Letters to the Editor
imho
Published Letters: 46 Editor's Choice: 11
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my mother could have written this
[Read the article: Should cafes be kid-free?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I write as someone who used to be a child, and who used to dine out with my parents. In restaurants, I behaved exactly the way I behaved at home at table. My parents taught their children manners the old-fashioned way, through example and admonition. We never went to "kid-friendly" restaurants (haven't been to one still!), because dining was a civilized event in the day, where the family gathered, and we politely conversed with each other as we ate. No one - not adults, not children - screamed, threw food, or left the table until finished. We used our utensils, chewed with our mouths closed, and kept our elbows off the table. I doubt this was easy or simple for my parents to achieve.
Adults dining in an adult venue are entitled to adult behaviour. Kid-friendly venues have been created expressly to allow children to act out, although within limits even there. And there are even drunk tolerant bars where adults are allowed to act out, again within limits. No matter what self-absorbed, obsessed parents believe, there are standards of public behaviour differentially appropriate to different public spaces, and these deserve to be honored. This is universally true, although there are a bazzillion (sp?) cultural differences among standards.
As Americans, we prefer to believe that we personally may behave as we choose, and that only our neighbors should conform to social norms. As a nation of narcissists, we need to wake up to our social responsibilities. What happens in restaurants is merely a microcosm of our national & international entitlement and hypocrisy.
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what's the difference between Koppel & Riefenstahl? Half a century
[Read the article: The Ted Koppel I knew]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If Branfman considers Ted Koppel to be "one of America's most honorable and well-respected journalists," then how does this reflect on Branfman's own credibility? How MANY mass murderers does a journalist need to protect from media scrutiny and promote as a "impartial expert" before his own honor is in question? I would think one might be enough.
Branfman is exercising the same identification with power that he excoriates in his article: he allows his personal feelings for Ted Koppel to override his judgment of the man's public behavior, behavior that is in large part responsible for the public's ignorance of our government's worst murderous excesses. There is nothing honorable about befriending, defending, and protecting a mass murderer. There is nothing respectable about being a mouthpiece for right-wing propaganda.
Does Branfman forget how Ted Koppel got his big "Nightline" break in the first place? He was a shill for big business opponents of Carter. His job then was to keep a nightly vigil before the public of Carter's "incompetence" over the kidnappings in Iran. Where has been his vigilance over the Bush II administration's incompetence in capturing bin Laden? That Koppel occasionally allows competing viewpoints suggests that he does know the difference between news and propanganda, and he has deliberately chosen his own mantle: he's a whore who's turned to pimping for the powerful.
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Better dead than wed
[Read the article: "Last Holiday"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Am I the only curmudgeon who is thoroughly disgusted and dismayed that so many of the movies with female stars involve the main character DYING? Is this a Hollywood phenomenon or does the whole country think that the only good women is a dead woman? Hillary Swank, for example, is in danger of being typecast.
It all reminds me of a line in Time Magazine lo, those many years ago, saying that Love Story was the most romantic movie ever made. Yeah, if romance means a happy ending between father and son.
Grumble, grumble.
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Support is a two-way street
[Read the article: Roe for men?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I believe that Men should have a right to choose, too. The point that most sticks in my craw, however, is that in ten years, it never seems to have occurred to NCM, or Mr. Feit, that Their best case lay in supporting abortion rights for women. Because I just have to laugh tragically when I read that women still have that right. We don't: in most states, access to abortion has already been so curtailed that legal abortion is only easily obtainable by women with enough money to travel or bribe.
The NCM has invited the disdain of women by worrying more about the financial costs to the Father of rearing an unwanted child, then with the public, social, logistical, emotional, legal, AND financial (not in any specific order) burden on the mother and unwanted child. For ten years, They've sat on the sidelines and watched silently while a woman's right to choose has been slowly and systematically eroded. Now They are whining that women haven't jumped in to support Their cause. Perhaps Their credibility would be improved if They used some of Their 15 minutes of fame to show some solidarity, and publically champion women's right to choose, not just Their own.
Duh.
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Mmmm... Manliness!
[Read the article: The manliest of manly men, man]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]And war, rape, genocide, Janjaweed, terrorism: manhood at its finest is covered by Ann Curry's reporting from Darfur.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11199306/
Just shows you what level of idiot gets tenure at Harvard. Part of his description of "manliness": "Manliness seeks and welcomes drama and prefers times of war, conflict, and risk. Manliness brings change or restores order at moments when routine is not enough, when the plan fails, when the whole idea of rational control by modern science develops leaks." If that were a woman being described, she would have been excoriated as a hystrionic personality disorder, a bitch, a gorgon, a virago, and denounced in any number of Greek tragedies. Guess there's a different set of standards for male behaviour, no surprise.