What is This?

Communist-Hippy-Outsider

Years ago a prominent citizen of Griffithsville called me a communist, hippy and outsider and then denied it in spite of the fact that the newspaper reporter who quoted him was sitting beside him at the time. Instead of saying why he disagreed with my opinions about the corrupt political system we have in Lincoln County he called me names. The writer of the letter to the editor, in which I am called a hypocrite, is no coward. She signed her opinions and gave reasons for them.

The communists have fallen in much of the world partly because they too don’t believe in the freedom of speech. When you disagreed with the Soviet communists they would call you an enemy of the state and send you to Siberia. Until it became unfashionable you could be called a communist if you disagreed with the political system in this country. The Chinese call you capitalist-roader if you disagree with them. In every system people are scape-goated to avoid a rational discussion of their ideas.

Ibsen wrote a great play called An Enemy of the People. There is a resort that attracts large numbers of people seeking the benefits of the natural mineral water springs. The water is reputed to have healing powers. It is discovered that the water is contaminated. Of course the person who wants to make this information public is called names and shunned by his fellows. You can’t tell the truth it will cost us our jobs! We depend on this foul water to attract tourists and make a living!

Hypocrite or not, I think strip-mining is the worst thing that has ever happened to West Virginia right after the law separated mineral rights from surface rights. If we must have electricity and if we must mine we can deep mine for two hundred more years before we have to face the decision of whether it is necessary to destroy the mountains with strip-mining. Strip-mines have replaced deep mines because it is cheaper and hires fewer miners.

Is a person not free to criticize the coal industry because his salary comes from taxes? Must one bow to the almighty dollar? Would it be prostitution to say the opposite to what you believe if you did it for money? Money for education comes mainly from property taxes that the coal industry tries mightily to avoid. If you buy advertising in a newspaper should the paper be bought off by those ads or should the paper be free to say the truth as it sees it? Do the people who have the money get to say what the truth is? Is everything for sale?

Coal mining cost my dad his eye and my father-in-law his lungs. As a little boy I stood on a UMW picket line with my dad. As a young man my grandpa fought the union-busters at Blair Mountain. It was from my grandpa and grandma that I learned of Mother Jones, Sid Hatfield and Bill Blizzard.
Back then those names did not appear in school textbooks. It was word of mouth history. My family was a coal mining family. My sympathies are with the miners. People have to make a living and strip-mine jobs are often all the rich will offer.

It is not the miners; it is the mine owners who have brought this plague on us. They want quick cheap coal and they don’t care about our future. The coal companies certainly don’t care about the miners—they fight every pay raise and every benefit. Look how they have fought against black lung benefits and worker’s compensation. Look who they support for governor, Mexico Joe. Manchin had campaign t-shirts made in Mexico after saying he was against bringing out-of-state workers into West Virginia. I guess he meant that he wanted out-of-country workers. Now there is a hypocrite for you.

When I was very young we did not have electricity at Emmons on Big

Coal River. It seemed like a wonderful life to me. My Uncle Kin was a logger with a mule team on Bull Creek. Kin logged before bulldozers were used to torture the woods. Now we have electricity at Emmons but Bull Creek was destroyed by strip-mines to make that electricity. How much of the country do we destroy so the rest can have electricity and jobs? Where does it stop if profit is the only consideration? Is electricity eating us alive as it lulls us to sleep with its conveniences?

We used to have electricity without strip-mining. We used to have 125,000 coal mining jobs in West Virginia. Automation and strip-mining have reduced us to 22,000 coal mining jobs. Production has increased and the jobs have disappeared.

Flipping the light switch doesn’t cause strip-mining. They don’t have

to use strip-mined coal to make electricity. Hypocrisy would be publicly criticizing strip-mining and secretly owning stock in a strip-mine company. Hypocrisy is Joe Manchin buying Mexican t-shirts for his campaign.

I have hated strip-mining since I saw it for the first time as I rounded a curve on the way home from WVU in the mid-fifties. I couldn’t believe what they were doing to our mountains. Is it hypocritical to call ourselves Mountaineers and sing of “O Those Beautiful Hills” and tear the tops off of them at the same time? Is West Virginia like the Vietnam village that “Had to be destroyed to be saved?”

Remember on Election Day that it was Bryant Bowman and Hoss

Farley who led the fight to stop the one-school consolidation. The Stowers-Jackson-McCann faction did everything they could to get the one giant concentration camp. They now claim to be for four schools. You would have to be dumb as a sled track to fall for that. Charles McCann has been for one school, two schools, three schools and now he claims he has always been for four schools. Vote for Con Hoke!

The Jackson-Stowers-McCann faction supports Joe Manchin for governor and so do the rich business people in the state. The unions support Charlotte Pritt. Whose side are you on? I see Cecil Underwood as the back-up candidate for the rich—they will support him if Pritt gets the nomination.

For the Supreme Court the people’s candidates are Joe Albright, Arthur Recht and Danny Staggers.

Jerry West and Hot Rod Hundley

The News from Sam’s Branch

The Lincoln Independent, May 10,1996

The middle 1950’s were golden years in athletics for West Virginia University. For forty-seven dollars tuition a semester we lucky hillbilly children got those for free and from fifty yard line seats and saw Bruce Bosley knock Jim Brown backwards from the two yard line and Bosley didn’t even see him coming. He just ran into him accidently and knocked Brown backwards and on his butt. There was a picture in a Milwaukee newspaper showing Bosley holding two Marquette blockers and a running back. The picture caption referred to Bosley as a “Giant Mountaineer.” Bosley’s 225 pounds of solid, natural, Little Abner muscle was a giant in 1954 before steroids, fast food joints and weight rooms.

Sam Huff was on that team and Joe Marconi and a freshman named Chuck Howley. They played both ways then and had no facemask. At the beginning of the second quarter West Virginia would often put a whole new team on the field that was almost as good as the first team. Chuck Howley was so good that he got MVP in a Dallas-Miami Super Bowl. He played middle linebacker for Dallas, the losing team, and still got the MVP. That is the only time a defensive player for the losing team ever got MVP in a Super Bowl.

Hot Rod Hundley was a joy to watch play basketball. I was there when he ran the famous football play. Clayce Kishbaugh got the ball and put it on the floor as the center. Hundley was the quarter-back. Lined up behind were the other three players in T-formation. Hundley smoothed Kishbaugh’s duck tail hairdo, took the snap, faked a handoff and threw a pass to the man in motion who was in the corner, the shot missed but it was a hoot anyway. In a Southern Conference tournament game Hundley once made a shot behind his back from the corner, but as one wag in the crowd yelled, it was his second try. Hundley did a hook shot for a foul shot and missed. He was within one point of breaking the Southern Conference tournament scoring record. “I wouldn’t have anything to shot for next year,” was his reply to a reporter in a post game interview that was broadcast throughout the gym’s public address speakers. A fan from New York University in Madison Square Garden got such a kick out of Hundley’s play that near the end of a NYU-WVU game he went on the floor and gave Hot Rod a bear hug. He was a one man Harlem Globe Trotter—one of a kind in the history of college basketball. The last time I saw Hot Rod as a broadcaster for the Utah Jazz he was as serious as Ted Koppel.

Hot Rod was by far the most fun to watch but Jerry West was the best and he could make you very proud to be a WVU fan. Yale University was winding its way back north during the Christmas break. They had just come from finishing last in the Dixie Classic in Alabama. West guarded their best player. West would give him ten or fifteen feet and still block his shoots. I’m not sure the boy even scored. Those poor Ivy League boys were out of their league, at least in basketball.

Against St. Boneventure on national TV the Mountaineers were behind fifteen points at the half. WVU had one of the best records in the country and they were being humiliated in front of the whole nation and on their home court. West moved under the basket at a mighty six foot two or three and completely dominated the rest of the game and WVU won going away. I have seen West get the defensive rebound throw it out for the fast break and score the lay up at the other end of the court.

The American Family is not Falling Apart

The News from Sam’s Branch

May 24, 1996
You hear a lot these days that the American family is falling apart. Well our family is falling together. We visit children and grandchildren clear across the continent, we go to weddings and family reunions, comfort one another at wakes and send presents to nephews and nieces. A whole bunch of families are not falling apart. My Barker clan, descended from Ethyl and Charlie Barker, will get together July 4 for a reunion of relatives from as far away as California, Florida and Texas. We will get together on the farm in Emmons that narrowly escaped becoming a coal processing plant. The more we get together at the farm the harder it is going to be for the dogs of the coal industry to get hold of it. I hope those little nieces and nephews grow fond of our piece of the earth.

Labor Secretary Robert Reich spoke out against the war between the states. This new war between the states is an economic war. If we give Toyota more tax breaks than Kentucky we get the new plant. If we let the pulp mill people pollute our water, smell up our air and get a million dollars¹ for every job they promise they will be nice enough to cut down all our hardwood forests for as far as you can drive in a day. If we cooperate they will rape us rather than some other state. We give away the store.

My brother was a plant manager for Bell and Howell. Puerto Rico offered them all kinds of tax breaks if they would move their plant down there. After the tax breaks expired they closed the plant and left Puerto Rico. When Toyota’s tax robbery expires you can bet they will threaten to move their plant to Ohio or Kentucky if we don’t kiss their butt. Everything we get from these companies is short-term. They really don’t care about us unless we are cheap. Is this the welfare state that Terry Headley² was writing about last week? Welfare for the rich is a zillion times greater than welfare for the poor, yet a lot of people gag on the gnat and swallow the camel.

I am very concerned about the gripe-line that I hear about in the Lincoln Journal. It appears that vicious rumors can be called in by anyone and it will be printed as is. I would be embarrassed and ashamed to be a part of that. The callers are obviously cowards because they will not own up to their opinions. The publishers and editors who allow such damaging poison-pen trash to be printed are obviously of low character or of low intelligence or both. Do Lloyd Jackson, Wiley Stowers and Charles McCann³ endorse this social McCarthyism. It is obviously their paper—does it reflect their character?

Trashy journalism makes me think of ice hockey. Man, what a sport! It is as brutal and hateful as any bunch of Lincoln County Republicrats. In Phoenix recently, my son, his family and I went to a minor-league hockey match. Hockey in Phoenix is ice in hell. What must it cost to keep that water frozen when it is one hundred and ten in the shade? Hockey is like so-called professional wrestling except hockey is for real—they ain’t faking.

In hockey there is no pretense at sportsmanship. In football, as violent as it is, you will often see an opposing player help his downed foe get up. In Hockey if the referee isn’t looking and your opponent is on his knees you knock him on his ass. The fans boo every opposing player as they are introduced, they sing dirty little songs about how much the goalie sucks if he lets a puck get by him. There is not a Black or Mexican face in the audience. People are lined up two hundred deep to get an autographed pair of boxer shorts of the county sheriff who brutalizes prisoners by housing them outside in tents in the desert heat.

Trashy journalism and violent hockey make me think of blatant politics. I loved the Lloyd Jackson quote in last week’s paper. Lloyd allowed that it was nice having Earl Ray Tomblin⁴ speak for airport locations in Lincoln County cause by golly the chairman of the Port Authority, Fred Van Kirk is also commissioner of highways “and often has to go to Earl Ray for funding.” Buddy he tells it like it is.

Burn the Flag

In Phoenix, Arizona, during spring break I went to the art museum and saw the exhibit on the American flag. It was an excellent exhibit, by most anyone’s standards, until the end. One of the last pieces was a new American flag draped in a new toilet commode. The flag was clean and toilet had never been used. It qualified as art if art is supposed to arouse emotion. At the very end of the show was a book on a podium where people could write comments. But to write comments you would have to stand on an American flag that was on the floor in front of the podium. I couldn’t do that. I stood to the side and made my comments in the book.

Since birth we are taught to respect the flag almost as if it is a living god. Is the act of saluting the flag a form of worship? The Jehovah’s Witnesses have been persecuted, imprisoned and even tortured because they will not salute the flag. They see saluting the flag as worshipping a false god. They put God above country. Do they have the right to refuse to salute the flag?

Is a person’s flag their property? Can they do anything they want to something they bought with their own money? Should you respect an American flag that says “made in Taiwan” on the label? Is it desecration to draw a flag with crayons and then burn it? What if you just imagine burning a flag—should that be punished?

Can you wrap your garbage in a flag? Many people have done worse on an old newspaper that used the flag in an advertisement. If it is patriotic blasphemy to put the flag in a toilet commode is it also desecration to use the flag to sell toilet paper? Is it desecration of the flag to burn a newspaper that has the flag printed on its George Washington day advertisement? In the sixties it gagged self-proclaimed patriots to see irreverent young people wear the flag sewn to the rear end of their blue jeans. Not too long ago a group of veterans presented the man who dresses as Uncle Sam with a pair of underwear that the American flag on it.

Does saluting the flag make you a patriot? Has there ever been a corrupt politician who didn’t very publicly salute the flag at every opportunity? I think it was H. L. Mencken⁵, a noted journalist, who said that the first thing a scoundrel does is wrap himself in the American flag. Crooks from Richard Nixon to Dan Rostenkowski⁶ have always made sure that the American flag was on the screen in their TV speeches. When dishonest, thieving politicians have their prayer breakfasts in violation of the Biblical injunction to pray in secret they make sure the American flag is on display. The money hungry TV evangelists usually connect what they are doing with the flag and patriotism. Are Christianity and American patriotism the same thing? Can you be a Christian and not a patriot?

If I wouldn’t stand on an American flag would I also not stand on a flag of Britain, France, Mexico, Canada, China, and Vietnam? If you had been raise in Nazi Germany would you have saluted the swastika? If you had been raised a loyal citizen of the Soviet Union would you have respected the hammer and sickle?

Our flag is a symbol of freedom to us but to millions of Vietnamese it must be a symbol of terror. Was the American flag on the uniforms of the soldiers at the Mai Lay massacre? Did the soldiers carry the flag when they slaughtered the Indians at Wounded Knee? Did the police have the American flag on their sleeves when they were beating Rodney King? There is a famous picture of a White man trying to spear a Black man in Boston with the sharp end of an American flag pole.

Why does the flag seem to represent war? Does the flag represent Food for Peace, the Peace Corps and disaster aid around the globe as much as it does the carpet bombing of Hanoi? Would it be appropriate to have children walking with the flag spreading flowers in parades? Does the flag need an armed guard in its own land? Does the flag represent those who believe in the freedom of speech or those who want everybody to speak the same party line?

The American flag has been a welcome sight to millions of people all over the world. The prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps must have loved the sight of our flag as our soldiers liberated them from a living hell. The starving people who have received food with the American flag on the box will no doubt be forever grateful to us.

Is our flag strong enough to stand for all freedom, even the freedom to desecrate the flag?

The principles the flag represents deserve allegiance, not the flag itself. I like the last line of the pledge, “with liberty and justice for all.”

The American flag has been a welcome sight to millions of people all over the world. The prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps must have loved the sight of our flag as our soldiers liberated them from a living hell. The starving people who have received food with the American flag on the box will, no doubt, be forever grateful to us.”

It has been pointed out by other writers that flag burning is offensive to almost everyone but so are KKK parades and Louis Farrakhan’s racist speeches. The first amendment protects everyone’s right to outrageous opinions, no matter how offensive. If everything that is offensive loses constitutional protection there will be a long list of behaviors that will become unconstitutional.

What the flag symbolizes is strong enough to keep us free. You can’t destroy the meaning of the American flag by burning it. So burn away if you choose—it is a free country and no fire can destroy liberty and justice for all.

“I prefer a man who will burn the flag and then wrap himself in the Constitution to a man who will burn the Constitution and then wrap himself in the flag” Craig Washington. “If you have a weak candidate and a weak platform, wrap yourself up in the American flag and talk about the Constitution” Matthew Stanley Quay

School Prayer, HMOs and Big Government

Doctors, hospitals and health insurance companies killed the Clinton health plan claiming there would be no choice of doctors. The health insurance companies spent $100 million trashing universal health care. Clinton lost, the medical and insurance professionals won. Now people are stuck with HMOs that force them to go to a primary care doctor tyo get permission to go to a specialist. The HMOs make it worthwhile to the doctor to refer as few as possible to specialists. With less referrals to specialists the HMOs make more money and can pass some on to the primary care doctors. The old kick-back scam. The defeat of Clinton’s plan left us with nearly forty million people without health insurance.

I don’t understand why we need the insurance companies in the health business. Let’s eliminate the middle man and have a single-payer system. By ptting health insurance under the government we eliminate the insurance company and HMO profit. Some HMO presidents are making over a million dollars a year at out expense. Do they own the politicians, or what? It is alarming that our health care programs are run by people who just want to get rich.

Since 1979 health insurance companies have given $180 million to congressional campaigns. Nothing more than a bribe to keep them on the gravy train.

Medicare, Social Security and the Military

The News from Sam’s Branch

June 16, 1996
They say Medicare will be bankrupt by 2001⁷ and that Social Security will go under by 2029. The Republicans immediately call for cutting benefits. The answer to both these problems is simple. Force price controls on doctors and hospitals and bring prices down. Put all medical services on a non-profit basis. Let no one get rich off the health of our people. Get health insurance companies clear out of the picture. Adopt a single-payer system like they have had in Canada for decades.⁸ Then grab the military budget by the throat and cut it in half—we would still have the strongest military in the world. Put that money from the military into health care and social security. Anyone who has ever been in the service knows that you could do the job with half the money. The military budget is to the country what the super tax credit is to West Virginia—the answer to all our money problems.⁹

The Republican Congress voted to give the military $7 billion more than the military requested. If they had given them $7 billion less than they requested that could be $14 billion available for Medicare and social security every year! If that isn’t enough cut the military even more. At $7 billion less the military would still have $251 billion. If you could spend a thousand dollars a day it would take a million days to spend just one billion dollars. That is about 2700 years!! To spend $251 billion at one thousand dollars a day would take you over 680,000 years. And the Republicans have the nerve to suggest cutting Medicare and Social Security benefits. Throw the rascals out! But be careful not to replace them with Republicrats.