Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan spurned him, but that didn't stop Maryland-based Royall Jenkins from believing he was Allah. Jenkins might have been unwelcome at the Chicago headquarters of the Nation of Islam, but he found streets paved with gullibility in Kansas City, Kansas. There, his daughter began recruiting members to open up friendly businesses like Your Diner, Your Supermarket, Your Service Station and Your Colonic Center in a forgotten slum. The United Nation of Islam -- whose impeccably dressed members possessed an almost otherworldly politeness -- earned praise from city officials and newspaper columnists. But as Pitch staff writer Allie Johnson discovered, a funny thing happened on the way to Heaven. Royall Jenkins started acquiring wives. Recruits began turning over their homes and property to the United Nation of Islam. Members' children ended up in a school where the principal had only a sixth-grade education. One child died under suspicious circumstances. And Allah's daughter, the Mother of Civilization, started coming to her senses.

The meaning of the term "hoosier" has been a matter of debate for centuries. And it seems the more the word is studied, the muddier its definition becomes. "It's absolutely lost any derogatory meaning in Indiana," says Indiana University librarian Jeffrey Graf. St. Louis vernacular suggests otherwise where the term is synonymous with "cheap beer, fast cars and fat girls." Author Thomas E. Murray notes that in St. Louis, "hoosier" occupies "the honored position of being the city's No. 1 term of derogation." The Riverfront Times' Mike Seely dissects the term -- both in St. Louis and in Indiana -- and offers that there may be a little bit of hoosier in all of us, in spite of the term's apparent trashy underpinnings.

The post-Vietnam myths of the spitting woman and the heroic POW are part of a strange psychology empowering America's "Support Our Troops" rallies. These myths of emasculated males regaining their manhood, which were even told by defeated German soldiers after World War I, reflect the nation's lost potency. Local Planet Weekly Editor Tom Grant examines how this need to revive America's challenged manhood has become a Freudian underpinning of pro-war politics.

San Francisco Bay Guardian reporters hit the streets to cover war protests that clogged the city center and ground traffic to a halt. "As I looked around, I realized that the most ambitious, best-organized -- and yet most wonderfully anarchic and free-flowing -- demonstrations I'd ever seen had done exactly what organizers set out to do," one reporter writes. "The core of the city was shut down. It was No Business As Usual in San Francisco."