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• Wednesday, November 19, 2008 08:51 AM

  @ Stonecutter

  If you're gonna decide to print stuff like this, at least "own" it in a straightforward, honest way, and reflect on the screwed up motives that caused you to post it in the first place.

  I find the slanted selection of Editor's Choice letters to be a passive way of "arguing back" with overwhelming reader response, hundreds of letters decrying this choice. It is a craven use of petty power, and increases my agitation about the editorial judgement here. There is a knee-jerk defensiveness that seems to characterize so many of Joan Walsh's choices (and remarks) about writing that is about women. From Hillary onward.

  I am beginning to see these episodes at Salon as almost due to a kind of psychological enmeshment. I believe all women share damage from living in this culture. I believe that Joan is so empathically triggered by any woman's assertiveness that she can't get past the relief of seeing or reading assertion to the point that she can be thoughtful about the assertive writer's content, or about the larger implications of publishing that content. For me, the larger implication is civic responsibility. I think fine publications should display that.

  I may not be with the crowd on this, but I think we all, journalist, pundit, author alike, share in the responsibility for helping the culture evolve. We share it, or we abandon it.

  This unrecognized emotional stuff is hobbling to Joan professionally (depending how one defines success), and it greatly affects this precious real estate.

  Thinking of it this way, given my own psychological history (I majored in enmeshment), I for the first time in a long while feel more compassion than annoyance about Joan. I know why women dissolve. I have dissolved. I am also older than she. I have probably cracked and collapsed harder than she ever will. Joan is smart, alert, and accomplished. She has fought her way into a high post in the publishing community, and I admire that.

  As a private person, I sincerely wish Joan well. As a citizen and a mother who wishes my daughter would inherit a different world, I wish she were not Salon's editor.

  Her decision to select and then to champion this article is why.

  —Lobelia Read Lobelia's other letters
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