Yes, it's been awhile. I don't have much time to blog now that I can't from home. Nor do I have much time right now, but I wanted to pass this on to any of you who might be amused. I can't verify the source (it's one of those things that floats around the Internet), although the drapery did happen. Enjoy. :)

The following letter was read by the author at this year's In Celebration of the Muse, Cabrillo College. She was the highlight of the evening.
The author is a woman of 60+ years, conservatively dressed, and obviously quite
talented.

AN OPEN LETTER TO JOHN ASHCROFT, ATTORNEY GENERAL OF THE UNITED STATES

On January 28, 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that he
spent $8,000 of taxpayer's money for drapes to cover up the exposed breast of
The Spirit of Justice, an 18 ft aluminum statue of a woman that stands in
the Department of Justice's Hall of Justice.

John, John, John, you've got your priorities all wrong. While men fly
airplanes into skyscrapers, dive bomb the pentagon, while they stick
explosives into their shoes, and then book a seat right next to us,
while they hide knives in their luggage, steal kids on school buses, take
little girls from their beds at night, drive trucks into our state capital
buildings, while our president calls dangerous men all over the world
evildoers and devils, while we live in the threat of biological
warfare, nuclear destruction, annihilation...you are out buying yardage to save
Americans from the appalling, alarming, abominable aluminum alloy of
evil...that terrible ten foot tin tittie.

You might not be able to find Bin Laden. But you sure as hell found the
hooter in the Hall of Justice.

It's not that we aren't grateful. But while we were begging the women
of Afghanistan to not cover up their faces you are begging your staff
members to just cover up that nipple to save the American people from that
monstrous metal mammary.

How can we ever thank you? So, in your office every morning in your
secret prayer meeting, while an American woman is sexually assaulted every 6
seconds, while anthrax floats around the post office and settles in the
chests of senior citizens... you've got another chest on your mind.

While American sons arrive home in body bags and heat seeking missiles fly
around a foreign country looking for any warm body..... you think of another
body.

And you pray for the biggest bra in the world, John, because you see
that breast on the Spirit of Justice is in the spirit of your own inhibited
sexuality.

And when we women see our grandmothers, our mothers, our daughters, our
granddaughters, our sisters, ourselves....when we women see that
statue, the Spirit of Justice, we see the spirit of strength and the spirit of
survival.

While every day we view innocent bodies dragged out of rubble, and
women and children laid out like thin limp dolls and baptized into death as
collateral damage, and the hollow eyed Afghani mother's milk has dried up
underneath her burka in famine, in shame, and her children are dead at her breast.

While you look at that breast, John, that jug on the Spirit of Justice
and deal with your thoughts of lust and sex and nakedness, we see it as a
testimony to motherhood....and you see it as a tit.

It's not the money it cost. It's the message you send. We've got the
right to live in freedom. We've got the right to cheat Americans out of millions
of dollars and then just not want to tell congress about it. We've got the
right to drop bombs night and day on a small country that has no Army, no
Navy, no military at all, because we've got the right to bear arms, but we just
better not even think about the right to bare breasts.

So, now John, you can be photographed while you stand there and talk
about guns and bombs and poisons without the breast appearing over your right
shoulder, without that bodacious bosom bothering you, and we just
wanted to tell you in the spirit of justice, in the spirit of truth: John there
is still one very big boob left standing there in that picture.

Claire Braz-Valentine