Tags: Americanism | culture | humanifesto

The concept of America, and with that the American, usually in reference to the home of the brave and land of the free...

The United States, instead of the 'new world' reaching much farther north and south, will elicit differing degrees of antipathy, belligerence, or outright antagonism.

Our manner of speaking, our loping gait, our myopia and mystique, not necessarily the Hollywood variety, but a variant of the cultural imperialism self-evident, ruffles the feathers of otherwise tolerant, and open-minded types.

Flashing buzzwords like shallow, unsophisticated, bombastic, dumb, etc., the anti-American will often bludgeon his target into the sad and empty patriotism that only confirms the stereotype.

I'd like to buy them a coke, pull up a chair, and tell tales that will raise the hair on their necks, puncture the armor, and perhaps take them deep into the abyss that my relentlessly self-obsessed, and obviously extremely volatile and dangerous motherland can dream up. Death Star California is only one such musing.

Think, while rhetorically raised under the stars and stripes, recognizes as such the concerns of our readers that this orientation is too stark, too bold and would challenge us to be more inclusive.

To that we say, write us, send us your thoughts and ideas about this duplicitous, and evolving city where we live. Or the mad musings and scribbling I know most of you confide to paper privately in your search to make heads or tails of this precocious and precarious era. What holds you back?

This magazine is more a question than a statement, offering overripe vegetables and raw fruit, under the auspicious audacity of a manifesto. Overfriendly, we want to be your lover, your companion, want to go with you to places you would rather be alone (e. g. the loo, or more formally the WC), to give you an excuse to talk to strangers, perhaps gleefully bashing us, to perhaps be lost at a nightclub. I once offered a guy who just got out of jail, I was once an espresso jerk, ten shots of this hearty beverage free if I could witness the chugging of such.

The happy and deranged look on his liberated face as he bid me farewell, is perhaps grasping, but nonetheless another of our objectives.

Join Thinky for some rocket fuel, and screw up your face to the ever tightening knot between art and commerce in 'We Have Always Written on Walls', a Horatio Alger (ask an American, it's their mythological rags to riches trip) journey from the inner city streets to Madison Avenue. This surrealistic display of mother nature that we have shiveringly called April, must have us all inspecting our karma, thus the new horoscopic lens of which to affix to your subconscious.

A poll of the American people last year discovered that 50 percent of the respondents accorded the US constitution the famous Marxist slogan, 'To each according to his needs, to each according to his abilities,' sounded plausible, sensible, maybe not, but if I were an astrologer, I would beckon each and every sunsign to enjoy our fleeting sunshine divorced from the where and who they receive it from, if not forever, just for a while, if only to unzip the cocoon of winter and to enjoy the transformation that is everyday Prague.

Peace!