hesitated, thinking about what he was going to say to clarify his point. "And out of a vast majority of kids at school, that do not name call, the one, like the jagged rock on the road, can hurt." He sighed, looking at me intently, did 1 understand? I understood. The next morning, I knew what was happening as I watched Sorrow's lighthearted skip up the street to meet the school's snow-covered hedges where one orange berry poked through a "hello." She waited as usual for Loran's first born son, Tommy. Tommy came allright, just a minute or two later as always, but he passed Sorrow with a little shove. In contrast to his nudge, he yelled, yes yelled I heard him through my paned window, "You ain't a nigger Sorrow, but you sho' is black!" He ran away from her, giggling up the school steps and I turned from the window bewildered for the moment. Loran's Tommy was a couple of shades lighter than Sorrow and I saw it happening with the children all over again. Somewhere between Fall and Winter, Tommy had contracted the dreaded disease that Pres says infects us all. SUNHEAT by Anne Andrews Sunheat blooms at morning's breaking. Comes gliding across to greet my soul. Where it reaches, I step warmly. Lingering. Drenching. As the ice melts to warm release I lie surrendered. Golden beam Soaking through my thoughts Like words, germinates in me. Caressing every cell in me. Burning flame. Desire springs and glows. Frank Cook 8 "Every one that was in distress, and every one that was in debt, and every one that was discontented, gathered themselves unto him; and he became a captain over them." I Samuel XXII 2 THE STYLE OF THOMAS PAINE by Edmund E. Hansen In an era of turmoil many men are thrown into prominence who in any other period of history would be ill-equipped to survive the normal stress of life's proceedings. Thomas Paine was such a man. Born in England in the year of 1737, he matured into a neglectful malcontent in the service of his King as an excise officer. In the crucible of hardship (caused mainly by his own ineptness) there formed an inner rage that would explode through his pen and onto the pamphlets that would make him famous. Discharged from the tax service for neglect of duty, he was forced to teach for a year as he sought to be reinstated. His wife died and he remarried, gaining a small tobacco shop in the union. The government reinstated him and he became embroiled in a dispute for higher wages. It was in this dispute that his first known pamphlet, The Case of the Officers of Excise, was written. Shortly thereafter he was again discharged and again it was for neglect of duty. In rapid succession he lost his tobacco shop through bankruptcy and his second wife left him. It was in this state that Benjamin Franklin found him a man who had lost all emotional and financial investments in a stable English society. Franklin sensed the potential of Paine's discontent and launched him on the perilous path that led him to become the "Great Commoner of Mankind." Paine's fame was the result of a series of pamphlets written over the signature, "Common Sense." The pseudonym, "Common Sense," would lead one to believe that the pamphlets were conceived in and appealed to basic intelligence. They were, in fact, blatant appeals to prejudice and passion. Filled with misleading metaphors, they constructed a case for hate. "Even the brutes do not devour their young, nor savages make war on their families. As well can the lover forgive the ravisher of his mistress as can the Continent forgive the murders of Britain." (An Appeal to Common Sense, by Thomas Paine.) Prejudices were exploited. Through creative illusions, Paine associated England, and more often the King, with institutions or individuals generally hated by the colonists. Catholicism was an anathema to the majority of Americans who were thoroughly imbued with the religious antagonism of the Reformation. The wedge between the people was driven deeper as Paine wrote, "The phrase 'parent or mother country' hath been jesuitically adopted by the King and his parasites, with low papistical design of gaining an unfair bias on the credulous weakness of our minds." As if the basis for bias were not broad enough, he would refer to the King as the "hardened, sullen-tempered Pharaoh of England." The professional army of Hessians were portrayed as ruthlessly converting peaceful homes into "barracks and bawdy-houses." Attempts at mob control became atrocities and the maintenance of English law and order affronts to God and nature. In questioning whether the colonies, which Paine continually referred to as the Continent, be governed by England, Paine wrote, "In no instance hath nature made the satellite larger than its primary planet; and as England to America with respet to each other reverse the common order of nature." England, in Paine's writings, was thus visualized as a satanic brute devouring the young and ravishing the women of the Continent, or, in defiance of nature, a savage satellite attacking a celestial body and bastion of freedom. That England was the governing seat of a vast empire that dwarfed the yet-disjointed coastal colonies and that England was attempting, rightly or wrongly, to maintain law and order and to protect an investment of English lives and capital did not deter Paine from his demogoguery. Events were woven into fabrications posing as facts; through Paine's enigmatic induction, specious generalizations were created to support the revolutionary cause. "The blood of the slain, the weeping voice of nature cries, TIS TIME TO PART." Paine, of pacifistic Quaker beginnings, advocated war through defamation and demogoguery. "The Almighty hath implanted in us these unextinguishable feelings for good and wise purposes. They are the Guardians of his Image in our hearts." He constantly maintained that God and nature were on the side of the revolution. This elevation of nationalistic motives to the plateau of divine inspiration and, conversely, the degradation of the adversary have been the cornerstones of the practice of American propaganda. Paine may justly claim the title of Father of American Propaganda. Thomas Paine's pamphlets were written to be read aloud to the men of the colonial army. For this reason the oratorical effects of his writing had to harmonize sound and rhythm with the emotional content. One can picture a ragged battalion on a hidden drill field reverberating with the explosive P's, hissing S's, and rolling R's of the following passages: "All plans, proposals prior to the hostilities are like the almanacks of last year which, though proper then, are superceded and useless now." "These are times that try men's souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will in this crisis shrink from the service of his country but I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul by swearing allegiance to one whose character is that of a sottish, stupid, stubborn, worthless, brutish man." "Reconciliation and ruin are nearly related." Alliteration combined with rhyme at poetic intervals set up an emotional cadance aimed at exciting and angering his listeners. Another characteristic of Paine's style is the biblical rhetoric. Although he was not ordained by any church and was charged later in life with atheism, he wrote as though he were delivering divine messages. "God Almighty will not give up a people to military destruction, or leave them unsupportedly to perish Say not that thousands are gone, turn out your tens of thousands; throw not the burden of the day upon Providence, but 'show faith by your works' that God may 9