So because we, your friends at The World's Magazine KNOW YOU -- we know you so well! -- we know that you expect both bread and circuses. That is what we shall give you this week...

Not to show any disrespect to our "Easter Egg" queen this week, Shakira. But you know our publisher's thang about Latinas. So we have to share a little Nelly Furtado with you here right now (CIRCUSES!)

So let the Games begin!

MESSAGE To Those Committed to Death: You are a wave, but WE are the ocean...

BREAD

IRAN: Now More than Ever

As a boy in 1979 I watched angry crowds swallow cities in my father's native Iran. Secularists, women, and intellectuals marched alongside religious merchants and urbanized peasants. My classmates in America didn't understand the fanaticism of Iran and, at that age, neither did I. The Iran I knew had always been a serene, tender place. I turned inward to my studies, to my favorite subject, history.

"...the will of the Almighty expressly disapproves of government by kings."

It sounded like Ayatollah Khomeini preaching against the Shah of Iran. It was actually Thomas Paine in his 1776 pamphlet Common Sense calling for American colonists to rise up against King George. During the American Revolution, it was common sense for most Americans to understand their world in religious terms. Revolutionary leaders fired imaginations by associating revolt with the second coming of Christ and the establishment of God's kingdom on earth. Iran and America, my twin heritages, were not so different after all... More


DAY ONE:

Taking Stock of the War

Six weeks after the attacks on the WTO and Pentagon and a week after the commencement of the bombing of Afghanistan, KEVIN CAREY takes stock.

In viewing exactly where we are in the welter of what has passed for analysis since the attacks on New York and Washington, let us start with some fundamentals.

The first, which I mentioned on September 12th, is that United States' Middle East and development assistance policies could in no way have "caused" these attacks; they may explain them to a certain extent but causality of the sort proposed confuses, as I said then, phenomena in a scientific laboratory with the acts of people and organisations that possess will and conscience. It was no more inevitable that these buildings should have been attacked on September 11th than it was inevitable that they were not attacked a day, a month, a year before, or not at all.

Secondly, in terms of the supposed explanation for the attacks, I say "may" advisedly. A great many people, including Mr. Bin Laden and the Al Qa'ida network, may oppose United States policy towards Israel and the Palestinians but this hardly explains why at least one of the planes ear-marked to participate in the September 11th attacks belonged to Air Canada.... More


VOX POPULI:

We Just Read 'Em, We Don't Explain 'Em

SUBJECT: Muslim-Hindu-Christian-Jewish Peace Plan

The desire to prevent World War III and bring peace to the world is most likely the inner mood of most of us today. To do that we need to come to a common understanding of religious terminology and beliefs.

For example most of us have no idea that the name Allah comes from the Hebrew letter Alef, our A, in the English alphabet. This simple point contains enough information for every Christian, Jew and Hindu to accept Allah as a name of God.... More



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Bread & Circuses

NEW ORLEANS - 20 October, 2001: People here were glad, at first, that the Super Bowl is still coming to town, even after some idyits thought it might be a good idea to move it to New York. We were afraid they might get away with it, too, considering all the national focus on that attacked city. That would have been a near-death knell for a chronically economically depressed city like this one, so dependent on tourism.

But are we happy down here? Hell, no! Now the news is all about how with the Super Bowl being so close (one week away) to Mardi Gras, New Orleans might become an obvious target for the terrorism which grips America in a sheath of fear right now.. More


THE NEXT FABULOSO EVENT

CIRCUS

With Washboard Sam

It was October in Greenwich Village, 1966. I had been playing as the permanent opening act at the famous folk club The Gaslight. It was the folk club to play. There wasn't a better gig in the Village -- not for an eighteen year old, new to the road and the urban folk revival in New York City. I was playing week after week with the biggest folk stars of the era, most of them I'd only read about or listened to on records. Clarence Hood, the owner of the Gaslight, made it his business for me to know everyone that was anyone in the folk world then, and the Gaslight on McDougal Street was the center of the folk world all through that amazing era. I knew the gig I had was folk Heaven, but I still needed a break. Mr. Hood (I always called him that, never called him "Clarence" like some of the other singers because I had too much respect for the man) he would let me come and go as I pleased, and leave my job open for me to return to on a moment's notice. You just couldn't beat that! ... More


RECOMMENDED DAILY REQUIREMENT: :

F--- With Me and FIND OUT!

AUSTIN, TEJAS - The latest Big Fun activity for the gutter punks down here in the trailer park -- when Jerry Springer or Rikki Lake ain't on the tube -- is throwing darts (or automatic weapons fire, if you got 'em) at posters of Osama bin Laden while blasting Wesley Willis's "F--- With Me and FIND OUT!" That song's become kindah a secondary national anthem down here since those ragheads attacked America. It's in keeping with how a lot of us down here in the Lone Star state feels about this here war. Far as we're concerned the Dubya's listenin' too much to that danged Colin Powell and not kickin' butt fast enough!... More

RDR 10.15.01: ROD AMIS turns to the foreign press to get logical analysis of America's Vendetta "War & Hell"

RDR 10.08.01: THOMAS HART laughs about the Dubya's notion of "Spending Out of Debt?"

RDR 10.01.01: RADIO RAHEEM signs on to the Peace campaign of The World's Magazine and lauds the American Friends Service "Give Peace a Chance"



THE MYTHVILLE PROJECT:

Art of War:

U2 Goes to War

We were late on the way to my first U2 concert and we still had a long way to go. My wife (back then) was pregnant with my son (he's 16 now). The Toyota Corolla charged hard down into the desert valley of metropolitan Phoenix, and then further south into the desert, toward the out-of-the-way Compton Terrace venue, a dusty outdoors amphitheater on an Indian reservation near Casa Grande. Then, the announcer on the radio gave the warning about the traffic jam for the U2 concert.

I decided to go past the venue's off-ramp exit and further out into the desert, intending to outflank the sheep who didn't know any better. So I pushed the engine. The little station wagon went into a starved whine. And then, the engine blew.

White exhaust from the hood, an awful sound of deaccerlating tin and grease, the car now still, the motor a smoking ruin. A casualty of war. Without much thought, we left it out there beside the tumbleweeds, where the streets really have no name.... More


IRISH EYES:

The Songs of Sean McCarthy

"The Songs of Sean McCarthy," a recently launched video features fifteen of the 160 songs by the prolific Bard of Finuge, sung by his friend and fellow Kerry-person Peggy Sweeney. His first song, written in 1930, when he was seven, with some assistance from a local songwriter, went:

"I'm intelligent Sean McCarthy
And I'm known by all the boys,
I live at the foot of Haleys wood,
With muck up to my eyes."