For Newt Gingrich to have floated to the top of the Republican presidential slough tells what a dismal swamp it is. As most of the other alternatives to Mitt Romney have turned out to be dim bulbs, the former House Speaker may look bright by comparison. But the appearance of his brilliance blinds people to his malignant ambition, demagoguery, opportunism, and deeply flawed character.

Former Rep. Kenneth A. “Buddy” MacKay Jr. of Florida, who served six years in the U.S. House of Representatives with Gingrich, considers him “the most amoral man I ever met.” During his nearly three decades in public life, I never heard MacKay disparage the character of anyone else.

Many Republican leaders share Democrat MacKay’s aversion. Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma says Gingrich lacks “the character traits necessary to a great president.” Conservative columnist George Will denounced Gingrich’s “vanity and rapacity.” David Brooks wrote in The New York Times that Gingrich “has every negative character trait that conservatives associate with 1960s excess: narcissism, self-righteousness, self-indulgence and intemperance.”

Gingrich’s serial adultery — which he now conveniently claims to repent — is not the half of it. He’s also a serial hypocrite. He hounded Rep. Jim Wright out of the Speakership and out of the Congress for an unethical book deal but then snared one of his own, for $4.5-million, that he was forced to return. The Ethics Committee brought other charges and the House reprimanded him by a vote of 395 to 28.

After impeaching President Clinton for a sexual affair with a staffer, Gingrich admitted to the same thing. More recently, he denounced the lending agency Freddie Mac but took $1.6-million for giving the firm “strategic advice,” a euphemism for insider lobbying and influence peddling. He once favored the individual health insurance mandate that he now decries.

Gingrich exudes contempt for the Constitution and the separation of powers. His threats to ignore Supreme Court decisions he does not like and to encourage Congress to subpoena judges to explain their opinions are the campaign planks of a would-be dictator.

In Congress, Gingrich was chiefly responsible for degrading American politics from civil discourse to civil war. That’s how he forced out the previous Republican leader, the very decent Bob Michel of Illinois, and set out to destroy the Democratic opposition (the contagion spread nationwide, not excepting North Carolina). Anyone who purports to deplore Washington as it has become and then votes for the person who made it so will be no less a hypocrite than Gingrich himself.

(Dyckman a retired associate editor of the St. Petersburg Time who lives part of the year in Waynesville. His books on Florida political history include Reubin O’D. Askew and the Golden Age of Florida Politics; His Century: The Courage of Governor LeRoy Collins; and A Most Disorderly Court: Scandal and Reform in the Florida Judiciary. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

I normally veer from airing my opinion as a columnist in the editorial pages on issues that I cover as a news writer in the news pages for The Smoky Mountain News.

In my world, and in the worlds of most respectable reporters and editors, news is news and opinion — well, the less said about that the better. It’s easier to pretend that we were born into this world devoid of any such thing (opinion? what’s that? never heard of it) than to try and explain the more accurate, but deeply complex, truth. That yes, of course, we news gatherers do have opinions about the stories we cover.

We are human; humans have opinions.

But, as the wise judge instructs the jury, our job isn’t to be devoid of opinions: that’s impossible. Our job, whether jury or news gatherer, is to set those opinions aside. For the jury, the goal is to render a verdict in accordance with law; for reporters, the goal is to report stories based on facts.

All that said, and I now want to comment in this column on two recent news topics I’ve covered as a reporter for The Smoky Mountain News.

One is Swain County High School’s successful capture of its eighth state football championship. As a 1984 graduate of that fine institution, and as a former Maroon Devils marching band member who sat in the stands and froze her rear end off year after year during numerous championship runs, I can’t help but give a shout-out to the school. Go Maroon Devils!

(And for the record, I’d like everyone to note that I do know how to use an apostrophe correctly. My headline to the contrary last week, a single Devil most certainly did not play all those football games this season.

In an “oh, oops” moment, the apostrophe wondered away from its rightful place in the headline — Devils’ — to inside the “s,” hence the embarrassing, and suddenly singular, “Devil’s.” Hey, there’s no doubt the football team is amazing, but it is made up of many devils, not simply one devil.)

Winning a state championship is a big deal. And I’ll tell you what’s an even bigger deal in my book — that Swain County did it with Coach Sam Pattillo placing such a decided emphasis on academics.

Earlier this year, former staff writer Colby Dunn (who, in a moment of insanity, accepted a job in Holland as an au pair. I kid you not, she’s in that fine country at this moment learning to speak Dutch and shepherding about two towheaded Dutch children) wrote a terrific story about the Swain football team’s reading program.

Pattillo teamed with English department head Dawn Gilchrist-Young, both fine products of Swain County High School — I’m certain neither of them would put an apostrophe on the wrong side of the “s” — in developing the program. Each summer, team members read books intended to both capture football players’ interests and enhance these student athletes’ reading skills.

Pretty cool, that’s my opinion; and even cooler now that the Devils up and won a state championship. Perhaps other area schools could institute the same reading program.

Story No. 2: I wrote this week about “preppers,” or people getting ready for they don’t know what — the Rapture or the next blizzard, they’re not sure, but by golly they aren’t going to be caught unawares and unprepared.

This is a hard subject to strike the correct tone on.

It’s difficult frankly to write about preparedness without making the people involved sound like a bunch of nuts. But also to write an article that does not stray into the nutty side that does permeate this topic.

Anyone reading this column on an even occasional basis must realize that I’m a true believer in sustainable living. I like being able to do for myself, to know how to raise vegetables and animals, and to have adequate knowledge and skills to take care of me and mine. I’m currently living in an all-solar powered house, I have a garden, I take care of livestock, and I preserve food. Does this make me a nut? Well, OK, I may be a nut, but not because I believe in sustainability. That’s perhaps the sanest part of my personality.

Sustainability is fun, sustainability is friendly to this planet, and sustainability is smart.

A small, and to me at this point in my life, an amusing confession: Before I abstained from drinking, one of my biggest concerns when it comes to sustainability was being absolutely sure I would have an adequate supply of drinks even if the world as we know it ended. I learned to brew a variety of alcoholic beverages, from moonshine to wine. I, at least, wasn’t going to go without a drink even if the world’s supply lines of booze suddenly went dry.

I noticed brewing books being sold in Carolina Readiness Supply in Waynesville. This makes me suspect that I wasn’t the only person paddling that particular sustainability boat. I’ve also noticed in recent years that some seed catalogues have taken to offering tobacco seed (often amazingly touted as “organic,” as if that mattered when you smoke cigarettes) for the home grower.

I guess in the event of apocalypse the human race will go out with a smoke in one hand and a drink in the other. Even in these days as a committed nondrinker and nonsmoker, I admit that sounds like a pretty damn fine way to say goodbye.

Bottoms up, a puff of smoke and The End.

(Quintin Ellison can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

When I turned 50 last week, I did not feel any older and certainly no wiser, but I did realize one thing I hadn’t really noticed before. I have now reached that age when people begin qualifying certain kinds of compliments, thus giving them a rather unappealing aftertaste. What should be sweet tastes instead like a spoonful of Pepto Bismol.

“Wow, you look pretty good for 50.”

“Fifty, huh? Well, you still get around pretty well.”

“Fifty and no heart attack yet? Not bad, big guy.”

You know you are getting on up there when people begin telling you that you look “much younger” than you actually are. Nobody says to a person turning 26, “Gee, Larry, you don’t look a day over 15.”

For one thing, it probably isn’t true. For another, and this is worse, it isn’t necessary. Celebrating your 26th birthday is grand. You’ve got all your hair. You can hike more than two miles without stopping to have a sandwich or a cigarette … or just a breather. You still get carded at Ingles, and you don’t care whether the wine you are buying will go with the lamb, because you’re not HAVING lamb. You’re having Taco Bell, which boasts a cuisine that matches well with a vast variety of wines, including the $3 bottle you just purchased. You get hangovers, but they last 12 seconds.

You have the nerve to dread turning 30. But not too much — it’s a LONG ways off, dude! You have a beanbag in your living room, and posters in your bedroom. Except for your parents and girlfriend — if you have one — no one expects much from you, since you’re only 26. You change jobs more often than you change your sheets, and no one thinks a thing about it. You get 12 phone messages a day and answer two of them, and it’s fine. You’ve maxed out three major credit cards, financing a trip to Cancun on one of them, and it’s all good. You’re 26. There’s plenty of time to be responsible later on.

When you turn 50, you get cards that make clever jokes about getting old, or not-so-clever jokes. You get sympathetic nods, or wide-eyed stares of feigned disbelief, or hearty slaps on the back. Damn, 50! Well, as one of my friends in the disbelieving camp put it, “you’ll always be 35 to me.”

See, that’s just the thing. I still feel 35 and think of myself as 35, until some 35-year-old doctor calls me “sir,” or I get a magazine from AARP along with my Rolling Stone in the day’s mail, or my wife reminds me that it is time to schedule that colonoscopy.

Sure, I can see some obvious signs of aging in the mirror every morning. My hair, what there is left of it, seems tinted with just a bit more silver each day, and the salt in my whiskers is making a hard charge these days to surpass the pepper, which is why I shave more than I once did. I can see a few more wrinkles around my eyes, and if I lay out of the gym for too long, my body revolts in the most violent and unseemly way, leaving me feeling about as firm and attractive as a bowl of cottage cheese. When I finally get up enough gumption to go back to the gym to resume working out, my body revolts again by aching for days. It hurts to wash my hair. It hurts to flip an omelette. It hurts to put the car in drive.

But there is a greater pain, still: the consequences of the desperate measures people will take to look 35 because they feel 35 or want to BE 35. For most men, such measures may include frequent trips to the tanning bed, hair plugs (or the more recent trend of shaving their heads, which I used to do), and various forms of overcompensation that are most likely associated with a paralyzing fear of sexual impotence. How about that new Harley Davidson? It sure is big and powerful, isn’t it?

Let the record reflect that I did not buy a motorcycle for my birthday. I celebrated at home with the family, and then went out for Japanese food. I took a nice warm bath in the Jacuzzi and put on a T-shirt and the new fuzzy pants my wife got me for my birthday. We put the kids to bed, danced in the living room for awhile to Billie Holiday, and then, well, let’s just put it this way. Not too shabby, considering I’m 50.

(Chris Cox is a writer and teacher who lives in Haywood County. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

I helped raise three turkeys this year. They were named Thanksgiving, Christmas and Extras. These turkeys were intended as the centerpieces for dinners on those festive occasions, plus one was targeted to fill a particular corner of the freezer.

There was trouble with this plan from the beginning.

Turkeys, I discovered to my dismay, are very personable. They took to greeting me happily with great joyful noises whenever I appeared in the barnyard. These shouts of delight were irrespective of whether I had food for them or not — they seemed to recognize me as an actual individual. And an amazingly wonderful, perfect individual at that, perhaps the most wonderful, perfect individual in the whole world, or maybe even the entire universe.

The turkeys’ effusive hellos, no matter how bad the day, always cheered me and provided nice boosts to my self-esteem.

Made a mistake in a newspaper article and wrote a correction that day? The turkeys didn’t care — I was AMAZING in their eyes. Got in a quarrel with a coworker and showed my … well, you know. In turkey land, all was forgiven — I was that WONDERFUL human being they loved beyond all others. Forgot an important appointment? No problem, the turkeys still shouted undying love when I, that PERFECT person they ADORED, came into eyesight.

This in total contrast to the chickens: Despite having helped raise them from tiny chicks to large hens or roosters, these ungrateful creatures still eye me untrustingly, like I’m a potential predator. They stay well out of reach and squawk hysterically when I draw near. I’m merely a food-dispensing machine, and a scary one at that, to the chickens.

And, as much as I enjoy the goats, sometimes I’m suspicious that is all I am to them, too — the person put on this earth to bring them food and water and to scratch places they can’t reach.

Not the turkeys: they visibly enjoyed having their heads petted. They would squat in front of me, making conversational noises while I rubbed their great ugly crowns, almost purring in happiness. I never knew that birds could enjoy affection and seek it out — but these three turkeys did just that.

I believe the turkeys came, via mail order, in April. Until Thanksgiving was almost upon us I successfully pretended to myself that I would be able to harvest them. (Harvest, you understand, means to chop the turkeys’ heads off, and pluck them or skin them, and generally ready them for the dinner table. “Harvest” is a nice euphemism for the word “murder.” Or for clear-cutting trees, for that matter — the word harvest has a sustainable sound that softens the actual deeds for the doers.)

At some point, just before Thanksgiving, I faced up to the fact that I wasn’t going to harvest these turkeys. That left three problems to solve:

One, we wouldn’t have a turkey for Thanksgiving. But that wasn’t too big a deal — we bought a turkey instead, and will probably do the same for Christmas.

Secondly, I don’t need and can’t afford turkey “pets” in the barnyard. Frankly, I wanted to keep them very badly, which leads directly into problem three — and this was a problem that couldn’t be solved without significant distress.

This particular breed of turkey was specifically selected, genetically, to gain weight quickly. This means the turkeys convert their feed to meat in a hyper-efficient manner. When you farm or homestead, heritage breeds are a nice concept, but the reality is the longer you feed an animal intended for the table, the more money you spend and the less you make. It is easy to end up on the losing end unless you opt for these newer, fast weight-gaining breeds.

Ironically enough, we hadn’t actually intended to get meat-specific bred turkeys. But the order was mixed up and our heritage turkeys went to someone else, a friend we’d placed an order with to save on shipping. By the time the situation was sorted out we were too attached to our individual turkeys to consider switching them.

Our turkeys, the meat-specific bred ones, were by Thanksgiving having increasing difficulties walking. Their bodies were too large for their legs. This meant I could keep them as pets, yes, but only at a great price to the turkeys. They would suffer, and one day soon, they likely wouldn’t be able to walk at all.

This left me with one single, unhappy solution. Since I couldn’t kill them myself, someone else would have to kill them. The three turkeys were given to friends in Balsam who raise and slaughter chickens and turkeys for a living. We carted them over there and said our goodbyes to the trio — Thanksgiving, Christmas and Extras — this past Saturday.

I know they planned to kill the turkeys the next day. I’ve not been able to block the realization that my turkeys are, by now, very dead.

There’s absolutely no doubt that the turkeys were killed in a humane and quick fashion. But dead is dead, and my hands are no freer of their blood than if I’d killed them and cooked one up for Thanksgiving — I just ate a turkey that I didn’t know on an individual basis, that’s all.

And by choosing to skirt the actual deed I took the cowardly way out.

So here’s what I got out of keeping turkeys — a whole heaping on my Thanksgiving plate of internal turmoil. Here’s hoping your experience this year was less dramatic than mine.

(Quintin Ellison can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.)

One fall when I was 9 years old, just about the time WWII ended, the Jackson County Elementary School was visited by a truck loaded with magic and magicians — at least, it seemed that way to me. When we peeped through the window on the second floor, we saw a truck with an elaborate sign: THE CAROLINA PLAYMAKERS! That sign meant absolutely nothing to us, but the people who climbed out of it left us stunned. There were lots of bright colors, parasols, soldiers, women with wigs, some folks that appeared to be Oriental and a guy wearing an aviator’s helmet. Maybe it was a circus!

Within a short time, we were herded into our creaky old auditorium and our teachers began to check the attendance book calling our names out so that they echoed. Nobody had escaped; in fact, all of us were filled with curiosity. When Mr. Cope, our principal, announced that a troupe of actors and traveled from Chapel Hill to perform a play for us, we were even more perplexed since we knew nothing of a place called Chapel Hill, much less what a “troupe of actors” might be.

There was a lot of coming and going, and I sat with my best friend, Charlie Kay, listening to the thump and rumble behind the curtain. Ah, but then the music began; the curtain opened and we were astonished into silence for the next hour.

I’m sure that the majority of us had never seen a play and perhaps that is the primary reason for its effect on us. It was a dramatization of James Hilton’s Lost Horizon, and we were transported from Sylva to some mystical village in the Himalayas (Shangri-La) where people wore huge coats and monks went about chanting. Gradually, we understood that the pilot was in love with this girl in a magnificent dress, and when the two walked together in the moonlight (yes, suddenly it was night on the stage!) and we learned that these people never died ... if they never left the village.

But, the pilot did leave, and in the final scene, he flew away. The beautiful girl stood on the stage and waved as her boyfriend flew away, the sound of his plane going from a great roar to a faint hum.

When the play was over, the Carolina Playmakers invited us on stage, where we were amazed to see that the set was painted cardboard. When I asked to see the plane, a stagehand laughed and pushed a piece of cardboard into an electric fan.  “ERRRRROOOOOMMMM!” it said.  That was the day I began to dream of magic and the art of making fantasies and dreams which could get up and walk around.

When I went to college, I learned how to build stage sets, hang lights and construct my own Shangri-La.  When I began teaching high school English, I took one-act plays to regional and state festivals where I saw my students not only win awards, but become young people who had learned to speak with confidence. Invariably, their experience with drama had a positive effect on their character.

Now, I come to the “real” purpose of describing the night a 9-year-old kid visited a cardboard Shangri-La. For some 40 years, drama and theater enjoyed a privileged position in North Carolina arts. North Carolina was praised for the quality of its theater and playwrights like Paul Green crafted plays that were admired by the rest of the country. Educators readily acknowledged that drama played a vital part in developing confidence. But now, something has changed.

We still have extravagant musicals and thriving summer stocks that “entertain” thousands of audiences. The majority of our small towns have active community theaters. However, for several years now, something has been quietly draining away. Perhaps this is only happening in my region. Is my experience unique? Is it not true that one-act drama festivals have disappeared?

Since I am a playwright, I am especially sensitive to the fact that grassroots theater seems to be endangered. More than a decade ago, I could go to any literary festival and find a covey of playwrights. Back then, I might even be asked to teach a workshop. When it comes time to hand out the accolades, there are glowing awards for novelists, poets, even essayists, but I haven’t seen the work of a dramatist acknowledged in a very long time.

A decade ago, although resources for playwrights were limited, I could still find a handful of organizations that promoted North Carolina playwrights and drama. They are gone now, although Google can still find a few of their abandoned websites floating somewhere in space.

What happened? Did the state of the economy eliminate theater as an art form? Certainly, North Carolina is still vitally alive in terms of the “other literary arts.” Novelists and poets are thriving. Universities and arts organizations continue to sponsor celebrations and book signings, but drama workshops and awards are missing. Why?

Maybe they are still out there and I am just “out of touch.” Or maybe a one-act play competition for high school students has been rendered an anachronism. It could be that today’s young people are content to watch from the audience. Perhaps they are all watching “Dancing With the Stars.”

Frankly, I had rather restore the magic that the Carolina Playmakers brought to my school some 60 years ago. I would like to see that dilapidated truck pull into a parking lot in Graham or Clay counties where a group of elementary kids watched, transfixed as the moon and stars over Shangri-La are carried inside. Would that old magic work now? Would the kids cut off their cell phones long enough to watch “Lost Horizon”?

Yeah, I think maybe they would. I would like to think that if we restored the event, they would come. Am I wrong?

(Gary Carden is writer and storyteller who lives in Sylva. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

Newspaper people are a special breed. As a type, these are individuals who tend toward the eccentric and are decidedly off-kilter; perhaps, dare I say it, are even slightly mad. They are ill suited for employment anywhere except at newspapers, or perhaps in a pinch, on a prison work crew.

Take The Smoky Mountain News gang in Waynesville. Now this is an odd bunch. The Smoky Mountain News people are odder even than Peggy, a woman I remember with great fondness from my years at The Franklin Press. Peggy had a take-no-prisoners outlook on life.

Peggy worked in layout for The Franklin Press. These were pre-computer days when newspapers were physically laid out by a now antique method known as “cut and paste.”

This was my first on-staff newspaper job. I wrote feature articles part-time and held a newly created position at the newspaper, optimistically dubbed “Quality Control,” to work out my remaining 20 hours a week.

Ken Hudgins, the publisher of The Franklin Press, was quite the wordsmith and something of a perfectionist. Ken’s manners were so gentle and kind it was difficult to recognize that he was a man ruled by a deep inner need for facts to be correct and words to be used properly. That’s a difficult need to have in the newspaper business, and one that resulted in this wonderful man suffering excruciating pain when our inevitably flawed, twice-a-week newspaper published.

I believe Ken dreamt of publishing the perfect newspaper. Just once, The Franklin Press would roll off the printing press and land on his desk free of blemishes. This dream newspaper would be absent embarrassing typos and factual errors, and no one would call and complain (or even worse, write a letter we were subsequently forced to print) about “pubic” instead of “public” meetings, or how we’d misidentified their loathsome children — again — in photo captions.

Ken searched high, low and in vain for an employee who would join him in this noble quest to create the perfect publication. Unable to find an actual individual, he instead settled on creating this new position of “Quality Control.” I suspect Ken hoped that by simply designating someone Quality Control they might rise to the grand title and fulfill his expectations.

Quality Control would equate to never printing corrections or letters critical of the paper, because nothing henceforth ever would be wrong. Ken, I believe, was convinced that Quality Control was the answer to life’s many woes.

Why I was hired as Quality Control I can’t imagine. My qualifications consisted of six months freelancing and of a couple decades of sleeping soundly through elementary, high school and university-level grammar courses.

My duties, Ken explained chippily during those first days when his glasses gleamed pink in color, were to place a pica stick across pages to ensure headlines were perfectly straight; and, when I spotted a misspelled word in an article, to use an X-Acto knife to cut out the offending letters and replace said letters with the correct ones.

It must have been evident early on that I was ill suited for a job so meticulous and grinding in nature. Ken endured six months or so of my ineptitude before, saddened but resigned, he moved me fulltime to writing. Ken eliminated Quality Control altogether, in sheer frustration, I suspect, at my total inability to come anywhere near his vision of what that person (something along the lines of the famous fact checkers with The New Yorker magazine) would do for The Franklin Press.

But, I mustn’t wander. Back to Peggy, who helped in layout. Peggy, I remember, became incensed at the editor. I’ve forgotten now the exact cause, but I’m fairly certain that Scott was being a smart aleck, as Scott — may he rest in peace — so often was.

Peggy was a woman of few words, so on this day when her temper quickened, she didn’t think twice — she twirled about and threw her layout knife straight toward Scott. I remember his eyes growing large and round as he looked at the knife, now stuck quivering into the wood of the layout table perhaps an inch at most from his leg, and mere inches from some even more tender parts that I am sincerely convinced Peggy was aiming for.

But I wander within a digression. We were chatting about The Smoky Mountain News crew, which in their latest demonstration of eccentricity, last week pooled pennies together to buy a rat-like thing for the office. This is a hamster, or a gerbil, or something equally small that my cats would enjoy killing.

This rat, or gerbil or hamster or whatever, has been christened Scroto Baggins. It resides in a cage in the Waynesville office. Except for 20 minutes or so at a time, when Amanda the bookkeeper or Margaret the graphic designer places Scroto into a clear plastic round thing, and he runs about in it, rolling this ball onto one’s feet and over computer cords, and generally making a nuisance of himself or herself while Lila, who is supposed to be selling advertising to help support my writing habit, squeals how cute he or she is.

(No one’s quite sure of the little creature’s sexual identity, hence the gender bending. This confusion, frankly, isn’t that unusual in the newspaper business, either.)

Is it any wonder that the newspaper you hold in your hands is flawed and imperfect? In what other industry besides news, pray tell me, could this happen? Office rats aren’t found in doctors’ offices, restaurants or in finer retail stores; at least not rats that are loved on and named.

Picture this: Here we poor writers are, trying to create Great Literature for the masses while being attacked by a rat named Scroto. It’s enough to send one scurrying in search of Quality Control.

Or, short of that, a good rat trap.

(Quintin Ellison can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

There’s more than just a little irony the official Small Business Saturday promotion that encourages people to spend their money with small, independently owned businesses on Nov. 26 rather than only with big box retailers. Irony or no irony, though, the message is still relevant — small businesses are the engine of our economy, particularly in areas such as Western North Carolina. Let’s hope consumers remember that truth throughout the entire holiday shopping season, not just on this big kickoff weekend.

Now to the irony. The Small Business Saturday promotion was started by American Express, the huge credit card company that controls almost 25 percent of the credit card market in the U.S. That said, let’s give the company kudos for getting on a bandwagon that many of us have been riding on for years.

Whether it’s this Saturday, Black Friday or anytime between now and Christmas, dedicate a portion of your holiday shopping to local, independently-owned small businesses. These businesses generated 64 percent of net new jobs over the past 15 years and employ just over half of all private sector employees, according to the Small Business Administration.

When you spend money with these businesses, a higher percentage of those dollars stays in the community. Those business owners and their employees are your friends and neighbors.

During the recent Waynesville election, this issue of local vs. big box was a campaign issue. Some argued that the town’s land-use policies inhibit economic development by making it hard for standard big-boxes or chain stores to build. Alderman Leroy Roberson captured my sentiments exactly when interviewed by our newspaper. Here’s an excerpt from that story from last month:

“Cracker Barrel is not my main concern. We are getting lots of good restaurants without Cracker Barrel,” Roberson said. “I want to create a climate that provides for small business. The big chains can take care of themselves. They have millions of dollars they can invest.”

Roberson said it is appropriate to ask chain stores to respect the towns they come in to.

“They should at least try to become a part of the community, in terms of ‘OK, this is the appearance you have, how can I fit into this?’ Not ‘This is the way we do it everywhere else and if you don’t like, we are not coming,’” Roberson said.

Roberson’s philosophy fits nicely with the argument I feel compelled to make every holiday season. It’s the local businesses — whether art galleries, auto parts stores, restaurants, and local and regional retailers — that make our mountain communities such special places to live. Keep that in mind as you make your spending decisions during the holiday season and throughout the year.

(Scott McLeod can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

Editor’s note: Dawn Gilchrist-Young teaches English at Swain County High School and was the 2011 winner of the Norman Mailer Writing Award for High School Teachers for her short story “The Tender Branch.” The winner receives a monetary award and a summer 2012 stay at the prestigious Norman Mailer Writer’s Colony in Massachusetts. Gilchrist-Young accepted the award during a banquet Nov. 8 in New York City. These were her remarks.

The distance between Southern Appalachia where I grew up and this Mandarin Hotel ballroom is not so great. Nor is the distance between an afternoon in 1981 reading a high school essay to my parents and, a few weeks ago, receiving a call from Lawrence Schiller telling me I had won the first Norman Mailer Writing Award for High School Teachers.

The distance is not so great because there is a bridge created by words that can cross even the widest divides. In creating this award for teachers, the Norman Mailer Center has allowed teachers passage on that bridge. And in giving this first award to a public school teacher, the Norman Mailer Center is questioning those who would be keepers of the gate, questioning the status quo in our governing bodies that seems bent on impoverishing public schools and preventing their movement from the less advantaged land on one side of that bridge to the proverbial land of opportunity that is always just within sight.

For many of us in this room, there lives in our memories someone whose words encouraged, cajoled, irritated and chided us into fulfilling our potential. For me, it is the words of a teacher at a tiny  elementary school telling me he had sent a story I had written to a state competition. It is the words of another teacher at Swain County High School telling me I might have talent if I worked at it. And it is my own words heard in the voice  of yet another high school teacher there reading a critical essay I had written to the class. These teachers’ words live in me as I try to say something fresh and true to my own classes of  seventeen and eighteen year olds at the same high school. These words live in me when I sit at my desk and write. These words reside in me just as I hope the words I write, the words I speak, will take up residence in those who hear and read them and provide for them a means of bridging economic and societal gaps.

From the rural child living in a singlewide trailer to the urban child living in an apartment in the projects, from the mountain student I teach who has applied to Vanderbilt and Tulane, to the one who hopes for community college and who did without heat or electricity for much of last winter without complaint, what my students want is what we all want: that someone will attend to our words, that someone will show us how to use those words to establish our dignity and uphold the democracy that may move us to a better place.

And that is what I think is so wonderful about this award that I receive tonight. It does not offer the sentimental version of me, the teacher, as unsung hero, perpetuating the damaging stereotype of teachers as martyrs. Nor does it thank me for 10,000 graded essays, nor for teaching thousands of stories, nor for caring about one after another after another of the students who enter and exit my classroom, though never my memory. Instead, it thanks me for saying what I would have said anyway because it has to be said. This award thanks me for the insistent words that will not be quiet or still because they cannot be quiet or still, for the words that teach, but even more, for the words that tell a story, that keep me awake nights, that demand they be allowed to go beyond the walls of school. God gives teachers who write two voices: the one voice with which we shape the words that allow us to teach, and the other with which we shape the stories that we must write. And among the impassioned and dedicated, these words and the voices that give them life become a compulsion because we know they are a passport for anyone who learns to use them.

This award this evening from the Norman Mailer Center is my assurance that someone out there is listening to what I am compelled to say, someone out there believes a teacher, a public school teacher, has words that are worthy of recognition. And as each year in the future allows yet another teacher to stand in this place and feel this moment of grace and gratitude, and as the words grow in number and the voices grow in volume, perhaps those whose legislation so deeply affects us all will notice and believe that those who spend most of our lives in a classroom do, indeed, have words that are worthy of attention, words that can connect the people on one side of a divide to the people on the other.

And so I thank you. Thank you for allowing our world to expand beyond our schools, and for giving our words, for giving my words, an audience that listens, that allows those of us on the far side of the gap to do more than just see the land that is promised, but to actually touch it.

(Dawn Gilchrist-Young can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

To read the story, go to www.ncte.org/awards/nmwa and click on “The Tender Branch.”

As I have written previously, in my dreams I am a tidy gardener. One of those saints who uses a tool and trots dutifully into the garage, cleans said tool in a bucket of sand and oil, and hangs up this now pristine work implement in an orderly fashion; exactly, of course, where it is supposed to go, and where it will be easily found for use as expected when next required.

But order is boring, chaos exciting.

In real life I am a garden slob. Abandoned buckets strewn about, hoes left forgotten for two or three days at a time until a deluge of rain reminds me of my garden duties. Then, after of course the rain is finished (I wouldn’t want to actually get wet), I trot about retrieving my tools; and if I have time, clean them and hang them where they are supposed to go. And if busy I simply cram them willy-nilly into the garage where they threaten to scratch the car and decapitate passers-by. Or I discover some hitherto never-before used or conceived-of place for garden tools so that nobody, most of all me, could ever find them in the future. I get angry that someone put them there, until I remember that someone was actually yours truly. It’s a good thing I’m also working these days on self-forgiveness. So I let my anger dissolve into nothingness.

I have similar tidy habits in the house.

You should understand that I was an unruly child, at least mentally, and tuned out during those early lessons about how like shapes go with like shapes. Or, the truth is I tuned out of this lesson when it comes to certain objects but not all; but anyway, that’s a different column and probably a different publication.

In a kitchen where I’m residing spoons somehow end up with forks; spatulas in the drawer near the refrigerator where whisks go rather than in the drawer near the stove where spatulas go.

The other night, after mindfully measuring out a cup of rice virtually grain by grain and two cups of water laboriously drop by sonorous drop (I’m working hard on mindfulness these days, in fact I recently attended an entire workshop devoted to nothing but paying reverent attention to the moment), I dropped the rice bag into the pot-lid drawer instead of taking it back to the pantry. This gave me a small start when I later opened the drawer to fish out a lid,and reached down and instead pulled out a bag of rice. A bag of rice, I share now with the world, works poorly as a lid substitute.

But I mustn’t wander.

In theory, I was this past weekend on my way to a goat-themed workshop in northern Virginia. I stopped instead in Winston-Salem, exhausted with the thought of driving another eight hours or so, and spent two very enjoyable days in that city’s art district and in old Salem.

There was a much-ballyhooed exhibit of modern art at Reynolda House, the “bungalow” built by the Reynolds family of tobacco fame (their bungalow is my mansion; their rustic campsite would, I suspect, be a grand estate to me). I enjoyed the exhibit, but frankly lacked the language and framework to enjoy the abstracts as much as I suspect they deserved.

After touring the art exhibit and house, I gravitated to the easily deciphered kitchen gardens. I later toured the kitchen gardens in old Salem, too. I have much in common with Moravians and tobacco barons, I learned. They love tidy gardens.

Unlike me, however, Moravians and tobacco barons achieved them.

I am left in envy. Nary a piece of grass dared cross the edging of the garden beds; every bed was exact in geometric perfection; all were weed- and bug-damage free. Perfect, absolutely perfect.

After getting back home, I glanced into my kitchen garden and wished I hadn’t. Weeds, bug damage, beds with lines drawn as if by a drunken snake, a hoe carelessly left out and five or six repurposed Ingles icing buckets serving as fine decorative elements.

Begin anew, I reminded myself. Everything changes, I muttered insightfully. Tomorrow dawns as a new day, a start to my future immaculate kitchen garden; one in which tools are never strewn carelessly about, weeds dare not grow and bugs don’t bite unsightly holes in the vegetables.

(Quintin Ellison can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

I don’t know Duke Energy CEO James Rogers and don’t have anything against him. But it’s not very hard not to imagine he and the giant utility he runs as the symbolic poster children for much of the discontent brewing in this country right now.

In a recent series of public hearings across North Carolina (including one in Franklin and one in Marion) about Duke Energy’s request for a rate hike, the company’s profits and the pay to its top executives have been mentioned by working-class folks who don’t want to see a 17 percent hike in their power bill. Duke has asked the state Utilities Commission to approve the increase, which would take effect in February 2012 if approved.

According to corporate filings and several news stories, Rogers earned $8.8 million in salary last year and received stock work about $1.35 million. Several other top Duke executives made millions. Also shown by recent corporate filings was a profit rate of 12.5 percent of earnings. Duke had an operating margin of 19.1 percent, which is a pretty good lick in this era. Most of those small businesses who will feel this rate hike would be ecstatic about those profits and that operating margin.

Rogers’ salary and compensation are at a level that puts him in elite company. His compensation is 200 times the salary of someone who makes $50,000 a year. The disparity is jaw dropping.

In addition to Rogers’ huge salary, Duke spent $1.73 million lobbying the federal government in the second quarter of this year. Multiply that out and one would guess that Duke spends somewhere close to $7 million a year trying to influence the votes of the men and woman who are going to make decisions about pollution controls, nuclear energy safeguards, etc.

According to Democracy North Carolina, a nonpartisan watchdog group, 115 of the 170 state legislators elected in 2010 got a donation from either Duke or Progress Energy. The PACs of Progress Energy and Duke Energy gave $540,000 to General Assembly candidates in the 2010 election alone. That was more than any other PAC. The two companies are on their way toward a merger that will likely be approved.

And here’s a kicker that might raise some hackles. According to Democracy NC, “The companies are also lobbying the N.C. legislature for an unusual law that would allow them to raise rates automatically to recover the millions spent on developing and building new nuclear or other power plants, even if the construction project is ultimately abandoned. The proposal would make ratepayers, rather than investors, bear the financial risk of expansion operations.”

This is not meant as an anti Duke diatribe. Duke Energy is a popular corporate citizen that gives some of its profits back to the communities it serves. Its executives and employees take part in hundreds of community service organization throughout North Carolina.

But the timing of this request is what is so galling. Duke is reaping huge profits, pays its executives exorbitant salaries, and spend millions lobbying lawmakers who make the rules it has to follow, while at the same it wants the poor, the elderly, the unemployed and struggling small businesses to pay more for power.

The reports about of income disparity and poverty are raining down on us like a tropical storm: largest income disparity in U.S. history between top 1 percent and everyone else; elderly rate of poverty highest it has ever been; income gap between young adults and their parents at highest level ever; student debt at record levels; and more and more.

N.C. Attorney General Roy Cooper is lobbying the state Utilities Commission to deny the request. The N.C. Public Staff, which represents the public in these rate hike requests, wants the proposed increase cut by almost two-thirds. Obviously, the opinion of the state’s citizens has been overwhelmingly against the rate hike.

Duke wants more than just the rate increase and the ability to let ratepayers take the risk for its expansion. It also wants the Utilities Commission to up its allowable profit margin to 11.5 percent, up from the 10.7 it is now allowed. The Public Staff recommended a return of 9.25 percent. Most U.S. utilities have been allowed returns of 10 to 10.5 percent in the past five years, according to the  industry trade group Edison Electric Institute.

Taken as a package, this sounds like a big corporation trying to stick it to its customers during an economic recession. Duke’s political clout, however, means it will in all likelihood get at least part of the increase. That’s my bet. Any takers?

(Scott McLeod can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)