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We LOVE to hear from you! Glad you're taking the time to be part of the commentary of The World's Magazine.
Below you'll find the latest letters from YOU.
Let's play!
Kudos, brickbats, you'll find it all right here.
From our Mailbag 08/22/04 - 09/25/04
by YOU
THE WORLD -
From DC Stultz, Largo, FL, USA:
SUBJECT: Tell Ron
that I loved his horse story...
Been there, done that. So, I sit here and read and laughed like mad.
Back in the 60's I owned an Okie cow pony that had been trucked to Florida in a semi load. I had the opposite problem with her. You could not lead or ride her behind a pickup truck with the tailgate down. That damn mare would jump in and want to go for a ride. She liked to have yanked my arm off the first time it happened.
I used to use her to do some cow hunting (with a guy that was later pardoned from his life sentence iby Clinton in his final hours as President -- but that is another story) and, yes, I often hauled her down the road at 60+ mph in the back of my pickup without stock racks.
Great issue Rod!
dc
ROD RESPONDS:Ya' know, I'm almost willing to bet that he came back to me with that picture of the horse because of your comment.
SUBJECT: A commendable start, I believe!
Iraki,
You seem to be discouraged with NARC just most of us here in Kenya.I really agree with you that we are chasing an illusion as things appear now-corruption is creeping back,half a million jobs promised are yet to materialise,insecurity on the rise again,workers demands not sufficiently addressed,etc.
what are your comments on the emerging issue of heroes corner in the uhuru gardens? what do you think should be done to the surviving national heroes and probably thier next of kin? Do we have unsung post-independence heroes and do they deserve dignified treatment?
What is your reaction to the current government of national unity?
Those are my few comments -expect others soon.
small miracles, large dreams G21 #394:
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TABLE OF CONTENTS & BACK ISSUESSUBJECT: Foreign Policy Magazine seeking your writer
To g21's editor,
I am contacting you from?Foreign Policy?magazine in Washington, D.C., with a big urgent favor to ask. Foreign Policy, a National Magazine Award winner of 2003 and published in 8 languages, is the premier bi-monthly magazine for international politics, economics, and ideas.
In our book section, we only review books published in languages other than English, which enables our readers to catch a glimpse of other countries' debates and books which create a stir for some reason.
As FP's?book review editor, I am currently?trying to track down Mr. Binyavanga Wainaina in Nairobi for an important assignment we would like to invite him to.
Since I had the pleasure to learn it was you?who?nominated him for the Caine prize two years ago, I'd be most grateful for your help. An email and/or phone number would be perfect. Also, do you happen to know whether he speaks and reads Kikuyu?
I am looking forward to hearing from you as soon as possible.
Thank you very much!
Sincerely,
Verena R.
________________________
Associate Editor
Foreign Policy magazine
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/>www.foreignpolicy.com
Carnegie Endowment for Int'l Peace
1779, Massachusetts Av., NW
20036 Washington, D.C.
USA
[EDITOR'S NOTE: Some days the e-mail warms the cockles of the Little Ole Editor's heart. -- RA]
SUBJECT: FWD: Remember How Women Got the Vote
Remember How Women Got The Vote?
Vote is a verb, it does not exist without action. It is a hard won right not a candidate or party.
The women were innoc ent and defenseless. And by the end of the night, they were barely alive. Forty prison guards wielding clubs and their warden's blessing went on a rampage against the 33 helpless women wrongly convicted of "obstructing sidewalk traffic."
They beat Lucy Burn, chained her hands to the cell bars above her head and left her hanging for the night, bleeding and gasping for air. They hurled Dora Lewis into a dark cell, smashed her head against an iron bed and knocked her out cold. Her cellmate, Alice Cosu, thought Lewis was dead and suffered a heart attack. Additional affidavits describe the guards grabbing, dragging, beating, choking, slamming, pinching, twisting and kicking the women.
Thus unfolded the "Night of Terror" on Nov. 15, 1917, when the warden at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia ordered his guards to teach a lesson to the suffragists imprisoned there because they dared to picket the White House for the right to vote.
For weeks, the women's only water came from an open pail. Their food--all of it colorless slop--was infested with worms. When one of the leaders, Alice Paul, embarked on a hunger strike, they tied her to a chair, forced a tube down her throat and poured liquid into her until she vomited. She was tortured like this for weeks until word was smuggled out to the press.
So, refresh my memory. Some women won't vote this year because--why, exactly? We have carpool duties? We have to get to work? Our vote doesn't matter? It's raining?
Last week, I went to a sparsely attended screening of HBO's new movie "Iron Jawed Angels." It is a graphic depiction of the battle these women waged so that I could pull the curtain at the polling booth and have my say. I am ashamed to say I needed the reminder.
There was a time when I knew these women well. I met them in college--not in my required American history courses, which barely mentioned them, but in women's history class. That's where I found the irrepressibly brave Alice Paul. Her large, brooding eyes seemed fixed on my own as she stared out from the page. Remember, she silently beckoned. Remember.
I thought I always would. I registered voters throughout college and law school, worked on congressional and presidential campaigns until I started writing for newspapers. When Geraldine Ferraro ran for vice president, I took my 9-year-old son to meet her. "My knees are shaking," he whispered after shaking her hand. "I'm never going to wash this hand again."
All these years later, voter registration is still my passion. But the actual act of voting had become less personal for me, more rote. Frankly, voting often felt more like an obligation than a privilege. Sometimes, it was even inconvenient.
My friend Wendy, who is my age and studied women's history, saw the HBO movie, too. When she stopped by my desk to talk about it, she looked angry. She was. With herself "One thought kept coming back to me as I watched that movie," she said. "What would those women think of the way I use--or don't use--my right to vote? All of us take it for granted now, not just younger women, but those of us who did seek to learn." The right to vote, she said, had become valuable to her "all over again."
HBO will run the movie periodically before releasing it on video and DVD. I wish all history, social studies and government teachers would include the movie in their curriculum. I want it shown on Bunko night, too, and anywhere else women gather. I realize this isn't our usual idea of socializing, but we are not voting in the numbers that we should be, and I think a little shock therapy is in order.
This is very powerful! I thought you might want to share it with your members and friends. We need to get out the vote!
SUBJECT: Of interest to your readers?
Dear Rod:
I have just finished reading this most remarkable book (The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind) which concludes with the following excerpt ... which I have given a short title.
The Rise and Fall of Civilizations
Excerpted from The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind
If we examine in their main lines the genesis of greatness and of the fall of the civilizations that preceded our own, what do we see?
At the dawn of civilization a swarm of men of various origin, brought together by the chances of migrations, invasions, and conquests. Of different blood, and of equally different languages and beliefs, the only common bond of union between these men is the half-recognized law of a chief. The psychological characteristics of crowds are present in an eminent degree in these confused agglomerations. They have the transient cohesion of crowds, their heroism, their weaknesses, their impulsiveness, and their violence. Nothing is stable in connection with them. They are barbarians.
At length time accomplishes its work. The identity of surroundings, the repeated intermingling of races, the necessities of life in common exert their influence. The assemblage of dissimilar units begins to blend a whole, to form a race; that is, an aggregate possessing common characteristics and sentiments to which heredity will give greater and greater fixity. The crowd has become a people, and this people is able to emerge from a barbarous state. However, it will only entirely emerge therefrom when, after long efforts, struggles necessarily repeated, and innumerable recommencements, it shall have acquired an ideal. The nature of this ideal is of slight importance; whether it be the cult of Rome, the might of Athens, or the triumph of Allah, it will suffice to endow all the individuals of the race that is forming with perfect unity of sentiment and thought. At this stage a new civilization, with its institutions, its beliefs and its arts, may be born. In pursuit of its ideal, the race will acquire in succession the qualities necessary to give it splendour, vigour and grandeur. At times no doubt it will still be a crowd, but henceforth, beneath the mobile and changing characteristics of crowds, is found a solid substratum, the genius of the race which confines within narrow limits the transformations of a nation and overrules the play of chance.
After having exerted its creative action, time begins the work of destruction from which neither gods nor men escape. Having reached a certain level of strength and complexity a civilization ceases to grow, and having ceased to grow is condemned to a speedy decline. The hour of its old age has struck.
"The writer thanked the producers for the lovely paycheck. Then he shot them." writelikegod.com
When is the last time you talked politics with your dog? dogshatebush.com
This inevitable hour is always marked by the weakening of the ideal that was the mainstay of the race. In proportion as this ideal pales all the religious, political, and social structures inspired by it begin to be shaken.
With the progressive perishing of its ideal the race loses more and more the qualities that lent it its cohesion, its unity and its strength. The personality and intelligence of the individual may increase, but at this time thi s collective egoism of the race is replaced by an excessive development of the egoism of the individual, accompanied by a weakening of the character and a lessening of the capacity for action. What constituted a people, a unity, a whole, becomes in the end an agglomeration of individuals lacking cohesion, and artificially held together for a time by its traditions and institutions. It is at this stage that men, divided by their interests and aspirations, and incapable any longer of self-government, require directing in their pettiest acts, and that the State exerts an absorbing influence.
With the definite loss of its old ideal the genius of the race entirely disappears; it is a mere swarm of isolated individuals and returns to its original stateãthat of a crowd. Without consistency and without a future, it has all the transitory characteristics of crowds. Its civilization is now without stability, and at the mercy of every chance. The populace is sovereign, and the tide of barbarism mounts. The civilization may still seem brilliant because it possesses an outward front, the work of a long past, but it is in reality an edifice crumbling to ruin, which nothing supports, and destined to fall in at the first storm.
To pass in pursuit of an ideal from the barbarous to the civilized state, and then when this ideal has lost its virtue, to decline and die, such is the cycle of the life of a people. ã Gustave Le Bon (1841 != 1931), The Crowd; A Study of the Popular Mind (Cherokee Publishing Company, Atlanta, Georgia 1982, ISBN 0-87797-168-4)
Might provide a possible context for current events.
Cheers!
NDK Creative Artist
Allforart.com
SUBJECT: Rod in Phoenix & The New Look
Rod,
Glad to see life settling into a bit of a pattern, comfortable pattern that is. I like The New Look!!!
Take care as you relish your reprieve from hurricane country,
Lehnert R
ROD RESPONDS:Thank you, kind sir! I'm just getting start. You may have noticed that this week I added the XML/RSS Feed
. And, as always, expect much more as we move toward the Holy Season.
Cheers,
Rod
SUBJECT: Getting the Message
Rod: I have a private site where I put information intended for our family and friends. A few years ago, all of a sudden, I began to see astronomic numbers of visitors - hundreds, then thousands daily. I was curious and asked the ISP feller if he could tell what was going on. He said that 99% of the increase came from Japan.
The mystery was solved about three or four months later. I got a letter, in English, from a Japanese grammar school teacher of English. She had read a story that I had written for my daughter some years ago, a series of tales about a pet dog named Bluey (he's blue) who could talk. She wrote an article in a Japanese teachers' magazine and recommended that teachers use the Bluey stories in their English classes. The traffic stayed high for two years, then subsided gradually, until now when it is back to a hundred or so per day.
Thought you might get a laugh out of this one.
Ron Diener
ROD RESPONDS:Ron,LOL indeed! That's pretty good. Maybe I need at least one winning story like that at G21. ;-)
You probably have noted that I'm obsessive about seeing what's going on at the site and what's working. Some of the conclusions, which I've not shared publicly, are almost counter-intuitive.
What I can say is that I have a fairly good handle on what works and what I do out of pure sentimentality or in order to keep a goodly amount of diversity of commentary and thus heterodoxy on the site. In short, I have a sense of what gets read the most. For reasons of my own, I haven't let it have great influence on my editorial policy.
As to advertising policy, I believe you'll see a new shift very soon, based on what seems to be remunerative and what isn't.
Thanks for sharing this great Web story. It's appreciated.
Cheers,
Rod
SUBJECT: TAXCO HOSPITAL PROJECT
SPONSORED BY ARTCAMP "Artesanas Campesinas" rural womens artisans cooperative
The Adolfo Prieto Hospital in Taxco serves the poorest people of four municipalities in northern Guerrero, Mexico.
Guerrero is one of the very poorest of the 36 Mexican states, and funds for health care have always been scarce.
Artcamp is a rural womens artisans cooperative of Tecalpulco, Guerrero, making handcrafted and .925 silver jewelry.
By offering its web interface, and network of contacts, Artcamp has secured valuable donations for the public Hospital.
In 2002, Artcamp arranged the donation of opthalmic equipment by the RH Burton Company of Ohio and DHL International
Today, our friend, and the friend of Taxco, Karen Buckstaff RN has generously offered a seed donation of $1000.00usd .
We would like to increase that amount by ten times to $10,000 to purchase much needed equipment for the public Hospital
To persons of good will, to friends of Taxco and Tecalpulco, your contributions for the benefit of our local Hospital are welcome
Transparent Accounting by Contadoras Campesinas***** Artcamp Projects****Who We Are***IFAT**Artcamp Shop*
Best wishes from your friends in Mexico!
Gloria Cambray
for ARTCAMP "Artesanas Campesinas"http://www.artcamp.com.mx/HO/DonorFund
Visit the Artcamp Hospital Project WebpageAbout Artcamp, our rural womens artisans cooperative:
http://www.artcamp.com.mx/ifat/
http://www.artcamp.com.mx/TechMuseum/index.htm
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