Letters to the Editor
Amity
Published Letters: 1113 Editor's Choice: 106
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Not as bad as it used to be
[Read the article: Are our husbands really so helpless?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It seems obvious that women, in their own way, have found themselves with as much invested as men in traditional gender roles and all the clarity and comfort they bring to self-identity.
What is maybe less obvious is how much less of an issue this is now than it was even a decade ago. For example, it's been a long, blessed while since I last heard a kaffeeklatsch of mothers smugly describe a father not present as being "at home babysitting," as if the kids somehow weren't his own. Man, do I not miss that one bit.
More than just anecdote, I think it represents wider change at work, if nothing else emerging out of inevitable exhaustion over all the "war of the sexes" nonsense that's plagued us for so long. It's tiring. It's been taking away from our real projects as a people.
Anyway, in the end all those third-wave kids (or are they post-third-wave now? I can never tell..) are too busy with the future to bother with essentialist hand-wringing, and the 21st century belongs to them, not us (and thank heavens!).
So cheers, men and women of the modern age — you've come a long way. Keep banging those rocks together!
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What's the problem?
[Read the article: King Kaufman's Sports Daily]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Maybe I'm just not enough of a football fan, or maybe it's that I'm fortunate in my choice of sports — sock color just doesn't provoke the same sort of blinkered idiocy as skin color seems to. (Maybe it should — people might end up a teensy bit more sympathetic toward one another.)
But seriously, in a sport where teams are renamed and even move wholesale from one city to the next, how much can "brand loyalty" really matter? Change these ridiculous names over the winter — this winter — and in 2 years nobody will care and in 10 barely even remember. If you want to preserve some sort of "real" local tradition, call them the Cleveland Algonquins or Washington Chinooks or what have you, but honestly you could just as easily go with anything — Longshoremen, Anglers, Webinars, Turnips, Capital Vectors... For crying out loud, there's a major-league baseball team whose name is just a letter. This isn't War and Peace, here. What's the problem?
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Show, Don't Tell
[Read the article: Dumbledore? Gay. J.K. Rowling? Chatty.]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]While Rebecca Traister's comparison between Tolkien and Rowling is interesting, especially regarding their massive collections of unpublished material, there is a basic difference between the two authors which seems to come down to how they approached their work. Tolkien regarded Middle-Earth as a work of scholarship and treated the ambiguity and unplumbed mythology at the misty edges of his world as the byproduct of research — only fragments exist of these ancient works, he would slyly explain, and we must accept that some tales are never finished.
By contrast, Rowling's series emerged as an exercise in children's storytelling and retains that bedtime-story quality throughout. Once a reader understood this unvarying, inevitable formula, most of the speculation about each volume became moot — the adult, relatively dark hopes of so many of her grown-up fans just didn't jibe with the vision that informed the entire project. And similarly, it's no surprise that now Rowling is continuing in the bedside vein. What parent doesn't indulge a child with "just one more question" even after explaining that that's quite enough stories for one night?
And that's where we get at the crux of the problem, and where Traister is right on. Great authors, like great athletes, inspire us when they do what it is they do, not when they talk about it. One of the cardinal principles of good storytelling, in fact, is simply this: show, don't tell.
So Rowling's presentation of Dumbledore — a sensitive, never-married elderly boarding-school master with a checkered past involving an impassioned relationship with another man when they were both young — accomplishes all that she could desire, while her "off-set" talk simply sounds like one of those painful interviews with an Olympic gymnast or World Series pitcher after the big upset. One feels as though such people spoil their own eloquence with words.
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Coming undone -- or never existed
[Read the article: The collapse of Bush's foreign policy]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The Bush administration's entire Middle East policy is coming undone — if it even has a policy left ...
... or if it ever did! Juan Cole's close analysis is excellent as usual, but let's take a step back and acknowledge a basic truth: the Bush Administration never had a policy, not just about Iraq but about anything pertaining to foreign affairs. Like art under a dictatorship or science under a theocracy, statecraft is so fundamentally contradictory to the values that these thieves and mercenaries hold dear that it ceases to be possible to even practice it, let alone well.
The idea that these were a bunch of guys who let their worst instincts get the better of them after the World Trade Center attacks, or that the rest of us all somehow succumbed to shock and awe and let them run roughshod over the country, is comforting but false. Liberals in America have failed to involve themselves in foreign policy in any serious way for a generation, with the result that long before September of 2001 the Bush regime was systemically failing to do any sort of policymaking, and nobody in the Democratic opposition really noticed.
They literally didn't notice, and the reason was because their constituents didn't notice either. Ballistic missile treaties? Euro-Turkish regional politics? Sino-American relations? North Korea's economic collapse? Who in this country cares about those things? Ho hum, right?
Except it turns out that even if you ignore the world, the world isn't going to ignore you. The failure of not only our collective imagination but also our good sense and cognizance of urgency has gotten us into profound trouble, and it's not clear that we've learned any lesson from the experience except "maybe we shouldn't invade Iran. Maybe."