I recently turned 85. I really did not expect to last this long. When I turned 70, I wrote a contemplative essay that attracted some attention. For 85, I mostly have only an old man’s boring reflections on how much has changed.


I was a teenager before I saw a television and a college student before I saw a pizza. The first television was on only two hours a day and there was only one station in town.


I can remember when bib overalls were the usual clothes of working men. And when mules and wagons could regularly be seen. And when a lot of city streets were not paved.


I can remember party-line telephones, and kerosene pumps, and a lot of tobacco-curing barns.


When I graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1963, it was still customary to give every graduate a Bible (King James).


When I was 10 or so, I could ride the bus (10 cents) downtown and spend the day reading comic books, watching movie serials (25 cents), and eating hot dogs with Nehi orange. Nobody dreamed that a child alone would be molested.


My maternal grandmother had 9 children and my paternal grandmother 5. Most couples I have known in recent years had 1 or 2 children and quite a few have none at all.


I can remember when my hometown boasted of our skyscraper-- 17 stories tall.


I can remember when BB gun fights between boys were commonplace.


Boys carried pocket knives to school and nobody thought anything of it.


No male carried an umbrella. To do so would have required a response to ridicule. The first time I saw it was in college and then only with fraternity boys.


When I first arrived at UNC, dormitories were 3 students to a room and there was one large bathroom for the entire floor. Having a phone never occurred to us. We did have a small TV where we could humourously watch “Lone Ranger” reruns before getting a full supper meal at the cafeteria for 35 cents.


I can remember when UNC-Greensboro was the Women’s College of NC. Of course, it was a weekend destination for UNC-Chapel Hill boys. Women students had to sign out and in and had to be back by 11 p.m. Nobody could imagine coed living quarters.


I saw the last college “panty raid”-- 1963. You probably don’t know what that is, but it was quite common in a certain period. Many students were veterans and did not welcome civilian discipline.


I remember many students cheering when the JFK assassination came on the radio. I also remember Walter Kronkite, “the most trusted man in America,” immediately announcing that Kennedy had been shot by “right wing extremists” in Dallas.


​When I gave up college teaching in 2006, undergraduate students could not do one-fourth of the work that they routinely did when I began in 1971. Of course, university presidents, a particularly bad bunch of con artists, were bragging that we were becoming ever more “excellent.”

The life of man is a dubious experiment. . . . Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux.  - Carl Jung


According to our experience and our human history, I know that everything essential and great could be born only from the fact that man had a homeland and was rooted in a tradition.  - Heidegger


Praise the Lord and pass the barbeque.  - Maurice Bessinger


We have no need, sirs, to be ashamed of our dead; let us see to it that they be not ashamed of us.  - Robert L. Dabney, 1868


The slave trade was routine in Africa before the Europeans arrived... The inculcation of guilt in Europeans has facilitated the masked invasion of their territories and the “great replacement” of their populations, something that has no precedent in the past.  - Dominique Venner


Without censorship in the West, fashionable trends of thought are fastidiously separated from those that are not fashionable, and the latter have little chance of finding their way.  - Solzhenitsyn


Donald Trump has proved to be a Great Betrayer—one of the worst in history. We foolishly forgot our inherited wisdom that nothing good can come out of New York.  - Clyde Wilson


We have sung of the soldiers and sailors, but who shall hymn the politicians. - Herman Melville


​“It always makes me proud of my country to see all those fine young men in the U.S. Army.”  - Crooked Yankee banker in the classic film “Stagecoach.”
Hitler did not know that Russia had a winter.  - Churchill

The words of his mouth were smoother than butter, but war was in his heart; his words were softer than oil, yet they were drawn swords. - Psalm 56:21



O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see ourselves as others see us!  - Burns



Those who have the most virtues in their mouths have the least in their bosoms.  - Oliver Goldsmith



Where will the Word be found, Where will the Word resound?
Not here, There is not enough silence.  - Shelley



I did not opposed to Obama as President because he is African. Just being from Illinois is enough for me. Besides, I am still not reconciled to John Quincy Adams. - Clyde Wilson



But capitalist society, which naturally does not know the meaning of honour, cannot know the meaning of disgrace. - G.K. Chesterton



Always make the audience suffer as much as possible. – Alfred Hitchcock


Everything has a moral if only you can find it. - Lewis Carroll



Previous to the War between the States, political education was maintained by public discussions of great principles, by great men. Since the War, political education has been neglected; and the people who once knew that they were sovereigns... now act upon the idea that they are subjects, without the liberty of doing anything , except to pay taxes, and obey the orders of those in office. - Tom Watson of Georgia, 1917.



You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you. - Lenin


Looking for Utopia you have to wade through rivers of blood and find out it’s not there. - Peter Hitchens



The North strove to remember the war during the remainder of the 19th century as one of valorous collective unity, rather than an unpopular struggle that held considerable dissent and resentment... Abraham Lincoln was despised by a sizable portion of the Northern populace. - Paul Taylor, ‘Tis Not Our War: Avoiding Military Service in the Civil War North (2024)