3/12/2005
Just Business, Not Personal
As it turns out, it's personal: (Fairbanks Daily News Miner)
WASHINGTON--Sen. Ted Stevens said the gridlock over oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge has depressed him, a feeling magnified by the growing guilt he feels for accepting the legislation 25 years ago that led to the current stalemate.Senator Stevens is alleged to have pressured the Smithsonian to edit the captions on a photo exhibit depicting ANWR, and to have the exhibit moved to a virtually invisible location in the museum basement. For the record, Stevens denies that he put pressure on the Smithsonian, but since he oversees the Smithsonian on the Senate Rules Committee this is a little hard to swallow.
Stevens, speaking with national reporters at the U.S. Senate's television gallery Friday morning, said the whole situation has him "clinically depressed."
Shortly afterward, he told Alaska reporters that he shouldn't have used that term. He has not been diagnosed by a psychiatrist and is not taking any medication. But he said he has been feeling low enough that he asked his physician about it. He said the doctor told him take some time off.
Smithsonian Secretary Lawrence Small said the exhibit needed to be modified since it amounted to "advocacy," and the Smithsonian doesn't do advocacy. ArcticWildlife.org records this exchange between Senator Durbin and Mr. Small on this point:
Senator Durbin cited a caption from an unrelated exhibit of botanical paintings at the same museum that says a particular plant might become extinct "unless we act now."Update: The more I think about this, the stupider it seems. Using a litmus test of "advocacy" you'd have to conclude that museums everywhere need to be shutdown right away. Take for instance the controversial anti-segregation message the Brown vs. Board of Education exhibit at the American History Museum sends, or the pro-evolution message the dinosaur exhibit at the Natural History Museum gives. Meanwhile, the Holocaust Museum gives off a vibe that must be offensive to holocaust deniers everywhere.
Isn't that advocacy?, Durbin asked.
"That's a statement of fact," Small insisted. The caption didn't say what was endangering the plant or what people should do to preserve it, he said.
Durbin also read a 90-word photo caption from a third exhibit at the museum. Quoting a Kentucky historian, it said mining would leave Appalachia with "dismembered mountains" and said "the corpse of a forest ... will lie buried beneath a wasteland like the world as described in the opening verses of Genesis."
Meanwhile, Durbin said, the Smithsonian concluded that a Banerjee caption about the buff-breasted sandpiper - saying it travels from Argentina to the Arctic and is vulnerable to habitat disturbances - had to go.
Wouldn't it have been more appropriate to give both sides of the debate: Drilling in the Arctic: necessary to keep America safe, or crime against nature? Could it be that the pro-drilling argument is laughably unsound? Could this be less about sound policy and more about a victory dance Republicans want to do in the end zone?
File under: ANWR.
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