Letters to the Editor
fkeppler
Published Letters: 4 Editor's Choice: 1
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Enough Madonna!
[Read the article: Dancing as fast as she can]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It is a perpetual source of amazement to me that intellectuals feel the need to justify any interest in pop culture entertainments with incomprehensibly pretentious, comically strained structuralist or Foucauldian interpretations. Ms. Paglia, it's OK if you like disco. Enjoy it. Just because black people like it and people tend to get drunk and have sex while or after listening or dancing to it does not make it "a dark, grand Dionysian music with roots in African earth-cult." Madonna, in particular, is and always was a buffoon. If you like her music, great! Enjoy! But, for the sake of your own intellectual credibility, refrain from saddling that enjoyment with, forgive my frankness, pretentious, obfuscatory bullshit that gives those of us with genuine interest in social criticism, critical pedagogy, Foucault, Jung, and post-structuralism a bad name. Just repeat to yourself, over and over, that an affinity for Madonna's "music" indicates only poor taste, not a lack of intellect which for which you must vigorously overcompensate and self-flagellate.
And can we please, please stop casting Madonna as a feminist icon? If Madonna represents the fruits of the feminist movement, then it is a comprehensively failed movement. Madonna is not ironic, she is not post-modern. She's stupid and childish. Period. But her music, or more accurately, the work of the songwriters, producers, and technicians who create the music to which she adds her heavily processed "vocal stylings" really know how to write a pop song. Her record labels know how to package and market it, and she knows how to put on a show. She is, in other words, a great entertainer, and really knows and understands how to shock people. There is no greater depth to her than that.
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Enough Paglia
[Read the article: Real inconvenient truths]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I will not belabor the valid criticisms of Camile Paglia already printed in other letters. But Salon should recognize that people who choose to pay 35 dollars a year (which, for some of us, is a significant sum)for a subscription to Salon do not do so that they might read overblown and probably disingenuous provocation. If one wishes to divine Camile Paglia's opinion on any topic, one needs only apply the following paradigm:
1) The opinion should be shallow and superficial.
2) The opinion should be maximally provocative.
3) The opinion should be pretentious and intellectually self-indulgent, designed with the sole intention making Paglia look amazingly clever and insightful. She is, however, neither.
4) Failing all else, the opinion should attract the maximum possible attention to Paglia within the given context.
Perhaps I'm just not smart enough to understand Paglia. Perhaps I'm just a victim of some patriarchal mindset. But, having attempted for many years now to find worth and substance in Paglia's writing, I have been able to discern nothing in her work but bourgeois pontification and shameless self-promotion.
Salon can, has been, and should be better than this.
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Nice try, but . . .
[Read the article: When Barry passes Hank]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]There is no question that racial prejudices play a part in the negative attitudes towards Barry Bonds, but of greater import is his well documented sense of entitlement, and (arguably) unwarranted arrogance. That Bonds has used steroids to attain his late career success is so obvious that to deny the fact is to engage in comedy: if it weren't for his use of steroids the baseball community wouldn't even be having this debate. He would never have been in a position to break Aaron's record.
Bonds was already a Hall of Famer before his obvious and egregious use of steroids began, and, although he was, for lack of a better word, a complete pr**k, his achievements merited the greatest possible respect.
The truly regrettable facts of this debacle are that he has sullied the greatness of his earlier career with his flamboyant cheating, and sullied the home run record similarly.
Does Bonds receive extra ill will because of his race? Definitely. Does he receive more scrutiny than a white player in a similar position? I doubt it. Let us not forget that Roger Maris, possibly the whitest man in the history of white men, was vilified unmercifully by the media when he broke the single season HR record; indeed, it almost seems that journalists describing Bonds plagiarize the writers of that time criticizing Maris.
White or black, Bonds exemplifies every negative stereotype of the contemporary pro athlete.
Fritz Keppler