A Wacky Idea

By CHARLEY REESE
President Bush is proposing that everyone in Louisiana who lost his or her home to the recent hurricanes be given up to $150,000 by the federal government.

What about the people who lost their homes in the recent hurricanes who live in Texas, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida? For that matter, what about the people who have lost their homes to tornadoes?

It's when the president says things like this that I wonder if he is not out of touch not only with reality, but with the words coming out of his mouth. Louisiana was devastated, but no more so than Mississippi. Port Arthur, Texas, was also flooded. In the previous year's hurricanes, homes were destroyed and people killed in Florida.

Are all those homes and lives less worthy of attention? Other than the fact that the media seem to find it more convenient to report on New Orleans than on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, the devastation in Mississippi is just as bad as in New Orleans.

This is the most flagrant and lamebrained example of pure political pandering that I've seen in a long time.

What happened to the concept of equality before the law? How can you justify helping one group of people and not helping another group who suffered identically? If the federal government is going to write checks to people who lost their homes to hurricanes, then it must write checks to everyone who lost his or her home to hurricanes. And why discriminate against people who suffered from tornadoes, floods, hailstorms, wildfires and earthquakes?

Of course, before Americans became addicted to the welfare state, it never occurred to our ancestors that it was the responsibility of the government to make us whole after a natural disaster. Why should the people of Oregon be taxed to pay for the damage suffered in Louisiana? I suppose for the same reason the people of Louisiana are taxed to pay for pork-barrel projects in Oregon and to subsidize the subway riders in Washington, D.C.

What is Bush trying to start, the War of the Pork Barrels?

All the federal government should do is repair any federal infrastructure that was damaged. Since it sells flood insurance as a favor to the private insurance industry, the government should see to it that it pays its policyholders promptly and fully. Other than that, it should butt out.

As for the private property-insurance industry, it should be damned from every pulpit and subjected to the most rigorous regulation by every state legislature and the U.S. Congress. Of all the despicable businesses, the property-insurance industry has shown itself to be worse than most. It is the reason most homes have not been rebuilt. The insurers are playing the game of, "Oh, this is flood damage, not wind damage."

They can argue that in New Orleans, but on the Mississippi Gulf Coast there was no flooding. There were only wind-driven waves, and that's wind damage. Whether the wind blows a tree through your house or a 20-foot wave, it's the wind that is causing the damage.

In America's finer days, before preachers started making six-figure salaries and, like university presidents, became primarily fund-aisers, they were not afraid to condemn sinners by name from the pulpit. Today, it's all pap.

As for the president, I think he needs a long vacation. He hasn't been making much sense lately. Washington gossips report that the White House staff is terrified by his frequent temper tantrums. He has scuttled the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, he has failed to secure our borders, he has botched the Iraq War, he has failed to find Osama bin Laden, and he thinks that swapping American jobs for mangoes from India is a big foreign-policy success.

I would even favor him taking a sabbatical and spending the rest of his term on his ranch in Crawford. We'd probably all be much safer if he would do that.

(Charley Reese's column appears weekly in The Crewe-Burkeville Journal. Return to this blog to read the Reese columns that are not published in The Journal. He writes three columns weekly.)

A Cousin's Death

CREWE, VA, March 4, 2006 -- Many cousins, most of them being from my mother's side of the family, have blessed and enriched my life. This was especially true of Donald.

You had to know him to understand why this was so.

I also probably was drawn to him because the Donald in his name had been taken from that of my father.

But more than his name, Donald was a special cousin, for he was a special human being. I am not supposed to tell you, my readers, this. I am supposed to let you figure it out from what I write. But this exercise is self-therapy for my hurt, and I am hurting a great deal even as these little words are being written.

When I learned of Donald's death in early March, 2006, I nearly lost it. I nearly lost self-control, for I could not believe he had died in North Carolina. Oh, Grim Reaper, tell us it is not so. Get to hell out of our midst. Tell us that Donald, the Donald we remember with the distinct smile covering his handsome face, is still among the living.

When news of the death reached me at The Journal, I had just the night before returned from North Carolina. Even while in my native state on something of a mission of mercy for my sister, we had not been told of Donald's passing.

The trip to North Carolina had forced me to finish last week's paper by Monday night, February 27, and rise early and head to Carolina with my younger son, Mark, on Tuesday morning.

The whole exercise forced me to miss the biggest story of the week, the special election in which Jane Brown won out in a field of four to continue as Nottoway circuit court clerk. But even it I had been here, I would not have gotten that story because of press deadlines. We print the newspaper on Tuesday afternoon and to break that routine causes more trouble than most folks can understand who have not walked in our shoes here.

Anyway, I got to see my sister, whose husband recently was taken from her by a heart attack, and to attend to some business relating to her welfare. It had not gone well, but the outcome of the trip had turned out about the way I had thought it would.

I had gotten to show Mark around the little Carolina mountain town where my sister and I grew up. It is a railroad town, too. We were overwhelmed by how prosperous and well-kept it appears. Don't tell me that all small towns have to be down in the dumps like some we all know painfully about in our part of the world.

Mark and I decided to head back to Crewe by mid-afternoon. It meant that we would travel about 650 miles in one day. But Mark, for all his 18 years, is a trooper, and he drove us home to Crewe.

We got back to town in time for me to help with labeling, inserting, and delivering last week's edition.

Then on Wednesday, still hurting from my experiences the day before involving my sister, I learned of Donald's death. I felt as though I had lost two relatives in the same week.

Donald's death truly tore me up, as we once said in the western North Carolina mountains.

I thought of Dr. Warren Lambert's words at Berea College all those decades ago. He was delivering a eulogy on Morris Gay, a student firefighter who had died in an accident while answering a fire call near the campus.

Dr. Lambert, who looked like the Confederate generals he admired, said, "We don't cry for the dead. We cry for ourselves."

Yes, I cried for my loss -- for not seeing Donald for so many, many years. My career took me across the American South while Donald moved from the mountains to Henderson, N.C. We lost touch.

But the distance and the years never could diminish what he meant to me. He was more than my cousin. He was my friend. He was like the brother I never had.

When I was drafted into the Army in the heart of the Vietnam War, he was on hand to raise my spirits. He already had served in Uncle Sam's green machine, having pulled a peacetime tour in Japan before 'Nam heated up.

"You're going to have to run a lot," he told me about boot camp. "You'll be fine. You'll be a good soldier."

I carried his words with me throughout my service, especially during infantry school at Fort Bragg.

Before all of that madness, Donald and I would get in his car and take long rides across our native Mitchell County, which is not far from the Tennessee border. We solved all the world's problems and never could understand why we were not in charge of the country's affairs.

He, his two sisters and three brothers had come up the hard way on Jakes Branch Road outside Spruce Pine.

His dad, my uncle Audie, had died when he was child, leaving his mother, my Aunt Mary, to raise a large family with little money. She was too proud to seek public assistance and not much was available in those hardscrabble days.

Mary, my mother's sister, was a saint, a true saint, and the family managed every crisis and forged ahead.

The trauma of losing his dad and living without many creature comforts did not diminish Donald's happy nature. Fact was, his household overflowed with the things that truly matter -- love and patience and understanding, and cooperation.

He drew people, including the ladies, to him.

He did well enough in school and finished at the old Harris High School in Spruce Pine. After the Army and a broken marriage back home, he headed off to Henderson for a new start.

When I worked at a service station back in Spruce Pine in the summers between academic years at Berea, Donald often would show up sporting a new vehicle and wearing the face of the richest man in the world. God had blessed him with a cheerful soul despite the ashes of a tough childhood.

The last time I saw him was years ago when we all gathered for his mother's funeral in Spruce Pine. She, like my mother a few years later, died of colon cancer.

A younger brother, Dewey, died in recent years.

It is clear to me that Donald did well for himself in Henderson. He became a designer for Sara Lee. He rose to be a deacon in his Baptist congregation.

With some people, even if you don't see them all the time, you feel them in your life. He was one of these folks. Even death will not rob his presence from my life. But the death of Donald Edward Burleson has impacted me more than any other deaths since those of my parents in the mid-1980s. I am haunted by Dr. Lambert's words: "We don't cry for the dead. We cry for ourselves."

But in this case, I also cry for my cousin Donald.

Amen.

(Originally Published March 9, 2006)

Redskins Trade Ramsey

I love Joe Gibbs, and who am I to question the coach who has done so much for the Washington Redskins and been enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame? But for the life of me, I never have understood why he never liked Patrick Ramsey.

The Redskins never gave the kid a chance, especially during Gibbs' two-year comeback tour. Now the team has traded the former first-rounder to the New York Jets. I hope he goes there and makes the Redskins and Coach Gibbs rue the day they let him go. This is the shabbiest episode in Joe Gibbs' storied career. Ramsey has a cannon for an arm and the courage of a Marine.

The Redskins, meanwhile, are left with an aging quarterback who unlikely can make it through an entire season, a journeyman backup, and an expensive backup yet to play in a regular season game. The crucial piece in the team's expected Super Bowl run is missing, that being the triggerman. I am very disappointed and hope I am very wrong.

See The Journal this week for a full column on this story.

Shelby Foote More Than Footnote

When Abraham Lincoln died in 1865, his secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, said," Now he belongs to the ages."

The sentence was prophetic and it has endured as well.

Much the same tribute could be paid to historian and novelist Shelby Foote, who died last week at the age of 88.

Certainly, if the cantankerous writer does not belong to the ages, than his signature work, "The Civil War: A Narrative," belongs there.

His trilogy, 20 years in the making, brings alive the seminal event of American history, the event that continues to shape us as a people in ways most of us never will fully appreciate nor understand.

Petty and inconsequential critics cracked that it took Mr. Foote longer to write his epic narrative of the war than it did to fight it.

He, as always, had just the right rejoinder: "There were a good many more of them than there was of me."

His trilogy should have won the Pulitzer Prize or the National Book Award, but politics and maybe no little envy entered into those selections. The snub little mattered to the proud Mississippian whose grandfather had lost the family plantation in a poker game. It little mattered to the courtly Southerner with wonderful manners and matchless eloquence with pen and tongue. The Pulitzer and National Book Award crowds needed Mr. Foote more than he needed them. He had the readers with him and such powerful advocates in the history community as the influential C. Vann Woodward who praised Mr. Foote for his "impressive narrative gifts and dramatic purposes."

The three-book set -- "Fort Sumter to Perryville," "Fredericksburg to Meridian," and "Red River to Appomattox" -- brought him three Guggenheim Fellowships, a Ford Foundation grant, and a ton of royalties. So the shrewd Southerner did not make out too badly in all of this. And the arrival in his life of documentary maker Ken Burns in 1985 was icing on the cake.

Mr. Burns was planning a PBS special titled simply "The Civil War." He and his producers planned to have 75 or 80 historians talking or reading material in the background. Then one day noverlist and poet Robert Penn Warren ("All The King's Men") called Mr. Burns and said, "Talk to Shelby Foote right away."

Anyone old enough to remember Mr. Burns' PBS show over several nights in 1990 understands that Shelby Foote was the star of that show. His Southern voice and the depth of his knowledge of the war captivated the nation.

Mr. Foote and Mr. Burns did an immense service to the country in that documentary. It brought alive the war to a generation that may not have much studied it before Shelby Foote stepped into their livingrooms through the magic of television.

Mr. Foote later was to tell Brian Lamb, of C-SPAN, "It was kind of strange. I had two sessions at my house with Ken and his crew, and I took them to Shiloh and I took them to Vicksburg and we did a little filming at Shiloh and a little at Vicksburg, but most of it was done right there in the sitting room at my house. I think he had maybe four hours of tape out of which he took what he wanted."

Mr. Foote would have been unable to play that significant national and regional role had he not had the discipline anf skill and love he brought to the Civil War. He had visited every battlefield in the war and more. Since his boyhood when he heard family stories about his great-grandfather, Capt. Hezekiah William Foote, of the Confederate Army, had commanded cavalry at Shiloh he had been mesmerized by the war.

"Any Deep South boy, anyhow, and probably all Southern boys have been familiar with the Civil War as a sort of thing in their conscience going back," Mr. Foote said a few years ago. "I honestly believe that it's in all our subconscious. This country was into its adolescence at the time of the Civil War. It really was; it hadn't formulated itself really as an adult nation, and the Civil War did that. Like all traumatic experiences that you might have had in your adolescence, it stays with you the rest of your life, certainly in your subconscious, most likely in your conscience, too. I think that the Civil War had the nature of that kind of experience for the country. Anybody who's looked into it at all realizes that it truly is the outstanding event in American history insofar as making us what we are. The kind of country we are emerged from the Civil War, not from the Revolution. The Revolution provided us with a constitution; it broke us loose from England; it made us free. But the Civil War really defined us. It said what we were going to be, and it said what we're not going to be. It drifted away from the Southern, mostly Virginia, influence up into the New England and Middle Western influence, and we became that kind of nation instead of the other kind of nation."

As a young novelist, he began assembling an enormous personal library on the war and read and reread it, especially after Random House contracted with him to write a one-volume history on the conflict. Mr. Foote quickly found that was not his cup of tea, that the history had to be three volumes. Bennett Cerf, then head of Random House, agreed. It took Mr. Foote five years to complete the first volume, another five years to finish the second, and an entire decade to complete the third book. He began working on the project in 1954 and completed it in 1974.

He later would say that he wrote 500-600 words a day. He refused to use a typewriter and word-processors and computers had not arrived on the scene during most of his writing process. Instead, he used an ink-dipped pen, the kind one once found in U.S. postoffices. He wanted to feel the words, the flow of the words, he later said.

This most admirable soul was a man of paradoxes, to be sure. He immersed himself, for example, in the works of the great writers, Shakespeare, Tacitus, Thucydides, Gibbon and Proust, even his lifelong friend Walker Percy, but Shelby Foote was an indifferent student at the University of North Carolina and dropped out after two years. He could write some of the most stirring prose about military engagements but he received a dishonorable discharge from the Army because he took an Army Jeep to date a girl near his base. He openly opposed racial segregation in his native state when it was dangerous to do so, but he honored the Confederate flag until his death last Monday, June 27, 2005.

But when he took pen in hand, he brought everything, every experience, every loss, every triumph, every hour spent walking the Civil War battlefields to the table. He made the reader or listener believe he had been there with Lee and Grant and their kindred spirits.

And so his readers, in a sense, really were there. Listen to his words describing Gen. Robert E. Lee after his surrender to U.S. Grant.: "Grief brought a sort of mass relaxation that let Traveller (Lee's beloved horse) proceed, and as he moved through the press of soldiers, bearing the gray commander on his back, they reached out to touch both horse and rider, withers and knees, flanks and thighs, in expression of their affection."

He would laugh when asked why Southerners are considered by Northerners obsessed by the events of 1861-1865. Again, he gave the perfect answer: "You remember the fights you lose."

In wake of his death, several commentators have said that he was the last of a breed, but let's hope not. There is something special in a human being pursuing the truth of an event and using every faculty in the soul to capture it for all time in the light of truth.

That is part of what he did for all those years, and glory to his name and his work. May his example continue to inspire those to follow him to seek the standards he doggedly set.

(Originally Published July 7, 2005)

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Turning 61 And Dad

CREWE, VA -- When my late father turned 61 in 1975, I thought he was ancient, although by that point I was beginning to settle into a newspaper career and to gain responsibilities of my own.

This is being written on Monday, June 13, 2005. If I am still around on Saturday, June 18, I will hit 61. Unbelievable. Where have the years gone? I don't really want to know the answer.

For all of the years, I do not feel any older than I did back in 1975. I really don't. But my body, no doubt, would tell a different story.

My point is not the years, but the life in my father's years, what he made of them. He made a lot of 70 years.

I come to this subject in the shadows not only of a birthday, but also of Father's Day that arrives on Sunday.

Most of us tend to idealize our dads. In my case, Donald Charles Gunter has been dead for nearly 21 years, but he lives in my life daily. I feel his presence all the more as I get older.

Among the most enduring memories of him was his kindness. He was not much on sermonizing. He simply lived his kindness and decency. He loved newspapers and words, but he let his actions speak for him.

I recall getting really angry at him because he did not slash out at those who had done him real wrong. I cannot recall a single instance when he struck back in anger. And I can never remember when he said an unkind word about another human being. Unkindness simply was not in his soul.

I laugh sometimes when my sons get angry at me for not striking back at those who truly tried to do me in in Crewe. They and their mother cannot understand why I don't get fighting mad when some malcontent attacks me verbally in a letter to the editor.

I obviously have gotten much angrier about some folks and circumstances than my dad would have. But I ask myself, "How would he have handled the situation?"

He would have gone about his business and let people say what they will say, and he would not lower himself to their level by being mean-spirited.

The older I get, the more I come to that conclusion. My father knew what he was about, although admittedly he never had to endure the crucible his only son faced in Southside Virginia. But he faced some other problems far more difficult than those we have encountered here.

My mother, who had Irish roots, took a different approach to life. She was ready to wage war on those who did her wrong. I got some of that trait in my psyche, too, and it is in constant turmoil with the temperament clearly inherited from my father.

There is a time for each temperament -- for kindness and for anger. But on this Father's Day's I remember my dad for his kindness in little and big things. And I can say without fear of embellishing it that he was the finest man I have known. He never made a lot of money. He did not belong to a fancy country club or hold political office. He was a working man, a Roosevelt Democrat and a Southerner. He always considered himself as just one of the common men of his generation. But he was an extraordinary man, the kindest human being I have known, and I always will be proud to be the son of Donald Charles Gunter.

Crewe Homecoming

CREWE -- The Crewe Homecoming Committee recently voted to change the date of the annual Crewe Homecoming celebration from the traditional third weekend in August to May. This year's event will be in on Mother's Day weekend, May 12-13, 2006.

There remains some controversy about the change, but the committee was motivated by the hot weather in August that has tended to reduce attendance at some Homecoming activities in recent years.

Mayor Henry Crittenden said this week that the number of vendors working Crewe Days probably would be down from previous year because they have made earlier commitments.

Please watch this blog for more details on the event as they are reported in The Crewe-Burkeville Journal.

Ben, Jane Powers Honored

CREWE -- A non-church-goer was recently overheard to say of the Rev. Ben Powers, "I really like him. He is so nice"

Those few words speak volumes of the man and minister whose congregation and the wider community celebrated here Sunday evening. The Reverend Powers and his wife, Jane, were honored for their quarter of a century of service to the ministry of Christ and the church and to the congregation's community outreach.

The Powers' achievement is, as an ad promoting their reception put it, "incredible."

During an era when too many churches change pastors as often as South American countries change rulers, Crewe Baptist has clung to their minister. A church with some of the community's most influential movers and shakers, Crewe Baptist understands what it has in this man and his lady.

A minister is charged with representing Christ to the faithful, but he (or she) also is charged with reaching out and ministering to those who have not darkened the church's doors in years. Ben Powers does this and then some. It does not appear to matter that those to whom he is counseling or ministering belong to his congregation. He carries the same sense of Christian love and charity to all.

But to have survived for a quarter of a century in one of the two or three mainline churches in the town underlines that this man of faith understands and likes people and knows how to deal with controversies without becoming the controversy. And to do all of this and more in Crewe, where many people wear their sensibilities on their sleeves, well, it is as the ad said, "incredible"

Ben Powers is the longest-serving minister in the 124- or 125-year history of Crewe Baptist Church. He leads the largest Baptist congregation between Petersburg and Lynchburg.

In an interview with The Journal six years ago, the Reverend Powers said his grandfather, who was a Free Will Baptist minister for decades, was one of his main heroes.

His grandfather surely would be proud of Ben Powers for his 25 years at Crewe Baptist. For there is, and pardon the judging here, a sense of constancy in this man's life and career. He is a man of loyalties and decency at a time of treacheries and indecencies.

His loyalty and love shine across the decades. After all, he married his childhood sweetheart and they remain the first family of Crewe Baptist.
Ben Powers, who started out to become a civil engineer, still sees himself as a bridge builder between and among people.

He became minister at the church on March 1, 1981. He probably still has a copy of his first sermon here. He titled it "Why Have You Sent For Me?"

At the risk of trivializing God, perhaps it was God who sent for Ben and Jane Power, that God said the names of these two mighty and constant servants of the Gospel and knew why they should be called to Crewe to serve Him and to serve believers and summon the non-believers to take up their cross and follow Christ.

Little Window On The World

A delightful web site that calls itself Little Window on the World had nice things to say about The Crewe-Burkeville Journal. The site may not be much maintained these days, but we still strive to live up to its words, which were as follows:

"NEWSPAPER (Local) -- Crewe-Burkeville Journal 434.645.7534 or 7550 107 W. Carolina Avenue, Crewe VA 23930 Some small newspapers can be little more than publications that filter the "news" per their owners personal values and/or cater to predominant local prejudices. The weekly (every Thursday) Journal is a physically small but delightful, well balanced newspaper that has an appealing positive feel to it. It covers the local news quite competently, and occasionally runs national stories with local impact. "Down home" Letters To The Editor and the Echoes From The Past decades-old-Journal-news column are fun to read. With a national subscription of $27/year ($17 locally), it is a pretty good buy too. (International publication #: ISSN 8755-9463"