(news)letter "Say the thing with which you labor." Thoreau from the porter.micro.press Volume 1, Number 3 January 31, 1994 _________________________________________________________________ Please send suggestions, submissions and subscription requests to CTPorter 117-A S. Mendenhall St. Greensboro, NC 27403 or e-mail ctporter@rock.concert.net Your input is appreciated. Things Aren't What They Seem It's been a weird week. Not much read, certainly not as much as last week, most of the time was spent in the Net. So often, once I come away from the Net, I'm of the impression that I have literally been caught in one. Networking can very quickly become addictive. I'll try to explain the particular appeal that's grabbed me in this week's "On the Net." There's been a lot of heat raised by a letter that appeared in the UNCG student paper, The Carolinian, this past week vilifying Dr. Martin Luther King. This letter was published as written by a Brian Nance, though the student named Brian Nance insists that he didn't write it. The letter was so obviously inflammatory, there's no earthly reason for the editors to print the thing. I've heard one student guess that The Carolinian is feeling the heat from a rival student paper and so would welcome a little controversy. According to this letter, Dr. King "prompted riots and massacres ... did more damage than he did good ... has been a rabble-rouser. He called himself a reverend, but many of the things he supported really seemed to be against God's word" (4). I'm just wondering why the letter was even printed, and why the editors didn't check with the student to make sure that he wasn't ready to take back what he'd written. Their policy, written quite clearly on the editorial page, states that "submissions must be typed and have the author's name and signature..." (4). According to the Greensboro News and Record though, this letter had no signature. The city paper got into the act because Brian Nance had received a death threat or two, and campus security was so scared for his safety that they moved him off campus until the heat dies down. Again: why even print it? And especially without calling first to the name at the bottom of the letter and making sure that this guy really held these opinions. The editor in charge of this page ought to hand in his resignation pronto, as well as the overall editor. They ought to have their little fannies hung out to dry. As should whoever supplied the "live" tape to the Virginia media from Ollie North's campaign. He announced his candidacy for senator this past week and as a public service (!) to the media, in case they didn't cover the announcement live, his campaign staff provided a sound byte of the speech. But instead of being live, they had altered the tape so that it was indeed his speech, but it was punctuated by shouts of "Ollie, Ollie, Ollie," something that didn't happen at the rallys. On second thought I guess there's nothing really wrong with that, the campaign workers are just doing what they are there to do, get their man elected. It is really the media's fault if they used the soundbyte and pawned if off as live. I'm just wondering more and more these days, who there is to be believed around here? Doin' It With Mirrors I missed President Clinton's State of the Union speech on Tuesday, but snagged a copy of it from the Net. That was the best way to scrutinize it because I didn't have to deal with Congress applauding at all of the "correct" times. It struck me as a well- written speech, but then we've seen Clinton be convincing before, only to waver when push comes to shove. Our President is going to spend a large portion of the coming months in the attempt to get his health care bill passed, and I'm starting to get wary. I read this week a couple of articles about health care, written from the conservative viewpoint, the first being Irwin Seltzer's "What Health Care Crisis?" in this month's Commentary (February 1994, 19-24). This article kind of set the tone for the week because Seltzer seems to find only statistics that support his point of view. Should that surprise me? Is it too much to ask for an intelligent examination, instead of an agenda-pushing, self-serving diatribe? Mr. Seltzer wants to convince us that there is no health care crisis, that we are imagining problems where none exist. The reasons we imagine these problems are fourfold: we're insecure because of the recession; there is a concern over the amount of money we spend on health care, as a nation (14% of the GNP); we think everyone should be covered; and, of course, the liberal media wants us to think there's a crisis. He lost me though, when he cited a statistic that said that the average American visit to a doctor lasts "fifteen to twenty minutes." That statistic obviously fails to take into account the amount of time a patient spends in a waiting room, or the time put into the paperwork that a visit generates. And is it a doctor's fault that Americans so love the newest, expensive technologies? Seltzer cites a study that showed that less than one in ten doctors would "put grandma" on a respirator while forty percent of family members would. Give me a break. In short, Mr. Seltzer blames this false crisis on others, always on the other guy. The poor don't deserve looking after because the present systems do fine by them. One case he makes is a mother on welfare who didn't want to deal with the forms necessary for her young son's shots, so he developed rickets. It all boils down, says Seltzer, to "a relatively simple set of choices" (24). And if you agree with his article, then those choices are extremely simple -- stay with the best health care system in the world, or trash it. To Seltzer, there are no other options. The next article I couldn't even get through because I've seen the commercial: all gloom and doom. Elizabeth McCaughey's "What the Clinton Plan Will Do For You," in the February 7 New Republic struck me as more intelligent than Irwin Seltzer's, but I couldn't escape the feeling that again I was being taken on an intellectual ride. There is something wrong with health care in this country, it's become a self-perpetuating racket. To completely overhaul it, as the Clintons want to do, strikes me as a Rube Goldberg solution -- too many gears and pulleys that can go wrong. To refuse to address the problem is cowardly. To find an intelligent discussion about the problems and options is gargantuan. "Uh, Excuse Me, Is Anybody up There?" Have to admit that I blew one last week: walking the issue to the copiers and I realized that I missed out on one of the most elemental of relationships that a person can have -- his relationship with the planet he lives on. The earthquake two weeks ago in California is still bothering residents with aftershocks, though it seems to be calming down a bit. I can't even imagine what would be going through my head when the earth moved, started bouncing up and down, and given the disasters that keep happening out there, you'd think people would begin leaving LA in droves. The image that will stay with me about the earthquake though is from the coverage during the day, when the media stayed on the whole day telling us about something that seemed to be over. One LA newscaster, when asked by Connie Chung about preparations for an event like this, laughed under his breath while gloating to her that a tragedy every once in a while "was worth the price of living in paradise." You can have it bub, and take all of that traffic with you. Schlooop Flamm Flooom Flizzle Okay, I confess that I didn't watch it, but I can't resist ranting about the Super Bowl halftime show. The whole spectacle struck me as so typically ugly-American: here you have a bunch of stars up on a big stage, lip-syncing their hit songs, a horde of dancers making fools of themselves everywhere performing caricatures of people dancing, a light show, the whole thing named after a corporate product, and it holds up the game besides. The word was out that no one wanted to follow Michael Jackson's pedophilic display of last year so they couldn't get the really big names they wanted, like Garth Brooks. If they'd asked me, I wouldn't have done it, but not because of the twisted legacy of Michael Jackson, but because I would ever refuse to be a part of anything so ludicrous as to be titled "The Wavy Lay's Halftime Show." Necessary Fictions I thoroughly enjoyed a book of short-short stories, Sudden Fiction (edited by Robert Shapard and James Thomas). This genre has a lot to offer both a writer and a reader, and the really forgettable stories were short stories whittled down. The ones I liked were the ones that surprised me, gave me a jolt within the four pages that one really can't expect in any other genre. Chet Williamson's "The Personal Touch" put junk mail in a different light: the protagonist fires off a nasty letter in reply to a subscription renewal form letter he received; the electronics surveillance magazine wants him to renew but misspells his name; the protagonist's name is spelled correctly on the next notice, but now there's a steep bill that must be paid. For any males who have stared at a woman too long, or any females tired of such stares, Robley Wilson Jr.'s "Thief," gives a female's twisted response to such an invasion. I'll not do it again, I swear! And Russell Edson's "Dinner Time" is worth reading because it's so absurdly funny: "The old man swallowed a spoon. Okay, said the old woman, now we're short a spoon" (116). I like the imagination it takes to come up with a line like that. Robyn Selman's sequence of fifteen sonnets, "Exodus," in the Fall 1993 Paris Review (pp. 324-338), refreshes because of the skill the poet exhibits. These are poems about coming to terms with life as a lesbian, and the content of each poem alternates: sonnet three continues sonnet one, sonnet four continues sonnet two, until the last, number fifteen, which is made up of the first lines of the previous fourteen. To read something like that, watching the creativity flow out of a rigid structure that such a sonnet sequence imposes, makes reading fun for me. Mark Holliday's "1946" (Poetry, February 1994, p. 255) and Sharon Olds' "1954" (Ploughshares, Winter 1993-94, p. 43-4) provide an interesting contrast. In Holliday's poem a young woman with a new job awaits a train at the station confident along with the rest of an America flush with victory. She's duded up right, she is, and "America is going to have to realize it needs / a smart new secretary whose hat looks right." In Sharon Olds' poem, though, America is quite different, this time a land in which the murder of a young girl is possible. The heroine learns of the murder while sitting on her mother's bed and in that moment loses her innocence. She will no longer be able to sit comfortably on the electric blanket because she realizes that the good men will use electricity to fry the bad man. Both poems achieve a powerful image, a slice of two very different Americas. A more contemporary America is addressed in Lynne Hanley's essay of images on the Gulf War in "Mean Streak" (Frontiers, 1993, pp. 93-101). Presented in two different voices, a peacenik who marches for peace, and her young daughter, Hanley's paragraphs cast a cynical eye at the war, concentrating chiefly on the divisiveness apparent in small town America, where those marching for peace are assaulted by those who support the war. Watching from afar, the young daughter and her friend, whose mother supports the war, just want the adults to quit fighting and come home -- they look so ridiculous out there. In a war it's always us against them, but sometimes the line between the two becomes fogged, and as a result of this inner American confusion, a ten year old Iraqui on a bombed out street has "no chance against a time that needs heroes" (101). On the Net The better Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs) have basically two different ways to communicate with fellow users who belong to the particular BBS. The Message and Chat functions each have their own appeal, and through them, one can quickly come to know different users and, depending on how much you like to put yourself out there on the line, you can become part of what appears, at times, like a huge ongoing conversation. In the message mode, the user posts letters for a whole group of users to read and react to; chatting is more confined, a real-time discussion between one or two users online at the same time. For messages there are a whole range of message groups, titles like Sports, Religion, Rush Limbaugh, you name it you can find it somewhere. The range of a group depends on the BBS itself -- some BBSs pay for regional access and so get feeds at different times (once a day, for example) from all over the country; other message groups are local, fed between area BBSs; and some groups exist just for the users of the particular BBS. A group can be moderated, meaning that there are several users responsible for ensuring that the posts follow the particular rules that the group has chosen for itself (for example, that the posts stay on topic or that the language remains clean). In my experience most of the regional groups are moderated, and an understood rule is that the local system operators (sysops) of each BBS ensure that if there is a problem with a user, that user is dealt with on the local level. The Chat mode comes into play when there are two users (or more, depending on the capabilities of the BBS) who want to talk. They signal each other, arrange to go into the Chat mode, then away they go. Depending on the software the BBS uses, and the amount of time the user is allowed to stay online, these conversations can take a long time. On one particular BBS several users can communicate at the same time and an hour can go by like it was nothing. The allure seems to rest not so much in what is said, but in the camaraderie. Part of the fun of online communication, of course, is in building oneself anew. You can be anyone you want to online, as long as you can pull it off. Be forewarned, though, posting messages and chatting with other users takes a thick skin. The normal social rules don't apply very well to the BBS. A new user will be tested, and if you post a message, expect to have it thrown back in your face. The term for the sharp criticism that one is bound to encounter is "flaming." Some people just love to flame the newbie (i.e. new user). The best advice for a beginning message poster is to expect your message to come under intense scrutiny from teachers tougher than any college composition teacher. People will test your logic, ridicule your spelling, wonder about your parentage and generally degrade you. Invariably, though, someone will come along and not like what the flamer has written and therefore flame him. While embarrassing, a flame isn't permanent and soon you learn that some people seem to exist only to flame. Once you get comfortable posting messages, watch out! They pile up so fast and you can spend a world of time just keeping up, and when you're in that mode, those messages can seem very, very important. Just remember: nobody will care if you go a few days without posting. Quote of the Week I've read Hamlet more than twenty times and it still boggles my mind. This comes from the fifth act, after Osric has informed Hamlet of the duel with Laertes that the King proposes. Hamlet describes to his friend Horatio what he dislikes about "yes-men" courtiers like Osric: Thus has he -- and many more of the same breed that I know the drossy age dotes on -- only got the tune of the time and, out of an habit of encounter, a kind of ye[a]sty collection, which carries them through and through the most fann'd and winnow'd opinions; and do but blow them to their trial, the bubbles are out. These people figure out what's popular, devise some opinions and attitudes that serve well in the average daily intercourse, but flame them once and you quickly find out how much hot air they emit. The problem with this kind of person is when they don't recognize that they're full of hot air, or worse, they don't care. ______________________________________________________________________ ______________ 117-a s. mendenhall st. 27403 TO: