Fall is too pretty to stay inside

Columns

November 2, 2012

Fall is too pretty to stay inside

By Rhetta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist The Picayune Item Picayune Item Fri Nov 02, 2012, 08:00 AM CDT

FISHTRAP HOLLOW, Miss. — I put on the new Iris DeMent album and place the stereo speakers near the window. It’s some kind of crime in all 50 states to stay inside during October.

Fall is this mixture of beauty and sadness that takes the breath. The sumac is the color of fire engines, and the falling sycamore leaves the size of small boats. There is water in the branch, but not so much as to disturb the dam that my husband’s grandchildren built with sticks last summer. It holds.

Hank the dog has renewed energy and gives the squirrels chase. From my chair I watch, and listen as Iris’ trembly voice echoes like life from hill to hill. She’s bona fide country, and sounds just right.

Last week I was at the opposite end of this mostly bosky state, down where the ocean laps live oaks and the light has a different and ethereal quality. I can never decide what I love most — the bright coast or the dark hills. The nice thing, I can visit both.

Fall makes me melancholy. I remember the dear but dead, a population that keeps growing. I can’t seem to concentrate on current events, which at my age have a certain repetitious quality.

In my younger, more ambitious years, I’d be writing about the presidential contest, as clear a choice as ever I remember. I would have weighed in on the debates and the debacles, the lies and the noise. Talk about barrels full of fish.

But the white men in gray suits seem to have political commentary covered; the same ones who were writing when I was a newly minted reporter are pretty much still in place on the op-ed pages of America. Propped up for show, like ailing Soviet leaders who won’t go away, they wax philosophical.

The political wags I admire most are gone now. Mike Royko, Molly Ivins. What would they say?

I might be inspired to comment if the late Harold Johnson — the only person with whom I agreed 100 percent politically — were still around. He would expect and want me to. A wise man who worked in an Alabama textile mill seven days a week, Harold would be characterizing Mitt (if ever there was a rich boy name) as a silk-stocking Republican and wondering aloud why the poorest states in the union are going to rush out and vote for the rich and red against their own self-interest.

Remember Frank Church of Idaho? He’s gone, too. When Church ran for president in 1976, he said he lost a primary because the “little people” couldn’t reach the ballot box. Now tycoons and radio blunderbusses pick up the mentally pliable little people by the scruff of their necks and tell them what levers to pull.

I keep thinking of that cartoon idiot, Alfred E. Newman. “What, me worry?” What, me need health care?

I cast my first presidential vote ever for George McGovern, who died the day I wrote this. He had wanted to live to see universal health care. Didn’t make it. Turns out McGovern was right about everything: Vietnam, Nixon and, as I see it, health care.

But I can’t quite get into high dudgeon on such a fine fall day. Iris is singing her brand of hymns, playing the “pi-aner,” as her mother pronounced it. Hank needs a pet on the head. Leaves float by.

Presidential politics will resolve itself the way it always does, one way or another. Four years from now, if I’m lucky, I’ll be thinking once more that most of my like-minded heroes are gone to their great reward and won’t ever again be bothered with the din and decay of democracy.

(To find out more about Rheta Grimsley Johnson and her books, visit www.rhetagrimsleyjohnsonbooks.com)

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Columns

Not your mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal
By Rheta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist

I haven’t seen the Ladies’ Home Journal in about a million years, except maybe in the dentist’s office when I was trying to avoid a television permanently set on Fox News.
Somebody’s grandchild was selling magazines for a school project, and Ladies’ Home Journal was the only one on the list I recognized. Now it comes to the house.
Let’s just say: It’s not my mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal. This month, right behind a feature called “A Country of People Who Never Stop Eating” is one called “Nice Girls Do Get Tattoos.”

March 29, 2013
Health care market needs oversight
By Gene Lyons/Syndicated columnist

Sometimes the best journalism explains what’s right under our noses. In Steven Brill’s exhaustive Time magazine cover article, “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us,” it’s the staggeringly expensive, grotesquely inefficient and inhumane way Americans pay for medical care.

March 29, 2013
VA’s appalling failures not recent
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist

While recent national press attention to ongoing problems at Mississippi’s G.V. (Sonny) Montgomery Veterans Administration Medical Center in Jackson is welcome and needed, the failures of the overall VA service apparatus in Mississippi are not recent problems.
In short, former U.S. Rep. Sonny Montgomery — Mississippi’s “Mr. Veteran” and author of the modern G.I. Bill that bears his name — must be spinning in his grave. There have been significant failures and poor service to veterans documented by state and local media since 2008.

March 27, 2013
Dolley Madison politically savvy
By Cokie and Steven V. Roberts/Syndicated columnists

When Dolley Payne Madison became first lady in 1809, she instituted Wednesday evening gatherings at the White House where political rivals could meet and talk. They were called “squeezes” because so many people showed up and crowded the room. As Cokie wrote in her book “Ladies of Liberty": “All were welcome as long as they were appropriately dressed. And all went — skipping a Wednesday night might mean missing a vital piece of political information or being left out of a crucial deal.”

March 27, 2013
Mississippi isn’t immune from national college tuition trends
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
Higher education in Mississippi has not been immune from national trends cited in a recent Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report which concludes that over the last five years, the global economic downturn and a “no new taxes” political climate have increasingly shifted the burden of higher education finance to students and parents at a time when enrollment is increasing and the percentage of state support is decreasing.

March 23, 2013
Right to vote not ‘racial entitlement
By Donna Brazile/Syndicated columnist
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Shelby County v. Holder — a challenge to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, specifically Section 5, which requires states and localities with a history of voting discrimination against racial and language minorities to get “pre-approved” by the federal government before changing how elections are conducted or voters are registered.

March 23, 2013
1st day of spring brings memories
By Wyatt Emmerich/Southside Sun

The first day of spring! My favorite month, April, is just around the corner. Now we just need one big gullywasher to get rid of the pine pollen.
Normally, spring gives me a strong sense of rebirth and renewal, but this spring I seem surrounded by moments crystallizing the passage of time.
It was a year ago, I walked up the porch to my mother’s home to box up her possessions following her funeral.

March 22, 2013
Soaking up in tiger paw-shaped hot tub
By Rheta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist

No springtime ritual was better at Auburn than sitting on hard rocks at a nearby state park to let cold water rush over your feet. You wore cut-off blue jeans and Dr. Scholl’s sandals, the unofficial uniform for coeds in the 1970s, and when you left, you felt ready to tackle tests, term papers and blind dates.

March 22, 2013
Medicaid or not, costs will be paid
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist

While the battle continues between state Republicans and other fiscal conservatives intent on focusing on the long-terms costs of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act and Democrats, health care advocates and state hospitals intent on focusing on the short-term benefits, the fact remains that one way or another, the costs of providing health care for the poor, the blind, the aged and the disabled will be paid by the taxpayers one way or another.

March 20, 2013
Multiculturalism is not rational
By Thomas Sowell/Syndicated columnist

Among the many irrational ideas about racial and ethnic groups that have polarized societies over the centuries and around the world, few have been more irrational and counterproductive than the current dogmas of multiculturalism.
Intellectuals who imagine that they are helping racial or ethnic groups that lag behind by redefining their lags out of existence with multicultural rhetoric are in fact leading them into a blind alley.

March 20, 2013
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