From MEREDITH TUPPER, Tampa, FL., USA :

Awwww man...questions like this are damn near impossible to answer. The list will be weighted toward the post-Industrial Revolution for obvious reasons.

All yours (except Lawrence Durrell, I gotta go look him up now) plus:

• Ken Keyes
• Rachel Carson
• John Lennon
• Mathew Brady
• and reluctantly do I add P.T. Barnum (for pointing out the achilles heel of capitalism)

Looking forward to seeing the results,
Meredith
--
PintSize Graphics & Web Hosting, Inc.
http://www.pintsize.com/

"Contribute to others, rather than converting others." -- HH Dalai Lama

Yeah, add him too.


From RIC WILLIAMS, AUSTIN, TX, USA :

That's Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre.

And where's de Sade? Remember when we talked about Benjamin Franklin versus de Sade?

Ten, huh? That's a tall order. These are broad and generalized assessments and not in chronological order.

Francis of Assisi (saved Christianity and the invisible--good or bad?) Martin Luther and Martin Luther King, Jr. fall under his aegis

Adolph Hitler (showed us the depths of human evil) Genghis Khan, etc.

Descartes (primary author of Western rationalistic dualism)--Hume nailed the mother and Wittgenstein walked away from the grave, but Descartes is still the name for philosophers and scientists, Newton et al.

Freud (showed us the myth of rationalism was a delicate myth)--I prefer Jung, even Adler, and the gods bless James Hillman, but Freud started it in the popular mind though he stole most of his material; even Madonna and Presley fall under Freud's shadow--the whole deconstruction thing starts here and the appreciation of the Other (which encompasses my obvious lacunae regarding other cultural heroes); yes, he was strongly influenced by Goethe and the Romantics which brings us to the next two

Elizabeth I (that Woman Rules) so many strong women proving it wasn't a man's world and that an individual's personal power matters, but her name sums it up...

My neighbor,
a spirited seventy-something year old man, tells me that he once put a hammer through a television screen. His eager confession briefly reminds me of a Life of Elvis Presley film wherein the opening scene features the bloated, aging King shooting a television screen with a pistol. My neighbor is prompted to reveal his act of bludgeoning when he views my paramour's brother hauling our own television carcass out of our abode. "My ex-wife...she watched so much TV that it was like living with the living dead," my neighbor says. My neighbor crushed and smashed his competition, but his then-wife didn't appreciate his chivalry--they divorced shortly after the Hammer Incident. Brother-of-paramour heaves our ostracized, circa mid-80's TV set toward a van parked on the street; the set's dangling plug bobs and swings menacingly around the brother's thick shins.

We unplugged the life force of our television as if confronted with a brain dead-parent, sibling or child. We didn't merely perform last rites for the television set within our livingroom, we got radical and severed the umbilical cord of television media from our home. I sometimes regret that my act of refusal lacked the drama and pathos of my neighbor or Elvis Presley; in this epoch outrageousness seems to be the only way to convey one's real or fictional convictions.

Sometimes death is a relief.
You see someone close to you deteriorating yet you can't let go; you begin relying on quackery and false hope to avoid the threatening emptiness. You try to convince yourself that a comatose relative moved their fingers when it was you who moved their fingers. Death is like lopping off an arm or a lobe of the brain; our sense of comfortable identity, real or manufactured, is thrown off-balance.

American television spiraled into a coma a long time ago. With few exceptions it is a grotesque device of mass manipulation. In this truculent Information Age, sensational diversions are more dense, insistent and despotic. Violent attacks on other nations are stylized like a movie of the week replete with demonic antagonists and false idols. The misery of humanity is trotted out like a freak show so that political agendas may be more readily received and embraced. We believe we are participants in a democratic society as we write our opinions to the op-ed sections of mainstream periodicals, as we channel and parrot the assigned roles in the latest debacle. Nazi propagandist Goebbels knew the power of media; he is snickering in his grave. If you sit quietly you can hear Goebbels snickering; tee hee hee. Mainstream media assigns the topic dujour like a demented school master and then we brawl amongst ourselves within a prison of opinion. Does mainstream media reflect the collective psyche or does mainstream media sculpt the collective psyche?

There are some concerned American citizens who want to regulate, that is Censor, television programming. These concerned citizens are convinced that any entertainment featuring violence spurs acts of real violence in the supposedly real world. Meanwhile the real world has been dressed-up and perfumed like an reluctant debutante. Alas, the painful underside of spurious, amusement park life-styles demand our attention like tragic shots heard round the world. ....

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