>Surely the only thing worse is the tragic compulsion to then spend additional precious minutes of one's life writing a letter detailing exactly how one feels.<

Second Rule O' The Internets: if you put your sorry business (in this case, lousy work) in the street, the street has _every_ right to talk about your sorry business. Third Rule O' Life: if you let people get away with lousy work, they 1) won't improve; 2) will continue on secure in the delusion that they are doing good work. And as other posters have pointed out, for this comic to have even run in the first place bespeaks some serious favoritism going on here. Do you really think a first-time cartoonist with no credentials would have gotten this kind of break? And why couldn't SALON have picked up any of the innumerable good, lesser-known comics that have at least proved themselves? SALON has pulled this kind of "we and our elite crew got props and you don't" crap before in selecting material (Ayelet Waldman, anyone?) and for a supposedly liberal magazine there's no excuse for that mess.

>I wish you strength in your struggle, Kansas O'Flaherty-haters. Remember, you can reclaim your dignity, reclaim your lives, and conquer this need. Think of your loved ones, think of a better time to come — a time when comics you loathe have no power over you.<

Well, I would, but I've got DEXTER episodes to catch up on, thanks...:).

>Very brave...

to mark as "Editors' Choice" the only letter bashing the other letter writers.<

And cowardly as all get-out for the authors/editors not to address negative comments about this strip. Seems to me someone is cutting Schlesinger and Bachtell a big-time favor--and that SALON _is_ elitist in how they pick what material to run. And here I thought it was only neo-cons who pulled this kind of crap...

>So Kansas isn't Archie or Eightball or Maus... She's a dynamo, and I'd like to have a cocktail or two with her.<

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modesty_Blaise

>There is something rotten in poor Black American culture that will forever hold them back unless it's shortcomings are confronted. Racism this, racism that, when 70% of Black Children are born into a one-parent home, out of wedlock,<

Yep, because as we all know, poor White Americans are always morally-upright achievers. The vast majority of out-of-wedlock births aren't to poor white girls, oh no. Meth and meth-making doesn't at all ravage poor white communities in the midwest, west, and south. There's no high crime in poor white communities, noooo...

>i don't know of a better unit of measure to show how badly things are broken (and i'm not repub/bible thumping conservative either, but even gay couples form family units in "white" America).<

Every single gay couple?

>Slate had an article where a writer attended an old (and decaying) Blacks-only college, a relic of the Jim Crow days, with the hope of uplifting these students into the middle classes, but found them totally unqualified, disruptive, destructive to the school's property, and basically thugs, and despite the occasional hardworking student, gave up on the school completely. The school was being forced to recruit from a black demographic totally unsuited for college.<

Wow. I guess Hampton University or Howard or Grambling or Wilberforce or Central State or Cheney or Lincoln University or Bethune-Cookman or Virginia Union or St. Augustine's or Morehouse or Spelman should just give up on poor blacks as totally uneducatable just because this _one_ black college was having problems. As for a "black demographic totally unsuited for college," let me tell _you_ something--as far as white colleges were concerned for much of the last couple of centuries, _all_ blacks were a demographic "totally unsuited" for college. If it weren't for black colleges, many poor blacks (including my own father) would have not been able to get into the middle class thanks to people with attitudes like yours.

>Racism does exist, and i've been shocked to see it in coworkers. OTOH, they have little scope to act on their racist feelings. But if the Black community continues to feed and prey upon itself, how much of that racism is unjustified, and how much of it is born of experience?<

Amazing. White people never _ever_ get judged by the worst of them. White-collar crime (which destroys a lot more lives than most drug dealers could ever dream of) never _ever_ is used to claim that white people are morally-inferior and that being racist to them is the right thing to do. It's so much easier for too many white folks to offload their guilt and ignorance onto all black folks and judge them by their worst elements. Instead of pointing fingers at the black community as being the source of all crime and evil, you and other posters should ask yourselves--why do we and other white people have this pathological need to point fingers and feel superior? Why can't we see the illness in our own communities and realize that bad choices, poverty, and lack-of-morality have no color. But, I'm betting you will never ask yourselves that question because if you do, your superiority game will be up. You'll have no one to look down on, and God forbid people like you don't have scapegoats.