The tumultuous managerial shake-up at National Public Radio headquarters for trivial verbal miscues once again has highlighted the ludicrous corporatist right-wing charge that public radio and public TV are replete with left-leaning or leftist programming.Ludicrous, that is, unless this criticism’s yardstick is the propaganda regularly exuded by the extreme right-wing Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. These “capitalists” use the public’s airwaves free of charge to make big money.The truth is that the frightened executives at public TV and radio have long been more hospitable to interviews with right-of- center or extreme right-wing and corporatist talking heads than liberal or progressive guests.PBS’s Charlie Rose has had war-loving William Kristol on 31 times, Henry Kissinger, 55 times, Richard Perle, 10 times, the global corporatist cheerleader Tom Friedman, 70. Compare that guest list with Rose’s interviews of widely published left-of-center guests — Noam Chomsky, two times, William Grieder, two times, Jim Hightower, two times, Charlie Peters, two times, Lewis Lapham, three times, Bob Herbert, six times, Paul Krugman, 21 times, Victor Navasky, one time and Mark Green, five times. Sy Hersh, once a frequent guest, has not been on since January 2005.Dr. Sidney Wolfe, the widely quoted super-accurate drug industry critic, who is often featured on the commercial TV network shows, has never been on Rose’s show. Nor has the longtime head of Citizens for Tax Justice and widely respected progressive tax analyst, Robert McIntyre.Far more corporate executives, not known for their leftist inclinations, appear on Rose’s show than do leaders of environmental, consumer, labor and poverty organizations.In case you are wondering, I’ve appeared four times, but not since August 2005, and not once on the Terry Gross radio show.The unabashedly progressive Bill Moyers show is off the air and has not been replaced. No one can charge PBS’s “News Hour” with Jim Lehrer with anything other than very straightforward news delivery, bland opinion exchanges and a troubling inclination to avoid much reporting that upsets the power structures in Congress, the White House, the Pentagon or Wall Street.The longest running show on PBS was hard-line conservative William F. Buckley’s show — “Firing Line” — which came on the air in 1966 and ended in 1999.Sponsorship by large corporations, such as Coca Cola and AT&T, have abounded — a largesse not likely to be continued year after year for a leftist media organization.None of this deters the Far Right that presently has a majority in the House of Representatives to defund the $422 million annual appropriation to the umbrella entity — the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). About 15 percent of all revenues for all public broadcasting stations comes from this congressional contribution.Though he admits to liking National Public Radio, conservative columnist David Harsanyi said there is no “practical argument” left “in the defense of federal funding … in an era of nearly unlimited choices.”Really? Do commercial radio stations give you much news between the Niagara of advertisements and music? Even the frenetic news, sports, traffic and weather flashes, garnished by ads, are either redundant or made up of soundbytes (apart from the merely two minutes of CBS radio news every half-hour). If you want serious news, features and interviews on the radio, you go to public radio or the few community and Pacifica radio stations.Harsanyi continues: “Something, though, seems awfully wrong with continuing to force taxpayers who disagree with the mission — even if their perceptions are false — to keep giving.”Public radio’s popular “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered” are the most listened to radio shows after Rush Limbaugh’s, and any taxpayer can turn them off. Compare the relatively small public radio and TV budget allocations with the tens of billions of dollars each year — not counting the Wall Street bailout — to subsidize greedy, mismanaged, corrupt or polluting corporations either directly in handouts, giveaways and guarantees or indirectly in tax escapes, bloated contracts and grants. Can the taxpayer turn them off?Here is a solution that will avoid any need for congressional contributions to CPB. The people own the public airwaves. They are the landlords. The commercial radio and TV stations are the tenants that pay nothing for their 24-hour use of this public property. You pay more for your auto license than the largest television station in New York pays the Federal Communications Commission for its broadcasting license — which is nothing. It has been that way since the 1927 and 1934 communication laws.Why not charge these profitable businesses rent for use of the public airwaves and direct some of the ample proceeds to nonprofit public radio and public TV as well as an assortment of audience controlled TV and radio channels that could broadcast what is going on in our country locally, regionally, nationally and internationally?Now that would be a worthy program for public broadcasting. Get Limbaugh’s and Hannity’s companies off welfare. (Want to guess what their listeners think about corporate welfare?) Consumer advocate and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader grew up in Winsted and is a graduate of The Gilbert School.
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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 first wife, 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.”
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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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