Year-round Fool
By David Cottrill
John 'Dubya' McCain
There’s merit to Obama’s assertion that
McCain, if elected, would, in effect, serve out George W. Bush’s
"third term." If you liked George Bush, you’re going to
love John McCain.
The two have a nearly identical view of the world
and our position in it. We and our allies (those who never question
our position on anything) are good; everyone else is evil.
We do wonder sometimes, though, about those Frogs (the French),
don’t we?
When the Puritans came to the wilderness to
establish their "Shining City on a Hill," a theocracy
which looked upon the rest of the world as the devil’s domain,
they created a mind-set that took permanent hold on the American
imagination.
During the Cold War, typical right wingers
characterized the Soviet Union as "The Evil Empire." Many
of them opposed negotiating co-existence and advocated war, saying
we could "win" a nuclear exchange. Calmer heads prevailed;
that’s why we’re still here.
Both men tend toward this simplistic worldview.
Both eschew complexity, seeing all our "enemies" as one
monolithic evil conspiracy to destroy God’s chosen nation. It
would be so much simpler, for instance, to just bomb Iran into the
Stone Age than to learn their history, their aspirations, and to
seek out ways to solicit their cooperation in resolving Middle
Eastern conflicts.
McCain said we mistook his crack about staying in
Iraq for 100 years. He’s referring, he said, to a Korea-Japan-type
presence of our troops in a peaceful environment. That begs the
question, John. How long do you propose keeping troops there while
they’re being shot and blown up?
While you’re at it, would you define what you
mean by "victory" in Iraq? And tell us why you supported
the incursion in the first place. No one has ever told us the truth
about why we’re there.
John "W" advocates dealing with almost
every domestic problem by—how did you guess?—cutting taxes.
Sound familiar? He would continue Bush’s tax cuts for the
aristocracy and reduce the tax rate on corporate profits, which,
according to economist Paul Krugman, would reduce federal revenues
by more that $5 trillion over ten years, a gap so large that Social
Security would have to be cut by three-quarters and Medicare
eliminated.
It’s interesting that a man who was tortured in
Vietnam, and who sponsored an anti-torture bill in the Senate, now
embraces the Torturer-in-Chief. Go figure.
John "W" does not differ materially
from George W on health care, environmental protection, global
warming, mortgage scamming, out-sourcing American manufacturing,
invasion of privacy, an imperial presidency, infrastructure
deterioration, and a cluster of other critical issues.
"By so unabashedly embracing the most
glaringly failed U.S. president ever," wrote Robert Scheer,
"McCain has surrendered the right to be considered an
independent candidate, judged on his own merits and personal
history. A vote for McCain is a vote for that rancid recipe mixing
religious bigotry, imperial arrogance, and corporate greed that he
stood against in the run-up to the 2000 presidential election, when
he challenged George W. Bush, but to which he now has
capitulated."
Capitulation? From a guy who’s always preaching "never
surrender"?
The Right…
Perspective
By Tom Holbrook
I was sitting with some friends the other evening
over dinner and we were doing what most people who live in a
retirement community do on a frequent basis—reminiscing about
home. Our community of The Villages is currently 65,000 strong and
growing at a rate of 250-300 new homes monthly, which means it is a
very diverse community with residents from just about every state in
our United States, plus hundreds from across the ocean. With this
diversity it is natural that we would be seeking knowledge of the
others’ hometowns and what it was like growing up in their area.
My dinner companions were from the great state of
Iowa and had spent most of their early lives doing chores on their
family farms—many of the farms consisted of several thousand acres
while others were 50 to several hundred acres in size. The crops
they helped gather in were primarily corn and hay and their memories
of gathering in the hay were a somewhat different during their
pre-teen years than mine were when my brother and I would spend our
summers on granddad’s farm during our pre-teen years.
I started talking about the horse-drawn hay
mowers, rakes and drags that my granddad used to bring in the hay
and the wheat, and they looked at me as if I were from another
planet. They had never used a horse-drawn anything in their farming
and they had no idea as to what a drag was or how it was used. I
received the same incredulous look when I told them it was used to
drag the smaller stacks of hay to the main stack pole.
Talk about a shocked look on their faces when I
asked if they had ever seen a stack pole—they looked like deer
stopped suddenly by a car’s headlights. They had never seen a
haystack, they said, and had no concept of what one looked like.
Unbelievable, I thought. I began to describe how a haystack was
constructed from the ground up. They sat, seemingly mesmerized, as I
told about dragging the smaller stacks to pole and placing the hay
evenly around the pole and one man would walk around the pole on top
of the hay and stamp down into a tight stack. As the stack went
higher so did the "stamper" and when it was tall enough he
would layer and place the hay on top so it would adequately drain
away from the pole any rain or melted snow.
They couldn’t fathom piling hay 20 feet or more
above the ground using extremely long pitchforks, and their next
question was how did the "stamper" get down. Sometimes a
few of the farms would have a ladder to lay against the stack, but
more often than not, with no ladder present, one of the men on the
ground would reach up to the man with his long pitchfork, handle
first, and even then it would only reach the bottom of the curve of
the top lacking 5 or 6 feet of reaching the top. Then the "stamper"
would carefully and slowly slide on his back down over the curve of
the stack until his foot could secure him somewhat on the end of the
handle and then slide down as the pitchfork was lowered— jumping
the last four or five feet to the ground.
Why didn’t they just use a baler my friends
asked, which is what they had used in their hayfields? An article I
recently read concerning putting up hay in West Virginia explained,
"The haystack built around a central pole indicates that
only hand methods of handling hay were used. The average West
Virginia farmer received only $1,010 from the sale of farm products
in 1950, which was the lowest income per farm in any state."
In rural West Virginia, "Punkin’
Center" specifically, balers didn’t come along till several
years later and then it was an entirely different process. Very few
farms owned their own baling and/or threshing machines and neighbors
would move from farm to farm helping each other put up the hay,
regardless of the method used. Where granddad lived, as I remembered
it, Con Johnson was the man who furnished the baler and thresher as
needed in the area.
Of course, my favorite part, which I found out
was indigenous to West Virginia and Iowa, was the harvest tables of
food provided in one corner of the field nearest the house. When the
bell was rung by the wives, who had been laboring just as hard as
the field workers, only in the kitchen, the men would cease what
they were doing and come in as one to sit down for a virtual feast
of freshly killed chicken, fried to perfection, boiled or fried
potatoes just out of the cellar and home canned green beans and
other vegetables accompanied with fresh baked bread. All that was
topped off, of course, with cold pitchers of fresh milk directly
from its source with smatterings of cream floating on the top.
Ummmmm!
Meanwhile, back to the present—all of us reminiscing about the
"good ole days" agreed that regardless of our origin and
differences in harvesting, our growin’ up years of the '40s and
'50s in this country were the most simple and most fondly remembered
days of our lives.
Wright to the Point
By Jonathan Wright
I’ve never been big on high school proms, and
nothing I’ve seen of them lately has changed my mind.
My problem with them can be boiled down to two
ironic components: (1) Parents and their kids spend a fortune on
dresses, tuxedoes, and flowers (2) only for the kids to sit or dance
in a dark, dark room for several hours with deafening music where no
one can see what anyone else is wearing anyway.
The money spent on prom preparations has gotten
way out of hand in the past two or three decades, as you may know.
Many families with the financial means spend literally hundreds of
dollars on everything from dresses, tuxedo rentals, meals, and
flowers to limousines and carriage rides.
A bit of extravagance is understandable on
rite-of-passage events like this, but moderation is the key here. I
would remind parents that your kids are going to appreciate you not
for all the money you spend on them—but rather the time and
attention you spend on them in the seemingly little things of life
throughout their growing-up years. They don’t have to have all
those elaborate "extras" to have fun at the prom, or
anywhere else for that matter.
But even at that—and I really don’t think I’m
being too simplistic about it—what’s the use of going to such
incredible expense when all you’re going to do is end up in a
large room that’s so dark that no one can see what you’re
wearing anyway? Plus—the incessant music is so unbelievably loud
all evening long that you can’t even talk to your date or your
friends without yelling at the top of your lungs.
That’s not the way television and movies show
them. They depict rooms that are well lit that afford good views of
what the kids are wearing, with music at a volume that actually
allows people to carry on normal conversations.
Not so in real life, where the only good look at
the assortment of fancy duds is afforded during the rather short
minutes during arrival and departure. The rest of the time? The
youngsters might as well be wearing blue jeans and sweat-shirts.
No amount of writing is likely to bring about any
appreciable changes in such a time-honored tradition. Let’s face
it: people are creatures of habit. This is the way it’s been for
several decades now, and certainly no one is going to change it now.
But it is indeed interesting to observe all the
trouble and expense people go to in order to be a part of a
tradition that has a number of incongruities to it. Such is life in
these United States. Enough said.
|
|
Reader
Comments - 05/17/08
Edition
|
'Support our environmental
organizations'
Dear Editor and Citizens of Greenbrier County:
Last week the Mountain Messenger put out
a nice supplement about Greenbrier County and how its tourism base
serves to generate significant moneys for our county and its
people and it got me to thinking.
What is it that brings tourists to Greenbrier
County? Many would say the clean air, wild and wonderful mountains
and rivers, long unobstructed views, and most certainly, the
unique community!
What keeps Greenbrier County beautiful? Why, it’s
the people that live here and care for this part of the world. And
who are these people? A lot of them are environmentalists who have
been working for years to keep Greenbrier County from turning into
a Belle or South Charleston. Environmentalists that fight to keep
the Greenbrier River clean and our air from becoming polluted from
a proposed Co-Gen plan in Rainelle. That fight is ongoing, but it
was a previous group of environmentalist who fought off the
proposed power plant in Caldwell years ago and there is a group
now fighting to keep unsightly 400-foot wind turbines from our
scenic and historic ridges.
These local groups and individuals are the
unsung heroes of our communities. They never get any public praise
or support from organizations concerned with keeping the dollars
coming in. They have to have bake sales and auction fund-raisers
to raise the money needed to keep up the battles. Groups like:
Mountain Communities for Responsible Energy, The Sierra Club, The
Friends of the Lower Greenbrier River, The Greenbrier River
Watershed Association, and The Appalachian Center for the Economy
and the Environment, and their lawyers who work for little
compensation to help control the possible ugly consequences.
Let's not forget all the Adopt- A-Highway folks
out there, who help keep our roads clean from those that use their
windows as trash cans!
Without these groups, I fear this area could
turn into a place much less attractive.
So the next time we consider who should get one
of those little lapel pins or dollars for advancing tourism in our
county, maybe we should think of those people and groups that
really do the untold hard work behind the scenes to help keep
Greenbrier County the way most of us want it. Realize that without
your active support they could lose the coming battles and then
the county’s future could become a sad and dark one.
Please, actively support our environmental
organizations working continuously to protect Greenbrier County.
Thank You,
Mark Blumenstein
President, Friends of the Lower Greenbrier River
Alderson
'Jesse Johnson makes history'
Dear Editor:
We have just made history again in West
Virginia.
It is very interesting that there is only one
actual political party in the state that is growing in size and
that is the Mountain Party. Four years ago, their candidate,
before Hillary, had the motto and campaign slogan of "Make
History." Jesse Johnson has been doing just that on a
continuous basis ever since. In 2008 alone, he made history as the
first West Virginian to run for U.S. President on a party with
ballot access. He made WV history again becoming the only WV
native to run for both U.S. President and Governor of WV at the
same time. He also topped that accomplishment by winning his
second gubernatorial nomination in a row, yet another historic
achievement.
Jesse's message is one of environmental
responsibility and demilitarizing the economy as well as restoring
respect for the constitution.
He made U.S. history by having one of the 2008
Democratic U.S. Presidential candidates, a former U.S. Senator,
cross party lines and instead of endorsing Hillary or Obama
endorse Jesse as a Green party U.S. Presidential candidate.
These achievements do not seem to be of
interest to the press in this state for nowhere have I seen
anything about this man's progress with his message and his
political rise, but I am sure that it will be of great interest to
every WV student of history. Children [should be] told from the
time they enter grade school that they too can grow up to do the
very things Jesse Johnson has endeavored to achieve for the
prosperity and posterity of all West Virginians. This is West
Virginia history in the making.
Mark Blumenstein
Alderson
'Follow the money'
Dear Editor:
Wind turbines destroy wilderness. Wind turbines
destroy and industrialize rural America. Wind turbines destroy
bats and birds. The 19+ projects proposed for or already built in
West Virginia will mean hundreds of thousands of bats killed each
year including endangered species. Thanks, World Wildlife Fund,
who recently announced that they are purchasing "local"
wind energy electricity produced in West Virginia and Pennsylvania
to supply their headquarters in Washington, DC.
All for nothing as wind turbines will not
produce a meaningful amount of electricity that will make a
difference in our national energy supply. Even if they did, I
would oppose them. Do we really want rural America to look like
"War of the Worlds"? All so we can have a TV in every
room of the house, or an extra microwave in the den. Protect the
environment by littering our highest ridges with thousands of
400-500 foot tall spinning structures?
Wind turbines perpetuate the extractive
economies that have historically kept areas like West Virginia
essentially poor. The vast majority of the benefits leave the
state and the local residents are left with the downside—degradation
of environment, loss of property values, health side effects of
living too close to wind turbines, loss of wildlife, destruction
and breaking up of wildlife habitat, aesthetic degradation and
loss of serenity, loss of the state’s tourist business as the
numbers of wind turbines increase. Would you really come to West
Virginia to sit on the front porch of a bed & breakfast to
watch wind turbines spin on top of the mountains? If you wanted
industrial scenery you would stay in New Jersey. The turbines will
destroy the aesthetics of our valley. The turbines will replace
the mountains as the dominant feature of the valley.
West Virginia has spent millions of dollars
building up a tourist economy. We have already ruined vast
portions of the southern coalfields with mountain top removal and
strip mining. Our highest mountains and some of the grandest
scenery remaining in the state lay along the eastern highlands
where coal is not present (and because coal is not
present). The wind industry has set their sights on devouring
these ridges and apparently the powers that be in the State of
West Virginia are happy to oblige them. The World Wildlife Fund is
going to reduce its "environmental footprint" by
destroying hundreds of miles of the highest ridge-tops in West
Virginia?
So who benefits? Follow the money. The 124
turbines that Invenergy is attempting to build over our mountain
valley on the highest ridges in Greenbrier County will net the
company over $200 million in tax subsidies, i.e., taxes they do
not have to pay. The one million or so a year that the primary
land owner, Mead-Westvaco, will get in lease payments, will help
pay their chief executive’s salary, which by the way, went up 20
percent last year to $8.6 million. The argument has been made that
this is private property and it is their right to do with it what
they want. Not while as they are spending my tax dollars on their
property!
John Nathan Stroud
Williamsburg
|
|
