Letters to the Editor
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What Really Happened
They have tried it for over 300 hundred years, and now they've finally got the formula for having sway over a democratic population. The religious prescription failed - witches just didn't work. The political prescription failed as well - the Communists collapsed. But now they have found the true elixir: children. I love children. You love children. We all love children. Even when they are not our own, we love them because they are lovable. They are the future, and so we want to protect them. But the United States law enforcement apparatus has twisted and bent this love into something perverse, something that can be used against random individuals, that can be used as a GET INTO JAIL FREE card for the whole adult population. It is the new scarlett letter, a digital Star of David that can be affixed to any person thus rendering them a nonperson.
Look at the recent laws. They are preparing all of us to be used like cattle, but they are practicing on what all of us consider to be the lowest of the low. They want to mark them with identifier tags that render the concept of privacy obsolete. They want to throw them back into prison if they so much as think about children, thus creating the first Thought Crime in the United States. Orwell must be weaping somewhere.
But all of that is not the worst. No, the worst is how they either deliberately or inadverantly corrupt the idea of what a child is, how they rape our minds by suggesting that children are somehow less than children, that they are objects to be played with by adults. That is their greatest sin.
And it is a sin we must resist. We cannot continue down this path. Like all such paths in this century and the one just before it, the ultimate destination is the ovens. After all, what else should we do with a population so designated? What else is to be done with people who have been tagged as grotesques who are not worthy or civil or even human rights?? Of course, they must be destroyed.
Debbie Nathan is one of the few journalists who is willing to buck this trend. Her writing about Arthur Friedman (of "Capturing the Friedmans" infamy) is extraordinarily wise. Here was a man who fought his whole life against his own worst impulses, who raised a good family without doing a single wrong to his sons, but who was laid low by an idiotic law that claims that possessing a publication is the same as committing an act (and for those of you who would foam at the mouth, suspected Communists underwent the same treatment during the McCarthy era). We have tyrants in our midst, terrible ones, and since American prisons have become amongst the worst places in the civilized world, they have a power over all of us - whether we wish to believe it or not - that must be wrested away from them. Only when over-zealous and corrupt prosecutors know that their trump card is no longer available to them will they stop playing it.
Now is the time to act, to cry out "Sic Semper Tyrannis" and be done with all the petit martinettes in our country. Only then will we truly be free.
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For those curious about the original article...
By doing a blogsearch on Google, I was able to find a link to a user who reprinted (I think) the entire article on Myspace's blogs. The user's handle is fuseaction.
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Here's an idea!
One of you, somewhere out there, must have access to the original article. So..... Maybe you could paste it into an e-mail, and put it up here as a post!(???)
Too bad you do not have the original posts as well. I had a pretty good one. I thought I had a good chance for a red star.
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Bringing topic back to: what the HECK, editors?
Rather than explore an issue that's obviously of interest, of bearing, from a reputable journalist, Salon editors kill the article and a lively discussion by its customers. On the basis of one journalist saying, "maybe researching child exploitation isn't completely perilous," while another journalist said, "maybe it is."
Versus giving the green light to an article about how those crazy kids have discovered Starbucks as a place to hang out. One with errors, beginning with the misspelling of "Caramel" (hmm, maybe they should delete that article & replies - fast!).
Glad to see cafe lifestyle articles get the top fold, while ones concerning false imprisonment, the hysteria of crowds, journalistic freedom and public policy are given the short shrift.
So completely disappointed. I'm not seeing much evidence of "premium" writing in this case...
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Was this it?
After having read the article my first thought on why it was pulled was that Eichenwald was very very pissed and threatened over the e-mail quotes from him in the piece.
But I did a little more looking around, and I think I discovered the probable real reason for why Salon pulled that article.
At http://www.opendemocracy.net/openblogs/blog/od/2006/08/25/Are-journalists-entitled-to-investigate-everything-1.html?page=comments
Kurt Eichenwald writes:
"As the original story makes clear, at no time did I or the New York Times break the law. We explicitly complied with every aspect of it. And even so, we were able to expose this troubling world.
Debbie Nathan's representation of what we did was false and misleading. Even when it was explained to her directly, she was incapable of understanding what we did."
So it seems that the relevant part of the article that got it pulled was the very first sentences of the piece: "New York Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald looked at a lot of kiddie-porn Web sites recently while researching the front-page article he published last weekend about "child model" erotica. The kind of looking he did can get a journalist arrested, but Eichenwald isn't very worried."[My emphasis.]
So Salon caved because it is too dangerous to even imply that someone might have looked at kiddie-porn.
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Unfortunate, but possibly necessary
It is extremely unfortunate that Salon felt it had to go so far in retracting Debbie Nathan's article -- but I strongly suspect Shea's proposed explanation is the right one: Some jerk or organization that felt such an opinion piece should not be given exposure on the Web made a threat against Salon that Salon felt it could not fend off, and so it gave in to the pressure; possibly all of us letter-writers who would normally deplore such censorship would have done the identical thing in Salon's place.
But this episode does bring to light the fact that despite Salon's not infrequently stunning journalism, it also has piss-poor standards of fact-checking. Or as far as I can tell, nonexistent standards of fact-checking.
It also has piss-poor standards of covering the range of topics that any truly respected news source would cover.
Have you noticed all the science articles recently? Hey, it's not really important for the well-informed person to know anything about science, anyway.
Or maybe it actually is.