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Friday’s Weekend Column
About a Minnesota Man Exploring Life in the South Driving North in the South
Right now I am some place north of Richmond, Virginia, but about lunch-time I was in the town of Saint George, on highway 15. That would be north of Walterboro, South Carolina, and a little east of interstate 95. I like driving the back roads. You can't make very good time, but you sure see some interesting things, I don't remember the name of the restaurant, but it is the only one in Saint George. So if you ever go there, it will be easy to find, and I guarantee it will be down home, back woods, sure enough genuine Southern cooking. They start you off with fried cornbread pancakes, and they come with the menu. We had pan fried chicken and twice baked mashed potatoes. Wanda got the butterbeans and I got the side of green beans with ham hocks. They had very fine sweet tea with just the right amount of sweet in it. I was proud of myself for passing up the triple chocolate cake. When I had a look at it, the calories started jumping up and down, dancing all around the plate. . . so I passed. We stopped at a South Carolina artisan gallery, and I bought a nice carved painted fish for five bucks and was amazed at how little crafts-people charge for their work. Also, the antique prices were way lower than in Minnesota and Florida, I think I am about 100 miles from Reston and my conference, so I should get there earlier than I planned. I will write more tomorrow evening. "Restoring the Republic"—The Conference
Here it is Saturday and I am about a third of the way through the 24 speakers. Yesterday I listened to Lew Rockwell talk about "Two Views of Social Order: Conflict or Cooperation. Then it was Justin Raimondo, from antiwar.com, who spoke on "War, Peace, and the Struggle for Liberty." There was also Karen Kwiatkowski and Robert Scheer. Today I heard Richard Ebeling, Ivan Eland, historian Thomas DiLorenzo, and then Daniel Ellsberg and Richard Vague. I will probably write on each of these people when I get back to Tallahassee, but for now I am just going to give some of the quotes from my notes, They are in no particular order, but they will give you a bit of the flavor of this conference, which by the way was put on by the Future of Freedom Foundation. "Dick Durban and George Tenant both knew, along with many others in our government that George Bush was lying about Iraq to get us into a war, but they couldn't tell us because everything they knew was secret." "When war starts, government shuts down all criticism." "My country right or wrong." "Reclaiming lost freedoms is hard once they are lost." "President Lincoln shut down over 300 Northern newspapers, who disagreed with his policies." "George Bush promised to end tyranny on earth." "Hitler would quote Lincoln when he was trying to destroy States Rights in Germany." "We don't have a military industrial complex, we are a military industrial complex." "Oil cost 28 dollars a barrel when George Bush started the war on terrorism, and today it costs over 60 dollars a barrel." "Terrorists gain support where there is occupation or suppression." "Poverty and despair breeds terrorists." "We are making more terrorists." Those are a few of the quotes I have written down. With speaker after speaker giving out his or her thoughts, it is hard to have a chance to think their ideas over, but everyone has been interesting, and I will write in depth about what many of these people had to say. Right now I am heading back to hear Joseph Margulies speak on "Legal idiocy and the War on Terror." |
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