Thursday, July 3, 2008

Currently: walking to the curb from here
Today’s Feature: “The Republican Speaks of Jungles” by Lauren Frey
Digest: “Mp3 Digest” by Erik Bryan

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Letters for publication in The Morning News should be emailed to letters@themorningnews.org. Letters must be exclusive to The Morning News, and may be edited for length. Authors will not be contacted if their letter is published. All letters must be signed. No attachments, please. We value your correspondence.

Edited by Kate Schlegel

Reader Mail

May 4, 2008

Hi, Kate,

Perhaps, instead of swearing off your beloved soup, you could try making it yourself. Yes, it may take a bit more time than it takes you to microwave a ready-made one, but it’s simple—and you can control the salt content. Why deny yourself a pleasure when the problem is so easily solved?

Yours,
Molly Bennett

Kate Schlegel responds:

Dear Molly,

Making soup is, indeed, simple. But in addition to being a soup person, I am also, sadly, an impatient person and a busy one. So I’ll keep soup off my meal plans for now.

Kate

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March 24, 2008

Dear Editors,

As an American currently living in Paris with my family, I was discouraged to read the broad, stereotypical claims made by Rosecrans Baldwin in “Paris I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down.” While reading his piece, I had the distinct sense that that he was pigeonholing a broader Parisian population, without experiencing a wider range of Parisians. It was at least remarkable that, in order to prove his points—that Parisians “don’t like anything,” that Parisians have a contempt for Paris, that Parisians lack humor, and that they’re generally rude—he only gave examples of two or three Parisians in a specific economic range.

But what about the rest of Parisians? In general, I have observed there are all different sorts. Some are quiet and reclusive. Others are loud and outgoing. One stranger may sit down beside you while out to eat and, by the end of the meal, you’ll feel like great friends. Another may eat alone in a quiet corner of a restaurant. And though many do support Obama, as the author suggests, many others, typically of a more conservative type, support Clinton. It is a range of people, acting and believing a range of things, just as it is in the U.S.

True, there are the cultural differences, but the average Parisian is not one type of person, but is an array of people as broad as the American array … and growing ever broader all the time.

So imagine this! If a Parisian were to visit a particular area of the U.S., he may enjoy particular aspects of his time spent there, but overall, his visit may just “bring him down.” Why? Because, he concludes, Americans don’t like anything. They have a contempt for their own country and they lack humor. Worst of all, they’re just so annoyingly rude. So, everything he’s heard is true: Americans are difficult and hard to live with, and that’s what he’ll tell his friends. Maybe he’ll write about it!

Whose fault is all of this? I maintain it is the fault of the Parisian, for not being able to overcome his cultural assumptions regarding Americans. For leaving on his cultural blinders. For not experiencing an array of Americans.

I appreciate Mr. Baldwin’s honesty and his tongue-in-cheek humor, but I do believe he should seek out a broader range of Parisians before writing an article that is on the verge of encouraging a conservative bigotry.

Robyn Miller

Rosecrans Baldwin responds…

Dear Robyn,

I appreciate your candor. You have seen through my campaign. But you left out of your shopping list the French who would vote for McCain. I have a couple you can meet, if you like.

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March 23, 2008

Dear Morning News Readers Who Think it Was Unfair That I Judged Díaz vs. Lippman Because I Already Have Read and Liked Díaz,

Are you batshit crazy? I mean that in the most evenhanded, levelheaded, unbiased way possible. If I loved an author’s first book, then I am less likely to like his second. That is because I am a literary author myself, and therefore embittered and unhappy to admire the works of others, and particularly unhappy to admire two books in a row. Nothing would have made me happier than to prefer What the Dead Know over The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Nevertheless, here is my revised list of connections to the books in the tournament. I teach Denis Johnson, too, and like 95 percent of the writers I know would give my left arm to have written Jesus’s Son. I loved Enduring Love but I didn’t like “Atonement” and I’m still pissed off that everyone else in the world did. I’ve read the descriptions of Shining at the Bottom of the Sea and I so love the idea that I really want to love the book. I like Tin House magazine and they publish Ovenman but I hate the cover. I have an aversion to lawyers-turned-novelists like Stephen L. Carter. I think Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name is a great title, though upon reflection maybe for an album by a wan singer-songwriter. I can never remember what the order of the words is in the title of Brock Clarke’s novel; he seems like a sterling fellow. I have been meaning to read The Savage Detectives for so long I am terrified it cannot live up to everyone’s praise of it, though I have loved the pieces of Bolaño I have read. Until I looked closely I thought Petropolis was Persepolis and I still can’t shake the idea that it’s not a graphic novel. I have never read a Marianne Wiggins novel and am deeply embarrassed about it and so feel humiliated when I see her books reviewed and therefore disinclined to read them. I have never heard of Remainder but can only assume that it’s about books: Ick. I’ve already read and loved And Then We Came to the End but heck, he’s young and got a lot of attention for the book already. Jonathan Lethem has a cool last name. And Ann Patchett has twice plucked my eyebrows.

There. Now you know everything. It is anyone’s guess whether any of these things makes me more or less likely to admire a book once I actually read it.

Sincerely,
Elizabeth McCracken
ToB judge

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March 23, 2008

Dear Mr. Warner,

I just wanted to thank you for your candid and insightful commentary on the second-round Tournament of Books matchup between Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke and Vendela Vida’s Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name.

I think Vida’s was the most critically overlooked novel of 2007. I worked at an independent bookstore last year (Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle) and spent a lot of time trying to convince coworkers and customers to read it. I must admit to feeling disappointment when I saw it matched up in the first round against The Savage Detectives (a book that no one needed much persuading to read, or at least purchase), and I resigned myself to clicking the “no way” button in response to the judge’s inevitable selection of Bolaño.

I knew it would be too much to expect Vida’s harrowingly lovely book to beat two of last year’s biggest, but I was comforted by your commentary and just wanted to pass along my appreciation.

I was especially interested in your comments about critical “certainty.” It helped me figure out why Sarvas’s decision irked me where McCracken’s, despite its bias, did not. It seems to have to do with tone, some kind of slippery difference between “this is my taste” vs. “this should be all our taste”… It’s probably got a lot more to do with that “wave of a hand,” but in any case, you’ve given me a lot to think about this morning. Thanks again for your astute commentary and for championing such fine books.

Appreciatively,
Elizabeth Ames Staudt

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March 13, 2008

Dear Morning News editors,

I quite happily read Elizabeth Kiem’s article on the elections in Russia last week. As I’ve been living in Russia this year, through both the parliamentary and presidential elections, my access to the news has been a combination of the Kremlin-backed television channels and any additional news I can glean as fast as possible at internet cafes and in rare bursts of wireless. It was nice to read something that didn’t dismiss the results before, at least, it meditated on the circumstances.

I wanted to update Kiem and others on the election atmosphere here, though what she gleaned from the televised bro-down of Medvedev and Putin together was definitely how it ended. If she was in town the week prior to the elections, she probably saw buses painted with advertisements to VOTE! for anyone at all really (my States-based parents passed on that this sudden campaign to get out the vote was to ensure the 50% turnout needed to make the election valid). She maybe saw a non-United Russia candidate appear on the news for the first time, an apparent response to international scrutiny. If she was staying with Russians, she may have seen the formal invitations to vote, issued by various parties, dropped into mailboxes. She may have seen on these invitations capsule biographies of all the candidates and observed that Medvedev’s was always the shortest.

I live with a 77-year-old babushka who I believe has anti-globalist leanings (in spite of having hosted foreign students for 15 years) and has a nicely collaged wall of socialist posters, including, oddly, a “Fight for your right to party!” declaration that is less Beasties, more post-Soviet. She voted for Medvedev in the end but was less enthusiastic about it than the young people I’ve met, saying just, “He’s a good speaker.” (I haven’t been in the States since our election process was launched, but with my limited contact I would guess you could say the same thing for Barack Obama.) In the week leading up to the election, a stranger rung at our intercom and without preface asked who we were voting for. My host mother said, “I haven’t decided,” and turned it off abruptly but was perturbed for some time afterward. She has seen many decades of what happens to Russians who dissent.

Get-out-the-vote ads the day before the election advertised it as the first holiday of spring. My host mother was nice enough to take me to the polls with her and the atmosphere was indeed festive: a buffet, live chamber music, books for children, balloons everywhere; it was a far cry from the polls in the grim lobby of government housing in my swing state back home. Talking with my father later, I observed that the festivity was probably less the result of the relative newness of the election process and more the result of a complete lack of tension regarding the results. On the way out, though, when exit pollers stopped to ask who we voted for, my host mother barked, “What do you want to know for?” The poller looked resigned to this reaction in a district full of pensioners.

As for the clip of Medvedev in jeans striding toward the stage in Red Square, practically holding hands with his predecessor, it was replayed on the news almost every night for a week. I will never cease to find this amazing.

Yours,
Lucy Morris
Yaroslavl, Russia

p.s. Television seeming to be the great Russian pastime, ours is always on but neither my babushka nor I saw coverage of the marches in Moscow and St. Petersburg. If there was anything to convince me of the state of mainstream Russian media, which I occasionally hope might be balanced, this was it.

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February 8, 2008

Dear Morning News folks,

So Barack Obama fans Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner agree that in a prospective match-up between Hillary Clinton and John McCain, they might well vote for the Republican. Which raises the question: On what basis do they support Obama? Is it just because he’s the anti-Hillary?

Don’t get me wrong. I like Obama, too, because I think his poetic style would be a huge relief from that of the most prosaic president in the history of the republic—but also because I agree with his consistent opposition to the war in Iraq. And I believe that an Obama administration would take a progressive approach on climate change, civil liberties, human rights, and, perhaps most important, appointments to the Supreme Court.

I don’t see any major policy differences between Clinton and Obama. My main problem with the prospect of another Clinton presidency is my distaste—shared by many Americans—for the dynastic right of succession that has crept into our presidential election cycles.

If Hillary Clinton becomes the Democratic nominee, however, I will gladly vote for her over John “100 years in Iraq” McCain. On all of the above-mentioned issues, she would be light years ahead of the man whose Straight-Talk Express took a detour to the doorstep of Jerry Falwell and the Christian right. The most extreme elements of the Republican Party may still think McCain is a closet liberal, but he’s proving them wrong.

On the key question of war, McCain has been particularly clear. Rather than extricating U.S. forces from an expensive, bloody occupation predicated on fear-mongering and massive fraud, the senator from Arizona would stay the course. In other words, no change, just more of the same: namely, an open-ended commitment to the quagmire in Iraq.

Regardless of Clinton fatigue, it’s hard to see how any supporter of the anti-war agent of change, Obama, could sign on for that nightmare scenario. But like they say, it’s a free country.

Timothy Ledwith

Kevin Guilfoile responds…

I appreciate Mr. Ledwith’s point; however, it assumes that Hillary Clinton’s position on Iraq has been closer to Barack Obama’s than it has been to John McCain’s.

Before April of 2007, when she changed her stance in advance of the Democratic debates, this was Hillary Clinton’s position on Iraq: “It is time for the president to stop serving up platitudes and present us with a plan for finishing this war with success and honor—not a rigid timetable that terrorists can exploit, but a public plan for winning and concluding the war.”

And this was John McCain’s: “Look, this is long and hard and difficult … . But to do what the Democrats want to do, and that’s set a date for withdrawal, even those who opposed the war from the beginning don’t think that that would lead to anything but an enormously challenging situation as a result.”

The main differences between Hillary Clinton and John McCain on Iraq are these:

1. McCain says he voted for the Iraq war resolution because he believed Saddam Hussein to be a threat, and Clinton says she voted for the Iraq war resolution because she hoped a tough stance against Saddam would force him to capitulate. In other words, she voted for the war in order to prevent the war.

2. McCain says, knowing what we know now, he still thinks taking out Saddam was the right thing to do, but that the execution of the war has been botched. Clinton says, knowing what we know now, she isn’t sure how she would have voted on the war resolution. Also the execution of the war has been botched.

Proposed convention chant: “OUR POSITION IS OVERLY NUANCED!”

We’re not electing a president to decide whether or not we should go to war with Iraq. We’re electing a president to clean up a big mess. Whatever Hillary’s supporters say, Clinton and McCain will be using the same mop.

Obama will have that mop as well, actually, but I believe he’ll scrub a little harder.

John Warner responds…

As Donald Rumsfeld famously said, “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.”

One of the “known knowns” about Hillary Clinton (as Kevin illustrates vis a vis Iraq) is that she will adopt a policy position out of political expediency, the famous Clinton gambit of “triangulation.” I actually think her original Iraq vote was closer to a principled act than her subsequent half-speed backpedal since (again, as Kevin illustrates) she appears to be pretty hawkish. However, subsequent events have proven her judgment was and is poor.

The “known unknown” in this case is what shape Iraq is going to be in come November of this year. If the pro-war faction manages to keep selling the “we’re winning” narrative, and if Hillary is the nominee, just watch her twist through an “I was for it before I was against it (maybe) and now I’m for it” formulation. “Overly nuanced” will be the nicest thing anyone has to say about her position.

Another known unknown is whether dating a super model makes up for losing the Super Bowl.

In the end, it seems to me that being president involves dealing with a series of never-ending “unknown unknowns,” once they become known. Hillary has shown herself to be ill suited to the task, be it health care in 1993 or dealing with the rise of the Obama campaign. Sen. McCain, while definitely not my first choice, seems like a better bet than Sen. Clinton when it comes to those eventualities.

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February 8, 2008

Dear TMN,

When we got the results of the Iowa caucus, I felt the things I was supposed to feel: excitement, vindication, enthusiasm, and fear. Fear of Mike Huckabee, primarily, but also fear that if the campaign a year ahead of us was to be between a black man from Chicago with a foreign name and a Baptist preacher from Arkansas, we may not have seen the end of the culture wars that have spoiled my young adulthood.

But there was another emotion present, more interesting than any of those: tremendous anxiety for myself. It was so disturbing that I didn’t tell my wife about it for several days. An unfamiliar anxiety, but not entirely remote. It was that night-before-the-S.A.T. anxiety. It was applying-to-college anxiety. It was first-real-job anxiety. Maybe even will-she-marry-me anxiety. In other words, it was stepping-off-into-maturity anxiety.

Barack Obama is one year younger than me. We are both almost baby boomers, but not. This isn’t the first time that someone our age has done something world-changing, but it’s the first time someone our age has done this.

You know what that test-taking anxiety really is, don’t you? I wasn’t afraid of a poor performance. I was terrified, in fact, that I would do well on the test.

I became an adult when I figured this out.

This is what an adult knows that a child doesn’t: A good performance on a test only assures the imminent arrival of other, much more difficult tests. I was scared of the S.A.T. because it promised college. I was anxious about college because it opened the possibility of a demanding career. I was terrified of a career because it meant that one day … I might have to decide the fate of my country.

You think I’m kidding? Maybe what I admire most about Barack Obama is his willingness to tell the truth. About himself, primarily, but also about us all. He uses words like “we,” he talks about “this moment in history,” not because those phrases make us comfortable, but because they are the truth.

I’ve got to decide if I’m ready for what I’m now certain is coming: the candidacy of Barack Obama. But don’t think such a wonderful event will solve anything or complete anything or even make the world a better place. We can talk about what it will mean to have the son of a Kenyan in the White House (and I will). We can talk about what it will mean that an interracial face will lead the world (and I will). But those aren’t the real issues, which is why Sen. Obama doesn’t speak about them so much himself.

The real issue is whether we’re all ready to grow up.

Growing up is not about power—it’s about sacrifice. It’s not about perfect faith—it’s about stumbling, incomplete faith. It’s really not about proceeding in airtight confidence of perfect righteousness—it’s about the completely absurd instinct that compromise and love of our fellows will somehow get us through.

I have spent a long time waiting for power and certainty to be conferred on me so that I might meet the challenges of my life. The news from that precinct has not been good. While I was busy wondering how to avoid being a citizen of this beautiful but terrified nation, we lashed out at the rest of the world, betraying everywhere our most sacred principles.

The news from other precincts, however, has been very good. Out of the crucible of this awful decade, a leader has emerged. Maybe Barack Obama is inexperienced and charismatic and full of the naive and unsupportable belief that America is still a great country and capable of great things, but I think I’m just inexperienced and charismatic and naive enough myself to support him with all my heart and soul.

And I will never call his vision of America—a nation innovative and undivided, a nation whose huge power can be wielded for the good of all nations—a fantasy. It is not a fantasy: It is what I pray for when I’m holding my wife and son. It is the true flag that I pledge allegiance to. And, from now on, it is how I will vote.

Sincerely,
Dan Barden

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February 7, 2008

Dear editors,

Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t limited space for headlines the only reason newspapers use commas in place of “and’? If so, a question: Web sites aren’t subject to the same space restrictions, so why do you persist in using them in your daily headlines? It really annoys me.

Yours truly,
Molly Bennett
Pedant General

Andrew Womack responds…

Molly:

(Note my use of a colon rather than a comma in the salutation.)

In fact, our space in the headlines is more limited than you might think. We try to maximize the readability of the homepage headlines column by keeping the number of lines any single headline spans to a minimum. And we do that by aiming for an economy of characters in each headline. Thus, we sometimes use commas in place of “and”—by doing so, we shave off three characters.

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December 4, 2007

I’m a longtime reader of themorningnews.org and normally I find your news section to be very well chosen and insightful. I was surprised you posted a link to “The Dollar Nosedive: Why America’s Currency Is the World’s Problem.”

This article is not news, it is one-sided nonsense using fragmented quotations to bolster such a baloney argument. To say that the dollar is brutalizing the world economy could very well be the narrowest and most Amero-centric idea I’ve heard in years. Yes, there is a global shift, but this gentrification is not necessarily all doom and gloom.

A much more pervasive and insightful article would have analyzed beyond the Amero-centric conservative economic dogma of “change is bad” and instead determined how the world marketplace will need to become less dependent on a single currency. America along with other countries reliant on the power of one currency, are now forced to negotiate more diversified economic agreements that may also allow them to gain an independence beyond a monopolized single currency. History has proven time and time again that reliance on one economic dogma, such as the Asian or now the American market, is a recipe for monetary decline.

Rich Cole

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March 20, 2007

Dear TMN,

I should, to begin with, admit that I am in the minority who feels that English, August deserved better than it got at Colin Meloy’s hands. I will, rhetoric-fashion, tell you that I won’t mention the arguably provincial privileging of parceled observations of What It Is To Be American over less-parceled-and-perhaps-then-subtler observations of What It Is To Be Indian, or that I imagine Mr. Meloy meant to say that he couldn’t care less about New Jersey real estate, or that many of the winning points he wards to Mr. Ford’s novel could as easily be given to Mr. Chatterjee—I am an admirer of Mr. Meloy’s music, and so I know that he is fond of the Victorians, who were after all not terribly interested in India beyond not having to stay there too long while in the civil service. However, I do wish he had given just a bit more attention to the jacket-blurbs he mentions in his description of the match. If he had read them, he would have known that English, August is not a translation, new or otherwise; it was written in English, and has only now been published in America.

With some sorrow that Chatterjee is not likely to rise in the zombie round,
S. Weiss

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March 20, 2007

Hi, Kate,

While I agree there is some weakness “especially apparent in the final third of” Arthur and George, I think you have greatly underestimated and misunderstood an important element of the novel. I refer to your contention that: “It wouldn’t have been so dry had Sir Arthur’s skills been more in doubt; the knowledge that eventually he would tap the correct villain and clear Mr. Edalji’s name took away some of my interest as I neared the end.” To your first point, isn’t the sentence in which Conan Doyle first sees Mr. Edalji and immediately identifies him as “oriental” the single funniest and most telling line in the book? How much more could “Sir Arthur’s skills” be in doubt? To your second point or points, does Arthur “tap the correct villain”? Is Mr. Edalji’s name cleared? It seems to me the novel is more about Arthur’s inability to negotiate an investigation in the real world and reach an adequate conclusion, hindered all along by his exaggerated sense of self-worth and preconceived notions. You state: “…it was clear from the beginning that the mystery would be solved and that the solution wasn’t the sort that could be sussed out by a careful reader.” Isn’t the great trick of the novel that we as readers, like Arthur, ignore or are blind to arguably the most logical explanation for its central crime? I think you have misidentified the true mystery of Arthur and George: It is one that may not be completely solvable but whose careful construction and implications can be sussed out by a careful reader.

Ryan

Kate Schlegel responds:

Hi, Ryan,

I stand by my decision: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s reputation for eventually getting the good guy off makes for a lackluster mystery. But if you liked Arthur and George enough to write, you should definitely give One Good Turn a chance. I bet you’ll like it!

Kate

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March 18, 2007

Dear friends at TMN,

TMN is my homepage. I consider myself a fan of your work. Does that give me the liberty to be critical? Probably not, but you’re gracious enough to have a feedback link, so I’ll just bite the bullet and use it.

For what it’s worth, I think that James McManus article was pretty low journalism. It begins with a semi-favorable but irrelevant critique of her appearance, then examines a tragedy from her past in a somewhat sympathetic fashion, then proceeds to link this ever so tenuously to stem-cell research. Somewhere in the middle is a digression about the lack of universal health care, which is actually reconnected to the article at large with the phrase “Where was I? Oh, right.” Low journalism? No, just bad writing.

The low part comes in dismissing Laura Bush’s family experience with Alzheimer’s as being irrelevant because a) her family is wealthy, and b) she has moral issues with the use of embryo cells as a research tool. The latter is implied rather than actually discussed. The former is treated with the utmost disdain, although the author does add a phrase crediting her “executive devotion.” The complete lack of respect this shows is appalling.

I realize that James McManus and I have differing views on stem-cell research. One of the things I like about your site is that it presents opinions I don’t necessarily agree with in a fun, articulate, but challenging manner. If any of these adjectives applied to this article, I wouldn’t have written this letter.

Please keep up the good work; TMN is the best read on the ‘net. Not that you need my approval, but you have it anyway.

A grateful reader,
Jon Blume

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