Marc Cooper’s Wrong on Mumia; New York Press Is Just Wrong
Lucy Herschel, Purrrrrge Him! The bullet that killed Faulkner If you like him, you slip Corporations get off polluting Steve Martinot, Marc Cooper replies: As to Mr. Martinot: After An Aching in His Heart Josh Tate, The editors reply: Crabtree & Grovelin’ Clinton "the most divisive This moralistic shit–this What a world the right has By the way, Alan Cabal’s On a positive note, thanks I see that you permitted Gary Crabtree, The editors reply: But more to the point, Crabtree’s But of course Crabtree knew By the way, what has Crabtree Such is the left-wing hero Crabtree’s such a thoroughly Lastly, Hillary Clinton Alan Cabal Prosody and…Parody? Well, obviously we have Let me clarify my "wrong Secondly, let’s count These men whom Guichard Matt Levy, Soup Bones He sure jumped on to the On to the millennium "news When does the new millennium Why the big deal over 2000 The "Christian era" What makes people think Even if Christ was born There’s nothing special So despite what Time Joe Rodrigue, He Wants the One He Can’t Have Gordon Smith, The Earth’s Flat In Kaintuck To say that Sam and Cokie As for the new kid on the The attitudes in evidence I can understand your frustration Question: Why do the Republicans George W. Bush couldn’t You predict a Bush victory. Bush doesn’t have the J.M. Prater,
NYC Coordinator, Campaign to End the Death Penalty, Manhattan
Mumia
may sicken Marc Cooper, but Cooper sickens me. He doesn’t like Mumia because
he doesn’t like MOVE. That’s a political reason. And he lies to back
it up.
did not come from Mumia’s gun. Mumia’s gun had not been fired. The
police have no evidence that Mumia fired a gun. If they did, they would not
have had to pressure witnesses. They could have had the witnesses tell the truth.
They wouldn’t have had to pull Sabo out of retirement. Any judge could
have seen the evidence. But they didn’t have it, and still don’t,
even after lies by slimy people like Cooper.
on the same slime he does. He can’t get away from the idea that Mumia should
have a fair trial, because he didn’t get one; but he can’t say it
outright, or forthrightly. He has to put in his little denigration. That’s
the old Roy Cohn stuff.
the planet. Funny how so many pretend leftists get off on their own conceptual
pollution.
Berkeley
I am pleased that Lucy Herschel has broadened her focus from merely Mumia
to other death row inmates. That is exactly the position I am arguing. I fail
to see how I am calling for Mumia’s death when I clearly state I am opposed
to capital punishment for even those guiltiest of the most heinous crimes, and
when I endorse a new trial for Mumia. There is also no doubt that Mumia has
been spared execution by the fervent activity in his favor. I merely suggest
that it is time for Mumia supporters to do the same as Ms. Herschel has–start
paying some attention to the other 3500 death row inmates–innocent or guilty.
his blood pressure recedes I suggest he calmly reread my column. I clearly state
three compelling reasons precisely why I think Mumia should get a new trial.
Perhaps then we will know better whether or not the bullets did or did not come
from Mumia’s gun.
Given
the relatively abundant space given to "The Mail" in the printed edition,
why are so few letters published on the website?
Just moved to California
and, goddammit, I want it all!
Los Angeles
Yearly subscriptions to New York
Press can be had by sending a check for $75 to "Subscriptions,"
New York Press, 333 7th Ave., 14th fl., New York, NY 10001.
How
nice of you to add an editorial page. Too bad the examples so far are poorly
reasoned and poorly argued, and reflect severe immaturity and an irrational
and exaggerated hatred of Bill Clinton. In other words, they reflect Russ Smith.
and Machiavellian president since Nixon" ("Opinion," 12/29)?
Huh? I remember Nixon. The guy very openly demonized a large portion of the
population–war protesters, students, leftist think-tank types, unfriendly
editorial writers. In modern times, Nixon’s still in a league by himself.
What’s "divisive" to New York Press about Clinton is the
fact that despite the best efforts of an overzealous right wing, the man didn’t
go away. If there is divisiveness, blame it on the likes of William Bennett,
Paul Weyrich, Bob Barr and Rush Limbaugh, who are, plain and simple, anti-patriotic.
As for Clinton’s "hiring thugs to physically intimidate opponents,"
there remains no evidence of that, except in the wild imaginations of less-than-reliable
sources like Kathleen Willey.
tilting at an admittedly imperfect man whose sins you and other conservatives
have greatly inflated–gets tired. Especially from New York Press,
a paper that owes its financial success to its golden- and brown-shower and
she-male ads.
created. Yeah, I guess we really need three virtually simultaneous books attacking
Hillary Clinton by three insipid conservative blondes (Olson, Coulter and Ingraham).
reference to Joe Gallo’s "lawn jockeys"–is that anything
other than pure unadorned racism ("First Person," 12/29)? No, it’s
not. And you know it. You guys are stooping lower than ever.
to Matt Zoller Seitz for pointing out the extent to which lazy movie reviewers
are now relying on plot summaries to fill their word counts ("Film,"
12/29). At least when your guys do that, they tip us off with a warning in advance.
Seitz is right. Not only is the spilling of so many details irresponsible and
unimaginative, but it does reveal contempt for the audience.
Seitz, Armond White and Godfrey Cheshire to vote in the year-end Village
Voice critics poll. That was gracious and magnanimous.
Manhattan
Idiot. So it’s "anti-patriotic" to dislike
Bill Clinton. And the White House is a more credible source than Kathleen Willey.
a bad reader. We didn’t write that Clinton was the most Machiavellian president
ever, as he implies in defiance of the quote he includes. We wrote that he was
the most so since Nixon. Which means from the field of Ford, Carter, Reagan
and Bush. Any thinking person really have a problem with that? If you were reading
carefully, Gary, you’d have seen that we were neither defending Nixon nor
denying the possibility that he was "in a league by himself."
all that, and was being dishonest in order to make a cheap point and call attention
to his own political virtue.
gotten for his devotion to Clinton? He’s gotten a right-leaning yuppie
president who–as we wrote in the editorial Crabtree’s complaining
about above–has sold out his own party and the left in general at every
turn. Clinton has been incredibly prone to using the military, bombing Third
World civilians for his own political gain and motivating 27 large military
deployments since his 1993 inauguration, at a cost of at least $20 billion;
sold out the environmental movement by supporting the salvage timber rider;
signed the 1996 Welfare Reform Bill, to the chagrin of leftists; supported the
death penalty (even for retarded men like Rickey Ray Rector, whom Clinton killed
in 1992 to help himself get elected); peddled White House access to the rich;
been a draconian law-and-order type, even to the point of supporting roving
wiretaps and the restriction of habeas corpus; and in all ways has been a lackey
of the corporations. According to news reports last week, Clinton might be bound
for a Wall Street career at Lazard Freres after his term ends. And he’s
a devout Christian who likes to get photographed walking into church holding
his Bible.
Crabtree defends and places up against such familiar demons as (yes, them again–trot
them out) "William Bennett, Paul Weyrich, Bob Barr and Rush Limbaugh."
conventional group-thinker that you want to believe that he’s getting something
out of writing us such dumb letters. But that’s not the case. He’s
just a yuppie follower, and can’t help himself. If it wasn’t Clinton,
Crabtree would be thoroughly conventional about something else.
is herself an "insipid conservative blonde" in the opinion of several
of us here who contribute to the editorials.
replies: My reference to Crazy Joe’s "lawn jockeys"
was hardly "unadorned racism." Calling them "gangsta niggas"
would have been "unadorned racism," but I’ll leave that sort
of language to Puffy Combs.
Philip
Guichard, in his 12/22 piece, declares that the future of Poetry (capital P)
is dead. Then by logical conjecture the Poetry that we have now is either dead
or dying at an appalling rate.
some serious issues here that I, as a concerned poet, journalist, performance
artist and college student, wish to address. First issue: Philip Guichard is
reading the wrong anthology of poetry. Second: He undercuts himself frequently.
Third: He smokes too much pot. (The happiest moment in November was when
he smoked as many bowls as there were days in that month? "It’s sad"
is an understatement, Phil.) Fourth, and most important, Guichard is making
no effort to save what he’s interested in, but quickly condemns it as a
waste of time. That is Poetry, in all its forms. In summation, part of your
theories on poetry are intelligent, but they get hogwashed back with all this
excess garbage, most of it subjective and most of it needing a nice scrub-down
with the facts.
anthology" comment. Clearly, not all poetry is the same. It varies from
school to school and there’s a major (never-ending) argument within poetry
about punctuation: is it a necessary device or a hindrance to the pure flow
of ideas? We have different theories about literary devices, literary methods,
metaphors and inherent symbolism. Enjambment, rhyme schema, etc. All of this
just proves that if John Q. Idiot wants to read poetry then he will get a different
feel from the love sonnets of the classical Romanticist Elizabeth Barrett Browning
than from the sex-drinking-and-gambling ditties of the great Charles Bukowski.
The "Pope Poems" by James Tate will not be found in the same collection
as the absinthe poetry by Rimbaud, and the slam poetry of Marc Smith might not
be found in the same collection as the wonderfully naturalistic poetry of Walt
Whitman.
the number of times Mr. Guichard undercuts himself in this article. There are
the choices he uses for poetic role models and the junior high-school insults
he flings at them; the constant use of bubblegum rhetoric ("And I got to
thinking, like, if you…"; "Like if Beck were wearing
a beret…"); the useless comparisons of poets to rock gods; his obsession
with the image’s meaning more than the word; and, finally, his generalizing
claim that our generation and society doesn’t want to do anything about
this death of poetry. Philip, open your eyes, why don’t you.
attacks with too many hyphenated insults are men who are for the most part absolutely
brilliant. They are literary-world shifting poets and playwrights, novelists
and authors. We all go through the Ginsberg-is-God phase, but then we grow up
and realize that his message is true. Life is about love and experiencing it
as an immediate sensation, not retroactively. Have you ever heard Leroi Jones
reading live? In Harlem? One of the most original and vehemently angry pro-black,
pro-anger, pro-revolution poets alive today, period. Where life is about starting
shit up and getting in peoples’ faces, with an intelligent political point
to make. Corso and O’Hara and Snyder have all actualized concepts in the
literary world that we as active/passive readers don’t even realize.
Brooklyn
I
laughed at John Strausbaugh’s comments about David Bowie ("Publishing,"
1/5). You would think Bowie would be a pretty interesting guy, but listening
to him I invariably find myself thinking, "What on earth is he talking
about?" Around 1969 he gave a great interview to Rolling Stone.
He talked frankly about himself and (as far as I know) refrained from making
things up, as he was wont to do in those days. Since then, I don’t know
what’s happened. The quote Strausbaugh gave is utterly typical. He tries
to sound deep, but what comes out is nonsense. At the same time he seems to
be under the impression that people are hanging on his every word.
Internet thing in a big way, but that’s been a complete dud as far as I
can see.
story." Twenty-eight hours or whatever of that fathead Peter Jennings,
not to mention every other pea-brained "news" anchor you can think
of. What a nightmare. Happily, I didn’t watch a second of it.
start, anyway? There was no year 0, so in fact the millennium doesn’t begin
for another 12 months. Of course, the media is completely unfazed by that, and
continue to hoot and cheer even though a few of them who can perform simple
arithmetic must have noticed that the popular view is wrong.
in the first place? This is only year 2000 under some numbering system.
The number itself is a completely superficial attribute–it bestows no special
quality on the year. It’s like being the 100th person to be admitted to
a club after 9 p.m. So what?
system of numbering years that is in common use today was invented by a sixth-century
monk in Italy named Dionysius Exiguus. He was trying to orient things
around the birth of Christ, which he thought was just before the beginning of
1 A.D., but according to the Gospels, Christ was born a bit earlier. The exact
year is in dispute, but Dionysius’ date is definitely wrong. Nor was he
very bright at arithmetic: he left out year 0 between 1 B.C. and 1 A.D. What
else did that idiot have to do all day but get this right? Nevertheless, our
calendar is still founded on his mistakes.
that the year should begin on Jan. 1? After all, if time revolves around the
birth of Christ, why not juggle the calendar to make the year start on Christ’s
birthday? The reasons for this are historical and entirely arbitrary. January
has only been the first month of the year since 153 B.C. The Romans of the period
took the beginning of the year as the date that new consuls took office; in
153 B.C. that date was changed for some reason from March 15 to Jan. 1. Through
the changes of subsequent calendars, the beginning of the year was retained.
So there’s nothing cataclysmic about Jan. 1.
at 12:01 a.m. on Jan. 1, 0 A.D., and there had been no subsequent monkeying
with the calendar (in fact there has been a lot of monkeying), this past New
Year’s would still have been overlooked but for the fact that we use base-10
numbering.
about the number 10. The Mayans used base 20; the Babylonians base 60; several
others have been used as well at different times and places. Vestiges of other
base systems survive in the English words "dozen" and "gross"
(base 12) and "score" (base 20), and in the French "quatre-vingts,"
which means 80 (four 20s). If we used base 8 this would be the year 3720; if
base 12 or 16 (all perfectly logical choices), this would be year 11A8 or 7D0,
respectively. In everyday life base 10 has supplanted other bases (I understand
base 20 is still used in Mexico and Central America), but for reasons that had
nothing to do with mathematics. In electrical engineering bases 16, 8 and 2
are still widely used (welcome to Year 11111010000).
and Barbara Walters and the rest of the morons tell you, this year will be pretty
indistinguishable from last year and next year. Cheers.
New Haven
MUGGER: I am a big fan
of the Smiths, too, but no "How Soon Is Now?" in your Top 65 list?
Or is it because it’s now being used in a car ad campaign?
Pleasanton, CA
MUGGER: Couldn’t
disagree with you more, though I understand your perverted views regarding Bush,
Gore, McCain and even the President, God bless him, who has still managed to
accomplish wonders under the most difficult circumstances for this country and
the world in the seven years he’s been in charge. I doubt that any of his
predecessors could have accomplished nearly as much under similar circumstances.
are liberals is a real hoot. George Stephanopoulos is the only liberal of the
three, and perhaps more balanced and fair in his assessments than the rest.
block of This Week, time will tell. The show’s ratings were sagging.
All of America is waiting to see if he is the breath of fresh air the show so
badly needs. George Will has his place, but they needed more balance. I commend
Westin’s decision.
over the past two years on This Week have been a profound turnoff to
every thinking American, the majority of whom remain decidedly liberal, your
attempts to undermine political choices and influence the electorate to the
contrary.
with the Democratic administration’s accomplishments. It’s hell to
watch the enemy doing good things in spite of all your efforts to discredit
and sabotage them.
seem to shoot themselves in the foot every time they try to outmaneuver their
opposition? Can you imagine the frustration level in the Bush camp? With all
that power, money and unlimited talent, they couldn’t make a good decision
to save themselves.
pour piss out of a boot if the directions were written on the heel.
This suggests that you’re either part of the Bush clan, on their payroll
or dreaming of a miracle that will never happen.
sense to fool all the people long enough to attain the Oval Office, and all
of Daddy’s dollars will not be able to put him back together again, once
he falls off the wall. They have the manpower to run the world, but Bush doesn’t
have what it takes to follow their orders long enough to get to the top. They
picked the wrong puppet to win the big game, so I predict the Democrats will
grace the White House again in 2001, after the Clintons depart, and the world
will breathe a sigh of relief.
Grayson, KY