Letters to the Editor
J.C. Miller
Published Letters: 319 Editor's Choice: 34
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evolution
[Read the article: Judge: Most males attracted to 1-year-olds]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Apart from his unfortunate choice of age range, the judge was on the right track.
What we haven’t learned from millennia of effort is that impulse control isn’t gained by prohibition or moral systems or “criminal justice”, but by the work ahead of us – integrating and transcending natural drives in ways that are adaptive and attuned to the social environment. That work requires, paradoxically, that we first stop prohibiting, shaming and fearing those drives and that we begin to move past counterproductive and meaning-free constructs like good, bad, moral, immoral, etc.
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aesthetic distance
[Read the article: My walls are covered with my mother's paintings]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Dear Aesthetically Challenged:
Your apartment is your psyche, your self, and the paintings are introjects, symbols with meanings that you swallowed whole without the opportunity to digest, evaluate, or choose. That’s why they don’t fit and are causing you distress. Your guilt stems from another introject we all share – that we are somehow obligated to behave in certain ways toward particular individuals whom we have arbitrarily, absurdly, and without meaning, constructed as a “mother” or “father”, and that if we don’t we are “bad” or ungrateful children. All nonsense, of course, and destructive.
You provided your own answer - They aren't at all what I would choose for myself . Like parents.
At your first opportunity, take them all to the nearest thrift store or Salvation Army store and leave them there.
Someone might choose them.
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distraction
[Read the article: Duke players cleared]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The Duke players have ostensibly been cleared of forcibly and without consent inserting their penises into another person, a convenient distraction from their normalized misogynistic and antisocial behaviors and attitudes.
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I wanna play football for the coach
[Read the article: I Like to Watch]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Lou Reed. Whatever.
Yeah it’s good. Really good. Catch-up-on-DVD good. I love the tension Coach sets up in his family with his boyish impulsivity and male needs which seem somehow to take precedence over Tami’s aspirations. And the looks on the players’ faces that say more than any dialog when Coach tries to explain the TMU thing. And how he projects his doubt and betrayal onto the big booster dude before his speech. And the discomfort of the earnest young Christian man with the car full of women getting their groove on. Could the chickens get more assignments in advance ? They are educational and fun.
Clearly “The Bachelor: Officer and a Gentleman” was conceived and broadcast in order to be deconstructed by H.H. I laughed without the benefit of caffeine.
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“inorganic”
[Read the article: The longest day ever]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Nice.
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I like to unplug
[Read the article: I Like to Watch]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]TV is (and I don’t mean at all to speak figuratively) the means by which doxa, or the Matrix, is transmitted to keep us so comfortably in collective illness, “ . . . the last, tattered remnant of [the American lie] this pitiful nation has." So few unplug for the same reasons that so few are free of other comforting addictions used to soothe anxiety and emptiness.
Weeds, Wonder Showzen, and a few other gems are viruses in System that give us some evidence and hope for a future “ . . . of community and understanding . . .”
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there are parallels
[Read the article: A tale of two horrors]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]We pathologize and label and desperately try to restrict attention to Cho for the same reasons that we did Saddam Hussein or the hijackers of 9/11, or the Duke stripper, or Andrea Yates, or one of Nancy Grace’s straw men. It’s a defense, an opiate that allows escape from intolerable insight into environments that drive and explain horrific behaviors, environments we maintain and celebrate.
Cho was not mentally ill. Like Andrea Yates, he reacted maladaptively and with impaired ego function to the normalized social pathology that was destroying him: constructed roles, shamed and repressed sexuality, the pathological needs of family, church, race, class, and that instrument of caste assignment and of doxa we term “university”.
Utterances that posit his behavior as “senseless” may be understood as defenses, as “Please never ask us to face the real pathology that drove the shootings.” Never ask us to face what drove our attack of Iraq. It is, after all, our way of life.
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Cruel, Heather
[Read the article: This little piggy]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I mean, really.
To draw out all those progressive Salon readers who can’t quite help but displace their anger on a child. Who, given what they mistake as a safe space, unwittingly and triumphantly defend their abuse of children.
They are quite serious. They think they’re agreeing with something, something that protects them from insight about the harm they do children.
What will you do for them now, and for their kids?
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“Christians”
[Read the article: A cause they've long ago forgotten]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]aren’t Christians at all, duh. If Mormons aren’t “Christians”, then it’s possible that they are, in fact, followers of the teachings of Christ. Turns out, on any cursory examination, they aren’t Christians either. Duh.
Next debate: now that U.S. freedom fighters have liberated Iraq, isn’t it time to free the people of Iran?
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Heather’s special mother’s day column
[Read the article: I Like to Watch]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Can you believe it? She’s making a joke out of motherhood, as if our very survival didn’t depend on it! As if the love every mother has for her little ones isn’t sacred and worthy of solemnity and special obligatory gift buying and soft images. As if it shouldn’t be above reproach and needless questioning and reality testing at least on one damn special day of the year! Who else but Havrilesky could spew such disrespectful nonsense and have her confused minions lap it up?
She has no real knowledge of her subjects, but somehow enthralls her confused followers with her snarky irony and glib disrespect for popular sensibilities and cherished values. Values that got us where we are today - strong and free and loving our mothers. Week after week her mockery of the respect and loyalty due to established order and values is increasingly endangering the entire Fleet.
Mr. Reedtoon, put that thing out an airlock.