Letters to the Editor
AJCalhoun
Published Letters: 959 Editor's Choice: 127
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Wonder Where Olmert Got His Chutzpa
[Read the article: Israel's wounds of war]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It couldn't have been a blatant imitation of the fool who got us up to our ass in Iraq could it? The similarities, as perceived by the Winograd commission, are so striking as to lead one to believe it possible that Israel's leadership has finally begun to believe that triumph is available only through self-deception, and no one currently does that trick more effortlessly than our mindlessly fearless leader (who is, ironically, also the chief fear monger among us).
As Israel begins to crawl out from under the wreckage of the Hezbollah fiasco and rethinks its future it might be wise to wake up and smell the hubris. Aluf Benn is right: Israel's strengh lies in its vulnerability, not in its imaginged invincibility. Now if we who gave them the warped self-image can only learn the same lesson...
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Jesus! Here We Are Again!
[Read the article: God grief]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The neoatheist (or is it evangelical atheist) movement is really starting to work my last nerve, and this screed from Hitchens really worries me because it is beginning to look like no one has anything of substance to bring to the damn debate. Beating up on religious fundamentalists is way too easy, and they too deserving of the beating, but there are those of us on the "supernatural" side of the table who can do it more effectively than the terminally bored (and equally boring) Hitchens and his "opponent" Dawkins, et al. Like Hitchens is so much more considerate of believers than Dawkins. When he writes "...there would be no such churches in the first place if humanity had not been afraid of the weather, the dark, the plague, the eclipse, and all manner of other things now easily explicable" he sounds like the damned fool he is (and clearly at least Harvey understands this - why didn't he write the book?)because without those "easily explicable" primal fears and the fact that they had not yet been explicated, there would not have been and still would not be any ground from which to launch an enlightenment, nor any explanation for the poor stupid early-arrivers to cling to while these genii were waiting to be born; There would be no reason for the existence of Darwin and his quaint theory of natural selection. There would most certainly have been no noble sort of evolution such as Tielhard posited had we not sprung from ignorance or innocence (and I rather prefer that latter term since I also believe in the innocent-until-proven-guilty nonsense).
This is cheap and shoddy work from one more member of a growing group of rebels sans cause who cannot wrap their overly muscular brains around something other than an image of Zeuss to use as a target for their mindless game of darts, which puts them in much the same position as religious fanatics who also suffer from a pathological need to get us all to thinking as they do - although "thinking", in this sense, becomes oxymoronic.
Now let fly the poison arrows from the army of those terrified of those who may believe in the unproven, the unseen, the difficult-even-to-conceive. Harvey has this part completely spot-on, too. Believers are dangerous to those who would enslave the minds of men, especially those who are willing to acknowlege they don't know exactly what it is they believe. Bring it on, you sad bunch of Sarte-worshipping, Mencken-looking basement dwelling Morlock. "New shit has come to light!" God may not be great, but nothing is still definitely nothing.
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The Myth of the Rugged Individual
[Read the article: Being a rebel is so 19th century]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Whether it was Alan Ladd's "Shane" character or William Holden in "Picnic" or maybe just the plastic-faced maniac in "V For Vendetta", our nation has become, over a long period of time, one of almost nothing but "individuals" trying to take part in an atonal orchestra. Nothing is reliably "there" when needed, and Keilor is right: when everyone is hearing a different tune there can be no unity, no cohesion and no identity.
The responses to his article largely prove him right. It's not as though each individual is not in some way unique, but that as a nation we have nothing in common. It would seem there are at least two faces, one red, one blue, but even inside those two stagnant pools is so much self-delusional diversity (dear god! Did I just use "diversity" as a pejorative?) that even the two engines of national discord can agree on only some very basic things like demonizing each other.
The stupid hat at the prom is the new uniform of social anarchy. Jack Kerouac predicted this in 1959. He said the Beat phenomenon would wind up being nothing more than "a revolution in manners" and that people would start showing up in denim at formal events and think they'd done something important. It happened while he was still alive. It just keeps happening.
Barack Obama is the closest thing we've seen to a truly centered politician in decades. This is frightening to this narcisist nation. Can we not find any common ground, any convention, any unity that doesn't strike fear into the hearts of...oh. Hearts. That must be it. When they don't beat resolutely they eventually stop beating at all.
Dr. Obama, kindly remember to shout "Clear!" before you knock us back into rhythm. It's getting scary in here.