Letters to the Editor
AJCalhoun
Published Letters: 959 Editor's Choice: 127
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Going Sane
[Read the article: Black vs. "black"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Thank you, Gary Kamiya, for having crafted, at last, an exposition which competently covers the issue of racial identity at a time when we really need it in order to let go of it and move on.
The "invisibility" factor is a brilliant piece of thinking and wordcraft. That this was inspired by matriculation at UC Berkeley is extremely telling, since the Bay Area has, at long last, become a cultural backwater unable to keep up with the maturation of the rest of the country. For this reason suddenly, after many a harsh commentary directed his way by me, Gary Kamiya is looking rather heroic.
I don't overplay the matter either, I believe, because it is only when we can fully come once and for all to grips with our self-conscious obsession with race, ethnicity and provincialism, can we move forward seeing those factors for what they really are: nothing but artifact, personal trivia from history, which is a phenomenon of the past, not the future.
Debra Dickerson keeps dragging us into the past. Gary Kamiya, in one deft and moving bit of thought, has swept us into the Now.
Maybe it's true: all we need is love. It's certainly a great point of departure from the past.
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The Light at the end of the Tunnel
[Read the article: Why Democrats can stop the war]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]may be an oncoming locomotive.
While I really liked reading Perlstein's genuine historical accounting of the unraveling of Viet Nam and the parallels between it and the current madness in Iraq, I also must give James Levy, PhD, some points for his analysis of the lack of resolve both in Congress and among the pundits. However, there is, tonight, as I write this, a possible galvinizing force still lingering in the air like smoke after a bomb has gone off, that bomb being the remarkable speech given by Senator Jim Webb in response to the President's "timid" (commentator's word) address. Bush's was a rather weak speach, lacking the usual arrogance and self-assuredness and with some very carefully-weighed words, but the one issue everyone really came to hear about was Iraq, and on that one, although the President employed a much softer delivery, his words were numbingly the same.
In contrast, Webb's speech was clearly barely restrained rage and, as Katie Couric observed after, "He really tore into the President." It may just be me, but I seemed to pick up a sense of awe in those words, a look in Couric's eyes that I haven't seen often.
The Webb moment may be the inspiration the New Majority needs to stand and be counted. It also clearly impressed the talking heads. In this respect it resembled to a great degree the defining undoing of the Viet Nam war as recalled by Perlstein.
Where Johnson, Nixon, Kissinger, et al collapsed before a far more considerate bunch, we now must prepare to "meet on the ledge" and for a moment join in one great, communal shove. The blow has been delivered. The breaking point is at hand.
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Take it easy Joan
[Read the article: Do you have to have balls to have balls?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Ms. Pelosi established her ballsiness before Webb did, so no need to see this as a "battle of the sexes." Who would you have preferred deliver the Webb speech last night? No one could have done what he did the way he did it but him. If Nancy Pelosi and he had somehow been in switched positions there is no doubt in my mind she would have been as effective in her own Nancy Pelosi way (which honestly turns me on), but she had something else to do and she did it with so much ease that it looked like she wasn't doing anything - but she was. That woman has balls. Hillary has balls to spare. Hell, every woman in politics has balls. They have to! But the best available person for this particular job was Jim Webb and I'm really sorry you see this (and the reaction of some males to it) as a sign that we don't recognize the strength of women in politics. For god's sake, we don't really need to go looking for trouble right now, and we don't need to find new excuses to divide ourselves. It was Jim Webb's moment after the speech. It's been Nancy Pelosi's from the first day Congress went into session. Iron fist in the velvet glove - and if you find that comment somehow condescending then you really don't want unity, you crave dissension and division. I don't want to believe that, but the tone of your article sure as hell sounds that way.
Have the balls to make me wrong, won't you?
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The Fatal Flaw
[Read the article: Hawks knock surge plan's command structure]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The most serious flaw in the President's newest same-old-same-old is that it was wrong to begin with. It was wrong morally, intelligence-wise, strategically. It was even more than wrong: it was a red herring laid in the path of public opinion and the US Congress, in order to accomplish obscure and basically evil goals totally contrary to our national character and national interest. The fact that those who started out supporting both the idiot war and the "surge" which resembles nothing so much as the first wave of a seemingly never-ending series of surges into Viet Nam are now finding fault with the clearly moronic dual-command structure is barely worth note, given the monstrously flawed rationale for the original invasion.
If there is anything at all worth drawing from this latest development it isn't that it won't work but that nothing will work in this Crusade because there is no target, no reason and no moral basis underlying any of it. We are now truly beating a dead horse. If it delights some of us at first to realize that even supporters of this war are now realizing it is being conducted by a fool, it only underscores how long we have all played the fool by not rising up at the outset instead of only recently, to try and stop this atrocity.
How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? So far well over 163,000 and counting.