Letters to the Editor
maureenodonnell
Published Letters: 1107 Editor's Choice: 5
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Why does Camille Paglia seem so like the washed-up actress Norma Desmond in that bleak film "Sunset Boulevard"?
[Read the article: Hillary's race against time]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Norma Desmond is supposed to be a charcter based on the real-life actress Gloria Swanson. It's a cruel fable of grandiose folly and delusion. Norma has convinced herself thatyhe world still wants her and that she can make a come-back on the screen but as the screen-writer Joe Gillis realises "The audience left twenty years ago. Camille Paglia's hatred for Hillary Clinton is searing and livid. It could have something to do with the fact that Camille and Hillary were born in the same year. Life is so unfair!
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The etiolation of the American election
[Read the article: Ferraro resigns from Clinton campaign]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The Last Dog @ 5 a.m. says it all but perhaps you'd like to know how this looks from outside the United States. The French Foreign Minister (who founded Medicins sans Frontieres over 30 years ago when he was a much younger man) has said of America "The magic is over". Bush and his bully-boys have disgraced you in the eyes of the world and now they're itching for an excuse to attack Iran. The resignation of Admiral William Fallon was far more significant than Spitzer's sexual spree but guess what dominated the American media! Ritual humiliation seems to be a popular sport in the United States and the mortification must even extend to the innocent party, namely the wife. In ancient Palestine, the Gadarene were associated with headlong/suicidal rush or flight and that seems to be what is happening in America today. The flight is from reality as words are picked apart for hints of racism or misogyny and as for national suicide that can only be termined by you. Before the primary in Mississippi commentators here took it for granted that Obama would win based on the fact that there was a sizeable cadre of black voters in that State. I suppose they can be branded as racists too. The inconvenient truth is that there is racism in Africa. While the war in Vietnam was exacting its grisly toll there was also a deadly civil war in Nigeria called the Biafran war, in Kenya the Luo and the Kikuyu have been at each others throats since the beginning of the year. Not all Europeans are the same and that also applies to Africans. I think America made a huge mistake in categorising people by their ancestral roots such as Irish-American and African-American. I'd be very annoyed if I came to the attention of your authorities, ended up in a police station and was labelled "Caucasian". I'm not from that mountainous region of south-east Europe which lies between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. My nationality should suffice.
On the matter of language, I've been truly amazed. Okey-dokey is a racial slur? Here it means nothing more than OK said in a jocular way. "Hoodwink" also has racial connotations? The word has been part of the English language since the sixteenth century and I think it was used in falconry, before the United States came into existence. Who would want to visit your country, even with the weak dollar, if one had to search the lexicon of acceptable words before speaking? All the hocus-pocus about words and names is just unbelievable. Did you know that the middle name of President Gerald Ford was Rudolph? Maybe his parents had an inordinate affection for reindeers.
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Correction
[Read the article: Ferraro resigns from Clinton campaign]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"determined by you".
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Manos99. if you don't understand English I can't really help you.
[Read the article: Ferraro resigns from Clinton campaign]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Canada is out too so maybe you should consider moving to Uzbekhistan where you could chunter away to your heart's content. Your bad manners might'nt be acceptable, of course. You never have an "argument" of any sort but seem to imagine that your gadfly role is important. If it gives you pleasure, why not? However, you are a waste of space if all you can do is taunt and insult. The intelligent people posting on this site ignore your putrid juvenilia and I intend to do the same.
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American myths
[Read the article: Ferraro resigns from Clinton campaign]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]To hear it now, one would think that John Fitzgerald Kennedy had beeb elected to national acclaim but the truth is that he won by just under ll9,450 votes out of more than 68.8 million cast. Some journalists and politicos have attempted to arrogate the JFK name to Barack Obama and I find that not only far-fetched but inherently dishonest. As far as I know (am I allowed to say that?) Americans -and also the western world - loved JFK most of all when he was shot dead in Dallas. His death was almost like a death in the family in "old", traditional Ireland because so many of the adults were only two or three generations away from the mass migration to the United States which took place at the end of the l9th century. To read about the Bay of Pigs fiasco is to wonder whether to weep or laugh and Cuba is still Communist. CIA plots to remove Fidel Castro included an exploding cigar, a poisoned pen (!) and the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion. When JFK authorised six Navy fighters to cover the B-26s, these planes were in Nicaragua. The CIA forgot that Nicaragua's time zone was one hour different from Cuba's so, it seems, the US jets were still on the deck when the bombers arrived in Cuba with no cover. Two were shot down but what happened in April l96l was that the Americans (about 2000?) had to surrender to Castro's men. Hindsight is 20/20 vision, of course, andmyths were used by our ancestors as a means of interpreting the mysteries of the universe. We shouldn't get too "carried away", all the same.