Letters to the Editor
Published Letters: 163 Editor's Choice: 13
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A Metaphor Too Far
[Read the article: Freedom is hard work]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I don't get it. You don't like the way some people express grief (fair enough), so you accuse them of living unstructured lives? Do you have any proof that this criticism applies to this man, or were you just trying to fit the news report into your own work for the day -- manufacturing a lovely set of linked observations about the world? Have you run over somebody's real feeling in the rush to articulate your own?
Grief and ritual and news-based memorialization are fraught. I get that. So is singling this man out, and not particularly different from what is being criticized here, I think.
Jarring and uncharacteristically mean-spirited.
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@llex, Archie Bunker or Willie Horton
[Read the article: Will McCain denounce Floyd Brown?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Thank you, I think, for the compliment. However, I must not be a very effective writer if I did not convey my main point, which is this: when people in this forum think of and write about Willie Horton, they selectively suppress what he has done, choosing instead to echo platitudes about the perceived injustice of daring to speak what is actually a very plain truth, which, as you put it, is that "Democrats are weak in the knees and soft on crime."
Democrats ARE weak in the knees and soft on crime. This message isn't effective because it is propaganda, or because our schools are turning out idiots (I am a teacher, by the way, and I believe that even decades of poor teaching may be almost universally ameliorated with simple demands and standards): it is effective because it is true. It is effective because the liberal left, which is supposed to uplift the masses, has instead committed itself single-mindedly, from Alinsky, to Kunstler, to Ayers, to the criminal-simpering New York Times pressrooms present and past, Butterfield to Liptak, Mailer to Sarandon, to Boston's moral morons Sebastian Junger, Noam Chomsky, John Silber et. al. (lots of blood on those soft palms), all writhing in sympathy for predators and rolling over endlessly to the demands of truly sick enigmas like Al Sharpton while simultaneously denying the humanity of crime victims.
There is no other sustained, funded liberal activism in this country, and I speak as somebody who was raised by Carter Democrats and educated at the feet of extremely elderly, Rosa Luxemburg-quoting Women's International League for Peace and Freedom activists who were themselves sick to death of fearing for their purses and lives by the 1980's. This is why so many decent people have such a hard time voting Democrat. Why make it so hard? Here's the choice the thinking class has nastily and unnecessarily offered: "Archie Bunker or Willie Horton?" Those of us now over such tatty offense and hauled up on the fence must answer: which would you rather be? To whom would you rather live next door?
Maybe it's because I've been screening Dr. Strangelove all week for my (brilliant) community college students in an economically strangled town in central Florida, and pressing them to decide, "Who is responsible? Who is the real Macbeth here?", and being quite impressed by the answers, but I have to say that the place I find the most demoralizing hewing to propagandistic group-think is not among the self-improving, socially-conservative, military vets and McDonalds' employees I teach but here in the pages of Salon.
And, screed or no screed, we should know better, right? We have the cultural capital. We have the fancy liberal arts degrees and deconstructionist methods that are supposed to lead to special insight. But the conversation here seems more narrow than the average conversation I strike up at the 7-11.
And there, no personal offense intended, when somebody suggests that I'm slipping a knife in, I'd expect them to offer their real name before suggesting it.
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The longer you go on
[Read the article: Why Jeremiah Wright is so wrong]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]the less I believe you believe what you say. Why is that?
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What Would Obama Do?
[Read the article: What should Obama do about Rev. Jeremiah Wright?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Quit your day jobs and go work for the Obama campaign already! "If only Obama clicked his heels and magic dust came out!" "If only Obama would denounce Affirmative Action, then middle America would know they could open up to him about their fears about race!" "If only Obama would make this cool speech, it'd be like I was on his fantasy baseball speechwriter camp team!"
If I actually supported this candidate, I'd seriously want you all to stop now. After a point, it diminishes him as a candidate.
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Very Funny, But Who Exactly Started This "Conversation" About Race?
[Read the article: Why the Jeremiah Wright story deserves more attention]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]In case you're forgetting, it was Obama and his stalwarts who insisted that his candidacy would be about a conversation about race. Not healthcare, not the class-based pressures imposed by the new Gilded Age, not the environment, not good public policy, not legislative efficacy -- a "conversation about race."
Well, now he's got one. And having been subjected to countless compulsory, derogatory, contemptuous, divisive, and frankly racist "conversations about race" as a white female in lefty academia and lefty politics, I have to say that it's nice to see that he and his supporters may be having precisely the conversation they deserve.
But I don't expect much insight to come of it, for despite Obama's own misguided insistence that we take this political season to converse about race, he and his supporters cannot run away fast enough from this one, which proves the big lie at the heart of Obama's campaign: it was never a "conversation" about race that was being sought in the first place; it was another of those divisive "diversity" encounters that many of us have been subjected to in a classroom or office, another interminable rap session imposed by the few people who benefit from such things at the expense of the rest of us, regardless of skin color.
Reverend Wright broke the rules of the game, but Obama's campaign started it, when he could have made other choices for platforms on which to run. Obama would show he's made of better stuff if he acknowledged this now. But it's simply re-writing history to suggest that the media, and not Obama himself, are responsible for making race "conversation" the main focus of his campaign.