For the week of August 8 - 14, 2001

Full cost of Rainbow Gathering unknown

Commentary by PAT MURPHY

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Those who dutifully buy annual Forest Service trailhead passes for entering public lands should be enraged by the slovenly conduct of the Rainbow Family’s 20,000-member "Gathering" in Boise National Forest last month.

Not only did they not have a permit as thee and me are required, but they left behind an unspeakable mess for others to pick up and to pay for.

I chatted with Boise National Forest district ranger Walt Rogers on Monday, and he has no idea on the final costs to Idaho, to Boise and Valley counties and to the federal government for repairing damage and cleaning up litter left behind.

Some of Cache Meadow may require years to return to normal, Rogers said.

I’ll guess the Rainbow People left hundreds of thousands of dollars in cleanup costs, plus other incalculable environmental damage.

Worse, there seems to be no present way of preventing this mob of rabble from storming onto public lands and wantonly damaging the environment they claim to worship, nor is there any apparent way they can be billed for the damage they create.

Talk about domestic terrorism.

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If all politics are local, as the late Speaker of the U.S. House Tip O’Neill said, then local politics are stronger than loyalty to the national party, as Idaho’s otherwise ardent Republican U.S. Senators Larry Craig and Mike Crapo demonstrate.

They junked party loyalty and sounded like Democrats by accusing Defense chief Donald Rumsfeld of "playing politics" for trying to retire or transfer seven B-1 bombers from Idaho’s Mountain Home Air Force Base.

Craig and Crapo act like stingy, rigid fiscal conservatives at other times. But like most congressmen, they regard shrinking or closing a military base to save money as heresy.

Craig and Crapo know, but won’t admit, that the hapless B-1 Lancer has been a costly, flawed combat aircraft, derisively known as a "hangar queen." The fleet of 93 B-1s has been plagued by design and operational failures that have kept it grounded off and on and out of combat, while the bomber it was to replace, the 50-year-old B-52 Stratofortress, continues as a workhorse.

As long as Sens. Craig and Crapo and others keep the B-1 on life support, and block efforts to reduce the fleet to 60 and/or consolidate squadrons at fewer bases, the U.S. military is denied equivalent funds for more urgent uses.

That doesn’t sound like the wise use of public funds that Craig and Crapo claim is a Republican virtue.

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Civilizations need futurists to peer ahead and prepare society with new ideas. But neither can humankind exist without those who look back.

A friend of 30 years, Walter Mears, who just retired as a vice president of the Associated Press and dean of the AP’s Washington staff, is one such backward-looker: he’s writing a book about the 11 presidential campaigns he’s covered, and how they’ve changed over time.

This is the sort of indispensable history, written by men and women who live it, that provides continuum to our culture’s understanding of its roots and evolution.

Mears and his reporter’s notebooks covering 40 years are gold mines of anecdotes and observations about presidential candidates that will provide generations of Americans for centuries to come with valuable, if not always flattering, facts about key political figures.

Although Mears’ book, due out next year, will be heavy reading for most voters, commentators covering future elections can use it to reflect on how presidential elections have been reduced to slick marketing productions befitting the unveiling of a new automobile.

The Idaho Mountain Express is distributed free to residents and guests throughout the Sun Valley, Idaho resort area community. Subscribers to the Idaho Mountain Express will read these stories and others in this week's issue.