Letters to the Editor
droogoy
Published Letters: 608 Editor's Choice: 9
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"Boring" books
[Read the article: Author at work]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"A likely reason that kids don't read as much as they should is because so many great books are boring. They may be well written and insightful and even beautiful but often times they are plain boring."
Written, of course, as a representative specimen of the 21st century and not the 18th or 19th.
The sad fact is the great novels, books appear "boring" to the modern mind because it is differently constructed. Raised on soundbites, PR and piffle, it simply cannot withstand the tomes of old, and withers when confronted by them. I have observed this numerous times, also with students I've had.
I believe it was author Neil Postman who wrote in one of his books (The Disappearance of Childhood (1982), that the modern mind has basically reverted to the level and maturity of a child. The reason is that all or most of its primary activities are predicated on the visual image (which, of course, any child can also grok).
Earlier, in a previous generation, this wasn't nearly so evident as it is today - now that PR and superificial drivel have come to dominate. Back in college in the early and mid-60s most of us read Sartre, and we also read Dostoevsky, Joyce ('Ulysses' was a favorite!), Aristotle's 'Politics' and others - and then debated their works.
The average college senior today, forced to part with his 'MySpace' page, would be paralyzed when faced with a similar task. He's locked in his own virtual world, and its very speed (e.g. of access) prevents him from having the patience to process deep thought. Or to read compendious but rewarding novels.
It is a tragedy in education, but one to be expected given the dumbing down and 'childification' of most of the current adult population.
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Vidor1 Redux
[Read the article: Chris Matthews gets it wrong -- again]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]vidor 1 wrote:
"For continuing to play your silly games and not admitting the truth of the Kennedy assassination, that Oswald acted alone."
Horse manure, codswallop and bunkum. The bulk of the records, especially from the 1979 House Select Committee on Assassinations, discloses that there was a conspiracy (96% probability) and that even if Oswald acted he didn't make any kill shots.
How many time must we go through this? What form of evidence do you wish?
a)forensic – including autopsy photos, and doctor’s testimony
b)radiological-medical (including x-rays made of the skull, analysis by David Lifton, -presented in 'Best Evidence' that the head wounds were fabricated at Bethesda using mortician's plaster)
c)ballistic – including simulations and firing tests of the alleged rifle, which was so poorly acquitted that a substitute Mannlicher-Carcano had to be used for the WC test trials)
d)dynamical – including analysis of the motions of head, directions of reaction, etc (See my previous Salon letters on this issue)
e)acoustic – including nature of the signatures, profiles, characteristics, and how matched to the Zapruder film (See my previous Salon letter on this)
f)ancillary –intel link: including Oswald’s 201, pre-201-files (in CIA documents), as extensively documented by Military Science professor John Newman in his Oswald and the CIA
"I am 500 pages through Bugliosi's book. It is, so far, unassailable in its merciless logic."
Hey, neato! But, unassailable logic" alone won't get you, your entourage of lone nuts, or Bugliosi very far if you don't also have factual hard documents, data, test results to advance it. In other words, all you have is "great logic" in a vacuum.
Immanuel Velikovsky ('Worlds in COllision') also had formidable "logic" - problem is it was misdirected and was propped up by biblical sources as it main input. As opposed to modern two-body and three-body celestial mechanics. With his "unassailable logic" he made the notion of planetary near collisions "work" - but when celestial dynamics was brought to bear that house of cards collapsed.
The real issue here isn't whether you can read Bugliosi' biased tome but whether you can process and assimilate any or all of the above lines of evidence and use it to interpret the nature and significance of the evidence?
It is also whether you have actually read many of the released Asssassination Review Board documents, as well as the records for the HSCA investigation.
My bet is you haven't.
"It is a far better book than all the silly imaginings of the conspiracy press over forty years<"/i>
Yes, and Velikovskians also believe the Immanuel Velikovsky's book is better than "all the books of celestial mechanics" written since Moulton's more than a generation ago. Never mind that Velikovosky's pseudo -science proves nada.
As for Chris Matthews, aka "Tweety Bird", he lost whatever minor creds he had left back in late 2002. He had one major and important appearance on the (then) MSNBC show 'Donahue' - in which he blasted Bush and the Iraq war promotion. However, after Donahue was axed, Chris became nice and compliant Tweety - and raged more against the left, and anyone on it, than the Right.
It is all too appalling, especially as Chris actually used to be a Peace Corps volunteer in Africa. What a colossal betray of Kennedy! But perhaps the behavior can be explained by Chris contracting schistosomiasis from a river fluke. Those little varmints will play havoc with your brain.
Maybe ask vidor! He never seems to learn or progress only yap incessantly about his lone nut bilge. Newsflash! That crippled old 'dawg' won't hunt anymore. And only fools that also buy into humnan virgin birth are lame enough to swallow it.
Put Bugliosi's book, read the actual compendious files, documents, records and data - and stop being an annoying little putz.