From "Mr. Advice," [No City Provided,] Tejas, USA:

SUBJECT: BOGOTA? No, Moscow!

No, no. Think Russia. Think Rumania. Hell, think Korea, Thailand. No, Russia. Beautiful. Blond. Intelligent. Can kick Nazi butt. Can keep you warm during long, cold, lonely nights. And they can hold their vodka. Boy, can they hold their vodka.

I'm telling ya, it's you all over.

Rod and Russia. Rodya?
There's a message there.
It's so bizarre it makes sense.

And your appetite? The doctor, yes? You have made an appointment? Good. After that you check out Dr. Zhivago's niece. Da.

Love,
Mr. Advice


From Ron D. Raleigh, NC, USA:

I like especially the material you wrote.

Remarks: [1] - yes, I was disappointed that you did not continue the humor in G21, but would not take you to task for it or complain BECAUSE I assume that you had REASONS for doing that. That is good enough for me.

Further on the American Empire, the so-called Pax Americana - see the new issue of Z for more details on US adventurism in South America.

But here is one datum that I really like. It is the proof that life is cheap, very cheap, almost worthless in the good ol' U S of A. The slayings in Littleton Colorado that had the media so stirred up - press and TV and talk radio, etc. - well, my friend, on the average seventeen to nineteen children PER WEEK in the U S of A are killed either by a family member or by someone very close, an intimate, of the family. Most with guns. But we have to lay it on the high school kids, it is THEIR problem, what are we going to do about these KIDS and their LAWLESSNESS. Note that it is the adults who are killing the kids week in and week out. One week a year, the kids imitate the adults and get slammed for it....

Every evening in every capital city in the world an embassy hosts a party for the diplomatic corps. While the champagne flows, the High Commissioner for Plotsova warily eyes the Ambassador for Conspiratoria over the canapÈs and the tipsy Correspondent of the Daily Gloss mutters semi incoherently with the Special Reporter from Whine Magazine, desperately trying to emphasise the magnificence of his latest scoop without betraying its substance. When it reaches a bewildered newsdesk it turns out to be so abstruse that the now deeply somnolent correspondent must be aroused if his ravishing morsel is to be tucked into a tiny corner of page 27.

Meanwhile, in Ulster former terrorists, now turned racketeers, decide where people live and how justice will be savagely dispensed, scores are murdered in East Timor, including some junior staff from the United Nations, a vast tract of Africa from Uganda to the South African border is ungovernable in spite of a new multi-national peace treaty, more than one third of fabulously wealthy Colombia is only the most startling example of Latin America's ungovernability and the Khmer Rouge lives.

Of late this bewildering phenomenon of diplomacy humbled by criminals has exercised those interested in Northern Ireland and Indonesia's East Timor. Why did the Good Friday Peace Agreement not put an end to beatings, knee-cappings and murder in Ulster? Why have so many people been slaughtered by paramilitary thugs over the status of a sliver of Indonesia? The answer is so profound, so shocking, that nobody in government may utter it; diplomats may construct frameworks within which politicians can do business but politicians have no simple methods of dealing with organised crime, particularly if the psychopaths wisely don the garb of political liberation though, to be honest, the more usual phenomenon is for the political psychopath to descend into the banal cruelty of entirely greed-driven organised crime.