HISTORY BOOK WILL MAKE YOU PROUD OF CITY

The new book, "Cape Girardeau: Images of the Past in the City of Roses" is simply a remarkable piece of work. You will want to own one and give others as gifts to friends and relatives, especially including former residents now residing in distant parts. We received the shipment of more than 2,000 hardcover books this past week, and selling was brisk beginning Thursday morning.

We are excited at the quality of this product and proud of the enormous amount of work that went into producing it. A great teaching tool for youngsters, it will make you proud of your city and our rich history. Copies are available at the Southeast Missourian office, 301 Broadway. See Joyce Hinze in the newspaper office.

If I may be permitted an aside but one I think highly relevant a work of this nature is also a tribute to local, community-based ownership of a newpaper, in the finest American tradition. Does it even need to be said? No distant, gigantic media chain would have thought enough of such a project to have even considered investing the requisite time, money and effort.

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Welfare and the Wreck of Western Civilization

Speaking at a Nov. 10 news conference promoting a bill requiring welfare recipients to work for their benefits, Rep. Newt Gingrich, R.-Ga., had this to say:

You can't maintain civilization with 12-year-olds having babies and 15-year-olds killing each other and 17-year-olds dying of AIDS and 18-year-olds getting diplomas they can't read. The welfare state has just plain failed because it reduces human beings from citizens to clients, because it ... subjects them to rules ... that are anti-family, anti-work, anti-property and anti-opportunity. The challenge of our generation is to replace the welfare state.

Strong words, but I believe them to be justified. The related epidemics of urban crime, illegitimacy, AIDS, and other pathologies show that we are reaping the awful whirlwind of failed welfare policies.

Congressman Gingrich, a Ph.D. professor of history before he ran for Congress 15 years ago, is moving beyond talk. This fall, Gingrich taught a course at a Georgia college entitled "Renewing American Civilization", with specific emphasis on his idea of replacing not reforming, but (ital) replacing (unital) the failed welfare state with humane alternatives that will work. This course comes complete with a syllabus of reading materials that accompany the lectures.

One of Cape Girardeau's leading citizens is Dr. Bill Terry, the moving force behind the prayer breakfasts of recent years. Bill Terry has gone to the trouble and expense of acquiring videotapes of the Gingrich lectures from this fall's course.

I have spoken with Dr. Terry about conducting our own version of the Gingrich course right here in Cape Girardeau. We hope that there will be sufficient interest after the first of the year that we can announce a meeting place and regular schedule during which those interested can participate in this vital project by actually taking this course. I personally know many students at the University who are interested in being a part of this. The course, however, should not be limited to the young. Everyone will be welcome, whether or not you has ever taken a college course.

We didn't get into this fix overnight, and we won't recover sanity instantly, either. But we can start. Stay tuned for an announcement of time and place.

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A model for health care?

Those who want health care run like the post office will surely want Bill Clinton elected. Now they can attend his inaugural too. The post office promises to deliver the forty thousand mildewed, soggy inaugural invitations it just found moldering in a Blytheville, Arkansas warehouse. "We apologize for any delays," it says.

12/27/93 National Review