Outfront
Page 4 of 5
|
|
Asses Not Yet Extinct
July 1978
Criticizing environmental legislation, Minnesota power company executive Henry Holm recently asked, "Wouldn't it be nice to look out a window and see a saber-tooth tiger swallowing the last of your beef cattle?" You might have seen it, Holm asserted, if we had had environmental laws long ago.
We'd like him to team up with New York State Senator James Donovan to write a logic textbook. Donovan recently told a religious group: "There would be no Christianity if it were not for the death penalty. Where would Christianity be," he questioned, "if Jesus had got eight to fifteen years, with time off for good behavior?"
And how would the Ten Commandments read if there were no asses?
From an Editor's Note
February/March 1980
Obviously we're not predicting revolution by 1990. Indeed, the next decade will bring severe economic troubles and probably some frightening victories for the Right. But one thing we are sure of is that ten years from now the issue of corporate power—who owns this country and who should own it instead—is going to be on the nation's political agenda in a way it never has been before. We predict:
There's going to be nationwide debate over nationalizing the oil companies.
From an Editor's Note
June 1978
It is all too easy to poke fun at the illusions of ten years ago; all of us who were around then were to some extent naïve. The overwhelming horror of Vietnam made all political choices seem urgent and simple. In retrospect, one unspoken assumption seems to lie behind many of those articles. It was that the whole system we were fighting was so weak that a few shouts, kicks and a good hard shove would bring it all crashing down. It didn't, but at least we're wiser in the knowledge of what a slow and cooperative job real change is going to have to be.
From "Are They Just Full of Granola?"
By Joe Klein
November 1979
More than anything else, I guess, I figured that the antinuclear movement was a holding action—something to keep the activists busy until a really important issue, one that disturbed real, live people, one that directly affected their lives, came along. It also seemed a bit of an evasion: rather than address the immediate problems of humans who were suffering—the 40 percent unemployed in the ghettoes, the textile workers—the Left (the effete, middle-class Left) had chosen to organize around an abstraction. The movement had the feel of a granola-tasting party. There was a sappy, wholesome quality to it. It reeked of backpacking.
Roaches Enter MoJo Contest
June 1976
Have you found the perfect method to exterminate cockroaches? Can you tell male and female cockroaches apart? Do you have a favorite book about cockroaches? Mother Jones is planning a collage of cockroach information: history, habits, literary references, perfect poisons, etc. Send us your cockroach trivia (with a self-addressed stamped envelope if you want it back again), and if we print it, we'll send you $5.
Anything/one else you love to hate? MoJo is starting a contest now for the year's ten worst villains. Politicians, other people, chemicals, machinery, statistics, institutions are all eligible. Cockroaches are ineligible.
YOU TALK, WE LISTEN (BUT WILL WE REMEMBER)
From a Letter to the Editor
November 1977
An Open Letter to Feminists:
We are pleased to announce the end of the boycott against Mother Jones. This year the women on the staff of the magazine have formed a caucus, and on July 16 members of the Feminist Writers' Guild met with that caucus. Working together, we created a set of minimal conditions that both groups felt would begin to make Mother Jones responsive to the feminist community. These include:
1. One specifically feminist article will appear in at least every other issue.
2. When funds are available, a feminist woman will be hired as a full-time editor.
3. The magazine will work toward a parity of male and female contributors and will make a special effort to solicit more articles by Third World women.
4. When funds are available in the future, the Foundation for National Progress will give half of its grants to women.
Those feminists who withdrew or withheld articles from publication in the magazine in support of the boycott are now, according to this agreement, invited to submit their articles again.
We feel most optimistic about this agreement because of the existence of a women's caucus within Mother Jones that has expressed a desire to continue working with the Feminist Writers' Guild.
SUSAN GRIFFIN AND MARY MACKEY
For the Feminist Writers' Guild
From an Editor's Note
June 1978
We now have a broader definition of what is "political." If you had suggested that sexual harassment at the office (p. 21 of this issue), or the exploitation of secretaries (p. 19), or the way women's unemployment correlates with mother-centered child-raising theories (p. 60) was a proper subject for a political magazine, all but a handful of women's movement pioneers would have laughed.
