Letters to the Editor
Amity
Published Letters: 1152 Editor's Choice: 107
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Better late than never?
[Read the article: Tigers don't belong in zoos]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The San Francisco Zoo has been dithering about animal enrichment for years. Maybe they'll get serious about it now, after one of their animals went postal. Better late than never, right?
Meanwhile, right across the San Francisco Bay, the tiny Oakland Zoo seems to have pursued a policy of expanding open space instead of expanding animal exhibits. While it makes the experience of visiting seem a little pathetic on paper, the lion enclosure is basically simply an extended enclosed area of natural hillside and provided one of the most breathtaking experiences I've ever had — a pride of lions scampering headlong after each other through the woods, roaring in play, within arm's length of me. If I needed any convincing of the value of open space captivity, I was sold.
That said, Susan McCarthy makes an interesting analogy:
But tigers in most zoos are like people spending their lives locked in an empty living room.
I don't know whom Susan McCarthy knows or socializes with, but very few of the humans I know live in natural hominid habitats — open grassland, sun-drenched veldt, what have you. Nor do we generally live in trees, fond as we may remain of having them around.
In point of fact, a large number of humans and a huge proportion of the ones that call themselves Americans live in high-density urbanizations — in homes or apartments that consist, basically, of a locked room — or a series of empty rooms, if you're a more mature specimen — with some furniture and maybe a few toys strewn around.
(And don't even start with office cubicles.)
So while preserving and even expanding what natural habitats remain is vital, we are already basically obliging all the world's creatures to urbanize. Some (like raccoons and dogs) do well without our intervention, and others (like tigers) are going to need us to find ways that they can live alongside us. In a world of ubiquitous human presence, there is no other way to survive.
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Sounds just like another campaign
[Read the article: Jonah Goldberg and Glenn Reynolds warn of "social unraveling" if Obama loses]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Speaking of Nixon, back in 1960 a lot of people had many of the same things to say about Kennedy being a Catholic — only the dark threats were about America being handed over completely to the Vatican, and they weren't subtle or veiled at all.
It's hard to take that WASP-y angst seriously now, but it was very serious — deadly serious — at the time. If history is any guide in this case, the good news is that the symbolism of a black man becoming president will drive a stake through the heart of the particular sort of racist nonsense that Glenn Greenwald cites, once and for all. The bad news, of course, goes without saying.
(For better or worse, or more accurately both, Obama is no Kennedy. The parallel in the case of hostility from the right wing is definitely there, though.)
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Difficult position
[Read the article: The politics of not nice]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If the remaining early primaries follow the essence of the Iowa pattern — a spike in overall voter turnout with a natural tendency toward Obama — then Edwards and Clinton will need to do more than just sharpen their swords.
The problem for them boils down to the fact that tactically they depend on suppressing voter turnout to gain on Obama, yet to pursue that aim would be suicidal. Instilling disgust and apathy in primary voters is ugly business and even if it weren't to backfire now, whoever won would pay in November.
So both of them have only one other choice, which is to retool — abandoning their dependence on lower, more targeted voter turnout — which is a risky and resource-consuming proposition in the middle of a campaign. The next few states will be a measure of how well Edwards and Clinton are able to adapt their organizations to the new reality of more, and more demographically diverse, people coming out to vote than they were expecting.
It will also be a measure of how well Clinton keeps her "dark side" operation against Obama in check — it's easy to lose control of that sort of thing and stumble down a slippery slope. (The same applies to Edwards, in theory, but thus far he doesn't appear to have much of an inclination to go that way.)