Newspaper Page Text
The ADVANCE, September 29, 2021/Page 6A
(Site Ahumtce
A free press is not a privilege but
organic necessity in a great society.
—Walter Lippmann
COMMENTARY
out of
CONTEXT
A compilation of quotations on a variety of
issues by national, state and regional writers,
well-known personalities, just plain everyday
people and from various publications
collected by the editors of THE ADVANCE.
Quotes for our Times:
Stephen Moore, senior fellow at
FreedomWorks, co-founder of the Com
mittee to Unleash Prosperity, and a Wash
ington Examiner columnist: Congress is
back to serving pork.
By injecting all these slabs of pork into
the tax code, we will have reversed all
the gains from bipartisan tax reform under
President Ronald Reagan, Back then, the
goal was to lower tax rates and get rid of
all the tax breaks so that the tax system
was pro-growth and simple but made ev
eryone pay their fair share. President Joe
Biden keeps saying this bill will make the
rich pay their fair share — unless the rich
people are contributors to the politicians.
Then they get tax goody bags from Con
gress.
Betsy McCaughey is a former lieuten
ant governor of New York and author:
Biden is stabbing nonunion workers in the
back.
Unfortunately, Biden and the Demo
cratic Party won't take no for an answer.
They're also pushing the Protecting the
Right to Organize Act, which would out
law right-to-work laws in 27 states, forcing
workers to fall into line and pay dues once
their workplace is organized. And in April,
the White House announced a task force
to identify other ways the federal govern
ment can push union membership.
Biden claims it's to build the middle
class. In truth, it's to benefit the Democrat
ic Party. That's an outrage.
Greg Gutfeld, host of Gutfeld! and co
host of The Five: Media attention to border
has nothing to do with compassion or jour
nalism.
You see my point? It would be one
thing if the press or Mayorkas had cared
about the crisis while we cared about the
crisis. You know: if they followed this story,
and the government had acted — we
wouldn't even be discussing this story. Be
cause it wouldn't exist.
Fact is — this is just about seizing a story
that suits them. They found a boogie man
— a cop on a horse. And that's all they
needed to pretend to care, when they re
ally, truly don't give a damn at all.
Tucker Carlson, host of ’Tucker Carlson
Tonight’: Biden knew the border crisis was
coming, he wants illegal immigrants here.
Parts of our country are already very
poor. Leave Martha's Vineyard sometime,
and you'll discover that. America could
be on the brink of getting much poorer.
This is the last thing we need. And it was
preventable, easily preventable. The U.S.
holds tremendous sway over the Mexican
economy. With a single phone call, Joe
Biden could make sure that the Mexican
government sent these migrants back
where they came from. But Biden hasn't
called to do that. And he hasn't because
he wants them here, in the United States.
So they're coming. He did this on purpose.
Write Us A
Letter
Have you a gripe? How about a compliment
for someone for a job well done? Lef us
know abouf if wifh a leffer fo fhe edifor. We
urge anyone fo wrife us abouf any subject of
general public interest. Please limit all letters to
250 words double spaced.
All letters must by signed, but we may withhold
the writer's name upon request.
Please write to us at The Advance, P.O. Box 669,
Vidalia, GA 30475 or email: theadvancenews@
gmail.com (Subject Line: Letter to the Editor).
A Western Society
Goes Insane
The 18th-century English
philosopher Jeremy Bentham
came up with the idea of the
panopticon, a prison designed
to allow all the prisoners to be
observed by one guard.
What even Bentham
couldn’t conceive of, despite
his creative musings about
schemes of perpetual
surveillance, was a society like
contemporary Australia.
Heretofore an honorable
member of the Free World,
Australia has lurched into a
bizarre and disturbing
netherworld of bureaucratic
oppression in the name of
public health.
Australia’s C OVID-19
lockdown mania has been so
all-consuming that one
assumes much of it would
make Dr. Anthony Fauci
blanch.
At the start of the
pandemic, Australia
determined to squeeze out
COVID with lockdowns and
travel restrictions, and as an
island nation, had considerable
success. It was the last of the
G-20 countries to hit 1,000
total coronavirus deaths.
But this created an
unrealistic expectation that
Australia could have COVID-
zero as a goal for the duration
and use targeted restrictions
and surveillance (“circuit-
breakers”) to maintain it.
As the pandemic has
dragged on, this has become
completely untenable and
done violence to liberty and
common sense in a great
English-speaking nation.
Lockdowns have cut a
swath through the norms and
conventions of an advanced
Western democracy, from the
suspension of a state-level
parliament to the banning of
protests, to military
enforcement ofthe COVID-19
protocols.
With the Delta surge, more
than half of Australians are
locked down, often in response
to a tiny number of cases.
Australian authorities
don’t fool around. State
premiers have vast powers and
use them. In Melbourne,
located in the state of Victoria,
a curfew is in place and limits
apply to people leaving their
homes. There are hefty fines
for noncompliance.
The sp irit of the lo ckdowns
was perfectly captured a few
months ago by the chief health
officer of New South Wales
who warned, “Whilst it is in
human nature to engage in
conversation with others, to be
friendly, unfortunately this is
not the time to do that.”
Ah, yes, the public health
threat of over-chattiness.
The Australian news
media might as well be an arm
of the public health
bureaucracy and produces
stilted and hysterical reports
about lockdown violators
worthy of some dystopian
future.
South Australia has
developed an app to enforce
home quarantines. As a news
report explains, “The app will
contact people at random
asking them to provide proof
of their location within 15
minutes.” If they fail to do so,
the health department will
notify the police, who will
send officers to check on the
possible malefactor.
Unrestricted travel is a
hallmark of a free society, but
Australians can barely leave
the country. Travel has been
cut off between states, creating
an arbitrary patchwork of
states trying to isolate
themselves from coronavirus
cases elsewhere.
Tens of thousands of
Australians have been trapped
overseas, unable to come back
home because of monthly
limits on returning Australians.
All of this economic and
social disruption and coercion
hasn’t been enough to stamp
out the Delta variant, which is
outrunning the government
controls.
Australian Prime Minister
Scott Morrison finally
admitted the obvious, “This is
not a sustainable way to live in
this country.”
Australia initially fumbled
its vaccination effort, which
should have been a focus all
Please see Lowry page 9A
GRITTY
Clarence Thomas
and the Declaration
ofIndependence
Last week,
Supreme Court
Associate Justice
Clarence Thomas
arrived at the
University of Notre
Dame to speak about
the Declaration of
Independence.
Speaking
invitations like this
that Thomas accepts are few and far
between.
Anyone who cares about our country
and listens to this address will wish that he
would agree to speak more.
His presentation was a brilliant and
profound articulation of what America is
about at its core.
It is what every American needs to
hear in these troublesome and divisive
times.
Thomas tells his own story and how
his life’s journey led him to understand
what America is about.
He grew up poor near Savannah,
Georgia, raised by his grandparents, under
the tutelage of his grandfather, a devout
Catholic and American patriot.
Thomas’ grandfather understood that
the injustices of the country were not
about flaws in the country but about flaws
in human beings in living up to ideals
handed down to them. What needed to be
fixed were the people — not the nation.
This insight strikes at the heart of the
divisions going on today that are so bitterly
dividing us.
But Thomas left his grandfather’s
house and went to college in the midst of
the civil rights movement. Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, and
Thomas became filled with bitterness and
the sense that America is an irredeemably
flawed, racist nation, which is so much in
the spirit of the times today.
In his own words, “What had given my
life meaning and sense of belonging, that
this country was my home, was jettisoned
as old-fashioned and antiquated. ... It was
easy and convenient to fill that void with
victimhood.... So much of my time focused
intently on our racial differences and
grievances, much like today.”
“As I matured,” Thomas continued, “I
began to see that the theories of my young
Please see Nitty page 9A
Rabbit Tobacco
Mickey called.
He said I'd
lost it.
According
to the Yankee
who stumbled
upon Lumber
City and
couldn't find his way back home,
rabbit tobacco is more important
than hickory nuts.
Mickey is not a pure Yankee. He
sprang from a line of timber-man
granddaddies who harvested pond
cypress trees in the Okefenokee
Swamp.
His daddy was a sailor before
WWII broke out but was too old to
stay in the Navy. He was turned into
a Merchant Marine.
“Daddy met this New Jersey gal
who talked funny, and he said he
went out with her to hear her talk. I
guess she talked him into marrying
her.”
Mickey was born in 1942 while
his dad was on a cruise. His father
made multiple crossings of the
North Atlantic delivering supplies
to England.
Crews left and never returned.
The casualty rate among Merchant
Marines was inordinately high, and
the pressure got to his mom.
“Dad's ship was never touched.
Ships around him were sunk, but he
never got a scratch.”
His mom took a train to Way-
cross and dropped him and his
brother off with his grandparents.
After high school he took off to
look for his mom's family but never
found any. He stayed and worked,
married and ruined that.
Sometime in his forties he faced
the fact that he was a “swamp rab
bit” and headed back south.
“I'm the only swamp rabbit with
a Yankee accent,” he said long ago. "I
didn't fit in up there, and the first
question people here ask is where
I'm from. Guess I'm a brown water
Yankee.”
He described the grandparents'
house where scared dogs whined at
the door at night, and his grand
mother's love of rabbit tobacco.
“Her sister moved up to Euhar-
lee and introduced her to rabbit to
bacco. She walked through fields
stripping the rabbit tobacco until
her basket was full.”
Mickey said that his family used
it to treat colds by setting a saucer of
it smoldering in the house, drinking
a tea from the leaves or having it
sewn into sachets and left under pil
lows.
I was introduced to it by North
Georgia cousins who smoked it.
That wasn't a grown-up thing.
Mickey enjoyed telling the story
of the day I met a tractor-trailer rig
on the narrow old steel bridge over
the Ocmulgee River on the day
WVOH in Hazlehurst signed on the
air.
He wheezed a hard laugh at my
terror and asked if I am still scared
of old steel bridges.
Yep. I still am.
joenphillips@yahoo.com