Was Booker T. Washington Right?

                               Was Booker T. Washington Right?

                  Published in Marietta Daily Journal January 29, 2017

Why did it not bother old Dad very much when his two sons left college, without degrees, for other pursuits?  After all, Dad was a career teacher, a lover of the liberal arts, one who believes knowledge can expand one’s horizons and promote understanding of our swirling world.  Why did I not resist my two sons’ re-set?

              Oh, I remember urging them to consider seriously what they were doing.  I’m sure I said something about how a college degree can stack the odds in one’s favor.  I hope I didn’t argue that a college degree “looks good on a resume,” such a reason for learning being superficial as well as crass.

            Jeff’s major was art, and he was less than a year from getting his degree.  However, among other influences, his bull riding and love for rodeo pulled him away.  That’s right, a bull-riding art major.  A well-rounded boy, that son of mine.  His paintings and drawings adorn our house, but I take equal pride in a photograph of him riding high on a rip-snorting bull.

            Pride?  Yes, because while atop those bulls, Jeff was following his heart.  How often had I told teens and college students to do just that?  Could I now urge my own son not to?

            Reagan left college after two full years.  His comments about his classes and professors were positive, but other things beckoned.  For one, the lure of work that took him around the country and “out to sea,” even if no further than the Bahamas.

            Interestingly enough, Jeff and Reagan’s decisions came at the very time I was becoming troubled by the emphasis being placed on college degrees.  Essentially educators were beginning to say that everybody should go to college.  Nothing could be more inadvisable. 

Early this month I looked down and watched from a hotel window as two men built a Tiki hut between the hotel and the beach.  As the construction crane ascended with huge beams resting on its fork; as the two men moved hither and yon on the partial roof with hammers, a waist-strapped tool bag, and an old fashioned carpenter’s square; and as heavy steel was put in place by only two men and a crane operator, I marveled anew at both the beauty and the science of manual labor. 

            Booker T. Washington once remarked that “education has spoiled many a plow hand.”  Of course he was engaging in hyperbole.  His point, made at the end of the 19^th century, was that manual labor is a skill and a necessity deserving of honor, and that those blessed with manual skills should be acknowledged.

            As was true in 1890, so is it today.  We will always need people who can repair engines, grow crops, construct homes and schools, raise cattle, restore electricity, fell trees, and build Tiki huts.  Washington was tipping his hat to such crafts.  All of his adult life he extolled the working man, the artisan, arguing that “the worker” is the one who keeps society’s wheels turning.

 Strangely, Washington received sharp criticism from other black leaders who accused him of betraying his fellow blacks and minimizing college education.  Strange indeed since Washington was the head of the famed Tuskegee Institute in Alabama for the last 34 years of his life and worked tirelessly to provide higher education for blacks.

            Actually, Washington understood what far too many modern educators don’t: that education should include and engage the head and the hand, the head for thinking and the hand for doing.  Our emphasis on doing took a hit decades ago as schools abandoned industrial arts (or “shop”) and began pushing college degrees.

            This emphasis has caught up with us.  According to David Gelernter, computer science professor at Yale University, American colleges have become “fancy-pants institutions,” whose commodity is “not education, but prestige.”  Gelernter, like Washington, believes that many there are who want a degree who don’t want to work.

            It’s time to honor and teach manual skills again.  Produce adults who can read, write, and speak, we must.  Produce citizens who understand Western civilization generally and Americanism specifically, we must.  But Booker T. Washington’s “plow hand” – in its various manifestations – is integral.

            Prestige doesn’t feed the world. Work does. 

            Incidentally, Jeff and Reagan are both in their 30’s now, and are Godly, hardworking, skillful men with families.  They would make any parents proud and any next door neighbor fortunate.

            They also understand what is meant by American exceptionalism, “the West,” and of course, parts of speech.

Roger Hines

1/25/17

Our Second Revolution

                                                 Our Second Revolution

                  Published in Marietta Daily Journal January 22, 2017

            Well, well !  It does appear that our recent presidential election was won by bikers, plumbers, lots of doctors and their patients, welders, mechanics, electricians, small farmers, small business owners, country singers, Bill Gaither fans, pro-lifers, evangelicals, and small town America.  It was lost by political consultants, pollsters, career politicians, lobbyists, party loyalists, bureaucrats, donors, television news anchors, commentators, and socialists.  (For clarity, I will reluctantly call these two camps Group I and Group II.)

            How many in Group II, do you suppose, know who Bill Gaither is?  How many had to decide which bill or two they would lay aside and not pay this month?  How many of them go to church?  (That question doesn’t question their faith.  It questions the breadth and depth of their knowledge of the heartland.)

            Of the rise of Group I, Andrew Jackson would be proud. So would Thomas Jefferson and Margaret Thatcher.  The Iron Lady was a grocer’s daughter.  Her family lived above her father’s store.  Donald Trump has nothing that compares to Thatcher’s piercing eyes and always-ready words for the Group II of her Prime Minister days.

            As for Jefferson, his ideal of participatory democracy has been advanced.  Donald Trump caused voter lists to swell.  The political class (Group II) should ask why.

            This second revolution has surprising facets.  One is the political left’s new disdain for Russia.  The political left was always soft on communism. Even after Reagan, Thatcher, and Pope John Paul’s demolition of communism, the left was still inclined to love the Soviet Union’s old order, her socialism in other words.  The left reacted in horror when President Reagan remarked, “My policy toward the Soviets is ‘we win; they lose’.”  The left was afraid that Reagan and Thatcher were going to get us all blown up.

            But now the left pretends they just can’t stand Russia.  We know why.  The Russians, they argue, defeated Clinton and elected that mad man.  Since the losers in the election think Mr. Trump is not “legitimate,” they obviously think that those who voted for him are illegitimate as well. And unwashed.  Farmers and mechanics, you know, have to get dirty.  Pro-lifers are religious fanatics, and small town America is unsophisticated.  Still in shock, Group II cannot think straight about the election.

            (I hate to use the word Group like this, but identity politics is what those who lost understand.  I’m trying to help them.)  

            In 1988 a colleague said to me, “Have you heard this new Limbaugh guy on the radio?  You would enjoy him.” My colleague and I shared not one political or social viewpoint, but she and I were great friends.  When I tuned in to Limbaugh, I heard a national voice defending the pro-life position, resisting intrusive government, extolling the little guy, and even challenging the growing argument that everybody should go to college.

            I was amazed that any national voice was saying what Limbaugh was saying.  Why?  Because ABC, CBS, and NBC had effectively kept traditionalists like myself in the desert.  It was a desert we were resigned to.  We didn’t expect the networks to be anything but the eastern seaboard megaphone that they were.  Their painting of both Goldwater and Reagan as crazy cowboys void of east and west coast enlightenment was typical. The Washington-New York nexus plus L.A. was where all wisdom lay.

We desert-dwellers waited for the light.  William F. Buckley was singing our tune in his National Review magazine, but appealed primarily to conservative intellectuals, not to the patriotic little guy.

            With the advent of Limbaugh and cable television, a different viewpoint was beamed out.  The second revolution was waged.  Since its seeds were sown by Goldwater and Reagan, traditionalists thought that the Obama interlude would be followed by a Reagan-type leader, but it was not to be.   Sometimes you just have to be content with a doggone billionaire who is as imperfect as the rest of us.  But if he’s fearless, as was Reagan, …

            Group II is not going to be quiet.  They have been stung and the stinger stuck.  Angrily, they will strike back for the next four years.  But note the big difference between the two groups.  Review the lists above. Group I makes its living by working, Group II by talking.  I believe Group I simply got tired of all the talkers, not to mention their elitism and pro-statist, anti-individualist views. 

The proletariat has spoken and won, the bourgeoisie is apoplectic, and that’s a revolution.

Viva la revolucion !

Roger Hines

1/18/17

            

Between You and I, the English language is, like, Awesome!

     Between You and I, the English language is, like, Awesome!

                       Published in Marietta Daily Journal Jan. 15, 2017

            Awesome, indeed!  Were it not, the English language could not have withstood so much abuse and manipulation since the Angles introduced it to Julius Caesar’s “Brittania” around 450 AD.

            But let’s not be too hard on ourselves, especially on teenagers, when it comes to what we call abuse.  I realize that schools (and parents, please!) must foster Standard English.  No standard at all equals linguistic chaos.  In all things we need standards.  But language isn’t a matter of absolutism.  Language isn’t a moral issue, except maybe for ugly words which we will address momentarily.

            Language, like dress, is social adaptation.  We put it on and take it off.  On, when invited to the White House, or when persnickety Aunt Alma visits, or when sitting for a job interview.  Off, when seated at the supper table with family.  We don’t wear coat and tie to the beach and we don’t wear swim suits to church; well, I have a few guy friends who may as well.

            Anyhow, neither is language like the U.S. Constitution.  The Constitution isn’t dynamic (changing).  It is static (at rest).  The Constitution means what the Constitution writers meant.  But words don’t necessarily mean what their inventors or first users meant.  “Tyrant” first meant ruler, but because of so many evil rulers, tyrant came to mean evil ruler or autocrat.  “Rhetoric” originally meant the art of speaking.  Today it means hot air. 

            This is not to say that word choices don’t matter.  The young man who said to his sweetheart, “Your face would stop a clock,” when he meant to say, “Your face is timeless,” probably didn’t make it all the way to the altar with her.  He would have fared better with the advice of Mark Twain, “Always use the right word and not its second cousin.”

            Using the right word is a national problem these days.  Social and political pressure is causing us to call things everything but what they really are.  Educators, not politicians, are the chiefest of sinners in this area.  For instance, what in the world is a paradigm?  “Para” seems always to be positive: paradise, parallel, paramedic, but paradigm?  To me, the word is just too fluecy.  If they were alive, Mark Twain and Will Rogers would die at the sound of it.

                        Actually, language change is not proceeding at the fast rate that it did as recently as two centuries ago.  Noah Webster slowed change by suggesting we spell and define words a particular way.  Attempting to be descriptive and not prescriptive, Webster sought initially to inform his homeschooled children on how Americans were using the language.  His efforts to simplify the language for a frontier people (in both spelling and definition) caught on and his description (his dictionary) became the standard.  Before Webster came along, there was no widely recognized standard. 

            It is amazing but understandable how celebrities can affect our language.  When President Eisenhower used the word “final-ize,” America’s English teachers hit the ceiling.  Now we will be “… izeing” every verb in the language, they argued.  They were right (“privatize,” “prioritize,” and that wondrous jewel, “dis-incentivize”).  Most linguists point out that it was CBS anchor Walter Cronkite who birthed the pronunciation, Ca-RIB-e-un, that in most quarters has displaced Ca-ra-BE-un.  Celebrities are as influential as we all suspect.

            A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a word is also worth a thousand pictures.  This fact is what makes ugly, salacious words (bathroom humor, etc.) so despicable.  Words being pictures, who wants to see ugly pictures, especially when they stream from the mouth of a friend or family member who thinks there is no other way to verbalize?  (Oops, sorry about that, English teachers.)

            One definite change in English rules is the controlled acceptance of the sentence fragment.  My wife, who happens to have a degree in English, hates a fragment of any stripe.  Makes her ill.  But I say fragments do have their place when placed carefully.

            The most amazing thing about English (actually, Angle-ish) is that a nation the size of the state of Alabama gave it to the world.  No amount of imperialism or colonization could spread English as it has been spread.  Spirit, pride, and workability are what spreads a language.  English, for instance, has a greater richness of synonyms than any other language.

            So, I can accept language change, but spare me of that most atrocious neologism, “dis-remember.”  In fact, join me in my crusade to stamp it out.

Roger Hines

1/7/17

            

A New Year’s Resolution

                                           A New Year’s Resolution

                 Published in Marietta Daily Journal Jan. 8, 2016

            Whereas Americans have seemingly given up on shaping the values and tastes of their teenagers, instead yielding to whatever the culture throws at them, such as the dress (actually un-dress) of Mariah Carey during her ill-fated New Year’s Eve performance, or the vile language dished out by prime time television,

            Whereas youth culture is now the dominant culture with adults of all ages dressing like youths and adopting the musical tastes of youths, thereby capitulating to teen culture instead of setting standards to which teens could and should aspire,

            Whereas said teen culture is sanctioned by public schools as witnessed by the music played in many a school cafeteria and at time-outs at basketball games in tight, suffocating gymnasiums, music that is never Debussy (“Clair de Lune,” for instance, that would inspire the young who could and would ingest it if only schools would offer it and stop giving them what they already have), never Wagner, never Beethoven, never anything Andy Williams-smooth, all because educators have swallowed the idea that to “reach” youth they must do things that will “rock you” (pound you, actually), thereby denying teens of richness that typical teen music does not and cannot provide, much of it being barbarous and sensual, certainly not music that anyone could fall in love to,

            Whereas today dress is deemed irrelevant even at funerals, weddings, worship, etc.,  rendering all we do informal and equal in significance, mainly because many pastors, principals, and other leaders (who are not being leaders) are succumbing to youthful tastes instead of shaping them, and are teaching youth that sloppy is OK (as in flip-flops, torn jeans, shorts, hairy legs, showy derrieres), implying that a little dressing up is silly, old-fashioned, and passé, disregarding the fact that dress matters for cops, the military, and for job interviews which it wouldn’t hurt to start thinking about while you’re in high school,

            Whereas so much music is no longer even juvenile but outright teeny-bopper, and is short on thought or content but long on endless repetition of the same words and score, replete with sounds such as “oh-ee-oh-ee-oh” or “wah-ooh-wah-ooh-wah,” absent of claim, inspiration, or of anything else that evokes positive action, but is an end in itself,

            Whereas we now live in an age that normalizes the marginal, particularly with sexuality; an age in which parents are obeying their children, a reality that can be observed at the park, the grocery store line, the home; an age in which more and more parents are simply afraid to correct their children, in fear of child abuse charges; an age of utter cowardliness regarding t-o-u-c-h-i-n-g our own children, thereby rendering impossible any measure of “shock and awe,” said shock and awe being exactly what three-fourths of American children need but are not getting,

            Whereas America’s long-standing love affair with alcohol continues in spite of the death and sorrow caused thereby, as well as the spoiled careers of athletes, news anchors, entertainers, and political leaders, and as well as the stupidity and loss that results from alcohol; and being that the first drink is a rite of passage for American teens, said teens having seen their own parents drink, consider it no big deal to drink themselves, despite the destruction they know it leads to,

            Whereas public education is no longer the glue of American culture, with teachers’ unions still ruling the roost in most states and opposing parental choice; with facts taking a back seat to “critical thinking,” with multicultural emphasis gone wild at the price of western civilization itself; with education’s dark cloud of nomenclature (“strategies,” “paradigms,” “self-esteem,” “the child,” “therapy”), with memorization now considered a violation of human rights, and,

            Whereas “hope springs eternal in the human breast,” and since the only sensible action in any age is to look outward and upward,

            Be it therefore resolved (1) that we citizens will reclaim the role of parent, acknowledge the necessity and naturalness of family (everybody has a mother and a father) and point our children away from themselves and into the lives of others, (2) that we will fight any cultural influences harmful to the development of our children’s character and tastes, including music and entertainment, (3) that we will never fall for a modernity that denies ancient unchanging truths about ourselves, one being our need for parents, friends, and neighbors.

            Be it further resolved that we will be a neighbor to all whom we meet and will challenge our children to do the same, that our land may heal.

Roger Hines

1/4/17

Religious Freedom, Round 2

                                           Religious Freedom, Round 2

                     Published in Marietta Daily Journal Jan. 1, 2017

Deplorables in Georgia will probably make some noise when the General Assembly convenes.  Deplorables, remember, are the unwashed who voted for Donald Trump.  Unwashed, uneducated, unthinking … all of these fit, of course.  

            The deplorable-elite divide has another context besides the Trump-Clinton presidential race.  That context is the religious freedom and transgender issue that still simmers across the heartland.  The 80% of evangelicals who voted for Trump are sure to be emailing and ringing up their state legislators in a matter of days.  They still believe it’s indecorous and dangerous for a man to enter a women’s restroom simply because he “identifies” as a woman.

            Watch and see where deplorables and elites stand when these issues are resurrected in state legislatures across the country.  Governor Nathan Deal already stands with the elites, in this case the corporations.  Some state-level leaders like Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick are standing firm with the deplorables.  “Transgender bathrooms are a public-safety issue,” Patrick says.  “It’s about common courtesy and privacy, particularly for women.”

The elites in the religious freedom and transgender debate are, among others, the Chamber of Commerce, corporate heads, the National Football League, the National Basketball Association, and The National Collegiate Athletic Association.  The deplorables are ordinary citizens who believe that pastors should not be punished for preaching what they believe Scripture teaches, that pastors, bakers, and florists shouldn’t be required to violate their religious convictions by participating in homosexual weddings, and that parents and husbands shouldn’t have to be fearful when their daughters or wives are in a public restroom.

            It appears that Senator Josh McKoon from Columbus will again front the religious freedom cause in the Georgia Senate.  Most likely he will be aided in the House by Rep. Sam Teasley from Marietta.  Both of these men are heroes to deplorables like me.  McKoon is a lawyer, Teasley a clear-headed thinker and businessman.

            Striding confidently toward these two good men and loaded with cash will be the groups named above.  Just how representative of regular folks, who have neither time nor money to lobby, do you suppose corporate CEOs and lobbyists are?  Regarding pastor protection legislation, just how out of touch is the Georgia Chamber with Georgians who carried the state for Trump?  How is it the NCAA considers itself the nation’s moral arbiter, having pulled all 2016-17 national championship events out of North Carolina because North Carolinians didn’t want men in women’s restrooms?

            There is evidence that the Democratic Party has learned a lesson about identity politics.  Not so the NCAA, the NFL, or the NBA.  These three economic powers are still pushing gender identity politics.  They will be ready for McKoon and Teasley, though I suspect McKoon, Teasley and their comrades will be fired up and prayed up as well.  Besides, no silver-tongued devil can convince me that a majority of Georgian men who love and watch sports are supportive of the aims of the LGBT lobby.  Real men don’t like being bullied by corporations and their sycophant politicians.

            The NCAA is a huge apparatus that draws its yearly multi-billion-dollar paycheck from the sweat and injuries of poor minority athletes, many of whom have trouble passing college courses.  Yet it moralizes on gender equality.  Google Father John Jenkins, president of Notre Dame, if you would like to see the NCAA properly chastised on this issue.

            Georgia’s corporations will be geared up for the legislative session, against pastor protection and for transgender rights.  No need to name them, but one is an airline, another a home improvement store.  Another delivers packages.  Like other corporations, they like to threaten governors and legislators with “Our way or we’re leaving the state.”  They bluff.

            Time is not on the side of those who oppose the legislature’s religious freedom bills.  Ordinary people are emboldened.  As in America, the populist movement is upending Britain, France, Germany, and most recently Italy.  Moral, fiscal, and immigration issues are all involved in the emerging populism.  Joe Lunch Box, Eli the electrician, and Paul the plumber are registering to vote across America and Europe.  They want common sense and freedom from the intelligentsia so long in power.

            The world order is in flux.  Across the industrialized world populist trends are moving.  Amazingly, America’s Rust Belt is now Republican gold.  Her Bible Belt is politically energized.

            Georgia legislators know this.  I predict they will stand with McKoon and Teasley and withstand the bullying corporations and sports titans.   If so, then bully for them.       

Roger Hines

12/28/16

A Tale of Two Christmases

                                            A Tale of Two Christmases

                   Published in Marietta Daily Journal Dec. 25, 2016

            The following is a re-print of a column published in 2012.  For myself, it still serves as a reminder of what Christmas means.

            On Christmas morning of 1965 my father, my younger brother, and I followed my mother’s casket out of a small church in rural Mississippi.  The crisp, Christmas Day air was a welcome relief to our tear-streaked, hot cheeks.

            I was 21, my brother Carlton, 18.  Our mother was 65.  We both thought she was so old.  Actually, age 65 really was older then than it is now, especially for a country woman aged by Southern summer suns and 45 years or so of childbearing and childrearing.  It wasn’t children and hard work that did her in, however.  It was kidney stones.

            For years they had plagued her. Her pill bottle collection of the stones would have scared a medical student.  Several times a year Dr. Baker Austin would come from town with his gawky medical bag and administer a shot to ease the pain from the stones.

            Her death had not been sudden.  Shortly after Thanksgiving, the urologist at St. Dominic’s Hospital in Jackson had told us her kidneys were embedded with stones and that the resulting uremia was quite advanced.  The closer we got to Christmas, the more hopeless her situation became.  It was one of those long good-byes.

            I arrived home from college to be with her at the hospital the week before Christmas.  All of my older brothers and sisters had families of their own, but those living nearby had been able to take care of her.

            Death is one thing; dying is another.  The week of her dying, my mind raced back repeatedly to my childhood.  As a small child, I was a big worrier.  Because I knew my mother was so much older than the mothers of my classmates (they were the age of my older sisters), I was afraid my mother would die before I grew up.  The doctor’s visits to our house re-enforced my fear.  Although this anxiety subsided by the time I was a teen, occasional thoughts of losing my mother drove me to the vast Bienville National Forest behind our house to cry alone.

            Please understand, but at some level, I think our mother willed her death.  Despite her characteristic strength and joy of life, there was no modern bravado of “I’m gonna conquer this.”  In fact, at the height of one of her worst illnesses, when my younger brother and I were the only children still at home, she looked up at us from her bed and with a forced smile spoke quietly, “I’ve always said if God will let me live until my baby boys get grown, I will be happy.”

            Her “baby boys” were now grown. With our eyes glued to her casket, I began complaining to God, raising those self-pitying “why” questions we’ve all felt, heard, or expressed.  Within moments, however, the God to whom I complained used two things to dispel my grief.

            The first thing was the cool December air.  As it patted my cheeks, it also seemed to whisper, “Life goes on and you can too.” 

            The second thing was the Christmas Day meal our family shared.  The laughter and storytelling, so common to all our gatherings, was not abated by the loss of our mother.  Our Christmas joy amidst the sorrow was no indication of anybody’s super-spirituality; rather, it was a testimony to the power of what our parents had taught us.  In this case, it was “Death, where is thy sting? Grave, where is thy victory?”

            On another Christmas morning, this time in Georgia in 1981, I drove from my home in Kennesaw to Northside Hospital, not because of a death but because of a birth.  Our new, second son and last child, Reagan, had been born on Christmas Eve.

            Reagan came home in a Northside Hospital Christmas stocking to join his siblings Christy, Wendy, and Jeff, his countenance as fresh and happy as was his grandmother’s right up to the week of her dying in 1965.  Reagan made this Christmas a Thanksgiving as well.

            Since even Herod the Great couldn’t stop Christmas, I pray that no reader of these musings will ever allow life’s setbacks or man’s evil to stop it either.  The Christmas message is still the same: God came down.  Irrefutably, wherever this message has gone, schools, hospitals, and orphanages have followed.  In other words, enlightenment, healing, and compassion.

            As it turned out, my own two favorite Christmases weren’t too different; they both ended in peace.  Ever wondered, perhaps along with Elvis Presley, “Why can’t every day be like Christmas?”  We know that every day should be.  The Christmas message says every day can be.

            Merry Christmas!

Roger Hines

12/19/12