Letters to the Editor
marksrichardson
Published Letters: 4
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How "American" They Are!
[Read the article: Inside the Creation Museum]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]A number of readers have remarked on the physiognomy of The Creation Museum's Adam & Eve. Why do they look so much like well-groomed Americans?
As it happens, some Creationists would have an answer & it is a sinister one indeed. It may be that the Museum is set up more or less according to the assumtpions of "British Israelitism," which still has a following in the USA amongst the ultra-fundamentalist & white-supremacist right. This noxious doctrine holds that the people of Great Britain were the "real" Jews (the so-called Lost Tribe), & that, therefore, their line is the true line of the Chosen People.
In short: Look around the margins of the Creationist/Homeschool movement, and you will find its very nasty bedfellows flirting with anti-Semitic & White-Supremacist views. A good many underlings in the Bush White House are on a hand-shake basis with these bigots, too.
Cf.: Michele Goldberg, "Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism." It will disturb your sleep for weeks. But it is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand the fringe, theocratic elements of the GOP.
--Mark Richardson, Kyoto, Japan
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"Eating Crow, w/ Goat-cheese Medallions"
[Read the article: Bush and Cheney walk, too]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]For quite a while I have thought that Cheney & Bush ought not only to be impeached but put in the dock at the Hague. The Scooter Libby pardon is obscene, brazen, for precisely the reasons Mr. Blumenthal gives.
Bush & Cheney falsify intelligence in order to foment a war that is among the worst follies ever committed in American foreign policy; they compel people like Tenant & Powell to take one for the coach(es); Cheney keeps a kind of enemies list (like Nixon), w/ Bush's indulgence; they both conspire to destroy the career of an incidental & completely anodyne woman (Valerie Plame) to punish a man (her husband) who dissents.
Now for a bit of nostalgia.
Here is G.W. Bush, on April 27, 2000, speaking at the D.C. Armory before a GOP fund-raiser that hauled in $21 million for his (non)election campaign:
"My goal is to change the tone of Washington so the Bob Kerreys of this world, the reform-minded Democrats and Republicans, will know that I'm coming to this town to get some problems solved and then gracefully retire to Texas."
Laughter at it now goes down so bitterly as to incline one to choke not (let us say) on the food served at that April 27, 2000 fund-raiser, of which I kept a record from an AP report, but at a mere citation of it:
"Grilled tenderloin medallion and horseradish-encrusted filet of red snapper & demitasse; creamy goat cheese medallions; roasted garlic; broccollini."
Dig in, Bush, perennial "presidential-hopeful" that you are, never even having properly been treated to an after-campaign-dinner election. "Retire gracefully to Texas"? No: Eat crow. With goat cheese medallions of "freedom." And retire ignominiously to that cell they put Jefferson Davis in, circa 1865.
--Mark Richardson
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Why do (we) Americans feel at perfect liberty to misunderstand Japan...
[Read the article: Groping toward gender equality]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...and other nations not European in fact or by descent? Ms. Lloyd's easy caricature of a nation & a populace with which she clearly has no intimate acquaintance whatsoever is so banal as hardly to merit rebuke. But: her air of condescension w/ regard to Japan has a pedigree. Let her sup in heaven, or in thought, with General Macarthur, foreshortening Japan at her whim.
As for me: I run in the "-phile" of no country in particular, so far as I can tell. But living in Japan for four years has certainly led me to one conclusion. WW2 propaganda casts a very long shadow. Ms. Lloyd is doing journalism lite, of course, which is fine: this is what blogs are for. Still: the sorry fact is that we Americans have built one of the finest glass houses on the planet. Violence? Check. Wife-battery? Check. White-supremacist subcultures a-wash in guns & gun-porn (Soldier of Fortune, etc.)? Check. "Elected" governments that "step & fetch it" for Xian fundamentalists whose misogyny & homophobia is nothing short of baroque in elaboration? Check. Fertile soil for the making of Creationist "museums"? Check. A foreign policy which has, take it all in all since 1848 & Mr. Polk's war, done more damage than the fabled Empire of Japan? Check. A for-profit "health-care" system that is the envy of...
As Milton has Satan say: "Shall I go on, or have I said enough?"
So, Ms. Lloyd: better to think twice & read a book or two, & do a little time in-country, before taking up any stones.
--Mark Richardson (at present living in Kyoto)