BECOME A SPONSOR OF THE WORLD'S MAGAZINE. WHY should you advertise here? We'll tell you. VETERAN? Need to know how to access more of your benefits? Need help buying a home for your family? These folks can help: VA LOAN INFORMATION and VETERANS' MORTGAGES KATRINA & THE LOST CITY OF NEW ORLEANS by Rod Amis New Orleans is the Lost City of America. New Orleans has disappeared as surely as the lost city of Atlantis or the lost city of Pompeii, which former mayor Marc Morial and Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA.) have compared us to in their statements. That New Orleans, the New Orleans I mean to tell you about, that will never, ever, exist again--that city of love, lust, death and sex--will never exist again. A portion of the proceeds of this book will go to the New Orleans Hospitality Workers Fund. The cooks, servers and restaurant workers of New Orleans have provided fabulous times and memories for millions. Now we must remember them in their time of need. Buy the book or get a downloadable PDF Copy now! To order on Amazon.com, go here! AFRICA FRESH! New Voices from the First Continent An anthology of African writing only featured on the Internet until now, this book features the collected works of writers for the G21 AFRICA section of G21.net. The eight writers represented here are from around the continent and present an exciting look at cutting-edge fiction and reporting from the first continent today. Buy the book or get a downloadable PDF copy now!

by Mphuthumi Ntabeni

G21 Columnist

an oasis for the thoughtful

G21 #431: YOUR NEWS PARTY AMERICAN DREAMS DAY ONE G21 AFRICA G21 ASIA G21 BOTTOM 10 OF 2005 JOIN OUR MAILING LIST. It contains more jokes than not. G21 E-MAIL NEWSLETTER HOT LINKS IRISH EYES NEW YORK STATE RECOMMENDED DAILY REQUIREMENT RECOMMENDED DAILY REQUIREMENT ARCHIVES SMOKE & MIRRORS VOX POPULI LAST WEEK's EDITION MEET THE G-CREW! These are the people behind this jam-band every week. HOME TABLE OF CONTENTS & BACK ISSUES BECOME A SPONSOR OF THE WORLD'S MAGAZINE. WHY should you advertise here? We'll tell you. We know you're lazy. Here's a button for a quick translation of this page. Just click on the flag for your country. You're welcome! OR TRY THIS GOOGLE TRANSLATION SERVICE.

To read this article in Deutsch, Francaise, Italiano, Portuguese, Espanol, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, copy and paste the complete URL ("http://www.g21.net/do212.htm") and enter it in the box after you click through.

G21's Best Quotes of 2005 - Mphuthumi Ntabeni looks back at the closing year and provides the best lines, observations and insights, from his perspective, published by the The World's Magazine in 2005.

Mphuthumi Ntabeni

East London, SOUTH AFRICA - Even a man stupid enough to try to putting out fire with gasoline should be able to make it in this city during Mardi Gras -- but I'm still waiting for you to prove it by me. (Rod Amis)

Tsunami, hurricanes, droughts, floods and earthquakes. Each has claimed its own victims. But the greatest tragedy of them all is the acknowledgement by the media that with the earthquake in Asia, the latest disaster to devastate our planet, the world and its people has had its fill of sorrow. Images of dying children no longer evoke sympathy or financial contributions. We simply switch off the television. We have experienced a glut of disaster, sorrow and need, a surfeit. We are numbed to images of sadness, starvation and death. Our humanity has been tested and found to be lacking. (A.J.)

100,000 dead Iraqis so that we can control Iraqi oil? So that we can establish military bases throughout the Middle East and Southeast and Southwest Asia? Nearly 2000 American dead so that our corporations can extort money and resources from the people of the region? So that a few wealthy businessmen and women in the United S tates can continue to gain huge profits at the expense of the American people? (Jennifer Loewesntein)

May it be written that the Reagan Revolution ended with thousands of deaths along the Gulf Coast. The tragedy of the aftermath of Katrina illustrated the success of the Reagan Revolution, the federal government is no longer capable of rescuing thousands of people from a natural disaster or caring for them. As a result, many poor, underprivileged people died slow, agonizing and preventable deaths. (This is reality, not gratuitous sensationalism for partisan gain.) [H.Scott Prosterman]

We are told that the death of Pope John Paul II has [awakened] the sleeping dogs of the Roman Church, and supposingly ignited the succession crisis facing the Church. We are told that the crisis is likely to expose the disintegrative forces within the Catholic Church that had barely been contained by the late, charismatic pontiff. People who hardly know anything about the Roman Church, the pressărelying on speculation, rumour and slanderătell us all this. (Mphuthumi Ntabeni)

Somewhere in the American South: Scenic? Hell, no. You're looking at the back ass of the world. Trailer parks, junkyards, print shops and warehouses, lots of trees. That's ităall the way from New Orleans, Louisiana, to Florida (Pensacola.) It is a ticket nobody should want to buy ...One of my biggest problems is that I've never thought of a thousand miles as too far to go. You talk eight, nine thousand miles and you start to get my attention. (Rod Amis)

I have struggled with myself over the last few months, in the build up to making the decision and in the months after, in seeking a satisfactory answer. I have realized that however superficial my attempt at anonymity may be, it satisfies a need in me to break the connection between my identity and my writings. It allows me to tell you more, to speak out more. In the context of my previous pieces and the subsequent backlash, this may sound like I am succumbing to societal pressure, repression and constraints. My editor has already conveyed his scathing response. I am not sure if this new step will work but I feel the urge to trust my instincts and to act ... and so I have. I can only hope that good will come of it, for both of us. (A.J.)

... the only perspective from which I can observe and write is my own. (Ethan Casey)

She pointed out that everyone knows the storyăthe writer is not going to be able to use "bizarre invention" to hold the reader. The power, she said, is in having "the old story brought home to us closer than ever before ... Shakespeare knew this act very well, and the Greek dramatists long before him." (Lionel Rolfe)

This time around I realized it was pointless being angry or resentful. It only clouds ones focus and leaves one feeling like a victim and I had resolved early on in this career never to reduce the issue to color or race. Nevertheless, in my quiet moments, I could not help but wonder if it would all have turned out differently if I was white. Like a friend in my writers' circle delicately put it, "What makes you think these white people are ready for a black romance writer writing about the feelings and desires of white people?" (Ngozi Razak-Soyebi)

Once we find our true identity and intimate it, it'll communicate itself. From there the literature of our lives shall emerge, and perhaps now and then shall come a genius in our midst who'll outpace our times, that is, delineate us to the future we must be. (Mphuthumi Ntabeni)

More often than not, I believe, our admiration -- or at least mine, if not my friend's -- for heroes has to do with the spiritual courage to risk rejection and ostracism, not to mention penury and unfulfilled promise, for daring to embrace an unimagined possibility. This courage has everything to do with placing a higher premium on discovery than that one places on security. It is essentially moral in that it is based, I believe, on the notion that there is a capital T, Truth, remaining to be revealed (Rod Amis).

"How do you find a lion that has swallowed you?" asked Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung, commenting on the moral dilemma posed by the "shadow," his insightful term for the dark, hidden side of the human psyche. The answer to Jung's questions is "you can't find or see that lion"ănot as long as you are inside the beast. And therein resides` the essential dilemma of a group's dark side or shadow: it is nearly impossible for those caught inside a group's belief system to see their own dark side with any clarity or objectivity ... Caught in the consequences of this shadow boxing, we find ourselves compelled to live in a constant state of hypocrisy, burying more and more of our own individual sense of real compassion and charity in the graveyard of our collective dark side, covering our self-deception and shame with the rags of hollow slogans from "mouths that pray." Ironically, "hypocrisy," as Hillman points out, "holds the nation together so that it can preach, and practice what it does not preach. It makes possible armories of mass destruction side by side with the proliferation of churches, cults, and charities" -the bright "good" side covering a very destructive dark side. (John. D. Goldhammer)

The plantain plant may wear rags, but that does not mean that it is mad. (Clarius Ugwuoha)

How I have changed since the three years that I was on this very same beach, for a happier though temporary, out of money, occasion and not to scatter my dead friends ashes to the oceans and four directions of the winds as we've just done today ... (Moraa Gitaa)

This, therefore, means that women have to work extra hard as compared to their male counterparts if they are to achieve adequate representation in Kenya's power structure. At the moment many, including women themselves, have been heard to comment that affirmative action seems to have made their compatriots complacent once they get into power. Apart from the very few who are active, female nominated MPs are perceived not to be aggressively legislating as expected and hence lack the platform to act as role models to young marginalized women that they too can impact in the power struggles of this patriarchal country. (Simiyu Barasa)

Kenyans will stand tall and look into the future with confidence. Phrases like "the good old days" will be retired. For that to happen, we must shed all our pretenses, stop dying our hair and accept that time waits for no man. We have wasted enough time politicking, it is the time we faced the moment of truth, like all those who go through the mid-life crisis. (X.N. Iraki)

A friend tells me that wearing a burkha or an Islamic cap immediately places the person in a compromised position, depicts them as a stereotype, and forces others to create a first impression based on their appearance as a Muslim and not as a person; a judgment made on their outsides and not their insides. (A. J.)

Jack came on my Monday shift to ask me for Fashionable's address. When he left, Scott asked me why I didn't just tell him to sod off and withheld the information. "You don't have to help him hurt you."

Well, I believe it's never us that choose; it's the women. I wasn't making any campaign against Fashionable any way. I don't make campaigns on women any longer. I wait for them to catch me.

Have you ever noticed that one of Basic Rules of Life seems to be that the person (in a relationship) who loves the most always loses? It's true. You see any two people, the one who is most in love is cruising for a bruising. Period. I've never seen it fail.

I've been on both sides of this equation and have to admit that I felt better when I was on the winning side. It's marvelous to be adored and just plain scary to be the one doing the adoring. If you're the adorer, you're always wondering if someone might come along who does a better job of it than you do ... Being the on e who is grateful and adoring, who wakes up every day thinking, How did I get so lucky? also means you are the one waiting to crash and burn ... I keep thinking that ONE DAY I'll run into a literate lioness who is ready to settle down on a cliff side in Rio and make cups of Earl Grey or Irish Coffee while I pound out the next book. I don't take her out to the club, I don't deal with the three chat-up droogs who appear while I'm off taking a leak. It's possible. (Rod Amis)

I've never been the one at ease with shouted certainties. I stammer about love not because I'm in doubt, but because I'm too convinced. I've understood love to be an encounter with that which cannot be mastered.

What is hypocritical to me is the fraudulent modern desire to win both sides while playing only one hand. The wish to enjoy the pleasures of order and the advantages of virtue while living the anarchy and drunkenness of feelings. (A.J.)

In such moments, my enjoyment of autumn and my connection to it is at its strongest. Because autumn visualizes my innermost thoughts. It externalizes my pain. It shows me that even the golden leaves that flutter lifeless to the floor shall return to the branches of the uppermost trees and bathe in sunlight again. (A.J.)

| THE PREVIOUS DAY ONE | THE NEXT DAY ONE |