Disgusted in Catville,

I back off nothing I said. My pronouncements are where I am, how I see it, how I want it to be --- and calling it simply "politics", as you have in order to denegrate it is way off the mark. Politics, as we have come to know it and love it (or leave it), is our modern version of BUGHOUSE SQUARE in my home town of Chicago. It was FREE SPEECH. People up on the soapbox trying to change opinions. It was no more truthful than what we see today. It was in your face and deceptively manipulating in order to obtain the desired result. It was TACTICS. And it was beautiful in that it made a final decision of sorts that let our dumbnesses function in some kind of an orderly but not a perfect fashion.

It is happening here in this forum too. And your feeling that my polemic isn't correct and polite enough says that you would not be very much good on a picket line when the goons and the ginks and the company finks came around to didcommode your niceness.

What I said is basically what I feel. I do not say what I BELIEVE because I don't feel that belief is enough to go on---ever. It isn't truth. It is based, as I've said in the past, on wishful thinking.

And changing one's mind when new facts are presented ought not be called flip-flopping or wishy-washy fom my point of view. This is, truly, the only way to go and be true to ones so-called ideals.

Ideals ought to be the starting point from which wisdom MIGHT be gleaned. ----- Ideals are not usually ideal!!!

Art Thieme