for 10 March 1999. Updated every WEEKDAY.

Your article is well in line
with the outstanding quality
of the writings hosted by
Suck. Congratulations.

But ...

The punishment inflicted by
the French on Germany after
World War I was really too
much. The hyperinflation and,
hence, instability of the
Weimar Republic was due to
the huge amount of money the
government of the country, most
of whose working-age males
were dead, had to pay to
France. If it's true the
French live to humiliate and
defeat the British (and
everyone else except their
already-defeated colonies,
toward which they are more
paternalistically
benevolent), this is twice as
true for the "much more
neighboring" Germans. If you
recall that the word France comes
from Frankreich, not from
Galois, you get an idea of
the favorite target of
French revanchisme. This is
without counting the coal and
iron of German-speaking
Alsace.

Jacques Brel was already
Belgian.

I would not dance on somebody
else's economic grave while
sitting on a big bubble about
to burst, despite the
wackiness of his economic
theories (which unluckily are
leaking to Italy).

Maybe you should have
substituted "self-centered" for
"balanced."

Guido Gambardella
<tddge@box2.tin.it>

Dear Guido:

The war reparations issue is
indeed more complicated than
a couple-line gag, I agree.
But it's not necessarily much
funnier.

Thanks for the kind words
otherwise,

Regards,

Eugen

Hit & Run

After more than a year of spending
15 minutes a day reading Suck
and then an hour each day
referencing links,
dictionaries, People
magazine, and a Roget's
Thesaurus to make sure I'm
enough of a cognoscente to
justify how hard I'm
laughing, I've chosen to
break ranks with the smug
silence of your truly cool
readership to join the
hypersalivating losers who
have nothing better to do
than write the editors of
online publications. I wrote
to MSNBC a couple of times just
to hone my reader-response
voice.

Anyone with the name Marlow
Peerse Weaver shouldn't be
involved with poetry on any
scale whatsoever, unless it's
a quatrain competition with
the local chapter of the
Society for Creative
Anachronism, Pantaloons and
All. Any serious Gen X poet
would have to pause at the
very least and scratch his or
her soul patch before submitting
to a Gen X anthology compiled
by a boomer with a stupid
name and '60s counterculture
credentials. Weaver's oozing
enthusiasm over the "colorful
patchwork" he's stitching
together and his penchant for
using fonts for emphasis
tell me he's got all the
luster of a self-appointed
co-chair of a five-year class
reunion. I can only hope he
isn't donating the proceeds
to fight AIDS.

As a poet and spoken-word
performer who has languished
through more than 10 years of open
mics brimming with barely
literate spinoffs of Dylan,
Ginsberg, and Morrison, I can
say with conviction that the
sooner Weaver's generation of
poetry dies, the better. He's
so mired in his own
philanthropy toward us Lost
Children that he's failed to
notice he now sports the
moniker The Man. Fight the
power!

I hope this letter is good
enough to print - otherwise
the sacrifice of my Silent
Suckster status will have
been in vain.

John Kusch
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
<jkusch@mcw.edu>

John,

I don't know. It seems to me
Marlow Peerse Weaver is
probably the greatest poetry
name anybody could have, most
of all for that wonderful
variant spelling of Peerse.
And that counts for
uncapitalized imagist shaped
verse as much as it does for
potpourri-scented sonnets
written with a quill. Can't
you see the album now,
written in a spidery Shelley
Volante BT: Emotions
Recollected in Tranquility, a
Nosegay in Verse, by Marlow
Peerse Weaver? Any Xer worth
his or her mountain bike should be
proud to be associated with a
moniker like that.

Yr pal, Bartel

Yeah, he's right. I'd prefer
to be called post-boomer
about as much as Malcolm X
would enjoy being referred to
as nonwhite.

Why won't they just die
already?

La Chingona
<Mychingona@aol.com>

La Chingona,

There you have the theory of
demographic relativity in a
nutshell. Here's a Ralph
Ellison quote:

"Said a young white professor
of English to me after a
lecture out in northern
Illinois, 'Mr. E., how does
it feel to be able to go to
places where most black men
can't go?' Said I to him,
'What you mean is, how does
it feel to be able to go
places where most white men
can't go.'"

Then again, Ellison called
himself an Invisible Man.

Yr pal,

Bartel

Isn't it just like a baby
boomer to prefer the term
post-boomers to Generation X?
And more to the point, to
come to the conclusion that
we do too?

Thanks to Dr. Spock, William
Levitt, and the Brothers
Gibb, this whole demographic
has ambled through their
so-called lives laboring
under the delusion that the
world is constructed in terms
relative to them. But how
much narcissism does it take
to define the next generation
in those terms too?

I've accepted the fact that
I'll be living in the shadow
of the baby boomers for
another 30 years or so. (I
eagerly await the
congressional hearings on the
Depends shortage of 2025.)
The only thing that keeps me
from self-immolation today is
the knowledge that with a
little luck I'll have 10 or
so years at The End when I
won't have to suffer these
self-involved whiners telling
me what I think.

Wayne();
<Wayne.Mesard@East.Sun.com>

Wayne,

Maybe you could cheer
yourself up by designating
your own age group the "Wayne
Mesard generation" or even
"Generation W" (which should
definitely be pronounced in
the demotic "double-yuh").
Then preceding and succeeding
generations could be "The
Pre-Generation Double-yuhs,"
the "Post-Generation
Double-yuhs," etc.

Yr pal,

Bartel

While I share your disdain
for the excesses of Weyrich &
Co., I see them from an even
deeper level of paranoia than
you do. You ask if they
noticed they'd won a round
with the Contract on America.
They certainly did notice and
are trying to continue to use
the same tactics to win a few
more rounds. To wit: Their
endless complaints about the
"liberal bias" of the media
became the Big Lie of the
early '90s. They cast the
shameless pandering of the
corporate media to their
owners' interests as the
liberal enemy. By staking out
such an extreme position they
managed to make the already
conservative press look
moderate by comparison and
thereby shifted the whole
context of the debate.

Moderation or centrism was
redefined as Reagan
conservatism and liberalism
became Hubert Humphrey
centrism. Truly progressive
points of view -
single-payer, state-
administrated universal
health care, for instance -
were simply written out of
the debate. They won by
losing - to themselves. Now
they're at it again. Weyrich
is just a stalking-horse -
another Pat Buchanan - set up
to disguise the real
objective, which is to
increasingly frame the debate
in conservative terms. By
pushing the far right
boundary to absurd limits,
they hope to continue to move
the perceived center. Don't
underestimate the power of
absurd, nonsequiturian,
irrational thought to
influence national politics.
Those who did so in Germany
in the mid-1930s lived to
regret it - or didn't.

Don't look back.

Ned Depew
<ned@wizvax.net>

You may very well be on to
something here, but I
sincerely hope not. And I
choose not to credit Weyrich,
Bauer, Buchanan, et al. with
cleverness. I mean, I just
can't. See what I mean?

Keeping my fingers crossed,

Ambrose Beers

You can imagine the
great pain it causes me, an
atheist and somebody who
doesn't understand why
right-wing fundamentalists
get so touchy about
homosexuality, to say that -
gulp - Jerry Falwell was
right about Tinky Winky.

Tinky Winky is gay. To
someone like me, this is
terrific news. It gives me
great hope that maybe one day
no children will grow up with
a taste for beating the crap
out of homosexuals, tying
them to fence posts, etc. For
all I care, Tinky Winky could
have a very special friend
named Jeff who comes over on
Friday nights and doesn't
leave until Sunday.

What is so frightening about
Falwell is not that he thinks
(or says) Tinky Winky is gay,
but that he gives a rat's
ass. I mean, this man is
really bothered by it all.
That's the creepy part.

Tom Castle
<Tom@asizip.com>

Jeff would be disappointed -
Tinky Winky appears to have
no penis. But who knows what
goes on behind closed doors?

One possible hint: A friend
sent me a Teletubbies book
from Spain, El Bolso de Tinky
Winky, that shows the
Tinkster cavorting with a
vacuum cleaner. The vacuum
cleaner is pointing its
phallic cleaning hose at
Tinky's face, saying, "Sucky!
Sucky! Eslapy!" My Two
Daddies? Perhaps.

Wondering about Tigger and
Pooh,

Ambrose Beers

French Tickler

1) Serge Gainsbourg wanted to
be a painter like
Gainsborough but he was a
singer. Serge Gainsbourg was
his stage name, his real name
was Lucien Ginzburg.

2) Geordie (the little
"singing" boy) was marketed
under the name Jordi by his
mum and dad.

3) Jacques Brel was born in
Brussels and is (was)
therefore very, very Belgian.
(Only a Belgian could have
written "Le plat pays.")

<B.Vanhumbeeck@tvt.be>

Dear Sir:

Apologies for the spelling
errors. And I'm glad you are
proud of Brel.

Eugen