NATE SCHWEBER WRITES HOME

Missoula’s Bummer Indian Summer

By Nate Schweber, Unfiltered 9-30-05

It’s been too damn long since I’ve been able to lift my fingers and mush them down on a computer keypad and say anything about what’s going on in Montana.

It’s been that bad.

The psychological burden of such a string of heavy bummer news from the homestate, as well as the federal developments that draw a bead on Montana, is palpable. It can make your brain feel like a grape, squeezed until it bursts.

In no particular order, here's what's got me down.

City councilmembers John Engen and Lou Ann Crowley deserve congratulations for advancing onto the final round of “Who Wants To Be Missoula’s Mayor?� The recount and subsequent five-vote margin between Crowley and third runner up Geoff Badenoch brought back shades of the 2000 presidential election, with a similar “How Long O Lord, How Long?� bummer of an ending. Despite the pathos in that last sentence, I’d be insane not to give a reality check. We love Lou Ann, she kicks ass, and shouldn’t be connected in insinuation with a maroon like Bush. The bummer stems from the fact that the election results – advancing two city council members to contention for the mayor’s job – highlights what was just an incredible bummer about the mayoral election to begin with: it was all inside baseball people. Four out of six candidates were from the city council. Nothing against the city council, but the current crop is the worst in recent memory and respectfully, the idea of one of them advancing to mayor isn’t appealing. Badenoch was the only plausible dark horse in the race, which is both to his credit and to the discredit of all the wackos in Missoula who have no business NOT running for mayor.

So in the end it’s spy vs. spy, and Crowley gets to be the one Engen will beat like a gong in November.

With it’s refreshing focus on practical progressive politics and other issues pertaining to enjoyment, preservation and access to the western countryside that is so inspiring and enchanting, New West hasn’t said anything about the nasty dose of violent crime in Missoula. Neither has anyone else.

Three recent events shook my brain particularly bad. First, in August former UM hoopster Sam Riddle was savagely pistol-whipped. Then last week Kevin Arthur Oldhorn, 20, joined Andrew Greybull, 18, in pleading guilty to beating Steve Rodriguez, 53, and chucking him in the Clark Fork River to die last summer. Oldhorn’s uncle, William John Matt, 34, was already found guilty of the murder in April.

Then, in one of the ugliest stories I can remember, Ben Corbett, a 25-year-old Iraq veteran and newcomer to Missoula who hoped to serve on the police force was stomped and brain damaged on the corner of Broadway and Ryman on Sept. 18. His buddy Tyler Drake had his nose shattered. Ryan Knight and Mila Gergen, both 17, were charged.

All this comes after the ugly April story 18-year-old Fred Wasson, who was allegedly held by John Harvey Komotios while Robert Garner shot him in the head, then left him still breathing under a pile of leaves and brush in Dry Gulch west of Missoula. Wasson died in the hospital after he was found by hikers.

O Lord, here it comes. Missoula didn’t use to be this way. There didn’t used to be crimes by kids this violent and vicious back when I was in high school and Better Than Ezra were on the charts. What’s going on – are kids these days really that hopped up on these new weird drugs we keep hearing about? More importantly, why isn’t anyone talking about it? All this news from Missoula makes me glad I live in New York City where it’s safe.

Meanwhile, Kenneth “Sonny� Martin, a 23-year-old former UM student, is looking at 60 years in the slam for allegedly getting drunk, crashing his Subaru into a pickup truck on Johnson Street on Aug. 30, and killing his two of his three best friends, Trent Kenneth Robinson, 22, and Timothy Seth Mineo, 21. The next day Ben Riley, a 23-year-old who rounded out the quartet of friends, died from an overdose of prescription pain pills. His family says it wasn’t suicide.

The saga of these four friends is a tragedy of Greek proportions. I wonder why the local media hasn't delved deeper into this story.

The tragedy gets worse, if you can imagine, as Martin is the first person in the state to be charged with vehicular homicide, a new law passed by the state legislature in 2005 that replaces the old charge of negligent homicide which would’ve carried a 20 year maximum. Yes, I’ll say it: as if the kid hasn’t suffered enough.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the Montana cult of crime and punishment the state’s most notorious sex addict, Dick Dasen received two, count ‘em TWO, years after being charged with more than a dozen prostitution related offenses. Remember, Dasen pumped thousands, perhaps millions into the Montana meth market via the girls (some allegedly teenagers) he paid to have sex with him (and with each other).

So let’s hypothesize and speculate here: Riddle, Corbett and Drake all get their skulls mashed in and Rodriguez and Wasson get murdered in crimes consistent with an uber-violent a drug like meth. A rich Kalispell pervert whose millions certainly helped the spread of meth (not to mention teenage prostitution) gets two years in the slam, while a 23-year-old kid with a few too many beers and more bad luck than any mortal deserves faces 60 years.

Perhaps justice is as deaf and dumb as it is blind.

Speaking of dumb, Missoula’s county commissioners approved a 109-lot subdivision in Lolo going so far as to tell landowner Paul Rossignol that he couldn’t turn his 8.3 acres into a park, he had to turn it into crappy little houses instead. Forgive me if I sound cynical. There seem to be so few landowners who want to share their land with everybody that it makes my fists clench to know that one who actually wanted to do that was REBUFFED by county commissioners. Is there any hope for the Bitterroot?

Those same commissioners also recently said they were powerless to stop a subdivision at pristine Lindbergh Lake, despite public outcry from 40 Lindbergh Lake residents (a hefty sum for such a small community).

Great. So a landowner says he wants to turn his land into a park and the county commissioners say he has to turn it into a subdivision. Then a huge chunk of a Montana town’s population say they don’t want a subdivision and the county commissioners say they can't do anything to stop it.

Is it just me, or are the county commissioners as pro-subdivision as any body can get?

Things aren’t any less depressing when you lift your gaze from local to national. One good thing about the Montana summer/fall of 2005 is that the fire season, so dreaded up until this point, wasn’t as bad as was feared. Still, instead of scorching the West, global warming took her licks on the gulf coast in the form of a couple king-hell hurricanes.

It was cool that Gov. Brian Schweitzer offered Montana’s aid to Katrina victims less than 24 hours after President Bush offered federal aid for the same thing – which happened about three days after the hurricane actually hit. It wasn’t cool that both of Montana’s senators rebuked Bozeman councilwoman Tracy Velazquez’ idea of sending $4 million earmarked for a parking garage down to the Big Easy. Baucus says the $4 million will create better roads and good jobs for Montanans. Well, it obviously won’t make roads better if it’s going toward a parking garage and what about the notion of sending some of Montana’s workers down to Louisiana so they can earn the $4 million there – I doubt they’d mind missing a little winter (those with families, second jobs or school could stay home and as for the ones eligible to go south: it's not like they will be doing any parking garage construction in Montana for the next six months anyway). Besides if, as Baucus says, Congress will pay for Katrina relief from “uncollected taxes� why not reimburse the parking garage fund from that cash crop after the $4 million has already helped people in the south?

And some people still wonder why the government was criticized in its response to Katrina? One thing’s for damn sure, we wouldn’t have the mess we’ve got down there if BRIAN SCHWEITZER WERE PRESIDENT.

Meanwhile, Baucus was one of the first Senate Democrats to jump on the John Roberts for Supreme Court Justice bandwagon, despite the fact that Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) – a freaking pro-life Democrat – opposed him. Roberts sailed through on Thursday, 78 to 22.

That debacle gives me the fear as to which way Baucus might vote on the scary-as-hell Richard Pombo bill which guts the Endangered Species Act. Pombo’s cynically titled “Threatened and Endangered Species Recovery Act of 2005� takes away habitat protection, exempts pesticides from environmental review, and allows corporations to suck money from the Fish and Wildlife Service’s budget by claiming that they were harmed by endangered species protections. The bill passed through the house 229 to 193 (yes, Denny Rehberg screwed us again) and now goes on to the Senate.

How can political pundits bash their drums about how well the Endangered Species Act is working because the Yellowstone Grizzly population grew by 400 bruins in 30 years and then push to both weaken the Endangered Species Act, and remove those Yellowstone Grizzlies from it to boot? Ye gods, am I really wishing for some freaking Nixonian Republican leadership? He was the one, after all, who enacted this very act that todays' Republicans are gutting.

This is an ugly wrap up to an ugly season in an ugly year in a brutal era of our country’s history, folks. If it wasn’t for a U.S. Forest Service appeals adjudicator overturning timber sales on the Kootenai National Forest on Sept. 28 out of concerns for grizzlies, I might just lose all hope and slit my wrists.

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