Letters to the Editor
William Timberman
Published Letters: 3298 Editor's Choice: 7
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Again I remember
[Read the article: Have Bill Frist and right-wing bloggers plagiarized their new Iraq plan?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]why I hated high-school football. In the late fifties, in the south, it was the real religion in small towns, not what went on in the Foursquare Gospel or First Baptist churches on Sunday, and it was unabashedly pagan; the early Roman proselytizers would have grasped what was going on right away.
In those days it always seemed to feature a sadistic ex-marine as head coach, usually about 5' 2" tall, with a white-sidewall flattop, a baseball cap and a whistle, who swore that football built character, loved pushups, and wouldn't let the cheerleaders anywhere near the practice field. (As an army brat, it was my good fortune to go out for the team in several of these towns, and trust me, they were pretty much of a piece.)
We always prayed before a game, and we hated queers, despised anyone who didn't hit hard enough, and never got a chance to look at the cheerleaders except out of the corners of our eyes. Pavlov's dogs. God knows what the girls thought they were doing.
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I remember, B
[Read the article: Have Bill Frist and right-wing bloggers plagiarized their new Iraq plan?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I rememer my first year in college, Silo Tech in Oklahoma, all those frat boys with peroxided hair, driving GTOs with a surfboard sticking up from the back seat.
Later, hitchhiking, making my own pilgrimage to the Golden State, was picked up by a drunken Navajo outside Albuquerque, who said to me Drive, kid, I need some sleep. I did, too, through a blizzard in Flagstaff, all the way to the Santa Monica bus station. He went to find a bar, I boarded the Greyhound north. Down the cliff from Ocean Boulevard to PCH.
My first sight of Malibu, the promised land. Oooh, How can every one of them be blonde? I swore I'd never leave, and I didn't until three years ago. I guess everyone has to have a honey and locust time, and at long last, a dialogue with scorpions.
But yes, I remember. And if the girls didn't know what they were up to, someone did. Deo gratias.
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America today
[Read the article: Have Bill Frist and right-wing bloggers plagiarized their new Iraq plan?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Shouldn't Salon be getting an avalanche of letters from outraged mothers just about now, accusing Glenn of mocking their innocent daughters? I'll say this, Glenn's got more chutzpah than I have -- either that or his contract includes a stipend for bodyguards.
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Republicans and the lady
[Read the article: Have Bill Frist and right-wing bloggers plagiarized their new Iraq plan?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Does anyone remember the scene in Tom Jones, when Lady Bellaston (as I remember it) is asked what she requires in a man? After pondering for a moment, she replies with one word: staminaaah.
Why do I doubt that any of those pathetic gasbags offered to the Republicans last night as presidential candidates would interest the Lady? Or the soprano from Amadeus, who informed Salieri that Only talent interests a woman of taste.
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Dissociations
[Read the article: A glimpse at Versailles]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Westlake Village has no sidewalks, at least it had none 20 years ago, when my old junk-heap of a car overheated on the Ventura Freeway, and was towed to a garage there by the AAA. I remember thinking at the time, how rich do you have to be to live in a town without sidewalks, where being well-dressed means being clothed in a BMW?
So...Republicans now eat dinner in this village, in a theme park called Tuscany. No irony there. Nope.
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The angel in the details
[Read the article: A glimpse at Versailles]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The great virtue in patient documentation of the kind offered here by Glenn, sysprog, Paul R., et al., and beyond the blogs, by Noam Chomsky, Paul Krugman, and Seymour Hersh, is that gradually the pattern which emerges becomes more detailed.
For someone like me, whose instincts tell him that the SOBs are lying, and has a pretty good idea why, but lacks the experience, the patience and the inclination to pursue this or that lie -- let alone all of them -- to its source, the knowledge gained about who exactly the SOBs are, what their agendas are, and how those agendas fit together into our disgracefully stupid and deceitful public discourse is worth a great deal. A great deal.
I was listening the other day to a speech given by a retired political science professor about what we call the Mighty Wurlitzer. Her thesis was that the most virulent, and most reactionary propaganda in the U.S. has long been funded by moneyed right-wing families of the Coors, Scaife, Albritton, etc. kind, who've been plying their filthy ideological agendas since the New Deal originally offended against their sense of hereditary privilege.
She argued that the corporate propaganda agenda is much more clearly motivated by pure economic interests, which in these days of globalization dovetail fairly seamlessly with the AIPAC/defense contractor's interest in geopolitical hegemony.
This made sense to me, but I don't think it would have hit me quite as hard had I not been reading what all of the folks mentioned above have been writing here and elsewhere for the past several years. For that reason, I think any well-meaning person who doubts that these repeated hammer blows by Glenn represent anything more than one man's obsession are gravely mistaken. Glenn is one of those who are very patiently reclaiming bits of a seemingly vanished reality for the rest of us. Even though I'm not qualified to contribute myself to the armory you and the others are preparing for us, Glenn, I don't believe we'd have much chance of winning the battle without you.
A salute to all of you, then, and an expression of deeply felt gratitude for your dark and largely unrewarded labors.
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Sadly, no, dataguyx
[Read the article: A glimpse at Versailles]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The speech in question was given by Harriet Young, the chair of the Coconino County Democratic Party (AZ), at a breakfast meeting in Sedona at the end of last month. It was extemporanous, but clearly it was something she's given a lot of thought to, and said before in other venues. As far as I know, the text is not available online.