Letters to the Editor
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Published Letters: 74 Editor's Choice: 6
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Self-Contradictory?
[Read the article: Dogma days ]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"Meanwhile let's focus on legitimate practical issues -- such as the grotesque volume of pollution belched by big-rig trucks, which in the absence of an efficient interstate rail system in the U.S. are absurdly carrying freight for thousands of miles from coast to coast. Exhaust from family SUVs is nothing compared to the environmental damage wrought by trucks, whose massive weight and deadline-driven high speeds also constitute an unacceptable risk to passenger vehicles on the highway."
If you don't beleive in global warming, what is your beef with trucks releasing exhaust in Montana as they transport goods across the nation? It's not like localized air pollution in harming the masses of people that live along rural interstates. In urban areas, trucks are a miniscule component of localized air pollution relative to cummuter traffic. And even with an efficient national rail system, this would have no effect on local truck pollution, since trucks have to transport goods from the rail yard to the Whole Foods or Urban Outfitters or wherever you shop, since most retail establishments don't have rail terminuses out back.
As for safety, despite being approximately 40 times the weight of passenger vehicles, trucks have fatal accident rates nearly identical to passenger vehicles, per the number of miles travelled. Recent FMCSA research shows that nearly 75% of fatal accidents involving trucks are the fault of auto drivers. Most large trucking companies now require speed limiting devices on the vehicles they opperate, and the ATA, which represent over 75% of the 100 largest trucking companies in America, has voiced support to congress for a 68mph limit on all large trucks.
I know a lot of ignorance exists about the trucking industry, but please, do at least a little research before you attack an entire industry. You're going to end up with one of those Oprah/beef lawsuits on your hands.
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It's Amazing
[Read the article: Flirting with disaster]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]How people can't distinguish musical talent from artistic creativity or merit. Winehouse is talented. She is not artistically creative. Her musical stylings are every bit as contrived and unimaginately as the "boy bands" or whomever else the letter writers are referring to as "pop radio". She can hold a note, and provide some fairly good renditions of original songs in a well-defined genre. Her work is only "original" in the sense that the genre of which they are a part is rarely engaged by contemporary performers. Why don't you all just admit that you like her because she sounds different than what is on the radio now, and you like to be different? There is no shame in that, and avoids this whole "tortured, fallen visionary artist" pastiche which is as old fashioned and frankly offensive as the mythologies embraced by right-wing, conservative America.
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The moral argument
[Read the article: Flirting with disaster]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm not sure if the blame should be placed on Winehouse or the press that follow her, but my beef with her behavior is that she attempts to link her musical talent with her drug use. If you want to be a junkie, fine. If you want to be a junkie in public, fine. But when you tell your adoring fans that using drugs is the key to your artistic success, screw you. The romanticization of drug abuse in western culture is shameful. How would we react to models tell their fans that being dangeriously underweight is good for their careers? Or atheletes telling their fans that blowing off school work or using steroids was good for their careers? Even if these statements were true, it's dispicable to tell it to the millions of young, impressionable people that (stupidly) beleive that they can one day be the next big hit, beautiful face, or star player. It ends up killing quite a few of them, needlessly.
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It's about the glamour.
[Read the article: Flirting with disaster]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"They don't seem to much care for what they find there, and drug use is unfortunately one of the most common results. I'm not sure why Winehouse should be vilified for it, anymore than Billie Holiday, Janis Joplin or Jimi Hendrix. Drug abuse isn't a moral failing, it's a mental health issue. I do find it interesting that Winehouse is coming under attack from folks who apparently aren't Reaganite Puritans for her drug use."
I, and I think a lot of people here, aren't upset that she uses drugs, but rather that she glamorizes drug use. Those artists all abused drugs, but they either 1) didn't sing in a direct way about their use, 2) weren't popular enough during their lifetime to exert much influence over the minds of others, or 3) weren't working within a culture where drug abuse is rampant and a real problem.
Say whatever you want about her music, but she's essentially acting as the Marlboro Man for hard drug abuse. I've unfortunately had a few musician friends pass away because they wanted to so badly to be the tortured emotional musician that Elliot Smith, Spiritualized, etc. represented. For them, drug use wasn't about their own tortured longings to find "real truth" or whatever this mythical musician is supposed to be searching for. It was about being young and trying to find an identity. Unfortunately, the identity they chose was one in which drug abuse was a pre-requisite for membership, at least in their eyes.