The Southern Highland Reader

REGIONAL–Those television wireless ads, the ones in which translucent, floating coverage maps follow various hipsters around town, have more to do with you than you know.

Even if you’re a consumer of rural land-line phone service.

The TV ads are pushing wireless “3G” service – 3G being a term for service that supports voice, video and data. But they’re relevant to land-line customers as well, because large phone companies are increasingly focused on the installation of wired networks with a capacity to stream great quantities of data.

In heavily populated areas companies that do this make big stacks of money. On the other hand, maintaining these services in rural areas like ours is expensive, which is why Verizon wants – and soon will get – out.

Verizon is in the process of selling its rural land phone business in 14 states – including North Carolina – to a Connecticut company called Frontier Communications. And while regulators in some states are being harder on the deal than others, there is little reason to think that Verizon customers in western North Carolina won’t become Frontier customers sometime next year.

In North Carolina, we haven’t heard too much about this, maybe because our Public Utilities Commission isn’t inclined to rock corporate boats. But in some states — West Virginia, Washington, Oregon and Ohio in particular — people, newspapers and politicians are pointing out that when Verizon makes such sales – and they do it often – the outcome is usually bad for rural customers.

Land customers here will argue that little could be worse than Verizon, but apparently they’d be mistaken. The smaller companies that buy Verizon’s rural land line infrastructure are often saddled with enormous debt in the transaction, and running a phone company in sparsely-populated, often mountainous terrain is high-dollar stuff.

The October bankruptcy of FairPoint Communications is a case in point. In 2008, FairPoint paid $2.7 billion to buy Verizon phone lines in Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire, but soon collapsed under the weight of its debt.

Wrote Oregonlive.com: “That set a grim precedent and served as a warning signal to regulators”.

Read the nuts and bolts of the deal here, from the Wall Street Journal
Read more about Verizon’s mixed messages on rural broadband here, from freepress.net
Read about an Oregon regulatory challenge here, from oregonlive.com
Read about West Virginia public opposition here from the Charleston (WV) Daily Mail
Read about West Virginia State Consumer Advocate Division’s concerns about deal here from WVNH television, Beckley, WV

Antoine Saint-Exupéry (1900-1944), author of the the “Little Prince”, takes occasional criticism for his over-the-top prose.

But the man led an over-the-top life. He worked during the 1920’s as a pilot for Aéropostale, flying mail routes over Europe, Africa and, eventually South America. He flew during a time when pilots flew largely by line-of-sight. When something went wrong with their craft, they landed, pulled out tools, fixed them, and took off again. In 1935, Saint-Exupery and his navigator crashed their Caudron C-630 Simoun in the Libyan Sahara while attempting to set a new Paris-to-Saigon speed record. They’d been in the air for 20 hours. They had no idea where they were, and no rations or water. Yet they survived for four days, before a miraculous rescue by a Bedouin on camelback.

“Part of the fascination is the Frenchman’s Hemingwayesque identity as a man of action”, wrote the Wall Street Journal’s Benjamin Ivry in 2004. “Saint-Exupéry was never a flawless pilot, and he survived a number of serious crashes. Nevertheless, he flew mail planes in South America in the 1920s, including a mountain route from Buenos Aires to Patagonia that inspired his 1931 novel “Night Flight” as well as a 1938 essay collection, “Wind, Sand and Stars.”

My personal attraction to Saint-Exupery has little to do with desktop-calendar-ready “essential wisdom”, of which he produced plenty. In fact, I’ve never even found much magic in the “Little Prince”.

What amazes me is the mystery and adventure that flows around his story to this day, and the ability he had to capture vivid snippets of that life in prose.

Saint-Exupery died in a apparent plane crash over the English Channel during World War II, and nobody really knows whether he crashed or was shot down. But in 1998, a fisherman pulled up the author’s silver bracelet from the ocean floor, and two years later, a diver found the remains of Saint-Exupery’s P-38 Lightning off Marseilles.

Here’s an excerpt from Wind, Sand and Stars, in which the author describes part of the trans-South-Atlantic flight of his colleague Jean Mermoz:

… when Mermoz first crossed the South Atlantic in a hydroplane, as day was dying he ran foul of the Black Hole region, off Africa. Straight ahead of him were the tails of tornadoes rising minute by minute gradually higher, rising as a wall is built; and then the night came down upon these preliminaries and swallowed them up; and when, an hour later, he slipped [back beneath] the clouds, he came out into a fantastic kingdom.

Great black waterspouts had reared themselves seemingly in the immobility of temple pillars. Swollen at their tops, they were supporting the squat and lowering arch of the tempest, but through the rifts in the arch there fell slabs of light and the full moon sent her radiant beams between the pillars down upon the frozen tiles of the sea. Through these uninhabited ruins Mermoz made his way, gliding slantwise from one channel of light to the next, circling around those giant pillars in which there must have rumbled the upsurge of the sea, flying for four hours through these corridors of moonlight …

NATIONAL–The current economic downturn and associated credit crunch are having a big impact on small business, which has come to rely heavily on credit cards to finance day-to-day operation.

This story from the Wall Street Journal Online tells how that reliance developed.

An excerpt:

Banks began moving into small-business credit cards in the mid- to late-1990s following the creation of credit-scoring models. One factor was a 1995 study by Fair Isaac Corp. and Robert Morris Associates, a trade group for loan officers and credit-risk managers, analyzing the performance of business loans.

The study surprised bankers. It found that a small business’s cash flow and financial statements bore little correlation with how the owner would pay his or her bills. A much stronger predictor was the business owner’s personal credit score. The banks concluded they could safely issue business credit cards to proprietors with good credit records even if the underlying business didn’t appear to justify a loan.

“The credit-card industry noticed that study and that’s when they started marketing business credit cards,” says Robert Lahm, a professor of entrepreneurship at Western Carolina University. “Credit cards have become probably the most common small-business loan product.”

A collection of thoughts, essays and columns

The comment feature at the bottom of this page is an open thread for thoughts and experiences from all viewpoints, and for suggestions of links that should be added. Comments are moderated before publication, so there is a time lapse.

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From after the vote …

Judith Warner, New York Times: Tears to Remember
Michael Sokolove, New York Times Magazine: Transformation
David Fellerath, Independent Weekly: Election Night along I-85
Charles Blow, New York Times: Without Appalachia
Talking Points Memo: I didn’t vote for Obama today
Greg Johnson, Knoxville News Sentinel: East Tennessee’s right-wing thinking unchanged
Rob Christenson, Raleigh News and Observer: Obama turns the tide in North Carolina
Chandler Brown, Cox News Service: No ordinary day for 106-year-old Ann Nixon Cooper
Tony Pugh, McClatchy: In Obama’s victory, America comes to terms with its past
Cynthia Tucker, Atlanta Journal Constitution: For my generation, the timing was unexpected
Jessie Pounds, Knoxville News Sentinel: Local black residents elated

Multimedia

Terry Gross and Bill Moyers, National Public Radio
Former Virginia Governor Douglas Wilder on Obama

From before the vote …

Southern Highland Reader: The Scots-Irish and the African-American
Kathleen Parker: Hearts and Votes in Appalachia
The Moderate Voice.com: Canvassing in Southern Appalachia (Waynesville)
Roger Alford, Associated Press: Appalachia grows beyond impoverished mountains
Christian Science Monitor: A southern black man stands to be counted
The New Yorker: The Appalachian Problem. Obama goes to rural Virginia
Frank Rich: In defense of white Americans
Slate.com: Swing-state rednecks
Slate.com: Diane McWhorter; Palin and Wallace? A legacy of resentment
Salon.com: NC as a swing state
Talking Points Memo: Sen. Jim Webb cuts radio ad for Sen. Barack Obama
Report: White Voters, Obama and Appalachia from Daily Kos
Hugh McColl, Jr., at bat for Obama
(July) Southern Highland Reader: Obama in the mountains …
(June) Chris Geis: Are North Carolina’s race-baiting days gone?

Multimedia

National Public Radio visits Logan, West Virginia
(Video) John Hope Franklin on the possibility of an Obama presidency (Scroll down)
(Video) Richard Trumka (Scroll down)
(Video) Joe Bageant (Scroll down)

Related News

Highlands Highlander: No to negative campaigning
Smoky Mountain Times: Defacement and theft of campaign signs
Dead bear left at WCU campus entrance

John Hope Franklin

Richard Trumka

Joe Bageant

This piece didn’t get too much attention when I posted it a few days after Jesse Helms’s death. There are some interesting thoughts gathered here, though, so I thought I’d trot it out again …

STATEWIDE/NATIONAL-Jesse Helms, one of the strongest figures in North Carolina’s far-from-bland political history, passed away last week.

Here are a few of the more interesting goodbye columns culled from a broad selection:

Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe suggests that Helms’ clearest sin wasn’t racism, but a ‘tenacious political correctness.’

Marc Thiessen, current chief White House speech writer and former Foreign Relations Committee spokesman for Helms, defends Helms’ legacy in the Washington Post.

Jesse Helms and Ronald Reagan

John Fund, columnist for the Wall Street Journal, presents Helms as an expert at defending and promoting embattled minority viewpoints, and points out that he introduced tactics used today across the political spectrum. Independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader echoed this viewpoint in a recent interview with the Raleigh News and Observer, saying, “I think [Helms'] legacy is that no matter how wrong you are on how many issues, if you stick to it you can win.”

More from the N&O: “Nader said that Helms had ‘enormous determination and stamina’ when pushing his conservative causes, something he does not think current liberal senators have. ‘They don’t have that stick-to-it-iveness that Jesse Helms had,’ he said. ‘They’re not hungry to win the way Jesse Helms was.’”

In a long piece, John Nichols, of The Nation, traces Helms’ political career, excoriates him for racism, and outlines ties between Helms and the McCain campaign.

Closer to home – and with greater nuance – Jack Betts of the Charlotte Observer and Jim Jenkins of the Raleigh News and Observer share some parting words.