SOBRAN'S -- The Real News of the Month April 2002 Volume 9, No. 4 Editor: Joe Sobran Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications) Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff Subscription Rates. Print version: $44.95 per year; $85 for 2 years; trial subscription available for $19.95 (5 issues). E-mail subscriptions: $39.95 for 1 year ($25 with a 12-month subscription to the print edition); $65 for 2 years ($45 with a 2-year subscription to the print edition). Address: SOBRAN'S, P.O. Box 1383, Vienna, VA 22183-1383 Fax: 703-281-6617 Website: www.sobran.com Publisher's Office: 703-255-2211 or www.griffnews.com Foreign Subscriptions (print version only): Add $1.25 per issue for Canada and Mexico; all other foreign countries, add $1.75 per issue. Credit Card Orders: Call 1-800-513-5053. Allow 4-6 weeks for delivery of your first issue. CONTENTS Features -> The Moving Picture -> West Meets East, Again -> Saturday Night Laughing Letters to the Editor Nuggets (plus Exclusives to this edition) List of Columns Reprinted FEATURES The Moving Picture (page 1) As it contemplates expanding the war, the Bush administration is also weighing the possibility of using nuclear weapons. It reportedly has contingency plans to nuke several states, including Russia and Syria (which has no nukes). Instead of learning the obvious lessons of 9/11, the government is redoubling the reckless imperial policies that helped provoke 9/11. In doing so it endangers the life of every American. * * * Another contingency plan: an unconstitutional "shadow government," to take power in case the president and his successors should be wiped out in a sudden attack. Under a decentralized -- i.e., constitutional -- government, in which power was properly dispersed, no such backup would be necessary. * * * Meanwhile, the Middle East boils. Ariel Sharon's ingenious peace plan -- to kill Palestinians until they cry uncle -- has backfired, getting dozens of Jews killed in the space of a few days. George W. Bush and Colin Powell, emerging from stupor, have expressed their alarm at the carnage. Saudi Arabia's peace plan -- recognition for Israel, if it returns to its 1967 borders -- is being denounced by Zionists as a sneaky Arab trick, though it amounts to what Zionists used to say they wanted. * * * The sinister visage of Osama bin Laden has vanished from the covers of the newsmagazines; indeed his very name has disappeared from the press. We haven't heard from him for months, and nobody -- well, no infidel -- knows whether he's alive or where he is. A strange eclipse, given our recent obsession with him. At first a chief goal of the War on Terrorism was to destroy him personally. Now it's unclear *what* the goal of the war is. It's as if Hitler had been forgotten in the middle of World War II. * * * And in another blow to our national pride, China has announced that it has successfully cloned dozens of human embryos since 1999. The genie of Progress is certainly out of the bottle. An eerie reminder that in the future, Western scientific achievements will be applied by non- Western people, uninhibited by silly Western moral scruples. Maybe we'll soon look back on the twentieth century as a period of stable traditions. The new century promises to be very, very weird. * * * David Brock is back -- yet again. He has now retold the story of his disaffection from the conservative movement in BLINDED BY THE RIGHT: THE CONSCIENCE OF AN EX-CONSERVATIVE, wherein he repents, or re-repents, of his days at THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR as the muckraking scourge of Anita Hill and Bill Clinton. He says he learned that his conservative friends weren't nice people, and having said that, he hopes his new liberal friends will take him to their bosoms. But he doesn't seem to have had a true conversion, because he never really had any conservative principles to recant. He's just a gossip who has switched sides. His career is just one more reminder of the triviality of today's conservatism. West Meets East, Again (pages 3-5) War, once more; or still. It never ends. No peace was ever concluded with Iraq after the 1991 war. American bombs have destroyed Iraq's water and sewage treatment facilities, causing untold (and in this country, largely unreported) suffering to the civilian population. Nasty business, and illegal under the Geneva Conventions. Israel's Amen Corner has been pushing for a new effort to topple Saddam Hussein, and it appears that G.W. Bush and his team intend to do just that later this year, in time for the fall elections. What began as a "war on terrorism" is morphing into a war to crush Israel's enemies. And naturally so. The 9/11 attacks would never have occurred except for the U.S. Government's Middle East policies, which are pretty much dictated by the Jewish-Zionist powers that be in the United States. The Zionists boast privately of their power, but they don't want the gentiles talking about it. Readers of Orwell will recognize the principle of Doublethink. The Jewish lobby, like all lobbies, exists to promote specific interests that may clash with others' interests; yet it resists any assertion of those others' interests, or even any admission that Jewish and gentile interests may not always be the same. Apparently the whole Jewish lobby exerts all its power and influence to make sure the United States does what it should do in its own interests even if there were no Jews! Obviously the truth is very different. The lobby strives to cause the U.S. Government to act in ways that are directly contrary to the interests -- and the moral principles -- of most Americans. We should have learned how opposite those interests are on September 11. Instead, the result has been to consolidate the American- Israeli alliance. Mark Weber of the Institute for Historical Review has said it best: "The truth is that if we held Israel to the same standards that we apply to Serbia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, U.S. bombers and missiles would be blasting Tel Aviv, and we'd be putting Israeli prime minister Sharon behind bars for war crimes and crimes against humanity." Heaven forbid! Yet it would simplify matters greatly if the United States treated Israel as its only enemy, instead of taking on all of Israel's enemies as its own. From the American standpoint, this alliance is not only immoral but wildly irrational. Usually your ally is someone you join with against a common enemy; in this case, we got the ally first, then we also got its enemies in the bargain. Furthermore, those enemies have a just grievance: Israel itself. The perpetual Zionist complaint is that the Arab-Muslim states refuse to recognize Israel's right to exist. But setting aside the question of whether any state can have a right to exist, Israel's putative right is the right of Jews to rule gentiles, to drive them from their homes, seize their property, and treat them as inferior beings. Is it surprising that the gentiles (who in this case happen to be Arabs) are reluctant to concede a "right" that consigns them to subjugation? What it comes to is that the Jews feel victimized if their victims deny them the right to victimize, alias their "right to exist." It's that crazy. You might think that a rational Zionist would understand why the Arabs feel that Zionism means somewhat more than Jewish existence, which has been an accepted fact for millennia. But most Zionists affect to believe that the Arabs, in refusing to concede the legitimacy of Jewish hegemony in Palestine, are denying the Jews' very right to live at all. According to Zionist propaganda, the Arabs -- Semites themselves -- are driven by anti- Semitism. Israel is based on a principle of racial discrimination that is illegal in Western countries, not only in law but in many aspects of private life. Not only is the Western state forbidden to practice such discrimination; so are most private enterprises, commercial and otherwise. And in the Diaspora, most Jews favor anti-discrimination laws -- for the sake of Jews who might be discriminated against! Yet the same Jews favor a Jewish state in which a new arrival from Moscow or New York instantly enjoys privileges denied to Arabs whose ancestors have lived in Palestine for countless generations. And this is the country we are told shares the "democratic values" of the United States. Maybe it does, if you correctly grasp what "democratic values" really means. The innocuous phrase, like "right to exist," seems to have hidden implications that most people never suspect. In truth, Israel is culturally remote from the United States. Israel Shahak, a dissident Israeli, explains this in his little book JEWISH HISTORY, JEWISH RELIGION (Pluto Press). It's one of the most illuminating books ever written about Zionism -- and one of the most lethal. Shahak, who died recently, had been in a German concentration camp during World War II, then went to Palestine as a Zionist. But he became disillusioned as he witnessed similarities between Zionism and Nazism. And he traces most of what is wrong with Zionism to the deeply rooted contempt for gentiles taught by Talmudic Judaism. He quotes one authoritative rabbinical saying: "The best of gentiles -- kill him; the best of snakes -- dash out its brains." This may not have been meant too literally, but it is hardly a summons to universal brotherhood. And Israel has been riven by debates over whether it is permissible -- *permissible,* mind you -- to save a gentile's life on the Sabbath. The Talmud teaches that a Jew may not directly murder a gentile, but may lawfully cause his death indirectly (as by removing a ladder if he is in a deep hole). In practice, Israeli Jews who kill Arabs are assured of lenient sentences. And the Arabs know this. Shahak was a brave and honest man, but I suspect he judges Talmudic Judaism too harshly. The point, I think, is not that traditional Judaism is evil, but simply that it is far more alien to Christianity than most Christians dream. The average Christian supposes that a Jew is just a Christian who is a bit behind on the news; that he reads the Old Testament in the same spirit that a Christian does, but hasn't caught up with the New Testament yet. But thanks to the vast Talmudic commentaries, the Jew's Old Testament is utterly different from the Christian's. And after all, Christ brought a whole new way of interpreting the Old Testament -- one in which, for example, Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son for the Lord prefigures the divine sacrifice of the Son on Calvary. This is totally at odds with the Jewish conception of the Messiah. Most Jews today know next to nothing about the Talmud, but Shahak contends that its millennia of authority have been a formative influence, particularly for contemporary Zionism. Israel is far from the pacific Jewish state envisioned by Theodore Herzl, a modern, secularized European Jew who would have been appalled by Ariel Sharon. Anyone who can mistake Sharon for a Western man has much to learn. Ethnocentrism is a universal trait, but few peoples have taken it as far as the Jews. Even in the ancient world they were hated for their alleged misanthropy, their aloofness from other races. Today's Jewish leaders are actually disturbed by the freedom with which Jews now mix with, and even marry, gentiles; some call intermarriage a greater threat to Jewish survival than the Holocaust. But again, Doublethink prevails: a gentile who warned against intermarriage with Jews would be condemned by Jews as a bigot. Jewish ethnocentrism is acceptable; gentile ethnocentrism is not. Jews should be self-centered; gentiles should be Jew-centered. All are expected to give top priority to Jewish interests, and the twin symbols of this Judaeocentrism are the Holocaust and Israel, which now dominate American public discourse to a degree that would have been astonishing a few decades ago. The Catholic Church itself is expected to defer, and even adapt its teachings, to Jewish sensibilities. Part of the misunderstanding between Jews and Western gentiles is due to the peculiar culture of the West. Since the ancient Greeks, and especially since the High Middle Ages, Western man has developed an extraordinary culture of measure. He measures, quantifies, classifies, analyzes, seeks order and proportion in all things. He has applied this mania for measure in mathematics, physics, biology, astronomy, law, philosophy, engineering, and a hundred other fields; religion itself has become systematized in theology. He has even developed an art form -- tragedy -- in which the lesson is driven home that hubris or pride, the sin of forgetting one's subordinate place in the order of things, leads to disaster. The rule of law is a way of averting tragic conflict in daily life by assessing rival claims; though easily perverted, it remains basic. This ability to see even oneself in proportion, an antidote to both individual and group pride, is a fragile and difficult thing, as the wars and conflicts of the West amply demonstrate; but it survives as an ideal. It is foreign not only to Judaism but to nearly all non- Western cultures, in which ethnocentrism is taken for granted. The primacy of measure is absent in cultures governed by myth, tradition, ceremony, magic, kinship, raw self-assertion, and other habits we have come to look on as primitive or barbaric, or simply impractical. We spend our days keeping records and manufacturing screws, and to us all the minutiae of measurement seem natural. We forget how peculiar we are, how difficult it is for people from other cultures to adapt to our ways. The special difficulties of Jewish adaptation are brilliantly explored in John Murray Cuddihy's book, THE ORDEAL OF CIVILITY: FREUD, MARX, LEVI-STRAUSS, AND THE JEWISH STRUGGLE WITH MODERNITY (Basic Books; now out of print). In Cuddihy's view, the great Jewish-founded sciences of psychoanalysis and Marxism are really reductionist ideologies, whose covert purpose is to undercut what seemed, to Jewish intellectuals, the hypocrisies of the West. If Jews appeared "rude" and "crude" to Western gentiles, gentile politeness, "refinement," appeared unnatural and phony to Jews. Freud, Marx, and other Jewish ideologists sought to debunk and explode gentile pretensions, and their ideas were shaped by this mission. For Freud, romantic love was "really" nothing but disguised lust, just as for Marx capitalism was "really" nothing but disguised greed. In the same way, resistance to Zionist demands becomes "really" nothing but anti-Semitism. That gentiles may have their own reasons, including reasons of moral principle, for not acceding to Jewish ethnocentrism hardly occurs to many Jews. The "real" motive must be a hypocritically disguised anti-Semitism. A recent article in COMMENTARY magazine virtually equated criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. What else is new? Everything from fanatical calls for war on Israel to a diplomat's private wisecracks about Israel were cited as proof of "the return of anti-Semitism." The category is broad enough to encompass anything, however trivial, that displeases Jews; which is why I've often said that an anti-Semite is no longer a man who hates Jews, but a man whom Jews hate. It's now the duty of gentiles to internalize the insatiable Jewish ethnocentrism that has come to the fore since the founding of Israel. The fiction that Israel is essentially a Western country -- a fiction that has now cost us dearly -- might seem hard to sustain during the ascendancy of a man like Sharon; but Israel's apologists are inexhaustibly resourceful in justifying killing Arabs as necessary for Israeli "survival." And Bush seems ready to take the propaganda at face value. Whatever qualms he may have felt about Sharon have apparently evaporated. By Western standards, the Arab-Israeli conflict is irrational on both sides. Talmudic Judaism makes Mormonism seem like Voltaire; Islam is simpler on the surface, but at least equally non-Western at its core. There are not two sides in this struggle, but three, the third being the American. The trouble is that the U.S. Government doesn't represent the American side; it behaves, as an Irish politician has remarked, "like a puppet of Israel." Bush has only a feeble sense of what makes the West Western. He is what the Jews call "goyishkopf," "gentile- headed," i.e., gullible. At least his father understood that American and Israeli interests are sharply divergent, even if he wasn't quite sure why; the son seems to believe sincerely in the democratic bromides on which Israeli propaganda relies. If reports are to be believed, he has become convinced that the United States must resume war on Iraq and dethrone Saddam Hussein. If history offers one easy lesson, it's that wars are a lot easier to start than they are to finish, and that even the most overwhelming victories may produce unpredictable and uncontrollable consequences. But America has drawn all the wrong lessons from the events of September 11 and is now in the grip of its own hubris. But maybe the bad news doesn't matter, because there is much worse news ahead. In a few decades, given the demographic facts of life, America, Europe, and Israel will be unrecognizable. What shall it profit a nation to win its wars if it lose its identity? Saturday Night Laughing (page 6) It's painful to watch SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE these days. Time was when I enjoyed it so much I'd turn down social invitations so I wouldn't miss it; today I don't usually bother with it. After a quarter of a century of success, the show's decline in recent years has caused much comment. To me the reason seems simple. In its greatest years, roughly the late 1980s, its humor was based on great characters. Dana Carvey's Church Lady was probably the most popular, but my own favorite was Al Franken's Stuart Smalley, the neurotic self-help counselor, who was both hilarious and oddly touching as he dispensed jargon- laden advice while falling to pieces before your eyes -- an inspired creation. Chris Farley was also a genius at playing hapless and insecure blowhard losers. The rest of the cast in those days -- Phil Hartman, Victoria Jackson, Kevin Nealon, Jon Lovitz, Tim Meadows, Rob Schneider, Ellen Cleghorne, and others -- were nearly as good, and the writers (including Franken and Conan O'Brien) were brilliant. Lorne Michael is still the producer, but he seems not to realize the secret of his own success. Today the show is rarely funny. Its humor is merely snotty and smutty -- mean-spirited. It was always irreverent and often off-color, but it also had a saving affection for its satirical targets. It used to understand that being hip and smart-assed wasn't enough. A fatal smugness has ruined the fun. Tim Meadows's Lady's Man promised to be one of the funniest routines ever, affecting suavity with utter gaucherie, but he soon fizzled into a mere dirty joke. While Bill Clinton was president, Darrell Hammond's mimicry carried the show, because his Clinton -- a sly, lecherous con man of hammy hypocrisy -- was another great comic character. George W. simply doesn't offer the same possibilities, and Clinton's departure from the show may be the only reason to deprecate the Twenty-Second Amendment. Nowadays I rely for my Saturday laughs on Garrison Keillor's PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION, an ingeniously updated version of the old radio variety show. Keillor has found another rich formula, but unlike Michael he hasn't lost his touch. Based in St. Paul -- which he insistently distinguishes from urbane, upscale Minneapolis -- he has carved out a secure niche as America's highbrow rustic. The show combines country-folk music with excellent formulaic skits. "Lives of the Cowboys" features two grizzled cowpokes who still think existentialism is hip; "Guy Noir, Private Eye" transfers the hard-boiled detective from Chandler's Los Angeles to the Scandinavian Midwest; the weekly "News from Lake Wobegon" -- Keillor's climactic monologue -- displays the full splendor of Lutheran humor, whose very existence, before Keillor, was unsuspected. Even as you laugh, you marvel at his inexhaustible inventiveness. As a humorist, Mark Twain had nothing on this amazing man. Keillor is a liberal, but his wit is dry, subtle, and gentle, more often at the expense of liberal excess than of conservatism. Who ever imagined a liberal humorist? Especially one who would make liberals laugh at themselves? This is originality indeed. He also has one of the finest speaking voices ever heard on radio, deep and softly resonant, without the usual flatness of the Midwest. Keillor can't resist poking fun at the most irresistible target the good Lord could possibly have given him: Minnesota's governor, Jesse Ventura. It isn't all in fun; the two men really feud. Ventura is absurd, and he has the power, but in this case, as it happens, he is quite right. He asks the very reasonable question: Why should the taxpayer be forced to subsidize so successful an entertainer as Garrison Keillor? On the point at issue, Ventura stands for liberty and Keillor for snobbery and serfdom. Ventura won his fame and fortune in the lower depths of the private sector, professional wrestling, and even as a governor he retains something of an independent outlook; Keillor is a tycoon of the public sector, and he has no apparent qualms about getting rich on the taxes of people less affluent than he. Much as I enjoy and admire his talent, he is for me a symbol of the arrogance of his class. He's also a reminder of how unscrupulously predatory the taxing power has become. Yet week after week, after several decades in the business, Keillor keeps delivering fresh material, bringing charm, wit, and variety to a medium that seemed to have run out of surprises long ago. He's still doing for radio what SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE once did for television. Letter to the Editor (page 2) Mr. Sobran -- I am an admirer of your work and faithfully read your columns, so please take these comments as the friendliest of criticisms. You'll know I am a fan when I compare your thoughts to those of Tacitus. Tacitus seems to have hated the Roman principate and despised its pretense of republican traditions and phony deference to the Senate. He records how the emperors used constitutional symbols as masks for their lawless concentration of power. However, Rome was an empire and Tacitus was a citizen and senator who had his duties. So despite his abhorence of the emperors, he seems to have grudgingly accepted the inevitability of imperial domination for Rome in order to avoid constant civil war and resist barbarian pressure around the huge perimeter of the empire. His practical goals seem to have been to hope for good emperors and put up with what he had to, while trying to avoid undue personal servility or self- defeating poses of political independence. As I understand your writings, you similarly despise the American pretense to traditional constitutional forms, when in fact power has been concentrated in the central government and its bureaucracy, which have erected a stupendous warfare/welfare nation-state. You've described yourself as a reactionary utopian, and as such and as a social critic you aren't bound by the demands of practicality. But as a citizen, isn't your view so impractical as to be irrelevant and self-defeating? Doesn't the raw fact of the American nation-state, like the fact of the Roman Empire, require not just our condemnation, but also our efforts to improve it in realistic ways and to live in it with as much dignity and freedom as possible? It is interesting to read of your admiration for the Swiss federation, but how could that be of any relevance to us, given the American character, the size of our territory and population, and the sweep of our present worldwide dominion? When I finish reading one of your columns, I agree with what you say, but only with regret and resignation. Maybe this is the lot of the concerned citizen. Still, it's hateful just to think that we, like the Romans, are being "driven by our fates." I'm looking forward to your promised book on constitutional history; maybe that will make it all clear to me. Anyway, many thanks. Richard L. Kirkpatrick, Esq. San Francisco, CA 94105-2228 NUGGETS THE SILENT MAJORITY: To say that we are hated around the world is not to suggest that acts of anti-American violence are somehow justified. But they should remind us that we are also hated by countless people who are too moral to take indiscriminate revenge on innocent Americans. These are the people who really deserve our attention, but don't get much of it. The only critics our government acknowledges are those with bombs. (page 2) THE BIG HE: Wrapping up his investigation at long last, special prosecutor Robert Ray, Kenneth Starr's successor (I'd nearly forgotten), says the evidence of Bill Clinton's perjury in the Paula Jones case warranted indictment and would have resulted in conviction. Not that it really matters much, but it's always nice to have one more nail pounded into the coffin of Clinton's reputation. As with Count Dracula, however, the trick will be to keep him in that coffin. (page 2) BAD NEWS: I don't know which I find more distressing, the war or the revelations about pedophile priests. But the sufferings of the war seem remote; whereas the stories of the victims of the perverted priests are heart- wrenchingly vivid. What an unspeakable thing to do to a boy; and because unspeakable, it remained unmentionable. For years each boy kept his silence in confusion and shame, thinking he was the only one to share the dreadful secret of his priest. Now we learn how widespread this abomination was, and how systematically concealed by the Catholic hierarchy, the only ones with some inkling of how common it was. The offenders had the assurance that their superiors, if they learned the truth, would treat their diabolical betrayal as a mere administrative problem. (page 5) JOKE! JOKE! Richard Lowry of NATIONAL REVIEW says his e-mail reveals "lot of sentiment for nuking Mecca." He comments: "Mecca seems extreme, of course, but then again few people would die and it would send a signal." Later he explained that this was just -- heh-heh -- "understated sarcasm." When an Arab-American group demanded that the magazine apologize and discipline Lowry, he quipped: "I'm going to officially slap myself on the wrist." Oh, that zany NATIONAL REVIEW humor! Back in the 1960s, the mag sold buttons with the merry slogan "Nuke the chinks." Maybe these kids don't really want to nuke Mecca, but they don't seem to discourage such talk. (page 5) INNOCENTS ABROAD: An American woman and her daughter have been killed by a terrorist grenade attack in a church in Pakistan. Nothing new here; Americans abroad have been targets for years, but now we're starting to notice. We can expect more of this, just as we can expect our government to keep on making us hated around the world. President Bush called the deaths "acts of murder that cannot be tolerated by any person of conscience." Do tell. And no doubt the perpetrators must be brought to justice. (page 8) Exclusive to the electronic version: EXTRA! EXTRA! A conservative newspaper in the Big Apple? Well, sort of. The NEW YORK SUN is scheduled to commence publication on April 18. Its columnists will include Peggy Noonan, Richard Brookhiser, R. Emmett Tyrrell, Seth Lipsky, and Fred Siegel. If you don't see a pattern here, you haven't been taking your daily paranoia pill. Just what New York so desperately needs: yet another pro- Israel paper. YOU KNOW THE TYPE: I honor genuine piety and charity, but some people ought to wear signs warning: "Dangerous when religious." For them, piety is a mood that comes and goes, and when the "spiritual" impulse strikes them, they are capable of feeling justified in behavior they would recognize as insufferable in their normal, human moments. FIRST HURRICANES, NOW THIS: Following a current fashion, the London daily LLOYD'S LIST, which has covered the shipping industry since 1734, has announced that it will now refer to seafaring vessels as "it" rather than "she." So passes another sweet old tradition, as Progress improves the language by neutering it. Maybe we should also refer to feminists as "it." After all, most of them are more sexless than any galleon or schooner. OLD FRIENDS: For those keeping score on the Balkans, the Bosnian Muslims befriended by the United States against the Serbs and Croats in 1992-95 have now turned anti- American. "The American government is the enemy of Islam everywhere -- and this includes Bosnia," says one militant, voicing the popular view. Is anyone learning anything yet? REPRINTED COLUMNS (pages 7-12) * Genocide and Wisecracks (February 14, 2002) http://www.sobran.com/columns/020214.shtml * Our Chesterton (February 19, 2002) http://www.sobran.com/columns/020219.shtml * Am I "Anti-American"? (February 26, 2002) http://www.sobran.com/columns/020226.shtml * The Duty of Lying (February 28, 2002) http://www.sobran.com/columns/020228.shtml * The Rise of Tax Slavery (March 5, 2002) http://www.sobran.com/columns/020305.shtml * How Might Makes Right (March 7, 2002) http://www.sobran.com/columns/020307.shtml ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ All articles are written by Joe Sobran You may forward this newsletter if you include the following subscription and copyright information: Subscribe to the Sobran E-Package. See http://www.sobran.com/e-mail.shtml or http://www.griffnews.com for details and samples or call 800-513-5053. Copyright (c) 2002 by The Vere Company -- www.sobran.com. All rights reserved. Distributed by the Griffin Internet Syndicate www.griffnews.com with permission. [ENDS]