Letters to the Editor
notre druide
Published Letters: 115 Editor's Choice: 5
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Is What All There Is?
[Read the article: The atheist delusion]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm grateful for Dr. Haught's eagerness to separate the religious from the secular in matters of education and governance. I am happy to make common cause with him on these points. But beyond that, I can only marvel at the mesmerizing fog of words with which he preserves his state of mystification. To me what really separates the Abrahamic religions from everyone else he mentions -- the atheists new and old, the Buddhists -- is that the former have built a whole worldview around the fear of death. This I presume is what he means when he questions the "justification" for "hope" in an atheist worldview. The hope, my friend, is that we will save our species from people so maddened by the fear of death that they bring it raining down on us like a tropical storm. That's ambition enough for a thousand lifetimes. And "purpose" enough, too.
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@ robert lewis
[Read the article: Administration lawyers were in on discussion of CIA tapes' destruction]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]You have expressed my holiday wishes exactly, except that mine emphasize Addington to the near-exclusion of all others. The thought of finding that repellent insult to the legal profession under the Yule tree, trussed up for shipment on a federal marshal's bus -- or better yet, a CIA black flight -- fills me with more-than-seasonal joy. (Just don't ask me to insert the suppository.)
Unfortunately, Bush is going to pardon the entire executive branch, so none of this stuff is going to go very far. Still we need to know. And I disagree strongly with an earlier poster about the relative importance of this investigation. Direct defiance of a court order by the White House is not small potatoes. It is a constitutional crisis as big as anything that's happened in my lifetime.
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Yule
[Read the article: Irving the Snowchicken is coming to town]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]As others have noted, the Christians stole the winter holiday from my pagan ancestors. They were very good at effacing the local religion by appropriating and "re-purposing" its rituals and celebrations. Is there any scriptural basis for placing Jesus's birth at this particular time of year?
One can just decide to take the holiday back. My wife has built our own tradition around celebrating the solstice. If we still open presents on the 25th, and listen to a lot of Christmas music, and if Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol is still a guilty pleasure of mine, it's because those things long ago took up permanent residence in some of my psychic receptor sites. I gotcher repurposing right here.
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@ PaulBC
[Read the article: Everything you know about absinthe is wrong]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Thanks for mentioning that 1989 Scientific American article. When I first noticed this absinthe renascence a year or two ago, I went looking for that article online, but didn't find it.
It's been a long time, but the impression I carried away from that article was that the wormwood in absinthe was somewhat like formaldehyde and operated over time to, in effect, embalm your brain. Did I misread the article? Is it wrong? And why this strange coyness among the absinthe cognoscenti on these toxicology issues? Are they afraid of getting the stuff re-banned by sharing what they know?
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Is It Snowing in Here?
[Read the article: "We're all fascists now"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I don't think you have to read any farther than this --
"[Liberalism] is definitely totalitarian -- or 'holistic,' if you prefer -- in that liberalism today sees no realm of human life that is beyond political significance, from what you eat to what you smoke to what you say. Sex is political. Food is political. Sports, entertainment, your inner motives and outer appearance, all have political salience for liberal fascists."
-- to see that we have here a mind blissfully unmoored from any sense of obligation to speak truly or meaningfully. Never mind the absurdity of implying that conservatives haven't politicized sex. What exactly does it mean to say that something has "political salience?" It doesn't exactly mean anything. It's a way of asserting something false in a manner that defies refutation only by defying any kind of logical analysis.
Beyond that, the passage is transparent blather. Fascism is a political term referring most broadly to the extreme concentration of power. "Holism" is first a concept of human health, and by extension perhaps of metaphysics, which posits the universal connectedness of things -- and by extension, perhaps, people. Any connection between the two concepts is about as abstract as the connection between bombing civilian homes and eating dinner. Well, both involve destruction, don't they?
This conflation is, however, unintentionally revealing, for through it Goldberg illustrates one of the primordial motives of the conservative mind, which is to escape the deep fear that one really doesn't matter. A character in Arthur Miller's Incident at Vichy says of the Nazis, "The less you exist, the more you have to make an impression." This is the driving emotive force behind the conservative obsession with individualism and separateness -- and the concomitant phobia toward anything smacking of, as Goldberg calls it, "unity." Goldberg's professed fear that liberalism leads to some kind of utopian somnambulism is the rationalized outgrowth of the underlying fear that his very Self may disappear if he does not vigilantly defend his individual boundaries. In equating fascism with liberalism Goldberg notices only the strain of fascism that emphasizes collective action. He overlooks the apotheosis of individuality reflected in the Leader, in whose godlike powers all citizens in good standing vicariously partake.