Letters to the Editor
DQuintanaNY
Published Letters: 379 Editor's Choice: 22
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The Appeal of the Republican Party
[Read the article: The GOP on the verge of imploding]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...is never having to say you're wrong. Just as "love is never having to say you're sorry."
The Republican Party offers the easy way out for Americans. You don't have to do the hard work of thinking and using logic and rationality in order to come to a conclusion. Knee jerk reactions are just fine, in fact they are preferable.
The Republican Party allows us to be comfortable with our laziest and most base natures. The GOP is our lowest common denominator writ large. Most civilized people would agree that a political party whose policies are based in greed, mindless violence, hatred, bigotry, and a complete disdain for the liberties they presume to protect- is not the party you want in power for nearly two generations.
The Republican Party will never inspire the American people to be better than what we are now, because its "strength" lies in perpetuating the comfort of our own fears and bigotry. It's implosion cannot come soon enough for me.
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"snatch defeat from the jaws of victory"
[Read the article: The GOP on the verge of imploding]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Can we please stop with this tired cliche!?!
I'm so goddamn sick of reading it in every other single article regarding the possibility of a Democratic defeat in November. If you have to speak about that possibility- come up with something new, okay? Repeating the same shopworn phrases is just a shortcut to thinking.
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Obama is standing up for us first by acknowledging that we exist
[Read the article: Is Obama really standing up for gay rights?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]as opposed to other politicians who either hope the "gay issue" will go away quietly, lest it upset their campaign, or bash the hell out of us in order to rile up their base.
I can't tell you how heartening it was to see a presidential candidate embrace both gay and straight members of our society in his speech on Tuesday. For the past eight years the open support of gay and lesbian Americans by our politicians has been a deafening silence. We've allowed the issue to be dominated by hatemongers and heterosexists. Obama might not be going as full throttle on the issue as some of us the community might like, but his acknowledgment of us seems to be a step in the right direction.
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Americans don't care if it isn't happening to us
[Read the article: Interrogating Abu Ghraib]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Abu Ghraib was a horrific incident that is beyond the pale in regard to everything this nation is supposed to stand for. Beating a prisoner to death and then giving a gleeful thumbs up over the corpse is the kind of psychotic behavior we expect from out of control dictatorships and regimes, but not in America, and not carried out by Americans.
But then we find out about the other tortures we are inflicting upon prisoners- freezing conditions, isolation, sensory overload, sleep deprivation- and the favorite of the tough-on-terror crowd - waterboarding.
The reason there is so little outrage is because we are so disassociated from it. We are carrying out atrocities halfway around the world in secret sites. These prisons aren't in Missouri. The problem with the American people as a whole, is that we don't notice anything, let alone have empathy for anything or anyone, unless it's pushed in our face and we can see it, smell it and hear it ourselves.
They are photographs, and powerful photographs. But therein lies the disconnect- they are only photographs. So Americans can be appalled and disgusted and indignant, and twenty minutes later they can go back to watching American Idol and go back to not giving a shit- because it's just a photograph, and it happened so far away, that it might as well never have happened.
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Sounds like a great book
[Read the article: Tangled up in Dylan]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]and probably really insightful too. It's great to see the humanity in people you admire so much.
And as for the quote: "...New York, in the days when impoverished artists, and not just supermodels, could afford to live there."
I wish that could come back a bit! What a concept. :)
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Great Letters
[Read the article: Writing is in my blood, but how do I know if I'm any good?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]This letters section is really fantastic today.
What Allie said also stuck out to me:
"There are many, many ways to learn, and many brilliant authors out there who never took a single workshop."
This is absolutely true. I would also add that while there are many brilliant authors who never take a single workshop- I would wager that all of them are capable of taking good advice about their work. It's essential. Hemingway cut the first thirty pages of The Sun Also Rises on Fitzgerald's advice and it certainly made it a better and leaner book and got the reader to the core of the story faster.