Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Volume 3, Number 5: Mayor Maharishi

(Note: I originally posted this entry on February 6, 2008, on my Yahoo! GeoCities blog.)

I just read that Mararishi Mahesh Yogi, best known for serving as a spiritual advisor for the Beatles in the late 1960s, has died at the age of 91.

It brought back memories of a January 1993 letter to the Detroit Free Press, from a reader named Key Halverson from Flint, who (like thousands of other metro Detroiters) was sick and dog-tired of Coleman Young as Mayor of Detroit. It was in response to an article the Freep had recently published about Maharishi Yogi's offer to save Detroit (for a price), and that article concluded that the "offer" amounted to a scam.

Halverson, however, responded that he didn't feel safer despite the country spending so much money to fight crime and enforce the law, so Detroit had nothing to lose by spending a few million bucks on the Maharishi.

While I do not believe in "transcendental meditation" or anything else the Maharishi practiced and/or tried to sell people on, I thought the letter was funny. And in light of all the problems we're having with our current mayor (with the texting, the $8.4 million cover-up, and let's not forget that Lincoln Navigator flap from three years ago), I decided to scan the letter and post it here:

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