Political morality is still quite simple. On the one side is the high ground of righteousness. On the other is the abyss of turpitude. Dividing them sit those with each cheek on either side of the fence...

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, wrote Samuel Johnson. I would add that those scoundrels who waved the flag of majority opinion have been most guilty of vicious excesses.

So it was that Madame la Guillotine dropped her sharp kiss upon the necks of all that the French revolutionary majority declared to be aristos.

'In such ugly times, the only true protest is beauty,' Phil Ochs once said ...

DAWN was breaking over the magnificent desolation of the Karoo landscape as cats eyes flung themselves towards me along the road pointing toward an infinite horizon.

This is the 9th month of the year 1999. There are 99 days to go to the last year of this century. Do you feel a sense of destiny?

A BUTTERFLY flapped his wings in East Timor, setting up gentle spirals of air currents that grew as they intersected harmoniously with others nearby. He lived gloriously for a few short hours, mated, and died. Night fell and the remnants of his wings tossed and turned, no longer with life of their own, in the now strong breeze.

The stars looked down silently upon the scene. They had seen it before.

How we deal with death is as important as how we deal with life...

If you knew that a rose would scream, would you still pluck it?