Thank You! Cara and Lee for this tragically funny news. What a hoot I
think is the appropriate phrase here, which will be an expression forever
changed for me now AND you've just provided me a perfect exercise for my
class this fall for using the AP Photo Archive and other news sources.
Mo
--On Friday, June 07, 2002 9:37 AM -0700 Cara List
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> A colleague of mine forwarded this letter this funny yet disconcerting
> letter about what our government is really concerned abou. Pardon any
> duplication-- its not exactly breaking news-- but as she said it was too
> good not to share.
>
> The following is a letter read by Claire Braz-Valentine, the author, at
> this year's In Celebration of the Muse, Cabrillo College in California.
> It is worth knowing that the author is a woman of 60+ years,
> conservatively dressed and obviously quite talented.
>
> AN OPEN LETTER TO JOHN ASHCROFT, ATTORNEY GENERAL OF THE UNITED STATES
>
> On January 28, 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that he
> spent $8,000 of taxpayer's money for drapes to cover up the exposed
> breast of The Spirit of Justice, an 18 ft aluminum statue of a woman that
> stands in the Department of Justice's Hall of Justice.
>
>
> John, John, John, you've got your priorities all wrong. While men fly
> airplanes into skyscrapers, dive bomb the pentagon, while they stick
> explosives into their shoes, and then book a seat right next to us, while
> they hide knives in their luggage, steal kids on school buses , take
> little girls from their beds at night, drive trucks into our state capital
> buildings, while our president calls dangerous men all over the world
> evildoers and devils, while we live in the threat of biological warfare,
> nuclear destruction, annihilation, you are out buying yardage to save
> Americans from the appalling alarming, abominable aluminum alloy of evil,
> that terrible ten foot tin tittie. You might not be able
> to find Bin Laden, but you sure as hell found the hooter in the hall of
> justice.
>
> It's not that we aren't grateful. But while we were begging the women of
> Afghanistan to not cover up their faces, you are begging your staff
> members to just cover up that nipple, to save the American people from
> that monstrous metal mammary. How can we ever thank you? So, in your
> office every morning, in your secret prayer meeting, while an American
> woman is sexually assaulted every 6 seconds, while anthrax floats around
> the post office and settles in the chest of senior citizens, you've got
> another chest on your mind. While American sons arrive home in body bags
> and heat seeking missiles fly around a foreign country looking for any
> warm body, you think of another body.
>
> And you pray for the biggest bra in the world. John, you see that breast
> on the Spirit of Justice in the spirit of your own inhibited sexuality.
> And when we women see our grandmothers, our mothers, our daughters, our
> granddaughters, our sisters, ourselves, when we women see that statue, the
> Spirit of Justice, we see the spirit of strength, the spirit of survival.
>
> Every day we view innocent bodies dragged out of rubble, and women and
> children laid out like thin limp dolls and baptized into death as
> collateral damage, and we see the hollow-eyed Afghani mother whose milk
> has dried up underneath her burka in famine, in shame, and her children
> are dead at her breast.
>
> While you look at that breast, John, that jug on the Spirit of Justice,
> and deal with your thoughts of lust and sex and nakedness, we see it as a
> testimony to motherhood. You see it as a tit.
>
> It's not the money it cost. It's the message you send. We've got the
> right to live in freedom. We've got the right to cheat Americans out of
> millions of dollars and then just not want to tell Congress about it.
>
> We've got the right to drop bombs, night and day, on a small country that
> has no army, no navy, no military at all, because we've got the right to
> bear arms. But we just better not even think about the right to bare
> breasts.
>
> So now John, you can be photographed while you stand there and talk about
> guns and bombs and poisons without that breast appearing over your right
> shoulder, without that bodacious bosom bothering you and we just wanted to
> tell you in the spirit of justice, in the spirit of truth, John, there is
> still one very big boob left standing there in that picture.
>
>
> Cara List
> Art and Architecture Librarian
> Architecture and Allied Arts Library
> 5249 University of Oregon
> Eugene, OR 97403-5249
>
> 541-346-2200
> [log in to unmask]
>
> __________________________________________________________________
> Mail submissions to [log in to unmask]
> For information about joining ARLIS/NA see:
> http://www.arlisna.org//membership.html
> Send administrative matters (file requests, subscription requests, etc)
> to [log in to unmask]
> ARLIS-L Archives and subscription maintenance:
> http://lsv.uky.edu/archives/arlis-l.html
> Questions may be addressed to list owner (Kerri Scannell) at:
> [log in to unmask]
Mo Dawley
Art and Drama Librarian
[log in to unmask]
412-268-6625
http://www.library.cmu.edu/bySubject/Art
http://www.library.cmu.edu/bySubject/Drama
http://www.greenarts.org
__________________________________________________________________
Mail submissions to [log in to unmask]
For information about joining ARLIS/NA see:
http://www.arlisna.org//membership.html
Send administrative matters (file requests, subscription requests, etc)
to [log in to unmask]
ARLIS-L Archives and subscription maintenance:
http://lsv.uky.edu/archives/arlis-l.html
Questions may be addressed to list owner (Kerri Scannell) at: [log in to unmask]
