So, gee, I guess there now is one. Of course, as many Kossacks know, I wrote about it
last week, and even that was much, much too long to wait. But it's good to know that now that the Times has reported on it, it must be true.
But even the Times finds ways to trivialize the suffering:
Even here in Mitchell, about 70 miles west of Sioux Falls, some residents did not grasp the scope of the drought until the Corn Palace, this city's tourist-luring castlelike civic center wrapped in hundreds of thousands of ears of corn, announced that because there was not enough of the crop, it would not redecorate this year for the 2007 season.
"We don't have any record of anything like this happening before," said Mark Schilling, the director of the Corn Palace, a campy, 114-year-old landmark promoted on highway billboards with endless corn puns.
"But if there's not a crop, there's not a crop," Mr. Schilling said quietly.
...
So for years (and through three different palaces in Mitchell), annual themes (like the "Space Age" in 1969 and a "Salute to Rodeo" this year) have been captured in images made all of corn here, at a cost, in today's prices, of about $140,000 a year. But as this summer proceeded and the sun blazed on, the palace board nervously monitored the fields whose dramatically colored corn goes to the palace, waited for rain and consulted with an agronomist.
With fields of certain colors struggling, the board decided the murals it had planned for the 2007 theme, "Everyday Heroes," could not be created, said Mr. Schilling, the palace's director. Wade Strand, the farmer who grows all of the palace's colored corn, took the news "pretty hard," Mr. Schilling said.
Looking back, Mr. Strand said he had believed that he had grown enough corn. He said he had hoped the designs could be made without orange tone and shades of black and light red. "But they felt that the colors I was missing were strategic to the theme," Mr. Strand said.
Mr. Schilling said he believed that the current murals would remain intact through a second year, though he acknowledged that they might fade a bit. The vulnerabilities now, he said, are the risks inherent in art, or anything, made of corn: the effects of birds and wind, sun and heat.
I understand that was a long quote, but there's actually a point to be made here: The Times article was 25 paragraphs long - the first 25 paragraphs the Times has investing in this story for the month of August, July as well. And seven paragraphs, over a quarter of the copy, was spent on the "Corn Palace" of Mitchell, South Dakota.
Now, we drove by the Corn Palace just two weeks ago, and though quite a national treasure, its focus, no, it's very inclusion in this supposedly serious story is downright ridiculous. We're camped next to a reservoir in southwestern South Dakota which is at 35% of capacity - a reservoir which, in better days, generated electricity, provided adequate irrigation opportunities for nearby farmers and ranchers, and was just an all-around "good thing", as many visitors packed the surrounding campgrounds to boat and fish, and just hand around the campfire. Well, those (open fires) went months ago, and more recently, so did boating - and the shallow waters are way too warm for serious anglers. Similar stories can be found throughout the state, and exist independent of the trivialness as to whether the Corn Palace gets a makeover this fall.
The reality is that the Times did a terrible diservice, and should either pull the story, or issue a retraction.
In the meantime, the Times fails to mention the growing gulf (no pun intended) between "upstream" red state legislators and their "downstream" counterparts, despite all belonging to the same party. Essentially, the "rob Peter to pay Paul" strategy of emptying upstream impoundments to sustain downstream flow is no longer working, particularly against other republicans. Let's see the Times report on that.