The Village Square

3 weeks from today: Screen Purple State of Mind with filmmaker John Marks

Get details on the FREE screening and reserve your seat HERE.

Add comment July 25th, 2010

Don’t miss this fascinating Purple Interview of the US Senate Chaplain

You should really ever miss any Purple Interviews, but especially not this one. Rear Admiral Barry C. Black:

…the issues that are debated in the Chamber usually have elements of truth in both sides of the issue. If the issue would happen to be blatantly wrong, most people would see that we should do the opposite. But there are pro and con arguments for both sides. That’s when you deal with right vs right. What might be right for the short term, might be wrong for the long term.

Read the whole thing HERE.

Add comment May 24th, 2010

My Purple Post: Real men (and women) pick their battles wisely.

(Be sure to visit our friends Purple State of Mind often… and whatever you do, don’t miss John Marks in his Tallahassee travels on August 16th. Details soon, sign up for our monthly newsletter to be sure you don’t miss it.)

First there was the War on Drugs.

Then there was the War on Poverty.

And finally there is the granddaddy of them all, the War on Terror.

All mere skirmishes when compared to the most successful war of our time… The War on Context.

At a time when we have breathtaking access to information relative to our parents before us, we have become a people who don’t really give a gosh darn about understanding the vast, rich and multi-dimensional context that surrounds nearly everything in this complicated world we occupy.

This lands us clueless in actually understanding any problem we seek to address.

Does anybody remember researching papers using the Readers’ Guide? The lucky youth at Purple State should know we had to look up our topic in an index with itty bitty print, hope we found it, get a volume and page number and pick up another book, flip through pages, either write down what we found or copy the pages… yes, we did have copiers (although don’t even get me started on mimeograph machines and the smell of the ink I remember like it was yesterday)…

All this work made you appreciate that little nugget of good information you managed to find after a whole day at the library (which we had to walk to in the snow even here in Florida, uphill both ways).

Relatively speaking, our information today comes at such a low effort cost to us. The whole world is at our fingertips while we sit on our couch with a beer in our hand. In this environment it’s probably inevitable that information becomes so easily is devalued. Supply is far outstripping demand.

Instead we’re all about pelting “them” with an info-blip, turned weapon du jour, that we think proves we’re right and they’re wrong. Partisans are so eager to find the next object to pelt the enemy with, sometimes they can’t even be bothered to read the whole sentence around the quote they’re using to invoke the damage. And there are fleets of people engaging in this twerp-ish behavior daily. (Please note this is not attractive. Plus, if Johnny jumped off a cliff would you follow him? And your face might just get stuck with that ugly scowl on it.)

Today’s motto seems to be who needs subtlety when we can die on that hill?

Maybe somewhere in this phenomena is a quaint yearning for simplicity as we are forced to navigate an insane amount of data, coming at us from all directions at all times at a million miles an hour. We can make it go away if we unilaterally proclaim what we believe to be true, is true, damn the pesky facts. Tah dah!

Unlike the other multi-generational wars, the outcome of the War on Context was a lock before the first spitwad launched: We lose.

We all lose. If you’re yearning for simplicity, there is it. Give that some thought next time you find yourself about to lob one.

If we can’t learn this the easy way, perhaps we’re going to have to start sending people to the principal’s office to turn the mimeograph machine drum over and over and over…

(Photo credit.)

Add comment May 17th, 2010

My Purple Post: Culture Wars meet War of the Worlds

(You really should click on over to meet our Purple friends and read this there. John Marks, half the dynamic Purple due, will be coming to Tallahassee on August 19th for a super-duper cheap dinner event that you won’t want to miss.)

In Tallahassee we’re smack in the middle of a debate on a proposed human rights ordinance designed to protect lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered individuals from discrimination. Since we just kept opening our big fat mouths telling people from here to Kingdom Come that The Village Square could do a whole host of impossible things, we jumped into the frackas with a forum.

At our forums we don’t just casually eenie meenie to see who gets on our panel. In this sea of partisan fury, I’m looking for the exceptional panelist who can articulate his or her view with statesmanship. Then I assemble the speakers like a jigsaw puzzle into a panel that (I hope) can sing.

In the process of all this panel-finessing, I come to have sincere affection for each of my panelists, even if I just don’t see it their way. I like them because if I’ve done my job correctly, by the time they’re on my panel I’ve walked a mile in their shoes.

It would be instructive if everyone in our audiences could experience my growing affection for each of my panelists, since in it lies a lesson: People, assuming you understand their unique life circumstance, usually really make sense. That we can be completely different at the same time as we’re really exactly the same is what makes a hometown work. I think it’s an quiet triumph of the human spirit.

With a topic as apparently challenging to us as gay rights, we need the community glue that binds us to be holding.

Some of the culture war is what we sincerely disagree about, in our very hearts. But too high a percentage of it is noise; junk we made up, statistics we lied about, dishonest cutting and pasting.

The forum brought us a vivid demonstration of this when someone in the audience began reading aloud from the “Homosexual Manifesto,” which apparently had once, decades ago, been read into the Congressional record. But because he started with an excerpt containing big fat ugly word bombs in it we just cut him off.

But our Village Square motto is “facts matter” so I felt compelled to do a little post-forum super-sleuthing.

Turns out that the essay entitled “Gay Revolutionary” and renamed for effect was written by one gay man by the name of Michael Swift. A man with a pen does not an army of darkness make, no matter how much you want it to in order to support an immovable opinion you might hold.

But this distortion doesn’t stop with warping the scale of the “threat.” Michael Swift’s essay was, in reality, absurd satire, the author’s (poorly executed and obviously ineffective in retrospect) comment on how mistaken he thought the people who see homosexuality as threatening were. Stuff like: “We shall raise vast private armies, as Mishima did, to defeat you.” Approve of the essay or not, it is tongue-in-cheek to high heaven. And just in case you don’t do nuance, he wrote a disclaimer at the top of his essay telling us it wasn’t real.

But dang if his disclaimer was removed from the infinitely echoing reverberations of this essay across the internet toward its ultimate immortality as a sliced and diced weapon of the culture war, landing in many an unsuspecting inbox. (Here’s an example of where they’ve gone to the trouble of printing the whole essay verbatim with the tiny little omission of the disclaimer at the top, else you actually understand what you are reading.)

I believe that the person who read the excerpt from this satirical essay believed sincerely he was warning us of something true and big and looming. Instead he was just unwittingly recycling a lie. “Tremble, hetero swine” should have tipped him off.

If there is any hope we can understand each other (without running my panel-screening gauntlet), we’ve got to start with what is true. The very least we owe each other is an honest conversation.

I think the people we really are in our hearts – the ones where we turn the other cheek, love thy neighbor, walk a mile in their shoes – can do it.

Or we can let the highly paid professional contortionists have their way, you know the ones who will pick over the carcasses of our communities destroyed by their infernal racket.

Our choice.

(Photo credit. And in case you’re a youg’in the pic is of Orson Welles of War of the Worlds fame… another satire run amok.)

Add comment May 11th, 2010

My Purple Post: The therapy bill will be high

(Also posted over at our friends John and Craig’s blog home Purple State of Mind.)

These days journalism is in a bit of a death match with human nature and journalism is losing.

Maybe it’s not quite a newsflash but journalists are imperfectly human and they do ere. Some are even biased. More than a few of us have found good sport in this, yammering on about bias in (check all that apply):

_______The New York Times
_______Fox News
_______Talk radio
_______MSNBC
_______”Mainstream” media or as Sarah Palin recently dubbed it the “Lamestream” media)

But then I’m not thinking human imperfection of journalists at all, I’m thinking much closer to home.

Amidst plenty of third-grade finger-wagging about just who the biased sources really are – You! No You! Nooo YOU!! – is way too little “if Johnny jumped off a cliff, would you” perspective, you know the kind that grown-ups usually provide on the playground.

Far from objective, turns out our perceptions of bias are actually a result of a complex, primordial and really quite fascinating stew of both psychology and sociology. To get schooled in the sociology, Bill Bishop’s “The Big Sort” is a one-stop-shop of ah hah moments. See Purple Interviews with Bishop here. On the psychology front, media bias is the ultimate inkblot test, and as a society, we’re in need of more than a few 50-minute-hours of couch time.

So here’s a primer on just three of the many, many ways we human beings fold, bend, spindle and mutilate factual reality (oh do tell me what the heck spindling is). Bad news for the smug: This means you too, not just the people you think have bad taste in t-shirt slogans, yard art and presidential candidates.

Confirmation bias: A phenomena well documented in research, we like the information that supports our view of things, facts be damned. We do all sorts of backflips to confirm what we think is true: We pick new info if we don’t like what we hear, we impugn the integrity of people who tell us what we don’t want to hear, and we even completely forget what we’d prefer to forget. Presto, chango, it’s gone-o…

Biased assimilation: Apparently when it comes to the human psyche, what’s good for the goose is distinctly not good for the gander. A 1979 study gave opponents and proponents of the death penalty contradictory studies on the effectiveness of capital punishment. Rather than creating agreement that the state of the information is inconclusive, each group uncritically accepted the information that supported their view while they subjected the study articulating the alternative view to a harsh critique.

The hostile media effect: A landmark 1984 study of the perception of media coverage of the 1982 Beirut massacre by pro-Arab and pro-Israeli observers demonstrated a strong tendency for partisans to perceive the very same news reports as biased against them - in exactly opposite directions - leading both sides to infer that the personal views of the journalists was opposite of their own.

“Partisans… are bound to believe that the preponderance of reliable, pertinent evidence favors their viewpoint. Accordingly, to the extent that the small sample of evidence and argument featured in a media presentation seems unrepresentative of this larger “population” of information, perceivers will charge bias in the presentation and will be likely to infer hostility and bias on the part of those responsible for it… In cases in which both groups believe that actual program content favored neither side, for example, both groups are apt to protest such “unwarranted” objectivity.”

The most fascinating part of the hostile media effect study is that it isn’t a phenomena created from lack of information or as political partisans would so charmingly characterize in each other as stupidity. Rather the people with the most knowledge perceived the most bias: “These people had the most basis for finding discrepancies in the coverage that was provided and the information that could have been provided.” Maybe it’s just normal that if you understand something in depth, you find the brief survey presented in a news article as inadequate. But biased? Maybe notsomuch.

Perhaps the next time you find yourself blathering on about media bias, you might want to briefly pause to look in the mirror. You’d be looking at someone who owns a part of the problem.

Good things can begin – and always have begun – there.

(Want more than three ways our thinking messes us up? Find a veritable cornucopia here.)

Add comment April 2nd, 2010

My Purple Post: Calling out all children and elected officials

Why not visit our partners in crime over at Purple State of Mind…

Like many of us, I spend my days pivoting quickly from my personal to my work life, sometimes enough that I get a little confused. In my case there is quite a bit of overlap: I teach my children not to call each other names, to clean up their own messes and to use their allowance sensibly. Then I write a blog post about politicians who are calling each other names, too busy making messes to clean them up and most definitely do no spend allowance well.

We can try to make it more complex, but it sort of boils right down to that in the end.

Although someone more sensible might recognize that making politicians behave is hopeless, it is still my earnest belief that all those folks in Washington really need is – same as my children – just a little bit of competent mothering. And given that I’m so very busy I have a hard time getting everything done, I say it’s high time for a two-fer column. So, Senators and children, alike, take note. (Begin dream sequence here. Music crescendos, screen gets dreamy, (incredibly young-looking) mother stands in front of elected officials and her offspring and—while I know this strains credibility—both groups are paying rapt attention. She gives them advice:)

Use your magic words.

Be careful with that stick or you’ll put an eye out.

Money does not grow on trees.

You let Johnnie worry about himself.

If everyone else was jumping off a cliff, would you do it?

No dessert until you eat your dinner.

Don’t make that face or it will freeze in that position.

If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.

You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

Never lie, cheat, or steal.

Alright, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, we might want to plan to send somewhere around 100 Senators and a whole mess of Congressmen to their rooms without dinner. Not 50, 100. If we’re going to be good parents, we can’t play favorites. The remarkable thing is that if we as a people stopped falling for the childish standby “he started it” and “I’m telling” – perpetually and hypocritically played one side against the other to divide and conquer – we might just have elected representatives falling all over themselves to grow up for a change.

Just wondering… If we don’t insist that they behave, who will?

(Photo credit)

Add comment March 12th, 2010

My Purple Post: A Special Comment regarding amphibians (and human beings)

Please click on over to our friends at PURPLE STATE OF MIND to read this post in a new neighborhood.

As promised, a companion piece to Why Glenn Beck is Stalking Me:

When Keith Olbermann hit the airwaves back in 2003, you could hear a collective sigh of relief among liberal-leaning America, long frustrated by their lack of voice in America’s media.

Conservatives who haven’t passed out reading my first paragraph should know that liberals sincerely believe that the media leans right. Limbaugh’s pinko “government-run media” is to a liberal the “corporate media” and comes with all the baggage and bias the name implies. (Parenthetically, the competing versions of media bias are explained in studies demonstrating a hostile media effect: The same story was simultaneously perceived as biased by both opposing camps, likely because they understood the subtleties of their own position and felt it inadequately represented… as subtleties usually are.)

As a center-left-leaner and a 2004 Howard Dean fan (a man with the nerve to tell us really early on that the Emperor of Iraq was buck naked, early enough to have avoided the whole affair were we listening I might add), I believe that in the years after 9-11 the American marketplace of ideas was pretty broken. Our collective trauma evolved into a very human need to march in lockstep with patriotic sounding bad decision-making.

So Olbermann was a breath of fresh air. I immediately bonded. My friends bonded. Veritable left-leaning lovefest ensues.

We were in. Keith Olbermann is chicken soup for the liberal soul. He was in our tribe.

I can only imagine that this is exactly how conservatives felt with the rise of talk radio inside of a culture that had moved dramatically leftward inside of a decade in the 60′s and mostly stayed there, likely leaving crew-cut heads spinning with culture shock. (University of Virginia professor Jonathan Haidt’s work tells us that conservatives are temperamentally more averse to change than liberals. That makes the 60′s quadruple crazy if you lean right, only double if you’re left.)

Trouble is that once in the Keith Olbermann (or talk radio) chicken soup for the liberal (or conservative) soul, we can barely notice the inevitable result of like-minded amen chorus groupiness. We were frogs in water brought gradually to a boil.

Ironically, Keith Olbermann is a frog too. And – while I’m having to force my fingers to type this measure of charity for a broadcaster I find hateful and factually wrong almost 4 times a sentence – maybe so was Rush Limbaugh? Could they both be victims of the sound of their own echo chambers?

Once in, the slight shifts toward unanimity are barely perceptible. Hyperbole forgiven. Insulting name-calling gets guilty snickers and knowing glances. Quirky family member forgiven. And then you look up a few years later and you can barely believe that someone you know and thought you liked – who might be a conservative “frog” to your liberal one – could see reality so differently than you do. And even if you were too polite to say it (which if you read blog comment threads, growing numbers of us are not), you might have thought that they’re dumb.

Lather, rinse, repeat… and you can see how we’re where we are now.

I admit that I still really like Keith Olbermann. He often makes a lot of sense to me. But my new Village Square center of gravity often leaves me uncomfortably having to forgive a bit more than I’d prefer. And it has me stretching to understand people who aren’t in my tribe. My message isn’t that Olbermann is bad/evil/at fault. It’s that he – like us – is human. As is everyone outside of my tribe for whom I have tended to not offer any forgiveness at all.

Keith Olbermann + a bunch of liberal viewers and liberal guests + 10 or 15 more years might just = right wing talk radio, the liberal edition. And if you think there is something about conservatives that makes them jump the shark when liberals can somehow magically avoid it, I’d like to suggest that you might want to hop out of the water.

I believe it’s getting hotter.

(Photo credit.)

2 comments March 5th, 2010

My Purple Post: Glass house you live in, meet stone in your hand

(Visit our Purple State of Mind friends who continue to be kind enough to host the Village Square once a week on their blog.)

The recent passage of the healthcare bill in the Senate brought with it some need-to-take-a-bath-right-now details on how the legislative “sausage” was made. Now dubbed the “Louisiana Purchase” and the “Cornhusker Kickback” by conservative commentators, two Democratic Senators (Landrieu and Nelson) seemed to have snatched possible electoral defeat from the jaws of what initially probably looked to them as consummate legislative dealmaking victories.

Whether you’re on the left or right side of the aisle, there are real signs of good news in the general public’s negative reaction to Nelson and Landrieu’s actions, most wonderfully in their home states – the people who were supposed to be delighted at the booty the Senators had brought home. Good for them.*

You would have a hard, hard time finding .5% of the population who support this sort of legislative ugliness. We should probably take a moment to revel in something that is finally bipartisan.

Moment over. Hope you enjoyed it though.

Right now “we the people” are acutely aware of the apparent failure in moral standing of our elected representatives. Half of them anyway.

We seem to be only capable of perceiving moral failure in those we disagree with. The exact behaviors that we rail on endlessly about in our political enemies get a big yawn – or even an ovation – when they’re practiced by our political allies, if we even ever perceive they’ve occurred. If we bother to see the inconsistency, we usually use an uber-rationalization for it, such as the old standby that “we” stand for goodness and light, “they” are out to get you.

So while the right is having strokes over the bad behavior of Democratic Senators, the left is having strokes over nearly identical bad behavior of Republican Senators:

Last week, after nine months, the Senate finally approved Martha Johnson to head the General Services Administration, which runs government buildings and purchases supplies. It’s an essentially nonpolitical position, and nobody questioned Ms. Johnson’s qualifications: she was approved by a vote of 94 to 2. But Senator Christopher Bond, Republican of Missouri, had put a “hold” on her appointment to pressure the government into approving a building project in Kansas City.

This dubious achievement may have inspired Senator Richard Shelby, Republican of Alabama. In any case, Mr. Shelby has now placed a hold on all outstanding Obama administration nominations — about 70 high-level government positions — until his state gets a tanker contract and a counterterrorism center.

We have become a nation of people who so love the warm bubble bath of only ever perceiving things that make us feel good. And apparently hate, finger-pointing and lobbing stones from our own glass houses is really yummy feeling right now.

The tragedy here is that if we could only momentarily throw off our blinders, we’d see that we could change what none of us like by holding everyone to the same high standards. Elected officials can only play their hypocritical childish games as long as our nation is a playground full of children with no adults in sight.

It should be perfectly clear by now that we can’t wait around for our leaders to grow up. So we’d better go ahead and do it ourselves.

If we don’t like legislators holding out for home state payoffs, we’ve got to be equally offended when our “side” does it. On the day that we wake up to that reality, when the politicians hold their finger up in the wind, it will have shifted.

So often we whine that we have no power. The irony is that we have all of it.

___

*On a side note, there is some reporting that the Republican Governor of Nebraska asked Senator Nelson to strike this deal, who is now – in an utterly ridiculous irony – the opposition candidate who Nelson’s action has put him 31 percentage points behind in the polls.

(Photo credit)

Add comment February 12th, 2010

My Purple Post: Meeting a gentleman at the knife edge of democracy

Visit our friends at Purple State of Mind if you’d like to read up there…

According to the National Endowment for the Humanities Chairman Jim Leach: “Citizenship is hard. It takes a commitment to listen, watch, read, and think in ways that allow the imagination to put one person in the shoes of another.”

While he’d be too polite to agree with me, by his own measure Jim Leach is the quintessential citizen.

We had the distinct pleasure to spend a day last week learning a thing or two about citizenship from this man who’s had a lot of practice at it, 30 years in Congress and all. Taking a page from Paul Revere – although with a gentlemanly preference toward intentionally less fanfare in the ride, possibly more of a William Dawes (who I admittedly would know nothing about were it not for Lea Marshall and Malcolm Gladwell.… bless them both…) – Leach is setting out to visit every single one of these United States to tell us a thing or two about the high bar that citizenship demands.

While he will be characteristically gentle in the telling, it just could be that a test of citizenship is coming, a test of citizenship is coming.

Leach served at a time when tense work week Congressional fights were followed by weekend signs of friendship across the aisle and probably a bipartisan backyard bar-b-que or two and then, in turn as a democracy demands, another round of philosophical fighting. He served when relationships among legislators were what Bill Bishop, author of The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-minded Americans is Tearing Us Apart, refers to as “cross-cutting.” These public servants could be on one “side” here and another “side” there as they went about the business of building a country (which they understood to be their job)… leaving noticeably less room for the evil “they” that seems to have so effectively eclipsed the common “we” just about everywhere these days.

Except we isn’t common at all when it’s part of “We the People,” it is something we should treat with reverence and care. According to Leach, “[c]ertain frameworks of thought define rival ideas. Other frameworks describe enemies.”

It isn’t just anybody who can commit to our historical tradition of complex cross-cutting relationships to serve a greater end. It isn’t just any country that builds itself on such a challenging principle.

There are those who are bonded to our founders because our founders were angry, chafing at authoritarian British rule for freedom.

They were.

But the big audacious and nearly-insane-had-it-not-been-so-wildly-successful essence of our founders was so much more than angry. These were men of profound ideas who believed that, despite all of human history before them, “we, the (plain old average) people” could be the boss.

They were willing to sit uncomfortably at the crossroads of ideas, where the comfort of convictions stood regularly challenged and the luxury of entirely dismissing rival ideas probably edged you a wee bit closer to being hung by the king. They had to sit at a knife’s edge, weighing one idea against another in constant struggle for excellence and results. These men had to bring their “A” game to their revolution, and indeed they did. And by challenging ideas as they stayed connected to each other, they made something magnificent.

They made America the City on the Hill in the world no matter what anyone says (thank you very much).

And it is public servants like Jim Leach who carry on their tradition. Please listen to his speech. What is 20 minutes when a country you love may depend on it?

The bad news is that “We the People” cannot be the boss if we’re unwilling to do the hard work of citizenship. The good news is that we come by it naturally.

Like riding a bicycle I hope.

Add comment January 22nd, 2010

A Purple State of dialogue

You can probably tell why we kind of like our friends at Purple State of Mind just a little from this post by John Marks. We think they do such important work that we moved heaven and earth to bring them to Tallahassee last spring. So why not go on over to Purple and find out what we mean.

…the idea of a Purple State of dialogue, in which people could speak their minds across ideological divides and yet still respect their opponents, ceased to be a nice idea about politeness and became an urgent attempt to reverse the national meltdown. One clear sign of the urgency has been our discovery of like-minded projects around the United States, whether the folks at the Village Square in Tallahassee or the people behind the website Science and Religion Today, who recently reached out to us.

It’s no coincidence that our project has a special relevance in Florida. Municipalities and counties have been dealing with ferocious political and cultural confrontation non-stop for at least a decade, and lots of people down there are exhausted. We saw strong signs of a new push to improve the terms of combat, but we also know they have their work cut out for them.

This coming March, the Republican primary contest for a Florida Senate seat promises to be a donnybrook between moderate conservative Governor Charlie Crist and conservative darling Marco Rubio. That contest shows all the signs of becoming a civil war within the state Republican Party, but it’ll be a national test, too, a measure of how good or bad things are state-wide.

Thank goodness, Tallahassee has its angels. While spending time in the state capital, where the local film festival honored the movie with an award for audience favorite, we met the ingenious and inexhaustible Liz Joyner. Her organization, The Village Square, hasn’t indulged in wishful thinking, ala Rodney King. It jumped into the fray. This year, while we wrung our hands about the decline in civility, Joyner jumped into the lion’s den and hosted a series of discussions about healthcare, doing everything in her power to bring both conservative and democratic voices into the room.

By her own account, it was exhausting, and she didn’t manage to get the ranks to fall in love with each other, but there was a dialogue, and there will be more.

Thanks to Liz, we got to Tallahassee. Thanks to Wendy Abberger, president of Leadership Florida, we began to see ramifications of our project that had never been obvious before. Wendy is extremely well-connected throughout the business and political communities across the state, and after seeing our presentations at St. John’s Episcopal Church, she invited us to speak to her organization’s annual meeting in Orlando.

In preparation for that event, she told us that her group would be less interested in the religious aspects of our conversation and more interested in the notion of civic dialogue. She also let us know that Leadership members liked their speakers to offer practical advice and asked us for a kind of tool kit for dialogue. I wrote an essay for the event that became the blueprint for what you can now read on our About page.

As important as that conversation was, the Leadership event itself turned out to be the real turning point of the year. It was mid June. Earlier in the year, Texas Governor Rick Perry had made noises about secession, a perennial political flower as reliable as the bluebonnets in spring, and yet scarier somehow in our current climate. The Wall Street Journal ran a big take-out piece that weekend on what secession would look like. Meanwhile, the healthcare town hall meetings had started to get extremely ugly.

Standing before that crowd of 300 or so business leaders, we didn’t need to talk about god to get anyone’s attention. All we had to do was hold up a newspaper…

Read the whole piece by John HERE.

Add comment December 15th, 2009