A Reader's Christmas Tradition

Natchez
St. Louis, Missouri

Honestly guys, if you really understood the criteria that Time requires to be "Man of the Year", it is clear that Matthew Shepard would not qualify. It was horrible what happened. Time is looking for the person who most affected man during the last year. Look at the list of people of the last 60 years. Do you see a trend?

Al

Oh goody. The Puritans are back and now they are taking over the country. When the Repuritan-majority Senate stages the trial, I wonder if they will use the tried & true New England Puritan test of Dunking? The Repuritans would like the way this works, if he drowns his innocence is proved, if he lives, it will show that he is Satan Himself, which Ken Starr has been arguing, along with Pat Robertson, for some time. When the Repuritans come for all of you out there that demand purity for all, don't say you weren't warned.

Eclipse

I don't believe we should spend millions, and countless hours focussing media time on pestering, trashing, exposing, witch-hunting, inquiring, smearing and otherwise attempting to destroy. And those Republicans? This is their legacy. This is the justice afforded by their hypocrisy.

Impeachment is an intolerable end to the Starr show. It is a disaster not just for Bill Clinton, who is far more honest to the country than George Bush or Ronald Reagan, whose lies and obfuscation did not result in their impeachment It is a disaster for America.

If the Republicans succeed in this tragic mess, they must never be forgiven. There should be driven from every facet of American political life.

N. V.

Gary Bauer and Jerry Falwell

Eureka! folks, The stuff I looked at was delicious; full of the most wonderful projection, especially Jesse Helms on 'intellectual dishonesty,' but it is important to remind folks that this is business as usual for these folks. All this stuff should be considered from a marketing perspective.

These demonizing remarks are usually made to bring the money in, if they did not, these folks would find something else to do.

Much as it may annoy us to have to deal with these greedy loons, careful consideration of their rhetoric can help us to identify the work that remains to be done. What they address is the fear that that great daisy chain of authoritarian culture, which Lewis Mumford tracked back to the Egyptian First Dynasty, is breaking down.

Having compromised themselves (in the old sense of having given in to what appears to be overwhelming force) to get what they wanted in life, they enjoy an acute sensitivity to the disappointments that many people suffer when they realize that some other people are getting away with becoming whole human beings.

I think it likely that Jesus and his friends were aware of this powerful social dynamic and none the less preferred wholeness and a democratically negotiated social scheme. That generations of toadies would hop onto and exploit the institutional bandwagon that followed is all too expectable.

Many people grow up supposing that the alternative to authoritarian socialization is early death. Their hopes that they will be able to divert some of the rivers of juice that flow through that decidedly less than zero sum game to attend to their own wounds if they play along, are hardly even secret.

When something threatens to bring down the authority to which they have submitted, anything and everything must be done (less than consciously, of course) to co-opt the threatening development. Can you say, "Promise Keepers", or, "Ex-Gays"? > Let's go back to the money. Part of the fun of industrialized mass culture is that even niche markets are huge agglomerations.

When that cute little Mr. Baker and his cuter wife Tammy Faye invented the 700 Club ( ed.:PTL?) for the otherwise rather hopeless Mr. Robertson, the age-old process of making a splendid living off of other people's resentments kicked in handsomely for all three of them. That Jerry Falwell's intuition and marketing research tapped into how his customers were freaking out about "Homosexuals" tells us that we were indeed doing some things right.

I could rant along, cranking out a lot more of that, but it would tend to bury my point.

Jonathan Justice