Ellington

Over the years my wife has been rightfully concerned about my time following and fighting Big and Brutal Tobacco. Get-a-way cruises can make wives more supportive. Regretfully, no cruises here as we need newspaper coupons to buy weekly groceries. (No sales tax on food and groceries would be a blessing for us. You?)

With this in mind, I noticed that Gov. Haley Barbour praised his wife of 35 years at the popular Neshoba County Fair by declaring that he got his "trophy wife" the first time.

I wonder if Gov. Barbour's trophy wife supported hubby while he passionately worked as a lobbyist for the "slow death" trade business of tobacco. Guess since Big Tobacco has no product liability that their blood-stained tobacco high profits would gladly sponsor many spontaneous cruise trips for their most popular skid greasers.

Fatherless by tobacco at age 11.
—Mike Sawyer
Birmingham, Ala.

No Free Lunch
As you say, Jackson Free Press, it's time for Mississippi to come into the new century with new people and new ideas. We need to develop all our people, not just those that are college graduates. Locally owned and operated businesses need upgrades. The fastest-growing segment of the U.S. economy is small to medium-sized businesses. New locally grown businesses will be key to our development. But these new industries should be earth friendly. China today is a good example of what can go wrong with manufacturing. I don't believe we should pollute ourselves to death, nor should we depend on cheap labor to help us move forward. The businesses that use cheap labor pay for it.

There is no free lunch.
— Patricia Wynn ("Sister Dewberry")
Jackson

Playing With Life
Those of my age are always playing chess with death, like Ingmar Bergman's knight in "The Seventh Seal." Bergman showed us how to win by unflinchingly looking into the darkness and accepting our fear, as he himself did in overcoming the terrors which informed so much of his early work.

Want to prepare yourself for the experience of age? See his "Wild Stawberries," perhaps the greatest film ever made. Want to explore the heights and depths of the relationships of men and women? See the warm "Smiles of a Summer Night" and the anguished "Scenes from a Marriage." Want to experience the cinema's strangest and most moving "sex scene?" See and hear Liv Ullmann's monologue in "Persona."

Bergman was a complete man of the theater, at home directing opera, the stage and puppet shows. What a privilege to have lived in his time.
— John Davis
Jackson