A confusing Sunday night

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The First Day of Class

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.

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.

That, of course, is to suffer a staggering and embarrassingly one-sided loss to the Tigers.

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.

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?

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.

And, who knows, lightning can struck twice.

Parley 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.

My initial reaction was "What???"

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.

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.

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.

Shame on us.

What'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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.
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.

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.

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.

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.

Football 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.

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.

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.

Amo, Amas, Amat!

Amo, Amas, Amat, Miss Alley's full of snot!

Bo, Bis, Bit, Miss Alley's full of ....!

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.

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.
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.

The next time I attempted the classics was eight years later as a returning veteran at the University of North Carolina Asheville.

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.

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.

Jesse 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.