The Mail
POST APOCALYPSE
Hey J.R.: Thanks for the plug in your column ("Slap Forehead Here," 4/7). But try to spell my name right next time! It's Hoffmann with two n's. You fluctuate between one and two. Get it right and maybe one day you can actually charge money for your paper!
Bill Hoffmann, New York Post
J.R. Taylor replies: What's the Post selling for nowadays, Bill? A nickel? Dime?
SUPPOSE, SUPPOSE, SUPPOSE
Your opinion piece "What Depravity Can Teach Us" ("Page Two," 4/14) argues against surveillance cameras because a suicide that was possibly recorded by one was possibly used in violation of a family member's privacy. But suppose that suicide was a homicide. And suppose that the camera recorded the murderer resulting in his (or her) capture and possibly averting future murders. Everything has positives and negatives, and to my mind the benefits of surveillance cameras in public places outweigh the liabilities. Sure, there are corrupt cops who do awful things. But we don't use that as an excuse for disbanding the entire police department.
Richard Epro, Manhattan
GAMBURG'S BIGGEST FAN
Cheerio: The only worthwhile act you have performed since taking over the paper has been to designate Rudy Giuliani as the vilest New Yorker ("50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers," 3/31). This insufferable twerp, who thought it was okay to keep a mistress at home while trying to regulate the morality of others, has certainly earned an upper berth in hell.
What makes you think that Alex Gamburg is an artist ("From Russia with Art," 4/7)? The trouble with the art world today is that it is controlled by people with taste not much better than yours. Alex Gamburg is a cartoonist, and a poor one. Even MUGGER Jr.'s drawings are more honest and interesting than his. Judging from the drawing on p. 94, his work is slick, obnoxious and extremely offensive. There should be a prison for people like him.
Talking about art, what happened to your former art critic Christian Viveros-Faune? While most of his opinions were second-hand and foolish, he was the most educated member of your staff. That is probably what did him in. He is missed.
Bruce Cahn, Manhattan
The editors reply: Christian Viveros-Faune became worried that serving as our art critic while also operating two galleries might cause a conflict of interest. We're still best buddies, and he is a fixture at the New York Press Artspeak brunch, where next time we will consider the letter-writer's astute proposal that artists whose work we dislike be thrown into prison.
YEAH, WHAT IS GOING ON?
What's going on? No Doonesbury for three days, no explanation, and today, to add insult to injury, you use an old Doonesbury on the kid's page. Arrgh.
Kent McKeever, Manhattan
AMERICAN WOMAN, STAY AWAY FROM ME
In regards to Mark Ames' review of 13 Going on 30 ("Film," 4/7), as always, he is right on, sight on! Every week I wait for New York Press to come out so that I can read his excellent insights into the very disturbing state of the American female. Marrying a foreigner is the best thing I ever did. The American women that I see at work and that I meet are all so lonely and miserable. They need Ames to wake them up. But that's the point; can they be woken up?
Robert Beissel, Brooklyn
FOR THE LADIES
Hopefully you've already been called to the carpet on this, but just in case...
I've seen a lot of vaguely misogynistic bullshit in New York Press, but Mark Ames' pointlessly nasty "review" of 13 Going on 30 is truly over the line ("Film," 4/7). Yes, I can see the perfunctory "women are told to feel this way" tropes that Ames has thrown in. Still, what's clear in his vicious little rant is his disgust for women.
Apparently, I only know women who fall outside Ames' "99 percent of over-30 women in America," the ones that, contrary to Ames' spew, don't look like Janet Reno or live in a bath of insecurity and self-hatred. Most somewhat-over-30 women I know, amazingly enough, look pretty much like they looked in their somewhat-under-30 years, even though they have crossed the great divide of hideousness and loathing that people like Ames so vividly imagine and foist upon readers.
Maybe it's the New York Press' more puerile, post-zine, wannabe punk, bitter-old-man-before-his-time streak showing through. Or maybe it's all Hollywood's fault for putting pretty women in movies for little girls. Whatever. It's mostly just evidence of how a squad of young (or at least juvenile), overwhelmingly male assholes running a paper are blind to vile, sexist bullshit when it crosses their desks. If you hate women, fine, but don't try to camouflage it in crappy movie reviews. I can get that drivel from Vice.
Edwin Adkins, Queens
AND SPEAKING OF MISOGYNY
Howard Stern and David Cross are two of the funniest, most progressive and most talented comic entertainers working today. Your "50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers" list is a joke, and your magazine is terrible (3/31). You're out of touch. Your comments about Stern are utterly false. He's been fighting the free speech battle for his entire career.
How you could see otherwise is baffling. And chastising Cross for having the courage to spit his venomous humor in front of a bunch of "hicks" is shameful. The only thing you're brave enough to do is jump on the "I Hate Stern" bandwagon. You people are a bunch of wimps.
Daniel DeLucie, La Crescenta, CA
Gregory M. Pflugfelder, Acting Faculty Director
Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture
NO FUMAR
I know this gets tedious, but I'd just like to point out that, as you've probably surmised, virtually all of Audrey Silk's "contradictory scientific evidence" on secondhand smoke has one thing in common: tobacco industry funding ("The Mail," 4/14). Science and epidemiology may be complex. What's happening here is not.
Gene Borio, Manhattan
THE SPIRIT OF THE OUTER SPACE TREATY
Thank you for Matt Taibbi's excellent article "The Numbers Game" (4/14). This American tendency to only count our own dead goes way back before Vietnam-think of the Indian wars. Really, think of them, because the neocons running the Iraq war, such as those at the Project for a New American Century, refer to our armed forces as the "cavalry on the new frontier." As long as we don't admit what the frontier was-genocide-we are doomed to repeat it.
Doubt me? Two U.N. officials associated with the embargo of Iraq (before the war) quit in disgust, calling the implementation of the sanctions "genocidal." Meanwhile, Clinton's Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, when asked about the possibility that 500,000 people had died from the sanctions (estimates range from 200,000 people to more than one million), said that it was "worth it." How different is that from frontier Colorado in 1864? At that time, citizens screamed "Exterminate them!" in town meetings, political parties gained votes by circulating "wild rumors of Indian conspiracies...heralded as fact." While actual Indian warriors were away in Kansas, the soldiers of Colorado attacked a completely unrelated Indian village at Sand Creek, Colorado, which had been disarmed under a previous treaty. Hmm, it sort of sounds like...Iraq!
Dave White, Minneapolis, MN
BUCK STARTED THERE
'Nam was also Harry Truman's ("The Numbers Game, 4/14). We forget he was pumping money to the French who had their clock cleaned before ours was cleaned so many years later.
Sue Schnieder, Buffalo, WY
TAIBBI'S NO-SPIN ZONE
How great to read the truth now and then. With so much spinning and blaming going on, the American voter becomes confused and doesn't know what to think or how to vote. And, of course, many Americans do neither these days.
I always thought that the original purpose of the federal government was to protect us from our enemies who would attack us and our freedoms-here at home. But, now, with this smaller world, and with American corporate interests spread across the world, it appears that our federal government has the mission from God to spread freedom, democracy and capitalism throughout the world, by means of force, when necessary, and starting with those nations who have ties to terrorism.
Matt Taibbi is right ("The Numbers Game," 4/14). Americans are self-absorbed and think only in terms of how their preemptive wars affect Americans. The "others" who die in these wars are also sacrificed to the vision of the freedom-and-justice-for-all-in-the-world proponents who believe that our way is the best way and the only way to a "better world." Wal-Mart and McDonald's and Pizza Hut and Walgreens on all of the corners of the world will lead the way to world peace. And, maybe this is true? Are the interests of the American-Global Corporations in the best interests of the American people and also in the best interests of the world? Who knows?
But, do they forget that "appearance" is everything? We should heed the wisdom of Robert Burns in "O would some power the giftie gie us to see ourselves as others see us." We are told that we are the most powerful nation on the face of the Earth and stand on high ground, but so much of the world is standing on higher ground and looking down at us-and we hardly notice.
Carol Eblen, Kansas City, MO
IRON, LION, ZION
I second the nomination of Jerry Nadler for the Most Loathsome list ("The Mail," 4/7). The point should be made that any believing Zionist who stays in this country and pushes Israeli propaganda is both a bad Jew and a bad American. A bad Jew for remaining in the diaspora instead of "returning" to his "promised land"; a bad American for insisting that this great secular republic should continue on its suicidal course of binding itself to a parasitic self-serving little religious state.
And surely it is significant when a guy who wants to control other lives with legislation can't even control his own body shape within the bounds of normalcy or decency.
Arthur Kean, Manhattan
DOMINO PIZZA THEORY
Thank you. Thank you for publishing Matt Taibbi's "The Numbers Game" (4/14). When Robert McNamara apologized for his role in the Vietnam War, he directed his apology to "the American people." I wondered at the time, "Can he think of any other group of people he might want to offer an apology to? Anyone at all?"
The simple and obvious fact that the U.S. military machine slaughtered millions of people "caught in the crossfire" in Southeast Asia is nearly invisible in mainstream academia and journalism.
Kudos to Taibbi and New York Press for helping us to see our own history of terrorism and indiscriminate violence against civilians.
Steve Hoey, Medford, MA
TORAH! TORAH! TORAH!
While I agree with what Christopher Buczek said about the misuse of epithets within the article, I take exception to what appears to be an insult to religious Jews ("The Mail, 4/14). You defend Judaism by critiquing Jeff Koyen's remark about Joan Rivers but then horribly paraphrase a line from the Torah that makes it sound like gibberish and a lot of toss. Some of us do read New York Press, you know, and would appreciate not being depicted this way. It's sheer ignorance.
The part of the Torah in which it appears will have been read all over the world on Saturday, April 17. The line reads (from the Artscroll translation, a bit more easy on the modern English reader): "...every animal that has split hooves that are not completely split, or does not chew its cud..." World of difference from what you wrote.
Gordon Davidescu, Manhattan