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Word
Worth Volume IV, 2004, Issues are available by clicking on the name of
the month below.
Adobe Reader is needed to access them. A free copy is available
here: |
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Editorials
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Arts
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Columns
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Crime and
Punishment—Marien Helz
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January
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The Lady’s New
Clothes—Charles Miess
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Saddam Hussein, unlike his elusive weapons of mass destruction, has been
captured. It is possible those weapons exist. There was
cause to believe that they did. They could be in a hole in the
ground larger, but similar to, the one in which their reputed harborer
was captured. The existence of such weapons, however, is becoming
less and less plausible. |
Michelle M Mayer
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I have never been much for clothes. I grew up in a large family, and we
dressed in hand-me-downs or whatever happened to be ... most nearly
clean. Color coordination was not a phrase that would have meant
anything to us—at least not to the boys in the family. I
remember the farmer up the road joking that the first one of us to get
up in the morning was always the best dressed. |
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Guns and Other
Toys—Marien Helz
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February
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The Encounter—Charles
Miess
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After Hussein’s capture, we apparently did nothing to prevent Iraqis
from primitively celebrating the event by firing guns into the air and
thus causing the injury and death of innocent people. The only thing
such a feral celebration should demonstrate to civilization is the
danger of a society like Iraq’s in which, we’re told, every
household has guns—not TVs or computers, but guns.... |
Photography by
Armin W. Helz
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A lot has changed since
that day in February 1991. I was in an unfamiliar land, hiking up a hill
of red earth, coarse tufted grass, and fissured rocks. I remember climbing
until I could see over the brick wall surrounding the house below. I
stopped and raised my camera....
Tires squealed as a car stopped abruptly at the base of the
hill.... |
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Notorious Trials—Marien
Helz |
March |
 The Robbery
—Charles
Miess |
|
A society or culture can, perhaps, be best judged by how it treats the
people it doesn’t like rather than by how it treats those it does. In
February, we saw the beginning of two trials of rich, famous, and
formerly loved personalities.... Both acquired wealth and fame
because they had the power to attract; both have seen that power not
simply fade, but reverse.... |
Test
Day
by
Gary Earl Ross
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...She
thought about... the stepfather who beat her with a table leg. She
thought about the man who kidnapped and molested her—then left her for
dead when she was only nine years old. She remembered how
she had to live on her own when she was barely thirteen—how she went
to school by day, worked at McDonald’s in the evening, and slept alone
in vacant apartments at night. |
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William
Shakespeare—M H Perry |
April |
Casting Stones—Charles
Miess |
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William Shakespeare, demonstrably the best loved writer world-wide for
four centuries, was born in April, 440 years ago, in a small
village in England. In a quixotic, though pernicious, form of grave
robbing, critics with too much time and too little insight attempt to
make a case for turning Shakespeare into someone else as year after year
thousands of times Hamlet agonizes and dies on stages around the globe. |
Selections
From
Shakespeare
|
It all began early that Sunday morning in April. The snow had finally
melted, robins were singing as they scouted out spots to build their
nests, and the air was as warm as a day in June. It was hard to imagine
that a week before, cold winds tossed the emerging crocuses as they
pushed their colorful heads through a layer of lingering snow. Now, the
golden rays of the rising sun exploded on the blooms of daffodils....
All was right with the world. ...except.... |
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Selling Our Souls—Marien
Helz |
May |
The Loveliness
Within—Charles Miess |
|
In
the middle of the recently departed century, people worked tirelessly to
make gambling illegal. Games of chance have slowly crept in, however,
under the guise of friendly activities supporting a good cause. Bingo in
churches has been accepted as a fundraiser. For a number of years states
began a plan to make a great deal of money by holding lotteries, and
they place ads encouraging people to participate. The money is supposed
to go for important things .... |
Photography
by
Michelle M Mayer
|
I
think of my mother’s journey.... I don’t think people go on journeys
anymore. Go ahead and laugh and tell me that more people are traveling
today—all over the world—than ever before in the history of
humankind. That may be true, but to me a journey is something slow and
arduous and filled with danger and disappointment, excitement and
elation, hardship and heartache. A journey evokes a sense of the unknown
and of things never before experienced. |
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Prisoners—Marien
Helz |
June |
The Gift—Charles
Miess |
|
In 1971 a Stanford psychologist, Phillip Zimbardo, did research
involving dividing students into prisoners and guards. The experiment
had to be terminated early because the guards—even though they were
only students playing guards—became too abusive of the prisoners—even
though the prisoners were only fellow students playing
prisoners....Having charge of others is a heavy responsibility, ...There
have been too many instances of college fraternities killing their
pledges for us to overlook ... |
Photography
from the 1920's
Armin W. Helz
|
Sunbeams danced in the rays of the late afternoon sun that filtered
through finger-smudged windows. The smell of dusty fabric and furniture
padding tickled my nose as I gradually awoke from a deep sleep. I
watched a fly as he walked a zigzag path, avoiding the patches and tears
in the back of the overstuffed couch. I could hear my older brother and
sister laughing and playing in the next room. The younger two were
upstairs giggling ...as Dad tossed them up and down on the bed. My
sleepy, bewildered mind wondered... |
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The Ethics of
Loyalty—Marien Helz |
July |
The Many Faces of
Eve—Charles Miess |
|
Only a country which generates allegiance in its people can survive
outward hostility and inward strife. Steadfastness to one’s kith
and kin is essential for the survival of a species with a lengthy infant
dependency and with a reliance upon transmitting culture and
learning. The problem with loyalty, however, is that it requires a
hierarchy, and many people get it skewed. Loyalty to one’s God,
or one’s ultimate center of value—whatever one cares to call it, ... |
Painting
by
Pei-Hua Chiang |
The faces of arthropods are something we very
seldom see. Usually, they fly by or jump away, or are turned to
mush under our shoe before we can inspect them properly. In
addition, some are so small it is hard to see the detail, assuming that
we are even disposed to do so. For those so inclined, though, the
microscope is a great equalizer. It can expand the tiniest face up
to the size of your own and open up a whole new world as well as scare
the bejeebers out of you. |
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Sex and Politics
—Marien
Helz |
August |
Liver and Onions—Charles
Miess |
“Power is an aphrodisiac,” Henry Kissinger was reported to have
said, and if one can judge by the photographs of glamorous women with
their wrists lightly entwining his elbow, he found out the fun
way. He was not married at the time, however, and when he did
marry, he chose intellect, not starlet.
Since the country is still reeling from Kenneth Starr’s
voyeuristic investigation of President Clinton, the temptation is to
declare that someone’s entanglements are no one else’s
business. |
Photography
by
Michelle M Mayer |
It’s not that I don’t like liver. In fact, you can go down to
the local diner on the night of a liver-and-onions-special and it’s
likely you’ll see me there. Yeah, I know, cooked liver smells
like a barnyard and all that, but I like it anyway—especially when it’s
served up with a heaping mound of mashed potatoes smothered in dark
gravy. But it wasn’t always like that. There was a time in
my life when liver and mashed potatoes didn’t sit well with me—but I’m
getting ahead of myself—so let me start from the beginning. |
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The
'Whatever' Syndrome—Marien Helz |
September |
Los Alamos Part I—Cheryl
Rofer |
In the last forty years, we have seen a decline in professionalism in
most of the time honored fields in which people formerly took great
pride in their work and in the significance of the field....
Another part of the problem is
the Whatever Syndrome—this is simply a pervasive attitude that
precision and effort don’t matter. It’s the outlook that
enables some people to wear blue jeans to a funeral. It’s the
posture that causes some people to dress the same to go to the movies or
to go to fine theater, ... |
 |
Removable computer disks lost, classified information e-mailed, a
student’s eye damaged by a laser. A dismal performance on the part of
the nation’s first nuclear weapons laboratory. Along with the Wen Ho
Lee episode and the loss of classified hard disk drives after the Cerro
Grande fire of 2000, reason enough, some say, to remove the University
of California as the manager of the Los Alamos National Laboratory....
Blame is easy if you are looking for publicity and reasons to shift a
plum contract. Solving problems is harder. |
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Honeysuckle
Tangles—Charles
Miess |
October |
Los Alamos Part
II—Cheryl
Rofer |
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Albert
Einstein once remarked that the most complex subject can be explained
simply. He went on to say that if you can’t explain it simply,
you don’t understand it. Perhaps that is why we resort to
important-sounding abstract words—an attempt to hide our ignorance of
the subject. The logic goes that if we say something vague enough we can’t
be accused of being wrong (and we have the additional benefit of not
committing to anything). Einstein, of course, was right, but he
illuminated only part.... |
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Employees at Los Alamos continue their efforts toward a “restart.”
It is rumored that the FBI has found that the two allegedly lost
removable computer media in fact never existed; inventory procedures
erred. This has the ring of truth, but it has been, as they say in
classified circles, neither confirmed nor denied. Four employees have
been fired, and one has resigned under pressure. Seven others have been
disciplined, ten were found to be guilty of “no wrongdoing,” and one
is still on investigatory leave. |
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Play Ball—Marien
Helz |
November |
Zoar Valley
Part I—Charles Miess |
|
In the fall of the year when leaves are turning russet, and the harvest
moon rises, whose thoughts could not turn to the World Series—even for
someone like me who is not very much into sports. Generally, for
me to get into a sport, there has to be some extraneous hook. A
number of years ago, for example, we used to go to moto crosses where
motorcycles raced around dirt tracks turning the meadows into scarred
mud banks... |
Readings
from
Shakespeare
and
Robinson |
I looked out at a landscape that has remained largely unspoiled since
the voyage of Columbus and the subsequent invasion of Europeans that
changed much of America forever. As I leaned over the edge of the
cliff I felt that funny tingle in my stomach that often comes with
taking a great risk for a great reward. If I had known that later
in the summer a young woman would fall to her death from the very spot I
stood, I might not have been so carefree. |
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The
Two-Party System—Marien
Helz |
December |
Zoar Valley
Part II—Charles Miess |
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The United States was founded on the two-party
system for good reason, and the structure has served well for over
two centuries. The arrangement has its drawbacks, however, when the
game of winning for the party overtakes both common sense and
loyalty toward the country and the general good. We’ve seen the
worst of that in the past thirty years with the leading party in
Congress inaugurating the game of “Get the President.” |
Photography
by
A W Helz
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"When it comes to big trees," said
Keith, "there are two kinds: sumo-wrestler big and
basketball-player big. I'm going to show you trees that are
basketball-player big."
Katie and I never realized how
much of the wonder we had missed, and how much of it we failed to
appreciate until we had a guide. Keith started by showing us a wild
grapevine as big in diameter as my head. Keith explained how
grapevines do not climb up a tree, but ... |
