BRATTLEBORO — Whatever critique or comment one might have about the special section on Richard Gagnon's killing of Michael Martin at the Brattleboro Co-op - and I can think of some and others have written many - one must start by thanking The Commons and especially reporter Joyce Marcel for the way she has leaned into the tragedy and tried to make sense of it. It is an exceptional work of journalism, and I hope that it will have the wide notice it deserves.
I've read the special report several times. It is clear to me that this is a really important instance of reporting and of the profession's salience in a time when journalism's relevance has been called into question. Brattleboro's great fortune in having two newspapers of record puts it ahead of many major cities - a sad thing to say.
Editor Jeff Potter notes the missing piece of the story, which is Martin's account of his version. To say that the package is slanted toward Gagnon's version of events - toward a narrative in which managerial ineptitude or malice might have contributed to the tragedy - is simply to note how much more his voice and its echoes is heard than others.
When I teach this report to my journalism class in the fall, I will hope that students may consider the question of whether a sidebar written by Alex Gyori should have been part of the package. Perhaps this will show up in a future issue of The Commons.
I have a personal narrative, which I won't relate, about how toxic leadership can collide with a sense of one's identity inhering in one's job, and the way that disequilibrium of power - even when one is actually quite right, or perhaps especially so - can lead to a sort of madness. I know what it is like to be enmeshed in a context where one has no power. I was lucky to have had a good escape. Gagnon clearly did not.
It was interesting to me that there has not been much discussion about how this story is partly about how easy it is to get a gun. The soul-wrecking nature of unequal power in a corporate framework, as it dovetails with the easy availability of firearms as people go mad with the assault on their dignity as workers, is a story that we have been reading about for quite a while in the national press. This version brings it home to our small town.
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But I want to make a different sort of comment, since I think that there is a subtext to this story which has not quite been touched yet, one that troubles me and feels important.
Brattleboro, and Vermont as a whole, are essentially colonies of the large centers of capital and their suburbs that lie to our south. I speak as a colonizer. I am complicit in this process.
I followed the migration of my birth family here in the 1980s, after decades of being among the summer folk. We inhabited the place. My dad served as a state senator for a couple of terms, after the 17 years he worked as Marlboro College's president.
I have held several different leadership and teaching positions at Landmark College in Putney, one of the area's largest employers, with more staff and a larger annual budget than the co-op. Only a small minority of people who work at Landmark - my wife is one - were born in Vermont.
I love Vermont. My family has owned summer homes here since 1935 - see, that's my point. But my wife was born here, seventh generation, and also our two daughters were born here.
I remember the co-op on Flat Street. I remember when Mann's department store was where Vermont Artisans now is, with pneumatic tubes to carry the money around.
I remember fishing with Forrest Gallup - he caught me my first trout - and working summers with Clayton Cutting and his sons, Reed and Ronnie. These names might be recognizable to those who attend Guilford's Labor Day fair, and perhaps to others. I remember a sort of integrity that seems missing now in the suburbanization of the land.
I don't really have any comment on what happened at the Co-op that day a couple of years ago. It is just very sad. But it seems - in the way the story was told - an emblem or marker of how two worlds collide now in our provincial backwater.
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The transformation of the Brattleboro Food Co-op into a version of Whole Foods - a place where no one without a professional income could possibly shop regularly - began with the move into the building that was destroyed to make a parking lot; the transformation now is complete with the new building.
It is the same process that I witnessed on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the 1980s, in which old pre-war buildings were torn down to build new towers to hold the newly monied children of my generation. That process has now extended into outer boroughs, for following generations.
Wealth shapes all of our lives in America, and the co-op's new incarnation is just an instance. How can one blame the board and management for following the zeitgeist?
What troubles me, here in Vermont, is the pretense that somehow buying organic food at the Brattleboro Food Co-op is an emblem of some sort of integrity of purpose, or that the decision to cash out on a house in Greenwich and build a mansion in the hills, on land that once belonged to one of the indigenous families, is somehow a sign of virtue.
Whatever else Marcel's piece was about - so rich and complex, it was about many things - it was about the corporatization of the co-op and the transformation of a way of life that in its founding represented virtues that are now only mimicked, in a fashion that allows those who have the means to shop there eat their cake and have it, and also say, sotto voce, in a way that they might not even hear themselves, “Let them eat cake.”
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Much has been made about the 1 percent and the 99 percent in the past couple of years. This equation is fair and just, but it leaves a lot out.
I belong to the 10 percent. I can afford to shop at the co-op. I can afford to go to Manhattan and shop at Whole Foods - just not too much.
What troubles me - let me get to the point here - is that the 10 percent enables the 1 percent and marginalizes the 40 percent who together make less each annum than the 1 percent.
When we buy a $15 piece of cheese, or that beautiful bunch of organic grapes for $9, we really don't imagine how poor people are doing when they are trying to get together the cash to keep the power from being turned off.
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The political ethos that keeps Vermont the most liberal state in the nation won't change as wealth moves into our countryside, because the state is a mirror in which one can feel quite good about oneself, no matter how the money was made. It is part of our brand.
The pathos of the state is the ongoing herding of the children of the native people away from their land and away from meaningful work to running ski lifts and cleaning motel rooms.
Gagnon was an incomer who wound up caught between two cultures and two times, and he handled it stupidly and tragically, to terrible result. I wonder the extent to which he was the canary in the coal mine. I hate what is happening to my state, because I have already seen it happen in the place of my birth.
I don't boycott things unless they are pernicious, but the few time I have shopped at Whole Foods in New York, where the awful, gaudy, beautiful New York Coliseum used to be, I felt a bit diminished, and I hate what gentrification did to the middle-class world I grew up in there. Now I watch it happening here, and I can see very clearly in Marcel's piece the clash of cultures that ended in tragedy.
I am sorry that the co-op turned into Whole Foods. I am sorry that most of the people within walking distance of it can't afford their prices. I am sorry that most of the license plates I see wherever I go on the weekend are from Connecticut, New Jersey, or New York.
I am sorry we are just a colony of the great towers of capital to our south. I am sorry that the way of life I knew when I first came here in the 1960s is not possible anymore for the people who already lived here then.
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When I write about the Manhattan of my youth, as I have done often in poetry, the sense that something authentic was translated into a theme park - with anything that did not fit into the theme shoved to the margins first, and then finally destroyed - is a constant trope. I see the same thing happening here, and I feel regret for it.
I should underscore that I am complicit in everything I have criticized in these sentences, and that if there is anywhere in the United States where our terrible trend toward corporatization and the stratification of wealth might be changed it is here.
One must always have hope. What happened at the Brattleboro Food Co-op on that day is clear only in the tragedy of it - an instance, reported so well and so thoroughly in these pages that perhaps it also tells us something more.