressions today. The pursuit is not of insight but a clever putdown — a one-liner that will be repeated at cocktail parties.Ask yourself: Do I ever learn anything from Dowd or Peggy Noonan? Is there ever a new fact or a fresh line of reasoning presented?Instead, we have an ongoing review of a high school dance. Frank Rich was a theater critic and that is how he writes about Washington — as a reviewer reacting to performance, not as an analyst struggling for understanding.There are exceptions: The Financial Times is a great newspaper, and Nicholas Kristof at The New York Times is an honest journalist who both teaches and seeks. Jay Newton Small at Time actually understands Congress and attempts heroically to cover it. Ezra Klein at the Washington Post digs deep into budgets and fiscal policy.But our journalism is being overcome by gossip and prejudice.3. Respect. There is less and less respect in our politics, as in our society, and that is a devastating change.Students commonly curse their teachers, and on the floor of the House of Representatives, as well as on op-ed pages, it is acceptable to deride the president of the United States.Washington was once a place of giant ghosts, and, occasionally, giant men. Those men had deep reverence for the buildings, monuments, heritage and folkways that preceded and would outlast them in that city. They respected the office, if not the man. They respected each other.One doubts that Lyndon B. Johnson would have refused to take a phone call from President Eisenhower.Everett Dirksen (who helped LBJ pass the great civil rights legislation) and Jerry Ford led the Republican opposition to John Kennedy and Johnson, but they never attacked either man personally.Mike Mansfield, William Fulbright and Sam Ervin referred to Richard Nixon, whose politics they loathed, as “the president,” and addressed him as “Mr. President.”We used to have respect for institutions in this country. We knew they were not perfect. But today, everything gets a pie in the face, cynicism and a dollop of barstool opinion based on nothing.What makes people feel bad about what we have seen in the in Washington is not the debt deal, but what accompanied it — the gossip, meanness, and disrespect.“Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out,” says the emperor Claudius, in one of Robert Graves’ novels.We have let the poisons hatch out.Now what? Keith C. Burris is editorial page editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.
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Dick Hermans in the Oblong Bookstore on Millerton\u2019s Main Street in 1985.
Provided
For Hermans, the award has prompted some reflection about why he has spent so much of his life involved in community projects.
“I was thinking about it this morning: Why do I do what I do?” he said. “And I think no matter what I’ve done, whether it’s been school board or rail trail, I’m trying to be useful to the communities I’m associated with.”
Hermans is perhaps best known as the longtime co-founder and steward of Oblong Books in Millerton, a business that began almost by accident. He and his former partner, Holly Nelson, were living in Millerton and looking for something to do during the winter. They had been painting houses, including the Grange Hall in Millerton, a job Hermans got through his aunt, who belonged to the Grange.
At the time, Hermans was also working in insurance for his father, doing collections.
“It was fine except I was doing collections, and it really kind of left me cold,” he said.
He and Nelson began thinking about what they might do together. Nelson was an avid reader, while Hermans had studied journalism and had worked in a record store. They noticed a chain of book and record stores operating elsewhere in the Hudson Valley and decided to follow that model.
And so Oblong was born.
Dick Hermans in the Oblong Bookstore on Millerton’s Main Street in 1985.Provided
“We really learned it by the seat of our pants,” Hermans said.
The business would eventually become a beloved and integral part of Millerton’s commercial life. But although Hermans may have learned the book business as he went, his affinity for retail — and for the connections that happen across a counter — had begun much earlier.
As a child, his second-grade teacher operated a little cardboard pencil shop in the classroom, and Hermans still remembers the satisfaction of selling a pencil for a nickel.
“I really liked selling somebody a pencil for a nickel,” he recalled. “I can remember that experience, and it was so pleasant.”
Later, while living in Arizona, he helped establish a food co-op and worked at the counter.
“I kind of knew that I liked doing that kind of thing,” he said. “It’s a nice way to be pleasant with people, but without making too much commitment to them.”
His relationship with Millerton also predates Oblong. His grandparents lived in the village, and he first came to Millerton as a baby. Over the years, he has watched the town change through several generations.
He remembers a Millerton with a much broader array of businesses, when stores such as Delson’s, the Main Street department store that stood for nearly 40 years in what is now Millerton’s Antiques Center, seemed to carry almost everything a resident might need.
“You could find everything from a set of dishes to a shotgun,” he recalled.
The rise of shopping malls changed that kind of downtown retail, he said, but Millerton has remained a lively commercial village.
“For us, it’s been a great place to have business,” Hermans said. “It’s a busy village.”
For Hermans, running a store was never simply about selling books and records. It was a way of being part of a place.
Music has remained another constant. Hermans continues to sell music at Oblong and hosts the radio program “New Harmony” on WKZE. The business of selling music has changed dramatically over the years, particularly with the rise of streaming, but Hermans has adapted.
He was initially reluctant to bring vinyl records back into the store because of their expense. But about four or five years ago, he began stocking LPs again, and they have become the main form of music the store sells.
He finds that many of the customers buying them are reconnecting with music they loved years ago.
“I do best with classic albums that people may have had when they were young,” he said. “And now that they’re retired, they want to hear it again.”
Hermans still reviews between 700 and 1,200 new music releases each week through the store’s distributor, Alliance Entertainment, carefully deciding what belongs on Oblong’s shelves.
That same commitment to place has led Hermans into a wide range of community projects. His work with the Harlem Valley Rail Trail is among the efforts he mentions when reflecting on his years of civic involvement. He has also served on the school board and has been involved with the Millerton Business Alliance and the Irondale Schoolhouse. He is now involved with The New Pine Plains Herald, which he sees as complementary to the work of The Millerton News and The Lakeville Journal.
“I really think that the important thing about this award is that people understand what a newspaper does to connect them to their community,” he said. “And if that means anything to their lives, they gotta support it.”
Hermans knew Mary Lou and Robert Estabrook and remembers them as people who were deeply conscious of their responsibilities to the community.
“They were really nice folks,” he said. “They were very conscious of what their role in the community was.”
There is, in fact, still plenty on his plate. Hermans admits he needs to scale back because he has taken on more than his current abilities can comfortably accommodate.
“To be given this award is very special,” he added. “But I don’t feel like I’m done.”
This article has been changed to reflect that Hermans and Nelson were partners. A prior version states that they were married.
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Adamah Farm crew members planning out the day’s tasks on a late September day.
Janna Siller
Over my 15 years of growing vegetables in Falls Village, I’ve exerted my will over all kinds of conditions, from drought to humidity to crows with a taste for cantaloupe. That’s what farming is all about. You zip around the field, hopping on and off tractors, moving hoses and chasing weeds, all in an effort to arrange conditions in favor of your crops. It is the crops’ job to gulp up sunlight and move water through their stems, to transform solar energy into your next pesto or ratatouille or butternut squash soup. It is the job of the farmer to irrigate just enough but not too much, to slice dandelion leaves without damaging delicate cabbage roots, to pander and pamper and stay in tune with what plants need to thrive.
The easy part of farming is trusting plants’ resilience. I have seen bright green shoots barrel ahead out of a plant torn to shreds by hail. I’ve watched wilty, heat-stressed seedlings turn rigid overnight and greet the next morning with vigor. The hard part is letting go of what you can’t control. As our crops lapped up Friday’s gentle sunshine and I considered the weekend forecast, I imagined roots holding tight to wet earth and branches supporting each other in sideways, pelting rain. I made sure all of our storage crops were already harvested and tucked away. I battened down the sides of our greenhouses and wished the remaining field crops good luck.
The nor’easter didn’t materialize too dramatically in our corner of New England. A few broken branches and debris blown about, nothing like the July Fourth storm that sent half a tree crashing onto the deer fence and left crates of fresh veggies in coolers without power.
Fall storage crop harvests amid soil building cover crops at Adamah Farm in Falls Village. Janna Siller
Farming is an exercise in acceptance. To do it well and return year after year, you have to balance hubris and humility. The prize can often be a certain equanimity, a training in the art of moving into the next day even when the last one scrambled all your plans.
Epic change is not always about the unexpected. It also comes like clockwork on the seasonal calendar. As I type, the last of summer’s watermelons wait naively on the vine for a few hot days to finish ripening. Broccoli are holding their leaves wide as they did in June and July, only to find that the hours of sunlight decrease with each earlier sunset. Plants can’t pick up and go south or call the manager to order a bonus round of sunshine. Their growth slows and they get a resigned look to the hue of their leaves, so different from the frenzied growth of summer.
The release of fall is not tragic or gloomy. It is not an ending because so many fall tasks are about setting up for the new beginnings in spring.
We turn the vines that yielded thousands of pounds of fruit into the soil, where healthy microbes feast on their rotting stems. Then we plant cover crops — a mix of cereal grains like rye and oats and legumes like peas, vetch and clover. Cover crops hold the soil and its nutrients in place over winter, feeding the soil food web and adding organic matter that next season’s crops will need to grow.
We sort sprinklers and repair hoses. We inventory tarps. We take notes about which plants did well where and how we might try a new approach for this or that. We stack crates of cured garlic and onions and winter squash in a cool, dark room.
We save seeds from tomatoes and beans and lettuce, carefully labeling each variety for next season’s long, sunny days.
Janna Siller is the farm director at Adamah, a community farm in Falls Village offering CSA shares, educational programs and a food access program.
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