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Lighten
Up on Linda
In her July 6 entry in the
dialogue "Linda Tripp: Victimized or Vicious," Margaret Carlson writes,
concerning Linda Tripp, "I have to stick by my observation that people, for
better or for worse, grow into their appearance, coming to look on the outside
as they feel on the inside."
Imagine
if Rush Limbaugh said something like that regarding, say, Hillary?
-- Jim Howard
Tripp
Trapped
It seems
that most people view Linda Tripp (Linda Tripp: Victimized or Vicious) as some kind of wicked
stepmother, and that is unfortunate. Tripp is justified in worrying that her
job and reputation were being threatened after Clinton's lawyer identified her
as someone who is "not to be believed." It would be very easy for me to say,
piously, that I would have sacrificed my job rather than make the recordings,
but I am a single 24-year-old without children, and I can afford to take a more
principled stance. Tripp has not only herself to think about when it comes to
protecting her job and reputation, but also the well-being of her children and
her ability to support them. What would people think of a mother who sacrificed
her own children in order to protect the president and Monica?
-- Damian M.
Schloming
Taping
for Trouble
Please ask Jonah Goldberg
(Linda Tripp:
Victimized or Vicious) to explain why he thinks, if all Tripp wanted to do
was to protect her good name, she continued to tape Lewinsky long after she
would have had enough "evidence" for this purpose. As Carlson says, "A 'seeker
of the truth,' as Tripp refers to herself, might at best need to tape one
conversation and hold it in reserve for that dark moment when her veracity was
challenged. Instead, she taped 20 hours' worth and offered them up
gratuitously, to get the ball, which wasn't moving much, rolling."
Why,
Jonah?
-- Angus
Maitland
Yates?
Yikes!
As one of the constituents of
Sidney Yates, the topic of Jacob Weisberg's July 2 "Strange
Bedfellow," I can tell you that he has been a distant and ineffective
congressman for decades. I say this despite the fact that I agree with Yates on
most political issues. Not surprisingly, Weisberg admits his personal
relationships with Yates and his staff.
Yates has done little for the
economic development of our district. While I admire his championship of the
arts and the environment, these do little concrete for the vast majority of
constituents. Yates is the only congressman in the Illinois delegation who
refuses to set up an e-mail link for constituents. How does this sit with a
Microsoft enterprise? Yates refused to step aside when he became obviously
physically infirm. He misses more votes than all but a handful of
congressmen.
Yates maintains little
contact with his district and made only token campaign appearances. He refused
to debate his campaign opponents. Emperor Sid treated those Democrats who dared
to oppose him as traitors and thought of himself as congressman by divine
right.
Our district will now be
vastly better off by his replacement by a person 45 years his junior. Yates has
personally enriched himself at the expense of his constituents and his
retirement is welcome to many.
Ironically, one of the biggest news splashes made by Yates in the last decade
was when one of his staffers invoked Sid's clout and attempted to set up
dog-walking runs in Rock Creek Park. When this hit the newspapers, out-of-touch
Sid denied any knowledge of the aide's activities. What an embarrassment.
-- Thomas A.
Marshall
Phenomenology of Spirits
As a member of that
clandestine group of German wine lovers that Fareed Zakaria describes in his
June 30 "Wine's World," I feel obliged to clarify the place in the pantheon
of winedom of one of the figures mentioned in Zakaria's hymn.
I speak, of course, of
Hegel. Whatever the merits of the rather severe idiom in which Hegel chose to
couch his ideas, he was nonetheless a member in good standing in the wine
lovers' circle. He grew up in a wine drinking area (Württemberg), and he did a
stint as a house tutor at Frankfurt's most distinguished wine merchant. In
fact, in an effort to lure him into taking the job, his friend Hölderlin even
promised him, "you will drink very good Rhine wine or French wine at the
table." When he was writing his Phenomenology of Spirit, despite his very
meager income at the time, he was ordering shipments of Médoc and Pontak
(Haut-Brion). (See where his priorities lay.) When he became famous in Berlin,
his tastes shifted slightly to Mosels (loved them), Rhine wines, and Cahors
(lots of it). He especially loved the 1811 vintage of "comet" wines, and he and
Schleiermacher even stopped quarreling for a while after Schleiermacher gave
Hegel the address of a good Bordeaux merchant!
Worldly
in his heart, he was also not averse to the Italians, drinking and praising
"Lacrima Christi" (red) as he was writing a Latin oration on the Augsburg
Confession. When he was visiting Saxon Dresden at the height of the Prussian
reaction in the 1820s, he surprised his students sitting at the table with him
by ordering the most expensive champagne in Europe, Château Sillery. With none
of the students quite understanding just what called for such a lavish outlay
on the old fellow's part, he astonished them even more by raising his glass and
toasting July 14 and the storming of the Bastille. So on July 14, instead of
champagne, a crisp Riesling might be the way for us German wine lovers to toast
that venerated French holiday. We can celebrate Hegel and the revolution at the
same time. And indulge our secret taste.
-- Terry
Pinkard Professor of philosophyGeorgetown UniversityWashington
Bedrock
Blues
As much as I enjoy Scott
Shuger's daily analysis of "Today's Papers," from time to time he gets the
facts just plain wrong. Usually it's in the last paragraph, and it's usually
some flippant remark that would be witty if it were only true.
In the
July 2 Today's Papers, Shuger wrote:
[Clinton] told families
there that home ownership is an investment in society, the bedrock of
middle-class life. Wonder if the Times had trouble resisting the
observation that it's an investment Clinton's never made, a bedrock he's never
stood on.
I quote
from Page 151 of Meredith Oakley's biography On the Make: The Rise of Bill
Clinton :
Hillary, three months shy
of her twenty-eighth birthday, returned to Fayetteville ... inclined to accept
the twenty-nine-year-old Clinton's marriage proposal. Any remaining reluctance
was dashed when he greeted her return with the news that he had purchased a
small brick and stonework house she had admired.
This
oft-reported account of Clinton's marriage proposal is well known. Too bad
Shuger felt the need to be witty--but wrong. Guess he was just following
Clinton's Fifth Law of Politics (Page 146)--"Under enough pressure, most
people--but not everybody--will stretch the truth on you."
-- Kari
Chisholm Portland, Ore.
The
Delicate Art of Profanity
I was just reading this
fascinating and well-written article ("Flame Posies,"
July 3) about the New York Times and the Washington Post and
admiring the balls of a publication that ran the headline "Who gives a f***
about the yen?" last week and had already used the phrase "holy shit" upward of
five times in the opening paragraphs, when I happened upon this sentence:
"Later that year, the paper spread its legs for the theory that TWA Flight 800
was downed by foul play, based on the discovery of 'PETN' residues in the
wreckage."
I am, personally, a big fan
of the well-chosen off-color remark. "Screw you," "kiss my ass," "fuck
me"--these are all phrases that have levels of meaning that have nothing to do
with the physical acts they describe. (See Donnie Brasco and
"fuggedaboudit.") I have recently deliberately begun to use variations of "kick
ass" and "bites X in the ass" because they are colorful, evocative phrases;
because, thanks to South Park , ass references are newly familiar and
hilarious and because they don't evoke particularly vivid mental images of
asses any longer. Or at least, less than they used to.
What I am very gently trying
to get at is: I don't think the phrase "spread its legs" has quite entered the
off-color oversoul. I think, like "up the ass," it is just a smidgen too vivid
for the average reader. (Then again, we have seen the rise of "suck" in its
many forms, so perhaps I'll be proved wrong.) So when you write "spreads its
legs," that's exactly what I think of, and for me, there is something
inherently unpleasant in having my gender's chief sexual activity thrown up on
the electronic page as an analogy for submissiveness. Human reproduction pretty
much hinges on leg-spreading and, hence, one would think this act would be
synonymous with ... well, something better than the Times being
sluttishly seduced into an ill-supported TWA theory.
Bottom
line: You don't have so much as a Saturday Night Live sketch to point to
as an example of how the phrase "spread its legs" has become so prevalent as to
have mostly lost its primary meaning; I think sex deserves better than to be
compared to bad reporting and I'm not especially keen on seeing my gender's
role during sex interpreted as one of whorish submission.
-- Kate Powers
School
Principles
David Brooks chides Bill
McKibben in the July 1 "Breakfast Table" for having one child, arguing that it is "symbolic
politics taken to an extreme." If only one couple does it, it will have little
effect on the situation. "Maybe if everybody followed McKibben's lead it would
[make a difference]." In the next paragraph, he says it's OK for Bill and
Hillary Clinton to send their kid to a private school while opposing school
choice because you should be able to rise above principle to send your kids to
private school.
Am I the only one who notices
the faulty logic? The problem is that the Clintons aren't an isolated example.
Many of the opponents of school choice send their kids to private school, even
while professing steadfast belief in public schools. This is like McKibben
having 10 children, making his wife/significant other take fertility drugs, and
then telling everyone we are running out of resources and everyone
else should have one child.
If there
were only one white, affluent couple sending its child to private schools while
decrying school choice for others, that would be one thing. For an entire
political class to engage in this behavior is a national disaster. Perhaps that
is why (as Brooks says) public schools are crappy in three-fourths of the
country.
-- Bill
Jones Pasadena, Calif.
The AFI
Cannon
I followed Charles Paul
Freund's argument in the July 1 "High Concept" about the AFI 100 greatest films list and the
decline of cultural gatekeeping right up to the point when he began discussing
the actual movies on the list. But his offhand comment that Bonnie and
Clyde "presents criminality in soft focus" is so off-the-beam it taints his
entire analysis. Exactly what is "soft focus" about the bank teller who gets
shot full in the face or Gene Hackman's agonizing death throes or Bonnie and
Clyde 's final, staccato "dance of death"?
Freund's take on the
Godfather pictures as a "daydream of limitless wealth and power" is even
loonier. Has he even seen The Godfather Part II , which charts the
complete moral decay of Pacino's Michael in minute psychological detail? Freund
is right that in many ways the Godfather pictures (especially Part
II ) are the opposite of the traditional gangster movie, but he's precisely
wrong in his reasons why. In fact, it's the older gangster pictures that
romanticize the charismatic crooks portrayed by Bogart, Cagney, Robinson, et
al. There's nothing romantic about the criminal violence depicted in the
Godfather movies or the way the blood seems to drain out of Pacino's
character over the course of the epic.
Given the
volumes that have been written about these movies, Freund's blatant misreadings
are stupefying. Maybe a little more cultural gatekeeping on the part of
Slate
editors is in order.
-- Steve
Warrick Pleasant Hill, Calif.
The Dirt
on White Boards
Regarding the June 29
"Millionerds" column on white boards, Michael Lewis writes,
"But I have now seen many hundreds of these boards, bearing the remnants of
some recent group meeting, and I cannot recall ever seeing anything on them
remotely resembling a thought."
Have you now? Have you ever
been part of a team developing a OO plan for a software project? Have you ever
diagramed a relational database for a critique from your colleagues? Most of
the white boards you've seen were spied while you were escorted about by PR
flacks or techs and suits on a PR mission. They were all sort of nervous
because you're a celebrity writer. They gave you free meals. Am I right so
far?
You've
never seen a white board used in real technical development, have you? You
don't really know what you're talking about, do you? The fact that what you've
just written--and much of what you've written before--is untrue doesn't bother
you because it's all in fun, right? And not really important, true? Just to
amuse, you see. You're a stylist.
-- Mitchell
Coffey
So ...
What?
Regarding Michael Lewis'
comments in "Millionerds" about programmers' use of "so": It's a
California programmer thing, not a programmer thing. I work in
Champaign-Urbana, Ill., (about 150 miles south of Chicago, 120 miles west of
Indianapolis, home of the University of Illinois) and no professional
programmer I know has this verbal mannerism.
My
personal opinion would be that people give so many technical presentations in
formal and informal settings, where every other sentence or clause starts with
"so"--"so then the frob bit is set, so this path is followed, so no data hits
the wire"--that they just "get in the habit" of prefacing everything with
"so."
-- Alan M.
Carroll Cisco Systems
Working
Words
Although Jason Turner's
remark, discussed in the June 29 "Chatterbox," may have been unintentional in its reference to the
"welcome sign" over Auschwitz's main gate, his attitude remains the same:
forced labor without hope for education, decent child care, or a better future.
I'm not Jewish or German, but I immediately recognized the infamous quote.
I believe a Haitian proverb
properly sums up the entire work/welfare debate: "If work were good for you,
the rich would leave none for the poor."
Amen.
-- Max E. Hughey
Jr. San Diego
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