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Authoritarian Dictationship
Now that
you have published the "Diary" jottings of Benazir Bhutto, regarded by many
Pakistanis as the most corrupt politician that unfortunate nation has ever
seen, I wonder whose diary you will publish next. How about Mobutu Sese Seko,
or perhaps Baby Doc Duvalier?
-- Joachim
Fernandes Santa Monica, Calif.
Stroman
Polanski
Thanks so
much to David Plotz for pointing out the true characters and legacies of Strom
Thurmond and Jesse Helms in "The Old Carolinians." As Plotz so ably demonstrates, that
great line from the film Chinatown is absolutely on the mark:
"Politicians, whores, and buildings--if they get old enough, they get
respectable." Of course, both Thurmond and Helms fit into at least two of those
categories ...
-- Roger
Simon Austin, Texas
Battle
of the Sexes
In
"Gorilla
Warfare," Robert Wright has misconstrued what gorillas can teach us. It's
certainly a striking fact that male gorillas are twice the size of females; but
looking from gorillas to humans, what should strike us is not that men are
somewhat bigger than women, but that they are nowhere near twice as big. What
evolution is trying to tell us here is that male aggression is much less
important for human beings than it is for gorillas. Wright's argument against
women in the infantry depends also on the assertion that what men in fact fight
about is women. That's debatable. At least as good an explanation is that men
fight about Lebensraum. Wright is no doubt familiar with the wars of the
chimpanzees at Gombe, which are much better interpreted as fights over
territory than fights over females. As for things getting "more primitive, not
less" when soldiers go to war, this is also a fairly careless argument. Actual
combat could just as well make things better, not worse, for women. It might be
easier to build solidarity when your life depends on it, rather than back home
in camp; and men might find it easier to believe that women can fight if they
could see them doing it.
-- Mark
Rosenfelder Oak Park, Ill.
Robert Wright
replies: Anyone who doubts that male chimpanzees spend lots of time
fighting over females should read Frans de Waal's book Chimpanzee
Politics . Though the chimp colony de Waal studied was not in a purely
natural setting, as were the chimps at Gombe studied by Jane Goodall, de Waal,
for that very reason, got a clearer look at daily life within a colony than
Goodall did. His exacting minute-by-minute account of hostile encounters and
sexual encounters leaves no doubt about what was ultimately at stake when males
fought (often coalitionally). And, actually, Goodall's own data, as synthesized
in her magnum opus The Chimpanzees of Gombe , also support the idea that
males fight over access to fertile females. This isn't to say that
territoriality couldn't also in theory be a cause of aggressive tendencies in
humans and/or chimps. But it is to say that females--an inherently scarce
sexual resource, in Darwinian terms--are in both species a big part of the
impetus for the evolution of aggressive tendencies in males.
Where
the Boys Are
Garance Franke-Ruta's
response to
Herbert Stein's "Watching the Couples Go By" is amusing, but ridiculous. Stein's
piece was simply light musings. How anyone could work up an angry, sweat-laden
combat attack over Stein's reverie, which I think is quite lovely, is beyond
me. And that part about "erotic confessionals" was too funny to be real! If
Franke-Ruta actually believes for a sane moment that Stein's cafe reflections
are "erotic confessionals," if this is the frustration she experiences from
"Watching the Couples Go By," then she had better not read anything at
all. And finally, the idea that the editors could have spared her the injury of
having to read Stein's piece had they listed it under the title of "Diary"
takes the prize for "most ludicrous statement thus far expressed in the history
of Slate's publication." I suppose Franke-Ruta was compelled to read every
single line without really wanting to at all? Alas, blame it on the boys! Too
many male editors at Slate!
-- Mike Grey San
Francisco
It's
Going to Be All White
Being Afro-American and
reading Eric Liu's "The Unbearable Being of Whiteness" was like finding a kindred
soul. It has been my feeling for some years that all the talk about race is in
fact just one word: assimilation.
--James R. Hurd
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