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Inside
NCR SOA
pics galore, space galore on earth
The School of the Americas has
become a scab on the American psyche. NCR has for years reported on the efforts
of Fr. Roy Bourgeois and an ever-growing band of protesters to close the place
on the grounds that it has been too much at the service of Latin American
dictators. In our Dec. 3 issue Pat Marrin reported on the most recent anti-SOA
protest, a rousing account of the rousing surge of young activists joining the
veterans in this radical struggle, as many see it, between good and evil.
Marrin, whose day job is editor of NCRs sister publication,
Celebration, took along our all-new digital camera and went crazy taking
pictures, great ones, one of which was on our Dec. 3 cover. But he had dozens
of others with no place to go. So we put them on NCRs Web site, a gallery
of the peace and justice faithful doing what they do at the School of the
Americas. Readers may look in on themselves or others they know at
www.natcath.org -- just follow the links to NCR online, then to the SOA
story, and then to a link at the top of the story.
On the editorial page of the Nov. 5
NCR we ran an Auth cartoon, Planet Earth: Six Billion and Counting,
which depicted a very crowded planet indeed. Robert H. Fincutter e-mailed us to
say the cartoon grossly exaggerates the body count relative to the size of the
globe, and he brings some interesting statistics to bear.
Texas is 266,807 square miles, Fincutter writes. Multiply this by
640 acres per square mile, and you get 170,756,480 acres. Put all 6 billion
humans in Texas, therefore, and there would be only 36 to the acre, which is
about the size of a football field.
Or take the state of Delaware, which has 2,057 square miles. That
adds up to 57,345,868,800 square feet. That would give everyone more than a
three feet by three feet of space to stand in, and what more could one
want?
Heck, if theyre prepared to put up with 2.4 feet by 2.4
feet, the worlds population could fit in Rhode Island. There must be some
appropriate punch line for this, but I just cant think of it.
Our Message in a Bottle messages
have been edited and finessed and theyre ready to go if only we had a
bottle and somewhere to send it. The entire package will arrive as a supplement
in our Dec. 31, 1999-Jan. 7, 2000 issue. Meanwhile, I have a confession to
make. I announced some weeks ago that I had written to NASA to ask if they
would take our bottle to outer space -- there is always room for one more
bottle on such trips, and plenty of room for bottles out there. It was a lie,
though a well-intentioned lie: I planned to have the letter sent to NASA by the
time readers received their papers, and thus I figured my words would be the
literal truth as people read them. But I failed to get the letter written.
And then, as that Mars landing went south, it just didnt
seem the right time to raise the matter of the NCR bottle. We plan to give them
a little time to lick their wounds, and then perhaps they can make a PR
comeback by launching your messages. Stay tuned.
Its hard to imagine the amount
of stuff that arrives in an average newsroom, from news releases to goofy
promotions to weighty tomes, the silly to the sublime. This weeks mail
brought a skinny tome that began as follows: They couldnt believe
their ears ... 2,034 prelates and officials of the Roman Catholic church sat
there dumbfounded, filling St. Peters Basilica, that Easter Day, 2001,
with a colossal hush. And why this hush? one may ask. Thats because
the pope was saying, I have come to believe in democracy ... and in this
new ecumenical council we must complete all the long-delayed programs of
Vatican II.
To which some of the prelates said, Hes gone
mad. And other stuff like that.
Later that night, the pope couldnt sleep. Then:
Across the pillow tiptoed a little gray bespectacled church mouse, a
modest handbag over her shoulder. Smiling fondly, she whispered, You poor
guy. You did it, didnt you? You dropped the bomb. And so
on.
This masterwork is the work of William Cleary and is called Pope
Dreams and is available in all its sublime wisdom for $3.95 from
www.1stbooks.com or by calling 802-862-4659.
-- Michael Farrell
National Catholic Reporter, December 17,
1999
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