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Right
Wing, Wrong Neck
In
"If At First
You Don't Secede," Alex Heard should have used the term "redneck" instead
of "right-wing." It is unfair to lump a bunch of wackos in with those who are
just politically conservative. The new "Republicans of Texas" are
gun-brandishing "rednecks" with an attitude. I grew up in the Southwestern
state of Oklahoma and have seen others of the same type. As a conservative, I
think we need to revise government and the general posturing of the BATF, FBI,
and CIA, but I know people will pay for misuse of authority eventually, and I
think there are other ways to fix our problems without stupidity injected into
the debate. Those "rednecks" don't represent my part of the political
spectrum.
-- Pastor Lew Everett
Lewis Maysey III
Kooks.
Cranks. Loons.
I was offended by the
language employed by Alex Heard in "If At First You Don't
Secede," his portrait of the participants in the Republic of Texas
movement. With an insouciant and supercilious tone, he employed descriptors
such as "trailer-trash," "redneck," "codger," "nut," "fringe," and the rest of
that all-too-familiar list.
The
undereducated, lower-middle-class white Southern males comprise the only
identifiable class of people in our country that can still be insulted with
impunity in today's politically correct society. What if, instead of white
folk, Heard had attended a gathering of Hispanics, Muslims, radical feminists,
or even ordinary-grade media liberals? He would never have used analogous terms
to describe them.
-- Tito Perdue
Cops as
Robbers
Akhil Reed Amar made a
disturbing comment in his dialogue with Alan Dershowitz on "Truth and Crime." In
criticizing the ability of the exclusionary rule to reverse a conviction, he
wrote: "The wrong done was the search, not the conviction. Yet the exclusionary
rule in effect rewards B with just such a windfall by sparing him from the
conviction."
Amar
fails to grasp the purpose of the reversal. It is not a reward for the criminal
but a punishment for the prosecutor. It is very important in our imperfect
justice system that the police and prosecutors do not get the idea that the
ends justify the means. As it stands now, police officers, especially in urban
areas, present more illegally obtained evidence than legally obtained evidence.
They justify their actions with the fact that the men and women whose civil
rights they routinely violate are involved in criminal activity, and therefore
have no rights. However, this indicates that law enforcement is convicting
before trying and is ignoring the fact that in performing illegal searches,
they themselves are criminals. I would encourage a reinterpretation of the
exclusionary principle to keep criminals in jail where they belong, but only if
the cops and prosecutors are severely punished for their crimes as well.
-- Mark
Hoofnagle
Book
Revue
It was clear in "Z." that Walter
Kirn had made up his mind about the book Mason & Dixon before he
picked it up. Kirn doesn't like Thomas Pynchon and doesn't like the kind of
novel Pynchon writes. Nor does he have anything interesting to say about why he
doesn't like them.
You might as well pick
somebody to review a Picasso retrospective who never liked all that Cubist
stuff in the first place (too hard to look at), or have somebody who thinks
rock music is just screeching write about Alanis Morissette. The reviewer ought
to consider whether the work succeeds on its own terms.
To say
nothing of how, somehow, it's not only OK but cool to say, "Hey, I didn't even
read the book in the first place," as if we could really infer the book is
unreadable from that. This, I guess, is Slate's self-chosen role, the forum for
those who can't really be bothered to try. How " '90s."
-- Andy Lowry
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