Western North Carolina: A Rich Man's Paradise

I 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The three universities on this end of the state stand as examples of how times have changed.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

God Help Us

So, 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

God help us.

Two Tires and a Lame Bailout

I bought two tires for my truck yesterday.

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.

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.

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.

Who the heck is Timothy Geithner?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Journalism's future

The 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?"
Sorry, but that anger is misplaced and evidence of her cluelessness is demonstrated to all.
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.
Blame my professors?
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?
No. There was no such understanding demonstrated in this column published in the student newspaper last week.
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.
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.
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.

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.