Letters to the Editor
kenwolman
Published Letters: 48 Editor's Choice: 3
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The truth will set you free of working
[Read the article: I was fired because I was the fall guy. What do I say in interviews?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"Your finest hour is still ahead!"
At age 63 I very much doubt a workable or working future. A bit over a year ago I was told "you don't have a job here anymore" by the ostensible CEO of a 10-person telephonics testing company in Jersey. I had refused to get into a pissing match with the founder, a man who questioned not simply my ability (after he hired me) but my mental capacity--this in emails cc:'d to the entire company. When I refused to meet with him unless a 3rd party was present, I was disposed of. The founder himself was gotten rid of thereafter, but he walked out with a small fortune and his name--Edwin Mier--is still on the firm, Miercom, Inc.
Now you tell me: is the truth worth it here. I was TOLD by the dismissing CEO (the founder's stepson) to say it was a Reduction in Force. This is of course a blatant lie intended to make the stepdad look good for awhile. Telling the truth, however, would make an entertaining and ghastly story that probably would get me shown the door rather quickly.
Bottom line (don't you love that phrase?)--the truth will set you free, for sure--of employment possibilities because nobody really wants the truth, they want business-correct yatada-yatada that talks all the right talk even if the walk behind it is staggering blind drunk on ego and power-tripping.
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Hateful
[Read the article: Why I won't stay silent anymore]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Kissling, not the prohibition. I'm not even RC...but how easy it seems to confuse aesthetics with slaughter. No, abortions are not known for their aesthetically pleasing aspects. No surgery is fun to watch. But the method of partial birth abortion is one of the most horrible things I've ever read. It's the one case where I will agree that "abortion is murder." It's not stopping the growth of tissue, it's butchering a likely viable human being. Cut the politics, Ms Kissling, and the song-and-dance act about a woman's right to choose. You play politics as surely as the Vatican or the Supreme Court, and the stench is precisely the same.
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Excuse me?
[Read the article: Psych meds drove my son crazy]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]To whoever wrote the headline - do you have any idea how much damage you could do? Every bipolar person I know HATES taking their meds, and looks constantly for reasons to stop taking them.
Excuse me, but this is one bipolar who doesn't mind taking the meds because I remember life before them. Fifty-four years of life before them. Rages, tantrums, inattention, involuntary celibacy, hypersexualism, adultery, drunkenness, Buying Stuff, and this feeling that life was really not mine but was happening to me anyway. Well, it still is not what I'd like to have, but it's better than that. I know damned well that without what I take I'd be so over the edge you'd have to look under the overhang to find me...three seconds before I let to and fell into my own personal chasm.
I spent 54 years not knowing I was not normal. I spent 54 years not knowing my parents were crazier than shithouse rats because they with both bipolar at a time when only a few could be diagnosed and then locked up in Payne Whitney or McLean, if they were rich, or in Rockland State or Creedmoor if they were like we were. Plus the family shame of saying you were (shhhh!) "mental in the head." Just like cancer: you whispered it.
The pharma and psychiatric industries in this benighted country have earned all the opprobrium heaped upon them. What in hell is Abilify except some crap on ashtrays and pen holders in my shrink's office? Another drug. Yet another drug. Prescribed like rock candy to people who need more than the goddamned psychiatrist's willingness to "experiment"--a word that makes me think of Mengele's experiments with twins or kids with blue eyes.
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It needs to be said
[Read the article: Memorial Day]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Enough of us have died for a country that is of no significance to us. We are not the corner cop and Iraq is not the corner. Get our troops out. Leave the Iraqis to destroy each other. They are not our concern.
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How to make the world a better place
[Read the article: Inside the Creation Museum]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If all these Fundies died tomorrow, via rapture or capture, the earth would be restored to is pristine state. Get them out of here.
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What's "better"?
[Read the article: Why is "Sgt. Pepper" so overhyped?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I liked only two Beatles songs the first time I heard them: "A Day in the Life" and "Lady Madonna." I don't believe the latter ever made it onto an album, but it's a stupendously cynical song performed to an upbeat rhythm that is totally incongruous. Where do I think Gilbert O'Sullivan swiped the structure for "Alone Again, Naturally" from but the Beatles' "Lady Madonna." "ADITL" is a masterpiece: a dark vision that makes me envision winter, Bergman movies, a shred of hope in the midst of shit. The Beatles were authentic only when they were on the dark side, and I don't think the Stones were nearly as dark as they made out. "Sympathy for the Devil" is just fun, a good time confession of iniquity, not some twisted journey into the Interior.
Why Sergeant Pepper? I don't know. It was too "concept-y" for me even 40 years ago, and the only song on there that lives up to the vision is "She's Leaving Home." The rest is cute or embarrassingly dated ("I've Got to Admit It's Getting Better" today is sickening).
The chief beneficiary of Sgt. Pepper was Richard Goldstein, the Village Voice critic who purposely panned it in the NY Times to earn his bones. When Ned Rorem blasted Goldstein, Richard had arrived.