Morning at the Office

General Convention

Sunday, June 19, 2011

Marxist Elephants


Thursday, Jun. 16, 2011

How Today's Conservatism Lost Touch with Reality

"Conservatism is true." That's what George Will told me when I interviewed him as an eager student many years ago. His formulation might have been a touch arrogant, but Will's basic point was intelligent. Conservatism, he explained, was rooted in reality. Unlike the abstract theories of Marxism and socialism, it started not from an imagined society but from the world as it actually exists. From Aristotle to Edmund Burke, the greatest conservative thinkers have said that to change societies, one must understand them, accept them as they are and help them evolve.

Watching this election campaign, one wonders what has happened to that tradition. Conservatives now espouse ideas drawn from abstract principles with little regard to the realities of America's present or past. This is a tragedy, because conservatism has an important role to play in modernizing the U.S. (See "The Heart of Conservative Values: Not Where It Used to Be?")

Consider the debates over the economy. The Republican prescription is to cut taxes and slash government spending — then things will bounce back. Now, I would like to see lower rates in the context of tax simplification and reform, but what is the evidence that tax cuts are the best path to revive the U.S. economy? Taxes — federal and state combined — as a percentage of GDP are at their lowest level since 1950. The U.S. is among the lowest taxed of the big industrial economies. So the case that America is grinding to a halt because of high taxation is not based on facts but is simply a theoretical assertion. The rich countries that are in the best shape right now, with strong growth and low unemployment, are ones like Germany and Denmark, neither one characterized by low taxes.

Many Republican businessmen have told me that the Obama Administration is the most hostile to business in 50 years. Really? More than that of Richard Nixon, who presided over tax rates that reached 70%, regulations that spanned whole industries, and who actually instituted price and wage controls?

In fact, right now any discussion of government involvement in the economy — even to build vital infrastructure — is impossible because it is a cardinal tenet of the new conservatism that such involvement is always and forever bad. Meanwhile, across the globe, the world's fastest-growing economy, China, has managed to use government involvement to create growth and jobs for three decades. From Singapore to South Korea to Germany to Canada, evidence abounds that some strategic actions by the government can act as catalysts for free-market growth. (See a dozen Republicans who could be the next President.)

Of course, American history suggests that as well. In the 1950s, '60s and '70s, the U.S. government made massive investments in science and technology, in state universities and in infant industries. It built infrastructure that was the envy of the rest of the world. Those investments triggered two generations of economic growth and put the U.S. on top of the world of technology and innovation.

But that history has been forgotten. When considering health care, for example, Republicans confidently assert that their ideas will lower costs, when we simply do not have much evidence for this. What we do know is that of the world's richest countries, the U.S. has by far the greatest involvement of free markets and the private sector in health care. It also consumes the largest share of GDP, with no significant gains in health on any measurable outcome. We need more market mechanisms to cut medical costs, but Republicans don't bother to study existing health care systems anywhere else in the world. They resemble the old Marxists, who refused to look around at actual experience. "I know it works in practice," the old saw goes, "but does it work in theory?" (See "When GOP Presidential Candidates Skip, They Quickly Stumble.")

Conservatives used to be the ones with heads firmly based in reality. Their reforms were powerful because they used the market, streamlined government and empowered individuals. Their effects were large-scale and important: think of the reform of the tax code in the 1980s, for example, which was spearheaded by conservatives. Today conservatives shy away from the sensible ideas of the Bowles-Simpson commission on deficit reduction because those ideas are too deeply rooted in, well, reality. Does anyone think we are really going to get federal spending to the level it was at under Calvin Coolidge, as Paul Ryan's plan assumes? Does anyone think we will deport 11 million people?

We need conservative ideas to modernize the U.S. economy and reform American government. But what we have instead are policies that don't reform but just cut and starve government — a strategy that pays little attention to history or best practices from around the world and is based instead on a theory. It turns out that conservatives are the woolly-headed professors after all.

Wednesday, June 01, 2011

An Artist Comes to the Ozarks

An Artist Comes to the Ozarks

Posted on 28. May, 2011 by admin in Features

Susan Powell

By Velda Brotherton

Northwest Arkansas has long been a mecca for artists, writers and musicians. It’s not often that one of such esteem as Susan Powell settles in our Boston Mountains.

I first met Susan when she called to introduce herself and tell me about her plans for continuing teaching after moving into the area. She has settled on the mountain west of Winslow on a farm she calls Talley Ho. It’s located just a little way from Oak Grove Community building. The moment she saw the large piece of land on the mountain ridge she knew she could cultivate her love of writing and poetry and teaching in such serenity.

After a visit to Talley Ho, I am convinced that Susan’s dream of creating a retreat for artists and teaching writing there will one day become a reality. Talley Ho is a nonprofit organization and anyone who would like to help out getting log cabins restructured and ready for use there would be donating their time to a very worthy cause. The arts have long been the last in line for funding and are in the most need of any type of assistance we can give.

Susan was born January 31, 1954, in Dr. Pillstrom’s seven-room hospital, located down the hill from Weiderkehr’s winery in Altus. A sixth-generation Arkansan, her great grandfather Smith was a state representative for Franklin County in 1920 and again in 1936. Her great grandmother was an Earp, and yes, a cousin of Wyatt’s.

She says, “What I remember most about my great grandparents, the Powell’s, is their farm and their log house and barn. I remember playing on the front porch of the house when I was two. The chink lines between the logs provided great hidey-holes for candy and little plastic cowboys, which, I’m told, I wouldn’t travel without.”

She smiles at the memory, then continues, “The old log house lasted well into the 1960′s, and I was sick to see the land divided and sold. Of course, the new owners began clearing, which meant taking down the trees and burning the buildings all that history, literally, gone up in smoke for pasture land, which eventually became a housing development.”

Perhaps her deep desire to see history preserved is one of the reasons she has rebuilt and restored the log schoolhouse which she moved from Rudy to her farm. Originally built in 1843, the old building literally had to be restored from the foundation up. But this type of physical labor is Susan’s passion. And she continues to search for old barns and log houses that she can buy and add to those she’s already restored at Talley Ho.

She comes by this interest honestly. Her Uncle Bud, Norman Powell, is a noteworthy historian and history teacher. He was a primary resource for Senator Dale Bumpers when he wrote his book, The Best Lawyer in a One Lawyer Town.

“I’m honored by the fact that Uncle Bud gave me his publishing presses,” Susan told me. Her plans for The Press at Talley-Ho include publishing chapbooks, cards, calendars, a quarterly magazine, and “Reflections of Winslow”, an historical newspaper. Susan would also like to put Uncle Bud’s press to good use by publishing family memoirs for those who want only enough copies for their family and friends.

It’s no wonder Susan grew up to become a teacher and writer. On her mother’s side of the family, her great-grandfather Jim Douglas was a businessman and a father figure for Francis Irby Gwaltney, one of the great Southern novelists. One of Gwaltney’s later novels, Idols and ​​Axle Grease, featured her great-grandfather as one of the idols. She grew up exposed to men like Gwaltney, and wrote her first poetry at the age of 5.

As a young woman, she yearned to live a regular life, rather than go into her family’s fourth-generation feed business. After a rather difficult job of convincing her family to let her attend college, she began her education at Jonesboro with a music scholarship to Arkansas State University. And she says ASU suited her plans. She was in the marching band, where they had to march in the fall if they wanted to play in the spring. With wool uniforms in the brutal heat, it wasn’t long before she added another major in Sociology and a lot of lit courses.

“Irby Gwaltney was my first writing mentor,” she tells me. “He encouraged my poet to speak out and be counted.”

Her first book, Sunshine and Shadows, came out in 1975. “I was primed to become a writer by four of the best, three of them born here in Arkansas. FIG Gwaltney, Clarence Hall, Miller Williams, and Norman Mailer were the foremost writers in my life. I was blessed to know each one of them personally, and to have their recommendations for grad school.”

Her other publications include An Act of Leaving, Sudden Departures, Women Who Paint Tall Houses and Arkansas Log Houses.

Miller Williams, Arkansas’ Poet Laureate, once referred to Powell as an intelligent teacher who is honest, has writing talent and is concerned for her students.

​During her long career, she developed two programs for community colleges in Arkansas that are recognized as creative writing credit courses.

Because she loves teaching, she has plans to begin open-genre creative writing classes at Talley Ho toward the end of May. Typically, classes would be held every Saturday from 11 to 2 each week for 10-12 weeks. If enough students show an interest, she could have another session mid-week for a second group. Each class would consist of no more than eight students. Studies would include fiction, nonfiction and poetry depending on the interest of students. Anyone interested in more information should contact her at talleyhoarts@earthlink.net.

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