It’s early Sunday morning, March 10^th [1996]. I have thirty hours left in America. This is the last issue of majenta, I suppose… It’s hard to begin; it is.

I misspelled majenta for the first time exactly three years ago out of political angst (caused by chiefly by the American apathy surrounding the incidents near Tiananmen Square) and writing frustration (caused chiefly by the fact that I have known six or seven superior writers who don’t care to toe the industry line in order to be published by a major house). Note: Random House just ate a two million dollar Joan Collins advance because of this bullshit and I couldn’t be laughing harder on the inside (although for some perspective consider that it’s roughly equivalent to this press losing about forty bucks). They will with any luck be destroyed eventually by their short sighted fall-list mentality.

Anyway, during my last week stateside I was awakened to several facts. One of which was how valuable honest fellowship is. My assistant editor and paisano, Todd Weissenberger, bought me quite a few drinks over the last week; more than I’ve ever deserved. He knew I needed to be liquored up this week of my departure; I didn’t have to hit him over the head with it either. You see, I hate America. I believe in freedom and equality so I can do nothing but hate what is masquerading in its place. Every cliched dead daycare child, every drug addict, every auto-union worker fighting for a twenty dollar an hour wage with less than a GED to turn out some of the worst automobiles made in the world, while I and at least a million like me struggle with full awareness and with college degrees for minimum wage while refusing to chose friends by color, clothes or party/church affiliation. In short: selfishly taking responsibility for ourselves. [Crippled by a corrupt government that is so far astray of the Constitution that revolution is about all that’s left to be done. The fact of Doctor Kervorkian’s acquittal is all that makes me believe this nation can last another fifty years without major bloodshed inside our own borders]. Anyone who is not selfish cannot be responsible for themselves, this is the definition of the word. To deny such reality is insane and worse than foolish, it’s ultimately fatal. There is a line from Red Rock West… “You know what? I am better than you.” I’m leaving, you see I love America.

This is the last majenta and the most hasty, probably the ugliest. There is a character named John Galt in Ayn Rand’s opus Atlas Shrugged. He is the man who stops the motor of the world; will no longer shoulder the care and feeding of an incompetent nation which demands entitlements and guarantees for a life which precludes such fecundly puerile poison. Our cover (by Dan Atyim) is direct allusion of course. I don’t have what Galt had…I’m not the man to convince each person of ability to stop being held hostage by their love of their work and walk out on the world. For all these people (scientists, judges, poets, doctors, novelists, artists, composers, engineers) to leave the world would be death…the stone age for the rest. Every robber baron puts dinner on the tables of a thousand families, every exploitive capitalist like myself would die to protect your freedom and life, but I’d be locked away before I’d be trusted with a public office… most people, most Americans, want what they can’t earn, what they don’t deserve, what they don’t even understand or appreciate. In a land where spilling coffee on yourself can make you a millionaire I am a traitor; every page of majenta is sedition.

I have no time to consider my essay, think of brilliant, lucid, tricky ways to convince you of my point. I can only talk to you as I would my closest friends. The advantage of this magazine of mine soon to dispel into the ether off the wings of a 767.

This magazine was a roller coaster, a fantastic time, a learning experience I couldn’t have equalled on staff at The Times, and I personally believe a superior publication never extorted for the concerns of a public which vaunts Danielle Steele and Rush Limbaugh over Hemingway and Paine. But these things are obvious, that’s why you buy majenta. You know them. So what I want to say is: it’s possible to be right, and strong and not hurt anyone in the process.

Life is so happy, so wonderful, there are so many artists releasing joyous work, so many engineers helping to make this possible and affordable. We live in a age not of wonders but of miracles. How often do we hear the words, “the miracle of birth”? The miracle that occurs every other second, the miracle followed by an infanticide somewhere every couple minutes. Birth is a right of being animals with split genomes in our seed; it’s no miracle, it’s a natural fact. Miracles: Alanis Morissette won a grammy, I am listening to Tori Amos sing to me (perfectly and beautifully) through a laser beam, I can write my friends in Italy to tell them my flight arrives at 8:05 am on the 12^th and by e-mail they will have the message in five seconds, cancer is often curable, people can fly in the air on machines made of steel, a simple infection will not kill you, eyeglasses can allow anyone to see as well as I can, food doesn’t spoil during winter, scurvy won’t take your teeth for want of a single lemon, a house of superior quality to any castle built in history can be had for the salary of a handful of years, you can have your guts spilled out of you in an accident and doctors can put them back charging you a small fraction of the money you will earn in the lifetime they have given you back, books from all lands can be read, there is one country in the world where people are nearly free, I can talk with someone on the other side of the world right now by dialing ten numbers and spending less than I would in a night at a bar, human beings have walked on the face of the moon… any idiot can have a baby or ten, it’s not a miracle, it’s commonplace. Raising a child to understand the true nature of miracles, that’s amazing. Understanding how much happiness is available in the world if this evil is merely brushed off like a fly…that’s a miracle. The miracle of human existence is that we can all be John Galt, we can be true, create while making our destruction self- sustaining.

I’d like to think we’ve awakened everyone to a couple facts here over the last three years. I’d like to think if someone offered you their life you’d say no. I’d like to think you wouldn’t call a happy person cynical and narrow minded. I’d like to think you’d worry more about yourself than zealots to freedom like me. I’d like to think that if you saw Atlas holding world up for you on bleeding shoulders and sweating skin you’d tell him to shrug… and that’s exactly what I’m going to try to do until the day I can come home.