".... our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war.... It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." -- The Gettysburg Address, President Abraham Lincoln, Pennsylvania, November 19, 1863

Regional note: When the State of Tennessee seceded in 1861, East Tennessee remained a stronghold of Union sentiment. The Emancipator (one year earlier called the Manumission Intelligencer), the first abolishonist periodical in the nation, was published monthly from Jonesborough by Elihu Embree beginning in 1820.

Corporate officers of ACR, Inc. are: Chairperson -- Jeannette Harris; President -- Leah Daily; Vice President -- Carolyn Moore; Secretary/Treasurer -- Rebecca Grindstaff; Members of the Board of Directors -- Gwendoline Fortune, Frances Lamberts, Chris Mysinger, Caroline Ross, and Vera Tracy.
(For more details, see Biographies)

Employer Identification Number: 75-3256917
Effective date of Tennessee incorporation and Federal 501(c)(3) status: October 31, 2007

"....they [men] are...creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbour is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and kill him." -- Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, quoted in The Enemy Outside, Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory, edited by Judith Kegan Gardiner

"Like recent feminists, she [the protagonist of The Awakening by Kate Chopin] implicitly rejects the choice of either a conventional sexual life in a marriage that allows no time to express her creativity, or the solitary spinsterhood of a woman who is devoted to her art or career. Like men, she wants both." -- Diving Deep and Surfacing: Women Writers on Spiritual Quest by Carol P. Christ in Spiritual Liberation, Social Defeat

Graphic: Technology

"Let's mine the great depths of the imagination, which is a God-given gift, rather than depend on some poor, innocent soul to provide fodder." -- Jan Karon, quote in WNC Magazine, Mountain Living in Western North Carolina, November/December 2007, Asheville, NC.

A Country Rag is accessible through Web addresses: http://www.acountryrag.org and a mirror site at http://www.reocities.com/countryrag (http://www.reocities.com/Heartland/1293) with content through 2003 and background music files, stolen and kept along the rest of the publisher's legally-owned property unfortunately by criminal government, corporate and resident force in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley (see Chameleon and Mandala for details). Midi music note: A Country Rag, Inc. does not claim copyrights on any of the midi files available herein. They are produced by talented musical technicians. To the knowledge of ACR, Inc. all are in the public domain and free of copyright restrictions.

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"Hannah"*

Wildflowers trained on light

The beast holds your ticker,
grunts without diction or grammar
and lifts a misshapen foot to pee

splay in mud

Sufficient unto this day is turpidity --
the dozed, dazed mechanic of chaos
mazed in a soundproof cell

to mark its eyeless way.

(1998)

*Hannah Arendt, author of Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, describing the trial of a Nazi war criminal -- "Arendt's thesis was that people who carry out unspeakable crimes, like Eichmann, a top administrator in the machinery of the Nazi death camps, may not be crazy fanatics at all, but rather ordinary individuals who simply accept the premises of their state and participate in any ongoing enterprise with the energy of good bureaucrats.... It is the function of defense intellectuals and other experts, and the mainstream media, to normalize the unthinkable for the general public."

Graphic: Organ, sculpture by Robert Kuhn

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Original material © A Country Rag, Inc. and/or Jeannette Harris, Jonesborough, TN, April 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2007, 2008, 2010. All rights reserved.

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