Letters to the Editor
m3myles
Published Letters: 6 Editor's Choice: 1
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NPR also downplayed Cunningham's party affiliation
[Read the article: We don't report so you won't decide]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]NPR also didn't make much of Cunningham's Republican affiliation. In the main news story (the 5 minutes at the top and bottom of the hour) they did not mention party at all. The in-depth story after the news summaries did mention he is a Republican, but there were no references to other ethical lapses by Republicans. Could this be that NPR is sensitive to the "liberal bias" label?
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Snobbery? Nah.
[Read the article: San Franciscophobia]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Maybe those who have railed against Garrison Keillor for his snobbery just aren't in on the joke.
Above all, Keillor comes from, works in, and represents the American heartland. His radio show, A Prairie Home Companion - the prairies are in the heartland, folks - originates from Minnesota, not New York or LA or DC. Minnesota, I'll point out, is deep in the midwest, not the snobby coasts. As Harry Truman might have said - he was from Missouri, another heartland state - you can look it up.
The...er... heart of the show is the mythical Minnesota town of Lake Wobegon, a place not unlike Waco except colder, smaller, and without the glitz. Keillor pokes fun at all the small-town provincialism of the place, while making it clear all the while that that is where he comes from, the environment he loves, and the sort of place that shaped his values.
I grew up in small-town Ohio, and so recognize and appreciate what Keillor represents, even though I now live in (snobby, elitist, out-of-step Liberal) Massachusetts. And I think he is absolutely masterful in a way that no New York entertainment maven could ever duplicate.
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The Apology Kerfluffle
[Read the article: To the worker ants of science]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I suspect there is a cultural misinterpretation afoot here.
To take a different example, years ago Geritol, the maker of that Kickapoo Joy Juice for old people, ran a series of much-maligned ads in which husbands gushed rosily about the youthfulness of their 50-something wives, ending with the tag line "My wife - I think I'll keep her."
Taken literally, of course, that line is at best condescending and paternalistic, and at worst downright misogynistic. My friends here in the Northeast where I now live took it just that way, as did media commentators and pundits on both coasts. But in the small-town Midwest where I grew up, I heard that very line – and its inverse spoken by wives – all the time. It was a compliment, meant to be taken as gently ironic. It’s a Midwestern thing: you show your affection for someone by kidding them. The problem is this doesn’t fly elsewhere. Geritol, made in St. Louis, didn’t account for the larger world in which its ads would run.
Keillor, no matter how many New Yorker pieces he writes, is a Midwesterner through and through. He has made a career out of kidding – kidding Norwegians, kidding country bumpkins, kidding Lutherans, kidding musicians and English majors and grandparents and Californians and everybody else. The column in question is a sterling example of the genre.
Was an apology warranted? Absolutely. A writer has at least some obligation to anticipate how his words will be taken, and Keillor fell asleep at the switch on this one.
And was his apology “real”? Yes. In language that didn’t kid, Keillor explained his thinking and lack thereof, expressed his realization that offense could understandably be taken, showed sincere affection for the many gay people in his life, and said he was sorry. That’s a lot more than saying “I’m sorry if I was misunderstood.”
Apologies – genuine apologies – are important. There is also an equally important flip side – that of accepting apologies (AKA, forgiveness.) Keillor has given his apology. Now the rest of us have to cut him some slack.
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Paying people not to drive
[Read the article: We paved paradise]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Katharine's article reminded me of a policy established by Ecover, the Belgian ecological cleaning products company, when they first constructed their factory: they paid workers extra for not driving to work.
Fuzzy-headed idealism from a bunch of tree-hugging enviros? Nope, hard-nosed dollars and cents (make that francs and centimes). Ecover execs realized there would be a cost saving that more than makes up for the additional wages to employees. They save cost because, needing less parking space, they could buy a smaller parcel of land (apparently, there were no requirements on parking lot size, as the article describes exist in the US). A smaller lot meant less up-front expense, and lower costs for on-going maintenance and taxes.
It's an excellent example of - to use economics language - internalizing externalized costs. The article's quotation that "parking appears free because its cost is widely dispersed in slightly higher prices for everything else" is a plainer way of saying that parking is an externalized cost, i.e., a cost borne by everyone - so little that we seldom notice it.
Externalized costs, whether financial or ecological, are the bane of sustainability. Asthma from increased air pollution, below-market oil drilling leases on public lands, and municipal landfills that enable us to be more wasteful are all examples of externalized costs. Many governments – especially in Europe – have been vigorously passing laws based on the principle of “polluter pays.” It’s ironic that here in the land of the “free”, such measures are so often lampooned as “socialistic”.