Election Day Eve

Posted on November 3, 2020 by Ralph Hanson

As I write this, it’s the night before the completion of one of the the most contentious presidential elections I can remember. Here are a few thoughts to take you through till we know the official results.

It will be a night where we all need patience.  As the AP reports in this story, the television studios will be full of fancy sets and graphics, but it doesn’t change the fact that we are all going to have to wait for ballots to be counted.  And unless it’s a blowout for one candidate or the other, we may have days or even weeks to wait for the results.

Vote counting takes time.  Here’s some great details from journalist Ari Berman (BTW, Ari writes for Mother Jones. He really is “the liberal media” you’ve been warned about):

As singer/actor Leslie Odom Jr. (Burr from Hamilton) sings in this public service announcement, we need to be “willing to wait for it…”

(As a side note, Nebraska, my red state home, does a great job of running elections. We all got postcards well before the election to allow us to request mail-in ballots. We could mail them in or return them to drop boxes. We have easy early in-person voting. And we count early ballots starting the day before the election. Making it easy for people to vote should not be a partisan issue; it’s good civics that we practice here in Nebraska.)

Not knowing who won on election day is more common than knowing, according to presidential historian Michael Beschloss:

President George W. Bush’s first win as president wasn’t settled until Dec. 12, 2000. That was more than a month after election day.

NPR’s Steve Inskeep has good advice to follow before sharing stories on social media that might not be of the highest quality.

One thing you can’t do in this election is vote for the candidate you would want to have a beer with – Neither of them drink.

BTW, Asma Khalid is a great national political correspondent for NPR. Imagine working at the pace she has been … with a baby due in December!

Love or hate Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, she did a great job this election cycle in engaging with young potential voters by doing a video game stream on Twitch.  My friend (and social media guru) Jeremy Littau tells the story with an extended thread:

And finally, there’s a vital national story that just get’s too little coverage as we talk about every last detail of the presidential race:

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Will “Everyone’s Gone to the Movies” be true again?

Posted on October 12, 2020 by Ralph Hanson

Back in May, I wrote a long post about the effects the COVID19 pandemic is having on the movie and movie theater industries.

The short version?

It’s a disaster. Theaters stayed closed for months and movie producers have had to either hold onto their new films (James Bond No Time to Die), go to premium video on demand (Disney’s live-action Mulan) or go straight to streaming as a way of bringing in new customers (Disney+ and the Hamilton movie).

The one big-deal movie to get a general theatrical release in the United States is Christopher Nolan’s big-budget time-travel/spy movie Tenet.

Let’s just say the release has not gone particularly well.  Made on a budget of $200 million, Tenet has made $45 million in the US and $262 million internationally. And it’s not because people aren’t interested in seeing it – they’re just not ready, at least in most of the US, to out to the movies.

I went to see Tenet at my local theater last Sunday at a 1 p.m. matinee.  I figured it would be reasonably safe given that I was expecting only sparse attendance at that time for a movie that had been in theaters for a month.  I was correct.  There were about 7 people total at the screening in a mid-sized theater at my local multiplex.

It was great fun to go see my first movie in a theater since probably February of this year.  Popcorn, a Diet Pepsi, and a darkened theater with a bigger than life movie.  Admittedly, it was not the same as going to Council Bluffs to see the latest Nolan release at the IMAX theater as I had been hoping to back in December, but it was still a lot of fun. (And to be honest – I liked Dunkirk at the IMAX a lot more than I would have liked Tenet there.)

But overall, things are not looking good for the movie industry.

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Regal Cinemas, our second largest movie theater chain, are closing down all of their US theaters:

And Denis Villeneuve’s version of Dune has now been delayed until fall of 2021.

Less disappointing to me is the news that Jurassic World: Dominion has now been delayed from 2021 to 2022 to make room for the 2020 movies that will be hopefully screening in 2021.

Note: This blog post has been sitting unfinished for the last week.  This tweet from Stephen King prompted me to go ahead and post it.

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Fighting Against “Fake News” with the Truth Sandwich

Posted on September 29, 2020 by Ralph Hanson

This week my media literacy class is working on the concept of fake news.  I’m having them take a look at the history of how both the concept and term have been used over the last several centuries.

Aside from the belief that respected news organizations routinely publishing false stories, I believed that the biggest problem we have with fake news is when our news media report on issues where someone is being deceptive, but the news outlet propagates the lie in the headline or lede of the story.

Take this tweet as an example from the fact-checking site Snopes.

The tweet is sharing an article from Snopes that debunks a photo and story circulating on Twitter that falsely claims that current mail-in ballots are being tossed into a California land-fill.

The tweet is actually quite good, stating:

“The items shown in the photographs were not ballots, were not from 2020, and were not illegally discarded.”

That’s how you should do it – give the debunking, then show the lie.

But the actual story on Snopes is not as good.  Instead, it goes with a clickbaity headline that perpetuates the falsehood with a question rather than dismissing it with a statement:

Were These Mail-In Ballots Discovered in a California Landfill?

People who only see the headline and don’t followup with the story could view this as evidence that mail-in ballots actually are being thrown out in California.

They are not. The photo actually shows empty envelopes from the 2018 election being properly disposed of after the election.

See what I did here?

I just built a truth sandwich – Truth on top, the deception in the middle, and the truth repeated at the end.

Journalism professor and media critic Jay Rosen has been pushing hard on the truth sandwich concept:

  1. State what is true.
  2. Report that a false or dubious claim has been made. (But only if it’s newsworthy, meaning important for the public to know it happened. Otherwise use silence.)
  3. Repeat what the actual truth is.

Here’s the extended Twitter thread from May of this year by Dr. Rosen on the topic:

The "truth sandwich" method for reporting false or dubious claims

Click on this tweet to read Dr. Rosen’s full thread on the truth sandwich.

So, the lesson from this for you, my dear readers, is to always use the truth sandwich in your own social media feeds:

  1. Tell the truth
  2. Explain the deception
  3. Repeat the truth.

 

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When Respected News Media Turn Zombie

Posted on September 23, 2020 by Ralph Hanson
Tales of the Zombie comic cover

Please note this is magazine about zombies, not a zombie magazine.

Earlier this week I recorded a short video for my media literacy class explaining why this would be the last semester I’m teaching a unit on magazines.  The industry, basically, is dying.

It was a difficult decision to remove the magazine chapter from the upcoming eighth edition of Mass Communication: Living in a Media World, but it is clear that much of the old magazine industry is dying. Former magazine giant Time Inc. has been sold by WarnerMedia, with some titles being eliminated and the flagship Time magazine sold off to an individual investor. It was becoming problematic trying to keep the chapter up-to-date with every month bringing news that another publication had gone digital-only or been discontinued completely.

Much of the material about how magazines influence our culture has found its way into other chapters. This has made room for something users have been requesting for several years: a stand-alone chapter on video games and social media. (We’ll talk more about that later this fall…)

One of the saddest parts of this change in the media world is the decline into zombie status of once proud publications.  Take Newsweek, for example. That was where Michael Isikoff worked back in the 1990s when he broke the story on the Clinton/Lewinski scandal. It used to be that you could share articles online from Newsweek and be able to count on it being a solid source.  But not so much now.

I was reminded of that yesterday morning when I saw this article being shared by multiple people on Twitter:“a favorite to be President Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is affiliated with a type of Christian religious group that served as inspiration for Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel, The Handmaid's Tale.”

The only problem is that at the end of the article is a correction that essentially retracts the core of the article. Yes, a potential nominee for the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat on the U.S. Supreme Court has been associated with a group that some people would view as having retrograde views on men, women and religion. But the group the nominee actually belongs to was never mentioned by author Margaret Atwood as an inspiration for her dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale.

Newsweek has become part of a growing group of declining news outlets known as zombie magazines.

Newsweek and the Rise of the Zombie Magazine How a decaying legacy magazine is being used to launder right-wing ideas and conspiracy theories.

These are publications that made the move from paper to online only, and then from being real news outlets to little more than sources of clickbait. While Newsweek in its zombie form is best known for right-wing conspiracy materials, it’s quite willing to lean to the left if there is a way to make the story click worthy. That’s why this story about the Supreme Court nominee was not an example of liberal bias. Instead, it was an example of a bias towards conflict and sensationalism in order to draw clicks.

Sadly, this is not a new story for Newsweek. Columbia Journalism Review ran an article a year ago on the magazine’s decline. And the zombie label was applied to it by New York magazine back in 2013 when Newsweek went all digital.

It’s been particularly sad for me to watch the motorcycle magazine world die off.  At one point I subscribed to four different motorcycle titles. Then one quit publishing. A couple of  years later I stopped renewing two of the most mainstream titles as they were clearly on the decline. And finally, without any real announcement, my favorite – Rider magazine that I had subscribed to since the early 1990s — stopped publishing paper copies during the pandemic.  There are still a few speciality books out there along with some online content. But the motorcycle magazine world I knew is gone.

 

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Remembering Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Posted on September 21, 2020 by Ralph Hanson

People in Kearney, Nebraska, gathered Saturday night for a candlelight vigil to remember Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

It was with great sadness, though not much surprise, that I learned about the death of United States Supreme Court associate justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Friday evening. On Saturday morning, a group I belong to started putting together plans for a vigil remembering and honoring Justice Ginsburg. My part was to prepare and read an obituary for her. Much of my information for it was drawn from her obit in The Washington Post.

Good evening.

Thank you all for coming to help remember Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Joan Ruth Bader wars born in Brooklyn, New York, on March 15,1933 in the midst of the Great Depression. Joan was a popular name in the 1930s, and her mother suggested that she go by Ruth in kindergarten to avoid confusion with the other Joans in her class. Her father was a Russian Jewish immigrant and her mother was from the US.

Her mother graduated from high school at age 15 but never had the chance to go to college, but she saved enough from her household budget to create a college fund for Ruth. Her mother died of cancer the day before Ruth graduated near the top of her class in high school. Ruth didn’t end up needing the money her mother had saved – she had a full-ride scholarship to Cornell based on her academic ability. It was there she would meet the love of her life, Martin Ginsburg.

Ruth learned early about how things were different for women than for men. When Marty was drafted into the Army, she applied for and nearly got a good job in the local Social Security office. But when her potential employer learned she was pregnant, she was offered a job of a typist instead.

After Marty was out of the army in 1956, both of them attended Harvard Law School. Ruth was one of 9 women in a class of 500.

She was a top student who also helped her husband through his time in law school as he was suffering from testicular cancer.

Ruth earned a spot on the Harvard Law Review, and after transferring to Columbia Law School in NYC to follow her husband to his first job, she had a spot on the law review there as well. Ruth ended up tied for first place in her class in 1959, but none of the top law firms would consider her for a job. “I struck out on three grounds – I was Jewish, a woman and a mother.”

She also couldn’t get an interview to be a clerk for Supreme court Justice Felix Frankfurter, who was not ready to consider a woman as a clerk.

After clerking at lower levels, she landed a job on the faculty at Rutgers law school where she learned she was being paid less than her male colleagues. This led to a successful equal pay campaign for the women teachers there. She also battled in court successfully for maternity leave rights for teachers in New Jersey.

She went on to be the first woman hired with tenure at Columbia Law School. At the same time, she was leading a team of lawyers for the ACLU. This team took six cases to the Supreme Court and won five of them, establishing that the equal protection clause in the constitution applied on the basis of sex as well as racial minorities.

President Jimmy Carter was impressed with her work and appointed her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in 1980. It was while she was on the court of appeals she developed her famous friendship with conservative judge Antonin Scalia, with both of them having keen legal minds and a love of opera.

In 1993, when Justice Byron White resigned from the bench, President Bill Clinton was considering Ginsburg for the high court. Oddly enough, given her modern day reputation as the head of the liberal wing of the court, a number of abortion rights advocates questioned her as a nominee for being too moderate.

But her perceived moderation also won her support from conservatives in the senate who viewed her as someone they could support. Following an interview with Clinton where she reportedly impressed with her sharp constitutional analysis, she was officially nominated.

In what is hard to imagine today, she approved by the senate by a 96-3 vote.

Perhaps her most famous decision was in 1996, writing the groundbreaking decision ordering Virginia Military Institute to admit women since it was a state-funded institution. She wrote that while Virginia “serves the state’s sons, it makes no provision whatever for her daughters. That is not equal protection”

Justice Ginsburg wearing her famous dissent collar. It became so iconic, it is the basis for necklaces and earrings.

Given that she was one of the more progressive justices on a conservative court, she was often put in the role of the person writing the dissent. (She was also known for the distinctive collar she wore on her robe for dissent cases that came to be known as the dissent collar.)

Famously, she wrote the dissent for the case of Bush v. Gore that settled the vote counting in the 2000 election. But she had important cases where she was in the majority as well, most notably approving same sex marriage and protecting abortion rights. She was also the first justice to perform a same-sex marriage ceremony.

Justice Ginsburg could be brutal in her dissents, criticizing the Citizen’s United case on campaign finance and Shelby County v. Holder that invalidated significant parts of the voting rights act. She wrote:

“Throwing out pre-clearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet,”

In the last decade or so, the diminutive justice became famous for her workouts with a private trainer, her incredible work habits, and reputation with her young fans as the Notorious RBG.

She also suffered from repeated illnesses and bouts of cancer.

Cancer claimed the life of her dear husband Marty on June 27, 2010. Ginsburg was in court the next day with an opinion to deliver.

Ginsburg died Sept. 18th at her home at age 87.

Ginsburg will always be remembered for her work on sexual equality under the law, both as a lawyer and as a justice. She said her view of quality was simple:

“It has always been that girls should have the same opportunity to dream, to aspire and achieve — to do whatever their God-given talents enable them to do — as boys,” “There should be no place where there isn’t a welcome mat for women. . . . That’s what it’s all about: Women and men, working together, should help make the society a better place than it is now.”

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Memories from 9/11 – Musicals, Movies and Motorcycles

Posted on September 11, 2020 by Ralph Hanson

It was 19 years ago this morning that I was teaching my freshman media literacy course at West Virginia University.  I had a class with close to 350 students in it.C-SPAN’s Washington Journal morning show was playing on the big screen as students gathered.  At 8:30 a.m. I shut off C-SPAN and started teaching.  When I got back to my office an hour-and-a-half later, news that our world was changing was in the process of breaking.

9/11 has always been highly personal to me.

One of my (and my Dear Wife’s) student’s father was supposed to be working in the section of the Pentagon that was hit by one of the planes. But since that area was under renovation, his dad ended up safe.

Another one of my students had a mother who was a flight attendant who flew out of the same airport the Twin Tower planes had departed from.  She was desperate for news. Fortunately, her mother was not on one of the attack planes.

One of my friends was the public radio correspondent for the area, and he ended up providing much of NPR’s coverage of the United 93 crash in Shanksville, PA.

And one one of my colleagues, who taught advertising, lost an old friend in the Twin Towers collapse.

Here are a few of my memories related to 9/11.

One of the last plays I saw before live theater shut down for the pandemic was the brilliant and heartbreaking musical Come From Away that tells the story of the town of Gander, Newfoundland, where many of the planes crossing the Atlantic were diverted when United States airspace was shut down on 9/11. I still have to be careful when I listen to the soundtrack from the show.  I don’t think I’ve ever made it through the show without crying. Here are two of my favorite songs from the show in a radio concert performance.

“Welcome to the Rock,” that tells how everything changed for Gander in just a moment.  

“Me and the Sky” is for me the heart of the show where pilot Beverly tells her story of becoming American Airlines first female captain and her horror of airliners being used as weapons.

Update: Beverly Bass, the Real-Life Pilot Portrayed in Come From Away, recalls 9/11 (from 2017)

My next memory is a look at cameos the Twin Towers made in numerous Hollywood films. Those two giant buildings defined the New York skyline from the 1970s until 9/11:

 

This last memory has nothing to do with the media. It’s a brief story about a ride I took on my motorcycle to the United 93 Memorial on a rainy June day back in 2004. It was written shortly after I had recovered from a fairly serious illness, and I was happy just to be back on the road. I’ve taken to posting every year on 9/11.

Me and my old KLRTook a short ride last Saturday. The distance wasn’t much, under 200 miles, but I went through two centuries of time, ideas, and food. Which felt really good after having been ill for the last month-and-a-half.

Headed out of Morgantown about 7:30 a.m. on I68. Stopped at Penn Alps for breakfast. Nice thing about being on insulin is that I can include a few more carbs in my diet these days. Pancakes, yum! (Penn Alps, if you don’t know, runs a great Pennsylvania Dutch breakfast buffet on weekends that is well worth riding to. Just outside of Grantsville, MD.)

Then off on the real purpose of the trip. Up US 219 toward the Flight 93 Sept. 11 memorial. The ride up north on 219 is beautiful; I’ve ridden it before. I always like when you come around the bend and see the turbines for the wind farm. Some people see them as an eye sore; for me they’re a potential energy solution and a dramatic sight. Chalk one up for industrial can be beautiful.

Continue on up to Berlin, PA, where I take off on PA 160 into Pennsylvania Dutch country. I start seeing hex signs painted on bright red barns, or even hung as a wooden sign. Not quite cool enough to put on my electric vest, but certainly not warm. Then it’s heading back west on a county/state road of indeterminate designation.

Now I’m into even more “old country” country. There’s a horse-and-buggy caution sign. Off to the left there’s a big farmstead with long dark-colored dresses hanging from the line, drying in the air. They may not stay dry, based on what the clouds look like.

The irony of this ride hits pretty hard. I’m on my way to a memorial of the violence and hatred of the first shot of the 21st century world war, and I’m traveling through country that is taking me further and further back into the pacifist world of the 19th century Amish and Mennonites.

A turn or two more, following the map from the National Parks web site, and I’m on a badly scared, narrow road that is no wider and not in as good of shape as the local rail trail. (Reminds me why I like my KLR!)

It’s only here that I see the first sign for the memorial. No one can accuse the locals of playing up the nearby memorial. Perhaps more flags and patriotic lawn ornaments than usual, but no strident statements. And then the memorial is off a half-mile ahead.

The crash site is to the south, surrounded by chain-link fencing. No one but families of the victims are allowed in that area. Off a small parking area is the temporary memorial, in place until the National Park Service can build the permanent site. There’s a 40-foot long chain-link wall where people have posted remembrences, plaques on the ground ranging from hand-painted signs on sandstone, to an elaborately etched sign on granite from a motorcycle group. The granite memorial is surrounded by motorcycle images.

The messages are mostly lonely or affirming. Statements of loss, statements of praise for the heroism of the passengers and crew. But not statements of hatred. It reminds me in many ways of the Storm King Mountain firefighter memorial. Not the formal one in Glenwood Springs, but the individual ones out on the mountain where more than a dozen wildland firefighters died several years ago.

It’s time to head home. When I go to join up with US 30, it’s starting to spit rain, so I pull out the rain gloves, button down the jacket, and prepare for heading home. It rains almost the whole way back PA 281, but I stay mostly dry in my Darien. The only problem is the collar of my too-big jacket won’t close far enough, and water dribbles down inside. It reminds me that riding in the rain, if it isn’t coming down too hard, can be almost pleasant, isolated away inside a nylon and fiberglass cocoon.

I’m home before 1 p.m.. I’ve ridden less than 200 miles. But I’ve ridden through a couple of centuries of people’s thoughts, actions, and food. And I’m finally back on the bike.

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Why it was OK for Bob Woodward to save his Trump virus story for the book

Posted on September 10, 2020 by Ralph Hanson

Distracted Boyfriend Meme - Bob Woodward's Book, Everyone, Michael Cohen's Book

The Twittersphere was losing its stuff this afternoon, pig-piling on Bob Woodward for saving the material from his interview with President Trump about the COVID pandemic for his book RAGE instead of reporting it in the newspaper back in February.

Christopher Bouzy, a coder I respect who put out the invaluable Bot Sentinel web site to help us identify Twitter bots, posted this today:

 

I was giving some significant thought to how I might address this, and then the WaPo’s media critic Erik Wemple posted a thread that addressed almost all of the issues that I was thinking about. In essence, Woodward was doing book-length journalism, not breaking-news journalism. He does a lot of interviews over an extended period of time with the goal of providing accurate, in-depth explanations, not first-to-print hot takes.

It drives me crazy that people are objecting to the fact that Woodward will be making money from the book. Well, duh! That’s how our media system works. People create journalism and get paid for it. Honestly, it’s much easier to write pandering rants for money than in-depth journalism.

It is possible for people to be concerned about good journalism and making money. One does not exclude the other.

I did appreciate what Margaret Sullivan, a media columnist for the WaPo, had to say this evening.

I appreciated reading how Woodward explained why he did what he did (Wanted to get the story right, make sure the president wasn’t lying, put things in context), and that Sullivan took a serious look at the possible consequences of Woodward’s actions.

 

 

 

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Twittering the Media World: ‘Liberal” media, student journalists and C-SPAN

Posted on August 24, 2020 by Ralph Hanson

For all the talk of liberal bias, even the avowedly progressive Vox Media has problems with how management treats employees.  And that pro-management / pro-business bias in pervasive in our profit-driven media world.

The Daily Tar Heel at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, has been doing some great journalism lately.  Student reporter Elizabeth Moore filed a Freedom of Information Act request for e-mails at the school that show all the early warnings the school had about how bad COVID19 problems might be this fall. They also ran a headline on an editorial that a lot of faculty would have agreed with, even if they wouldn’t have approved of the NSFW language.

And finally, if you want full, unfiltered coverage of the political conventions, C-SPAN is the place for it.  And if you miss anything, they’ll have easy-to-use archives of it.

 

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COVID19, Student Free Speech & Dress Codes

Posted on August 10, 2020 by Ralph Hanson

Free speech in public schools has been an issue for some time, with school administrators really not liking it when students publish things that embarrassing the school, district, administrators or faculty. Go back to the Hazelwood case or Bong Hits For Jesus. The real sin of these students is making the district look bad.

So we’ve just had this hit again, with Georgia student  Hannah Watters getting suspended from Paulding County School District for posting a photo on social media that showed crowds of students passing between classes, not social distancing and not wearing masks.

Note the John Lewis quote… Good and necessary trouble…

Soon after, however, Hannah’s mother reports that after she spoke with the school’s principal, the suspension was cancelled and would not appear on the student’s record.

According to CNN, “Watters was originally told Hannah was being suspended for violating several parts of the high school’s code of conduct, including using a cell phone during school hours, using social media during school hours, and violating student privacy by photographing them, she said.”

The district’s superintendent Brian Otott wrote in a letter to the community that while he recommends wearing masks, “Wearing a mask is a personal choice, and there is no practical way to enforce a mandate to wear them.”

This generated endless numbers of tweets about young women remembering being punished in high school for letting their shoulders or bra straps show.

Note this post and series of responses from NBC news tech reporter April Glaser:

As of this writing, the high school has at least 9 confirmed cases of COVID19

 

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Motorcycling in the Time of COVID19: Riding with Bass Reeves and the Watchmen

Posted on August 9, 2020 by Ralph Hanson

This is one of a series of posts about going motorcycling during the COVID19 pandemic.

Spoiler Alert – Discusses a few plot points from HBO series Watchmen. 

Have you watched the limited series Watchmen on HBO? Damon Lindelof (of LOST and The Leftovers fame) took the brilliant 1985 graphic novel about masked vigilantes and used it as the basis for an updated story about race, police, and masks in the 21st Century.

One of the key characters of the series starts out as a 5ish-year-old Black boy in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He’s sitting in a silent movie theater in 1921, where his mother is the piano player, thrilling to the story of Bass Reeves, Black Lawman, who protects people from a corrupt local sheriff. The movie, however, is interrupted by the start of the real-life 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre in which the Klan attacks an area of Tulsa known as Black Wall Street, killing dozens of people and leaving thousands homeless.

As I watched the series this summer, I assumed that “Bass Reeves! The Black Marshal of Oklahoma!” had to be the product of Watchmen’s writers. He was too perfect of a metaphor for the show.

But…

As I I discovered last month on my first real motorcycle trip during the COVID19 pandemic, not only was Bass Reeves real, he may have even been the inspiration for the Lone Ranger.

Every year I do a Grand Tour on my motorcycle sanctioned by the motorcycle club Team Strange Airheads. These tours have a theme of things you need to collect photos of. Several years ago I did one of my favorites ever – On the Trail of the Whispering Giants – looking for Peter Wolf Toth’s tree-trunk sized sculptedNative American heads.

This year’s GT has theme Riding to Hounds. You get points for taking photos of your bike and GT flag in front of public equestrian, dog and fox sculptures.  Most of these you have to find on your own, but in addition there is also a list of special bonus locations that have higher point values. Most of these are related to the Lewis and Clark expedition and feature Meriwether Lewis’ Newfoundland dog Seaman.

Pre-COVID19, I had been planning a trip on my motorcycle across the Southeast, including the Natchez Trace Parkway and the Blue Ridge Parkway. While the pandemic put an end to that idea, as I’ll discuss in another post, I went and spent a little over a week in the Ozarks in northern Arkansas and southern Missouri. (Sound familiar to you? I’ve been to that area before…) While on this trip, I started looking for qualifying statues.

So I was astounded when my research showed a statue of Bass Reeves riding his horse while accompanied by his loyal dog. Whattaya know. Bass Reeves was real! According to Den of Geek, Reeves was born a slave in Arkansas in 1838. He escaped from his owner George Reeves during the Civil War and lived for a time as a fugitive with Native Americans. Ten years after slavery was abolished, Reeves became the first Black deputy U.S. Marshall, in large part because of his knowledge of multiple Native American languages. Back in 2015, HBO reportedly commissioned a limited series about Reeves written by legendary screenwriter John Sayles. As of now, the proposed series has vanished, but you never know.

Fort Smith, AR, sculpture of U.S. Deputy Marshall Bass Reeves.

Author with his GT flag and the sculpture of Black lawman Bass Reeves, his horse and his dog.

Distant image of Fort Smith, AR, sculpture of U.S. Deputy Marshall Bass Reeves.

In order to count for the Riding to Hounds Grand Tour, I need to have my motorcycle, GT flag, and sculpture all in one photo. I included a second close-up photo so you can better see the statue. I should get points for both the equestrian statue and the dog statue.

One of the things I love so much about these nationwide scavenger hunts are the amazing places they take me to. Finding Bass Reeves, Black lawman, in Fort Smith, Arkansas, was one of those great moments.

Bass Reeves sign

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