January|February 2003

FOREST VS. RAINBOW

When I agreed to help Megan Twohey with her story about the 2002 Rainbow Gathering in Michigan ("After the Rainbow," September | October 2002), I was hoping for lucid reportage on the civil rights and policy controversies swirling around this event. But that didn't happen.

Instead, the piece took the low road, leaning on hippie-dippie caricatures and druggie slurs, portraying the gathering as a big, spaced-out disco in the woods and disregarding its meaning as a spiritual pilgrimage and social experiment. The blithely gullible article devolved into a "he said, she said" crosstalk more befitting a tabloid than a serious magazine.

First things first: "The Rainbow Family" does not exist, in fact or theory. The term is exploited by the Feds to imply that some aggregate "group" entity convenes or comprises the gathering. But there is none—it's just unconnected folks who show up. This is not an arcane distinction; it has everything to do with the nature of consensual assembly, and this right as a personal guarantee under the Constitution.

Parroting the official posture of the U.S. Forest Service, Ms. Twohey reported that the site of last year's gathering surrounded "a 19th-century ghost town that contains delicate archaeological specimens." But the site is no "ghost town," with old buildings and relics subject to archaeological harm—it's just a wooded landscape with buried foundations, overgrown railroad grade, and a few "artifacts," mostly left over from the logging that took place there long after the town was abandoned and demolished.

Among other complaints, Forest Service officials alleged that there was on-site water pollution. In fact, it was the Forest Service's closing of the area that increased water and health risks, forcing camps from higher ground and suitable soils to the damp clay swales east of the river. Gatherers fixed the few problem spots and left the site clean, restored, and recovering by late July, as always. By definition, transient or marginal effects are not "environmental damage."

Clearly these are loaded issues of public law worthy of scholarly revelation—not glib condescension from a reporter who breezed through for a few days and left without the story. The piece offered no insights into this revived folk tradition of gathering on the land, nor was there any scrutiny of the policy questions raised by the actions of the Forest Service.

This story didn't end in July. It has continued unfolding in the court cases that came as a result of last year's Gathering, cases that will define it in the years to come. A need remains for good journalism on these matters.

Scottie Addison
Coordinator, PCU/Free Assembly Project
St. Louis, Mo.


ALL'S QUIET

In her article "Sounding Off" (November | December 2002), Emily Bazelon "startles" too easily. What's really startling isn't that Judge John T. Noonan Jr. sounds off in his latest book Narrowing the Nation's Power, but that he is almost alone among today's federal judiciary in doing so. There should be more in the bar and on the bench who are willing to trust their own logic and write their own history.

J. Scott Merritt Jr.
Kansas City, Mo.