Dear George,

Mr. Beliles is absolutely correct to object to the indecent display of slavery at your Charlottesville Festival.

It's outrageous for any group to focus attention through art on something that happened over 150 years ago.

If they wanted to call attention to slavery they could have presented a perfectly tame skit of workers in a South American T-Shirt Shop, or Iraqi prisoners piled on top of one another.

Slavery no longer exists in this country. We have done a tremendous job of making sure it only exists in poorer
countries than the U.S. and for anyone to insist that our consciousness be raised about such practice, obviously has no idea how decent our government leaders are.

This is the problem with art in America - it insists on stirring people up unnecessarily. Young people don't need that. They can't understand artistic images. They get very confused.

What kind of an education do we want to give children? We don't want them to think that we would ever condone anything like that do we?

Sincerely,

Joe Clancy (electronic mail, December 9, 2004)