Note the eyes in the tip of the "V" swooping down from Canada. To the right, the clean-shaven American form seems to say: "Yes, I know it is medically possible to attach or remove splendid breasts, but I implore you, sir, to allow me to proceed with my free will in control of my body and its movements." The figure is the King's Indian, the one with a Minnesota headdress and boots in Louisiana. The beehive hairdo is correlated with Minnesota, the head with Iowa.
The eyes in the tip of the enormous soaring "V" are focused on the chest of the figure with the beehive hairdo, and the line of sight passes roughly through Wichita, Kansas. In fact, a bundle of rays from the eyes scanning the breasts up and down is a cone that covers my home town. Wichita is where I sit, and somewhat vulnerable is how we all begin to feel when superior force clouds up on us. The issues of War and Peace, of human forms caught in the apparatus of progressive conquest, continue to haunt us. Turning our eyes to the Atlantic, I seem to see a figure opening its mouth to drop bombs. "Duh... I have but to speak, and the bombs will fall...", it seems to say.

Note the two faces on the inside surfaces at the top of the "V", suggesting debate and presidential politics. The vision may be connected to my earlier remarks including quotes from V.I.Lenin, who was not a local boy, but a professor of proletarian internationalism, featuring a red flag suggestive of the George W. Bush favorite necktie and of the red flag used at airports, which features a hole in its nether extremity through which the wind may whistle.

I remember one Christmas Party years ago when I switched to Marxist nomenclature for a few minutes, having studied it at college and having just seen a display on Red Square on the living room TV set. Thereafter instead of the usual Christmas tree, splendidly decorated with glowing and bubbling displays, Grandmother Mayfield also set out a simple green tree covered with knockers and made of clay. I still prefer the old-fashioned tree, however, which was also still at the party thereafter. But the clay tree with the knockers was always there, too. Newspeak in Rome for men with beards on (on the face of it workers and NOT "bourgeois") was not always received well by women intent on their next kiss.

Quoth Grandmother Mayfield: "When in Rome, do as the Romans do."

At KU The Communist Manifesto by Marx was required reading, but I didn't get around to Lenin, edited by Saul Silverman and including critical remarks by world leaders, until after 1973, when he was featured in a Great Lives Observed Series title. I forgot about Communist Non-People, something often complained of my Western reporters. Our insistence on free speech may be limited: if one drops too many verbal bricks for an unpopular viewpoint, squeaks may eventually emerge, balls may vanish, breasts may bloom, ect.

On the other hand, I remember a joke Lynn Stephens told me in high school: "A man rushes up to a sheriff in a high, squeaky voice, asking 'What are you up to today, sheriff?' The sheriff replies in deep, husky male tones that they are 'hangin' queers'. The man then replies in a deep, husky male voice 'Oh, I didn't know that.' " Maybe later they'd hand him a necktie in connection with how to handle the male role when one is actually a versatile actor. Then there is a specter stalking your rope. You, at least.

A Jedi, eh? Well, what do you know...
I tried myself to read foundation source material on major terrestrial religions, to familiarize myself with my terrestrial neighbors, but I had to include the influential men of history, including figures like Hitler, Lenin, U.S. Presidents, Bertrand Russell, and many others to form some conception of how it was that a leader became an influential force on the world stage, whether or not I agreed with him about everything. From Lenin, for instance, I got the habit of putting quotes around words with sloganeering content, to emphasize some logical thing hiding in the word. I was trained in high school to exhibit a Jeffersonian attitude concerning books: we could read them, we could handle that. Lynn Stephens was unusual in his interest in philosophy and politics, and I guess we were pals in high school because of our mutual interest in a wide spectrum of influential writers. He had a huge bookcase full of such stuff, and Wichita bookstores were less conservative then than they are now about displaying literature from other world religions or political points of view. However, some authors were suppressed in public bookstores, though not at university libraries, to maintain military morale. I guess Lenin was suppressed until after the Vietnam War. I re-read Mohammed after the World Trade Center got hit, and was able to recognize signs planted around that I'd otherwise have missed because I'd troubled to walk through life a little better informed than average. That was how a scholar with a Jeffersonian attitude might come out ahead, though in debt to other authors. General George Patton (who used to say he was a Prima Donna [pron: pre-madonna]) read Rommel's book on tank warfare, for instance, and I read General George Patton. War as I Knew It had a nasty surprise at the end, however. It seemed, dreamlike, a rope hit my neck and took my head off, as I recall Patton experienced toward the end of his life. Men upset with him had placed a rope across the road where his jeep passed regularly, and that was the last line that stopped the pen of the diary War as I Knew It.