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Mark Boehler, 4A • Wednesday, December 11, 2013 editor Corinth, Miss.
Books make great gifts As Christmas approaches, the shopping mall can become a shopping maul. One of the ways of buying gifts for family and friends, without becoming part of a mob scene in the stores, is to shop on the InterThomas net. However, for many kinds Sowell of gifts, you want to be able to see it directly, and perhaps Columnist handle it, before you part with your hard-earned cash for it. One gift for which that is unnecessary is a book. Books are ideal Christmas presents from the standpoint of saving wear and tear on the buyer. There are the traditional coffee table books, featuring marvelous photographs by Ansel Adams or the moving human scenes in the paintings of Norman Rockwell, both of which are very appropriate books for the holiday season. But there are also more serious, or even grim, books that some people will appreciate as they read them in the new year. One of these latter kinds of books is the recently published “Why We Won’t Talk Honestly About Race” by Harry Stein. It is a bracing dose of truth, on a subject where sugarcoated lies have become the norm. This book says publicly what many people say only privately, whether about affirmative action, Barack Obama or the ongoing obscenity of gross television shows about paternity tests, to determine the father of children born to women whose lifestyle makes it anybody’s guess who has fathered their children. Hopeful signs from the past and present are also covered, along with honest and insightful people like Bill Cosby and Shelby Steele. But the abuse to which such people have been subjected is a sobering reminder that it is still a struggle to confront racial issues. A very different book, but one with the same goal of getting at reality, despite society’s prevailing fog of rhetoric, is “Choosing the Right College.” For both students and their parents, this book can be enormously valuable. It is by far the best college guide, for both its honesty and its insights. Unlike other guides, “Choosing the Right College” is judgmental. For example, it says Boston College has a “Terrific political science department” and its graduates in “finance have a fast track to jobs in big Boston firms” but “Education and sociology departments are mediocre hotbeds of radical activism.” That kind of information not only helps when deciding which college to attend, it also helps in choosing which courses to seek out and which to avoid. Barnard College is described as having “doctrinaire leftism” that “pervades every nook and cranny of campus.” But MIT is credited with a politically “diverse or neutral” environment where the students “are too busy for activism.” Unlike most other colleges, Hillsdale College still has “single-sex dorms, with firm visitation rules” and a “very extensive well-taught core curriculum.” It also has “almost unanimous political conservatism” that may not be for everyone. Nor is its isolated location “in a very cold part of the country.” In short, the 900-plus pages of “Choosing the Right College” lay out in plain English the pluses and minuses of colleges and universities across the country, calling a spade a spade. They report, you decide what is right for you. With so many people already speculating as to who might be the “front runner” for the Republican nomination for president in 2016, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s new book, “Unintimidated” may be especially worth reading. It shows a man of real depth, and with an impressive track record that ought to overshadow the rhetoric of others, especially among the Washington Republicans. Unlike the Washington Republicans, Governor Walker has been tested and has come through with flying colors. His ending the labor unions’ sacred cow status in Wisconsin, in spite of union thuggery in the capitol and death threats to himself, his wife and his children, tells us what kind of man he is. Merry Christmas to all. (Daily Corinthian columnist Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His website is www.tsowell.com.)
Prayer for today My Father, may I never be content to pass by thy beautiful offerings and keep on in wretched despair. Save me if I may ‘be inclining toward misery. Give me the spirit of repose, and help me to confide in thee as I daily seek the strength of thy love. Amen.
A verse to share “And now, little children, abide in him; that, when he shall appear, we may have confidence, and not be ashamed before him at his coming.” -- 1 John 2:28
Reagan was right on South Africa “Apartheid is an affront to human rights and human dignity. Normal and friendly relations cannot exist between the United States and South Africa until it becomes a dead policy. Americans are of one mind and one heart on this issue.” So said Ronald Reagan in his 1986 message to Congress vetoing the “sweeping and punitive sanctions” Congress was seeking to impose. Reagan equated the sanctions to “declaring economic warfare on the people of South Africa.” His Treasury Secretary James Baker said Sunday that Reagan likely regretted this veto. But having worked with the president on his veto message and address on South Africa, I never heard a word of regret. Nor should there have been any. For in declaring, “we must stay and build, not cut and run” from South Africa, Reagan, whose first duty was the defense of his nation in the Cold War with the Soviet empire, saw not only the moral issue but the strategic imperative. In 1986, there were 40,000 Cuban troops in Angola, where South Africa was a fighting ally and backer of anti-Communist Jonas Savimbi. In Zimbabwe, Robert “Comrade Bob” Mugabe,
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having butchered thousands of Ndebele of rival Joshua Nkomo, was communizing his country. Southwest Africa and Mozambique hung in the
balance. Reagan was determined to block Moscow’s drive to the Cape of Good Hope. And in that struggle State President P. W. Botha was an ally. Second, as Reagan declared, the sanctions ban on sugar imports would imperil 23,000 black farmers, and cutting off Western purchases of natural resources would imperil the jobs of 500,000 black miners. “The Prime Minister of Great Britain has denounced punitive sanctions as immoral and utterly repugnant,” said Reagan in July of 1986, “Mrs. Thatcher is right.” “Are we truly helping the black people of South Africa -- the lifelong victims of apartheid,” said Reagan in his veto, “when we throw them out of work and leave them and their families jobless and hungry in those segregated townships? Or are we simply assuming a moral posture at the expense of the people in whose name we presume to act?”
Zulu Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi had come to see Reagan to implore him to block sanctions, as they would harm his people. The greatest forces for equal opportunity, higher wages and better working conditions in South Africa, said Reagan, are the U.S., British, French, Dutch and German businesses. Sanctions will force them to divest, depart and sell out to Afrikaners at fire-sale prices. How does this help the black majority? Calling capitalism “the natural enemy of such feudal institutions as apartheid,” Reagan noted it was not in the Great Depression but in the prosperity of the 1960s that segregation collapsed in the USA. While decrying the Pretoria regime’s repression, Reagan also attacked “the calculated terror by elements of the African National Congress -- the mining of roads, the bombing of public places” and the “most common method of terror ... the so-called necklace. “In this barbaric way of reprisal, a tire is filled with kerosene and gasoline, placed around the neck of an alleged collaborator and ignited. The victim may be a black policeman, a teacher, a soldier, a civil servant -it makes no difference, the atrocity is designed to terrorize blacks into ending all
racial cooperation and to polarize South Africa as a prelude to a final climactic struggle for power.” In his speech Reagan called specifically for Nelson Mandela’s release, and the release of all political prisoners. Not for four years would Mandela be let go. But when he was, he, like Reagan, recognized that just as Xhosa and Zulu built South Africa, so, too, had 5 million Boers and Brits. And peace between them was essential if the promise of the country was to be realized. Undeniably, the American right was suspicious of Mandela and an ANC that condoned and practiced terrorism in the struggle for power, and aligned with enemies like Moammar Gadhafi and Fidel Castro. Yet, in the last analysis, Ian Smith, the World War II Spitfire pilot and last ruler of Rhodesia, got it right: “I was right about Mugabe, but wrong about Mandela.” As for Reagan’s veto, issued in the face of a certain override during a major epidemic of moral posturing, it was both courageous and correct. No regrets needed. (Daily Corinthian columnist Pat Buchanan is an American conservative political commentator, author, syndicated columnist, politician and broadcaster.)
Life was so daily for folk artist Moseley BAY ST. LOUIS — If there is a prettier town than this, I don’t know it, Katrina scars and all. It is no wonder that when, at age 79, renowned Mississippi folk artist Alice Moseley first crossed the long bridge over the Bay of St. Louis and saw the town with its melon-colored houses, she decided she wanted to live here. And she did. For the last 14 years of her life. She didn’t just live here. You might say she did a Julius Caesar: She came, she saw, she conquered. The occasion was an art show. Miss Alice, lateblooming artist, sorting through many invitations, had chosen almost at random to attend. She had never heard of the town. She didn’t start painting till she was 60. She didn’t find her spiritual home till she was 79. Alice Moseley leaves more than a body of work. She leaves us with an example of how to live, loosening latent creativity, never giving up on happiness. She left that momentous
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art show to go home to Enid, Miss., just long enough to pack up her belongings Rheta from the Johnson house that she and her Columnist late husband, Mose Moseley, had moved, log by log, from Memphis. It once stood on the grounds of Graceland and was a gift to the couple from Vernon Presley, Elvis’ father. She never looked back. Miss Alice moved into a little blue shotgun house across from the historic Bay St. Louis depot, a building so quaint and engaging it was used as the centerpiece in a 1966 movie with Natalie Wood and Robert Redford called “This Property Is Condemned.” Her new hometown embraced the artist and her whimsical art, making for a perfect match. It’s fitting that the Alice Moseley Folk Art and An-
tique Museum, which outgrew the little blue shotgun, is now housed upstairs in that old depot, where Geralyn “Geri” Bleau enthusiastically shares the paintings and story with the public. “She died the year before Katrina, which might have been for the best,” Geri says. The thought left unsaid is the sight of her beloved Bay St. Louis leveled would have killed Miss Alice. The natural light upstairs in the depot gives the place a perpetually cheerful look, and Geri is the perfect host. Despite her happy paintings with their funny titles -one is called “Three Sheets in the Wind” and features a weaving drunk with his moonshine jug as well as a literal three sheets hanging on a clothesline -- Alice Moseley’s life wasn’t always petunias and picket fences. Her father shot himself in the head during the Depression. A young Alice found him. Soon after she married Mose, he lost his job. Alice took in washing to help pay the bills. While teaching
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English in Memphis, she took care of her mother, who had Alzheimer’s. Her last, artistically productive years in Bay St. Louis must have seemed almost carefree to Miss Alice. It must have been a gratifying period with pilgrims coming to meet her and to buy her work. One painting’s title was inspired by a conversation Miss Alice had with the janitor at her Memphis high school. “You know, Miss Alice, life is just so daily,” he said. The painting depicts a sharecropper’s shack with a man picking cotton and a mule hitched to its wagon. The tracks of work never finished are evident. The title: “Life Is so Daily.” In Bay St. Louis, at least for Miss Alice, life surpassed “daily.” It slipped the bonds of the routine and became extraordinary. (To find out more about Daily Corinthian columnist Rheta Grimsley Johnson and her books, visit www. rhetagrimsleyjohnsonbooks.com.)
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