Friday, June 1–Despair not, faithful readers. We are not dead.
See yon banner, up above? Note the date – it is today’s! The Post Office has papers for every one of our dear subscribers scattered across the country, lovingly prepared by our labeling crew. Our downtown distribution volunteers have (we’re pretty sure) completed their rounds. In a hundred and fifty locations around the Piscataqua basin, people of all stripes and inclinations are picking up copies. This is what we live for.
And here’s a new wrinkle: everyone atttending the 4th Annual DemocracyFest, to be held at the Wayfarer Inn in Bedford this coming weekend, will receive in their Welcome Bag, a fresh copy of this issue, printed just for them. We published a brief note to them, on Page One:
To the Attendees of DemocracyFest:
Chalmers Johnson, a reformed Cold Warrior and former CIA consultant, wrote recently that the
“United States, today, suffers from a plethora of public ills. Most of them can be traced to the militarism and imperialism that have led to the near-collapse of our Constitutional system of checks and balances. Unfortunately, none of the remedies proposed so far by American politicians or analysts addresses the root causes of the problem.”
We think Johnson is right. Exchanging one corporate-bankrolled politician for another isn’t going to be enough to straighten things out. And neither is writing polite letters to the editor of a corporate-owned newspaper.
Some five hundred of you are taking this weekend out of your no-doubt-busy lives to search for new remedies. Our hats are off to you. We can’t be there in person. But we’d like to propose a remedy—and it’s right here in your hand.
The three branches of our government could never have sunk so low without the fourth being used to beat us senseless. One possible cure would be to wait for the media to reform themselves. At our advanced age, we’re not sure we have enough time. So we commit acts of independent journalism, every two weeks. We invite your support.
That’s it for now, folks. We’ll try to check in more often in the future.