Forty-nine years ago, shortly after I joined the UMass faculty, Prentice Hall asked me to write a philosophy textbook. My wife at the time, Cynthia Griffin Wolff, had won an AAUW fellowship to take a year off from teaching in order to write a book on Edith Wharton. Although she worked very hard that year, it was clear that she needed another semester to finish the manuscript. I agreed to do the textbook for Prentice Hall if they would give me an advance large enough to permit her to take the semester off from teaching, and they agreed. One year later I turned in the manuscript to Prentice Hall, and in 1976 the book came out. (Her book, A Feast of Words, was a brilliant success and has become a classic study of Wharton's fictions.) My textbook has now gone into eleven editions and still is being used somewhere in American higher education. I recently got a six month royalty check for $2603, and I think it is time to do another matching fund exercise for the benefit of the DLCC.
We are at a critical moment in the evolution and/or demise
of democracy in America. The Dobbs decision, the endless series of mass
shootings and racially encoded murders, the descent of the Republican Party
into a cult, all suggest that what passes for democracy in America is coming
apart. Simultaneously, there seem to be spontaneous mobilizations all over the
country of men and women, some quite young, who are eager to use their votes to
counter the ugliness of contemporary American life.
For all the reasons that have been discussed on this blog
site in the past, the most effective way for us to make our little bits of
money count is to funnel them into local and state level elections.
Therefore, once again, I am announcing a matching fund
campaign for the DLCC. I will match each dollar that you contribute to the
Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee with two dollars of my own, up to a
total of $1000 from you matched with $2000 from me. That is just a drop in the bucket, of course,
but it is not nothing and it is the most we can do.
Let me know what you donate and I will match at 2 for 1.
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