RE: Free enterprise

["Alan Partridge" <apartridge@turbonet.com>]

My good friends,

Mr. Wilson may be a bit off, and I never thought that he'd be heretical
enough to attempt to revive the dead, especially a deceased racist
Georgian governor. We all have our quirks though, and even if my own
personal attempts at necromancy have failed, I wish Doug the best of
luck.

This may be more alarming than it first may appear. Instead of
eliminating conflicting viewpoints through dialogue and logical
construct, he may actually be attempting to raise those who already
share his opinion to upset the balance of thought in our society.
Granted, it may be more difficult to accept the deceased as active
members in our community, think about how much easier it would be for us
as individuals to focus all of our distaste on a new ethnic class, the
living dead.

Perhaps to the contrary Mr. Wilson is doing us a favor; isn't it poetic
justice that a dead man, walking among the living, a racist himself, may
be automatically the person most prejudiced against? That's food for
thought.

Alan Partridge
-A non-representative of the BBC or its affiliates, at home or abroad

-----Original Message-----
From: DonaldH675@aol.com [mailto:DonaldH675@aol.com] 
Sent: Friday, September 20, 2002 12:44 AM
To: vision2020@moscow.com
Subject: Free enterprise

Dear Visionaries,

Doug Wilson's email containing his interpretation of free enterprise is 
revealing.  In it, I detect more than a whiff of the putrefying spirit
of the 
late Lester Maddox, segregationist Georgia governor and restaurant
owner.  
Maddox, who owed a whites only establishment, based his lamentable
political 
career on a pitiable sense of southern Anglo-Saxon entitlement; i.e.,
his 
inalienable privilege to preserve and protect the racial exclusivity of
his 
eatery.  He staked this private property "right" on exactly the same 
philosophical grounds that Doug argues in his post.

One can tart up bigotry in classical allusions, ethnic superiority
claims, 
religious conceits, or pseudo-political declarations, but it's still
bigotry 
- plain and simple.  A pig in lipstick is still a pig.

The Civil Rights Movement shaped the perspective on human rights for
most 
people of my generation.  Some of us chose then (and choose now) to
stand 
beside those people who, with enormous courage and dignity, risk their
lives 
to confront and overcome oppression.  Others chose then (and choose now)
to 
defend and perpetuate the culture of oppression via spurious claims of 
property rights, white supremacy, romanticized and historically
inaccurate 
views of the old South, chauvinism, and garden variety cultural
ignorance.  

Doug and I may share on one conviction, however: the principles that one

defends, define, at least in part, one's character and one's vision for
a 
society.

Rosemary Huskey