tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28045259131238225622024-03-13T16:13:11.122-07:00Saturday Morning Breakfast ClubDavidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06998485419146402806noreply@blogger.comBlogger30125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2804525913123822562.post-76839952510131408332011-06-29T12:35:00.000-07:002011-06-29T12:37:46.986-07:0021st Century Has Left A Lot of Bodies About<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:officedocumentsettings> <o:allowpng/> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:trackmoves/> <w:trackformatting/> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:alwaysshowplaceholdertext>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:donotpromoteqf/> <w:lidthemeother>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther> <w:lidthemeasian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:lidthemecomplexscript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:compatibility> 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mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} </style> <![endif]--> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent: .25in;line-height:200%">Dale Earnhardt, Sr., was blocking the competition for his teammates, Michael Waltrip and his son, Dale, Jr. It was the Intimidator doing what had not come naturally to him over the 30-plus-years he had driven the NASCAR circuit. Normally on the last lap of the biggest race in NASCAR, Earnhardt would have been charging, butting and bulling his way through the competition trying to win the race he’d only won once in his illustrious career. But that was what Sterling Marlin was doing February 18, 2001.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent: .25in;line-height:200%">Marlin was bumping, pushing, tapping, trying to bull his way around Earnhardt so he could use all his tricks to get around Dale, Jr., and Waltrip and steal a victory in the last lap. The crowd, those cheering for Earnhardt, Sr. or Jr., or Waltrip, and those cheering for someone to take a victory away from the Childress team that day, roared like a great beast across the Florida scruff.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent: .25in;line-height:200%">Marlin’s silver Coors Light Dodge had a front end that showed all the dings and dents a knight might have shown after a day of jousting. His right front bumper tapped Earnhardt’s left rear one more time. Not much, but just enough to cause the Intimidator to veer to the left and down to the flat apron of the track. Earnhardt, ever the competitor, fought the forces of physics that day and muscled his car back to the right. It was too much muscle, however, and the car turned farther to the right and began its climb toward the wall.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent: .25in;line-height:200%">Ken Schrader’s Pontiac hit Earnhardt’s Chevrolet, and then the Intimidator struck the wall at about 160 miles per hour. The two cars slide down the track toward the infield. Schrader climbed from his car and ran to help Earnhardt, but he took a quick look inside the black Chevy and turned to the infield frantically waving for the emergency crews. He didn’t know it then, but Earnhardt was already dead.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent: .25in;line-height:200%">The cause of death was a basilar skull fracture. That’s the fancy medical term for the injury that killed Earnhardt. Basically, he died when his head whipped forward as his car hit the wall and stopped suddenly. Earnhardt also suffered broken ribs and a broken ankle, and he had abrasions where his seat belt rubbed his collarbone and hips.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent: .25in;line-height:200%">Dale Earnhardt, Sr., the son of a stock car pioneer and the father of one of the racing games newest stars had died doing what he loved doing: driving a fast car and trying to win a race. His death was a shock to the Daytona crowd, and a shock to the nation.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent: .25in;line-height:200%">Thousands of fans made their way that night to Dale Earnhardt, Inc., in Monroe, North Carolina, to leave shirts, hats, flowers, anything they had that symbolized their love affair with this southern good old boy.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent: .25in;line-height:200%">I heard the news as I and several students from Appalachian State University were returning from the spring convention of the Associated Collegiate Press Association in New York City. We were heading down Interstate 77, near Fancy Gap, Virginia, when the word came that Earnhardt had been taken directly to the hospital. That was ominous news. Usually drivers injured on the track are first taken to a first aid station that NASCAR provides. The station is almost an emergency room itself, so by bypassing this facility one had to wonder if the news was already bad.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent: .25in;line-height:200%">NASCAR delayed announcing Earnhardt’s death for two hours. One would have thought a head of state had died. The Intimidator made the cover of Time magazine. His death was on all the news shows for the next week. His funeral was carried live by the networks: Pretty good for a race car driver.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent: .25in;line-height:200%">Earnhardt wasn’t the first driver to die on the track. And despite all the efforts of NASCAR to build cars around driver safety, he won’t be the last. There has always been this element of risk and danger associated with racing, but particularly with the southern version where a driver puts his foot to the metal and drives around the oval as fast as he can go hoping to outrun everyone else on a particular Sunday. Stocks are southern. The roots lay with the dusty red clay tracks in sleepy southern towns. Mechanics would soup up an old car, bring enough gas and oil, and a couple of extra tires, and spend the afternoon running around the dusty ovals. If they were fortunate, they might win enough money to buy some groceries for the week, or if the gate was particularly good, maybe some shoes for the kids.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent: .25in;line-height:200%">Racing was a dirt and grease under the fingernails working class sport. The fans came out of the textile and furniture plants that dotted the Carolinas and the South. The big boys raced at Wilkesboro against Junior Johnson, or at Bristol, Winston-Salem, Charlotte, Rockingham, Martinsville, Daytona, Darlington, or Talladega. The wannabees could be found on the dirt tracks or the quarter-mile ovals in places like Hickory, Asheville, Spartanburg, or wherever a race lover could get the financing together to build a small track.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent: .25in;line-height:200%">On the day Dale Earnhardt, Sr., died, the stands at Daytona were packed. But a decade later the stands at NASCAR events are showing signs of fan dissatisfaction. The stands are not filled. Traditionally the fans for NASCAR came from the textile mills and furniture factories scattered across the Piedmont from Virginia, through the Carolinas, and into Georgia. No track was so far away that a working stiff couldn’t load the wife and kids into the old car and make it to the race of the week, or get back home in time to go to work at 7 a.m. on a Monday morning. Those plants are padlocked today. The companies that used to hire the southern worker have moved to China or Vietnam or Indonesia. The southern worker has been left behind without a job and without much of a future since many of them were high school dropouts, or only had a high school diploma.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent: .25in;line-height:200%">For almost a century the southern worker avoided union attempts to organize them. They accepted the promise that the owners would look after them; the plants would always be there. But with the arrival of the 21<sup>st</sup> century, the crash of the Dot-Coms, and a recession that followed the Bill Clinton years, manufacturing began to implode. Many blame Clinton, who shepherded the North American Free Trade Agreement through Congress. NAFTA began the flow of American plants to Mexico, then to any place in the world where the cost of labor was cheaper. For the southern working class, the recession did not end during the George W. Bush years. In fact, one might say the economy crashed on to the southern worker like the concrete and steel that crashed to the ground on September 11, 2001. Three thousand souls were lost that day when terrorists from the Middle East crashed airliners into the twin towers of the World Trade Center. More than a million souls ultimately discovered their jobs were gone and the plants they had made careers at were padlocked.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent: .25in;line-height:200%">One could say that the George W. Bush administration was as unable to stop the imploding manufacturing economy as it was unable to stop Osama bin Ladin’s plot to wage war against the United States. When Dale Earnhardt died at Daytona, one might be forgiven for believing our lives changed for the worse. Life became harder for most of us. We became meaner as a people and much more suspicious of our neighbors and a lot more unforgiving toward those who didn’t have it as well as we had it.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent: .25in;line-height:200%">George W. Bush was governor of Texas when he ran for president in 2000. Before he became governor he pretty much was the recovering alcoholic son of George H.W. Bush, a New England Republican who had traveled to Texas to make a fortune in the oil business before he turned to politics, finally winning the presidency in 1988. He was a one-term president when the economy turned sour on him after he led a coalition of forces against Saddam Hussein. When that war ended so quickly in what appeared at the time to be a stunning victory, we celebrated like we had won World War II. In truth we had only won two decades of heartache and sorrow in the Middle East.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent: .25in;line-height:200%">Shrub, as the late Molly Ivins so lovingly called W., came to power after the country had pretty much tired of the parade of trailer-trash women chased by Bill Clinton, the democratic president of the 1990s. Clinton’s dalliance with Monica Lewinsky in a private office in the White House was one dalliance too many and his lying to cover it up led to his impeachment by the Republican-controlled Congress. But that was a political battle and Clinton was saved when the Democrats hung together to prevent a conviction on the charges. But it soured the public on a Democrat in the White House. Clinton’s vice president, Al Gore, ran as the Democratic nominee against the Republican nominee, George W. Bush.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent: .25in;line-height:200%">The campaign was long and dirty, and on Election Day the American people were conflicted. Gore had a commanding lead in the popular vote, but the popular vote doesn’t win you the White House. You have to win the Electoral College in the United States and there Gore was coming up short. Had he just won his own state of Tennessee we would have been talking about the Gore administration today. But Gore lost Tennessee and neither he nor Bush had enough electoral votes to win the office while Florida remained locked in controversy.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent: .25in;line-height:200%">The nation didn’t know for weeks who would win. Gore hung on as the Democrats sought to recount all the ballots. We were treated to night after night of news reports of hanging chads and write-in votes. Very quickly the count became a legal issue and Republicans found the Democratic-controlled state supreme court favored counting the ballots. The Republicans had to get the issue before the U.S. Supreme Court, controlled by conservative Republicans judges. The Republicans were able to win the legal battle and the U.S. Supreme Court did what everyone expected, it closed down the recount and delivered the state to Bush. Gore did the only thing left to him; he conceded the election to the Republican candidate.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent: .25in;line-height:200%">Bush, in what we would see time and again for the next eight years, wasted no time in claiming a mandate of the people to do things the people clearly opposed.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent: .25in;line-height:200%">For nine months, George W. Bush frolicked in the White House, seemingly in an aimless fashion. The son had finally matched his father’s achievement; or so he probably thought in his mind. The country, however, was beginning to see there was a power behind George W.’s throne, and that was former congressman, White House aide, defense secretary to the elder Bush, and now vice president to the son.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent: .25in;line-height:200%">A lot has been said and written over the years about Dick Cheney’s decision that only he had the mettle to be vice president in 2000. The country could not be faulted for believing Cheney was the acting president on September 11, 2001. Cheney was the man holed up in the basement of the White House while an ashen-faced George W. was flown from one location to another, apparently unsure of what was going on or what was happening around him.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent: .25in;line-height:200%">After Bush had returned to Washington, his eyes welled with tears and his voice choked when reporters asked him what he would do. One was left to wonder if this swaggering version of a Texan, albeit one with Connecticut roots, really had it in him to take on a monster. It wasn’t until Bush had his emotions under control and could visit ground zero that we saw him act like our John Wayne defined version of a steely-eyed Texan. You know the image: One riot, one ranger. At least that is how the story is told about a single Texas Ranger arriving on the train after the local sheriff had telegraphed the town was rioting.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent: .25in;line-height:200%">It was this man to whom we had given the task of ordering the military, the army, to attack the country housing the training camps of al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. It was this same man who a few weeks later would almost kill himself tossing Cheetos into his mouth while watching a football game in the presidential residence. America found it impossible to move enough troops to Afghanistan to attack the Taliban and to search for bin Laden. The war became a CIA operation using Special Ops troops to form a bond with the Northern Alliance, the only credible fighting force not part of the Taliban.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent: .25in;line-height:200%">For the next ten years America’s fight against global terrorism was fought in the back alleys of the Middle East. The truth, however, is more damning. We never put enough troops into the country to defeat the Taliban. We only ran them across the border into Pakistan. And when it came to capturing the elusive bin Laden, well, we were told it wasn’t important if we captured him. Only later did we come to understand that Bush’s handpicked general was too interested in retiring and playing golf and not interested enough to put American troops at a critical location to hammer bin Laden into surrender or to kill him. So, we allowed the mastermind of 911 to escape and to go into hiding for the next decade, many of those years hiding out just yards away from Pakistan’s largest military base and only 30 minutes from Pakistan’s military arsenal of nuclear weapons.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent: .25in;line-height:200%">Two years after bin Laden’s escape into the unknown regions, Bush sent American troops across another border and into its second war in the Middle East. This time the target was Iraq, and with that decision America entered five years of hell. As our gaze was turned to the world of Saddam Hussein, a truly bad man but one who had nothing to do with 911 or bin Laden, we took our eyes off Afghanistan and the crumbling economy here at home.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent: .25in;line-height:200%">American wages had been stagnant since the 1970s, and during the Bush years, especially after the crash of the Dot Coms (the fantasy world of computers and online commerce), job growth slowed and reversed as factories began to close across the country. Globalization was on full display. North Carolina alone lost almost a million jobs in this five-year period as most textile mills closed the factory gates and left for China, and the same for furniture. Today the governor sends out press releases seeking cheers when they can get 20 or 30 jobs in some town in the state, but remains very quiet when some national firm shuts its doors and takes 1,000 jobs to India or China. From 2003 to 2005, no one was watching the hen house as the fox destroyed not just the eggs in the nests, but ate the hens.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent: .25in;line-height:200%">Because those who came to power in 2000 and were re-elected in 2004 believed in an unregulated free market, Wall Street and the big banks created investment packages that were nothing short of fraudulent. It wasn’t much of surprise to many that the whole system almost melted that autumn, but for the free marketers who had built their house of cards out of the libertarian rants of Ayn Ryan it came as a rude awakening, but one they buried while blaming the very people hurt the worse by their criminality. It was the biggest crisis since the Great Depression. George W. Bush once again looked into the pit and turned ashen with fear.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent: .25in;line-height:200%">His two terms in office had begun with the first attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor, and it ended with the country standing on the edge much as a man at the edge of a cliff waving his arms desperately trying to regain his balance before pitching over the edge. His terms in office ended with the bailout of the very institutions that had caused the collapse of the American economy. His legacy is one of enriching his already rich and powerful cronies and those already well off, but sending more and more Americans into poverty. You could say he hit the wall twice, but unlike Dale Earnhardt, Bush was able to walk away and leave the mess for someone else to clean up.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent: .25in;line-height:200%"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height: 200%"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height: 200%"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height: 200%"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height: 200%"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height: 200%"><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></p>Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06998485419146402806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2804525913123822562.post-88544862461118566032011-03-08T09:37:00.000-08:002011-03-08T10:17:27.156-08:00Can We Keep Our Democracy?Our nation was forged out of rebellion against British tyranny. For the next 221 years we have wrestled with the tyrannical excesses of regimes around the world, and from time to time the tyranny of our own elected officials, yet it isn't the tyranny of our government we should fear, but rather the tryannical excesss of the capitalist system that has us under its heel.<br /><br />Today, we find our government on its knees, not before some foreign potentate, but on its knees before big business and the capitalist system.<br /><br />We spend billions of dollars to subsidize business at a time when American business ships American jobs overseas. One could argue that the shortsighted nature of the American business class has sealed our doom. Our jobs are gone. The factories that used to house them are relics of a past that no longer exists and every job lost is a paycheck not buying products and boosting our economy.<br /><br />With all these lost jobs we have watched the dollars we need to rebuild our infrastructure, our schools, our psyche vanish. Instead we are trapped in a rustbelt mentality that accepts this and refuses to allow our anger to explode.<br /><br />We listen to the Glenn Becks of the world, spouting their hate-filled swill that drains directly from the bile ducts of the John Birch Society and the John Locke Foundation. These seem to be people who are filled with so much hate their minds can't get around a simple concept: if the country falls, so do they.<br /><br />The Lockers try to sound so knowledgeable in their Libertarian mindset, but it is an act. They really just want our great experience to fail. They don't understand, certainly they don't accept the notion of a shared responsibility. Instead they pitch their argument in language that seems to show them as smart and deserving of attention. But that argument is that those hurt by the conomy have no one to blame for their fate but themselves: It's all their fault, NOT MINE!<br /><br />Think about what is under assault. Schools: Yes, why should we pay for schools for the unwashed masses when what we need is to rob the public coffer yet again to fund our charter schools and private academies. Those will train our children to live in this global world while the rest of you can live in the filth that will be left after the garbage men have all been laid off. Police: Who needs police? Who cares if the most crime ridden areas are the poor neighborhoods of our collapsing cities? We live in gated communities and if what police are left to protect them can't do the job we'll either hire private security firms to do it or move to protected enclaves for the rich overseas. Highways: Who needs them? Our factories are gone so why do we need to keep them up? Railroads: Walk. Airports: No fuel to fly anyway unless you have the money to pay for it. Doesn't sound like much of a world does it?<br /><br />Our parents and grandparents could clearly see their future and they didn't let the hate-filled, selfish men of their day keep them from repairing their damaged economy; defeating the dark forces of evil that really did challenge their world;<br />building a better world. They certainly didn't hesitate when their country needed them to fight, and when it was over they returned home and went back to work building that better world they so desired.<br /><br />We, however, have failed to keep it. Our generation has squandered the vast natural wealth of our nation, and sucked the natural resources of others into our smelters and burners. Today we face a world frightening in its hostility to our economic system. Think about this. When the terrorists flew their planes into the World Trade Center, what was it they attacked? Capitalism. Particularly a capitalist system pushing its tentacles globally. They did not fly those planes into the National Cathedral in Washington, our national homage to the spiritual; they did not fly those planes into the Golden Dome at Notre Dame University, our national homage to the games we love so much; and they did not fly those planes into the Kennedy Space Center, our national symbol of American greatness reaching for the stars. No, they realized those symbols were not the essense of America, it was trade. Our global reach and our willingness to use our military to protect trade at the expense of poor people around the world.<br /><br />Benjamin Franklin is often quoted as saying that with the adoption of the Constitution, we had "A Republic, if you can keep it." Can we?Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06998485419146402806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2804525913123822562.post-91311468740091580162011-03-07T10:05:00.000-08:002011-03-07T10:39:06.403-08:00The End of An EraOne day in the middle years of the decade we call the Sixties, I went to work at Marion Manufacturing Company. It was a textile plant that dominated the neighborhood in which I was born and grew up. I was working for $1.25 a hour, the minimum wage of the time and was trying to earn enough money to go to college for a year. On entering the weaveroom, I and all my fellow workers were greeted by blown-up photographs, at least 10 feet tall, of the shootout at the main gate of the plant which happened one October day in 1929.<br /><br />It was an attempt to convince those of us working in the Sixties that the union was bad and supporting a union would lead to violence again. It was intimidation at its worse and it achieved its objective. The employees voted down union representation yet again. In North Carolina and across the South, the late 1920s and early 1930s was a period of labor strife and when coupled with the brutally savage response strikers in the coalfields of Kentucky, West Virginia and Virginia suffered when trying to organize, it successfully kept unions out of the Carolinas and much of the Deep South.<br /><br />Why is this important today? I'm reminded that what we see happening in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Ohio, and surely in other Midwestern and Northeastern states, organized labor once again finds itself backed into a corner suffering savage blows from a well-muscled opponent. Like a boxer whose eyes are swelling shut with blood flowing down his face, organized labor is at the mercy of a vicious opponent determined to stamp out forever the ability of the working man and woman to have a say in working conditions, wages, benefit packages and the like.<br /><br />Of course, organized labor representation in non-public unions is at an historic low. Not since the days of the sitdown strike in the 1930s has labor been so weakened. Public employee unions make up the majority of unionized America today, and it is exactly those union members coming under attack by Republican henchmen. And henchmen is exactly what you have to call the current crop of state leaders who are attacking working men and women, and who are vilifying them. Imagine, public enemy number one isn't the Wall Street numbers runner, but is a school teacher.<br /><br />Most of us have forgotten the long and often bloody trail American workers have traveled since the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution. As Americans left the farm and moved into the cities for employment, they fought for safer working conditions, fairer wages, and a say in determining what those conditions and pay might be. Many workers paid a dear price for that struggle. In the case of Marion and the textile workers, six were slain on the pavement of Baldwin Avenue, a street I didn't know until I was grown was named for the plant manager in 1929. Much like we name highways for successful generals in our wars, Marion honored a successful warrior who fought against the union in a small mountain town whose only industry at the time was cotton mills.<br /><br />Believe me, many more than six died fighting for the union in this country. Now we are watching as their sacrifice is ground once again into the dust and public employees in Wisconsin face the possibility that what was once a proud bastion of liberal thought and practice has turned inself into, for lack of a better example, another Arizona. A state run by men and women with limited vision.Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06998485419146402806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2804525913123822562.post-82974156640565830532010-02-01T12:26:00.000-08:002010-02-01T12:43:17.226-08:00They were the losers!When two airliners struck the World Trade Center's twin towers on 9/11, and another hit the Pentagon and a fourth crashed in Pennsylvania, my students acted with shock then with determination to tell the story and report how students at Appalachian State University were affected.<br /><br />One wonders, though, how many finally joined a branch of the armed services to serve either in Afghanistan or Iraq. For some of the male students, their testosterone-laden bodies were ready to fight, or so it seemed at the time. Calls were made for us to strike back. To send troops to the mountains of Afghanistan to track down Osama bin Laden and to kill him.<br /><br />One thing has not changed, however. The faces of our airmen, soldiers, sailors, and marines have not changed since the 1960s. While there was a draft in the sixties, it only snared the young men from working class backgrounds. The likelihood that anyone from an upper crust background getting called up in the draft were slim, pretty slim, hell, almost impossible.<br /><br />Today, the soldiers and marines who are doing the dying in our two wars look a lot like they did in Vietnam. These are the young people who attend second- or third-rate high schools. And even then they are the students the cream of those schools labeled as the "Losers" with a capital L. They are the students one identifies as not going on to college, or who has to work to help the family, not just help pay for the Jeep in the driveway.<br /><br />How interesting it is that when it comes to dying for our country, it seems that only those we label as losers are the ones willing to join and serve. Makes one wonder just what is worth saving in our country.Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06998485419146402806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2804525913123822562.post-78758679831496725932010-01-21T13:10:00.000-08:002010-01-21T13:19:00.467-08:00Weather and Politics Enough to Cause a Teetotaler to DrinkThe weather has been...well...Boone weather today. It is cloudy, rainy, and there is ice on everything and people are beginning to worry about getting home. Appalachian State has canceled classes tonight and warned everyone to check the Web in the morning for whether there will be further cancelations. All in all, just another dreary day in the High Country.<br /><br />Actually, the weather is pretty much a match for the funk the nation finds itself in. It seems everyone is pissed at the big banks, angry as heck at Congress and the White House, and, if Massachusetts is an example, angry enough to send any brainless bonehead to Washington in an effort to get change.<br /><br />It's only been a year, but it seems the Democrats have set a record for how long it took them to completely turnoff supporters and ignite a progressive protest across the nation. If I weren't a teetotaler, I'd go home tonight and pour me a tumbler of scotch.Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06998485419146402806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2804525913123822562.post-71345591010709710332010-01-07T07:48:00.000-08:002010-01-07T08:24:24.139-08:00Who? 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Will we remember it as a celebration of a Savior’s birth, or will we remember it as the day we, as a nation, showed the world just how feckless and cowardly we are?</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">Do you remember the 2000 hit movie “Gladiator,” starring Russell Crowe as the Roman general Maximus who was betrayed by an emperor, had his family murdered, and escaped death at the hands of the Praetorian Guard only to find himself in slavery, captured by a North African slave trader who sold him to Proximo and a life in the arena.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">One scene in that memorable movie stands out for me and, and at least in my mind has come to represent what I see out of the Washington and media elites whenever some uneducated or obviously mentally deranged scavenger from some Third World country decides he wants to blow up himself along with a bunch of Americans.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><o:p><br /></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">Maximus is chained to Juba, played by that marvelous African actor Djimon Hounsou, and they stand with all the other newly purchased slaves in their rags and filth waiting for the crude door to this backwater arena to open and lead them to their fate. The excitement in the scene grows as each character comes to grip with what awaits them. Horns sound. The crowd screams in its bloodlust. The gladiators on the other side of the door, identities hidden behind grotesque animal heads, swing their arms and swords, axes and other implements of death. Maximus and a few others stand tall, tamping down their own fear ready to lead and conquer.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><o:p><br /></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">Remember? As a member of the audience the day you saw this film, weren’t you ready for Maximus to avenge himself? You had picked your side in this fight. That’s the image we want the world to see when they see an American. Isn’t that so?</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><o:p><br /></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">But what image do they see all too often? It’s the image of the little, sniveling coward standing in line, chained to a huge German slave. Tears streak his dirty face and piss slides down his legs to pool at his feet. The others move away from him. The stench of death already rests with him and when the door opens the first to die is the coward. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><o:p><br /></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">Wow! I can heard it now. I’ll be accused of not supporting our troops in Iraq or Afghanistan. As a U.S. Marine veteran I’m convinced our men and women in those theatres of operation are performing outstandingly. But of course the British Army was just as professional in the 19<sup>th</sup> century when it fought two wars against Afghanistan tribesmen. The first, from 1838 to 1842 ended badly for the Brits. After invading and ultimately reaching Kabul and seating their man on that country’s throne, the British faced insurrection and, ultimately, defeat in the mountain passes as the remainder of its combined Brit and Indian force and 12,000 civilians were wiped out. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><o:p><br /></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><o:p> </o:p><br /></p><o:p></o:p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">It is not the brave men and women on our frontlines that I see as the sniveling cowards. It is all the rest of us who refuse to sacrifice for this struggle. Especially, it’s this daily image of conservative lawmakers and talkers who rant and rave about the inadequacies of our mission, blaming the current leadership, Democrats, for all that’s wrong but never once offering anything that might indicate they have really thought about this war and what our strategy ought to be. Despite all the failure. Despite all the abuse. Despite the war crimes we have committed and, probably, continue to commit, no one offers<span style=""> </span>sound advice for getting ourselves out of this mess, and no one shows any willingness to talk with those in the other party to work it out. The failure, my friends is not with our brave men and women in uniform. It is with the feckless cowards who stroll the protected halls of Congress doing nothing to protect our soldiers, sailor, marines and airmen.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">We are constantly bombarded with vitriol from the right. Conservatives in Congress take a perverse pleasure in seeking failure for the country as they see their only route to power as coming with the destruction of those currently in power. We ought to remember this. Democrats, then the minority in both Houses of Congress, crossed the aisle with extended hands offering to work with their Republican colleagues and the Republican administration in 2001 to defeat the people responsible for 9/11. That happened. It is in the historical record. But Republicans decided they controlled Congress so there was no need to be bipartisan. The White House decided it was their way or the highway, not only for the domestic political world but for international strategies as well. That attitude continues in Washington, and not just with the war effort. It is an attitude that will ultimately destroy us.<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><o:p><br /></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">For me, I am beginning to see strong parallels to these Afghan wars with our own. I’m also beginning to see strong parallels to the Vietnam struggle, despite what our leaders and military analysts say. Cambodia, a neutral country bordering Vietnam was sucked into the maelstrom of war as it was used by North Vietnam and the Viet Cong for safe havens to escape American and South Vietnamese forces in the 1960s and 1970s. Sound familiar? Our leaders at the time opted to carry out secret bombings of that tragic little country, and finally, when that had not worked, invasion. The result was a country toppled into the quagmire of our war. In fact, we opened the gates of hell for Cambodia as the result of our failed strategy was Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. It is estimated that 1.7 million people died in the Killing Fields of Pol Pot’s regime.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><o:p><br /></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">We bomb the tribal regions of Pakistan trying to kill Al Qaeda leaders using drones and missiles. We badger the Pakistani Army to fight the war for us in the tribal regions, and in Afghanistan we face a growing and persistent threat from the Taliban, the former leaders of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, the government we toppled in 2001 when we attacked after 9/11. Eight years later we are still fighting them. Just like the Brits in the 19<sup>th</sup> century, we face an insurrection. We have tied ourselves to a leader the people of Afghanistan hate, don’t trust, and whom we do not trust. The Afghans don’t want us there, yet we are afraid to pullout. The Taliban is using that growing hatred of Americans to grow its struggle for regaining control of that backwater little country. And, Al Qaeda is willing to see American blood spilled on any battlefield as long as it leads to the collapse of another super power.<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">Finally, who will be the next Pol Pot? Is he sitting in some mud hut in the tribal areas today? If we Americans are truly like Maximus, we will not let that happen. However, if we are truly like the sniveling coward with piss on his legs, then we are really at the end of our run as a world power. Which are we?</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><o:p> </o:p></p> Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06998485419146402806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2804525913123822562.post-57065077096281475182009-09-14T12:30:00.000-07:002009-09-14T13:04:35.927-07:00Two apologies: Night and DaySerena Williams, after a day and a half to cool off, has offered a sincere apology after her behavior Saturday was deemed inappropriate and threatening by U.S. Open officials.<br /><br />At least there seems to be one person in this country who, after taking some time to reflect on their actions, is ready to admit they screwed up--BIG TIME. Not so the congressman of South Carolina, Joe Wilson.<br /><br />The only thing Wilson has proved is that James L. Petigru had it right on the eve of the Civil War when he said South Carolina was too small for a country but too big to be an insane asylum. Joe Wilson certainly appears to be a descendant of those South Carolinians who believed it was OK to kick start a war that would destroy their region and leave 600,000 American from North and South dead.<br /><br />Here it is several days beyond the episode. Wilson has given his grudging apology claiming he just lost it. Like I and most football fans lose it before the TV in the privacy of our living rooms when we scream at the idiot coaches or hapless players who are spoiling our afternoon.<br />Wilson apparently believed it appropriate to shout out from the floor of the House at the President of the United States and call the man a liar.<br /><br />I put that behavior in the same tasteless and threatening arena as those bozos who carried guns to where the president was speaking during the August recess.<br /><br />Well, we know there are lies and damn lies and I don't know which kind Wilson was accusing President Obama of, or of which Joe Wilson is guilty of himself. One thing we know about our political leadership in this country, most if not all of them lie from time to time. We voters are capable of deciding who is lying and who isn't without Joe Wilson's help from the floor of the House.<br /><br />We expect Wilson to act like a grown up. And we expect Serena Williams to act like a grown up. She and her sister have commanded center court in tennis for several years. They are well on their way to, perhaps, becoming the best to play the game. There was no need for this outburst, and certainly no need to appear so threatening while using language more appropriate to the parking lot outside a strip club.<br /><br />But she has apologized, twice, for her misdeed. Good for her. But Wilson is another matter. He is the poster child for a fringe element that seems to have grabbed control of the Republican Party. This radical element is the same that used to control the Democratic Party in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the South. The Democrats at the time were a regional party, pretty much based in the South like the Republicans today.<br /><br />Party members were basically in bed with industrialists and bankers (sound familiar?), and used race baiting tactics to keep poor whites and blacks at each other's throats. It worked until the 1960s when, for some reason a southern president decided Civil Rights had to be honored in this country and forced Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and other legislation that finally began to remove the second-class status of blacks. The flow of white voters switching parties began to grow in the South, picking up a really fine head of steam when Ronald Reagan decided to announce his candidacy for the presidency in the heart of old Dixie, Mississippi.<br /><br />Joe Wilson seems happily at home with that pedigree. After LBJ gave it up the Republicans began to attract those in the South who were wanting a better home for their race baiting souls than the one the Democrats then offered. Republicans have become a marginal party, but one still capable of making mighty mischief as they obstruct progress. However, unless their plan is to forment armed insurrection, I don't see how they plan to widen their influence and once again challenge the nation with its political theories.<br /><br />I tip my hat to Serena. She and Venus are still the best. Joe, it's time you learn how to really lead. And voters of South Carolina, it's time you moved away from Petigru's directions to a lost traveler, "My dear sir, take any road, you can't go amiss. The whole state is one vast insane asylum."Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06998485419146402806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2804525913123822562.post-68361724194158931542009-07-27T05:33:00.000-07:002009-07-27T06:41:34.040-07:00Six minutes: That's all it took!I read an article in this morning's New York Times by Dan Van Natta Jr. and Abby Goodnough in which it was stated that the call to police about someone breaking into Henry Louis Gate's house was made at 12:45 p.m. the day of the incident. Gates was arrested at 12:51 p.m.<br /><br />That's six minutes. Six minutes to go from a voice on the end of a telephone line to a cop slapping the cuffs on a 58-year-old, 5-foot seven-inch black man who needs a cane to walk.<br /><br />Let's break that down if we can. The article didn't provide a timeline for the events, but lets say the call came in at 12:45. It still requires, let's say 30 seconds for the dispatcher to get the necessary information and get that relayed to police in the vicinity. Sergeant Crowley was nearby and responded. OK, let's say it took him about a minute to get there. That puts the time at 14:46:30 or there abouts. Let's say further that it took Crowley about 30 seconds to park his car, get his whatever in order as he walked from the car to the house and knocked. That takes us to 12:47. That leaves four minutes for this situation to deteriorate to the point that Dr. Gates was arrested, and, if you remember, Gates at some point provided Sgt. Crowley with his driver's license and Harvard ID, clearly establishing the residence as his. So it really wasn't four minutes.<br /><br />And, when Crowley didn't respond to a follow up call after he called in his response, the Cambridge police dispatched six other units to that quiet residential street.<br /><br />This just further convinces me the police were out of line on this one. Four minutes or less for a cop who wasn't getting the deference he wanted from an uppity black man to slap the cuffs on a senior citizen.<br /><br />I'm more convinced than ever that too many cops strap on their self-importance when they put on their uniform and that gets in the way of good community policing. Bottom line, I'm more convinced than ever that race was at the heart of this encounter and while Dr. Gates may very well have been confrontational with the policeman, that isn't a crime as long as it remained verbal. Come on, give the man a chance to vent then cool off. Unfortunately that's not the image of police one sees on the cop shows and the reality shows. The image one sees then is of heavily armed Darth Vaders shouting and threatening violence if the suspect doesn't comply. And, at what point does a suspect become a suspect. In this case Dr. Gates should never have been the suspect.<br /><br />And one always hears that Massachusetts is the most liberal state in the Union. Really?Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06998485419146402806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2804525913123822562.post-77977792080345839272009-07-24T07:16:00.000-07:002009-07-24T08:03:07.367-07:00Procedure and state power are at issueOne doesn't have to spend much time reading the news to come across another example of how stupid we as social creatures have become.<br /><br />I'm referring to the flap surrounding President Obama and his comments about the arrest and detention of Henry Louis Gates, the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University, and director of the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Research.<br /><br />Anyone who remotely follows the news in this country is probably familiar with the events recently when Dr. Gates, returning home from a trip overseas, found his front door stuck and as he and his driver, another black man, were pushing against the door to open it were sighted by a neighbor who called the police.<br /><br />That's where Sgt. James Crowley came into this picture. Crowley is a white police officer and it is the controversy swirling around the interactions between these two men that has the nation buzzing. Was it racism? Was it an over-agitated senior citizen refusing to back down? What really happen?<br /><br />Let me state my position on this. First, I don't know if racism was overtly at the heart of this situation, but I bet it was there covertly, buried so deep in the psychi of both men that neither could respond in any other way than for Dr. Gates to become angry at being confronted in his own home by an agent of the state, and the policeman seeing an out-of-control citizen confronting him in anger and disbelief. Second, I believe that President Obama did nail it when he made the observation that arresting a man who had demonstrated he was in his own home, wasn't confronting his neighbors with illegal or inappropriate behavior, and who was confronted by what he perceived to be the jackbooted authority of the state was stupid on the part of the police.<br /><br />Why do I feel that way? Easy. While many don't see the modern American policeman as some Darth Vader figure dressed in black and armed to the teeth with expression stern and eyes masked behind dark glasses, I want you to look at the photograph that went across the country. There is Dr. Gates, a slight man as compared to the giants who have cufffed him and are leading him off his own front porch. There were three of them in the photo, three of them. You have to wonder where these men parked their compassion and understanding. Instead they choose the stern "make and example" position that cops usually take. Their immediate response was to follow procedure to the letter and that's what they did. That's what initial investigations have found, anyway. But that is my point. Perhaps the "procedure" is at fault. Obviously these men, all adults with years under their belts as police, found it too difficult to step back in a situation not going to their liking and choosing instead to not use their mind, compassion, and understanding of a tense, but certainly not life-threatening or bodily-harm threatening situation. Instead they choose to humiliate Dr. Gates.<br /><br />Perhaps it is time the Cambridge Police review their procedures for cases like this. I certainly feel that once Dr. Gates established his identity and that he was in his own residence, the police, without a duly sworn warrant, were wrong. While many might disagree, it is my opinion that at the point Dr. Gates established that it was his residence, that no crime was in progress, his IV Amendment rights came into play and the police were then at fault.<br /><br />It seems that on a regular basis we hear of police overstepping the bounds of their authority. Whether it's the tazing of a student who refuses to leave a library, or the killing of a senior citizen who refuses to leave his humble home when confronted by the local SWAT brigade ready to haul him to a rest home, or the simple arresting of a distinguished citizen who happens to be black for becoming angry at being confronted in his own home by one of the state's dark knight, it shouldn't happen. Procedure is always cited as the reason no one is held responsible. My contention is procedure is at fault and should be changed.Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06998485419146402806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2804525913123822562.post-89496974097171140002009-07-20T08:23:00.000-07:002009-07-22T02:24:14.047-07:00Our Creaky Old Space ProgramToday is the 40th anniversary of man finally stepping onto the surface of a world on which he wasn't born. On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first man to do that, and shortly after Buzz Aldrin became the second. For a few brief hours they froliced on the surface of our moon, totally alone except for the tenuous radio link to earth and with their orbiting comrade, Mike Collins.<br /><br />For those of us watching from our living rooms, bedrooms, diners and wherever we could gather to watch those static-filled TV images of this historic event, it seemed that we Americans were finally stepping onto a path that would take us to the stars.<br /><br />If it were only so. Here we are 40 years later, and we haven't returned to that outpost that circles us a quarter of a million miles away.<br /><br />That's right. We sent six other crews to the moon and five of those were able to land and send back breath-taking images of our engineering prowress. Unfortunately, the politicians of the day from the White House and Congress couldn't wait to shutdown the program. Three missions were cancelled, and the vast engineering system that built the powerful Saturn V rocket was dismantled. Instead of looking to the outer planets and dreaming of further adventures, we decided to build a space bus and for almost 30 years have been satisfied with NASA's version of Ralph Cramden circling in low earth orbit.<br /><br />Don't get me wrong. The Shuttle was able to put into space the Hubble Space Telescope and when it proved near sighted as heck, we found men who could go aloft and fix it. That alone justified the program and proved man has a role in space. But the dream, the adventure, the mystery of deep space exploration was left to our imaginations. And we American quickly filled our minds with Star Trek, Star Wars, Alien, and numerous other nameless space westerns.<br /><br />Of all the movies about space, the one I like best is Clint Eastwood and Tommy Lee Jones in "Space Cowboys." Why? Because it showed us what is really true about our present space effort. The adventure of space is dying off as quickly as our mid-70-year-old former moon walkers line up for the rest home and death. How much longer can a 78-year-old Neil Armstrong try to ignite the flame of adventure once again for a generation that sees him and his deeds as just words on the page of a history book?<br /><br />I remember those days. I was home on leave from the Marine Corps. I was stationed at Cherry Point MCAS in North Carolina, and being around pilots and high-performance aircraft was a real ego booster. I remember sitting in the bedroom of Steve Neighbors, a friend of my brother, watching the images as Walter Cronkite acted like a teenage boy who has just been told by the prettiest girl in the class that she would go to the prom with him.<br /><br />How were we to know that in just a few short years it would all be over and the only monuments to this achievement would be a few crumbling concrete foundations that marked the spot where once mighty, thundering rockets shook the world as they carried a few lucky men on the greatest adventure ever.<br /><br />A couple of years later I was stationed in Iwakuni, Japan, and while there purchased a Moon watch. The Omega Speedmaster Professional was the only watch certified by NASA for space missions. I still have that watch. Of course it is like the space program. The seals and gaskets that keep out dirt and moisture have long since deteriorated to the point that if I wear it on a rainy day the crystal will cloud up. It needs an overhaul. But like our country I can't affort the price of sending it to a recognized Omega repair facility for this work. The United States talks big about going back to the moon and setting up a base there. It talks equally as brave about going to Mars. But so far there isn't a spacecraft on deck to do either mission and probably won't be for many years to come. Our shuttle, that aging delivery van of a spaceship, will be retired after a few more mission to the International Space Station. And the space station, despite hundreds of billions of dollars and the efforts of several countries to manufacture and place in orbit the various components needed to build it, will be decommissioned and crashed into the ocean in 2016.<br /><br />Talk about lack of vision. It's no wonder we haven't made it back to our nearest space neighbor. Perhaps it's time we overhaul the space agency. Start over with new people, those who haven't bought into the current stagnant and fetid play it safe pond that has worked so hard to lower our sights. Let's dream again.Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06998485419146402806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2804525913123822562.post-12712988222786881902009-07-01T07:11:00.000-07:002009-07-01T09:17:53.672-07:00Western North Carolina: A Rich Man's ParadiseI live in Western North Carolina. The natives of this region are called mountaineers, the team name for Appalachian State University and West Virginia University. Appalachian is in Boone, North Carolina, and of course WVU is in Morgantown. This region that stretches from northern Georgia and Alabama to Pennsylvania (I'm not including the northern portion of this mountainous spine to east coast America) was the home for small, hard scrabble farms on which lived families that barely could raise enough to eat and depended upon the annual burley crop to make a little money.<br /><br />The region was filled with small towns and crossroad stores. To shop at anything resembling a department store usually meant a long trip by car over roads that were an insult to the word. The people and their families had lived there for a century and a half.<br /><br />In North Carolina, poverty in this region reigned, and it wasn't until the families began to flee off the mountain to find work that there was a change. Where did they go? To the small towns along the western edge of the state's Piedmont, places like Old Fort, Marion, Glen Alpine, Morganton, Valdese, Hickory, Wilkesboro, and on and on, places with new wealth from the textile and furniture plants newly established there. And for me these towns were the rivals of Marion High School. Our Rippers, as the athletic teams were called, played the teams from each of those towns either in football, basketball, or baseball, if not all three. But time has run its course and there is no Marion High School, Morganton, Valdese, Hickory high schools any longer. They are all relics of a past that no longer exists, much the same as those cotton mills and furniture plants are empty shells in communities that have watched an entire way of life disappear in the past decade and a half.<br /><br />In the early days of the last century logging was king. If you find old photographs of the period you quickly note that the mountains are stripped of their trees. The logging companies of that day cut everything and left little or nothing behind. In Watauga County the railhead was in Todd, and the line went down the mountain to the east. The principal load in those pre-Great War days was logs sent to build a mighty nation, if you accept the propaganda from the period. Actually, the disappeared forests only fed the personal wealth of the old and newly established rich in this country. It was one of many boom times our nation has experienced since its founding, a building of wealth that ultimately led to a widened gap between the rich and the poor that when it ended always seemed to hurt the small man more than the big man.<br /><br />Today, those denuded green hills of the pre-war period are once again covered in lush forests. Environmentalists fight to keep from happening what happened in those first two decades. We fight to keep the trees from being harvested yet again for wealth-creation, but we turn a blind eye as they are felled to create the open spaces needed to build the vacation homes of the rich and powerful in this state and others from the southeast.<br /><br />Old family land has been broken up and sold as the children moved away to escape the back-breaking poverty of their parents. This out migration continues today as our young try to find a better life someplace else while the sons and daughters of the priviledged wish to stay here where no well-paying jobs exist.<br /><br />The land that was once dotted with farm fields and old barns is now covered with burgeoning vacation tracts. The McMansions and Super Log Homes of the well-off citizens of Charlotte, Winston-Salem, Greensboro, High Point, Burlington, Durham, Chapel Hill, and Raleigh cover the ridges behind their guarded gates. They come here to sit on their expensive wooden decks blind to the remaining poverty of the region and with an unwillingness to pay their fair share for the services they use or the problems they create.<br /><br />The population of the state has tripled just since I was in high school. While once we numbered about 3 million inhabitants from Murphy to Manteo, today we number about 9.25 million, a figure that puts a strain on the state to provide just the basics in a fair and equitable manner.<br /><br />The three universities on this end of the state stand as examples of how times have changed.<br /><br />Western Carolina University and Appalachian were established as teacher-training institutions in the late 19th century. In fact, neither became full-fledged universities until the 1960s. The third institution, the University of North Carolina Asheville began as a junior college in the '20s called Asheville Biltmore College. It basically supplied the first two years of college for the priviledged sons and daughters of Asheville before they left for Greensboro and Women's College, or Chapel Hill to finish at Carolina, or just enough post-high school training to supply Asheville's businesses with the limited trained help they needed to serve the rich and powerful of another era who found Asheville to be a pleasant escape from the clamor of life up north.<br /><br />Today only Western Carolina seems still to honor its roots by continuing to recruit the region's students, many who are still first-generation college attenders. UNCA and Appalachian have long since grown beyond that to attend to the upper middle class denizens of the metropolitan areas of the state along the I-85 corridor that stretches from Charlotte to Durham.<br /><br />Many of these students fall in love with the region and want to attend school here after vacationing away from the super hot and muggy Piedmont summers. Both UNCA and Appalachian have only too gladly become expressions of privilege and entitlement that define this particular demographic in our population.<br /><br />Western North Carolina remains an escape. Today it's an escape not only from the insufferable heat of the lowlands, but also from the growing economic calamity speading rapidly across the face of our nation. Yes, we will suffer, too, but for a time we are protected by the gated communities of upper middle class America, and of the rich and powerful who vacation here in the anonymity the region offers. Did you know that Paul Newman, before his death, maintained a vacation home near Grandfather Mountain. Rita Moreno could often be spotted shopping at Mast General Store in Valle Crucis. And Wayne Huizenga, who made a fortune renting movies and hauling trash before he owned the Miami Dolphins, Florida Panthers and Florida Marlins, is reported to have flown in and out of Banner Elk on his private jet to helicopter around big ticket sports stars and movie actors like Dan Marino and Kevin Costner, among others trying to sell secluded getaway homes the likes of which no local could ever afford.<br /><br />We've become a playground. Our low-tax local governments keep taxes low to keep what they perceive as the gravy train running. But these communities often don't produce a lot of new revenue for these governments. Afterall, if you fly in your private jet and helicopter to your home away from home, and you stock it with food from New York, LA or some other exotic location because the local markets just don't have what you are used to eating, then how is the local economy benefitting? The truth is it isn't. And when you throw in the incentives local government provide the developers of these communities to get them to build here and not somewhere else, the economy often comes out losing, not gaining.<br /><br />The state's budget mess is a calamity. Cuts in public schools and in higher education seem to signal the end of the current binge. While the priviledged might be pulling their belts tighter to get through all this, the locals--capenters, electricians, plumbers, sales clerks, janitors, teachers and teacher aides, and all the rest who have to work to get from payday to payday without going broke, they are being hurt and to hear the bitter back and forth between Republicans and Democrats, well, one can only hope they all come to their senses soon and realize that we are in this together. If they don't figure that out soon, the lower economic classes will go under but sooner or later, so will the upper economic classes. And if we go, so goes the world and if you have that many dissatisfied people, conditions are rife for violence and war.<br /><br />Most of our great science fiction writers, they were futurists in the best sense of that word, seemed to believe that some worldwide calamitous war would send us into a Dark Age to rival that which fell on western civilization when a corrupt and broke western part of the Roman Empire fell in 476 to the Germanic Odoacer who deposed the last western emperor. For us it might not be that we are defeated, even in a weakened state, but that we commit suicide. We have spent ourselves into international poverty. We owe tremendous sums to our enemies who have financed us for decades. And our military has demonstrated it can no longer project a powerful enough footprint to force our will on the unwilling in this world.<br /><br />For those of us in Western North Carolina it means that once again we become a region defined by poverty rather than bounty, by ignorance rather than knowledge, and by sickness rather than our good health. One can only pray that in time we learn to overcome the problems confronting us.Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06998485419146402806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2804525913123822562.post-20981137063581014002009-05-12T07:43:00.000-07:002009-05-12T08:12:40.145-07:00God Help UsSo, the Obama Administration has finally taken control of the War in Afghanistan. Yesterday it was announced that the Secretary of Defense had fired the field commander there, Gen. David D. McKiernan. He is to be replaced with a new commanding officer and assistant who have a history in counter-insurgency warfare. Robert M. Gates said "fresh eyes were needed." One has to wonder whether it is a fresh American commitment that is needed?<br /><br />After eight years we are no closer to winning this war than we were when Tommy Franks screwed it up so royally following the WTC attacks. Bin Laden and much of his foreign army was allowed to escape into Pakistan where, with minimal pressure from American or Pakistani military, he was allowed to rebuild and rearm. Today Pakistan is in turmoil. The Pakistani army is openly engaged in a war only miles from the capital. And just a few weeks ago Gen. David Petraeus, America's favorite general right now, predicted that if the Pakistanis did not do something, the country would fall to the Taliban in a matter of weeks.<br /><br />I guess fresh eyes are needed, but so is a commitment by the American people. I don't see that happening. We are still content to let the few from an American underclass of rural men and women carry the burden of sacrifice in this war. You don't believe me? Then watch the News Hour on PBS every night. Periodically they flash the photos of the men who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan as a memorial. What you see are young faces fresh from small-town America staring into the camera so seriously.<br /><br />The American military establishment lives in dread that it will have to fall back on the draft to fill its ranks. For years it has wasted its enlisted ranks, squandered its reservist ranks, and destroyed the National Guard's capacity to do much of anything. That fear of conscription by the military and Congress tells me this country still hasn't gotten over Vietnam.<br /><br />So, Mr. Gates, what is our policy for Afghanistan now that you have fired a brave and honored commander? Did Obama see him as his McClellan? A general too prone to avoid the war-ending strategy of swift assault some see as so necessary? I hope you are right, for I fear we have stepped out on the slippery slope of defeat. We don't have the forces necessary to do the job that needs to be done, so we are opting instead for a strategy of snoop and poop, rope-a-dope, or whatever you might want to call it. Send in a few men to hit and run in a land where the indigenous forces are already the world's best at that.<br /><br />God help us.Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06998485419146402806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2804525913123822562.post-73844936122743966992009-02-11T12:36:00.000-08:002009-02-11T12:39:24.562-08:00Two Tires and a Lame Bailout<p class="MsoNormal">I bought two tires for my truck yesterday.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Wow! You might ask if that’s all that I have to write about. No, but it’s a good starting point. You see, the tires were the cheapest I could find at $71.00 a piece. So, with tax I spent over $150.00 for two with the tire store having to order two more just like them for me to complete the set.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p><br />Well, I needed them. My Ranger bounced along the road every morning as I headed into work. The rubber was worn and sculpted into bumps and gouges, and the ride was anything but smooth and my gas mileage was slipping toward Hummer territory. The two tires placed on the front sure smoothed out the ride, and the steering. It was a pleasure riding to work this morning. Instead of my kidneys being whipped like eggs ready for an omelet. I got to work feeling pretty good.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p><br />I bought this truck around New Years in 2001. I remember because my old truck had a floor shift and my aging knees were in rebellion. As I mashed the clutch and shifted the gears as I drove up Boone Mountain every day, the knee began swelling to size of a small cantaloupe. Since getting rid of the old truck and buying this Ranger with an automatic transmission, my knee has remained within normal dimensions. No more swelling. And, no more pain.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p><br />Who the heck is Timothy Geithner?</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p><br />Before you tag me as uninformed, I know he is Obama’s treasury secretary and yesterday he was busy telling the world about his new bailout plan. Only thing ……… he really didn’t tell us anything. There was a lot of details Mr. Geithner left out of his explanation and evidently bankers, financiers and investors all felt he hadn’t delivered sufficiently to soothe their worried minds. At least that seems to be the consensus of the American media.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p><br />The more important question probably should be why anyone in small-town America should care? After buying those two tires yesterday, I care, and I’m not much impressed with what I’ve learned.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p><br />The details are missing and what few were given sounded suspiciously like the soothing missives issued by Henry Paulson during the waning days of the Bush Administration. Well, I guess you could say the most important change took place. The FSP, or Financial Stability Plan, is the new name. No longer is it TARP, which stands for Troubled Assets Relief Program. You remember TARP? That’s the program that spent $350 billion bailing out Wall Street with no oversight, after the program was sold as a bailout for Main Street. Remember, the taxpayer was to purchase those toxic loans from banks so the banks could once again make loans.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p><br />Well, that didn’t seem to work too well. Credit in this country has remained frozen for months, jobs are being lost by the thousands every day, and today the heads of the major banks trooped to Washington for their turn at being publicly flogged by Congress. I don’t think it amounts to anything but for a way that Barney Franks can grandstand and our senators can hog the media spotlight so the people back home can see that they are doing something.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p><br />There is so much subterfuge in Washington today. Frankly we need much more transparency. I suggest our government ought to operate much as M.I.A. did at the Grammys the other night. When she bounced her VERY PREGNANT body out on the stage wearing that transparent poke dot costume, she became the talk of the nation. I’d say she had the right idea. You want the nation to talk about you, hang it out for everyone to see. Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s a lesson that will be learned by Obama and a Democratic Congress any better than it was learned by Bush and a Republican Congress. </p>Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06998485419146402806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2804525913123822562.post-44180057300209117702008-12-10T13:06:00.000-08:002008-12-10T13:33:58.063-08:00Journalism's futureThe column was filled with venom. You could tell the young writer didn't have a clue, but she thought she did. Her anger, so childish in a way, came through. It said loudly and clearly to the newspaper adviser: "Just who the hell do you think you are?"<br />Sorry, but that anger is misplaced and evidence of her cluelessness is demonstrated to all.<br />She said in her final column for the student newspaper that those who criticize her work are wrong. It isn't her fault if her work is less than perfect. If we want to criticize we need to criticize those who really should be blamed, her professors in the department of communication.<br />Blame my professors?<br />Is there no sense of personal responsibility? No understanding that you don't learn it all in a 16-week semester? No understanding that a part-time student journalist just cannot match the experience and wisdom accumulated over a 30-year career?<br />No. There was no such understanding demonstrated in this column published in the student newspaper last week.<br />Every day I see evidence that the age of newsprint just might be coming to an end. Our harsh economy seems likely to finish off what arrogant editors and publishers threw away in their rush to appease the gods of readership and profit. Newspaper have been shedding readers for a half century, and for the past quarter of a century one newspaper after another has been gobbled up by chains which owe their financial future to the barrons of Wall Street. Today those chickens are coming home to roost.<br />Many of our newspapers are only bloodless corpses today, and some of the others have the rattle of death hanging in their throats. For example, the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and other Tribune Co. properties. Sam Zell, the real estate tycoon extrordinaire of Chicago, has announced he's going to take the Tribune Co. into bankruptcy. That after he raided the employee pension plan to finance his purchase of the company. The only thing this would-be savior has shown is that the old business school adage that a businessman can run any company is baloney. Zell's complete failure as an owner is evidence every day. He created this debt heavy load himself and now finds he can't make payment on that debt. I guess for Sam Zell, he has discovered that running a media empire is vastly different that running the overblown real estate empire he created.<br />So, my arrogant student journalist will graduates in a few days. I wonder if there will be any journalism jobs there for her, and question just what we have prepared her to do. For her sake and for the sake of all our student journalists, I hope we soon find the model of the future for journalism.Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06998485419146402806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2804525913123822562.post-12205333789427931142008-11-30T09:26:00.000-08:002008-11-30T09:51:02.675-08:00Beauty sends our minds wanderingThanksgiving 2008 has come and gone. For my wife and I it was a marathon trip from Boone, North Carolina, to Rome, Georgia, and back in 72 hours. You could say that we are getting beyond our prime for these long car trips. Bathrooms and the need to stretch creaking knees get in the way of long stretches between fillups. So, our travels have taken on a less hectic and more leisurely pace.<br /><br />Saturday morning, after driving from 9 a.m. until 7 p.m. on Friday, I attended my weekly Bible study and in the discourse made the point that Heaven must be like A&W Rootbeer stands. I don't know of any in North Carolina, but it seems Tennessee and northern Georgia are filled with them. So, if you love the frosted mugs and the supercooled elixir as do my wife and I, then those A&W stands are like Heaven. They are far away and hard to reach, but oh so worth the journey to get there.<br /><br />Of course one of our more well-off retirees made the point that he didn't think A&W was Heaven. In fact, he thought more of the other place since he had invested a lot in the stock and had evidently lost much of his investment. Well, I guess I should have told him that faith required patience; but I let it pass.<br /><br />On our trip back from my wife's mother and her third husband's place, we stopped in a small town in Tennessee called Ocoee at a Huddle House Restaurant. It was there we both ventured on flights of imagination. Cynthia, of course, took the more romatic path while I, as a journalist trained to observe, took the more practical path.<br /><br />Our waitress, for lack of a better description, had the fading beauty of a Playboy Bunny, and that's where my wife went. She envisioned this aging beauty as one who had left for the bright lights of the world only to be bruised and sent back home broken but defiant. I, on the other had, first noticed she was not wearing a regulation T-shirt as were the other waitresses, or the cook. That said to me that perhaps she was the day manager or, possibly, the franchise owner for Ocoee.<br /><br />Now, the truth is probably nothing at all like our mindless wanderings as we left Ocoee and headed toward Maryville, Severville, North Carolina and home. Our beautiful, friendly waitress was probably just that, a hometown girl grown up with children, a husband working in the local whatever plant, and both attending the local Baptist church on Sunday mornings. Take your pick, but if you ever are passing through Ocoee on Highway 411, stop at the Huddle House and enjoy an order of bacon, overeasy eggs, hashbrowns, toast and coffee. It's a clean, friendly place to break your travels.Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06998485419146402806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2804525913123822562.post-22442029553372561572008-09-21T15:54:00.000-07:002008-09-21T16:29:34.655-07:00The Gang of Four<p class="MsoNormal">It was so surreal on Friday. Our economic world crashed around us last week and there were our president, George W. Bush; the secretary of the Treasury, Henry Paulson; the Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke; and the chairman of the Security and Exchange Commission, Chris Cox standing in the Rose Garden of the White House assuring us they had things under control. All that was necessary was for Congress to forget about partisanship, and the abysmal track record of these four so-called wizards in regard to the economic collapse.<br /><br />We've been kicking around for a decade when to say the 20th century ended. So many have wanted to peg its demise to the establishment of the Internet as a viable communication tool for average people, but I'd like to suggest that the end of the 20th century arrived this past week, on September 12th, when Wall Street finally melted.<br /><br />As we listened and watched the news last week, it was sobering how many commentators were talking in terms not heard since Black Friday, when the Stock Market crashed in 1929. And there was the Gang of Four, assuring us they had things under control. All that would be necessary would be for us average tax payers to pick up the tab for the failing hubris of men and women frantically chasing your and my wallet. Once again it seems that Wall Street had figured out how to swindle the pants off all of us. But this time, unlike 1929 when those who were guilty had to actually suffer the pain of their greedy money grab; the guilty will be bailed out by the Federal Government.<br /><br />Frankly, I just wish some of them would have the common decency to jump from their New York skyscraper windows like their grandfathers did 80 years ago. It does make one wonder whether we have finally reached the end of the long rope we have been dangling from for a half century in this country.<br /><br />One of my favorite pieces of music has been Aaron Copeland's Fanfare for the Common Man. It has been associated for so many years with Abraham Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address. It resonates with the solemn grandeur of the man who must roll up his sleeves and work his butt off to feed his family, all the while being asked to sacrifice for God and country, sometimes giving the ultimate sacrifice for his nation.<br /><br />When one thinks of that image, one repeated so often in our nation's history, one must wonder about the squealing pigs at the trough of Wall Street greed. Are they offering sacrifice? Are they offering to protect the nation? Are they offering to set aside their personal fortune for the survival of the nation? The answer is no. As often happens when the course of events slaps a stiff call for sacrifice on them, it is to the federal government they run with pleas to be bailed out at the expense of people who actually work their tails off every day to just make ends meet.<br /><br />One could ask what else did you expect.</p>Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06998485419146402806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2804525913123822562.post-43385795120516600662008-09-15T05:48:00.000-07:002008-09-15T05:50:15.836-07:00A confusing Sunday night<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">The noise outside my office door is growing steadily into a crescendo of sound. Youthful voices challenge each other for dominance as everyone tries to talk at the same time and tries to be heard at the same time. It is Sunday night and the newspaper staff is gathering for its latest meeting. The staff meets Sundays and Wednesday’s at 8 p.m., and I, as the adviser, am here. I don’t actually control the meeting. That’s the editor’s job. I do, however, offer criticism of the last issue or two in an effort to get them to improve as reporters and editors, graphic designers and photographers. Lately I’ve come to believe it just might be a lost cause.<br /><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">As the frost on my head grows ever whiter, and the waddle of my neck grows like that of an old Tom Turkey, the failure of my voice to crack through this cacophony is more and more evident.<br /><br /> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">Over the past three weeks I have been attempting to convince the young editor and his staff that they, talented as they are, do not have all the keys to the journalism kingdom. Their stories are poorly edited, with quality greatly dependent on the raw talent of the writer. Of course that means there’s a great disparity between stories in terms of style, grammar, quality of thought, you name it. While John McCain has been making much of Obama’s off-hand remark about “putting lipstick on a pig,” the newspaper staff seems to believe that just a bit more color on the front page will hide all their sins.<br /><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">Perhaps I have finally reached a point in my career in which I have failed to understand how to reach a new crop of students. Each year it has grown worse, from the standpoint of convincing them they can do better with just a little more work, until this year when it seems the feeling among the senior staff is they already know what to do and no one can really tell them anything they don’t already know. So, they don’t listen.<br /><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">I wonder if a younger hand might cut through the bullshit with more force than I seem to be able to slice it. Then I watch and listen and I have come to believe it is not an age thing at all. It is an attitude, a mindset that refuses to admit any culpability.</p>Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06998485419146402806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2804525913123822562.post-53955399520117153482008-08-26T11:54:00.000-07:002008-08-26T11:58:46.983-07:00The First Day of Class<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">The excitement is growing. The students outside my door are loud today. Despite the rain from Tropical Storm Fay, they are having a blast being back at school.<br /><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">A large portion of the excitement is from the quickly approaching start of the football season. Appalachian State will get its day in the sun on Saturday as it takes on LSU in Baton Rouge. Of course, everyone expects ASU to valiantly struggle against daunting odds, but to in the end fold its tent and accept the inevitable.<br /><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">That, of course, is to suffer a staggering and embarrassingly one-sided loss to the Tigers.<br /><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">The entire world of the Bowl Subdivision wants to slap us down. The Mountaineers were audacious enough last year to go to Ann Arbor and beat Michigan. And the football world hasn’t been the same since.<br /><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">What do I think? Well, coaches can talk too much about the possibilities of getting embarrassed by a school you should easily beat. Sometimes if you over coach, your team reacts in ways you don’t expect when they get their nose bloodied. After all, isn’t that what happened last year when Michigan found out those boys from that small school in the mountains of North Carolina knew how to play football?<br /><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">So, what’s going to happen Saturday in Baton Rouge? Appalachian State is going to come out a winner, regardless of what the score is. On national TV football fans will see a talented, well-coached group of young men play a game they love to the best of their abilities and when the final gun sounds, they’ll walk out of the stadium with their heads high.<br /><br /> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">And, who knows, lightning can struck twice.</p>Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06998485419146402806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2804525913123822562.post-24296724857138240892008-08-13T10:42:00.000-07:002008-08-13T11:09:17.634-07:00Parley Vous .....Did you see the snappy photograph of French President Nicolas Sarkozy with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev the other day? You know the one that appeared on front pages around the world as Sarkozy successfully negotiated a cease fire in the dust up between Russia and Georgia.<br /><br />My initial reaction was "What???"<br /><br />My adult life and study of international relations has always had the United States as the principal negotiator with the former Soviet Union when these flare ups happen. The person in that photograph should have been Condoleezza Rice, the American Secretary of State, or Vice President Dick Cheney. But it wasn't.<br /><br />In fact, we heard that President George W. Bush conversed with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin while at the opening sessions of the Olympics in China. Well, Putin left China to return to Russia and hurried to the war zone to cheer on his troops. A fat lot of good Bush's conversation had. I guess he was looking deep into Putin's eyes again. The image of Bush as this tragedy continued to unfold was of him batting balls or something a round with some of the athletes. It wasn't until the situation in Georgia looked to be spiraling totally out of control that Bush returned to Washington. I guess this was another of those Katrina moments.<br /><br />I don't remember a time in my life when the United States failed to move decisively in an international crisis. Now, our movements might have been more inclined to diplomacy than to militarism, but at least we were doing something. And you can bet that Henry Kissinger would have been standing before the cameras mumbling something about the "Vorld" and "Var" before he hopped onto an airplane to head to the world's capitals to negotiate a settlement. In fact, even during the Iranian crisis in the late '70s our diplomats were working the world to negotiate a settlement. This time, it seems we were content to let the French carry the load of peace.<br /><br />Shame on us.Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06998485419146402806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2804525913123822562.post-79153186880803589002008-07-23T11:30:00.000-07:002008-07-23T11:48:10.700-07:00What's in a name?Your name is all you have, at least that's the lesson my mother instilled in me as a young boy. She said if you treat people with honesty, dignity and respect, your name would be an asset. That was another time and place if we are to go by some of today's examples.<br /><br />Wachovia announced this week it had lost $8.9 billion in the second quarter, mainly in its mortgage divisions. If you accept the comments of CEO Bob Steel, these losses came about from faulty management decisions within the mortgage division. Yeah, the same old story we've heard so many times the past few months, it seems like the needle is stuck in a groove.<br /><br />What's the solution for Wachovia? Cutting 10,750 jobs, that's what. Putting people on the street. It sounds more and more like the 1930s after the banking crisis.<br /><br />What does all this have to do with a post about names? Well, Wachovia is a good example of how one company, at least, continues to trash its name and its reputation.<br /><br />If you're from North Carolina, you probably remember the hometown First Union National Bank branch. In the 1960s these were small places, with people you knew working the teller windows and in the offices. Small town values were the norm along with small town Chamber of Commerce sensibilities. But that has changed.<br /><br />For First Union National Bank, it began to change in the 1980s when the banks management decided it was no longer profitable to be a small bank playing at banking in a middling state. First Union National Bank had to grow and the place to grow was Florida.<br /><br />Do you remember the Florida of the 1980s? That was the decade of fast money in a state powered by the legalized laundering of drug money through the real estate and development industries. No one was crude enough to come out and say it, but First Union National Bank wanted into that action, as long as it was legal.<br /><br />Well, once First Union National Bank moved outside North Carolina, the old small town name had to go. So, FUNB it became, then just First Union.<br /><br />Over the next two decades, however, First Union, like all other banks in this country, began to sell themselves to the big customer and to forget or downright gouge their small customer.<br />Granny with her small checking account suddenly was eaten alive by overdraft fees, late fees, fees to answer the phone, or fees to talk to a live person.<br /><br />It was treatment like this that led to the spurt of small town bank development in North Carolina. Hey, Boone has a couple of these going right now and people love them. I don't hear people talk about Wachovia that way. Oh, Wachovia, I almost forgot.<br /><br />After First Union had succeeded in trashing its own name in the eyes of many of its customers, it bought Wachovia Bank, a smaller state competitor with a really top notch reputation and name recognition. You guessed it, suddenly First Union became Wachovia, playing off the positives Wachovia had earned but First Union only bought.<br /><br />Well, it seems this banking giant we know as Wachovia has succeeded in tarnishing its name again. You'd think they'd learn a lesson or two along the way.Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06998485419146402806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2804525913123822562.post-85141430404468100462008-07-17T11:18:00.000-07:002008-07-17T11:36:28.841-07:00Football is not too far away!Football season is only a few weeks away. The pros go to camp before too many weeks will have passed, and the colleges will be putting on their pads in August. I can't wait.<br /><br />What do you make of Brett Favre? He can't seem to make up his mind. For the past few seasons he's hinted at retiring, then not at retiring. At the end of last season he did more than hint, he actually did it after crying his eyes out on national TV. Now he's crying some more because he wants to play afterall, but the Packers, tired of his peek-a-boo dance with stepping away from the game, don't want him back. Unfortunately they don't want anyone else to have him either. It all makes for some interesting talk during a time when baseball is in the long, slow stretch of the season; the political campaigns are in the t'ween times after the primaries and before the conventions; and we are all just a little tired of the talking heads on TV who really don't have anything to say to us.<br /><br />Do you remember the old College All-Star Game? It hasn't been played in years, but I used to look forward to watching the new crop of college recruits playing the previous year's NFL champs. I remember the year the mighty Green Bay Packers took the college boys too lightly and lost. A couple of things killed that game. First, when the new recruits began signing huge contracts many opted not to play for fear of getting hurt. And, what NFL champ wants to open with a meaningless game in which they have absolutely nothing to prove, but everything to lose. But it was a wonderful bookmark on the changing seasons. When the all-stars and champs took the field in Chicago, you knew football was just around the corner.Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06998485419146402806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2804525913123822562.post-28997155070405167562008-06-05T10:51:00.000-07:002008-07-17T11:39:12.908-07:00Amo, Amas, Amat!Amo, Amas, Amat, Miss Alley's full of snot!<br /><br />Bo, Bis, Bit, Miss Alley's full of ....!<br /><br />Well, you get the point. That's the only Latin I remember from my high school Latin class. My teacher first year was Miss Catherine Alley, a spinster from Georgia, and Mr. Aubrey Eggers, an old bachelor from Glen Alpine, North Carolina, was my second year teacher.<br /><br />The only reason I remember that little bit of Latin knowledge is the two little ditties I and my fellow students used to memorize the conjugation of these two verbs.<br />Unfortunately, that's the extent of my pre-college training in the classics. Caesar's "Gallic Wars" and Edith's Hamilton's book on Roman mythology.<br /><br />The next time I attempted the classics was eight years later as a returning veteran at the University of North Carolina Asheville.<br /><br />UNCA considered itself to be the liberal arts campus in the UNC system. Don't know about that then, but we did have a pretty extensive focus on the liberal arts. I remember that in order to get beyond the sophomore year one had to take a battery of tests to judge one's abilities in history, basic science, literature, art and music.<br /><br />I don't know of many state-supported schools today that require the training in the disciplines one needs to write clearly, think inductively, and to express one's self fairly elegantly (present company excluded, please). That seems to be a creature of the past.Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06998485419146402806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2804525913123822562.post-68150542299323841082008-04-22T09:18:00.000-07:002008-04-22T09:21:20.517-07:00Jesse Helms has won another one!Back in the 1980s, when I was just a young reporter in Lenoir, North Carolina, Jesse Helms had taken after Dan Rather. It was 1985 and Helms called on conservatives to buy CBS stock and in sufficient numbers to gain control of the company.<br />Helms, our notorious “Senator No,” was upset with Rather. The CBS news hound, if you remember, had been anchor for a few years after replacing Walter Cronkite and Helms wanted Rather fired. Rather had made a habit of confronting Republicans in Washington. If you remember, Rather famously, or infamously depending on your point of view, confronted Richard Nixon at a press conference with a belligerent response to a quip by Nixon. But Jesse’s efforts failed to get CBS brass to send Rather packing.<br />Well, that was funny at the time and I had some fun writing opinion columns supporting the freedom of the press and getting stinging letters to the editor back from Carter Wrenn, one of Jesse’s more right-wing minions in the Congressional Club. That was Helm’s keep me in Washington organization that searched for money across the nation and even, some have said, from some foreign donors.<br />Rather wasn’t fired, and neither was I. All seemed safe in the world of journalism. Even a guy as powerful as Jesse Helms couldn’t crash the First Amendment.<br />I have come to the conclusion, however, that Jesse Helms actually won that war. While I might have won a small skirmish in that great campaign to cripple the independent press in America, Helms and his minions, like Wrenn and Tom Ellis were able to keep Helms in power by defeating the most powerful Democrat of his generation, Jim Hunt. They were able to get Republicans, and not just country club Republicans like Jim Broyhill, elected to state office. They got conservative, really off the wall right-wing Republicans elected even at the expense of more moderate Republicans office holders. Helm’s cry for conservatives to buy stock and own a network and fire its top anchor proved farsighted.<br />What’s going on today in our world of media? Newspapers are sloughing off newsroom employees about as fast as an Ebola victim sheds blood. Our broadcast news organizations are weak shadows of the broadcast newsrooms of the past. And we did it to ourselves. One thing you could say about Jesse Helms, there was no hubris there. He always knew that it could end for him if he ever let his guard down. But we in the news media were only too content to sit on our powerful perches and believe the First Amendment was the only protection we needed from the likes of Jesse Helms, Carter Wrenn and Tom Ellis and the others who have spent the past two decades attacking the press at every opportunity.Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06998485419146402806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2804525913123822562.post-23830977725180162182008-03-14T08:56:00.000-07:002008-03-14T09:29:01.493-07:00Where is the sin?Elliot Spitzer has been the top story this week. As the former governor<br />of New York twisted in a whirlwind of his own making, we discussed<br />almost every aspect of his life. We asked how a supposedly intelligent<br />man like Spitzer could think in this day and age he could practice adultery without it becoming public knowledge. I have chosen to use that word purposely. <br /><br />Spitzer apparently used the services of high-priced prostitutes for years. He was a married man, so it seems adultery is the appropriate word to use. I don't recall hearing or reading that word in the press accounts this week. For me that is revealing. One might think that by only referring to Spitzer using prostitutes, we<br />avoid the issue of sin. That's understandable. We realize our media isn't in the sin business, and in fact seeks to avoid discussions of sin as that places them in a religious discussion. Sin is part of religion.<br /><br />Christians and Jews both look at the Ten Commandments as important building blocks of human society. Thou shall not commit adultery is the seventh commandment. Thus, it is a sin, but our media chose not to refer to it as such, because we have lately tended to view it as a personal foible. <br /><br />And that is at the heart of our conundrum. We don't want to talk about sin. To do so would force us to accept that we all sin, and Spitzer is someone who should be forgiven by us for it is up to our God to deal with Spitzer.<br />But we are not content to do that. Instead, we want to watch his<br />humiliation. And we want to punish him by forcing him, at the least, to<br />give up his position as governor.<br /><br />As this week has passed, the Spitzer<br />story has tended to reveal much more about us than about him. In all<br />the TV footage I saw, one telling moment revealed so much about this<br />tragedy. When he was announcing his resignation, he made some reference<br />to leaving the public spotlight to work at restoring the trust of his<br />family. When he said that Spitzer's wife, Silda, with her sad and humiliated eyes looked up and swiveled to look into Spitzer's face. One wonders what she was thinking at that time. Perhaps she thought: "Now you worry about our trust?" Who knows? I think I saw a steely glint emerge from the pain, and if I were Elliot Spitzer, I'd be afraid of her.Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06998485419146402806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2804525913123822562.post-84780814112819366942008-02-26T10:15:00.001-08:002008-02-26T10:39:59.274-08:0046 Years: What a difference!Walking by the theater in the student union today I noticed a double feature is being promoted: "Dr. No" and "Goldfinger." Now, I realize I'm really telling my age, but a peculiar thought swept through my mind. OK. I know, it's just a crazily misdirected brain fart, but it went through my mind.<br /><br />"Dr. No" was released in 1962. That's at least 25 years before this crop of college students was born. Forty-six years ago for me. Wow! That's almost a lifetime. So, my mind immediately thought, if I go back 46 years before 1962, what was going on?<br /><br />Well, for those of you who might be a little more challenged than I am mathematically, that takes us back to 1918. <br /><br />That was a big year for the United States. World War I ended after the Doughboys whipped the Hun over there. But Americans were also just beginning to appreciate a somewhat new medium--the movies.<br /><br />In 1918 we could watch the first film stud, Elmo Lincoln--Elmo! Lincoln!--you shout. Who the heck is that? Well, Elmo was our first movie Tarzan. The movie was made just four years after Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote the first Tarzan book.<br /><br />Other treats included Tom Mix in "A Child of the Prarie." Tom Mix was our first cowboy star. Mary Pickford starred in "Stella Maris" (I wonder if Stella was related to Roger?), and Gloria Swanson starred in "Shifting Sands."<br /><br />Other than the Tarzan movie I can't tell you much about the movies above, except that Tom Mix created a genre, the Western, that dominated American movies for the next half century. Mary Pickford later married Douglas Fairbanks (Senior, not Junior) and started a movie studio with several of her fellow actors. She was our first SUPER STAR. And, Gloria Swanson, well her last film was "Airport 1975" which was released in 1974. <br /><br />All of those movies in 1918 were silent films. So, those 92 years have seen us go from crude black and white films to color films, from silent movies to talkies, to Doby sound systems, to digital mastering and projection.<br /><br />Now, you notice I have nothing to say about quality. Those films were state of the art for their day. The actors have survived in our memories because of the images we have of them from film. And what about "Dr. NO"? Well, that one started another successful genre, the spy story and in particular the James Bond series. I've lost track of how many men have played James Bond. But in that 1962 classic, it was Sean Connery. Let's see if I can remember: Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan, and now Daniel Craig. Oh, and let's not forget Barry Nelson who played the first James Bond in a TV version of "Casino Royale," or David Niven, Woody Allen and all the others who were Bond in the first movie version of "Casino Royale." It's enough to make your head spin, almost as much as trying to remember all the men who played Tarzan over the years, all basically playing the same character created by Elmo Lincoln in that 1918 film.Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06998485419146402806noreply@blogger.com0