Letters to the Editor
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he deserved it
Having worked in the travel industry for a few years, I’m going to have to say that he deserved to be arrested and thrown into jail. Travel would be better if airlines cracked down on passenger’s behavior and more people were arrested for causing disturbances like that.
It’s not the airline’s fault that he wasn’t intelligent enough to make sure he didn’t leave his personal items at the gate. Yelling at the airline employees because you did something stupid just makes you look like more of an idiot. Claiming that the whole thing is everyone else’s fault proves you’re an idiot.
Oh, and having read Victorian novels, calling that place a “Victorian hellhole of a prison” just seems like a ridiculous exaggeration. Prisons aren’t supposed to be pleasant!
I’m agreeing with Cesium133 that he picked spending the extra days in jail so he could get more material to write to try to make money off of his idiocy and bad behavior.
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one more thing
I think that maybe an "editor" should have cleaned up some of the "quotation marks" that are "rife" through this "essay."
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crime and punishment
The condoning of prison rape makes no sense. If the goal is to punish, the guards need to do the raping so punishment is even.
Rapists in or out of prison should be castrated. Castration would have a serious deterring effect.
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MJB and Kansasgirl
Again, who or what was responsible for his incarceration is provided as the background information for the actual journal. It's not the point of the piece. At all. It's completely peripheral. Personally, I read a reasonable amount of regret in Kurth's descriptions of his own actions, but again, that's irrelevant, because it's not the main thrust of the piece.
There's nothing wrong with personal responsibility per se. But what I've seen in a large number of responses to this piece are people so hung up on what they see as Kurth's self-pity and shirking of said responsibility that these readers do not actually, y'know, read his writing. The conservative talking machine has used the lack of "personal responsibility" as the bogeyman let in by the New Deal; regardless of whether or not that's accurate, this particular talking point has so clearly gotten beaten into peoples' heads that they find it necessary to get extremely upset over the issue in contexts where personal responsibility is completely irrelevant.
That's why it's in quotes. The issue is not personal responsibility. The issue is the endless, vicious badgering done in the name of the talking point--which, possibly not incidentally, has effectively quashed any prospect of discussion about the actually matter of this piece.
Either you care about "just another prison story," or you don't. But that's what this piece is supposed to be, and it's a good one, and it baffles and frustrates me that my fellow readers have gotten so bogged down in complete and utter trivia.
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America, America...
It's not that Mr. Kurth is white and a citizen of the United States.
It's not that he acted like an asshole on a plane and his punishment for this far outweighed the crime, just as many people who are not white and a citizen of the United States experience every day.
It's not that he didn't deserve to be treated this way.
It's not that no one, and I mean no one, deserves to be treated this way.
It's that so many of you are so poisoned with the embitterment and sadness of our age.
It's that so many of you have desensitized yourselves to the point that imprisonment, rape and inhumanity mean absolutely nothing to you when it's someone not "like you," or another human being is nothing more than a prime time TV show.
And, most importantly and sadly, it's that so many of you either refuse or are incapable of dreaming of a better world than this one.
To those of us who refuse to stop believing there can be a better world made from this one, your letters are more than troubling, they are deeply saddening. I deeply pity you your cynicism, your disconnection from the good and bad of your fellow man, and the product of this, your loss of humanity.
I pity that you have been so defeated; for once, if only for a brief time as children, you had this belief in your dreams, your play, your friends who looked like you and did not, who acted like you and did not, no matter where you were born and to who.
You let this world and our age take your humanity from you. I wonder if you even put up a fight.
And, finally, for those of you who have raised the spector of 9/11 as an excuse and a reason for inhumane punishment such as this, as someone who was touched deeply by the tragedy of that day on personal terms, I cannot writer this letter without saying to you that 9/11 is not an excuse for the collective inhumanity expressed here in these letters.
9/11 is a reason to fight for our humanity harder than we ever have before.
But this is your own affair, your decision, and perhaps, all of our reckoning.
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wow
So glad you ditched The Fix in favor of "what you do very well."
It makes me sad to say it, but though I've been a premium member since the program was rolled out, I'm on the verge of a non-renewal vow. Push me a little, Salon - why not another DD piece?
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Flying in the age of terror
Asshole or not, official over-reaction or otherwise, Peter Kurth's account maintains a snide tone implying that part of his problem was that he was dealing with unreasonable and "snooty" (the default slur) Brits.
It's worth pointing out that, while I'm perfectly happy to sling mud at brits myself, Kurth should count himself lucky that he wasn't a foreigner running afoul of the utterly ridiculous US treatment of everyone that arrives without the Pope's personal blessing.
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Peter Kurth is a very interesting person
and not the one-dimensional stereotype that some on this board appear to see him as being.
Letter writers who are interested in knowing more about Kurth can look at his website at www.peterkurth.com and at this Salon interview with Kurth that was done at the time his biography of Isadora Duncan was published - archive.salon.com/people/conv/2001/11/12/kurth/index.html?pn=2
Good people do stupid things. I would not have acted as Kurth did because I would have anticipated being arrested. But even accepting his arrest as predictable doesn't mean Kurth's treatment following tye arrest wasn't an overreaction (as it appears to have been).