Banishing bloggers

Yes, he could have been more tactful. There are ways to criticize that make the subject of your criticism defensive, and ways that make him or her attentive instead. When Rob Port went beyond documenting conditions he observed on the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation to rip into the character of the people living there, he naturally drew lots of angry rather than thoughtful responses.

But there are effective and ineffective ways to respond to intemperate attacks, too. And I think the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa's chosen response is terribly ineffective. The band has banished blogger Rob from the reservation as a result of his critical article, which appeared first on his sayanythingblog.com Web log and then in a political magazine. By doing so, they've hurt their own cause, because they seem to be responding to a critic not by engaging him but by putting their hands over their ears. That reinforces Port's point, which is that the reservation system on balance seems to do a poor job of solving many problems.

It's the tribal council, not Port, that's taking an action which will be backed up by the power of the police and the threat of arrest. Who is being a bully here?

I like sayanything, especially when it gets into matters of North Dakota politics and draws good back-and-forth comments. I admire (and envy!) Rob's ability to post an average of 10 times a day , every day, for the past several years. I salute his willingness to openly step into the political fray.

That said, here's why I think Rob went too far in his criticisms of the reservation.

First, he paints with too broad a brush. If there's one thing I've learned from Dorreen Yellow Bird, it's that close observations of social problems among Indians -- the high rates of poverty and alcoholism, for example -- ought to be leavened with acknowledgments of the "other half." That is, while it might be true that x percent of Indians are alcoholic, it's also true that 100-minus-x percent are not ... and any fair portrait of conditions ought to describe that.

Here's why, and I'll use an example conservatives know well: Iraq. News stories from Iraq are almost uniformly negative, conservatives complain. That has real and destructive power on the home front, because by neglecting the real progress being made in Baghdad, the Kurdish provinces, Anbar province and so on, the mainstream media shapes public opinion in a powerful and yet fundamentally unfair way.

Et tu, Rob?

Second, if a person truly wants the best for someone else, then they ought to show that by offering their comments in a spirit of respect or even love. Problems of poverty are at least as challenging as problems of overweight. Yet if we want to encourage someone to trim down, do we say, "My God, you're sloppy fat. Get off your lardbutt and hit the pavement"?

Not if we hope for them to heed to our advice, we don't.

Third, I think Rob's wrong to blame welfare for poverty and poor conditions on the reservation. Poverty is a much more complicated, and to see how, just think of Mexico or many other countries in central and south America. There's no welfare there (that I know of), no free health care, no Social Security, etc. Yet the families-living-in-tin-shack poverty is much more shocking and widespread than anything Rob saw at Turtle Mountain.

Besides, even economic theory admits that an absolutely free market will not end poverty.
A free market is a survival-of-the-fittest system, which means it generates abject "losers" as well as billionaire winners. Social Security, etc. are our country's flawed but necessary response, a majority of Americans have decided at the ballot box. The economic trade off is between equality and efficiency; no system devised by man has yet been able to deliver both. At best, we opt for some imperfect blend of the two, because we've collectively judged either extreme to be unacceptable.

Now, ALL OF THAT BEING SAID ...

... I still think the tribal council's response to Rob's criticism was hugely disproportionate and counterproductive. He may have been intemperate in his writing, but the council was thoughtless and heavy-handed in its policy response. That, to me, is the worse offense.

Posted by: tdennis on 5/16/2007 at 11:15 AM | Comments (22) | Permalink