Making the click-through worthwhile: What it means when there are lines of hundreds of people at the top of Mount Everest, how both Trump and his fiercest critics throw around the word “treason” casually and carelessly, a beautiful love story about a president and a little-noticed underdog cable-news network, and a bit of news about the book.
No, Really, You Don’t Have to Climb Mount Everest
Can you imagine standing on line behind “a couple hundred people” near the peak of Mount Everest? I get irritated when there’s a handful of people in front of me at Starbucks.
If mountain climbing is your passion, God bless you. But does the fact that we’ve got Disneyland-level lines at the top of the world’s highest mountain mean that too many people, seeking their personal metaphorical Mount Everest, are choosing the literal one? Has a picture of oneself at the top of Mount Everest turned into some sort of talisman, a symbol of strength and glory that is otherwise almost extinct from mundane modern society?
Most of us will never get near the Himalayas, never mind near the summit, but we picture something like out of an adventure film — not another soul around for miles and miles as a small party braves wind and cold and steep rock cliffs, inching their way to the top.
Recent accounts to the New York Times suggest the experience is nothing like that:
Climbers were pushing and shoving to take selfies. The flat part of the summit, which he estimated at about the size of two Ping-Pong tables, was packed with 15 or 20 people. To get up there, he had to wait hours in a line, chest to chest, one puffy jacket after the next, on an icy, rocky ridge with a several-thousand foot drop.
He even had to step around the body of a woman who had just died.
“It was scary,” he said by telephone from Kathmandu, Nepal, where he was resting in a hotel room. “It was like a zoo.”
It gets worse. I’m reminded of my own copious physical limitations every time I pull a muscle yawning, but some of the aspiring Everest climbers have no sense of their own physical limitations and only the vaguest awareness of the scale of the challenge before them:
According to Sherpas and climbers, some of the deaths this year were caused by people getting held up in the long lines on the last 1,000 feet or so of the climb, unable to get up and down fast enough to replenish their oxygen supply. Others were simply not fit enough to be on the mountain in the first place.
Some climbers did not even know how to put on a pair of crampons, clip-on spikes that increase traction on ice, Sherpas said.
Nepal has no strict rules about who can climb Everest, and veteran climbers say that is a recipe for disaster.
“You have to qualify to do the Ironman,” said Alan Arnette, a prominent Everest chronicler and climber. “But you don’t have to qualify to climb the highest mountain in the world? What’s wrong with this picture?”
The Nepali government is coming under increasing criticism for not restricting access and instead maximizing its revenue from permit fees. It would be nearly impossible to cordon off the entirety of the world’s tallest mountain. If people want to climb a mountain, they’re probably going to figure out a way to attempt it. The Times notes past complaints and scandals involving bilking insurance companies for unnecessary evacuations, shoddy oxygen tanks, and other safety lapses. Climbers complain about heaps of trash being left on the mountain.
All the worst traits of the commercialization connected to modern tourism — the eagerness to make a buck, the disregard of natural resources, the cut corners, the greed — somehow made its way to one of the most remote and difficult-to-access spots on earth.
Hearing these tales of unprepared amateurs succumbing not to avalanches or lost footholds or freezing temperatures but long wait lines, we want to inform these people, there are other mountains. We will be every bit as impressed by a selfie of them on some other high mountain. Many of us are not all that impressed with the selfies in the first place!
That Times article describes climbers ignoring members of other climbers who are injured or dying on the way to the top, stepping over or around dead bodies, obsessed with reaching the summit. If you’re making this epic climb to find yourself . . . are you sure you’re going to like the person you find when you get there?
Everyone in Washington Needs to Look Up What ‘Treason’ Means
No, the president of the United States should not throw around accusations of treason without a big stack of evidence to support the severe charge. Late last week, Trump listed off former FBI director James Comey, former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe, former FBI lawyer Lisa Page, and former FBI agent Peter Strzok and declared, “That’s treason. They couldn’t win the election, and that’s what happened.”
If Comey, McCabe, Page, and Strzok used their official powers at the FBI to launch an investigation based upon spurious evidence, or chose to leak privileged information about Trump, they abused their powers, violated the law and their oaths, and ought to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. But not every extraordinarily unethical act is treason. The U.S. Constitution literally spells this out: Article III, Section 3: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” Abusing a law-enforcement authority in order to favor one candidate over another is illegal, but it isn’t the same as giving aid and comfort to a foreign enemy.
But watching mostly left-of-center folks complain about Trump using the T-word this weekend was insufferable, considering how we’ve spent two and a half years watching prominent Democrats and media commentators insist Trump had committed treason.
Last summer, Representative Adam Smith, D-Wash, declared, “There is no sugar coating this. It is hard to see President Trump siding with Vladimir Putin over our own intelligence community and our criminal investigators as anything other than treason.”
John Brennan called Trump’s decision to revoke his security clearance “treasonous.” Back in 2017, Virginia senator Tim Kaine said that the investigation into Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting at Trump Tower “is moving into perjury, false statements and even potentially treason.”
Last December, Jon Meachum declared on MSNBC, “If, in fact . . . Donald Trump knew about the Russian efforts on his behalf, then there is a live question about whether . . . he has been giving aid and comfort to the enemy, which is the definition of treason in the Constitution.” (The Mueller report did not find any coordination or Trump campaign knowledge about Russia’s activities.)
Earlier this month, Representative Mark Pocan argued that Trump’s conversations by phone with Vladimir Putin might be seen as “treason.”
Keep in mind, that to meet the definition of treason, one would have to classify Russia as an enemy. Many of us would be fine with that, but there was NOT a political, legal, or cultural consensus that Russia was our enemy during the Obama administration — in fact, most of the people accusing Trump of treason insisted that kind of talk was hyperbolic.
We all remember Obama’s scoffing to Mitt Romney, “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign-policy back, because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.” The Democrats didn’t, en masse, turn into loud and outspoken Putin critics after the polonium poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006; Russia’s threat to bomb Eastern European missile-defense sites in 2012; Russia’s decision to take in Edward Snowden in 2013; the annexation of Crimea in 2014; the destruction of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine in 2014; or Russia’s intervention in the Syrian civil war in 2015. Nor did you hear much from the average Democrat about the Novichok nerve-agent poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury in 2018. No, what really got the Democrats mad about Russia was Putin’s preference for Donald Trump in 2016 and his hacking of DNC and John Podesta’s emails.
The President Wants to Be Able to See Other Networks
Remember back in March, when One America News Network (OAN) publicly complained that President Trump hadn’t mentioned them when listing “media supporters” at a rally in Michigan? It was the saddest cry of unrequited love since, oh, Valentine’s Day of sophomore year of high school, when it turned out that cute girl that you bought flowers for already had a boyfriend.
Great news, everyone. Sometimes that cute girl will get irritated when her boyfriend hosts a town hall with Pete Buttigieg, and that girl will give you a second look. “This year, Trump has tuned in more often than ever to OAN, two sources close to him say. There’s been a conspicuous uptick in his public promotion of OAN’s segments, including on his personal Twitter account. And, it appears, he’s even pitching the network to those roaming the halls at Mar-a-Lago.” I want to see OAN and Trump run into each other’s arms to the tune of “I’ve Had the Time of My Life” like at the end of Dirty Dancing.
Some will complain that this isn’t what a news network should be doing, and that the fact that they so openly and desperately yearn for the public approval of the president indicates that they are, voluntarily, aspiring to be state-run, or at least state-approved television. But if you’re going to run a news network with this agenda, best to do it so openly. Just come on out and tell viewers: “We are supporters of the president, we want him to notice and praise us, and we tailor our news judgment and programming accordingly. If there’s news that the president doesn’t want to see, you won’t see it on our channel.” Truth in advertising!
ADDENDUM: I’m scheduled to chat about Between Two Scorpions and other topics on the No Gimmicks podcast with Brady Leonard today. As of this writing, the preorder price is just $12.34 on Amazon. I’ve finally gotten my hands on the paperback, and it looks terrific — the illustrations and photos came out clear. The book is also available through Kindle Unlimited for free — apparently I get something like a half-penny for each page you read. Read the whole thing and put an entire $1.68 in my pocket!