Erstwhile Editor

Bowles bows out; McCrory can coast

2012-02-03T08:01:00.003-05:00

Erskine Bowles will not run for governor, and who could blame him? He lost two bruising elections for U.S. Senate, and being rejected twice by voters had to hurt. With Bowles' absence, however, Democrats have little hope of keeping the governor's chair.

Bowles, former White House chief of staff, successful businessman, highly praised for his work as UNC system president, would have been the Democrats' best hope in this abbreviated campaign since Gov. Bev Perdue surprised colleagues with her decision not to run for re-election. With only weeks remaining to launch a campaign, Democrats have been floundering about for a viable candidate.

Lt. Gov. Walter Dalton is running. So is Bill Faison, an Orange County legislator. Former U.S. Rep. Bob Etheridge has joined the race. Others, including U.S. Rep. Brad Miller, are considering taking a shot at the race.

The problem for Democrats is that none of these candidates have the name recognition and respect enjoyed by Bowles. Dalton is little known, despite years in the legislature and a term as lieutenant governor (a nearly powerless office). Faison is nearly unknown. Etheridge served two terms as superintendent of public instruction, meaning he has statewide campaign experience, but he also has baggage. As state superintendent, he presided over wasteful spending and ineffective educational schemes (remember the highly touted but quickly abandoned Basic Education Plan?). And he lost his last congressional race to an unknown, Renee Ellmers, after a devastating ambush video that made him look mean and arrogant.

All of this means that Pat McCrory, who lost the governor's race to Perdue in 2008 has a clear glide path to election unless he stumbles very badly during the campaign.

Gov. Perdue pulls a surprise

2012-01-27T15:31:00.004-05:00

Bev Perdue did what's hard to do these days: She shocked the political establishment. Perdue announced Thursday that she would not run for re-election as governor, and that took both Democrats and Republicans by surprise. They had expected her to run, and many, if not most, had expected her to lose.

Perdue said she decided to devote her time to improving education, her pet policy priority throughout her years in the Governor's Mansion. But she also must have decided that she was likely to lose and didn't want to go out a loser. Who could blame her.

Bev's surprise opens doors for plenty of Democrats. Lt. Gov. Walter Dalton has already thrown his hat in the ring. Richard Moore, former state treasurer who lost to Perdue in the primary four years ago, might be interested. Erskine Bowles, who lost two bids to be U.S. senator and settled for a much better job as president of the UNC system, has been touted as a potential candidate. Others have taken themselves out of consideration. Attorney General Roy Cooper says he likes the job he has. Four-term Gov. Jim Hunt, who was as intense as ever when I saw him this week, says he's not interested.

Pat McCrory, the former Charlotte mayor who lost a hard-fought battle with Perdue in 2008 and has been running for the same office ever since, might be tempted to send a thank-you note to Perdue. Running against nobody or against a gaggle of little-known Democratic hopefuls, should prove even easier than running against Perdue. He was far ahead of her in the polls.

President Barak Obama offered conciliatory remarks about Perdue's decision. He undoubtedly knows that without his get-out-the-vote effort in '08 and the surge in African-American voting on his behalf, McCrory would have whipped Perdue. Perdue owes Obama, and her getting off the Democratic ticket might do Obama a favor. Perdue was not increasing Democratic turnout with her below 50 percent favorability rating, so if Democrats can come up with a more popular candidate, it might help Obama hold North Carolina in the fall. He'd like to hope so, anyway.

Perdue's problem has been that, although she is the state's first woman governor, she is not much of an innovator. She has been a traditional, old-time Democratic politician. She harped on education, and she embraced most traditional Democratic causes. But can you think of a single original, innovative idea she has put forward?She has been a foot soldier for the party, and she kept marching until it became her turn to head the ticket. It was her misfortune to face a new Republican legislature that didn't much care for her priorities. Perdue's proposal earlier this month for a sales tax increase — just for the chil'ren, you understand — hit the ground with a thud and didn't bounce at all. If Perdue intended to hang her re-election on that proposal, it was smart of her to bail out.

Voters look for meanness

2012-01-26T07:44:00.002-05:00

"I want somebody who's mean."

— S.C. voter explaining his support for New Gingrich

This is what we've come to — that a significant number of Americans want a president who's mean? Should we be electing an Adolf Hitler or a Josef Stalin? They were plenty mean. They didn't let other countries push them around. They didn't mind starting a war or turning the government upside down or eliminating a few million enemies.

Fifty years after America elected a president who inspired young people to engage in public service and who strove to make politics an honorable career option, we have presidential candidates who try to impress voters with how belligerent and ill-mannered they are. President Kennedy jousted with the press by disarming reporters with his quick wit and self-deprecating humor. Asked about how the news media were treating him, he mimicked the current cigarette commercial, replying that "I've been reading more now and enjoying it less." He said it with a smile because he genuinely enjoyed matching wits with reporters, maybe because he was wittier than the best of them.

Now we have Newt Gingrich attacking the media for daring to ask about the recent allegation of his ex-wife, castigating the media for their "despicable" question. This from a man who led a congressional effort to impeach President Clinton over his extra-marital affair even as, it turns out, Gingrich was having an affair himself. Now candidates address the press with a scowl and bitter words and interrupt those who disagree with them.

But "mean" goes beyond attacking the media. A segment of the electorate seems to want a president who will launch wars around the world over whatever disrespectful comment any foreign leader might make. They're ready to go to war over Iran, Pakistan, North Korea, Somalia, Syria and on and on, as if wars have no consequence except to teach those foreigners a lesson. That same segment is prepared to round up more than 10 million illegal immigrants, load them onto buses and drive them back where they belong, even if it means leaving their dependent children to fend for themselves on American streets. And, while they're at it, they would cut off food stamps to the hungry, housing to those who don't have rent money, heat to those without fuel for the winter and public assistance for those who have no jobs.

They want a "mean" president because they're tired of seeing America get pushed around, and they're tired of paying taxes that go to programs supporting those who pay no taxes. They want the United States to be mean, but they can't mean it, can they?

Joe Paterno, rest in peace

2012-01-22T18:13:00.004-05:00

Rest in peace, Joe Paterno. I'm sad to see you go, especially in the manner that your death came.

I was never a Penn State fan, but I was always a respecter of Joe Paterno. Unlike most of his college football coaching colleagues, he seemed genuinely concerned, first and foremost, with the character, education and success of his players. He could have worked his way up the coaching ladder, going to ever-larger schools until he reached the pinnacle, the football factories of the NCAA. He eschewed the showboating and grand spectacles of win-at-any-cost football programs. He insisted on plain uniforms without player names on the jerseys. He lived in a modest house, by coaching standards. He gave generously to charities. He went to Penn State and stayed there until they kicked him out.

The kicking out was the saddest part of Paterno's story. He was summarily fired by Penn State after it was revealed that he had been told that Jerry Sandusky, his former trusted assistant, had sexually abused a young boy in the Penn State football complex. Paterno reported the incident to university administrators. Police were never called. Sandusky is now accused of abusing several boys over a period of years, both during and after his Penn State coaching career. In his only comments about the incident, Paterno said he did what he was required to do. He reported the accusation to his superiors (who have also been fired). He also said he had only vague information about the incident and has trouble imagining that sort of conduct. It's easy to believe that Paterno was naive about child sexual abuse. It's easy to believe that he could not conceive of his old friend doing anything so despicable.

Paterno accepted his dismissal as gracefully as anyone can accept being fired after 41 faithful, successful years. One mistake can wipe away all those successful years, and that incident (which is thus far only an accusation; Sandusky has not been tried or admitted guilt) will undoubtedly taint the stainless legacy Paterno had built at Penn State.

Paterno's legacy will survive his error in judgment relating to Sandusky. His 400-plus wins will be an insurmountable peak to conquer. His insistence on education and sportsmanship will endure. In 1968, he explained his philosophy to Sports Illustrated's Dan Jenkins: “We’re trying to win football games; don’t misunderstand that. But I don’t want it to ruin our lives if we lose. I don’t want us ever to become the kind of place where an 8-2 season is a tragedy. Look at that day outside. It’s clear, it’s beautiful, the leaves are turning, the land is pretty, and it’s quiet. If losing a game made me miserable, I couldn’t enjoy such a day.” That sort of clear thinking is needed in sports.

If only he had never hired Jerry Sandusky.

Gingrich, audience pounce on media

2012-01-20T07:49:00.005-05:00

It didn't take long in last night's Republican debate for Newt Gingrich to pounce. Moderator John King began the Q&A with a question to Gingrich about his ex-wife's report of marital infidelity. Gingrich was appalled. He found the questioning "close to despicable." He attacked ABC News for airing an interview with the former Mrs. Gingrich two days before the South Carolina presidential primary. When King attempted to justify the question as one raised by another network and the topic of national discussion, Gingrich pounced again. CNN (King's employer) had aired the accusations, too, he said, and King and his staff had chosen to open the debate with a question about Gingrich's failed second marriage.

Anyone who has watched the GOP debates could not have been surprised at Gingrich's sanctimonious, condescending tone. After all, he's the guy with all the answers, the one with all the brains, the lecturer who understands history, the outsider who knows how Washington works, the smartest guy in the room — or any room at any time in history. That Gingrich would turn a question into an attack on news networks and on the news media in general should not have been a surprise. The only question might be whether he had rehearsed his shock in advance.

And maybe the reaction of the crowd should not have been a surprise: The more that Gingrich lashed out at the media, the louder the cheers from the audience became. The "mainstream media" has been a convenient whipping boy throughout the GOP debates. Gingrich has criticized the media before. Herman Cain, before dropping out, blamed his troubles on the news media. It seems to be a fundamental doctrine of the Republican Party that the news media are evil — and on the side of whatever Democrat is around. But the hooting from the Charleston audience was particularly vociferous, nearly matching Gingrich's obvious contemptuousness.

I'll agree with Gingrich on one thing: The ex-wife question was no way to begin a presidential debate (can you imagine that question coming up in the Lincoln-Douglas debates?). The timing is improper, bordering on silly, given the important issues of the day. But "despicable"? The professor is lapsing into hyperbole. A candidate's moral underpinning is a fair topic for voters to consider, and Gingrich knows his personal history is filled with blemishes, so he'd rather dodge the question and blame the media for his past lapses. The question put to Gingrich is wrong, at least in its timing, because it's sensational rather than substantive. The biggest problem with the national media is not that it's "mainstream" or biased but that the media have turned to sensationalism, sex, blood and hype and has turned away from substantive, in-depth reporting. You can blame the media's consultants who (led by television viewership numbers) care more about attracting eyeballs than serving the public interest.

That — and not any perceived bias — should be what gets the public's blood boiling. From my own experience in more than three decades in the newspaper business is that news reporters, on average, tend to lean leftward but make conscientious efforts to separate their personal views from their reporting. I've also known my share of right-wing news people. The national media are not monolithic. Even with recent consolidation in the industry, dozens of corporations are in the news business, and there is no secret collaboration among them. In fact, they are viciously competitive. On cable news, you can find right-leaning Fox News, left-leaning MSNBC, and (mostly) balanced CNN. Intelligent people can digest news from several sources and make their own judgments.

But the audience in Charleston last night played into the hands of demagogues who would stifle the free press with threats and anger. Vigorous, independent news media are as necessary to the democratic process as the secret ballot.

If photo ID is not needed for voting, then ...

2012-01-17T20:45:00.004-05:00

If a photo ID is such an onerous and detestable requirement for voting, perhaps Congress should consider passing a ban on such a discriminatory requirement in other transactions. The U.S. Justice Department has blocked South Carolina's implementation of a voter ID requirement, and lawsuits are challenging voter ID laws in other states.

If photo ID is such a terrible thing, maybe we should forbid any requirement for a photo ID for such transactions as cashing a check, using a credit card, obtaining a library card, taking a college entrance exam, renting a car, or boarding a commercial airliner. Opponents tell us that the incidence of voter fraud is near zero, but, then again, very few checks are forged, and only a tiny percentage of credit card transactions are fraudulent. And of all the people boarding airline flights every day, far less than 1 percent are trying to blow up or hijack the plane. A photo ID is required for these transactions partly to avoid a terrible outcome but also to keep people honest. If an obstacle stands in the way of a crime, most people will avoid trying to cross that barrier. See if the Transportation Security Agency will let you on a plane without an ID because you think photo IDs are discriminatory.

I'm not persuaded that the people pushing voter ID bills are entirely forthright in their insistence that they are merely trying to prevent election fraud. It does seem likely that a voter ID requirement will hurt Democratic candidates worse than it will hurt the Republicans who are pushing the bills. But provisions can be made to ensure more equitable application of the law. ID cards can be made free or at very low cost for those (the elderly and poor, primarily) who are most likely not to have an ID card.

For me, as it did for many of my peers, it came as a shock to realize that I could go to vote without ever having to show proof of who I am. The nice ladies at the polling place would ask me to state my name, and then they just took my word for it and let me vote. Wasn't voting just as important as getting a library card or renting a video — actions that required a photo ID?

44 years pass quickly away

2012-01-16T16:29:00.004-05:00

I was reading a story about a couple who were reflecting on the meaning of Martin Luther King Day. They were in their early 40s and late 30s and were talking about passing along King's principles to their children.

Then it struck me: They had not been born when King was assassinated in 1968. I did the math. It was 44 years ago this April that King was shot down on the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tenn. King was 39. He has been dead longer than he had been alive.

Two generations have passed since the assassination. Only those of us near 60 or older can remember King as a controversial figure on the evening news. Only those of us of that age can remember the segregation laws, the societal prejudices and the quiet indignities that ignited the protests that motivated King's remarkable leadership, his personal bravery and his inspiring rhetoric. My own children, born in the decade following King's martyrdom, grew up in a society where integrated schools, restaurants, jobs and hotels were as normal as sunsets. They could not fathom a society that created separate school systems for black and whites or that refused service to customers because of their race.

King's life, and the lives of many others like him, transformed our society and made America better. Forty-four years after his untimely death, as we celebrate King's legacy, it's hard, even for those who lived through it, to explain the injustices he set about to change.

International sanctions 70 years apart

2012-01-13T07:41:00.003-05:00

Nobody, least of all the people of Israel, wants to see Iran develop nuclear weapons, but a look at recent events and 20th century history would caution us against backing Iran, or any powerful nation, into a corner. The United States and the European Union are backing harsh restrictions on Iran's ability to transfer money internationally. This could result in Iran being unable to sell its oil on the international market. The move by Western nations is aimed at discouraging Iran's apparent development of nuclear weapons, though Iran insists unconvincingly that it is developing its nuclear power for peaceful purposes only.

In response to the sanctions, Iran threatens to close the Strait of Hormuz, the entrance point to the oil-rich Persian Gulf. Iran claims the strait as its territorial waters, but it is the passageway to ports in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and other Persian Gulf nations. Closing the strait, through which passes about 20 percent of the world's petroleum supply, would immediately push oil prices sky-high and could push the world into economic panic. The United States is committed to free navigation through the Strait of Hormuz and has the power to pulverize any attempt by Iran to close the strait, but it would be a very nasty fight.

This standoff is reminiscent of a decision the United States made more than 70 years ago to close off a bellicose nation's access to the world market. The hostile nation then was Japan. In an effort to curb Japanese aggression and its dream of a Pacific empire, the United States cut off supplies of petroleum and rubber to Japan's war machine. Japanese leaders at the time would argue that this action constituted an act of war and forced the Japanese military to make a risky and fateful decision. The Japanese Navy would cripple the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, leaving the Japanese free to capture oil fields and rubber plantations in Malaysia. Japanese strategists misjudged their ability to destroy U.S. naval power and the reaction of the U.S. government to their infamous attack.

Iran in 2012 is not comparable to Japan in 1941, which had a proven army and powerful navy, but in both cases, the nations' leaders feel backed into a corner by international sanctions. Like Japan in 1941, Iran appears to be ready to fight rather than comply with the wishes of the international community. And, as in 1941, the ensuing fight could lead to an international conflagration.

Political slogan harks back to JFK

2012-01-12T07:41:00.004-05:00

Lay aside for the moment any consideration of the policy positions of the remaining Republican candidates for president. One candidate has found what should be a winning slogan. The candidate is Jon Huntsman, whose 17 percent third place in New Hampshire was by far his best showing thus far but was not good enough to pull him out of the long-, long-shot category. His slogan: Country First.

It has a John F. Kennedy ring to it. "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." Huntsman has taken some heat from die-hard Republican voters for serving as President Obama's ambassador to China. He has defended his decision to leave the governorship of Utah to serve in Beijing as an obligation, a duty when country calls. He also reminds voters that two of his sons are active-duty military personnel.

I'm not suggesting that Huntsman is more patriotic than his more popular and better-funded rivals. Ron Paul and Rick Perry are both military veterans, for example. But Huntsman's slogan has raised a point that has too often been ignored in recent political races — politics is about more than which party has the power or who can win the next election. The slogan turns back the calendar 50 years to a time when Washington was less partisan and more respectful of differences of opinion.

What candidate, if any, will put the interests of the nation above personal or partisan interests?

Presidential debates serve voters well

2012-01-02T07:40:00.004-05:00

The first voting of the 2012 presidential election cycle comes Tuesday in Iowa, and the competition only escalates from there.

This nomination cycle has been different from past years in an important and, it seems to me, beneficial way. The eight candidates for the GOP nomination have met in an unprecedented number of debates, giving voters nationwide (not just in Iowa or New Hampshire) a look at the candidates and an opportunity to hear their views and see how they handle questioning. Debating is not managing the government, but the process does give some insight into the candidates' demeanor, intelligence and personalities. Overall, it's been a positive experience for the electorate. Although I have watched only segments of several debates, I have seen enough to form opinions about the candidates. In the 24/7 cable news universe, it has been impossible to escape talk about and analysis of the Republican debates, and that's a good thing. The more voters know about the candidates, the better they will be able to cast wise votes.

There has been another benefit to the increase in debate dates: Candidates have spent less money on campaign advertising. Compared to earlier nomination cycles, campaign spending is way down. Candidates have relied more heavily on what publicists call "free media" — the publicity you don't have to pay for. This should be a plus for voters, who will get more balanced information about candidates from their debates and less misinformation from misleading campaign advertising.

Whoever gets the Republican nomination (and we might know who that will be by the end of this month) should challenge President Obama to a series of debates, similar to the GOP debates we've witnessed through the latter half of 2011. Debates between the presidential nominees have been rare, one to four per election in recent years, and these have mostly been inconclusive debates in which both candidates resolutely sought to avoid mistakes. Ten or 20 debates would serve the electorate better and would reduce the need for campaign advertising. The president will say he doesn't have time for so many debates (no incumbent would admit to having time to spare), but both candidates should make time within their campaign schedule to provide American voters the opportunity to assess the differences between the candidates. If they can't do that, they shouldn't be running.

Edna Earle Boykin: One of a kind

2011-12-29T07:22:00.005-05:00

The wind was brisk and unpredictable when a large crowd laid to rest Edna Earle Boykin Wednesday morning — an appropriate weather pattern for the feisty, determined, witty and wise 90-year-old who died Christmas Day. Gathered around the polished wood coffin in the old section of Maplewood Cemetery were scores of admirers, supporters and beneficiaries of her wise counsel and generous donations. The retired school teacher, school administrator, Wilson City Council member and arts and education advocate had preached education for children, care and concern for children, education for its innate value and arts for the health of the community. She gave generously to the Arts Council of Wilson, to Barton College and to other promoters of education and culture. She was quick to offer her opinion and adamant about the importance of art and education.

Jim Hemby, the retired Barton College president, had the crowd nodding and chuckling as he described Boykin's command to him about what he should say at her funeral.

The grave site where so many gathered in the chilly wind Wednesday stands within sight of Margaret Hearne School, where Boykin spent most of her career and where she ruled as queen of the roost and caretaker of thousands of impressionable children. She was my younger daughter's first school principal. When my wife was elected president of the Hearne PTO, she quickly found out that Miss Boykin really ran the organization; the president need not worry.

Soon after I came to Wilson in 1980, the Board of Education decided to demolish the 19th century Hearne School building and rebuild a "modern" one-story school on the same site. Miss Boykin went along with the decision, though it seemed obvious that she loved that old brick edifice that had once been the pride of Wilson's city school system. The public was warned that the building was so old that it was a hazard and might collapse anytime. When the bulldozers came, they found the 8-foot-thick walls much more of an obstacle than they'd thought. I'll bet Edna grinned wryly at the impotence of the bulldozers against her old school.

She used to tell audiences that "I am Miss Boykin, but I haven't missed a thing!" When she retired from the school system, she proudly boasted that she had just sold the car she had bought new in 1948 — a Lincoln — for more than she'd paid for it nearly 40 years before. She got enough from the sale to buy herself a brand new Lincoln. Her frugality and shrewd business sense served her well and allowed her to give large donations to her favorite charities. Her support of the Wilson Theatre renovations prompted the city and Arts Council to rename the historic building the Edna Boykin Cultural Center.

Her humor, experiences and well-honed sensibility helped her through her run for City Council. I clearly remember her defending the city's investments in downtown, citing other cities that had restored their downtowns and thrived while other cities had allowed downtowns to deteriorate, and that decay had metastasized to an ever-widening area of the city. She overcame my concerns that, as a large property owner, she might favor landlords over renters in city regulations, but she turned out to be a defender of the poor against those who would exploit their powerlessness.

For much of her career, Hearne School educated some of the city's poorest children, and that experience clearly influenced Boykin's judgments. She believed in education. She believed in the benefits of the arts. She believed in her hometown. And she didn't mind telling anyone how she felt. Just a couple of years ago, I ran into her at the theater that bears her name and had a spirited and delightful conversation with her as she sat (no longer able to stand for long periods) and gathered well-wishers and admirers.

She was one of a kind, a treasure and an inspiration.

House Republicans just say no, no, no

2011-12-22T07:42:00.003-05:00

What are they thinking?

Republicans in the House of Representatives have backed out on what was supposed to be a done deal to extend the payroll tax cut and jobless benefits for two months. Nothing doin', they say. They want a year-long deal or nothing at all.

Can they seriously be willing to settle for nothing and be portrayed in election campaign ads as the wackos who raised taxes on every working person in the country and cut off unemployment checks for millions of desperate, jobless Americans? Do they really think nothing is better than something? Do they really think compromise is a dirty word?

Regardless what you might think about the long-term wisdom of cutting payroll taxes (the 6.2 percent of your paycheck that goes to Social Security and Medicare), refusing to extend the tax cut at the beginning of an election year is political suicide. Yet, the Republican lemmings in the House are lining up to take a flying leap off that cliff. The tax cut to 4.2 percent for individuals was passed last year as part of a stimulus package. For a typical American worker, it amounts to about an extra $20 in each week's pay. Economists say that extra jolt has encouraged consumer spending and helped avoid a fall into another recession.

But the real jolt will come in early January, when the first paychecks of the year arrive and 160 million Americans see less money in their paychecks. House Republicans will bear the brunt of public anger over that short-changing. Inevitable GOP efforts to blame Democrats are unlikely to stick. The Senate overwhelmingly passed the tax cut extension, with broad Republican support. Only in the dysfunctional House were serious objections raised. There, the ideological principle was more important than pragmatic politics. Some among the true believers elected in 2010 seem to believe pragmatism is a dirty word, but it's what gets you elected, and it's what allows government to function.

Unless the House has a change of heart, the Tea Party partisans may have just sealed the 2012 election and opened wide a door for Democrats that just last year had seemed closed and locked.

Our pilgrimage to the "Holy City"

2011-12-19T07:29:00.003-05:00

For 21 years, my extended family has spent a weekend before Christmas in Charleston, S.C., "the Holy City," as it's been called. It began a year after my brother moved there and months after he was able to return to his home after the damage from Hurricane Hugo was repaired. We went to see his house and the city and to have a meal together.

Twenty-one years later, we're still returning, eager to experience again Charleston's exotic charm and to see the family members we see only rarely now. Our pilgrimages have survived all the changes in our lives since 1990. When our parents missed the trip because they were in a nursing home, we continued to gather. We made four trips without them before they died. This year, we were without my sister-in-law, who succumbed to cancer just two days before our scheduled trip. But the reunion went on, despite those hollow places and mournful moments whenever we expected to see her turning a corner or to hear her laughter.

In 21 years, our children have grown from teens to parents, and our entourage has expanded to include new dates and spouses trying out this family tradition. A new generation of babies has learned to walk with the aid of cousins they didn't know they had. Our children's children have grasped the excitement of these weekends and look forward to Charleston almost as much as their grandparents do.

In the evening, and sometimes during the day, we sit and reminisce about how we lived growing up. We share stories about our parents and other relatives we can no longer ask for answers to our questions, and we talk about our own lives, sharing details lost in our daily routine.

In the end, it is not the beauty of the city, the cuisine for which Charleston is known or the tangible Christmas spirit there that keeps us coming back. It is this sharing of time and stories that makes the drive and the expense worthwhile.

The end of a relationship

2011-12-15T07:41:00.003-05:00

A late-afternoon telephone call Wednesday ended a 49-year relationship. Karen was my first sister-in-law and the first new member of our family by marriage. Now she is the first of my generation to die of "natural causes," if you can consider cancer "natural."

Her terrible illness and the inevitability of its ending have stirred up memories long forgotten of the awkwardness of incorporating a new adult into the family and how she made the transition easy with her quiet tolerance and her quick laughter. I was 15 or so when she brought a newborn baby to our home and plopped my first niece into my lap one day with a laugh because I was the only family member who had not fought for a turn to hold the baby. I was 15 and too cool for that. When I married and had children of my own, she vividly enjoyed their presence and bonded with my wife, a decade younger than she. As her sister pointed out, Karen didn't like crowds of strangers but she reveled in gatherings of close family and friends, no matter how large. She never liked having her picture made, so we have few photos of her, just memories of her laughter and her softly worded advice.

The last weekend we had together, just five months ago, was before her diagnosis. It was obvious that she was not feeling well. Her laughter was not so quick and she was unusually reticent. I'll remember instead other weekends strung over 49 years of good times, good stories and good laughs. And the warmth of sibling love.

Two years and then a lifetime

2011-12-09T08:02:00.003-05:00

A couple of months ago, I tripped past two years in my new job — an anniversary so insignificant that I had not noted it until my wife reminded me. Earlier in my life, two years would have seemed like forever. I spent three years in my first full-time post-college job (with the U.S. Coast Guard), then just over two years each in my next two jobs, laying the foundation for a career in journalism. Then I spent 29 years in my next job, ending in a layoff and a year of job hunting before landing my current gig.

Now, the past two years seem brief, but that may be only because those 29 years with one company skewed my average. Today's worker, labor statisticians tell us, changes jobs several times over his working life. A friend near my own age told me last night that he was embarking on a new career after eight years in one job. He was restless and wanted a new challenge. In contrast, I spent my early working years looking for a job with permanence, a comfortable situation that would give my then-young children stability and a sense of security and give myself the confidence of familiarity and detailed memory. A decade in which I moved six times was more than enough adventure for me. I had chosen to forgo the security and benefits of a Coast Guard career primarily because I knew it would entail frequent moves. So I left the Coast Guard and moved two times in the next five years.

The past two years were brief, a single tick, it seemed, in the antique clock we moved from one home to another. But in an earlier time, which also seems not long ago at all, my three-year military commitment had seemed to stretch forever ahead of me, just like my four years of college looked from the perspective of freshman orientation.

Now all those years have passed. My little children have children of their own, and time swoops past me like autumn leaves in the wind. So much has changed, yet I feel the same. I chase my grandchildren and tickle them into ecstatic squeals the same way I chased and tickled their parents. It is the same love and emotion and the same I. The years disappear like views in a mountain fog, briefly glimpsed, then gone.

Two years in a new job strobe past like a flash of lightning on a dark night. Whole decades slip away before a rumble of thunder startles me into present day.

Christmas stockings from long ago

2011-12-05T07:28:00.004-05:00

Maybe it was the two stockings my wife hung over the fireplace yesterday, but something got me to thinking about the Christmas stockings I knew as a child. Christmas morning always seemed like such a miracle — a roaring fire in the fireplace that illuminated the living room, a room closed off and unheated for most of the rest of the year; the sweet scent of a red cedar Christmas tree glowing with the old-style, large, hot, colored bulbs; the wonder of gifts left by Santa Claus, possessions far too costly for our parents to ever provide. The excitement as I waited with my brothers and sisters to enter the living room left me shaking and shivering.

Those stockings that hang by my fireplace today are as different from the ones I knew as a child as our gas logs are from the wood fires of my youth. On Christmas Eve, we would search through a wardrobe's drawers for five old, woolen socks that our father never wore, but they were ordinary socks, not giant Christmas stockings. Each year, Christmas morning, those stockings would be stuffed the same treats: an apple, an orange, a tangerine, a handful of nuts (walnuts, pecans and Brazil nuts), three or four packs of chewing gum, two Hershey's candy bars (milk chocolate and almond), another couple of candy bars (Baby Ruth and Butterfinger?), a few loose chocolate drops candies, and a peppermint candy cane. What made those treats special was not their volume or variety but the simple rarity of such special treats. It was the only time of year we ate Brazil nuts or walnuts; candy bars were rationed the rest of the year at the rate of one per week if we were lucky, and never, ever the succulent Hershey bars; Dentyne chewing gum was tasted only at Christmas; oranges and tangerines, it seemed to me, must only grow at the North Pole. One year, I mentioned to my mother that my cousin had a banana in her stocking. I couldn't understand why Santa Claus would provide different fruits for children only a few miles apart. Would I like to have a banana in my stocking, she asked. I said I would. The next year, my stocking contained a banana. Until dementia stole her mind, my mother had an amazing memory.

By Christmas sundown, I would have sucked all the juice from my orange and perhaps peeled my tangerine, too. I would have eaten at least half of my candy bars, chewed nearly all of the chewing gum and cracked all the nuts in my stocking. I would have managed all of this while playing with new toys and eating at least two huge meals with extended family. And I would have listened to my parents and their siblings talk about how much kids get at Christmas these days. In their day (the 1920s and '30s), they would have felt fortunate to receive one little toy (a ball or a doll, usually) and one piece of candy for Christmas.

But for me, Christmas was one amazement. With such a bounty of food and playthings amid a year of frugal existence, it was no wonder I considered Christmas an inexplicable miracle.

Christmas parade from a different perspective

2011-12-04T17:03:00.004-05:00

Walking down Nash Street in the Wilson Christmas Parade Saturday afternoon, I waved to crowds of faces I didn't know. Many of them returned my wave. "Merry Christmas," I said to many of them and heard their greetings in reply. One spectator yelled out to me, "I read your blog all the time! Wish you were still at the paper." Surprised at the greeting, I could only wave and reply, "Thanks!" Occasionally, I would detect a familiar face and try to catch her attention. All the while, I kept walking and waving. This mile-long walk was not a physical challenge. It was more of a pleasant stroll, made more enjoyable by the sight of so many happy faces.

For 23 years, I lived a block from the parade's route, and my wife and I would gather up our children and walk down to Nash Street to see the parade. Too often, we would grow tired of the parade and head home before its end.

The parade has a different look and a different feel when you're part of it instead of a patient watcher from the sidewalk. The variety the parade offers to the watcher is nothing compared to the variety of faces and expressions the participants in the parade see. And even when the parade's momentum stalls on occasion, the pace for someone walking the parade is so much more lively than the pace for someone watching it. When I watched the parade, I might catch a couple of hundred faces. Walking in the parade, I saw a few thousand faces, ranging from excited children to dutiful adults who felt obligated to attend an important civic event to curmudgeons who wouldn't smile or laugh no matter what passed by.

After 20-some parades as a spectator, this was my third parade as a participant. The latter role is much more satisfying.

666 posts are not a sign

2011-12-04T13:34:00.005-05:00

This is the 666th post to this blog, but fear not ye fundamentalist biblical literalists and numerologists. This is the second Sunday of Advent, and looking around the nave of our small church, I felt a wave of love wash over me this morning. The blue paraments, the Advent wreath, the Scriptures, the Marty Hautgen liturgy, "Now the Feast and Celebration" (which we're using during Advent), and the familiar hymns "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel" and "Prepare the Royal Highway" set me in the mood for Advent, for drawing closer to God, for awaiting with anticipation the royal birth. It gave me a sense of optimism and relief that I had not felt recently, a confidence that all things would work for good.

At the communion rail, I felt the mood stronger still. "The body of Christ ..." "The blood of Christ..." A sense of humility warmed my clinched hands. "Amen," I said.

Six hundred sixty-six posts, but not a sign of the beast.

Advent has arrived

2011-12-01T07:49:00.003-05:00

Last Sunday, with the pastor away on vacation, I preached the sermon for the first Sunday of Advent. Playing off the lectionary's warnings in the Gospel of Mark and Paul's letter to the Corinthians to be prepared for a day and a time you do not know, I talked about the need to observe Advent as a time of preparation before Christmas, a time to prepare and reflect for the coming of Christ. I recalled that 33 Advents ago, our pastor in Danville, Va., had written a letter to my pregnant wife comparing her pregnancy to Advent. Like Advent, a pregnancy is a time of preparation and anticipation. All of Christendom should be pregnant with anticipation and preparation during Advent, I suggested.

I don't know how well the sermon went or whether any of my fellow church members might be motivated to light an Advent wreath, read an Advent devotional or use an Advent calendar instead of rushing mindlessly into the commercialized Christmas holiday.

Yesterday, my wife found this video that explains Advent better and more entertainingly than I could, so I offer it as the message I had sought to deliver from the pulpit.

Do nothing and fix the deficit

2011-11-17T07:43:00.005-05:00

Here we are less than a week before the deadline for the Supercommittee to come up with $1.2 trillion in budget cuts, or else! Few people in and around Washington are holding out much hope for the partisan committee to agree on cuts that will prevent automatic, across-the-board spending cuts. This column by E.J. Dionne offers a different — and far more effective — solution: Simply let the Bush tax cuts expire and go back to the tax rates in place 11 years ago.

It seems like a different universe but was only just over 10 years ago. The Clinton presidency closed out with a budget surplus and a projection of budget surpluses as far out as budget writers could project. The U.S. Treasury would be flush with money. President George W. Bush pushed a solution to the budget surplus problem: Reduce taxes. His argument was that the government was taking in more money than it needed. Unless taxes and revenues were cut, he argued, Congress would just spend that excess revenue in worthless ways. I admit that I found the argument at least a little appealing at the time.

But guess what — it's no longer early 2001. We no longer have a budget surplus. We have a $1.4 trillion deficit. Even if the Supercommittee succeeds beyond expectations and enacts a $4 trillion budget cut over 10 years, the federal deficit will increase because we'll be cutting only $4 trillion from a 10-year cumulative deficit of at least $14 trillion. Doing nothing — letting the Bush tax cuts expire and tax rates rise to their 1990s level (a time of great economic growth, by the way) — is a far more effective and fairer way to reduce the federal deficit and debt. Yes, it would require sacrifice by all taxpayers, and sacrifice is a word that has disappeared from political discussions, but if we're going to correct our budget mess, we will have to sacrifice, like it or not.

You can't escape television's grasp

2011-11-15T07:28:00.004-05:00

Last week, I spent a couple of hours in the waiting room of two car repair shops while my car's oil was changed and four tires were replaced. I had a good novel to read, so two hours of being absorbed in reading should have been a treat, not a negative.

But there was a catch. In both places, a television blared from its corner throne, and all of us customers were expected to bow down and worship the inane proclamations from the idiot box. Although I was absorbed in my book, I could not escape the unrelenting chatter from the TV. The giggling talk-show panelists, the whining soap-opera stars and peripatetic advertisers kept inserting themselves into the book I was reading, leaving me discombobulated and disturbed. When a television is in the room, there is no escaping it. It overwhelms conversation and distracts reading. It disrupts rational thought.

Although I detest being forced to give attention to the television with its too-loud volume, there are fewer and fewer businesses whose waiting areas are without a television. I've even found televisions built into gas pumps so that even the five minutes of pumping gas cannot be a respite from the ubiquitous tube. I usually hunt for a seat facing away from the TV, but in many rooms, all the seats face the television ("pay attention!"). You are a prisoner, and you cannot escape your torture.

A video screen (not always broadcast/cable television) can be found almost everywhere now — waiting rooms, banks, restaurants, gas pumps. It should be no surprise that most of the population is distracted, confused and unable to focus on a single task. The insatiable video distraction will not leave us alone.

On Veterans Day, I proudly wear the title

2011-11-11T08:01:00.003-05:00

I was a reluctant veteran, but on this Veterans Day, I gladly share the spotlight with those who came before me and after — men and women who served their country, wore the uniform and sacrificed (even in small ways) for the nation's good.

Watching a History Channel documentary on the Vietnam War last night, I was reminded of why I was reluctant to fulfill my obligation. By the time I faced mandated military service (my draft number was 29), most of the American public had turned against the war in Vietnam. The carnage in that distant land seemed pointless; President Nixon was already withdrawing troops under his new "Vietnamization" policy. I chose an option that made it unlikely (though not improbable) that I would serve in Vietnam. I applied for and won a slot in Coast Guard Officer Candidate School.

In retrospect, it was one of the best things that ever happened to me. I spent three years in Washington, D.C., at Coast Guard Headquarters. I worked for some amazingly efficient and dedicated senior officers. I met and got to know people from all over the country. My horizons expanded greatly. I experienced the metropolitan atmosphere of the D.C. area. My respect for those in uniform grew enormously. I developed great pride in the Coast Guard and its members.

I proudly claim the title of veteran, though I never faced combat, never endured an overseas deployment, never spent more than a couple of days at sea, and never had to work very hard after graduating OCS. At the same time, I learned what all service members learned — to focus on what's important, to obey orders, to respect those in authority, to work as a team, to be confident, to take pride in your work, to do things right the first time, to make sure there's "a place for everything and every thing in its place," to honor your oath to uphold the Constitution.

Most every veteran takes away these lessons from their years in uniform. Even 36 years after my active service ended, these lessons are still with me. I am a veteran.

An embarrassing exit for a legend

2011-11-10T07:38:00.003-05:00

Penn State's board of trustees fire Coach Joe Paterno for failing to report an incident of child sexual abuse to police, and students riot in support of "Joe Pa"? If there's any doubt that big-time sports are running academia, it can be proven in the students' attitude: The big game with Nebraska is more important than protecting innocent child victims.

On the other hand, no one has been convicted in this case. A prosecutor has brought charges against the alleged perpetrator, former Penn State assistant coach Jerry Sandusky, but Sandusky maintains his innocence and has not yet faced a jury. The charges against Sandusky have created a media sensation with many seemingly willing to forgo due process and fair trial. Paterno, as well, apparently will not get his day in court to defend his legendary reputation.

Regardless of the truth of the allegations, Paterno's departure is a sad ending for a storied career. He has won more college football games than any major-college coach, and he has avoided any hint of scandal. But if the allegations are true, he failed police his assistant coach and made only a minimal attempt to report the crime reported to him. Only a week ago, Paterno, 83, had seemed destined to walk away into history with insurmountable victories and a reputation without blemish. Now he may have only the victories.

But the students at Penn State who rioted on his behalf need a reality check. Big Ten football is one thing; child sex abuse is quite another. Hint: The latter is the bigger deal.

Obama missed deficit-cut opportunity

2011-11-04T08:01:00.005-04:00

Barack Obama's greatest mistake as president is likely the opportunity he didn't take — the opportunity to endorse and push for the reforms proposed by the Bowles-Simpson deficit reduction commission. The proposals, which went nowhere after the much-ballyhooed panel reported back to the president, would have reduced the federal deficit by $3.6 trillion or so. It called for some tough cuts, including reductions in Medicare and Social Security spending, and it called for new revenues. In other words, it was a bipartisan plan, which was devised by a bipartisan panel of smart, experienced and realistic committee members. It could have given the president some shelter from inevitable criticism — this is what the committee recommended. But Obama let the controversial plan wither without his endorsement and without any effort to follow through on the course he had initiated.

Now, another panel, this one composed of highly partisan members of Congress looking out for their own and their party's political future, is tasked with coming up with a deficit reduction plan by Thanksgiving — or else. The "or else" is automatic spending cuts that would reduce government spending across the board, slashing essential spending as well as optional spending and entirely forgoing the option of raising revenues, which most Americans say they favor.

It's too late for Obama to go back and reconsider endorsing the Bowles-Simpson plan. His cowardly error has put us on this path that leads to potential chaos in only three weeks.

I can't think of a worse error in his presidency.

Shakespeare controversy is not dead

2011-10-28T14:04:00.005-04:00

Sarah Beckwith's op-ed piece in today's News & Observer, "Shakespeare was Hardly Anonymous," would have you believe there has never been a controversy over Shakespeare's authorship. But the authorship controversy is nearly as old as the plays themselves. Even some contemporaries of the actor from Stratford-on-Avon and some who came soon after raised doubts about who wrote the plays attributed to him.

I'm no expert on the matter, as Beckwith purports to be, but I've been reading about the controversy and have been intrigued by it for more than three decades. (I blogged about this matter more than two years ago: "Will the true Shakespeare please stand up?") A Washington Post article in the mid-1970s first introduced me to serious doubts about the authorship of the greatest set of writings in the English language. The Atlantic magazine devoted a cover story to the authorship controversy in 1991 and has looked back at the point-counterpoint arguments over the Bard in this post. (I think I still have that issue of the Atlantic squirreled away somewhere.) Neither the Washington Post nor The Atlantic can be accused of lacking seriousness. Amazon.com lists 166 results in a search for books on "Edward de Vere Shakespeare." Admittedly, that doesn't mean there are 166 different books available on this subject, but the controversy has generated dozens of serious books. One of the more recent is "Shakespeare by Another Name: Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, The Man Who Was Shakespeare." I checked that book out of the public library and found it quite persuasive in its argument that Edward de Vere should rightfully be credited for the authorship of the Shakespearean plays. Hank Whittemore has written a book titled "The Great Shakespeare Hoax," and there are others. To claim there is no controversy or that the argument is akin to flat-earth claims is ridiculous.

The contention of the Shakespeare debunkers boils down to doubts about the ability of the man William Shakespeare to write the plays attributed to him. He had little or no education — some even doubt that he could read and write. But the plays attributed to him expanded the English language with new words and metaphors that have become familiar parts of our conversations — "the milk of human kindness," "a pound of flesh," etc. His vocabulary exceeded that of the translators of the King James Bible. He was intimately familiar with the royal court, with foreign literature and classic tales and, perhaps most tellingly, with Italy, where several of his plays are set. But William Shakespeare, the actor, never traveled to Italy. Edward de Vere lived there for some time, in Verona. There were good reasons in Elizabethan society for an aristocrat to deny authorship of plays, which were considered debauched common entertainment unfit for royalty. Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, is the logical answer to the question, "Who had the education, skills and life experiences to have written these plays?"

I know English professors who are steadfast in their faith that William Shakespeare, despite his lack of formal education, travel and worldly knowledge, wrote the plays attributed to him, and I respect their position. (I am an English major who took only one Shakespeare course.) I don't think the question is a closed book, but I do lean strongly toward the belief that the Earl of Oxford wrote the plays and an actor named William Shakespeare took credit for them.

We may never be able to satisfy this 500-year-old mystery, but it is a mystery, one of the greatest in literary history. If the mystery is not why de Vere denied his authorship, then it is how Shakespeare managed to write so magnificently about things he never experienced.

Saddam could have been another Qaddafi

2011-10-24T07:31:00.003-04:00

The capture/killing/execution of Muammar Qaddafi by Libyan rebels occurred with no loss of American lives. That makes you wonder how different the world might have been if the NATO strategy in Libya had been applied to Iraq in 1991.

In 1991, the United States, having amassed a huge coalition army, attacked Iraqi-occupied Kuwait and stormed into the Iraqi desert, unimpeded by Saddam Hussein's once-feared military. American air strikes had obliterated the Iraqi air force, and American ground forces with air support had demolished the Iraqi army, sending remnants of it scurrying toward Baghdad in one of the most complete military victories in modern history. After 100 days of one-sided combat, President George H.W. Bush declared the war was over. Riding ridiculously high approval ratings, Bush seemed assured of re-election.

Bush and his advisers chose not to follow the panicked Iraqi troops into Baghdad and directly overthrow Saddam Hussein. They were convinced that the Iraqi people would rise up against the now-weakened tyrant and quickly be rid of him. His army was decimated, his air force crippled and the allies promised to keep his remaining fighter jets out of the sky. The oppressed Shiite majority should easily be able to overthrow the ruthless dictator.

That was the theory, but it didn't work out that way. Allies allowed Iraqi helicopters to fly, and those aircraft gave Saddam the advantage he needed to crush the rebellion. For 12 years, Iraq played cat-and-mouse with Allied fighter jets patrolling skies over Iraq while, on the ground, Saddam built an even more oppressive regime. In 2003, the first President Bush's son saw an opportunity to finish the job his father had begun. Using erroneous or fraudulent intelligence, George W. Bush declared that the world had to depose Saddam Hussein before he could use his weapons of mass destruction. It should be another cakewalk, just like 1991, the advisers said. Once again they were wrong, and 4,400 American troops would die in the invasion and the subsequent insurgency.

If the first President Bush had followed NATO's Libyan protocol of 20 years later and provided air support for Iraqi dissidents, Saddam Hussein might have been deposed 12 years earlier, the Iraq war would not have happened, the United States would not have spent trillions of dollars in an ill-conceived invasion and occupation, 4,400 Americans would still be alive, the federal budget would be far healthier, and America would enjoy far more support in Arab countries.

Helping a stranger while dodging traffic

2011-10-19T07:42:00.003-04:00

I was stopped at a busy stoplight at the intersection of two four-lane roads one recent afternoon, about five vehicles back from the stoplight. More cars were behind me. I noticed a box truck pulled over to the curb of the intersecting street, its cargo bay open. A man was walking away from the truck, watching approaching traffic, as he stooped to collect something from the roadway.

It took a moment to realize that what he was retrieving was several folding chairs that had fallen from the open rear of the cargo truck. I couldn't tell how many chairs were in the roadway, but I could see enough, as I peered around the cars ahead of me, to see that it might take several signal cycles for him to clear the traffic hazards. There were enough chairs to stall traffic for a while, and, already, drivers were ignoring the traffic signal and looking instead for a path between the chairs lying in the road.

Then something surprising happened. First one driver, then another and another, got out of the cars waiting in front of me and, watching the oncoming traffic carefully, walked into the roadway to help the man whose chairs were in the road. With this additional help, the road was quickly cleared, the chairs were secured in the truck, drivers returned to their vehicles, and the stoplight began to matter again.

I don't know how many places something like this might happen. I don't know how many people would put their lives at risk on a busy street to help a stranger who either failed to secure his cargo or was the victim of an equipment failure. But I saw some brave and considerate souls do the right thing. In the process, they helped everyone waiting at that intersection get where they were going.

It happened in Wilson, N.C.

First impression of Cain plays out

2011-10-18T07:49:00.003-04:00

Back in June, I wrote that after the first Republican presidential debate, Herman Cain came across as a serious, even viable candidate. It's amusing now to see that Cain, the unlikely politician, has risen to the top of the GOP field, at least in some polls. With another debate scheduled tonight, Cain will have another opportunity to live up to his newfound ranking.

Cain is still an unlikely candidate. With no campaigning or governing experience, he has a handicap vs. his more experienced opponents. Still, he has struck a chord with some voters. He comes across as folksy, jovial and avuncular. His 9-9-9 plan has taken off, despite the fact that it would shift tax burden to the poor and low-income and probably would not produce enough revenue, analysts say, to cover the federal government's expenses. Cain continues to pitch the plan with the fervor of a snake-handling evangelist and is not about to back down, even to questions about whether 9-9-9 might turn into 12-12-12 (percent sales tax, personal income tax and corporate tax).

What Cain's rise in the polls indicates is that voters are not particularly interested in a candidate's race or color. The GOP electorate is conservative and predominantly white, but a plurality of GOP voters polls say they like Cain and support him. If Cain's race has handicapped him in any way, it's not apparent.

Cain remains highly unlikely to win the nomination, and as his platform comes under greater scrutiny and his foreign policy inexperience becomes more apparent, he is likely to slide in the polls. Still, his accomplishment as a businessman taking on the political establishment is impressive. He has livened up the GOP debate without venturing over the cliff with Ron Paul.

Returning to campus after so many years

2011-10-17T07:37:00.005-04:00

My wife had this wild idea: Why not sit in the Carolina Inn bar and watch a football game on the big-screen TV instead of sitting in Kenan Stadium on a too-warm afternoon to watch the game from afar (assuming we could find tickets). We tried her idea on Saturday, when Carolina was playing Miami and the streets and sidewalks of Chapel Hill were packed with thousands of extra cars and people. On a gloriously beautiful autumn day, we sat in the bar, ordered $11 hamburgers and delicious draft beer and watched as the Tar Heels looked disappointingly inept on their way to a 17-0 halftime deficit.

By then, having consumed a hamburger and a couple of beers each, we'd seen enough of disappointment and decided to stroll down to Franklin Street, where my wife wanted to cash in a coupon at a store. First, we took a detour through campus, along the brick walks of the oldest portions of the now-sprawling campus — Memorial Hall, South Building, the Old Well, Person Hall, BVP, the Davie Poplar and the rest. Although portions of the campus are barely recognizable because so many new structures have been squeezed into formerly wooded or pastoral slices of ground, this part of campus is little changed from its 1790s origins and is nearly identical to its mid-1960s appearance. The old buildings are freshly washed or painted; the creeping ivy is missing from several buildings that now glow in the sunlight. All four of us, all Carolina alumni, strolled slowly through our memories of this place, picking out favorite spots and keen recollections, opening doors left unlocked and standing back to admire improvements.

You can say it about any university campus, I suppose, that it is a "special place," where teenagers tasted freedom, tested independence and learned maturity. It's a place of ideas and concepts formerly unknown and of interests explored. It is as well a place of romance — each of us had met our spouse at this place — and a foundation for later life.

On football weekends when I was a student, I would see the returning alumni and feel more pity than envy for them. They turned out in university-emblazoned finery and drove big cars at a time when ragged jeans and sweatshirts were normative student attire. I interpreted their presence as an attempt to relive their youth. My youthful analysis was flawed. Now I realize that returning to this place is not an effort to relive one's youth; it is a way of saying thanks for the glories of youth and, also, for the blessings of maturing years.

Why should we 'Occupy Wall Street'?

2011-10-12T07:35:00.003-04:00

Although I came of age in the era of protests — the 1960s — and participated in a few myself, I am having trouble figuring out the Occupy Wall Street protests. These protests, which are proudly leaderless and disorganized, take aim at the big banks and other financial institutions on Wall Street and have spread to demonstrations in other cities, including Chapel Hill, N.C. (which has a long history of protests).

But it seems to me that the protesters are blaming the beneficiaries of policies when they should be targeting the creators of policies — Congress and the executive branch of government. The rich have gotten richer, the income gap has widened and economic wealth has become more concentrated not because banks and investors have taken advantage of opportunities but because the government has paved their paths to these new economic realities. Tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, deregulation of banking and forceful pushing of questionable home loans are all federal policies. Banks and investors have taken advantage of these policies, but who could blame them? The last thing this economy needs is a ban on taking on opportunities.

Wall Street — as a term meaning American corporate thinking — can be blamed for some policies that are not good for the nation as a whole and are particularly bad for certain segments of the population. Corporate policy has frequently been criticized as being too short-sighted, looking no further than the next quarterly report when wise business practices would be looking ahead to the next year or the next decade. Satisfying investors and the corporate board is not as important in the long term as satisfying customers as a whole. The short-sighted focus on the next earnings report also ignores larger economic good, such as environmental benefits and domestic employment.

So, yes, I see the anger at Wall Street and the frustration of young people with large student loans but no jobs, but the first policy change needs to come out of Washington, not out of Wall Street. Or so it seems to me.

Presidential primaries can't get much earlier

2011-10-10T07:34:00.004-04:00

SOMEDAY SOON — The Florida Republican Party announced today that it will hold its presidential primary tomorrow. In response, New Hampshire, announced it was moving its presidential primary, traditionally the first in the nation, to yesterday.

These announcements follow a string of escalations in the Great Presidential Primary Wars that began when Florida announced it would hold its presidential primary in January. Refusing to be relegated to second place in the presidential sweepstakes, New Hampshire promptly moved its primary to December.

But the Christmas Primary was short-lived, when Florida proclaimed its primary day to be the Day after Thanksgiving. Then New Hampshire retaliated by declaring Halloween its primary day, despite a chorus of "how appropriate!" from cynical Democrats. Ultimately, that led to today's twin announcements of the Tomorrow Primary and the Yesterday Primary.

Asked how voters were supposed to arrange to vote tomorrow, much less yesterday, one New Hampshire party spokesman admitted, on condition of anonymity, "It's not the vote we're after. We just want the over-the-top publicity for an event that involves only a minuscule portion of the national electorate."

Steve Jobs: One shock after another

2011-10-06T07:45:00.004-04:00

Steve Jobs' death came as a shock Wednesday. He was a modern-day genius who changed technology and, by doing so, changed popular culture and society. (I wrote about this recently in this blog post.)

As we look back on Jobs' legacy, we get another shock: The iPod is only 10 years old. It's hard to remember a world without it. Not so long ago, my children were listening to music on a Sony Walkman, which seemed so compact and convenient, capable of playing 40 minutes or so of consecutive music on a cassette tape. The CD version of the Walkman seemed like the ultimate in personal listening. Now, I have hours of music on an iPod shuffle that is barely larger than a postage stamp. It was Jobs' visionary creativity that gave us these devices and others. The iPod led to the podcast, which makes all sorts of radio programs and other information or entertainment available at our convenience. The iTunes store revolutionized how we buy music, as well as movies and television shows.

I've been using Apple products for more than 25 years and have always found them preferable to the alternatives because Jobs demanded products that were not only technically competent but also easy to use, intuitive, practical and elegant. In the process, he created one of the most successful companies in American history. The company had its first office and manufacturing facility in the Jobs family garage.

Here's another shock: Jobs' genius was so little appreciated that he was actually forced out of the company he had co-founded. During his exile beginning in 1985, he went on to other imaginative ventures, including NeXT computers, which was later bought by Apple. When he returned in 1996, Apple was losing money, and consumers were leery of Apple products, fearful that the company might soon be bankrupt. But Jobs directed the development of the odd-looking iMac and then a whole range of new products, including the hugely successful iPhone. Jobs took big risks — the iMac was ridiculed at first because it had no floppy disk drive. Critics said consumers wouldn't by a computer without a floppy drive (Apple's original Mac had led the change from 5.25-inch floppies to the less floppy 3.5 inch disks), but the critics were wrong.

It seems doubtful that Apple will be able to maintain its creative boldness without Jobs, but I hope his sense of inventiveness, perfectability and user-friendliness has so pervaded Apple that the company will remain an innovation leader.

A chill in the air, and altered sunlight

2011-10-03T07:36:00.003-04:00

I feel the chill in the air and welcome it after so many spring and summer afternoons working in the hot sun. Saturday's chill came unexpectedly simply because I had not looked at the forecast, somehow assuming that summer's warmth would continue through the weekend. I borrowed a jacket from my son for a chilly walk through his Greensboro neighborhood, reveling in the brisk breeze and the changing leaves. We needed only the aroma of a wood fire to think that winter had fully arrived.

The sunlight is different. After last weekend's dreary clouds and misty rain, the sunlight is back but no longer the same. Its obtuse angle gives a different feel to the daylight. It is the difference between a spotlight set too low and a broad-spectrum floodlight shining high overhead. Driving west in the late afternoon on Friday, I shifted my eyes and my whole body to take the glare out of my eyes and to avoid being blinded by sunlight on a plane with my face.

Light is quickly receding. Darkness slips in before dinner is done, and the night stretches out to cover more of every 24-hour span. The artificial creation of Daylight Saving Time will soon be repealed until next year, and the darkness will push out the light before the end of every workday.

Last week, walking out to the driveway to retrieve the morning newspaper, I looked up at the cloudless sky and saw Orion stalking prey across the black sky, the surest sign that winter is on its way. Nature's time cycle continues its revolution, and it is good.

Early warning signs I don't want to see

2011-09-28T20:55:00.003-04:00

Jane Brody's New York Times article about cognitive impairment as a sign of impending dementia hit me like a water balloon dropped from a high-rise. If you're having a problem remembering things, such as simple, familiar words, or names of people you know, you might have only a few more years of functional living before Alzheimer's disease takes over your life.

What scares me is that I have had these cognitive impairments for some time. I've always had difficulty remembering names, even in my twenties. Something in my cognitive makeup doesn't latch onto names, so for years I've run into people whose faces I know but whose name I cannot produce. Words also escape me from time to time. The name of a flower I see by the walk just escapes me, as does the common noun that I know perfectly well but my brain just won't produce. I've learned to live with these frustrating and sometimes embarrassing impairments. If it gets no worse than this, I can take frustration and occasional embarrassment, but if these lapses are indicative of looming dementia, I don't want to face it.

In their declining years, my parents both exhibited mild to moderate dementia and confusion, which they tried to hide. Dementia, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's are diseases that have a genetic element, and that gives me more cause for concern. When my parents were spending their final years in a nursing home, I told my wife that if she suspected I was losing my mental faculties, she should sign me up for skydiving lessons. "If I can't remember to pull the ripcord, I don't want to live, anyway," I said.

I stand by that sentiment. It seems cruel to see someone who is intellectually sharp trapped in a body ravaged by MS or ALS, but it seems even worse to me to occupy a relatively healthy body but lose memories, reasoning and personality, leaving nothing but a shell. For the present, I'm hoping that Brody's early warning signs are, in my case, simply a case of brain overload, having retained more facts and memories than my brain can efficiently store and reproduce.

Penalize Congress for failure to pass budget

2011-09-26T20:33:00.003-04:00

Ah-h-h-h! We've avoided another government shutdown. At least that's the hope — who knows for sure, these days? Even if the government doesn't shut down, Congress' track record on fiscal responsibility is abysmal. The dodging of a shutdown is being achieved via a stopgap funding bill, a continuing resolution that allows the government to operate even though no budget for fiscal year 2012 has been passed. FY2012 begins Saturday!

This is nothing new. Congress routinely fails to pass a budget before the new fiscal year begins. So year after year, no matter which party controls Capitol Hill or 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the federal government survives through special measures forced upon Congress because it has failed to pass a budget. Federal fiscal years used to begin on July 1, but Congress said it needed just a little more time, so Congress changed the start of the fiscal year to Oct. 1. (I was a federal employee in Washington, D.C., at the time of that 15-month transitional fiscal year in the early 1970s.) It has done no good. Congress is no better at passing the budget by Oct. 1 than it was at passing a budget by July 1. When you consider that passing a budget is, arguably, the single most important task of Congress every year, that's a sorry track record.

My suggestion is this: Pass a law that cuts off the salary and expense accounts of all members of Congress when a comprehensive budget is not passed by the beginning of the fiscal year. Continuing resolutions or stopgap funding won't count; it has to be a full budget — the main job constituents sent them to Washington to do. Otherwise, their pay is cut to zero until the day both houses of Congress pass the entire budget for the fiscal year and the president signs it.

I think this proposal might give members of Congress some incentive to get their jobs done.

Where will we have these discussions?

2011-09-23T17:04:00.004-04:00

Roaming the aisles of a closing bookstore for a few minutes earlier today, I ran into an acquaintance who wanted to talk books. Always a good topic, especially surrounded by so many of the topic.

She asked if I had read a couple of authors and was looking for a good book to buy at 20% off on this day before the store closed for good. She asked about John Irving, and I told her he and I share a birth date. I told her I thought "World According to Garp" was a great book. She said she'd read the synopsis on the book's cover and didn't think she'd like it. I told her it was not at all the kind of book I had expected from comments from some friends when I read it 30 years ago. I found it intriguing and affirming about relationships. She said she'd read "A Prayer for Owen Meany" and liked it. I recommended "A Widow for One Year," but she'd tried it and didn't like it. We both agreed "Hotel New Hampshire" was too weird.

Looking through the stacks of books, "The Kite Runner" by Khaled Hosseini caught my eye. I handed the paperback to her and urged her to read it. "It's about Afghanistan, isn't it?" she said skeptically. Yes, I said, but it's a wonderful story and it teaches so much about Afghanistan. "Is it depressing?" Well, part of it is set in the Taliban era, so yes, but it's well worth the trouble. Hosseni's "A Thousand Splendid Suns" was lying on the next shelf. I recommended it also. She finally agreed to buy "The Kite Runner" but threatened to throw it at me if it wasn't good. I told her I had no worries.

I spent the next few minutes trying to remember the author and title of a book I've recommended dozens of times. Senior moment. By the time I remembered it, I was out of the store and halfway across the parking lot. I walked back to where she was sitting in her car and told her: "Magic Time" by Doug Marlette. She wanted to know the time period of the book. Marlette weaves together three time periods with the same characters — the civil rights era of the 1960s, the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and present day (2008 or 2009). I've told other people that I thought it was the truest, most accurate fictionalization of race relations in the South during the early 1960s. "The Help," another book I enjoyed but didn't remember to recommend today, has more recently tackled the same era from a much different vantage point and with a less complicated plot. I'm saddened every time I recommend "Magic Time" that Marlette, the editorial cartoonist who created the comic strip "Kudzu," died in a car crash not long after "Magic Time" was published. A literary tragedy!

With Books-A-Million closing, where will people in Wilson have conversations like this?

When a town's bookstore closes

2011-09-20T07:38:00.004-04:00

Wilson's Books-A-Million, the only bookstore in a town of nearly 50,000, is closing, the victim of a lingering economic downturn and a changed business environment for booksellers. First, it was the big-box bookstores that ran the little independents out of business. Now, it's the online retailers (Amazon, etc.) and the switch to e-readers (e.g., Kindle) that is forcing the big-box bookstores out of business.

Economic changes aside, can a small city claim any intellectual ranking without a bookstore? A bookstore is not just a place to buy books; it's a place to discover books, to talk to fellow readers and to luxuriate in the aroma and feel of freshly printed books. Bookstores are places where I can spend hours without realizing any time has elapsed.

When we moved to Wilson 31 years ago, a B. Dalton bookstore lured us out of Parkwood Mall's wide corridor into its cramped aisles. Now the store (part of a chain but with some helpful local clerks) is gone, and the mall is pretty much kaput, too. We mourned the demise of B. Dalton but were encouraged by BAM's opening. We could, at last, shop through thousands of books along wide aisles and refresh ourselves at the coffee bar without leaving town. Every Christmas season, we would hunt through the selections for books for young nieces and nephews because we knew there's no better gift than a good book, and we wanted to have a role in sparking these children's love of reading. Other gift-giving occasions for older relatives or friends also would bring us to the bookstore. On other occasions, we would simply drop by the bookstore to spend a half hour or so just looking to see what's new and to treat ourselves to a cup of coffee.

Now, we won't be able to do any of those things without going out of town. We can order books online, but it's not the same, especially when it comes to children's books. Without a bookstore, Wilson will be a lesser place.

BAM's closing will be an opportunity for an enterprising bibliophile to open an independent bookstore, perhaps combining used books with a few new printings. The business plan will depend on one's ability to get a business loan in this economic climate — and on local shoppers' willingness to support that increasingly rarity, an independent bookstore.

ACC gets bigger, not better

2011-09-19T07:36:00.003-04:00

Size matters. That's certainly true on the offensive line in football and in the three-second lane in basketball. It also applies to collegiate athletic conferences, at least as far as the league executives are concerned. For the fans, I'm not so sure.

The Atlantic Coast Conference has announced an expansion of the 58-year-old conference to 14 teams, adding Syracuse and Pittsburgh to the 12-team roster. Two factors are behind this move: (1) Major conferences are falling apart or expanding — the Big 10, Big 12, Pac 10 (I have trouble keeping up with the numbers) are adding or shedding teams and (2) enlarging the conference and adding major television markets increases the conference's revenue from TV contracts.

If you haven't noticed, television controls intercollegiate athletics. That's why you have Thursday night and Friday night football games. That's why you have 9 p.m. start times for basketball games. Everything is geared toward maximizing TV audiences, even if the schedule is bad for the fans and the student athletes.

I am reminded of televised boxing, which had its heyday around the time the Atlantic Coast Conference was formed. "Friday Night Fights" was a staple of televised sports in the 1950s when college basketball and football got relatively little attention. Boxing fell from favor and disappeared as a regularly scheduled broadcast within a few years. One of the explanations for boxing's fall was that television demanded matches that were not good for the boxers or for the sport. (The brutality of the sport and some in-ring tragedies also contributed to its demise.) Feeding television's insatiable demand was not good for boxing. Collegiate football and basketball have not reached that tipping point yet, but concerns over television's influence are rising.

I am one fan who would prefer the early days of the ACC, when eight teams competed within a relatively compact geographic area, and almost every game was a rivalry. Each team played every conference opponent in football each season, and in basketball, each team played twice, one game at home and one game away. This made for wonderfully heated rivalries and great excitement among fans and alumni. The conference comprised North Carolina, N.C. State, Duke, Wake Forest, Virginia, Maryland, South Carolina and Clemson. Stricter academic standards for athletes and other factors led South Carolina to (foolishly, it turned out) leave the conference in 1971. Georgia Tech was recruited to replace South Carolina, adding the Atlanta TV market. Since then, Florida State, Miami, Virginia Tech and Boston College have enlisted, bringing their own TV markets and fan following. The home-and-away basketball games had to be dropped, and the football season was divided into two divisions. Rivalries waned.

The bottom line is nearly $2 billion worth of television contract. Forget about the fans; forget about the rivalries. Television rules.

Gathering stirs newspaper memories

2011-09-18T09:46:00.004-04:00

The memorial service Saturday in Maplewood Cemetery for Margaret Dickerman was cool and damp, but warmed by the renewal of relationships with former co-workers and others who had been part of Mrs. Dickerman's universe. She was remembered for her caring and concern, for her kindnesses, for her membership in "The Greatest Generation," for her faith and for her civic-minded philanthropy.

I was there to pay my respects to a woman who had been wonderfully considerate and kind to my family when we moved to Wilson 31 years ago. She took the time to find a house we could rent until we decided on a permanent home. She recommended doctors and a dentist, insurance agents and other resources for us, strangers in a new town. She drove my wife and small children around town, pointing out landmarks and neighborhoods. One day she brought a pot of hot soup for our lunch. She personified the graciousness of eastern North Carolina, and we were eternally grateful to her for making our difficult transition a little easier.

In my early years at the newspaper her grandfather had founded, her presence was obvious. She wanted everything decorous and proper, which wasn't always possible in a messy news environment. She knew the employees and cared about them. Frequent pot-luck lunches and a grand Christmas party created a genuine sense of unity and cohesiveness. We joked that you might not get rich working there, but you wouldn't starve.

Over the years, the newspaper business changed, that newspaper changed, and Mrs. Dickerman's influence faded as she aged and became less involved. Few recent hires knew her or even knew of her. Gathered beneath that funeral tent Saturday, the old-timers paid their respects and remembered the good times.

Obama is counting on North Carolina

2011-09-15T07:32:00.004-04:00

President Obama was back in North Carolina Wednesday, an indication that he thinks he might be able to repeat his win in the state. His 2008 taking of North Carolina, the first Democratic presidential win here since Jimmy Carter in 1976, seemed miraculous and impressive at the time. Repeating that win might truly be miraculous.

North Carolina not so long ago enjoyed its success as a job-creating economic engine. Manufacturing and high-tech companies came here for the state's low taxes and low unionization rates. But since the recession began in 2008, North Carolina has trailed the nation as a whole in jobs and economic stability. The state's downward economic spiral seems likely to continue with Bank of America, headquartered in Charlotte, announcing 30,000 job cuts earlier this week.

Rightly or wrongly (mostly wrongly), the president and his party get blamed for economic misery, so Obama's effort to keep North Carolina in his camp will be especially difficult unless the economy turns around. An economic boost seems unlikely in the next year. Forecasts are for weak growth, at best. The unemployment rate seems likely to remain stubbornly high, and that rate is worse than in recent past recessions because so many of the unemployed are mid-career or older breadwinners. The housing crisis, which sparked this recession, will not be solved soon because so many mortgages are delinquent or in foreclosure.

To win in North Carolina and nationwide, Obama will have to hope for mistakes on the other side. If Republican primary voters nominate a Tea Party favorite who appears to threaten the existence of Social Security and Medicare or who suggests continuing war in Iraq, Afghanistan or elsewhere, Obama's task will seem more manageable, though still an uphill slog.

Toppled trees should be replaced

2011-09-12T07:19:00.002-04:00

You would think that, after the devastating hurricanes of 1996 and 1999, Wilson would have few trees left for high winds to topple. But everywhere I go now, I see trees down and damage to homes that stood in the falling trees' paths.

I spent the day that Hurricane Irene struck and several days thereafter in Rocky Mount and did not get to see much of Wilson's damage. In terms of damage to the electrical grid, Rocky Mount clearly had it worse. There were still hundreds of Rocky Mount customers without power days after Wilson Energy announced its lines were fully restored. But that doesn't mean that there weren't many, many trees down on Wilson houses or across Wilson streets. Stately old willow oaks were twisted and wrenched from their trunks in many Wilson yards. Or big trees were ripped from the ground, their monstrous root ball exposed to the air. Some pines were snapped off high above the ground. In my yard, we had limbs and branches down, but the trees somehow managed to withstand the wind. We are worried about one sassafras, however. Its roots were lifted and partly exposed, and we could not pull the tree back to a fully upright position. I used an electric chain saw to trim back the tree and bring it more upright. We're hoping it will survive.

We want these trees to survive because they provide shade and charm to a neighborhood. That's why older neighborhoods, with stately trees and canopied streets look so much more appealing than stark new streets without a tree in sight. But there are dangers. Trees have a life span, and they incur diseases that leave them hollow and brittle. Add a little wind, and you can have a 70-foot obstruction in the street or a cleaver that chops off a roof gable. Still, if you look at Wilson from the seventh-floor board room of the BB&T Towers, you see green trees stretching to the horizon with a steeple or roofline here and there. The carpet of treetops seems as impenetrable as a shield. Those trees of our urban forest are our best antidote to the pollution created by our cars, trucks, power plants and furnaces. Without them, our streets would be barren, our yards inhospitably hotter and our air dirtier.

That's why I hope all of the trees lost to Hurricane Irene, as well as those toppled by Floyd and Fran, will be replaced with healthy, long-living and beautiful trees so that our landscape will always be charming and inviting.

The (Sunday school) lessons of 9/11

2011-09-11T15:10:00.003-04:00

Today's 10th anniversary commemorations of the 9/11 attacks are more interesting than the NFL games on this first weekend of the season. The anniversary and the 10-year-old event were the topics of an adult Sunday school discussion this morning. Blame me for that. Asked to teach the class and given the freedom to choose whatever material I wanted, I settled on the anniversary as a discussion starter. I downloaded some material from several religious websites, including some National Council of Churches material.

Ten years later, some of the shock and anger have abated, but the grief and the determination remain. A statement signed by thousands of religious leaders issued days after the attacks condemned the terrorists' strategy of using any grievance as an excuse for violence and mass murder. But it also called for a response of love and understanding instead of more violence. Ten years later, our primary response is still violence against violence.

And where has it gotten us? The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost thousands of American lives and trillions of dollars in U.S. wealth. Our troops are still trying to pacify cities in Afghanistan, and our scheduled departure from Iraq could result in civil war in that former dictatorship. Osama bin Laden, who planned and gloated over the 9/11 attacks, is dead, shot by a Navy Seal in a daring nighttime raid. But American troops remain bogged down in his former sanctuary.

In a CNN interview today, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld refused to concede that the Iraq war was a foolish and costly mistake, but the question clearly made him uncomfortable as he hedged his answers. The invasion that led to the aptly named book "Fiasco" was sold as a means of stopping the spread of "weapons of mass destruction," but it turned out Iraq didn't have any. Instead, it had hundreds of thousands of mines and artillery shells that were easily converted into "improvised explosive devices" that proved perfect for killing and maiming American troops.

The attacks of 10 years ago will be judged in history as an act of infamy at least as brazen as Japan's Dec. 7, 1941, attacks. But America's response to the latter attacks were clearly not as effective as the response of December 1941 and following. World War II lasted less than four years from the date of America's entry. The response to 9/11, dubbed a "war on terror," has lasted 10 years — and counting, in time, lives and treasure.

"Fixed income" complaint lacks firepower

2011-09-08T07:42:00.003-04:00

You used to hear it all the time: "I'm on a fixed income and ... ." The complaint came almost exclusively from retirees commenting on some new tax increase or price hike.

That complaint is less common now because most people can claim to be on a "fixed income." Over the past five years, annual pay increases have disappeared for large numbers of workers. Even some government workers, who once could rely on a 3 to 5 percent pay "cost of living" increase or a "merit" raise, are now facing flat wages or even reduced take-home pay as cities, counties and states begin charging employees for part of the cost of health care or retirement reserves. Many private industries have imposed a wage freeze as a means of reducing costs while avoiding layoffs. Other industries have resorted to layoffs to cut costs, and some unionized companies (look at the auto industry) have actually reduced pay rates.

So the complaint that "I'm on a fixed income" no longer generates the sympathy it once did. The "fixed income" assertion was often not accurate anyway. Since the 1970s, Social Security has incorporated an automatic cost-of-living increase that, in most years, increased monthly benefits. Only when inflation was very low were Social Security benefits "fixed" from year to year. Some pension plans and annuities are truly "fixed" — they pay the same monthly rate year after year, but Social Security has been annually adjusted to match the rate of inflation and eliminate loss of "real" income.

The "fixed income" complaint has lost steam largely because there are millions of unemployed workers who would love to be on a "fixed income" or any other kind of income. Millions of others have taken lower-paying jobs in order to escape unemployment. As one of the latter category, I would love to have had my income "fixed" at what it was five years ago, when it was capped by a company wage freeze.

Travel is exhausting but worth it

2011-09-05T14:44:00.003-04:00

Here are a few observations from our quickie weekend trip to Grand Rapids, Mich., for the wedding of nephew Mark:

• Airport security is pretty ridiculous. You have to be at the airport two hours before the flight. Even on Labor Day weekend Friday at RDU, a very busy airport, we ended up with more than an hour to kill after getting through security. On our return flight on Sunday, the airport was nearly deserted. The Transportation Security Agency agents outnumbered passengers by about eight-to-one. Apparently just to amuse themselves, an agent announced that he needed to open my bag and look inside. He opened the bag, took out a container of talcum powder and announced he'd have to test the powder. He shook some powder out of the original manufacturer's container, releasing enough powder to kill everyone in the airport if it had been anthrax, and carefully dropped two liquids onto the powder he had captured on a little square of paper. "Looks good," he said, then took a plastic probe and ran it through my suitcase before sending the bag back through the X-ray machine again. The whole process must have relieved their Sunday morning boredom.

• We tend to think of where we live or where we were reared as the best place to be, but I found myself intrigued with the Grand Rapids area. Major roads have no development — commercial or residential — abutting the roadway. It's all set back behind trees and other greenery. A wide sidewalk paralleled the road, even rural roads, giving people a place to walk or bicycle. What a great idea! Michigan seems designed for outdoor activities — kayaking, canoeing, biking, running, etc. And the topography is beautiful — forested rolling hills similar to what you might find in the Morganton or Mount Airy area. Of course, we were there in September, not February. I suspect the winters are brutal.

• When first invited to the wedding in Grand Rapids, my first thought was "home of the Gerald Ford Presidential Library." We didn't make it to the presidential library, nor did we make it to the famed gardens my wife wanted to visit. A two-day whirlwind trip left almost no time for personal activities.

• For the first time in more than 15 years, I rented a car. The agency gave us a "free upgrade" to a larger sedan instead of the compact we had reserved. I got to drive a Hyundai Sonata, which was roomy and drove beautifully. From my couple of days' experience, I'd say the Sonata is a rational alternative to an Accord or a Camry.

• Trips are exhausting and discombobulating. The rush to get to places on time, the unfamiliar surroundings, the anxieties, the scheduled activities all combine to tire you out. Being one place one minute and a thousand miles away three hours later plays tricks on your brain and your body. I'm convinced that humans were not meant to travel like that. Even a weekend car trip of a couple of hundred miles wears me out.

• There are occasions when it's important to "be there." Saturday's wedding was one of those occasions. Although I gulped at the distance and expense when I first learned of these wedding plans, there was never any question that we would go. Weddings are joyous occasions for bride and groom, and it is essential for them to be launched into their new life by those who have played important roles in their original, separate lives. You need to be there to see them off and to keep them close for the rest of all of your lives. Some of my greatest regrets in my life have to do with the funerals I missed. They were too far away; I had too many other things to do; the timing didn't fit my schedule. I missed final goodbyes to beloved aunts and uncles and cousins and a grandfather. At the same time, I missed helping support and feeling the love of grieving family members. It has been said that distant family members too often only see each other at weddings and funerals. Don't miss any opportunities.

Rocky Mount, Wilson weather storm

2011-08-29T07:30:00.004-04:00

I spent almost all of Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday in Rocky Mount as Hurricane Irene blew through eastern North Carolina. Unlike some members of the response team, I was able to spend the night in my own bed each night, although the days were long. Observing damage and emergency response in both Rocky Mount and Wilson gave me an opportunity to compare the two.

Rocky Mount seems to have suffered more damage than Wilson did from the hurricane's high winds. Both cities had trees down in the road and a widespread power losses. Rocky Mount reported more than 15,000 customers without power at one point Saturday. Late Sunday, large areas of that city were without power, and many intersections had no working traffic lights, which made travel a little more scary. At my home in Wilson, we lost power for less than two hours on Saturday, and our Greenlight service also stayed on. The highest power outage total I saw in Wilson was less than 4,000, and all of the stoplights I encountered on my commute were working (admittedly, this is a small sample).

Wilson utility crews did a phenomenal job following the April 16 tornado getting electricity restored in only four days to areas that were obliterated by that storm, and it looks like they've done a good job again. Somewhere in my neighborhood, I've heard a generator humming, but it appears that only a few people have had to resort to gasoline for electric power.

Apple computers, Steve Jobs and me

2011-08-25T07:27:00.003-04:00

I've been using Apple products since the mid-1980s, only a few years after the first, boxy little Macintosh came out. I've personally owned five Macs (three bought second-hand) over the years. In fact, I had some experience with an Apple IIe computer that I used in taking a BASIC programming course in about 1981. I've always enjoyed the intuitive, simple interface of the Macs I've used. Jumping from a Microsoft DOS-based computer at my office to the Mac's graphical user interface with point-and-click selections and simple commands in the early 1990s was like going from doing algebra in Roman numerals to using a calculator.

When the newspaper I was editing faced a decision on a new production system in the late 1990s, it was at Apple's low ebb. Some forecasters were saying that Apple would soon be bankrupt or would get out of the computer business altogether. It's recent innovations (remember the Apple Newton?) had flopped, and its personal computers had performance and reliability problems. I remember calling a trusted consultant who advised sticking with Macs; he thought Apple would dig its way out of that hole.

Did it ever! Only a few years later, Apple introduced the iMac, which took the computer world by storm. Following quickly were the iPod and iTunes. By the time he iPhone and iPad came along, Apple's ascendancy to the top of the innovations market was complete.

I have no doubt that the credit for this remarkable turnaround belongs to Steve Jobs, the Apple founder who left the company only to return years later to resurrect his baby. Jobs has demanded creative thinking, simplicity of design and reliability. I am writing this blog on a Mac that is about 10 years old but still reliable (although slow by today's standards). At work, I now use a Windows computer, which I have become accustomed to and don't think much about its differences. But occasionally some task will emphasize to me how comparatively simpler and more intuitive Apple's interface is.

Steve Jobs announced Wednesday that he was stepping down as Apple CEO. He has had serious health problems, including pancreatic cancer, for years. The news can't be good for Apple; one doesn't replace such an innovator so easily. I hope the culture that Jobs created at Apple will live on and that Apple will continue to create dazzling new products that make me say, "Wow!" and "I want one!" I just wish I could afford more of those toys. I might start by replacing my old Mac.

Tea Party attacks the bird problem

2011-08-16T07:22:00.003-04:00

Here's where we're headed:

Tea Party officials today urged Americans to stop feeding birds at their homes. Two hundred Tea Party members held a protest at a local hardware store, urging that sales of bird feeders and bird seed be banned.

"Americans are running the risk of creating a generation of soft, dependent, lazy welfare birds," spokesman I.M. Looney warned. "The strong, self-sustaining, independent, entrepreneurial birds on which this great nation was founded are being enticed into dependency by the handouts of a few well-intentioned bleeding hearts who don't realize what they're doing to the bird nation. Our research shows that birds have given up foraging and are becoming increasingly reliant on handouts from homeowners. They're changing their diet from worms and grubs and grass seeds to organic sunflower seeds piled in overly generous amounts in bird feeders at fully a third of American homes. We're even seeing evidence of inter-generational dependence as parent birds pass on to their chicks the habit of relying on handouts from humans."

Looney noted that there was even evidence of environmental degradation as worms and grubs become overpopulated and dropped sunflower seeds litter the landscape. "Not that we give a damn about the environment, though," he said.

The bird-feeding problem even touches the economy, he said, because people are spending exorbitant amounts on gourmet bird seed that has no benefit to the economy. When taxpayers buy seed to feed birds, it's like throwing money down the drain because birds do not participate in economy. "All that money just goes in the beak and out the tail, and all you get is bird poop on your car," Looney said. "Anyone can see that's an economic detriment." If it weren't against the Tea Party's core principle, he said, the party might call for a bird seed tariff to discourage wasteful bird feeding.

The Tea Party called for a program aimed at weaning birds off of seeds left in bird feeders and reteaching them the foraging techniques that used to come natural to birds. "Do we want an America where all the birds are strong and independent, able to take care of themselves, or do we want an America where birds are sitting around on their fat tails chirping for another handout from the welfare state?" Looney concluded.

President always gets blame for economy

2011-08-14T16:18:00.002-04:00

The caller to NPR's "Talk of the Nation" last Thursday was dripping with sarcasm about the man in the White House he referred to as "Barry" or "this administration." The caller said he had decided to cancel a planned expansion of his business because of the economic ineptness of "this administration," which, he said, had never had to meet a payroll or look at a monthly P&L statement. "This administration" had never had a real job, never managed anything, he said.

The president, no matter who he is, gets the blame for a lousy economy or plaudits for a good economy, despite the fact that the president has little control over the economy. Congress controls spending. The Federal Reserve controls the money supply. The president, most often, is left to a role as a cheerleader when the economy needs a boost.

The critical caller got me to thinking, though, about presidents with business experience vs. those without it. In the past 50 years, only a handful of presidents have had meaningful business management experience. Jimmy Carter ran a family peanut warehouse business. George H.W. Bush was in the oil business in Texas. George W. Bush helped manage a baseball team for a while. All three of these men saw the economy turn sour on them and got the blame.

Presidents who had little or no business experience fared better in the economic sweepstakes. Bill Clinton's only occupation has been politics, except for a brief stint practicing law after losing an election; Ronald Reagan was in the acting business, but as an employee, not a decision-making manager; Richard Nixon practiced a little law but mostly practiced politics; ditto for Gerald Ford. Lyndon Johnson claimed to be a gentleman farmer and executive, but his only real interest was politics. All five of these presidents enjoyed better economic results than "this administration" is experiencing today, but their better fortunes could not have been the result of their business management experience.

Economic upswings and downturns are almost never the result of presidential action. They are usually the result of factors beyond a president's control, such as the bursting of the housing bubble and the international debt crisis that plague us today. A president can have some influence over the economy, as Franklin Roosevelt did in his first term by pushing stimulus spending and reassuring the public, or as John F. Kennedy did by proposing a dramatic cut in the maximum tax rates. Even then, however, Congress must act to approve a president's proposals.

Whenever the economy founders, from whatever causes, "this administration" will always get most of the blame.

Historic home will soon be gone

2011-08-12T07:35:00.003-04:00

I may be the only one who thinks so, but I think it's a shame that efforts to save the home of former Wilson Mayor and County Commissioner John Wilson have fallen flat. Preservation of Wilson is handing the property back to United Way, which received the property after Wilson's death. The United Way will almost certainly raze the house to create more parking.

The house on a tiny lot behind the United Way building, 509 W. Nash St., intrudes into the United Way parking lot and is, quite frankly, an eyesore. It was an eyesore the last several years that Wilson lived there because he never made repairs or renovations to the old cottage and allowed the house to nearly fall in around him. He lived there nearly his entire life.

Despite what you might think of Wilson — and most people considered him a slightly loony eccentric — he held political office from the 1950s, as mayor, into the 1980s, as county commissioner. His tenure was not progressive or transformative like the terms of long-time Rocky Mount Mayor Fred Turnage, who died recently. Wilson was a true believer in all manner of conspiracy theories, from European bankers controlling U.S. presidents, to United Nations' secret "black helicopters," to abundances of oil secretly hidden away to drive up prices and so on. You never knew when he might interrupt a board meeting with an off-the-wall observation about international intrigue.

As editor of the local paper during Wilson's final decades, I was often bemused by his wild theories and sometimes challenged him to document accusations he made in letters to the editor. He read articles from fringe publications that claimed all sorts of Nazi/Communist/international banker conspiracies to rule the world. When I told him I doubted the veracity of some of these charges and asked why they never appear in any mainstream publication, Wilson always had a ready answer: "They're afraid to publish the truth." Only the periodicals to which he subscribed had the courage to tell the truth about the Bildeberg gang, the Trilateral Commission, the Swiss bankers, the oil fat cats and so on, he claimed. Still, he was an unceasingly polite and courteous man.

He never seemed to have a job. Once, when asked about his occupation in an election campaign interview, he responded, "Now that's a good question." I assumed he received enough inheritance to live on, but not enough to keep his house repaired. He hoarded those fringe publications, along with other reading material, in stacks all over his house, which he heated with a wood stove fueled by rolled-up newspapers. He drove old cars or rode a bicycle and never passed up a free meal. He was a character we're not likely to see the likes of ever again.

Parents have a responsibility, too

2011-08-11T07:38:00.003-04:00

A letter to the editor in this morning's N&O addresses a seldom-discussed public policy issue: the responsibility of parents to raise their own children. The letter pertains directly to Judge Howard Manning's ruling that the state is obligated to provide preschool for North Carolina's children. Manning's reasoning is that the state constitution requires the state to provide a "sound basic education" for all children, and that, he says, includes preschool that will prepare them for kindergarten.

There's no question that many children arrive at kindergarten woefully unprepared. Ask any elementary school teacher. Over the years, I've repeatedly heard of preschoolers' homes that contain not a single book of any kind. (Of course, there is a television that is on 20-plus hours a day in many cases and feeds a $100 a month cable bill.) Some children arrive at kindergarten having never been read to, having never turned the pages of a book, never learned words by looking at pictures, never pointed at letters and pronounced them, never recognized one-digit numbers or counted. It's tragic and shameful, but is it the state's fault?

The letter writer has a good argument that it's not the state's fault that parents are irresponsible or incompetent. Too many children are born into single-parent homes, and too many mothers are barely out of childhood themselves. Too many do not have good role models as parents, and too many never learned the joys of reading and learning. At least one charitable organization I'm aware of (St. Timothy's Episcopal Church in Wilson is a participant) buys books for children who do not have any in the home, but that's not a total solution to the problem.

It's not the children's fault that their parents are too irresponsible or unprepared to nourish them intellectually and encourage their innate curiosity. Preschool programs can help these children and perhaps turn them away from a pathway toward failure. But it's not the state that set them on a path toward failure in the first place. The problem did not begin in kindergarten or in preschool. It began in the home.

Book spreads blame for economic collapse

2011-08-09T07:23:00.004-04:00

Financial markets are reeling, and it's not just from Standard & Poor's downgrade of U.S. bonds. The wheels are coming off the economic bus all around the globe — national debt crises in Europe, stagnating markets in developing countries, famine in Africa, and the lingering aftermath of the housing crisis in the United States.

The best explanation of how and why our economic foundations began crumbling is found in "Reckless Endangerment" by Gretchen Morgenson and Justin Rosner. The subtitle is "How Outsized Ambition, Greed and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon." The authors trace the beginnings of the 2008 economic meltdown to the 1980s and '90s, then walk the reader through the incompetence and corruption that steadily increased the danger factors until the whole flimsy structure collapsed.

Morgenson and Rosner find plenty of blame to spread around. Greed and ambition play major roles as Fannie Mae, the guarantor and financier of most mortgages, became increasingly politicized and self-serving, cooking the books to maximize executives' bonuses and making political contributions to powerful members of Congress who obediently did Fannie Mae's bidding and ignored the fiscal hazards. Almost all members of Congress ignored the warning signs of endangerment and corruption and blindly supported Fannie Mae and its cousin Freddie Mac as they made increasingly risky investments and put the national mortgage structure in danger.

Every political sector can find a villain in this book. For conservatives, it is the hell-bent determination to increase home-ownership rates during the Clinton administration. Riskier mortgage-writing rules began with the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, which required banks to pro-actively seek out mortgages in poorer neighborhoods and to lend to poorer borrowers. Those mortgages carried greater risk, but Congress and federal regulators ignored these risks for the "greater good" of turning lower-income renters into homeowners. But these riskier borrowers in the emerging "sub-prime" market ended up as the worst-hurt when the financial markets collapsed and mortgages went underwater. No-interest loans, no-documentation mortgages and "liar loans" became parts of the banking landscape.

Liberals can point to the slack regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as federal agencies ignored the higher risks these mortgage giants were taking. They can also point to the changes in bank regulation, eliminating Depression-era reforms that limited banks' services and the riskiness of their investments. In the post-Reagan anti-regulation climate, banks got a blank check to delve into all kinds of riskier investments. Among those investments were bundled mortgages put together by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, commercial banks and others that could be sold to investors like municipal bonds. But the sub-prime mortgages hidden in these derivatives wound up dragging down the whole package and leading to global economic collapse. Ratings agencies, such as Standard & Poor's, also share the blame because they ignored the riskiness of these bundled mortgages, awarding them AAA status when they were really junk bonds. Powerful politicians who sold their principles to bankers and others in exchange for political contributions also are responsible for the financial morass.

"Reckless Endangerment" is a sobering look at how ineffective and even corrupt our political and regulatory systems are. Even now, Congress concentrates on political gotcha battles over the debt ceiling or gay rights instead of addressing the systemic problems that are destroying our democratic process. If every American could be required to read "Reckless Endangerment," Washington might be forced to reform.

Wow! We avoided default!

2011-08-03T07:37:00.004-04:00

OK, so we beat the debt ceiling deadline by a few hours and will cut spending by more than $900 billion over the next decade. Problem solved? Not at all.

The debt ceiling agreement, which President Obama signed Tuesday, calls for a 12-member commission to cut another $1.2 trillion from the next decade's deficits. But here's the problem. Our annual deficit right now is more than $1 trillion. Cutting a trillion over 10 years amounts to cutting one tenth of the deficit each year. That's the equivalent of paying the minimum payment on a credit card that you've just used to buy a $10,000 vacation. You'll never pay it off!

The commission, to be composed of an equal number of Democrats and Republicans, will have to tackle some spending that no one wants to touch — Social Security, Medicare, federal pensions (including military), defense spending, ethanol subsidies, farm subsidies, federal salaries and other big, popular programs — and it will have to address revenues. There is no way the United States is going to dig its way out of the hole it's in with spending cuts alone. We could eliminate the Defense Department or decimate Social Security and still not have a balanced budget. Increasing revenues will be a necessity, and the Tea Party conservatives have to realize that, regardless of how many "no new taxes" pledges they might have signed.

Revenues can be raised with minimal impact on the middle class. Tax reforms, eliminating some wasteful business deductions and expanding the tax base can generate some additional revenue. Increasing the tax rate for the highest earners can also be done without touching 95 percent of all earners. The home mortgage deduction can be modified so that it doesn't apply to vacation homes or to $1 million mansions.

Perhaps the biggest challenges will be Social Security and Medicare. These popular programs have strong lobbying support, but you cannot effectively reduce the deficit without addressing the programs that consume more than half the budget. These issues should have been addressed 20 years ago; each passing year makes resolution more difficult. Whether the solution is higher payroll taxes, higher full-retirement age, adjustments to cost-of-living increases or some combination, the issue will have to be faced.

Washington's goal should be to eliminate the budget deficit. That won't be done by a couple of trillion dollars in cuts over a decade, and it won't be done without increasing revenues. Rep. Paul Ryan's austere budget proposal does not eliminate the deficit, nor do any of the other plans currently being discussed. A balanced budget amendment will not achieve that goal without monstrous cuts in spending or large tax increases. But unless the goal of eliminating the deficit is addressed, the current $14.3 trillion federal debt will keep on growing.

Jihadists of the right in Congress

2011-07-29T07:38:00.004-04:00

Osama bin Laden always said he wanted to destroy America's economy (presumably to set it back to the seventh century, when Islam began). While he never achieved that goal in his lifetime, he'd probably take some pride in the work of the Tea Party conservatives in Congress. These yahoos are so determined to make their point about government spending that they're willing to risk economic catastrophe for the federal government, state and local government, domestic and foreign investors, car makers, home buyers and ordinary consumers. Enough of them are willing to allow a historic government default on its debt that they are rejecting not only the Democrats' proposals to raise the national debt ceiling but even their own party leadership's plans.

Call them "enablers" of al-Qaida or "fellow travelers" or whatever the operative phrase is in this post-Cold War world. They are making themselves the jihadists of the right wing. They can destroy the American economy without blowing up any skyscrapers or hijacking any airplanes, but their impact on the economy could be worse than anything that happened 10 years ago on 9/11. They even share some traits with the Islamic terrorists who wish to destroy us economically or any way they can — zealotry for their cause, unwillingness to compromise, contempt for their opponents and blind allegiance to their vision for the world.

The American military finally got bin Laden, who had threatened to destroy America. Now this country faces destruction from another group vowing to "save" America by pushing it off an economic cliff.

'Why now?' is the question at Chapel Hill

2011-07-28T07:28:00.003-04:00

The question I have about UNC's firing of head football coach Butch Davis is not "Why?" but "Why now?" Chancellor Holden Thorp said there was nothing new in the year-long NCAA investigation of the football program, just cumulative damage to UNC's reputation as a quality educational institution that plays by the rules. So he chose to fire Davis a week before football practice begins.

Why now? Although Davis asserted his innocence in a written statement issued after his surprise dismissal, UNC had grounds to fire the coach a year ago. That was when it was revealed that assistant coach John Blake, whom Davis had hired and supervised, was acting as an agent in an unseemly scheme to connect UNC players with a sports agent friend of Blake. The bad situation unraveled from there. The NCAA investigation happened upon academic problems with a tutor hired by the university, and about a dozen players were withheld from one or more games. A couple of players' actions were so egregious that they were banned from college football. One player's lawsuit against the NCAA led to the revelation that he had heavily plagiarized a term paper, and the student Honor Court had failed to discover the obvious violations. You can complain with some justification that NCAA rules are too picky and its disciplinary actions too inconsistent, but the activities revealed by the NCAA probe and news media investigations have been embarrassing to the university. That cumulative embarrassment apparently is what led Thorp to fire Davis.

But in the weeks and months leading up to Wednesday's announcement, Thorp and athletics director Dick Baddour had repeatedly vouched for Davis, missing every opportunity to hang the responsibility around the coach's neck. By reversing himself days before practice begins, Thorp has not only shown himself to be inconsistent, but he has badly damaged UNC's ability to field a competitive team. And if Davis is responsible, so is Baddour, who selected Davis and started UNC on this path of embarrassing surprises.

The football scandal at UNC goes back further that Wednesday's announcement or last year's NCAA probe. The university's decision to hire a big-name coach with Football U. and NFL experience paved the way for the embarrassment UNC is trying to purge now. Under Davis, venerable Kenan Stadium has lost its iconic and charming tile-roofed field house to be replaced by fancy wrap-around lounges for well-heeled donors. Die-hard fans had hoped Davis would bring top-five national rankings, even a championship, to Chapel Hill, but that hasn't happened. Davis has brought a megalomaniacal super stadium, some talented teams and exciting games. But his four years as head coach will be remembered mostly for the embarrassment of the NCAA and academic investigations.

Coming next week: financial cataclysm

2011-07-27T07:24:00.004-04:00

Six days from a fiscal cataclysm, Speaker of the House John Boehner can't keep enough of his GOP colleagues in the fold to pass his own legislation to raise the debt ceiling. Over on the Senate side, Majority Leader Harry Reid has thrown in the towel and is offering a half-hearted bill to raise the debt ceiling in return for some ephemeral spending cuts and no increases in revenue.

I watched President Obama's and Boehner's Monday night addresses — Boehner's live and Obama's via the Internet — and thought Obama came across more genuinely. Boehner made his political points but wasn't entirely honest in talking about a "bipartisan" House proposal and accusing Obama of wanting a "blank check." Boehner probably fired up the right wing while Obama was seeking a broader appeal, and he likely succeeded. His call for compromise was one most Americans would welcome, and although he couldn't resist parroting the Democrats' catch phrase about the rich paying their "fair share" of taxes, Obama's overall point was well taken. Obama was on much sounder ground and more persuasive in arguing that all Americans should share in the sacrifices necessary to get our fiscal house in order — the wealthy should feel the pain just as much as the poor who lose federal services or the middle class who pay more for college loans.

If this impasse continues and we get to next Wednesday with no debt ceiling bill in place, we will all regret it. America's credit rating will fall, and interest rates will rise. Our payments on the national debt will rise, and that will create even more federal debt or dismembering cuts to federal spending, including Social Security. Interest rates on mortgages and consumer loans will also rise, and that will throw us back into a deeper recession as home sales and car sales collapse. Business loans will be more expensive, and that will curtail jobs. The dollar will fall, and that will mean higher prices.

To the freshman Republicans who have vowed not to raise the debt ceiling, no matter what, and have fought any inclination Boehner might have to compromise, I can only ask: Are you happy yet? If all of this transpires, Democrats will be able to run in 2012 under the slogan "We're not crazy!" Of course, remembering Democratic congressmen Weiner and Wu, Republicans can counter with "We're not perverts (or at least haven't been caught at it)."

The end of the shuttle era

2011-07-21T07:33:00.003-04:00

The shuttle has landed for the last time. What now? And what of 30 years of shuttle flights?

The space shuttle was an engineering marvel for its time, but one has to wonder in retrospect whether its purpose, its reason for being, was ever thoroughly thought through. The shuttle was touted as a "space truck," an orbiting vehicle that would make manned space flight affordable, reliable and frequent. On all three of those criteria, the shuttle flopped. It turned out to be many times more costly than NASA had imagined; it was plagued by glitches and fatal flaws; and it was never able to come close to the optimistic turn-around time NASA had promised. Instead of multiple launches per month, the best the shuttle could do was a launch every few months.

The bigger problem with the shuttle was its purpose. If it was intended only for placing satellites in low earth orbit, it was an expensive and dangerous waste. Traditional rockets could do that job, as they had for decades, much more cheaply. The shuttle made sense only as a service vehicle for the International Space Station. Over its 30 years, the shuttle made multiple trips to the space station to haul up components and astronauts to live there. Space walks were necessary to put all the parts of the ISS together, and NASA solved the many engineering problems involved in zero-gravity construction work. The space station still orbits, but the shuttle will no longer service it.

The space station has been the focus of U.S. space flight throughout the shuttle era. While much scientific research has been conducted there, it has not advanced space exploration. Arguably, the Hubble Telescope (sent into orbit and repaired by shuttle crews) has done more for scientific knowledge than the space station.

Now NASA is at a turning point: What do we do now? If we aim for a return to the moon or a far more ambitious trip to Mars, the space station is of no help. Maintaining the ISS will be a costly burden that will deplete funds that could go to the next interplanetary exploration. Imagine where NASA might be if Congress had shot down the space station proposal and directed all of that money toward a Mars mission or permanent moon base.

With Congress' focus on the national debt and annual budget deficit, NASA will hard pressed to find the federal funding needed for any long-range, ambitious projects. Even keeping the hulking ISS in orbit might be more than a tighter federal budget can support.

Ethical scandals hurt journalism

2011-07-18T07:10:00.003-04:00

The fallout from the News of the World phone-hacking scandal is still falling out. Top news executives in Britain and the United States have resigned, along with the commander of Scotland Yard, and at least one News Corp. executive has been arrested.

It's a sad commentary on the state of journalism, but subterfuge is not unknown in the news business. More than a decade ago, the Cincinnati Inquirer faced a phone-hacking scandal of its own, along with a multi-million libel suit brought by Chiquita, the target of an extensive investigation by the newspaper. Even the beatified Woodward and Bernstein stepped over the line in their Watergate investigation. In "All the President's Men," they tell of finding the names of grand jury members in a courthouse filing cabinet and attempting to contact the grand jury members — an absolute no-no in the criminal justice system. The judge read them the riot act, and Woodward and Bernstein went on to look elsewhere for their next scoop.

With newspapers struggling to just survive today, the ethical issues that were all the rage 25 years ago have faded as topics of discussion at news association gatherings. In the 1980s, newspapers were adopting strict ethics codes as a means of garnering public confidence. Some codes were so restrictive that a reporter risked being fired if she accepted a flower or a soft drink from a news source. When I was a newspaper editor, I tried to focus on the bigger issues — identify yourself as a newspaper reporter, tell the truth, don't reveal confidential information, double-check any controversial statements, be accurate, don't embellish the facts you're given, attribute all information to its source, don't give even the appearance of prejudice.

In the post-Watergate era, "investigative reporting" had a brief heyday. Some news organizations resorted to hidden cameras, disguises and false identities to pursue a story. Remember the ABC News report about repackaging outdated meat at Food Lion? I was never comfortable with the tactic of having a reporter hired as a supermarket employee and luring other employees into potentially damaging comments recorded on a hidden camera.

But these abuses of journalistic principles (and not everyone would consider them abuses) pale in comparison to tapping the cell phones or voice mail of news subjects. The News of the World apparently tapped the voice mail of murder victims and government officials. Whatever "scoops" the now-closed newspaper gained could not have been worth the cost in ethical lapses and public shame. The damage this episode has done to journalism as a whole is an even greater worry.

I've always held that journalists have a solemn obligation to live up to the protections of the First Amendment and to defend democracy by providing accurate, objective information about the workings of government. Unfortunately, many news consumers and some news executives have shamelessly measured news by its titillating gossip and shock value — aspects the Founding Fathers would not have cared to defend with a constitutional amendment.

Debt limit cannot be ignored

2011-07-14T07:30:00.003-04:00

Some members of Congress, including presidential candidates Michelle Bachmann and Ron Paul, say defaulting on the nation's debt ain't no big thing. They're not worried about the federal debt limit, and they're not going to vote to raise it, no matter what. By some accounts, a few dozen U.S. House members are in this group.

They can't possibly be serious! Even if, as they claim, the Treasury would have enough money coming in from taxes to make payments on the federal debt and meet a few other obligations, the ramifications of even a near-default would be enormous. America would lose its prime credit rating, meaning fewer people around the world would invest in U.S. securities, and America would have to pay more for any borrowing it did well into in the future. Consumers would see their borrowing costs escalate. Housing, already in a giant hole, would sink into the abyss. Auto sales would collapse as car loan rates would jump from near-zero interest into double digits. Businesses would have to pay more for their routine borrowing for expansions or operating capital. More jobs would be eliminated to compensate for higher interest costs.

The costs of imports would soar as the dollar falls in value. Consumers would be paying more for nearly everything and would pay more interest on every penny they borrowed. Houses might be the exception. Already faltering housing prices might collapse if potential buyers are faced with mortgage interest rates of 15 percent or more. And the government would have to pay more in interest on the $14 trillion in debt it already has incurred.

The disdainers of the debt limit crisis and other Republicans who complain that higher taxes (on anybody) would hurt the economy will get a look at what soaring borrowing costs will do to an economy. A four- or five-fold increase in borrowing costs would hurt most businesses and do more damage to the economy than the relatively small tax changes the Obama administration has proposed.

Along with all these very tangible impacts of defaulting on the national debt would come another embarrassment: The United States would find itself in the dustbin of once-proud failed nations, lumped with Greece, Zimbabwe, the Weimar Republic and others. "Solid as a dollar" would be a joke.

Remembering Betty Ford and the 1970s

2011-07-13T07:31:00.005-04:00

I watched a few minutes of Betty Ford's funeral last night, a delayed broadcast on C-Span, and was reminded of my only partly facetious proposal in a column several years ago that someone launch a Funeral Channel, which would televise celebrity funerals along with archival video of funerals past. I still think it's a concept that seems macabre at first glance but would probably succeed.

Betty Ford's funeral proves my point. There on the front pew were Rosalynn Carter, Michelle Obama, George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton and Nancy Reagan. If Mitch McConnel and Harry Reid had attended the funeral, we might have a debt limit increase by now. Such are the good feelings generated by shared mourning.

I was transfixed by Rosalynn Carter's eulogy, which was obviously sincere and leavened with deep affection. Beyond her hard Georgia accent, Carter poignantly described her relationship with Ford and their mutual respect and love for each other. Carter obviously admired Ford's achievements but also admired her priorities, her support for her husband and her love of her children. It was one of the most moving eulogies I've ever heard. Later, journalist Cokie Roberts delivered an unscripted talk about the demands of being in a political family and the loss of camaraderie that used to be common when her father, Hale Boggs, and Betty's husband were opposing party leaders in the U.S. House. They were also close friends. Betty was appalled by the venom and the insults that have become part of political dialogue, she said and urged the politicians in the room to re-examine their tactics.

It's easy to forget the Ford presidency, which lasted only a couple of years. In one sense it was a minor footnote to history, but in another, it was a great achievement. After six years of the paranoid, conniving, suspicious, insecure Richard Nixon, good ol' Jerry Ford was such a breath of fresh air! The Washington Post (I was a subscriber at the time) published a front-page picture of the bathrobe-wearing new president retrieving the morning paper on his front porch. Before Congress, he proclaimed himself to be "a Ford, not a Lincoln," and the country found a comfort that had been impossible with Nixon. Ford was probably not a great intellectual or a creative thinker or "policy wonk." Lyndon Johnson dismissed him as having "played football without a helmet." He was an amiable politician, the kind of guy you vote for because you like him, and he had a very successful career, even if you don't count his appointment to vice president or his presidency.

Betty Ford's outspoken candor and honesty contributed to the aura of her husband's presidency. Like her husband, she had no pretensions. She didn't mind speaking her mind, and she was brave enough to expose her own vulnerabilities. Her death at age 93 reminds us of the good times in the 1970s when problems seemed huge but are forgotten today.

The Funeral Channel could provide that comforting nostalgia.

My second-floor bedroom fitness plan

2011-07-12T07:36:00.004-04:00

When my wife and I were house-hunting eight years ago, hoping to take advantage of absurdly low interest rates, we had several criteria: a two-story house with a master suite downstairs, a screened porch and a brick exterior. We got none of those, but we love our house and wouldn't dream of moving.

In the years since, I've had time to ponder whether the second-floor master bedroom might force me into a different home in the coming years or whether the several-times-a-day climbing of the stairs might provide the exercise and flexibility I will need as my muscles and joints age. I go up and down the stairs a half-dozen times on most days. When I'm home all day, that number doubles or triples, depending on what I'm doing. Most days I'm in enough of a hurry to run up the stairs and skip down the stairs. So far, so good.

The agent who first showed us this house told us that there were plans available to add a master bedroom on the ground floor on the far side of the sunroom. If money were more plentiful, we might consider such an addition, but money is not going to be plentiful, so we have to settle for what we have. If my mobility falters, I will simply have to gut it out and climb the stairs like a toddler or convert the sunroom into a sickroom.

But I'm counting on the daily climb up the stairs to maintain my leg strength, core muscles and flexibility. Casual observations suggest to me that people who give in too easily to their aches and pains are the ones who develop early mobility problems. So it's up the stairs for me, with as much velocity as I can muster, but I promise to keep my hand on the rail going down so I don't lose my balance and topple head over heels to the bottom.

Redistricting ridiculousness

2011-07-11T07:30:00.003-04:00

The silliness of modern, computer-age redistricting battles is pointed out in an article in today's News & Observer. The ridiculous convolutions of new congressional districts are illustrated in the article: One person in Sampson County is in the Third District while everyone else is in the Second District; three residents of Wendell are the 13th District while all of the other 5,842 town residents are in the First District.

The slicing and dicing of electoral districts are a product of the computer age (mere humans would find such distinctions difficult to carve) and a Supreme Court decision that requires "zero deviation" from the standard derived by dividing the total state population by the number of congressional districts. This year, that number is 733,499. Seven of the 13 proposed districts hit that number exactly (the N&O article has a typo in the next paragraph in referring to five other districts that are one person short). Computers make such preciseness possible, but there are a couple of fallacies here.

1. The population totals (and the 733,499 figure) are based on the 2010 census, which was taken a year ago. Think no one moved during that time? Think no one died? Think no one was born? An instantaneous census is not possible, so redistricting is always going to be based on outdated data.

2. When these new districts are approved, they will be in effect for 10 years (unless court challenges change them). Do you think the population will remain fixed for 10 years? Dream on. Congressional districts are inherently unequal because regions of the state do not grow (or shrink) at equal rates. As soon as districts are implemented, they are unequal. The Constitution demands equal representation, but equal representation based on decennial censuses is a myth.

Congress, state legislatures and the courts should aim for something less than perfect, knowing that perfection is impossible. Districts should be approximately equal, say within 2 to 5 percent, an acceptable deviation knowing that census data is already outdated. Districts should also be contiguous, compact and cohesive and should follow natural or political-interest boundaries.

The districts proposed by Republican legislators who now control the General Assembly fail to meet a compact, cohesive standard, just as the maps drawn 10 years ago by Democratic legislators failed. They sprawl all over the map, trying to achieve political advantage. The anomalies the N&O points out today merely emphasize the silliness of this exercise.

Seize opportunity to cut deficit

2011-07-07T20:43:00.003-04:00

In about three weeks, the United States of America might default on its debts. Think about that! The richest country in the world, the paragon of democratic governments, could become a deadbeat.

The problem is not that America cannot come up with the money to pay its obligations. Its credit is good, even though it has made a habit of spending more than it takes in. This problem is more political than fiscal. Congress must approve an increase in the debt limit in order for the Treasury to come up with the money to pay the bills on time.

Republicans in Congress, particularly those who were elected last year on pledges to never, ever, under any circumstances raise taxes, don't want to increase the debt limit. They think America should live within its means. Good sentiments, but America cannot fight wars all around the globe, pay the promised benefits to Social Security and Medicare recipients, fight terrorism at home and abroad, respond to catastrophic natural disasters, maintain a space program, keep up interstate highways, pay the interest on debts already incurred, provide nourishment for the poor and all the rest without either raising taxes or borrowing money. If raising taxes — and many in Congress and the political action groups that do their thinking for them — say any increase in revenue, even if it comes from closing tax loopholes and ending unjust preferences in the tax code, is a tax increase. And any tax increase in any form is off the table.

New York Times columnist David Brooks (one of the most thoughtful and sensible columnists I've read) decries the no-tax ideology of the Republican right wing. If Republicans are unwilling to compromise, if they are unwilling to snatch the deal of a lifetime when it's being handed to them, they are no longer a political party; they are a medieval college of cardinals burning at the stake people who say the earth is round and revolves around the sun.

America's $14 trillion in debt is a real problem. Our $1 trillion-plus budget deficit is shameful. But the answer is not to force the government to implode into anarchy. President Obama is offering to go along with $4 trillion in spending cuts if Congress will agree to less than $1 trillion in revenue increases, mostly from tax reforms and closing loopholes. It's a heckuva deal for Republicans; it represents significant cuts in federal spending. All they have to do is agree to comparatively minor and relatively painless revenue increases.

I think the American people might go along with even harsher measures. Rep. Paul Ryan's highly touted deficit reduction plan, which has become an icon of the Republican Party (it raises no taxes), would not eliminate the budget deficit. The Bowles-Simpson deficit reduction commission did a better long-term job of reducing the deficit but still didn't put the federal government back in the black.

No politician seems prepared to boldly make the elimination of the deficit and the paying off of the federal debt a national priority. This could be done by returning to tax rates in effect before the 2002 Bush tax cuts and reducing federal spending in a deliberate and rational way. Remember that those 2001 tax rates already had been reduced from peak rates of the 1950s by Kennedy's and Reagan's income tax cuts. Who will stand before the public and pledge, "Before this decade is out, we shall pay off the federal debt"?

Ernest Hemingway, 50 years later

2011-07-06T07:28:00.003-04:00

Maybe this 50th anniversary of Ernest Hemingway's suicide would be a good time for me to get back to reading the author I most admired as a teenager and young adult. I had veered away from my youthful fascination with Hemingway, the hard-driving, macho writer who could turn the simplest of sentences into lines of beauty. Far more than his illustrious contemporaries, I thought Hemingway's work was the epitome of good writing, and I devoured all of his major novels and particularly loved his memoir of Paris, "A Moveable Feast."

Only after I received a hardback copy of the memoir to replace my dog-eared paperback, did I re-read the book once more and find it wanting. The story of Ernest and Hadley and baby "Bumby" and F. Puss the cat, which had seemed so alluring the first time around, now seemed a bit juvenile and self-indulgent.

Nevertheless, Hemingway's terse, simple prose style has had a greater influence than any other author's on my own writing style. Hemingway honed his writing as a newspaper reporter, and I pursued a newspaper career with that thought in mind. I frequently advised young writers with Hemingway's maxim: "Write one true sentence" and then another and another.

Hemingway biographer A.E. Hotchner reminded me this week of Hemingway's untimely death (at my current age) and brought back my admiration and wonder of this man who, in his day, was even bigger than his fictional characters. I faintly remember the television news announcement of Hemingway's death, initially reported as an accidental shooting. At the time, I had never read any of his work. A few years later, a television viewing of the movie "A Farewell to Arms" turned me to the novel, and I was hooked.

I've not read much of Hemingway's short stories, and a volume on my bookshelf of his short fiction is now luring me. It's an appropriate way to remember him on this 50th anniversary of his death.

Court keeps expanding First Amendment

2011-06-29T07:33:00.004-04:00

I spent three decades defending the First Amendment and exercising the press freedom that it guarantees. At times, however, I have to doubt the reasoning that extends First Amendment protections to practices I consider unrelated to the authors' definition of free speech.

The Supreme Court this week found in the First Amendment's language a prohibition against any state limiting the sale of violent video games to minors. Any such prohibition, the court majority said, inhibits free speech protected by the First Amendment. Having read press accounts of the decision, I cannot understand whose First Amendment rights are being inhibited. Is it the right of minors to expose their young minds to destructive violence or is it the right of game makers to sell its deleterious products? If the former, I question whether First Amendment protections are meant for minor children (would the court protect an adolescent's "mooning" of his parents or teachers or shouting "you suck!" over a bullhorn?). If it's the right of game makers, I question whether the First Amendment was ever intended to protect that kind of speech.

Andrew Cohen wrote an interesting explication of this week's two First Amendment cases for the Atlantic.

The video games case divided the court in an interesting way. The ruling left liberal Stephen Breyer and conservative Clarence Thomas in the minority with conservative Antonin Scalia (usually Thomas' philosophical mentor) defending the "liberal" position of free access for children to violent games. The California law the court shot down (excuse the violent metaphor) only required that children have a parent's permission to buy a "mature" rated video game. If parents have any role in child development (and that might be an open question these days), a state should be able to reinforce that role by statute. Extending full constitutional protection to the whims of immature children will inevitably lead to conflicts with parents who believe their role is to help mold children into mature, responsible, caring adults.

If the argument is that video game makers have a right to express their "art" in any way they see fit (including the murder of innocent "virtual" bystanders), the California law did not inhibit their ability to create their "art." It did not prohibit the use of violent video games by children. It only prohibited the purchase of these games without a parent's permission. Taken to its logical conclusion, the court could find that distillers should be allowed the freedom to sell their "artistic expressions" to 6-year-olds. Although the Constitution does not expressly mention it, there are and should be rights of parents to discipline and nurture their own children.

Eulogy for 'The Sweetest Dog'

2011-06-28T07:27:00.004-04:00

In 40 years of marriage, my wife and I had a dog for about seven and a half years. You wouldn't think four paws would have such an impact on us. But this morning, after I had dug a grave in the dark last night and had laid our sweet Little Bear into the earth, our house echoes with emptiness. Throughout my interrupted sleep, I kept expecting to hear her shuffling about on the floor beside our bed, scratching for a comfortable spot. This morning, as I went to the shower, I did not have to step around her. As I went downstairs, it was only my two feet I heard on the steps. There was no reason to open the back door, no need to step aside so that a blur of fur could rush outside, but I walked out the back door anyway, walked over to the mound of earth I had piled atop her body and felt an immeasurable loss.

When I arrived home last night, my wife had just taken Little Bear for a walk, which always delighted our dog. An hour or so later, Bear was wandering around outside instead of curling up near us inside — very strange behavior for this dog. We looked closer and realized she was panting heavily and was unsteady on her feet. She was weak and dazed. I lay down beside Bear on the floor and told my wife, "I think she's dying." We rushed her to the emergency vet, who immediately diagnosed abdominal bloating caused by stomach torquing. Emergency surgery might save her, but she was unlikely to survive the surgery. We opted to relieve her pain and tearfully say goodbye.

My wife and I have a habit of sitting on the deck on evenings when it's neither too hot nor too cool and watching the sun dip below the trees and then fully disappear into darkness. Because Bear had always been our quiet, contented companion on those evenings, I don't know whether we will be able to enjoy sitting on the deck in the evening again.

We buried her within sight of the deck, where we can look out at her resting place and think of her as keeping us company, quietly uncomplaining, "the sweetest dog."

The literature of celebrity and politics

2011-06-26T17:21:00.003-04:00

I've come to the realization that both Bristol Palin and her ex-boyfriend, Levi Johnston, have books coming out. Thousands of writers are out of work, but these two teenagers can get their memoirs published by major publishing houses? I fear that both books might end up on the bestseller list. Just the fact that I can use their names without having to explain who they are is a sad commentary on our melding of politics and celebrity — and how "celebrity" has somehow become its own occupational category.

Bristol is the daughter of a former Alaska governor who quit in mid-term after an unsuccessful bid for the vice presidency. Johnston is the teenage boyfriend who appeared in the audience at his girlfriend's mother's speeches, looking uncomfortable and out-of-place. Bristol was a pregnant teenager when her mother ran for vice president three years ago, but she's likely the only teen mom who has made a career out of making an embarrassing mistake. Not only is she paid for being a spokesperson for an abstinence-advocacy group, she even appeared on the "Dancing with the Stars" television show. (I didn't watch it; was she the star or the dancer-in-training?)

Palin's book reportedly implies that she was the victim of a sexual assault by Johnston. In his book, Johnston is reported to be highly critical of the whole Palin family. When has a she-said/he-said dispute ever achieved such literary success?

For that matter, when has a losing vice presidential nominee ever become the entrepreneurial commodity that Sarah Palin has, with her own gig on Fox News, a couple of books, a successful speechmaking business, a national bus tour and I'm afraid to imagine what else? Henry Cabot Lodge (1960), Bill Miller (1964), Ed Muskie (1968), Tom Eagleton (1972), Bob Dole (1976), Geraldine Ferraro (1984), Lloyd Bentsen (1988), Jack Kemp (1996), and Joe Lieberman (2000) were rarely heard from after their party ticket lost the election. OK, John Edwards (2004) did achieve a bit of notoriety after the election, but not in a good way. Palin has joined that uniquely American job category, the celebrity who is famous for being famous, and now it appears her celebrity is transferable to her offspring and even to her antagonists.

America has developed a history over the past century of idolizing its past presidents, giving them fat pensions, Secret Service protection and presidential libraries. Some have earned excellent salaries (on top of their pensions) just by making speeches. As a nation, we have come a long way since the days of John Quincy Adams, who won a seat in the House of Representatives after leaving the White House, and Thomas Jefferson, who reportedly stood in line for lunch at a boarding house after his inauguration.

After the veto override, teachers keep jobs

2011-06-21T13:43:00.005-04:00

Governor Perdue vetoed the Republican legislature's budget, saying the budget made too many cuts in education funding. The legislature, along mostly partisan lines (with five Democrats in the House siding with the majority), voted to override the veto.

Then a strange thing happened: School superintendents in Wilson, Raleigh and Charlotte announced that they would have enough funding from the sharply constrained state budget to retain all current teaching positions. No layoffs for teachers. Despite dire warnings that the Republican-written budget would result in massive teacher layoffs and a resultant decline in educational quality throughout the state, it looks like most school systems will survive with their teaching positions intact. Some support positions, even some "central office" positions, will be eliminated; after all, even Perdue's budget contained severe cuts in education funding. But massive layoffs of teachers statewide? It doesn't look like that will happen.

That's not to say that there aren't severe -- and questionable -- cuts in state funding. Mental health services will suffer. Prisons will be without peacekeeping chaplains. Many teacher aide positions will disappear (although there will be money to reduce class size in kindergarten and first grade -- a tradeoff whose wisdom I question). In what seems to me might be the worst for the long-term health of public schools, legislators decided to eliminate the Teaching Fellows scholarship program. For 25 years, this innovative program has provided four-year scholarships to students willing to teach in public schools for a minimum of four years. Teaching Fellows targeted academically superior students and provided enrichment opportunities in an effort to improve the quality of the state's teachers, and it is teacher quality, more than any other factor, that improves student performance. (Full disclosure: My younger daughter was a Teaching Fellow and was an exceptionally good math teacher in three different school systems, more than fulfilling her obligation to the state, before resigning to raise her children.) If the Republicans running the General Assembly are going to reduce class size, thereby increasing the number of teachers, they'll need a Teaching Fellows program to attract students into the ranks of teaching.

For legislators (and others) who want to know what's wrong with public education, I recommend this article from The Atlantic. Although many of the problems cited are confined to New York City Schools and other heavily unionized systems, the interests of the entrenched bureaucracy and the "us first" attitude of the teacher unions (the North Carolina Association of Educators is an affiliate of the National Education Association) also apply to North Carolina.

Goodbye to a 50-year-old glove

2011-06-17T07:45:00.003-04:00

I buried my old baseball glove yesterday, not in some sacred spot under home plate or beneath the dugout but in the kitchen trash. After 50 years, it was time to let it go, so I dumped it unceremoniously and without remorse. I no longer have any use for this artifact of my youth.

I've been trying to remember if I had another baseball glove before that one, and I suppose I must have, but it is not memorable, perhaps a hand-me-down from one of my older brothers or a cheap faux-leather toy, not a tool in the sports equipment bag like the glove I got when I was 10 or 12 years old.

As best I remember, it came as a Christmas present, in the dead of winter far removed from hot summer days of baseball season. It was by far the best sports equipment I'd ever claimed as my own, though its now-forgotten generic brand name fell far shy of my brother's professional-level Rawlings glove made of leather as soft as a pillow and fingers as long as my foot. I can still remember that my brother's glove cost an astounding $18, about a day's wages for either of my parents at the time. My glove must have cost about half that or less.

The glove got plenty of use in those ephemeral days when every boy in my class would bring his baseball glove to school, and we'd choose sides and play ball at morning recess and afternoon recess (yes, twice a day). I also used it in the organized play of church-league games and in the back yard as my athletic brother tried in vain to salvage me from my klutziness. My glove stood out on the playground because it was black, as black as a man's dress shoes — a color almost unheard of in baseball gloves then — and in those clearly not-politically correct days, I took some ribbing about the racial origins of my baseball glove. I oiled it and flexed it and wrapped it tightly around a baseball to improve its shape. On the left hand of a better athlete, I'm sure it would have been more than adequate for a teenager in the early 1960s, but in my hands it never made it to a high school or American Legion baseball game.

Years later, after I was grown and married, I rescued the glove from a coating of mildew it had developed in a cabinet on my parents' back porch, where it had lain unseen for years. I have a photo of me wearing that glove as I played a game of catch with my son in the back yard of my childhood home. My son was learning to use his first baseball glove more than two decades ago.

I can toss out the old black glove now without regrets. Not one of my five grandsons has shown any interest in baseball, and the game is not the ubiquitous glue that, 50 years ago, taught young boys coordination, athleticism, camaraderie, teamwork and orderliness. It's an artifact as ancient and useless today as the flat, inflexible baseball glove that I remember from early childhood. That glove must have belonged to my dad or one of his brothers. It looked like the fat, awkward glove that Babe Ruth had used in the dark, mythical past. That old glove, which must have been tossed out with the trash when I was my grandsons' age, was not as old then as the black glove I just threw in the trash.

You can't manufacture in South Carolina?

2011-06-15T07:28:00.003-04:00

The dispute between airplane maker Boeing and the Machinists union could be the labor fight of the decade. Boeing has built a new assembly plant in North Charleston, S.C., a testament to the resilience of the Charleston area, which had its signature U.S. Navy shipyard yanked away by base realignment. Charleston lost thousands of jobs when the Navy pulled out, and landing Boeing's highly sought-after 787 Dreamliner factory promised a new era in the South Carolina Lowcountry.

But Machinists in Washington state complained that the new assembly plant was a violation of federal labor law and appealed to the National Labor Relations Board, which found that building a new factory in a non-union state violates labor law. Who would've thought it? That decision is now on appeal and will likely end up in federal court. This fight comes after Democrats gave up their plans to acquiesce to labor's demands for "card check" unionization, which would eliminate secret ballot elections for unionizing. Democrats never brought the issue to a vote, even when they had strong majorities in Congress after the 2008 elections.

Boeing apparently made no secret of the fact that it wanted to build a new assembly plant in a location that would not be subject to labor unrest. Machinists had gone on strike four times from 1989 to 2008. A Boeing official said the company could not afford to stop production every three years. Charleston was just one of several locations, including Kinston, N.C., that Boeing considered.

If labor law prohibits a company from building new factories, that has to come as a surprise to most people. The steel industry, automobile manufacturing, textiles and other manufacturing moved production from heavily unionized northern cities to "right to work" states throughout much of the 20th century. In the latter part of that century, companies moved manufacturing from the South to even lower-wage factories in foreign countries. Reducing costs is a motivating factor in any competitive environment.

Apparently it is not wages that motivated Boeing's move but production consistency. When you're selling multi-million-dollar aircraft, a strike every few years is extremely expensive, and Airbus, the European consortium, is all too eager to make up for Boeing's production delays. The Charleston facility, which is already built, would supplement Boeing's Washington plant. No union members in Washington have lost their jobs, nor have wages been cut. All that Boeing has done is ensure the continuation of its production schedule. The NLRB has found that to be a violation of federal law. If the courts finds that to be illegal, manufacturing in this country is truly endangered.

Was that a debate or a display?

2011-06-14T07:33:00.005-04:00

I turned on the TV for the first time in a couple of weeks last night to watch seven Republicans in New Hampshire answer questions before a friendly audience. It's hard to describe the spectacle as a debate.

However, I found the discussion remarkably civil and most of the candidates for the GOP nomination for president fairly reasonable-sounding. Even Michelle Bachmann, whom I'd never seen before, seemed less the fire-breathing loony as she has often been described than simply a very conservative member of Congress. Ron Paul, a holdover from the 2008 GOP debates, defended his title as the most far-out candidate, repeatedly calling for truly radical policy changes, such as eliminating all overseas military operations. On the other hand, there is some solid logic in Paul's contention that America would be better off defending its own borders than defending Iraq's or Afghanistan's.

Mitt Romney, the presumed front-runner in the GOP contest, looks as presidential as he did in 2008, but he still comes across as overly aggressive, never missing an opportunity to change the subject from whatever he was asked to what he really wanted to talk about — the "failures" of Barack Obama. This is not conventional wisdom, but Romney appears to me to be over-coached, told by consultants to repeat his campaign themes no matter what the question, and his themes come across as well-practiced platitudes. I didn't think he helped himself in last night's event.

Rick Santorum also surprised me a little. It takes some audacity to run for president after losing your last Senate race, but Santorum stood in and won a few points. But he looks a bit geeky, and it's hard to imagine him staying very long in this race.

Tim Pawlenty came across as well-informed and rational. He won points by citing specific accomplishments as governor and translating those into presidential policy. I thought he helped himself, though one pundit I read criticized him for not taking advantage of the opportunity to attack the front-runner, Romney.

Visually, Newt Gingrich came across as the old man on the stage. Heavier and much jowlier than when he was speaker of the House, Gingrich sometimes slipped into his lecturing mode and lost both moderator John King and the audience. But Gingrich occasionally showed how he can cite specific historical incidents to explicate his points in a manner that leaves others awed.

Perhaps the biggest surprise of the event for me was Herman Cain, the former pizza CEO and political novice who largely held his own against the seasoned politicians beside him. Cain was forceful in his answers and espoused largely mainstream, Chamber-of-Commerce-friendly policies. His might be the longest shot of this GOP showcase, but he's not an impossibility. Wouldn't it be extraordinary if the 2012 contest were between two black men — Obama and Cain?

This is the first heat of a long and complex contest. Six months from now, the Big Seven will probably be winnowed to four or five, perhaps with the addition of former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman. It's a long way to the GOP convention and even longer to the general election, but last night's event showed that the Republicans have some viable candidates. If the economy remains stagnant, President Obama will have a tough fight against one of the GOP hopefuls.

Intensely interested but lacking access

2011-06-13T07:16:00.003-04:00

When I was working as a newspaper editor, I used to tell people that editors and reporters don't necessarily know more about politics and policy than the average, attentive citizen, but our jobs just kept us more focused on current events.

Almost two years out of the news business, I'm still intensely interested in the political process and governmental policy. For followers of politics and policy, this is an intriguing time on both the state and national levels. But I have to admit that my knowledge of the ins and outs of politics is not what it used to be. I still devour all the national and state political/governmental news in the News & Observer every morning (and deeply regret the diminution of news coverage caused by the fall-off in newspaper advertising), and I read some online blogs, columns and news that keep me informed about the state and national political scenes. I am intensely interested in whether President Obama will be able to replicate his 2008 strategy, whether N.C. Republicans will succeed in tearing down the programs and policies put in place by state Democrats over the past century, and whether the Congress will ever find the political will to address the budget deficit and debt crisis.

I'm no longer being paid to think about these issues, write about them and assign reporters to cover them, and I miss that intimate involvement with the forces that shape out daily lives. People spend most of their days doing what they are paid to do, and I am no longer paid to pay attention to politics and politicians. I find myself in the position of so many of the people I used to talk to in my former career — intensely interested observers of the political sphere.

But there is another difference between the way I used to view politics and how I view it now. As a newspaper editor, I had access to the candidates, strategists, foot soldiers and advisers in the political game. It was not unusual for a candidate for governor or senator to drop by my office and talk policy. What the candidates wanted was favorable news coverage or, perhaps, and editorial endorsement. What I got in return was some insight into the candidates and the strategies in an election. I also got to form an opinion about the personality and intellect of the candidate. Very few intensely interested observers got this insight, and now I understand just how privileged I was to have that access. Since leaving the newspaper business, I have talked one state legislator, a congressman and a few county and municipal officials (all of whom I knew personally from my earlier career) but no governors or candidates for high offices.

My interest in politics and policy may be undiminished, but my knowledge and understanding have declined because I no longer talk to the folks making the big decisions.

Perdue can help herself by vetoing budget

2011-06-05T20:12:00.003-04:00

Republicans rode into town determined to make big changes. After more than a century in the legislative minority (except for a brief period in the 1990s when they controlled the House), Republicans held substantial majorities in both the House and Senate. They promised big — no tax increases, a budget passed long before July 1, improved schools, a better business climate.

Three weeks before the end of the fiscal year, the budget is finally on Gov. Bev Perdue's desk, and the best thing Perdue might do is veto it. Perdue has complained that the budget shortchanges education, and the chairman of the state Board of Education has vehemently complained about the budget, which, among other things, eliminates teacher aides after kindergarten and phases out the Teaching Fellows scholarship program. With five Democrats voting for the budget, Republican leaders have a veto-proof majority in the House. Nevertheless, Perdue has nothing to lose in vetoing the budget. She can make her point more effectively than she has in all the speeches and press conferences while challenging Republicans to stand behind their actions. Perdue's criticism of Republican budget cuts has resulted in an uptick in her popularity ratings, although she still has a long way to go to get re-elected. Pat McCrory, who is running hard to be the Republican gubernatorial nominee again, has to hope that Perdue will quietly let the budget pass.

Legislative Republicans have done more than pass a budget that undoes much of the educational strategy and tactics of the past 20 years. They have unashamedly aligned themselves with business interests to the detriment of the public in bill after bill. The broadband bill, pushed hard by the giant national corporations that have virtual monopolies in most areas, forbids new municipalities from getting into the broadband business, as Wilson and a few other cities have done. Although titled with other words, the bill is really a monopoly protection bill. Most North Carolinians will not have the option that Wilson residents have, to choose a cheaper, faster cable TV and Internet provider. Republicans pushed a bill that would prohibit Raleigh and other cities from ensuring that rental housing is safe and habitable. Republicans even tried to prohibit the Department of Transportation from forbidding left turns on some highways because some business people complained that the left turns, though dangerous, were good for business. They even tied the extension of unemployment benefits to budget cuts, making out-of-work North Carolinians pawns in a game of political chicken.

Republicans may be able to proclaim that they have won majorities and passed a new kind of budget, but Democrat Perdue can only help herself by vetoing the Republicans' budget. By 2012, as voters realize how cozy Republican legislators are with big corporations and how little they care about the plight of individual voters, the GOP gloating might be over.

The other "third rail of politics"

2011-05-25T07:43:00.003-04:00

The late House Speaker Tip O'Neill once called Social Security the "third rail of politics" — meaning anyone who touched the program risked instant death, at least politically. If O'Neill were still around, he might say the same thing about Medicare.

It was Medicare, apparently, that turned the tables in Tuesday's election in upstate New York, where Democrat Kathy Hochul won a special election in a traditionally Republican district. Hochul's campaign emphasized her opposition to Republican Rep. Paul Ryan's plan to turn Medicare into a voucher program — instead of the government paying directly to providers for the health care of Medicare recipients, Ryan would reduce costs by giving vouchers for recipients to purchase their own health care in the private sector.

What is interesting is that both parties have recognized that the current Medicare program is unsustainable. Some type of reform is necessary. President Obama took a lot of heat because his health care program required cuts in Medicare reimbursements to save money. Republicans screamed. President Bush had proposed cuts in Medicare reimbursements, too. Democrats had screamed. Tuesday's election indicates that we may have reached a point at which no one can afford to reshape Medicare, and both parties see Medicare changes as an invitation to attack the other party. This will lead to an impasse in which Medicare costs outgrow taxpayers' ability to pay for the program.

Then what?

Smart guy, but his foot is in his mouth

2011-05-24T20:05:00.004-04:00

I've always thought that Newt Gingrich was a smart guy. He taught college-level history, and his revisionist history of the crucial battle of the Civil War, "Gettysburg," is surprisingly well-done. His 1994 "Contract with America" was a brilliant piece of political showmanship that helped the Republicans win the House for the first time in decades. He has also made a point of thinking creatively about America's political problems. He has been useful as a devil's advocate, often looking at problems from a different viewpoint and offering creative new approaches.

None of this suggests that he should be president of the United States. In addition to his sharp, creative mind, Gingrich has had a wide streak of self-righteousness, and, unfortunately, his self-righteous streak might be more character-shaping than his intellect. He has also made a habit of saying what he's thinking before fully thinking it through and, thereby, saying some outlandish things. Take, for example, his rejoinder after catching some flak after criticizing Rep. Paul Ryan's budget plan: “Any ad which quotes what I said Sunday is a falsehood.”

And now, sanctimonious and short-tempered as ever, Gingrich is claiming the $250,000 to $500,000 he and his third wife (count 'em) owed Tiffany's is just a normal, everyday payment for a "frugal" couple who live within their means and always pay on time. The Washington Post digs into the debt a bit and finds more than gold dust.

Gingrich is a smart guy, but he shouldn't be president. And with his foot in his mouth like that, it will be hard for him to keep in the running.

After 1967 war, Israel had another option

2011-05-20T07:30:00.004-04:00

If only history would offer a do-over, one of the world's most troublesome dilemmas might have been long-ago resolved. Unfortunately, history offers no mulligans.

President Obama's Thursday speech, aiming to respond to Arab demands for more democratic governments and to reset the Arab-Israeli conflict brought to mind a missed opportunity, perhaps the greatest missed opportunity of the 20th century. In the aftermath of the Six-Day War, the 44th anniversary of which we will celebrate next month, Israel looked invincible. Facing invasion from all sides by a coalition of Arab armies, Israeli Defense Forces struck first, pushing Syria off the Golan Heights overlooking northern Israel, shoving Jordanian soldiers back to the Jordan River, and halting their rout of Egyptian forces only at the Suez Canal. It was perhaps the most convincing military victory of the century. There was unrealistic talk that the Israeli Army was so good it might defeat the United States or the Soviet Union. The Arab nations that had planned to annihilate Israel from the map of the world were humiliated, and Israel celebrated what looked like a final victory over their adversaries.

Israel, as conquering armies usually do, held onto its newly captured lands. Israel reunited a divided Jerusalem and declared it, not Tel-Aviv, its new capital. Israel claimed former Jordanian territory all the way to the west bank of the Jordan River and openly discussed annexing the area as its rightful claim. Israel held power in the Gaza Strip, a narrow tract of land populated by entrenched refugees from an Arab-Israeli war two decades earlier. And Israel controlled the vast Sinai peninsula all the way to the western bank of the strategically and economically important Suez Canal. Israel, a tiny country, had multiplied its territory several-fold in just six days. Who could blame the Israelis for gloating a little?

But Israel's holding onto the West Bank, the Golan Heights, Gaza, and the Sinai gave rise to the next episode in the Arab-Israeli conflict — the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, an era of Arab terrorism and the demands for a separate Palestinian nation, the so-called two-state solution. Although Israel signed peace agreements with Egypt (returning the Sinai) and Jordan, its occupation of Gaza and the West Bank has engendered the terrorism-backed demands for a separate Palestinian state.

What if Israel had pursued a different course? What if Israel, instead of occupying the territories it had won fair-and-square, had chosen instead to pull back its armies and give back the lands it had conquered? Had Israel returned the West Bank (or at least substantial portions of it, keeping only East Jerusalem) to Jordan and turned over Gaza (along with Sinai) to Egypt, the Palestinian problem of the last 44 years would have been Jordan's and Egypt's, not Israel's. The West Bank had been captured from Jordan. Why not give it back, in return for a peace treaty? Likewise, Gaza could be given to Egypt to govern, along with all of Sinai. Palestinians such as Yasser Arafat could clamor for Palestinian independence, but their fight would be with the Arab rulers of Jordan and Egypt, not with Israel.

In hindsight, Israel would have been better off giving back its captured territory than keeping it with all of the turmoil and terror it brought. But hindsight, as they say, is always 20-20.

'Shiloh Rules' proves the past is still here

2011-05-18T19:12:00.002-04:00

My review of "Shiloh Rules," which opened last Friday night at the Lauren Kennedy and Alan Campbell Theater at Barton College as part of the Theater of the American South:

“The past is not dead,” William Faulkner famously said. “In fact, it’s not even past.” Doris Baizley’s “Shiloh Rules,” the second installment of the 2011 Theater of the American South, proves Faulkner’s point: The past is always with us.

How much more with us could the past be than among a group of Civil War re-enactors on the Shiloh Battlefield National Park? “Shiloh Rules,” which opened Friday night, brings together six women — two Union re-enactors, two Confederate re-enactors, a Park Service ranger and a merchant of Civil War history — on one stormy night before the re-enactment of the decisive 1862 battle. All six women wrestle with history and identity and try to make sense of their callings.

Lighting director Liz Droessler, scenic designer Chris Bernier and sound designer Chris Droessler take full advantage of the “black box” style of the Lauren Kennedy and Alan Campbell Theater at Barton College. The audience flanks the stage on three sides, and entrances and exits come from all directions. Artillery fire, thunder and lightning are real enough to make audience members jump. Chirping crickets set the opening scene.

Jane Holding as enigmatic Southern refugee Cecelia Pettison stands out among uniformly strong performances by the entire cast. Pettison is more of an anachronism than a re-enactor, a woman firmly planted in the 19^th century with an 1860s view of the world. Holding’s Southern accent is pitch-perfect, a drawl that never drags as she scathingly berates the Yankees who “come down here to kill our loved ones.” Her “Well, I declare!” could have been uttered by many audience members’ grandmothers. The characters and cast are left to wonder whether Cecelia is some sort of ghost or spirit. “Modern does not exist for her,” says the Widow Beckwith, a woman who has found a way to make a living off of “living history.”

Pettison’s counterpart is Clara May Abbott of the Massachusetts Soldier Aid Society, convincingly played by Mary Rowland, who is coaching Meg Barton, played by Hilary Edwards, on the fine art of re-enacting — and planting one’s brain in 1862. Edwards’ offstage scream is enough to silence a rebel yell. Likewise, Pettison is teaching Lucygale Scruggs, played by Leanne Horton Heintz, to ignore everything she knows that happened after 1862.

Into this schoolroom of historical fantasy comes the Widow Beckwith, played by Bonnie K. Allison Gould, and Park Ranger Wilson, played by Barbette Hunter. Officer Wilson tries to enforce the 21^st century rules while 1862 is happening all around her. Widow Beckwith finds ways to bend the rules to her commercial benefit. Things get out of hand just as Officer Wilson is trying to enforce the rules against overnight camping on the battlefield. The characters confront a past that is never really past with all its racial overtones, cultural differences and violence, sparking some angry words and some scary moments as they play by Shiloh Rules.

These serious aspects are leavened with large doses of humor about the anachronisms of re-enacting events that happened 150 years ago. The re-enactment gets out of hand, just as the real fighting did 150 years ago. The result is powerful and enjoyable theater that combines serious social issues about the ways we perceive history with entertaining humor lines. “Shiloh Rules” fits well into the theater festival’s focus on the Civil War as the conflict’s sesquicentennial begins.

—Hal Tarleton

Social Security is part of the deficit now

2011-05-16T07:13:00.002-04:00

This year's federal budget deficit is projected at around $1.4 trillion, and that number is getting the attention of members of Congress on both sides of the aisle. Even the most liberal of economists agree that deficits of that magnitude are unsustainable. The United States' credit standing might be in jeopardy if serious efforts to reduce the deficit are not undertaken quickly.

All that is old news, but one aspect of the deficit is not getting much attention. Part of the deficit consists of shortfalls in Social Security funding and the nation's obligation to repay money borrowed from the Social Security Trust Funds. In 2010, Social Security benefits exceeded Social Security taxes by about $49 billion. That's a tiny percentage of $1.4 trillion, but it's a factor in the overall deficit that had been projected for decades. Had Congress acted 10 or 20 years ago, this shortfall could have been avoided relatively painlessly.

Social Security has always worked by transferring wealth from workers to retirees. Since 1983, Social Security had built up a huge surplus to meet projected obligations when the baby boom generation began retiring. That day of reckoning is upon us, and Social Security revenues are no longer sufficient to pay promised benefits. Moreover, the billions of dollars that had been borrowed from Social Security have to be repaid, and those notes are coming due. For years, Social Security revenues have obscured the magnitude of the federal budget deficit as those excess revenues were spent for government operations. Those borrowed funds would have to be repaid through higher taxes, but no plan was in place to produce those revenues.

Now, America has a crippling budget deficit and no plan to balance the budget. Even Rep. Paul Ryan's austere budget proposal would only reduce the deficit over the next deficit; it would not produce a budget surplus, like the one we had in 2001. Contrary to what some politicians are claiming, Social Security is part of the deficit problem because its obligations exceed its revenues and the money borrowed from Social Security has to be repaid from other taxes.

Troubador finds accompaniment in Wilson

2011-05-14T18:03:00.002-04:00

(This review was published in the Saturday edition of The Wilson Times.)

The last time Bill Schustik was in Wilson, he stood alone on the Fike High School Auditorium stage and performed his American Troubadour show for subscribers to the now-defunct Wilson Concert series. That was about 25 years ago. He’s back, and this time his solo act has a choir and some musicians to back him up.

Schustik kicked off the 2011 edition of Theater of the American South Thursday night with a look back 150 years with his “The Civil War in Song and Legend” show. Although Schustik has been performing as a one-man show through much of his career, he chose to involve some local talent in his Theater of the American South performance. He proved that he “plays well with others,” especially the St. John AME Zion Unity Choir whose soloists Toshika Smith and Jean Jones provided a nice contrast to Schustik’s rich baritone. Jones’ soprano filled the Boykin Center on “Let My People Go” and “Motherless Child.” The 17-member choir under the direction of local musical legend Bill Myers sang harmony as well as lead vocals, giving Schustik’s troubadour act a new dimension. Young singers/musicians/dancers dubbed The Many Thousand Gone Youth Chorus also added to the show, especially with their toe-tapping drumbeats.

Myers, playing flute and melodica, and other local musicians supplemented Schustik’s talent on a variety of instruments, including guitar, banjo, harmonica, dulcimer, drum and jaw harp. Abby Dorfmann on the fiddle stood out among these skilled supporting musicians, and also sang a haunting ballad.

Last night’s performance was originally pitched as a one-man show, and it’s obvious that Schustik can hold the stage by himself. As he moved confidently from one instrument to another and from one musical style to others, this self-described troubadour conjured songs of yore and the history of a nation. As talented as a storyteller as he is as a musician, Schustik taught Civil War history by telling personal stories of the men and women who lived through it or died in it. And the Civil War facts he subtly teaches are, as Mark Twain might say, “mostly true.”

At times Thursday night, the mood was as much like the 1960s as it was the 1860s. Schustik’s rendition of “Follow the Drinking Gourd” brought back memories of the late folk singer Josh White on the “Hootenanny” television show 50 years ago. And his “Cumberland Gap” could have been sung by the New Christy Minstrels or by the Limelighters. Schustik’s style is clearly lost in the sixties of both the 19^th and the 20^th centuries.

He guided his embarrassingly small opening-night audience through the Civil War playlist of raucous, boastful, longing and mournful songs, telling the story of songs each side in the war adopted as its own. He told of Julia Ward Howe writing new words to a military marching song to create “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”; of the contradiction of Shiloh, a biblical name meaning “place of peace” where 20,000 perished; and of the poignancy of the empty chair at the table and soldiers’ wish to “perish nobly.”

At the end of the two-hour show, the audience stood reverently as Schustik sang the little-known latter verses of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The audience continued standing and clapped their hands to the beat as Schustik and the entire company sang “This Land is Your Land,” the Woody Guthrie song written long after the Civil War, but a poignantly perfect fit to close this show.

—Hal Tarleton

Some parents miss the higher calling

2011-05-11T20:40:00.000-04:00

In this post on her blog, my wife reminisces about her baptism and about the little baptism service book that she has treasured for years. The stilted language derived from the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer seems quaint and dated now, but the verities are undeniable: Parents' greatest responsibility is to nurture their children, not only physically but spiritually. "Given to God" is the title of this baptismal service, affirming that parents have a duty to present their child to God in humble thanks for the miraculous gift God has presented to them.

Many of the problems parents encounter today could be avoided if they fully appreciated their responsibility to guide their children spiritually as well as physically, academically, culturally and emotionally. There is no more solemn responsibility, no greater task, no greater honor than the privilege of raising a child miraculously formed by God's plan. Too many parents see their parental responsibility as getting out of the way so that a child can "find himself" or "express himself" in his own unique way. What the church of the era when "Given to God" was written knew was that children are not born perfect and in danger of being corrupted by the world. They are, instead, born as blank slates, or (more contemporarily) as unprogrammed computers. Children need discipline and social skills that usually do not come naturally. They also need spiritual guidance, which won't come to them if their parents follow the plan of one young mother I overheard. She was going to avoid church until her son was 12 or 15 and then let him decide whether he was interested in attending church. I'm betting he's never darkened a church doorway.

Yard trees are blowin' in the wind

2011-05-09T07:19:00.003-04:00

I recently passed a house in the neighborhood with a front yard that looked like a lumber yard. A half dozen or more huge pines had been cut, leaving tall, straight tree trunks lying askew all over the lawn. I had no way of knowing whether this was an effect of the April 16 tornadoes that uprooted and splintered trees all around Wilson or simply a landscaping decision. I do know that each time there's a powerful storm that topples trees, more healthy trees that survived the winds are sacrificed by homeowners as a preventative measure. We saw it happen in 1996 and 1999 after hurricanes Fran and Floyd, and I have no doubt that many homeowners, having seen trees that crashed through roofs last month, are contemplating getting rid of the trees in their yards.

Call me crazy, but I don't see the logic in destroying perfectly healthy trees to avoid what might happen sometime in some future storm. Although Hurricane Fran toppled hundreds of trees in Wilson, thousands of other trees withstood the same winds. The reward for such persistent strength should not be a chainsaw. The tall pines I saw lying horizontal recently were probably 50 years old or older. They cannot be replaced for at least 20 years. A snap decision to cut down a tree cannot be reversed for a generation, and some trees thrive for hundreds of years if allowed to grow unimpeded.

As to the idea that trees present an imminent danger to houses and other structures, I have a theory: Trees withstand wind better if they are grouped together. An isolated oak or pine is more likely to fall or splinter in a strong wind than a tree that has other trees nearby to buffer the winds. Homeowners who take out all but one or two trees might have been better off to leave the trees to stand together against the wind.

Dead or diseased trees have to be removed. I've had to remove two tall pines from my lot in the past few years because they had died. I hated to do it. I hate to take out trees (and not just because it's expensive) because I know I cannot replace them, and I will not see their beauty or enjoy their shade again in my lifetime. Homeowners who have a real phobia about winds should consider planting smaller trees, such as dogwoods and crape myrtles, that withstand winds well and don't do much damage even if they do fall.

Trees are treasures to be cultivated and enjoyed. They gobble carbon dioxide and replenish the oxygen in the air. Their leaves provide cooling shade in summer and compost through the winter. Their branches provide natural climbing gyms for young boys. Their towering heights inspire and amaze us. Their fall colors leave us in awe. They are focal points for landscaping.

Sometimes trees fall, causing damage or injury, but those incidents are rare. We should not cut down healthy trees for fear of wind just as we should not blow up the family car for fear of a traffic accident.

But what about the principle?

2011-05-05T07:39:00.004-04:00

The city of Wilson is touting its victory in the General Assembly — a bill restricting municipalities' right to build fiber-optic networks exempts Wilson and other cities that already have such a network in place. Having escaped the noose tied by the big cable companies and compliant legislators, Wilson is abandoning the principle that all municipalities should be allowed to serve the best interests of their residents.

Wilson and other opponents of the cable law had marshaled an impressive array of supporters for the concept that provision of high-speed Internet is a 21st-century utility, as essential today as electricity was a century ago, when scores of cities got into the electricity business because the big utilities were not interested in serving small towns and rural areas. Wilson boldly gambled on the broadband future in 2007, when it established its Greenlight service, offering an Internet connection with speeds several times faster than any available through commercial cable services. Corporations such as BB&T, which processes millions of check and credit card transactions through Greenlight's high speed data service, supported the city's objections to the restrictions. Also lining up with Wilson, the N.C. League of Municipalities and other opponents of the cable company monopoly protection bill were high-tech entities such as Google. These companies know that the best advances in technology come through an unfettered market and that a competitive market is best for the customer. If our legislators had bothered to ask any Greenlight customer or customer of any other municipal broadband service in North Carolina, they would find enthusiasm for the service (full disclosure: I am a satisfied Greenlight customer).

Wilson might believe it has won its war against the politically powerful cable companies, even if it did have to abandon principle and allow the majority of the state's residents to miss out on this opportunity. But the cable companies have been defeated before — on the principle of allowing competition and "Internet freedom" — only to come back the next year with another restrictive bill. This time, Wilson's Greenlight service is protected, but next year, compliant legislators might do the cable companies' bidding again by introducing legislation to nibble away at Greenlight's franchise and then nibble again and again.

With this bill to restrict Internet access, the new Republican majority in the General Assembly has demonstrated its commitment to big business over the interests of individual consumers.

Cold War strategies still affect policy

2011-05-04T07:31:00.003-04:00

The "Arab Spring" continues, and Osama bin Laden is dead, but little attention is being paid to the ways the Cold War created and cultivated the authoritarian regimes that dominate the Middle East. During the Cold War, every developing nation was a battleground between communism and capitalist freedom. Africa, South America, Europe and Asia contained philosophical battlegrounds, where advocates of Marxism and capitalism competed for the hearts of the population and, especially, for the allegiance of the leaders. In many nations, the United States reluctantly supported cruel dictators because they were anti-communist. The battles for allegiances were especially strong in the Middle East, where strategic locations and vast reserves of oil made these nations important to both sides in the global struggle.

America installed and supported the Shah of Iran and supported the Hashemite monarchy in Jordan. In Egypt, the Soviet Union wooed and won the support of Abdul Nasser, but the United States was able to persuade his successor, Anwar Sadat, to change sides. U.S. support continued for Sadat's successor, Hosni Mubarak, who was finally forced from office after decades of brutal repression. How different the history of the Middle East might have been had the United States not been focused on fighting communist expansion at all costs? With global communism consigned to "the dustbin of history" (in Ronald Reagan's memorable phrase), the United States is willing to support protests and insurgencies in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya without fear of turning these countries into mortal enemies.

The United States this week took out its primary mortal enemy of the post-Cold War era, al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden. Even though bin Laden has no allegiance to Marxism, his rise began in the U.S. support for Afghan fighters opposing the Soviet Union — support born of Cold War containment strategy.

The Cold War, which the United States won with the fall of the Soviet empire in 1991, ruled U.S. foreign policy for almost half a century and continues to affect U.S. policy today, 20 years after global communism collapsed. The Arab dictators, whom restless Arab populations have begun to rebel against, and the Islamist terrorism that opposes Western secularism, can be traced back to Cold War decisions. In containing communism successfully, we have developed entirely new problems.

In bin Laden killing, give credit to Obama

2011-05-03T07:41:00.003-04:00

I have watched, with some chagrin and amazement, the lack of respect for President Obama displayed by the birthers, tea partiers, racists and the rest. Admittedly, disrespect for elected officials, including presidents, is not unique to Obama (George W. Bush was the target of frequent vitriol), but it seems more accepted and less related to policies with Obama.

In the aftermath of the assassination (you can't call it any less) of Osama bin Laden, the Obama detractors were quick to give credit to Bush, the guy who vowed to bring bin Laden to justice but never got around to it. On Facebook, Bush fans/Obama detractors posted Bush's statement about bin Laden's death, ignoring the fact that bin Laden was located and killed two years after Bush left office, and the order to execute the mission came from Obama. After bin Laden's death, Obama did one more thing: He telephoned Bush and former President Clinton as a courtesy to tell them the news first. Both former presidents had made their unsuccessful attempts to capture, kill or cripple bin Laden.

Bin Laden's death sparked celebration among many Americans and not a few foreigners, including some Arabs. One can argue that killing is wrong, even in an act of legitimate self-defense or justifiable vengeance, but the vast majority of Americans are glad bin Laden is dead. What is difficult to understand is why some Americans won't give the president who issued the orders credit for the success of this mission.

Osama bin Laden is dead at last

2011-05-02T07:27:00.004-04:00

The death of Osama bin Laden is one of those rare moments of nearly unmitigated rejoicing. A celebration of death goes against our nature, but in this case, as with the death of Adolf Hitler, a death brings closure and, in a word used by both Presidents Obama and George W. Bush, "justice."

Bin Laden's assassination — that is the honest description of his demise — places a cap on America's decade-old rage over the 9/11 attacks, which Bin Laden instigated and planned. Bush had promised to avenge those attacks by tracking down Bin Laden and his associates, but he took a detour through the quagmire of Iraq and lost sight of his promise to bring bin Laden to justice. Obama will get the credit for ordering the operation that killed bin Laden in a firefight inside his Pakistan compound, but the intelligence personnel who had tracked the wily bin Laden for nearly 10 years and carefully planned the surreptitious attack deserve most of the credit for this success.

Bin Laden's death gives a glimmer of revenge and justice to the thousands who lost loved ones in the 9/11 attacks and other al-Qaeda crimes, but it does not eliminate al-Qaeda. Without the charismatic bin Laden, al-Qaeda might lose some followers and financial support, but it will remain a thorn in the flesh of Western civilizations and a threat even to Islamic nations. The greatest benefit of this assassination might be the elimination of bin Laden's periodic videotapes promising doom for all who oppose him and thumbing his nose at the concerted efforts to find and kill him. At least we won't have to see those any more.

While clearly pleased with this achievement, President Obama still has his hands full in Afghanistan and Iraq, where al-Qaeda-inspired or -allied insurgencies continue their war against U.S.-allied governments. Militant Islamist perceptions will not die with Bin Laden and will continue to endanger the world economy until the financial and political support for this philosophy is buried along with its most prominent proponent.

On what day did God create tornadoes?

2011-04-29T07:37:00.003-04:00

"We believe in one God,
the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is, seen and unseen ..."
—The Nicene Creed

Why did God ever create tornadoes? That has to be on the minds of millions of people who have witnessed, even vicariously, the destruction left across Alabama and much of the South by this weeks' killer tornadoes. More than 200 people died senselessly as air masses collided into a roiling, rotating, whirling wind that hit puny man-made structures and towering trees with a power that seems unimaginably evil but that is, in fact, natural. America's heartland is where tornadoes are born, where warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico collides with cold, dry air from Canada, and the concentrated power of gentle winds unleash a destruction that rivals the combined power of the world's military arsenals. It is a scientific phenomenon that we have learned to study and predict. Heartbreaking images and the awful facts of shattered lives are scattered behind these fast-moving funnels of destruction, leaving survivors and distant observers to wonder why.

If we believe, as we proclaim in the Nicene Creed, that God is, indeed, the creator of all things, visible and invisible, good and bad, then these deadly tornadoes were, like us, the creations of God. And though we might wonder why God ever created an evil person, the creation of such a destructive weather phenomenon seems among the most unfathomable of mysteries. The problem of evil has vexed theologians for ages. How can a loving God allow such tragedy and such evil to exist, even in an imperfect and sin-scarred world? This week, especially, as we see the images of the arbitrary destruction of powerful tornadoes that scrape away everything along their paths while leaving nearby structures unscathed, the creation of such destructive and tragic phenomena seem more like the work of whimsical Norse or Pagan gods than of the loving Judeo-Christian God.

As in any tragedy, it would be wrong and theologically flawed in the wake of these deadly storms to say, "It's God's will." The loving God of Scripture, willing to sacrifice his Son for the salvation of mankind, does not choose tragedy over life or grief over happiness. But even this understanding does not settle the question of why God created a world in which tornadoes, hurricanes, lightning and earthquakes shatter the lives of the people He loves.

I find some reassurance in the experience of the prophet Elijah, who stood at the mouth of a cave and witnessed the presence of God, not in the whirlwind but in a soft whisper:

"Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake. ¹² After the earthquake came a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. ¹³ When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave."
—I Kings 19:11-13.

More tornadoes, more destruction

2011-04-28T07:40:00.004-04:00

On April 16, North Carolina caught the onslaught of the worst series of tornadoes this state has see at least since 1984. Wilson was in the path of at least one tornado, which skipped along a northeasterly route destroying whole buildings, tossing vehicles like matchsticks and toppling dozens of trees. Other areas of North Carolina saw even worse destruction and a total of 22 deaths statewide.

Just as we are recovering from that storm, with trees and debris removed from roadsides and tarps stretched across damaged roofs, we learn of an even more destructive series of tornadoes that ripped apart portions of Alabama and other states. Anyone who has lived through a tornado has terrifying stories to tell. Since 1996, when I lay in bed as Hurricane Fran roared overhead through the September night, I have listened more acutely to the sounds of the wind and watched more closely the color of the sky. Nature's destructive force is both awe-inspiring and terrifying. The post-disaster comment that "it looks like a war zone" is more of a commentary on the power of modern weaponry than a measurement of nature's power. Wartime bombardment photos and the aftermath of a tornado do have similarities, but nature's destructive force is often more widespread and unpredictable than any one conventional bomb.

Tornadoes seem to be occurring more frequently but probably are only getting more attention from the 24-hour news cycles and instantaneous communications of today. But whenever the wind blows and the sky darkens, I — and millions of others — will feel the unease in our gut.

Supply and demand drive oil prices

2011-04-26T07:37:00.004-04:00

Like other presidents before him, Barack Obama has criticized rising gasoline prices and has called for an investigation into possible price fixing and manipulation. Like other presidents, however, he has little to go on. The Justice Department will look into gasoline prices, which are now pushing $4 a gallon nationwide, for any evidence of conspiracy or fraud. It is not likely to find much evidence.

Obama's announcement might make good politics and might defer some criticism of his administration, but it makes little economic sense. High gasoline prices are the result of high crude oil prices, which are soaring as the result of two primary factors: the decline of the dollar and unrest in oil-producing countries in the Middle East. Markets are uneasy over volatile situations in Libya and other oil-rich countries. Uncertainty breeds price spikes. Add to these factors the increasing demand as the world recovers from recession, the emergence of higher energy demands in developing countries and the onset of the vacation season in the United States, which always increases demand for gasoline.

The price of any object is the result of supply and demand. The market price is that amount which a willing seller and a willing buyer agree upon. In times of shortages or increasing demand, buyers are willing to pay more, and sellers are motivated to demand more. That, rather some nefarious conspiracy, is why gasoline prices are spiking.

Obama has few choices when it comes to moderating gasoline prices. He could release oil from the government's Strategic Petroleum Reserve, but that would have minimal impact and might jeopardize the U.S. oil security the SPR was designed to protect. He might take some actions to strengthen the dollar, such as reducing the federal deficit, and he could try to increase domestic production through tax incentives or eased environmental rules. But the results of these actions would be slow in coming and might not amount to a lot. Settling the volatility in the Middle East, something that is likely beyond the ability of the United States to achieve, would do more and more quickly than any domestic policy shift.

It seems likely that gasoline will climb past the $4 barrier and frighten American consumers out of buying so much or driving so much. Those decisions should reduce demand for gasoline and, eventually, lower the price of gasoline. Obama can only hope that this moderation comes well before he faces voters again in 2012.

Six-word memoirs can say a lot

2011-04-25T07:05:00.003-04:00

I heard an NPR story recently about the fad of "Six-Word Memoirs," which has attracted interest from some celebrities as well as ordinary folks. The concept reputedly comes from Ernest Hemingway's boast that he could write a novel in only six words. Hemingway's six-word novel: "For sale: baby shoes. Never worn." The memoirs or epigrams have been compared to epitaphs, as some of them sum up a lifetime, such as "Three wives. Three children. Happy life" or "Got a bachelor's. Still making $8.75."

As I listened to the NPR report while driving home, I began writing six-word memoirs in my mind. I came up with a few:

"Met girl. Found wife. Got Nana."

"Three children. Six grandchildren. My legacy."

"Grow old along with me. Done."

"Writer, editor 33 years. Laid off."

"Forty years together. Better and better."

"Mother died. Daddy followed. I'm orphaned."

"Life is better than I deserve."

"Having family all together. Joyous happiness."

Try it yourself. Might like it.

Tar Heels found a winner in 1971

2011-04-21T07:35:00.003-04:00

When Woody Durham took over as play-by-play announcer for the Tar Heel Sports Network 40 years ago, I was skeptical. Durham announced his retirement Wednesday.

Woody, who was just a few years older than I, was a tepid puddle compared to the roaring stream he was replacing, Bill Currie. Currie, who was sports anchor for WSOC-TV in Charlotte, reveled in his moniker as "Mouth of the South." He was the kind of guy who would say almost anything on the air and get away with it. Sometimes the action on the court moved faster than his tongue and mouth could follow, and he'd say, "You shoulda seen it!" In those days, few games were televised, so UNC fans had to rely on radio broadcasts to keep up. Currie was colorful. "He just faked him right out of his athletic undergarment," he'd say. Currie was a personality, and my friends and I would listen to games partly just to hear what outlandish thing Currie might say next.

When Currie left for fabled KDKA in Pittsburgh, Woody, then the sports director at a Greensboro television station, got the job. Durham was the antithesis of Bill Currie, and I wasn't sure at first that it was a good trade. Woody approached the job differently from Currie. Where Currie wanted to entertain and be the center of attention, Durham wanted to disappear into game action. He always seemed to have his background information at his fingertips and could do a credible job of keeping pace with the action on the court. He was as sophisticated as Currie was outlandish. And although I tired of hearing all the plugs for commercial sponsors that he worked into his game commentary, I thought Durham did as good a job as any team-affiliated announcer in staying objective and giving the other team, its coaches and its star players their due.

After 40 years of listening to Woody Durham, I'll miss him, and I'll admit I was wrong. Though he's not as funny or as outlandish as the Mouth of the South was, Woody has been more professional and more descriptive, all that you can expect from a game announcer.

Tornadoes are another twist of fate

2011-04-18T07:20:00.002-04:00

"I can replace my house, but I can't replace my babies."

—Bertie County tornado victim

Wilson and much of North Carolina has begun recovering from a cluster of tornadoes that killed 22 state residents Saturday, the deadliest storms to hit the state since 1984. Most of us, like the Bertie County resident quoted above, feel fortunate to be spared death or serious injury. The deadly winds hopscotched arbitrarily across neighborhoods and streets, ripping one house to shreds while sparing the one next door. Incidents such as these leave us seeking some rational explanation — Why was I spared but my neighbor wasn't? — when there is no rational explanation. It is the same quandary we face after an automobile accident — "If only she had left two minutes earlier or later ..." — or a fatal disease diagnosis — "Why me, Lord?" Some take comfort in blaming God — "It's God's will!" — but this explanation turns a God of love into a God of evil. No loving God prefers such suffering for his creation.

There is no explanation. Things happen. A simple misstep can prove fatal. A tornado can strike one home and not another. We want to "seize the day," but sometimes the day seizes us, and there is no reason and no escape. The only comfort is knowing that even in tragedy God's love prevails.

Saturday's tornadoes were quite different in one way from the 1984 tornadoes that killed dozens, including some in Greene County: These tornadoes have been chronicled in online postings of pictures and video. In 1984, when I sent a reporter to Snow Hill to report on the tornado damage, there were no cell phones, digital photos or hand-held video cameras. Our reporter was out of touch for hours until she finally found a working pay phone and called in her report, which had to be read over the phone and painstakingly transcribed. Photos would have to wait for another day when film could be processed in the darkroom. Saturday night and Sunday, I looked at scores of pictures online and several videos showing a tornado bearing down on Wilson. One effect of this change is that people who have been spared the destruction feel more closely connected to it. Perhaps that connection will help as we try to recover from these storms with their online presence.

"April, come she will ..."

2011-04-13T07:39:00.003-04:00

Several years ago, I wrote a column rebutting T.S. Elliott's line about April being the cruelest month. After a long day of working in the yard, I sat on the deck and looked out at the newly greening lawn, the bright azalea blooms and the neat white dogwood blossoms, and I could find nothing cruel in my view, nothing to complain about. Life seemed about as good as it gets.

Now it's April again, and the azaleas glory in the sunlight filtering through the trees. The early morning sun shines in beams between the fence pickets and between the tree trunks, spotlighting the fresh, colorful blossoms. Neighbors' lawns have turned bright green, shimmering like a thick, flat emerald and highlighting the colorful blossoms all around.

After the long, ceaseless grays of winter, when we shivered against the wind and sought refuge indoors, the outdoors beckons, the colors lift our spirits, and the warmth gives us comfort. April in all its glory has quietly retaken the world from the forces of dark and gray. It is spring again, and the world stirs with hope and promise.

150 years ago today ...

2011-04-12T07:31:00.004-04:00

On this day 150 years ago, the Civil War officially began. Over the next four years, the war would kill more than 600,000 Americans, destroy the wealth and economy of the Southern states, free the African-American slaves, sow bitterness on both sides and empower the federal government as the pre-eminent political power in this union of sovereign states. As we commemorate the 150th anniversary of this war, which is a source of intense fascination by history buffs and others, debates about the origins of the war will rage on, as they have for 150 years.

The secession movement was about slavery, but it was also about economic policy. It was also about interpretation of the Constitution and the perceptions of the not-so-long departed Founding Fathers. The Constitution does not forbid secession, and it hints that "these United States" comprise a voluntary alliance. But the secessionists were determined to "cut off their nose to spite their face." Secession might not have been an act of treason, but it was was an act of foolhardiness — with tragic consequences. At the end of the war, the South was laid waste by a military policy and a personal bitterness that was unprecedented. The Shenandoah Valley of Virginia was torched from one end to the other. Gen. William T. Sherman's destructive path through the South was so cruel and complete that generations of Southern mothers threatened misbehaving children with the omen of Sherman. Although slavery was the spark that ignited the war, most Confederate soldiers owned no slaves and had no stake in the economic system that left many of them with little more economic power than slaves. My great-great-grandfather,
who died at Third Winchester on Sept. 18, 1864, had worn U.S. blue in the War with Mexico. He owned no slaves and no real estate. He was tenant farmer with five children. His widow would sign an application for a Confederate widow's pension with her "X."

The Civil War was a tragic failure of a young and fast-growing nation's political system. A political compromise of almost any description would have been preferable to the four years of unmitigated tragedy that ensued. Whom to blame? Surely, the hot-heads of South Carolina who lit the fuse in Charleston Harbor on this day in 1861 deserve a large share of the blame. The staunch abolitionists who sought immediate and uncompensated emancipation of all slaves failed to understand the investment Southern agriculture had in slave labor. Surely the moderates of both sides should have been more assertive in seeking a middle path.

I, too, am infinitely fascinated by the Civil War, sometimes described as the first modern war with its introduction of ironclad naval vessels, a submarine, repeating rifles and trench defenses. I have stood in awe on many of the battlefields and marveled at the bravery of men with no real stake in the political issues of the war who obediently met their deaths. The Civil War is worth remembering, worth commemorating and worth learning from. Moderation and compromise can avoid the tragedies of extremism.

Government shutdown looms again

2011-04-08T07:30:00.004-04:00

In less than 18 hours, as I write this, the federal government is expected to go into partial shutdown. The reason: Congress has not passed a budget for the 2011 fiscal year (that's the one we're now halfway through), and the interim spending resolution is expiring. Democrats and Republicans are blaming each other for the impasse, and it appears that a budgetary dispute will lead to a governmental closure for the first time since the Clinton-Gingrich game of chicken in the 1990s.

The thing to remember about this impasse is that it is not about next year's budget. This dispute is over the current fiscal year budget, which began Oct. 1, 2010. This budget should have been passed last summer and should have been in place before Oct. 1. Once this cat fight is out of the way, which it surely will be sooner or later, Congress faces the much more daunting task of passing the budget for FY2012, which begins Oct. 1.

Passing a budget, one can argue, is the primary, fundamental duty of Congress. But Congress has consistently failed to pass budgets on time. Call it attention deficit disorder on a massive scale. Congress can't seem to concentrate on its primary mission — setting a spending plan for the federal government. This is not a new phenomenon. I was on the federal payroll (as a Coast Guard officer) when the federal government changed from a July-June fiscal year to an October-September fiscal year. That year, we worked with a 15-month fiscal year. The extra three months, we were told at the time, would give Congress the additional time it needed to pass a budget on time. Ha!

Last year, when the FY2011 budget should have been passed, Democrats in control of Congress didn't want to pass a budget that could become a political hot potato in the 2010 elections, so they let government slide through a continuing resolution. That strategy didn't work out too well in November. With Republicans now in charge of the House and holding more votes in the Senate, they are determined to use the overdue budget to win ideological points. The year-round campaigning and 24-hour news cycles (which must be fed with controversy day and night) have made any legislative agreement more difficult. But if Congress cannot agree on how to fund the last six months of this fiscal year, how will our representatives ever find common ground to steer a new fiscal course in 2012?

Both sides, it seems to me, would be better off yielding on FY 2011 and saving their energy for the FY2012 fight. Rep. Paul Ryan has already thrown down the gauntlet with a radically different FY2012 budget plan that would fundamentally change Medicare and Medicaid and sharply reduce federal spending. The fight over Ryan's plan and alternatives yet to be revealed will make tonight's threatened government shutdown seem inconsequential. There is a growing consensus that the federal deficit and debt are much too large and must be trimmed. The fight will be over where and how to cut spending and whether to include some tax increases (or sunsetting of tax cuts), as the Bowles-Simpson deficit commission had proposed, in the budgetary solution. The battle over Ryan's plan or some alternative to it could be the political fight of the decade. Both sides should stockpile some ammunition for that fight and not waste it all on today's interim measure.

There are other ways of looking at a blog

2011-04-05T21:38:00.002-04:00

Here's a neat new feature on Blogger that my wife showed me. If you go to the URL of this blog's main page and type view after the .com/, you will discover some new ways of looking at this blog's 589 (and counting) entries.

At upper right you'll see a link that says "sidebar." Click on that, and you'll find a dropdown menu that allows you to see each blog post as a flipcard, with the headline or photo that flips, when you touch it, to reveal the date of the post. If you select "mosaic," you see a collage of all the blog posts. If you select "snapshot," you see a photo gallery of pictures from the blog (sorry, I don't post that many photographs). It's a different way of looking at the blog, and the casual reader might more easily find a topic that interests him.

Have at it!

What if we'd had talk radio and cable in 1961?

2011-04-01T08:08:00.004-04:00

John F. Kennedy's 1961 inaugural address is considered one of the greatest speeches in American history, but Kennedy had the advantage of not having to face the criticism and whining of talk radio and 24-hour cable news pundits. How would Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck react to Kennedy's speech? I can only imagine.

You know, you really have to look deeply into this speech to catch some of the obscure meaning the new president has hidden in it. Just look at this — "For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life ..." Can he be serious? Does he really think we can wipe out humanity? And as for poverty, he's apparently never heard that Jesus said, "The poor will always be with you." Is he expecting us to join hands with the commies and sing Kum-bay-ya while we give away our wealth to the stone-age tribes in the undeveloped world?

And look at this: He says he wants to "bring the absolute power to destroy other nations under the absolute control of all nations." He can't be serious! Does he want America to ask the United Nations' permission to fight back if we come under attack by the Soviet Union? That's what he says right there in his speech! "All nations" are going to control how we wield our military power. You've got to remember, this is a guy who lost his PT boat in the Pacific, but instead of going down with the ship like a good skipper, he skedaddled to a nearby island to sit out the war. Anybody whose daddy wasn't a millionaire former ambassador would have been court-martialed, but he gets a medal. And 16 years later, he wants to ask for other nations' permission before fighting back! If we do what he says, we are no longer a sovereign nation. We might as well go back to 1776 and say, "Long live King George III"!

The new president says, "If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich." Since when is it government's job to save anybody? A free society saves those who want to save themselves. It's a free market. It's competition. That's what has made this "free society" so great. But now he wants to ruin all that by declaring that we should "save" the poor. That's a contradiction, my friends. You can't be a "free society" and give special favors to one group. You do that, and it's no longer a free society.

Now here's the clincher, Kennedy wants us to "ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country." He's got it exactly backwards. Thomas Jefferson had it right: Governments are "instituted among men" to serve their best interests, "deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." We made the government. It should serve us, not the other way around.

This new president has it exactly backwards. Now you say, he's young, the youngest man ever elected to the White House, but, friends, we don't have time for him to grow up and learn his way around, maybe read the Declaration of Independence for once. We've got to do something now to straighten out the mess he's created with his first presidential speech!

I'm old enough to remember watching Kennedy's inaugural address 50 years ago. I'm glad I got it straight up without the critiques.

Class size reductions are no panacea

2011-03-30T07:29:00.005-04:00

As North Carolina and most other states face declining revenues for public education, it's a good time to take a second look at one of the sacred cows of education policy — smaller class sizes. The current debate was sparked by an op-ed column in the Washington Post by Eva Moskowitz, who runs a charter school company in New York City. Her Sunday column contends that the drive to reduce class sizes takes money away from other educational needs, including modern technology and even paper. School budgets aren't getting bigger, so when a state legislature, in its infinite wisdom and spurred by teacher unions eager to create more jobs for members, mandates a cut of four or five students from each class, money that could be used for better books, better teacher salaries, better classroom equipment, etc. instead has to go to pay for more teachers.

Throughout the last two decades, North Carolina has mandated smaller classes as a sort of guaranteed cure-all for education problems. The initial logic is compelling: Lower student-teacher ratios allow teachers to devote more time to each student. But that thinking is misleading. Does it really benefit a struggling student if his classroom has 18 students instead of 22? Does that teacher's small additional fraction of time per student really amount to anything?

As Moskowitz points out, the costs of smaller class sizes — another five or six teachers per school — can be spent more effectively on other educational improvements. This is real money. A school that has to hire five more teachers to meet state-mandated class size reductions will have to spend $200,000 or more in pay and benefits. Multiply that by thousands of schools across the state, and you can see one reason why the state education budget is in trouble. Gov. Bev Perdue, a long-time advocate of class size reductions and a darling of the N.C. Association of Educators, refuses to reconsider class size reductions as she struggles to find funding for public schools.

Class size reductions also cause problems for principals and local school boards. If class size reductions require creation of a new class in each grade, principals have to find space to hold those classes in schools that were designed based on larger class sizes. Some schools have been forced to hold classes in rooms designed as cafeterias or teacher lounges, and many counties have been forced to add onto schools or move in mobile classrooms. Even if the state covers the costs of additional teachers required to meet lower class sizes, local governments are stuck with the expense of creating the space for those classes.

This trend is based on the dubious assumption that reducing class size, even by two or three students, will have a positive impact on student achievement. The biggest impact, however, has been to increase job opportunities for education majors, and that impact, more than benefits to students, is what has driven this trend.

It's time to reconsider how we go about improving education. Moskowitz's column should be required reading.

The lector reads, and hears anew

2011-03-28T21:48:00.003-04:00

It was my turn to lector at church Sunday. I usually read the Scripture off the bulletin insert before I go to the lectern to read, but the New Testament lesson was not printed, and I had to read the appointed verses from Romans Chapter 5 without any preparation.

Reading the words, as if anew, I felt their impact like never before. Saint Paul's words came to me familiar, yet fresh, as I read:

¹ Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, ² through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God. ³ Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; ⁴ perseverance, character; and character, hope. ⁵ And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.

⁶ You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. ⁷ Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. ⁸ But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

⁹ Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him! ¹⁰ For if, while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life! ¹¹ Not only is this so, but we also boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.

Project counters as professor spreads doubt

2011-03-28T20:39:00.005-04:00

I've read a few of Bart Ehrman's books, and I went to hear him when he was at Barton College a few years ago. Ehrman is a tenured professor at my alma mater who has made a living on writing books that tweak Christian sensibilities, notably "Misquoting Jesus," "Jesus Interrupted," "God's Problem," "Truth and Fiction in the Da Vinci Code" and many others, including his latest, "Forgery." Ehrman, who describes himself as a "happy agnostic," seems to enjoy slinging provocative barbs at orthodox Christian beliefs.

The News & Observer reported today that a campus Christian group has organized an anti-Ehrman study aimed at countering the doubts the professor's lectures have cast on unsuspecting Christian students. The Ehrman Project attempts to dispute Ehrman's interpretation of the rise of Christianity in its first few centuries. Much of what Ehrman teaches is not in dispute among modern biblical scholars. The Pentateuch was not written by Moses (whose death and burial is recorded in Deuteronomy). Genesis contains not one but two creation stories, which are contradictory in several aspects (scholars surmise that the two stories came from rival branches of early Judaism, and both were included when the Scripture was written several hundred years after the stories were first told orally). The Gospels have contradictions in the telling of their most important story, the execution and resurrection of Jesus. And the synoptic Gospels (Mark, Matthew and Luke) use common sources with Matthew and Luke borrowing heavily (in some cases nearly verbatim) from Mark. There were other Gospels that did not make it into the New Testament when it reached its final form in the fourth century. And most scholars agree that not all of the epistles attributed to Paul were actually written by him.

Ehrman won his job based on his scholarship, but it's hard not to get the impression that he takes delight in stomping on the beliefs of faithful Christians. Ehrman tells his story of a strict biblical literalism form of Christianity and how his simple faith was shattered by his first real analysis of Scriptural criticism. Ehrman lost his faith, and he seems to see no reason why his students shouldn't lose theirs.

It is possible, however, to accept the findings of modern biblical scholarship without giving up the Christian faith. Marcus Borg, who also spoke at Barton a few years ago, sees the Bible as a wonderful book filled with ancient myth and metaphors, great poetry, advice for living, and a description of God's overwhelming, unconditional love for individual people. Where Ehrman sees fallacies in Scripture, Borg sees metaphor, allegory, allusion or simple human error, non of which detracts from the fundamental truth of the Scriptures. While Borg is solidly in the camp of religious liberals (he was a member of the Jesus Project), he confesses that he remains a Christian. When our church did a study of one of Borg's book a year or so ago, we found it challenging, to say the least, and we sometimes disagreed with Borg's take on a particular Scripture.

Ehrman, and to a lesser extent, Borg, seems to dismiss the canonical Gospels as non-objective, belated accounts by enthusiastic supporters of the new religion. He seems to see no reason why one of the heresies of the early church should not have prevailed, creating a very different Christianity. But such conclusions discount the simple fact that orthodox Christianity evolved over several hundred years of disagreement and study. While political power might have played a role in these debates, early Christians aspired to find the true meaning of Christ's message. The canonical Gospels might not be entirely historically accurate, but they are the best accounts we have of Jesus' life. The letters of Paul, the oldest writing in the New Testament, are the clearest explanations of Christian doctrine and faith in the early church. Most biblical scholars accept the Bible as inherently flawed but the best available resource for understanding God and understanding life.

There is a middle ground between a fundamentalist's inerrancy and Ehrman's dismissive rationality. I hope the Ehrman Project scholars find it.

Keep your money; we have ideology

2011-03-25T08:16:00.003-04:00

Can the North Carolina General Assembly, newly in the hands of Republicans, be crazy enough to reject $461 million in federal funding for rail improvements? We're about to find out.

Rep. Ric Killian of Charlotte has introduced legislation to refuse the U.S. Department of Transportation grants that would improve tracks and speed passenger trains along the Charlotte-to-Raleigh corridor. His rationale is that $461 million would be bad for North Carolina. How he arrives at that conclusion is as foggy as morning mist over a train station. Killian says accepting the grants will obligate the state to pick up part of the costs. No, say state and federal officials: the grants cover all the costs associated with the project. Well, all those danged passenger trains could hurt freight trains, he says. That's hard to figure, since the grants would provide dual tracks along part of the route and new sidings to allow trains to pass each other. Killian also thinks high-speed rail will hurt small towns that the trains speed through without stopping. Many small towns see freight trains speeding through without stopping now. Should we put up stop freight trains at every little town?

It sounds like Killian's objections are more ideological than pragmatic. GOP governors in Ohio, Florida and Wisconsin rejected high-speed rail grants, so North Carolina can join the bandwagon and, thereby, embarrass President Obama, who has been pushing high-speed rail as both a transportation improvement and an economic stimulus.

I've taken the train from Charlotte to Wilson once, and I found it a pleasant experience. If the trip could be shortened by an hour or two, it would be even more pleasant. If the federal government is giving away $461 million to spend on N.C. tracks and trains, it makes little sense to dream up excuses for not accepting it. Yes, it's true that Congress will have to borrow the money to give it to North Carolina, but Congress is going to borrow that money anyway. One state's rejection of offered grants won't change the federal deficit.

Some basic skills do not fade away

2011-03-23T20:27:00.004-04:00

These breasts have not suckled an infant in decades, but they still know how to comfort a frightened child. These hands are no longer a young mother's, but they still know the way to hold a baby. These arms still wrap a child in a protective cloak that no earthly fear can penetrate. These shoulders still can cushion the head of a sleeping child.

Some knowledge never fades. Knowing how to comfort a crying child is one. Some are born with the knowledge. They are nurturers from an early age. Some learn the skills later, out of necessity. The soft voice, the gentle touch, the rhythmic motion stay with you deep in the subconscious. Life's most frightful sounds, of an infant in distress, can be comforted away with the right voice, the right touch, the right motion. It comes back to you, like throwing a ball or riding a bike, and there is no finer silence than the quiet breaths of a baby returning to blessed sleep. Grandchildren are a time machine that takes you back to a time and a feeling almost forgotten in the distant past. You find the skills you had put away and stretch your patience beyond its bounds.

It is good that child-bearing years come early, when energy and vigor are more plentiful. Nothing can prepare young parents for the ordeal of sleepless nights, the terror of nocturnal crying and the irrationality of an inconsolable infant. But at a young age, they are better able to physically adapt. A generation later, muscle memory will return to them those skills honed long ago, but their bodies will not recover as they had the first time around. Grandparents still can comfort and quiet a crying child and find in these immutable skills renewed awe at the miracles of life.