Topic: Culture & Society

Like his name, Maury Maverick Jr. was a maverick. In fact, he came by his name honestly. His great-grandfather, Samuel Augustus Maverick, who signed the Texas Declaration of Independence in 1836, was a rancher who refused to brand his cattle. After that, all unbranded cows came to be known as mavericks, a term that quickly came to be used to describe non-conforming people as well.

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Maury Maverick Jr.

Editor's Note: This article was originally published in "ESP Magazine," an entertainment weekly published in Greensboro, N.C. on April 2, 2003, just as the war in Iraq was beginning.

"Oceania is at war with Eurasia. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia."

Eerie, isn't it, how George Orwell's novel seems much more relevant now, 19 years after it's self-proclaimed due date of 1984, than ever. Last year we were at war against Osama bin Laden, with our government's propaganda machine working overtime to convince us that the Al-Qada leader had been public enemy number one practically forever. Now we fight Saddam Hussein, and are reminded that this tyrant has been our chief nemesis, also practically forever. In case we notice this obvious inconsistency, the officials at MiniTrue, the Ministry of Truth, imply that Hussein and bin Laden are actually the same person.

America is now fighting two separate wars, yet our leaders are trying their best to convince us that these two actions are actually one. Because the war on terrorism is obviously necessary, the Bush administration is trying it's best to convince us, and the rest of the world, that the war against Iraq is part and parcel with our efforts against Al Qaeda and Hamas, by playing on our fears of "dirty" bombs going off on crowded streets, of anthrax again infecting us through the mail, or of nerve agents being released in our subways.

Back in the ‘60s, there was a common belief among the more cosmic hippies that the social historians had it wrong when they said that we humans elevated ourselves from primitive status some seven to ten thousand years ago and began slowly working towards the eventual goal of creating the U.S. Constitution, Ford automobiles and the Windows operating system. According to this theory, humans had developed a highly advanced technological society in the past, long before the dawn of known pre-history, but had somehow managed to destroy their civilization by misusing their technology.

The Sphinx stands guard over the Pyramids at Giza. How old is it really?

Numerology is the study of the numbers that effect us at all times during the course of our lives. These numbers can be understood and explained through the images of the Tarot cards. During the week after the death the Princess of Wales, I began to look at the numbers concerning both her life and her death. What I found was very interesting, not only because of what it told me about the princess, but because of what it told me about humanity in the 1990s.

Welcome to The Twilight Zone of the North Carolina legal system.

It’s a Friday night and you and your best friend are hanging out at your house. Since both of you have already seen this week’s episode of Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and you don’t have enough money to go out, you decide to fill the time by playing with the new deck of Tarot cards that you purchased the day before at Border’s.

During the social revolution that was synonymous with the sixties, perhaps nothing was more controversial than the rise of black militancy. This is a history that is rapidly becoming forgotten, as roughly half of the population was not yet alive during during the height of the “Black Power” movement. School textbooks have given them scant reason to realize that this movement grew out of peaceful attempts to bring integration to the South, and simple equality to the rest of America.

There’s been a big brouhaha recently regarding internet censorship and your local librarian. Remember now, the computers at your neighborhood public library are many people’s only way to connect with the web, including many school children who must rely on the web for research to be competitive in the classroom.

As Kurt Vonnegut pointed-out in Slaughterhouse Five, wars are fought by children, generally male, who are usually too young to understand the discrepancy of politics. Adolescent boys are seldom motivated by any clear cut ideology other than patriotism. For example, our fathers and grandfathers didn’t go off to invade Normandy or the Philippines because of any particular support of FDR’s New Deal, but to protect their country by fighting evil. They wanted to be like the heroes that our country had before produced. They wanted to make their fathers proud and to protect their mothers and siblings.

On the day that NATO began making air strikes on Kosovo I was at work, unable to follow the news on the radio or television. I was, however, able to keep up with the story’s developments by going to various news sites on the internet. On “abcnews.com” I found a link to the Yugoslavian home page.