Greil Fan Is Idiot X 2; Eww, Gross Me Out, NYP; Relax on Laxity, MUG; More

Hi. I'm the "brain-dead Marcusian" and "knucklehead groupie" Richard Byrne quotes in a 2/27 "Daily Billboard" about Greil Marcus. You know, I, too, have some problems with Marcus: he is getting a little (all right, a lot) persnickety in his dotage, he is going on and on about the same (obscure) things and so on. So I don't really object too strongly till Byrne runs out of things to say about Marcus and picks on me.

I'm just not sure what I did to make Richard Byrne call me two kinds of idiot. He quotes my Amazon.com note on The Old, Weird America, which is not, in the long run, so much a review as a consumer warning. You see, I'd bought that volume on the same day I'd bought a new copy of Invisible Republic, assuming?incorrectly?that they were two different books. I thought that Marcus was publishing a career retrospective and that he'd chosen the title The Old, Weird America since that phrase seems to be his main contribution to our cultural vocabulary. That day's mail brought both nearly identical books and I wanted other potential customers not to fall into that trap.

Again, I am not sure what makes my note to Amazon.com so ridiculous, but I will happily concede if Byrne will just explain a little more clearly why I'm so laughable.

Jimmy Dean Smith, Barbourville, KY

Richard Byrne replies: I think buying any Greil Marcus book?let alone buying one on the title alone?makes you both an acolyte and an idiot. (Not to mention that Smith was hoping that one of them was a career retrospective.) 'Nuff said.

Letter of the Week

As shown by Alexander Cockburn's column section "Sweaty Red Feet," ("Wild Justice," 2/27), which catches him leafing through the case study of a foot fetishist who was "promptly enlivened by the sight of corns and...likes only male feet: red, swollen, dirty, sweaty and inflamed," New York Press is the grossout teen sex comedy of alternative newspapers: funny, mean, socially Darwinist, obsessed with sex and interspersed with strangely entertaining stories about the body at its most disgusting.

Sharon Lamberth, Manhattan

We're in Deeper Trouble

MUGGER: I expect that your ears are burning already on the subject of Bay Rigby's front-page illustration for your 2/27 issue. If not, we are in deeper trouble than I thought.

There's no way around it that I can see, not even given the customarily irreverent tone of your publication: your depiction of a hooked-nose, beturbaned Islamic terrorist smuggling an atomic bomb aboard a New York City subway train belongs in the permanent collection of the Museum of Bigotry in Art, next to watermelon-eating minstrel-show blacks, Nazi caricatures of Jews, the Frito Bandito and the like. (That corpulent, lazy, donut-snarfling cop is not going to win you any points with the law-and-order crowd, either.) It's worth pointing out that the young men who carried out the attacks on New York looked like any of hundreds of thousands of ordinary, thoroughly assimilated Americans of foreign descent, just as Timothy McVeigh looked just like the guy your sister went to the prom with, and just as the perpetrator of the anthrax attacks on Congress is probably going to turn out to be your community college organic-chemistry professor.

Your advertisers should discontinue their accounts with you until you print a prominent apology, and their customers should refuse to patronize their establishments until they do.

You might also want to dedicate some coverage to the Muslim community's struggle against this kind of brutal, ignorant stereotyping, starting with Paul Findley's highly regarded recent book, Silent No More: Confronting America's False Images of Islam (Amana Publications, 2001). Go ahead, print this letter with a smart-ass headline.

Colin Brayton, Brooklyn

We're Sure He'd Agree

Alexander Cockburn should receive a Pulitzer Prize for his moral perspectives on the Daniel Pearl debacle ("Wild Justice," 2/27).

Lucia Adams, Chicago

Aid for AIDS

Michelangelo Signorile's recent piece, "Powell's Fleeting Words" ("The Gist," 2/27), presented several glaring misstatements regarding the Bush administration's AIDS policy. To begin with, Signorile discounts the influence of the AIDS czar, openly gay appointee Scott Evertz. The true story is that Evertz, in addition to managing the White House Office of National AIDS Policy, also sits on the White House Domestic Policy Council, the senior domestic policymaking body, chaired by the President. Evertz also serves on the President's interagency task force on HIV/AIDS, which is cochaired by Secretary of State Colin Powell and HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson. One is left to wonder what level of access would be required to impress Signorile as leverage.

Signorile goes on to criticize Bush's AIDS spending. Again, a simple review of the facts is in order: as the nation faces an economy in recession, widespread unemployment and a war effort costing $1 billion each month, the overall AIDS budget increased by nearly a billion dollars. Ryan White funding and other prevention programs were saved from cuts, and research got a hefty increase. The Global Fund also received more money, and the United States has readily committed more than any other nation in the world.

Signorile also scoffs at the Bush administration's approach to creating dialogue within its ranks. As the author himself notes, when senior officials of the Clinton administration differed with administration policy, they were summarily fired. The Bush administration is clearly not so thin-skinned, and is willing to tolerate not only a closed-door debate, but one that allows one of its most prominent Cabinet members to give voice publicly to alternative points of view.

It is truly shameful to watch a columnist allow his political leanings to skew his presentation of the facts in a situation as pressing as the global AIDS crisis. Our President deserves credit for his leadership on behalf of those living with HIV/AIDS, as well as the countless uninfected who will remain so through prevention education.

David Jackson, President, Log Cabin Republicans of New York City

Michelangelo Signorile replies: Jackson fails to address the main point of my column: despite Powell's words, the Bush administration only promotes and funds abstinence programs when it comes to HIV prevention?a point highlighted a week later by a New York Times story ("Abstinence-Only Initiative Advancing," Feb. 27, 2002). On AIDS dollars, I'm not sure where Jackson gets his curious numbers and contentions, but here are some figures anyone can check: in San Francisco Ryan White Care Act funding has just been cut by $2.2 million. In New York City it's been slashed more than $1.5 million. When Scott Evertz visited San Francisco in January, Tim Kingston of San Francisco Frontiers reports, he valiantly tried to reassure AIDS advocates about Bush's commitment on AIDS funding. But shortly after Evertz left town, Bush flat-funded the Ryan White money (and Evertz now apparently isn't responding to reporters' inquires on the matter). So much for Evertz's leverage.

Gag Reflex

Congrats on the high quality of writing in your paper, but why are your comic strips so vile?and ugly? This week's "Mr. Wiggles" almost made me puke. I understand the back pages, that's economic.

Chris Burn, Rye, NY

X the Laxity

MUGGER: Couldn't agree with you more (2/27). I get exercised when I leave work late (I work across from Grand Central) and the cops and their interference-running squad cars are gone after, say, 9 p.m. As if murderers and terror-mongers work an 8-to-9 shift or something!

When I saw a phalanx of ethnic-looking men pushing huge gray carts with enough capacity for any number of incendiary devices, and called attention to the fact that they could be pushing bombs in front of them (this is on Vanderbilt Ave., mind you, one major city hub of the train system upstate and out of state), they coolly looked at me (I'm on a bike) and said, "They're mailmen. Mailmen," as if I were demented and couldn't grasp the concept of day jobs. But when I persisted, noting how much those deep gray wheeled carts could carry, they allowed as how, Yes...well, maybe you're right.

I shiver with dread at the laxity of the goofballs who seem to be charged with saving our gluteus maximi.

Marion Dreyfus, Manhattan

Flinty MUGGER

Hey Russ Smith! You can have "valid" concerns about security on the nation's railroad and then turn your article into the Andy Rooney show. All you did was complain about everything under the sun in this not so perfectly "tailored to the Russ Smith" world.

I also see how easy it is to sit your fat asses down at the drawing table and draw illustrations of apparently clueless, and stereotypically fat, dunkin' cops. I take exception and am insulted by your chosen artwork, since a lot of good and honorable people who wear the uniform gave their lives in recent months for all of us. You thoughtless nerd.

I want to know?why is it so easy to pick fun at the fine men and women in blue? I guess you are of such higher caliber? I bet that drawing more closely resembles you!

The truth of the matter is that your article sucked! I am so tired of all of you liberal whiners! Take this towel, wipe your eyes and take your asses on the next flight out to Afghanistan. I'm so tired of the complaints! Don't just complain. Try to think of a solution. No one really cares about your hypercriticisms anyway! You whiner!

Name Withheld, via e-mail

Russ Smith replies: I'm not sure which brainy insult from this correspondent stung more, that I'm "liberal" or weight-challenged. But he's on to something: You see, readers, "Russ Smith" doesn't write MUGGER at all. Howdy, everyone, it's me, Michael Moore!

Sour on Krauts

TAKI: These are the same "innocents" who shouted "Sieg Heil" and knew "nossin" about concentration camps ("Top Drawer," 2/27). Fuck 'em and fuck Taki. Too bad so many survived!

Franklin Steinfeld, Hewlett, NY

Red Tide

RE TAKI's "For Stalin's Victims." Thanks for your up-front article concerning the new Gunter Grass novel Im Krebsgang, as well as your general discussion of the Gustloff and East Prussian tragedies. All I can say is it's about time there was some frank discussion of this issue; however, I would add that Winston Churchill's "Germanophobia" (or more properly "hatred") is also a key component of the East Prussian tragedy (and certainly that of Dresden).

As you might suspect from my level of emotion, this is a "hot" issue for me, as my mother and uncle (nine and four years old, respectively), as well as my grandparents were among the refugees in Danzig/Gotenhafen when the Gustloff incident occurred?and experienced firsthand the brutality of the Russians as they took East Prussia and eastern Pomerania. Thank you for writing on this long-neglected history.

Andrew Freborg, Stow, OH

Take That, Dan

TAKI: I'm not sure if I have much sympathy for the Germans during and after WWII. Remember, 20 million Russians were killed, 300,000 Americans died and millions more were murdered. Another one I have no sympathy for is Daniel Pearl. Mr. Pearl was of the same ilk as those who called American soldiers baby-killers, who denigrate America in any way they can. He was there looking for their side of the story, and he got it. I'll go along with what Jane Fonda's husband said about the murderers of the Twin Towers: They were brave men, maybe a little misguided. Yeah, that's the ticket. A little misguided. And he got their side of the story. Now send Dan Rather and the rest of that bunch down there to get the rest of their story.

Bruce Rava, Scottsdale, AZ

Careful Reader: Dude Is a Lady

MUGGER: Employing someone like Lane Lipton, whose marginal abilities in the use of the English language are only slightly less egregious than his total ignorance of culinary matters, is your decision. The choice to pay this man to produce such tripe is an affront to your readers, but the choice is, nonetheless, legitimately within your purview. Letting a howler like "...plenty of shards of buttery Stilton..." disgrace your already-dubious pages is unforgivable. As an oxymoron it ranks with William Bryk's description, in an article some months ago, of "convergent parallel lines." You are listed as the editor. So edit. Or at least buy some dictionaries for these benighted scribblers.

William Mehlman, Manhattan

The editors reply: We're big with pompous asses who have some gender-identification problems, it seems.

Spewing Like Linda

MUGGER: Pretty please with a cherry on top, give Michelangelo Signorile to the Village Voice in exchange for a couple of postage stamps. He's unworthy of New York Press and (given his manifest fatuity and septic mind) would be very much at home with that organ of leftist cant and rant.

Signorile's most recent outrage, "Powell's Fleeting Words" ("The Gist," 2/27), is yet again grounded in his creepy loathing of the Holy Father and the Catholic Church. The attack is gratuitous and is additional evidence (as though more is needed) of Signorile's colossal ignorance of his favorite bogeyman, Catholicism. First, exorcism is not a "throwback"?a bizarre anachronism resurrected by Pope John Paul II. It is, rather, an ancient rite of the institutional Church that doesn't need to be revived, for the very good reason that it has never been abandoned. Nor is exorcism "embarrassing," though obviously Signorile finds it so. Poor delicate baby. Second, the statement that "the Pope seemed even further out in his own orbit than usual last week" is risible. Seemed to whom? To space cadet Signorile? The Holy Father doesn't appear to be "out in his own orbit" to millions of good and true Catholics. Two cherries?

Clarence George, Manhattan

Next, a Busboy's Lament

I thought Eric Friedman's "The Waiter's Lot" was excellent ("First Person," 2/27). I hope in some way it turns into a regular column, if the writer is willing to do it, of course. But the guy obviously has talent, so I'm sure something can be worked out. We always read those food columns, but a waiter's column seems interesting and different, especially in New York where everyone eats out. Bravo to Mr. Friedman!

Patrick McDonald, West Hollywood