Insults And Apologies: Your Letters

We want to hear from our readers! Please submit all letters to the editor through our feedback form, and remember to specify which article your letter is in response to. Letters may be edited for length.

Paraphilia And Parenting

Re: The GOP’s Loyalty Fetish by Paul Waldman

One small counterweight—if you read The American Conservative you will find Mr. Bush being demonized as nicely as he is in The Nation . It's quite heartwarming.

Marshall Carter

This "loyalty fetish" is a classic case of the strict father frame described by George Lakoff. The father can do no wrong or the whole value structure is tainted and falls apart. The right does it with Ronald Reagan—who has been all but deified. George H.W. didn't merit it because he didn't invoke it. But Rove and Cheney—supported by wingnut mouthpieces Limbaugh and Faux News—wield it like a club. And devotees of the frame fall into line like baby ducklings, just as Lakoff described. It's not pretty, folks. It's nothing like democracy. Just true.

Chris Finnie

Chinese Connections

Re: Logging Off On China by Robert B. Reich

I am not surprised at Prof. Reich lining up with the China bashing yahoos, using phony "civil rights" issues to inflame public opinion against China and lending support to the Rumsfeld-Cheney clique who view China as a potential enemy that we will have to engage militarily down the road. There are plenty of "human rights" issues here in the U.S. like preventing labor unions from organizing free from intimidation by employers. You would think that a former Secretary of Labor would be speaking out on such issues.

Wilfred Lumer

Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction And The President

Re: Jurassic President by Frank O’Donnell

The major effect of the warming and melting will be far more damaging to humanity than stronger storms.  As polar ice—which is fresh water—melts it flows into the North Atlantic and North Pacific, lowering the salinity of both oceans. Both North America and Europe are dependant on the Atlantic circulator current, which includes the Gulf Stream.

With less salinity in the current, it slows down.  Who cares how fast it runs, you say?  Well, we all should care, for this is the main thing responsible for keeping North America and Europe warm by circulating the heat from the equator northward. 

Without it we freeze. Google "little ice age" for a small peek at what lies in store. And with peak oil upon us or close, how will we heat our homes?  We've already clear cut most of our forests to profit the corporate whores.

Why do I get the feeling that America is being led off a cliff and the head lemming is our president?

Harold Fink

Perhaps President G(lobal) W(arming) Bush should consult with Hugo Award-winning Kim Stanley Robinson, a science fiction writer whose books—include "Forty Signs of Rain" and "Fifty Degrees Below Zero" deal seriously with the catastrophic aspects of this terrible problem.

Michael Zalar

On The Offensive

Re: The Right To Be Offended  by Gary Younge

"Such actions should be opposed; but no one claims Protestant, Catholic or Jewish values are incompatible with democracy." Here, you're quite well off the mark. Many—though not enough—claim that all religious values are incompatible with democracy, with its attendant secular, anti-clerical values—Tom Paine, for instance.

It's true that the "clash of civilizations" message is an oversimplification, and a jingoistic one at that. However, there is a third perspective, one neither "Christian" nor "Muslim;" one thoroughly anti-clerical, which holds that this clash of civilizations amounts to an attack by two bullies—one Christian, one Muslim—on secular humanism. It's Tom Paine's own common sense philosophy—secular, atheistic, humanistic—that will lose in this clash, regardless of whether the victor in the religious conflict is Western or Eastern.

Yes, all religions are incompatible with democracy. All faiths derive their power from some entity other than "the people" and make the people accountable to that entity. Until we eliminate religion from political life entirely, and discourage it in public life, the clash of civilizations will rage on. Any shot at religion, any ridicule of superstition, is a step in that direction.

James Brown

And then there's Rose's relationship with one Daniel Pipes. 

Chromatius Aquileiensis

In characterizing Jyllands-Posten's publishing of the Muhammad caricatures as pure Muslim bashing, Younge ignores the context of the action: the Rushdie affair, the Theo van Gogh killing, the inability of a Danish children's book writer to find anyone who would illustrate the prophet Muhammad.  Is it not a problem when people self-censor because they are afraid of being killed?

David Choweller

Apologies Don’t Stop Wars

Re: Fukuyama’s Misleading Apology by Patrick Doherty

Patrick Doherty has some valid points. However, all commentators seem to miss the fallacy of the essential premise: Bush supports neither democracy nor freedom. You need no more proof than administration hostility to democratically elected governments in Venezuela, Haiti, Palestine and Bolivia. And Fukuyama is disingenuous if he thinks that Bush will ever change the essential premise. The concept of America fighting for freedom and democracy simply plays too well with the American people for it ever to be changed.

However, American political behavior may well change. At the outset the Bush administration believed it could run the world. Since then the specter of the world's greatest military machine being stymied by 6 million Sunni Arabs together with the rise of independent financial powers have combined to force the foreign policy establishment to think again in terms of a multi-polar world. Resource rich countries such as Russia, Iran and Venezuela suddenly have bargaining power. Countries in debt need no longer adhere to the mandates of the IMF but can look for the best terms from China or countries such as Venezuela that are awash in petrodollars. To be relevant in such a world, U.S. foreign policy will once again need to think in terms of mutual self interest instead of unilateral mandates.

John Hofer