Letters to the Editor
s. sen
Published Letters: 63 Editor's Choice: 12
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Camille Paglia on Madonna
[Read the article: Dancing as fast as she can]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"I for one do not dance to dance music; disco for me is a lofty metaphysical mode that induces contemplation"?? Jesus Christ. Get over yourself.
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What's new about a gay western?
[Read the article: All quiet on the gay western front]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I thought the western was inherently a homoerotic genre. This one's probably a bit more explicit, is all.
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Planes, guns and skin color
[Read the article: The war on terror: Miami]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I find the actual presence of gun-toting sky marshalls on board passenger aircraft to be a greater source of anxiety than the prospective presence of hijackers. The Alpizar shooting only reinforces that anxiety. The killing of Mr. Alpizar is a horrifying consequence of the assumption that guns are the best response to our insecurities. In reality, the presence of armed agents only makes it inevitable that any "threat" will provoke a lethal reaction, regardless of the reality or the degree of that threat.
Placing sky marshalls on board aircraft is not necessarily a bad idea. But if those marshalls were unarmed, or armed with non-lethal weapons such as tasers, Rigoberto Alpizar would be alive today. It is quite unlikely that terrorists would knowingly take the chance of encountering well-trained agents in the course of a hijacking, even if they knew that the agents carried no guns.
Finally, Patrick is quite right to draw attention to the parallel between the shooting of Menezes in the London subway and the Alpazar shooting. Those Americans who insist that marshalls with guns are essential to their safety never imagine that they themselves could be at the wrong end of the barrel. This sense of safety - or should we call it immunity? - comes from the knowledge that their skins lack a certain pigmentation. Being a brown-skinned man like Menezes and Alpizar, I lack such assurance, and fear the "misunderstandings" that accompany this culture of paranoia.
S. Sen
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Thick skin, anyone?
[Read the article: Europe's cartoon jihad]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The cartoons are stupid, offensive and racist. Moreover, the decision by newspapers in some European countries to continue printing them is a way of giving the finger to Muslims who live in those countries, under a self-righteous garb of freedom of speech. These are certainly not "equal opportunity" offenders: it is quite unlikely, for instance, that a German newspaper would dare to print funny cartoons about the Holocaust, or that a right-leaning French editor would spoof French nationhood. History and nationalism are among the most powerful religions of our age.
Nevertheless, it must be conceded that life in a free society includes the right to be stupid, offensive and racist. When we are offended by the bigots in our midst, we have a right - indeed, an obligation - to rebut, criticize, mock, ignore, boycott, or condemn. We do not, however, have the right to silence the offender, because ultimately the right to offend is inseparable from the ability to dissent, without which freedom is meaningless. Living with freedom occasionally requires a thick skin.
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Why now? And by the way, bravo
[Read the article: Why we're publishing the new Abu Ghraib photos]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The question is not why the "new" images from Abu Ghraib should be published now. The question, rather, is why they were not released to the media when the first set of images surfaced. By attempting to keep these pictures under wraps, the military and the government practically ensured that the scandal would come back to haunt them in the future. Attempted cover-ups tend to generate their own come-uppance.
Bravo Salon for publishing the images. As an exercise in free expression, it certainly beats commissioning and printing puerile insults in the name of journalism.
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Another shootdowns
[Read the article: Ask the pilot]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The downing of KAL flight 007 in 1983 was not the first shooting down of a Korean airliner by a Soviet interceptor. There was an earlier incident in April of 1978, when a KAL Boeing 707 was shot down near Murmansk. In that occasion, the pilot was able to belly-land the damaged plane on a frozen lake. All the passengers survived, except for two who were killed when the air-to-air missile hit the wing of the 707, sending shrapnel into the fuselage.
The 1978 and 1983 incidents were both in a grey area between accident and massacre. In 1983, for instance, the Soviet pilot (flying a Su-15 fighter) was low on fuel, he had failed to inform his ground controller that he was following a civilian jet (although he knew it himself), the KAL jet was 90 seconds from "escaping" back into international airspace, and the ground controller had to make a quick decision: if he let the KAL plane get away after it had overflown strategic installations, he risked facing the wrath of the Soviet government. So he chose to follow military protocol, which said that intruder aircraft that did not land were to be shot down. It's probably correct to assume that if the case had been put to the top Soviet leadership and they knew it was a civilian airliner, they would have realized that the political cost of shooting it down was greater than the military cost of letting it go.
The incident was driven by a specific pattern of decision-making, which was itself grounded in the Cold War policy of giving local-level military commanders leeway in identifying and dealing with local-level threats. In Cuba, Soviet commanders even had authorization to use nuclear weapons against a potential American invasion, after all. Tt is perhaps unlikely that an F-16 that intercepts an errant airliner today would be allowed to open fire without an ok from the President. But can we count on that when the response time has to be measured in minutes or seconds? Might the airline make a difference? If I was a passenger on, say, an Emirates or Saudia jet that had strayed into restricted airspace over Washington DC, and I saw an F-16 outside my window, I would be very nervous indeed.