Chapter Five: An Examination Of My Own Political Definition

"I have a label I've inherited, but...."

I was raised by my grandparents in a home constantly crowded with visiting relatives and their children. More than anything, I remember the sounds of laughter and music that filled that small house. My grandfather worked for Houston Natural gas, now Entex, for twenty five years. They had seven children and they added me and later, my sisters, when they were in their sixties. They covered all the basic bases, but there was never much money available for things above that. Even so, I never heard of Welfare or any other type of governmental programs that could have subsidized our lives.

My grandparents had survived the Depression on my grandmother's talents for business management and my grandfather's propensity to work hard. My grandmother, Jilma Montemayor Vela was the Valedictorian for the San Diego, Texas class of 1925. She would be among the first students invited to study at my Alma Mater, Texas A&I University when it was a Teacher's College. She was an only child and her mother had passed away that year of anemia. She was too concerned about her father and her grandmother who would remain behind in San Diego to commit to the task of studying. She opted to return home and ask a local German couple, the Besweirs, who owned the town's General Store to apprentice her in Business and Management.

Years later, after she was married, she took the skills she learned from the Besweir's and opened up her own store, which sustained them and a majority of the community, as they were allowed credit and to pay using a barter system, as the Depression ravaged the country. As I grew older and studied the Depression Era and the difficulties so many Americans experienced, my grandparents would share that they had not been as adversly affected by hardships because of their store.

My grandfather, Baltazar Pedro Vela, was born in Mier, Mexico. He and his family had moved up to San Diego when he was in his twenties. He had come to America to make a better life for himself. He had seen my grandmother in the town's plaza and had fallen in love with her at first sight. She was twenty seven and had rejected the attentions of other suitors. He had gone over her and asked her father for her hand in marriage. Her father granted it and they married. He met his live with zeal in work and in play. He worked diligently, laughed loudly, sang and drank beer as his liquid of choice. His other vice would be his kind heartedness. He couldn't hear of anyone having a need without dipping into his pocket, even to empty it, to help out.

If my grandfather's family had suffered under a Mexican government, he may have forgiven it by the time I came along, because he didn't talk about it. I do recall talk of Mexicans and Mexican Americans having to work for White bosses that were often oppressive. He would complain sometimes and repeated stories his friends shared about unjust White bosses. More often he spoke of, Mr. Wilke, his boss with Houston Natural Gas. I remember Mr. Wilke visiting in our home and eating with us and shaking my grandfather's hand. I don't believe I had ever seen him touch another White man before Mr. Wilke. Our family loved him. Near as I can figure, the major difference between him any other White man was that he crossed over the cultural line to make an effort to get to know our family.

My grandmother shares that her father, Juan Montemayor was very political in nature. He loved politics. I fancy that I must have inherited his political genes, since I had so little other exposure to the political world. My greatgrandfather was a Republican. His family had been in this area of Texas when it was a part of Mexico. "America landed on us", my grandmother would say.

She wasn't sure of what had influenced her father's decision to become political, much less affiliate himself with the Republicans. In those days, politics was strictly a man's game and it was not polite to discuss such matters with the women. My grandmother loved her father and speaks of him with great fondness, but his political activities do not make into her storytellings about him very often. I gathered early on that she was either not impressed by his politics or that she was not proud of it. I romanticized that he had aligned himself with the Republicans under Lincoln, in hopes that he would established rights for all Americans, including the Mexican-Americans, who were suffering the fates of the Blacks in discrimination.

My grandparents lived in San Diego, Texas until 1945. They had hoped that San Diego would grow in populaiton and industry. They anticipated that their children would not be able to stay in the town if they could not find jobs that would maintain their future families. My grandfather was especially mindful of this since he had seen his family separate as they pursued employement.. The Mexican and Mexican-Ameican family structure is such that extended family is considered immediate family. Just because my grandfather's mother and his brothers made the trek from Meir, Mexico to San Diego, Texas, he still considered himself having been separated from his family and he did not want that for his children.

They moved twelve miles away to Alice, the Hub city of South Texas, which at the time was prospering nicely as the train went through it, bringing and new families, new commerce and new jobs. My grandmother recalls 1945 Alice as being bustling and exciting. It had a theatre and it was not long before they would learn to frequent this entertainment site.

My greatgrandfather purchased a house for them and it was moved to Alice and placed in an area that had once been a swamp land. It was then the far outskirts on the South side of Alice. Their closest neighbors, the Leal family, would be two blocks away. The area was not developed at all. They had to make their own niche in this new homestead.

That first year, they planted a row of pecan trees on their property. Through the years they sold off sections of the land as they needed to provide for a child's surgery or whatever other need arose. The house sits on the remaining lot. The pecan trees are now the tallest and likely the oldest in the area. If you stand in my grandmother's back yard and look to either direction, you can see the line of trees.

Well after I was born in 1958, that area of Alice remained undeveloped. The city was divided into the South Side, which was predominanlty lower income Mexican-American and the North Side, which was predominantly White. I remember a conversation my grandfather had with a friend of his in which they expressed shock that the White people in the city were having their streets swept and washed on a regular basis by city employees.

It would be years later that I would see a street sweeping vehicle. To this day, I remember my grandfather's outrage that the North side would be indulged while the South side hardly had the streets paved at all. He lamented that it was because the "Mejicanos" did not have representation within our city. The politics of Alice were White and for Whites.

Tina Villanueva would emerge as a strong leader within the Mexican American Community and the city. It has always astounded me that a community entrenched in such a machismo-driven patriarchal culture would have so readily accepted a female leader. She was a character; loud and tough as nails.

One year, we had received an unusual amount of rainfall and the dam in San Diego had broken and Alice was to be in the path of a flash flood. At about 2:00am we were awakened to sounds of Tina Villaneueva blaring through a loud speaker, "Despierten! Ay viene la agua!" (Wake up! The water is coming!).

We heard her from a block away and were all on the porch by the time she past by our house. She was riding in a white convertible, dressed in some kind of fur coat and donning a white felt cowboy hat. I had heard her holler through that same loud speaker during the election about needing everyone to vote for her so that she could change the South side.

The water came and like most substancial rain falls we would get, our streets were flooded, the yards filled and the water threatened to enter into our homes. Our area had little to no drainage. Even just a few days ago, a man walked into my office who grew up in my neighborhood and we joked about how we had both learned to swim in our front yards. We could not wait for the rains. We didn't have public pools, nor did we need them. We both expressed how fortnunate we, and all our friends were, not to have caught any bacterial infections or microorganisms.

The night of Tina Villanueva's ride through the South side became a defining moment in her legacy as she would be remembered as one who truly cared for her neighbors. She was practically canonized in our home. Thinking back, all she did was climb in her car and wake us all up. She didn't keep the waters from us nor did she bring any help of any kind if anyone would have needed it. Non-the- less, allegations of misappropraitions would later arise and her people stood firmly by her because she had been one of the first of the politicians on Alice who demonstrated a compassion and vigil for the South side. We finally had one of our own in representation. I was sad when she died. It was the end of the Tina Villanueva era of politics in Alice.

One of our local teachers, Ernestine Glossbrenner, decided she needed to run for a Representative office and head for Austin to make a difference. I was a teenager by then and her sacrifice in giving up her job and her home as she would have to live in Austin, which may as well have been on another planet , since I'd never traveled past Corpus Christi . I did not see her much after that nor did our community make much a fanfare of whatever legislations she may have been involved in. She has retired now and living in Alice again. I'm proud to say that I have seen what I am sure is but a small protion of the contribution she has made to our area with the Ernestine Glossbrenner Unit for Drug Rehabililitation Center in San Diego, Texas.

During my teen years politics was not really a part of my world until my senior year when I took Civics under Mr. George Draper. That year was an emmersion into the everyday dealings of politics and the inner working of the political machinerey on the local, state and national level. I understood it as if the political world was scripted in a language I was fully versed in. I found this same experience with Shakespeare, probably because his writings were so political in nature.

Mr. Drapers Civic's class was cathartic and set in place what my goals for what my future vocation would be. I supposed that I would want to be involved in public service and could do so as an attorney. My choices of Undergraduate study towards a Law Degree were either Business or Political Science. I chose Political Science and then later chose not to pursue the Law Degree after all. I perceived that there was an over abundance of attorneys in America and not too many truly committed Soccer Moms. It would not have been easy being a bi-vocational attorney. I would not have had the time I would need to give to my children.

When I was born I was issued a Culture Bag that we all get upon entering into the Mexican-American reality. The first item within it is our name, not so much the first name as the last name that affiliates us with our lineage.

The second item is the lineage itself, which may go back as far as seven or more generations. It will have attached to it photos and/or word pictures describing who each member in the lineage was and how we connect to each of them. I am a composite of many. I have my greatgreatgrandmother's hands, my greatgrandfather's temperment, and so on. This item is a collection of our history and it lays out where we have been and where our ancestors hoped we were going.

The third item is a guitar, symbolic of our people's love of music. We put our historic tales to music in corridos and we express either joy or mourning and every emotion between through song.

The fourth item is a Crucifix with a rosary wrapped around it, denoting our people's longstanding membership within the Roman Catholic church. I grew up with shrines to saints and candles within my grandmother's home, but very little church attendance. We were Catholic and through Baptism we were registered into this faith. I grew up knowing that to think of doing or being anything but Catholic constituted something that would bring about bad spiritual consequences. I later learned the word for it: anathema.

Item number five is a recipe book recording the foods our ancestors learned to make off of the ingredients the land provided. Our cooking methods have changed, but most of us have insisted that the ingredients and a semblance of the method of preparations remain the same as a tribute to our ancestors.

My greatgrandmother grew the corn, tended it, picked it, removed the kernels from the husks, dried the husks, soaked the kernels in lime water, ground the kernels on a stone slab or molchajete, until they made masa, a corn dough, rendered fat from tallow, ground the spices she had grown , killed pig or a cow or a deer, cooked the meat and ground it finely, soaked and seperated the dried husks in hot water, spread the spiced corn masa on the individual husks, spooned meat on the husk , rolled them up and placed them in a cast iron pot or an earthenware pot, added a few cups of water in it, placed a lid on it , lowered it into a hole in the ground that had hot coals on the bottom and then piled hot coals on top and at the end of several weeks worth of preparartion and a long day's work- they could enjoy a special meal of TAMALES.

We have managed to cut this process subtancially and can produce far more that our ancestors because of refrigeration. We get together and prepare as many as fifty dozen at a time, but we stay as close as we can to the old recipe because producing tamales is our way of paying homage to our ancestors and reminding our children of their sacrifices for our us.

Item six is neatly triangular-folded American Flag, symbolic of our people's patriotism to this great country and the many losses we have suffered to war. My family loves America and worked hard and fought hard and died to help in its formation.

Items one through six had been issued in the cultural bag for centuries. Some newer items have begun to be included. One of which was a political button with a Democratic Donkey on it against an American Flag background. Even though I grew up with very little interaction with politics, like our slight intereaction with the Catholic church, it was clearly established that we, as Mexican-Americans were Democrats and that to think of doing or being anything but Democrat would constitute a political anathema.

Before I married Richard, I struggled with the fact that uniting with him would be difficult because he was a White Baptist. I didn't know very much about either of these worlds. I knew him and figured that whatever had contributed to making him who he was would be beneficial to both myself and what would be our family.

Attending the Baptist Church was difficult, especially since I had to form the habit of attending church. I kept expecting for the "anathema" consequences to fall on me and mine. I think God was just happy to see me in a church. It was not too long before I was comfortable with the newfound spiritual-natured activities. I have now taught in Sunday School and sang in a church Choir for the past sixteen years in various churches and have taught in Vacation Bible School for thirteen years. The addition of a consistant and meaningful Church life has proven to make for a more balance life. We get to touch base with our intellect, physical and spiritual beings within our weeks and have learned how our humanity functions better when all of these aspects are tuned. Our children have averted social pressures such as drugs and promiscuity, thus far, because of their relationship with Jesus Christ.

In DC, this was not an issue, but in South Texas I still have a problem admitting to Mexican-Americans, especially the older members of our community, that I am a Baptist. I interject that I was born a Catholic, (as if I bore a permanent tatoo that identified me as a life-member), but that I had married a Baptist and attend with him ( as if this was noble on my part). I sometimes even leave out that my Baptist husband is White for fear of older and feebler hearts. It is as if I am being asked to have my Culture Bag checked and I feel as though I have squandered important parts of my birthright. It has always been heartwrenching to think that I might have dissapointed my lineage and that I might have even broken the lineage itself by having married outside of my race. My culture is so precious to me and yet I have wondered about what Culture Bag my children have and how much have I comprimised my own? These had been haunting questions that I knew one day I would have to face and answer.

May of 1997 brought these matters to a confrontation. It was to be the Alice High School Class of 1977's twenty year reunion. I had not attended the ten year reunion because I had heard that it had been riddled with racial problems. That whole idea was so ridiculous. I had not been aware of there having been such problems when we were in school. I have heard it said that racial polarization in a community may begin when the citizens enter into the work place as adults aware of social descrepencies on all sides. This may have happened with our class. I did not want to alter the happy memories I had of my highschool days. I had made some wonderful friends who had helped me, whether they knew it or not, through some very difficult times.

The twenty year reunion was no different than the tenth, except that I lived in Alice now and was asked to participate by a dear friend, Lorenzo Moncevais who saw the splintering fo our class as an injustice and wanted to get a group together to brainstorm the problem. Any time a racial situation arises, the minority member will have to deal not only with the present, but with the ghosts of the past, which echo old strife and inferiority. As ghosts tend to be, they are not often based on present reality. Instead of crutching on the ghosts, I decided to evaluate the lives of those who lived before me. What would they think of this situation and what they have had us do? I came to realize that each and every one of my ancestors had lived with a Soccer Mom mentality.

They had sacrificed thier immediate gratification to contribute to the next generation so that those who came after them would be able to do better and have better than they had had. It was their desire, (as it is mine for those who will come after me), that I, as I stood in my spot on the lineage, would have the freedom to be whatever I chose to be and to experience life and happiness to its fullest in an understanding that they had all gifted this to me.

My children have a Culture Bag that is richer than mine. As those who came before me took the opportunity to add to and enhance the Culture Bag, I am able to decide what of my husband's culture we will adopt. Part of his family came from Scandinavia and part of his family is a direct desendant of Cynthia Parker and Quana Parker, the Cherokee Chief. My daughters are eligible to join the Daughters of the Confederacy. His own Culture Bag is quite rich as well. We both have a great deal to offer to the makeup of our children's Cultural bags. We have a responsibility to help them realize the treasures they carry and the many sacrifices that were laid down for their benefit.

It was with this enormous bolstering from my relatives, that I was able to say to myself and others that I was not better than anyone, but that I could not allow anyone to place themselves as better than myself. Too much had been given for me to allow for that.

I also concluded that not all the items in the Culture Bag were edifying and that it was not yet complete. It is instead, a collection in progress and each generation could chose to add to its makeup. For example, alcohol and alcoholism are a part of the Mexican-American Culture Bag while a promotion and a desire for education are not. There is definitely room for change.

It was with this freedom that I then ventured to analyze what my poltical ideolgy should be. I had the Democrat button in my Culture Bag, but I could plainly see that the party of my fathers was NOT at all the party that stood today. The Democratic party that John Kennedy had aligned with in the 1960's was no longer the same, only thirty years later.

In as much as the Democrats now complain about the Republican party being too highly influenced by the far Right, the Democratic Party has been overtaken by the far Left and the liberal principals they aspire to set in place within our society do not match our cultural convictions as Mexican-Americans, who hold religious and collective(rather than individual) values as sacred.

As I spotlighted the discrepancies between what I held as my religious believes and what I held as my personal, secular world believes, I discovered a tangled mess. I have no idea how I deluded myself into becoming such a worthless hypocrit and how it is that I never really bothered to see it as such.

In the movie, Clear And Present Danger, the villan cries out to Jack, the noble hero, "It's gray, Jack! The world is gray!" in an attempt to persuade him that ethics and morals no longer rule the thinking man's world; that there is no longer a wrong and a right but, instead just a chosen decision.

We have inherited the effects of what Nitchze set in place when he urged in his writings, that humans needed to shed off the restraints of religion so that we could determine just how high we could soar. Without the restraints of what he argued was a malevolent diety who oppressed us into conformity, humans would be able to achieve higher levels of thinking. It was his reason that we would leave the constraints of menial labor behind as we learned to ease our work and would evolve into a society where everyone was refined and cultured.

Even in the insane state of mania Nitzche was ranting from, he managed to recognize that a human society would have need for restraints in the form of morals. He warned that the Christian morals needed to be dismantled, but that if we were not careful to place others in their place, society would fall into a state of "nilism", the belief in nothing; the gray area.

Nitzcheism suffered the same fate as Communism- it never completely materialized, but like Communism, it has taken some deep roots in the American psyche. I would have expected to have found his philosophy to have been completely integrated into the Liberal mentality because of the humanistics aspects of the thought, but I was taken aback by how the Religious sector of our society had been inflitrated by it as well.

All religions have suffered dilution because of the addition of Nitzcheism into the mindset of their American congregations. Nitzche's plan was to introduce his ideas through the government's school system. Students would be taught Reading, Writing, Arithematics while they were being indoctrinated into Humanism, the religion of the Self, for the new age, the enlightened and the truly free.

It is argued that Humanism is not a religion, but examining it clearly indicates that it is. Humanism removes an external diety and replaces it with the "self". Each individual is a "god" to be revered and worshipped. The element of "faith" is placed upon the self and the element of "meditation" or prayer is utilized to "center" or refocus on the self.

However, if each individual is a god, then each individual has free reign to determine his/her rules- then no god should be able to impose an adopted set of rules on another god. This is not the type of freedom that our Founding Fathers envisioned for America, in which everyone is "free" to do whatever he/she pleases.

We should be free to the extend that our actions interfere with another, yet under humanism, others can and should be circumvented and/or discarded if they interfere with one's endeavors.

The institutions of marriage and family are in freefall in our country because of this philosophy that insists that we should be willing to do a thing if it feels good and discontinue doing the thing if it is no longer satisfying , even if the "thing" is a marriage or the responsibility towards the raising of children.

People just walk away from commitments, big and small, feeling justified in their actions because, after all, they have a responsibility, as disciples of Humanism, to put themselves first.

What was a search for enlightenment for one generation of adults has become disillusionment for the next generation of their children, who were left behind to be raised by a single parent who was often so occupied with trying to meet financial obligations that there was really no time left and the kids had to fend for themselves.

These kids, many of them fell into Nitzche's nightmare: nilism. The area they ventured to was dark gray. There was no one validating them, so their life had no defined value. Worst still, no else's life had value in their eyes either. As humanistic gods they wrote the rule that stated that they could and would take the life of another if they deemed that it was necessary in THIER pursuit of self fullfilment and gratification.

And in the church, congregations moaned under the weight of people too preoccupied with self discovery to commit to meaningful discipleship of any given religion or to extend the time and energy needed to minister to others. It is said that twenty percent of church organization carries out one hundred percent of the church's work. The other eighty percent attend or are simply listed on a church roll.

In my own life, as a Christian, it was painful to see that I, like most of this country's religious people, had taken to living a dual life, paying homage to God and proclaiming that I believed in His word and sometimes even vowed to keep it- on Sundays - because the rest of the week was set aside for my secular life.

We, as religious people, live in a house divided and in a state of mental schizophrenia, knowing full well that God would not condone our secular life and that the secular world is not capable of accepting our religious beliefs. We burden ourselves with the everpresent weight of knowing that we fail and betray both worlds.

We tell our children that THEY need to have strong relationships, with their God and with their family members and their friends, but they watch our failures and turn away from our "answers" to life's dilemas because they clearly see us as hypocrits. We do not walk our talk or practice what we preach. There is nothing kids hate more than blantant hypocrisy.

The Liberal camp has risen to and entrenched itself in the Democratic party's hierachy. They have professed that our world's number one evil is capitalism, the pursuit and collection of material wealth, because focusing on wealth rather than the enhancement of the collective human race is a detriment to our evolution. Yet, as the philosohpy of Humanism has been implimented and the dilemna of what god from amongst us all would have the right to establish and impose laws and limitations on the rest of the gods, the answer has been: the god who has amassed the most capital.

This experiment has gone full circle. They are right back to capitalism with the added societal detriment that some from among us are dangerously insisting that, as gods, they have the right to disregard law and order.

Horrific things have happened in our society that seem to lack explanation. Students terrorizing and murdering their teachers and classmates, doctors murders because they perform abortions, the Unibomber, who took it upon himself to attempt to murder those he thought were detrimental to society because of their use and promotion of technology and so on and so on.

If we look at these events in the constraints of present time only, we will never understand why these things happen and we have no chance of working towards ending these horrors. The answers are clearly found in a study of our history. Time weaves a single thread through history that connects to and affects our present and our future.

America dealt with the consequences of having engaged in slavery. Much of our land is saturated with the blood of our countrymen who died on either side of this issue. The end of the war did not bring resolution ,closure or healing to our country. We are still dealing with the effects of what that generation of people did or did not do during the Civil War.

Likewise, America will be dealt consequences for our high divorce rate, our ambiguance towards our children, our use of abortion and our attempts at dismantling God. Like those before us, we will leave consequences that future generations will contend with. It was in looking at this panoramic view of the world that I decided that I could not be affiliated with a political party that was actively choosing to continue to impliment such a philosophy which had brought such horrific consequences to bear within our society already.

As a culture, Mexican-Americans are not a part of the higher echelons of the Democratic party and are therefore not a part of the planning and implimenting of the party's platform. Just like with the alcohol I found in my Culture Bag, I am consciously opting to throw out the Democratic Button I found within it.

Now, the question is: "Where I do go now?"

The Republican Party has not prepared a place for me as a Mexican American voter- not on the Local or the National level.

On the State level, we are fortunate to have George W. Bush, Jr who, with a sincere heart, has extended a hand of amistad (friendship) to the Mexican- American community. He is good man because he was raised by Barbara Bush, an ASMS Charter member. He appears to be headed for the national arena, but he has been rather slow at committing to the project and establishing a clear platform for his domestic and foreign policies.

On the Local level, I have no idea who aligns themselves with the Republican Party. I have never seen a concerted effort by any group in this area to publicize their partisanship, with the exception of the occassional lawn signs that campaign for a Republican candidate, displayed sporatically on the city's North side. The Democratic party is quite entrenched in and perhaps the Republicans have written this area off.

On the National level, the Republican Party has cowered to the attacks levied on them by the Democratic Party. However unfair, uncivil and unwarranted the attacks may be, the appearance is that of a Party who is incapable of defending itself, much like a brainy nerd who is continually beaten by a schoolyard bully. Quite frankly, If the Republicans can not defend themselves, I have no hope that they would defend me and mine.

Newt Gingrich opted to accept a censure from his fellow congressmen and pay a $300,000 fine for an error made by his attorney's office in transcribing his original answers to congress in an inquiry regarding the use of a class he was teaching. The Democrats accused him of misleading the Congress instead of accepting the simple fact of a benign error. Rather than to take his case before the American public and fight for what was right and true, he caved.

Once the Democrats , through malicious lies, race baiting, fear mongering and setting anyone and everyone against one another, were successful in labeling the Republicans as being anti-children, anti-middle class, anti-elderly, anti- nutritiuos food, anti-clean water, anti-clean air and pro-tax cuts that would benefit thier rich, capitalist friends, the Republicans cowered collectively and allowed the Democrats to escalate their political terrorism further and further.

The Democrats insisted to the American public that the Republicans would discontinue the School lunch program and children would starve. They also said that the Republican's would end Social Security and Medicare and that the elderly would be left with no funding, no healthcare and that they would be thrown out on the streets. They went so far as to say that a vote for a Republican would be a vote for lynchings and the burning of Black churches.

The actions and words of the Democrats were bizzare and obviously wrong and bad for our society. The Republicans should have been able to logically counter the rantings of these desperate politicos, but they did not. Their inaction and silence was equally bizarre and harmful for our society as well because they allowed the standard of decency to be lowered by the Democrats and they did little to counter it.

I often wonder if perhaps the Republicans thought that the Democrats were being so obviously in choosing to cause divisions amoung the races and the ages,(setting Baby Boomers against Seniors and Gen-Xers for social funding) that they did not have to point these things out. They may have counted on the American public to figure it out. To some point, they did.

In 1996, the American public overwhelmingly supported the Republicna party and overthrew the terroristic Democrats out of Majority-status in the House of Represenatatives and the Senate. Not even this vote of confidence gave the Republicans a strong backbone when it came to countering the Democratic attacks.

Third parties act as spoilers to the two predominant partys, as the Reform Party did in the 1992 election. Ross Perot and his followers managed to pull away votes from the Bush camp and bring about the election of Bill Clinton. Even though third parties are not viable contenters against the established two, the country does owe the Reform Party a debt of gratitude because it was their concerted disatisfaction that brought the Liberal agenda, as implimented by the counter culture mentality embodied in the Clinton Administration, to the forefront to be illuminated and examined by the American public.

@Jenni Vinson ....April 17, 1999