Beauty sends our minds wandering

Thanksgiving 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Gang of Four

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

One could ask what else did you expect.

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.