Dear Editor:

Often, when we heard words like "Syria," "Iran," and of course, "Lebanon," we hear these words only in a political context which conjures up images of violence, wars, and political strife and ignores that fact that in all of these places there is a culture of its own and a unique way of life. The instance of Lebanon is particullarly jarring because it a country simultaniously Western and Eastern, Liberal and Conservative, Arab and Cosmopolite, and also a place where people party and play hard.

I liked this article because it reminds us that irrespective of the political problems of Lebanon, and the wider conflict in which it is involved, there is a unique style of life in Beirut, and that every one of these wars destroys this special social dynamic for some people who must flee for their lives. It reminds us that Lebanon is the most liberal of the Arab countries which still has, in spite of groups like Hizbollah, the sort of freedoms that are part and parcel of the Western Democracracies, freedom of consciousness, freedom of speech, freedom for women, and the freedom to do what one wants, just as in the U.S. but with an Arab cultural overlay which in Lebanon can be very gratifyingly secular.

The author, an Arab-American described the life in our country as "...contradictory offerings of comfortable assimilation and interminable alienation." As an adult I certainly understand how she feels. I also know that life in Lebanon, even for a non-Arab, could never be like that.

That is the true tragedy of this situation, that not only are people being killed, economic development potential being thwarted, and recently rebuilt infrastructure being destroyed, but also a unique and special sort of life and mindset, unique both in the Arab countries and special in the panapoly of world cultures.

If my circumstances were different, I might have joined her and had a chance to write about it as well.

Sincerely yours,

Arthur C. Hurwitz

Dear Editor:

It seems that in all instances, the mainstream media remains committed to a certain type of typecasting, and a certain vision of stereotypic notions of people, political and personality types.

It is for that reason that our politics is so dysfunctional and it is for that reason that this new miniseries "The Path to 09/11" must reinforce those culturally-mandated notions to be accepted by a mainstream audience, i.e. to be commercially viable.

In other words, certain ideological notions about personal and personality types must be maintained. Certain notions of what Democratic and Republican presidents are supposed to be like must continue to be culturally validated by miniseries such as this one.

The point being that in our culture objective truth is meaningless, and that all points-of-view are subjective. Meaning that it really doesn't matter what anyone actually does as they really are not able at all to escape from their stereotyped typecasting. They are really not at all judged on their own real life merits.

Sincerely yours,

Arthur C. Hurwitz

Dear Editor:

Altman was a kind of American rightious man, i.e. someone whose living existance represented some sense of truth about our country, always so full of its pretentious and hypocritical imagined sense of itself. As long as we knew that he was alive and continuing to make movies, we knew that some sort of truth could prevail. We knew that we were not alone in how we felt about and observed our country. His great movies about the American experience, MASH, Nashville, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Short Cuts, and others reminded us of what this country is like as we actual live it and know it. The dark side of life in our country which we feel every day but never ever dare to admit.

Often MASH is thought of as an anti-war movie, or more specifically, an anti-Vietnam war movie. But in many ways, this film was far ahead of its time, its characters representing certain political phenomina which arrived much later. Don't the indifferent and self absorbed Colonel Blake and General Hammond in the MASH movie remined us of Donald Rumsfeld or Richard Cheney? Doesn't the Frank Burns of the MASH movie remind us of the religious right with all of its mixture of self-rightiousness and actual depravity?

Nashville exposed in an artistic venue the emotionally and spiritual messiness of the actual American life. True to this lived reality, when the music came on everything seemed perfect and emotionally awesome, only for the music to stop again and return us back to the same always confused, dark, and far more messy sensibility. The most thematic song in the movie, chimes in its chorus, "We must be doing something right to last 200 years," says so much about the problem of the mainstream political discourse: Yes we must be doing something right, but is that really enough? Can't we aspire to do it far better?

Of course I knew that Altman was mortal, but somehow I could never imagine him dying. As if the idea of him continuing to make his films confronted the wide schism in our society between how we feel about it inside, and how we discuss it outside and in public. I was truly shocked and sadded and grieven when I head of his death. His directing was a sort of voyariusm, he zoomed in and saw what was actually there and present and in doing that we were better able to see it too.

Sincerely,

Arthur C. Hurwitz