🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1885@randvax.UUCP> talmy@randvax.UUCP (Shel Talmy) writes:
}Dear Chairman Gorbachev:
}We  have organized a company in the U.S.A.  whose
}main goal is to produce the first ever musical concert  broadcast
}from space.  To that end, we are in negotiations with some of the

You have friends who are in desperate financial state and incredibly
low on morale, and you go to their house and say, "Yo, Fred!  How's
about you let us use your car to go to Tahoe -- and you pay the gas
money.  We're gonna visit an old folk's home there, and we need
wheels and we can't pay you for the use of your car.  Oh, you stay
here and tell your old lady and the kids why they can't use the car
for the weekend."

Sound crass?  It's not much worse than this concert crap.  Mikhail
Gorbachev is trying to reform his country.  He is facing enormous
budget deficits, rampant alcoholism and food shortages, gang
and Mafia-style activity crippling his production and making his
streets unsafe, and is quite literally in danger of being deposed,
offed, or "disappeared" on a daily basis.  He has pissed a lot of
people off.

Now you want him to tell the people of his country that he is going
to spend the megabucks necessary to launch the shuttle just so some
Americans and Russians can broadcast a concert from space to radios
and TVs his own people don't have, can't get, and even if they could
get couldn't afford?

This is the height of liberal altruistic bad taste.  And since I are
a liberal myself I'm quite embarrassed by it.  Perhaps your next
little venture will be to ask the spiritual leader of your local
black ghetto if you can boot them out of their church for a Sunday
so you can go in there and sell beautiful imported chocolates they
can't afford -- with all proceeds going to Muscular Dystrophy, of
course.

I find the arrogance of Americans as a group very annoying these
days.  "Mr. Gorbachev, do this because *we'll* like you more for it,
and that is of course what you want."  Gorbachev wants technology
to help feed and cloth his countrypersons and bring them into the
mid-twentieth century, and glasnost is strictly a vehicle to make
that possible.  I applaud him for trying to do his job -- make
the USSR a better place to live.  I do not and cannot applaud
the lack of tact shown by Shel and Co. in this matter of the concert.

Follow-ups have been directed to talk.politics.misc, since this is
a political issue -- not a musical or shuttle one, and certainly
not a headline I've seen lately.
-- 

Curtis Jackson @ Adobe Systems in Mountain View, CA  (415-962-4905)
Internet: jackson@adobe.com	uucp: ...!{apple|decwrl|sun}!adobe!jackson