_______________THEY BOMB PHARMACIES, DON'T THEY? BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS (09/23/98)
	So, I'm trying to read Christopher Hitchens' polemic on the Sudan bombing and there are so many attitudes, (mis)interpretations and misrepresentations of the facts within the first several paragraphs that I cannot read on! I admit it! I'm writing this without even giving this guy the airing he deserves. Isn't this the same guy who directed a rocket attack on Mother Teresa, right during a time when she was most beloved and he most needed the publicity? Hey, I loved that piece, agreed with him, mostly. This Sudan piece is opportunity being taken by a wannabe-bad-boy journalist to get attention, and it's working. When I saw the headline, I thought "Horowitz!" Then I clicked through and ... no, it's that other asshole, Hitchens. Both these guys are trying for bonus points by using their intellectual abilities to create a shapely inductive case for a P.O.V. they know will piss many liberals off -- these stink bombs would even piss them off, if they hadn't been the first to get there. (Ever notice how it's always the person who passes the gas who reserves the right to a natural function -- after all, he can't smell it -- but they'd be just as upset as everyone who has to smell it if someone else'd broken wind.) Keep publishing this drivel. I love it, although I'll tell you, Hitchens is dead wrong this time. I don't even care what else he says in his snotty little article, he excuses himself the right to be read by me in the second paragraph. It's so obvious where he plans to go with his whole diatribe, once he telegraphs his posture in the opening statements (not to mention the headline). I would have read the whole case if it had been given a neutral tone until such point that I was familiar enough with where he was going to be confronted with his interpretations. Boy, I love your rag. -- Stephen Bickford I hope whoever decided that it would be a good idea to have Christopher Hitchens write an article will come to their senses and realize what a moron he is. I always considered Salon to have good taste on deciding who would write for you guys. But you guys blew it in letting a stuck-up, sarcastic refugee like Christopher Hitchens contribute an article to Salon. There is only one journalist who is more of a sanctimonious, self-righteous, asshole than Christopher Hitchens, and that's his brother, Peter Hitchens. -- Luis Vazquez Christopher Hitchens' writing is so uniformly vitriolic that I won't believe a word he says about anything without independent verification. It's misleading to put him on the news page. I think you should either give him a column or make him cite his sources, or, preferably, both. -- Jim Crutchfield Norfolk, Va.
_______________FROM SCREAMING BABIES TO SCREAMING COLLEGE STUDENTS BY CAMILLE PAGLIA (09/23/98)
	Doesn't Camille Paglia have classes to teach, or freshman essays to read, or soap operas to watch, or something? Reading her advice column may not be a complete hardship -- one can still find the occasional insight amongst all the onanistic, self-congratulatory ooze -- but when she presumes to "review" a book she admits to not having read, where do we draw the line? Does she plan to review books before they're written? Paglia has concluded, after thumbing through Harris' book "several times" in the store, that the book is unscientific, "anecdotal," "overblown" and "rambling." Without exploring further the absurdity of Camille Paglia taking anyone to task for being "overblown," here are a couple of small observations from one who has read the book and thought about it. The book is not unscientific; Harris scrupulously cites key studies in presenting various aspects of her thesis, testing all of them against rigorous standards of objectivity and scientific validity. This is exactly the kind of non-biased, apolitical thinking that Paglia purports to champion. It also gives lie to Paglia's inference that Harris claims to have "discovered" the influence of peer pressure; on the contrary it has, as she notes, been "studied and documented for 50 years," and it is precisely these studies to which Harris refers. In attacking Harris for being "anecdotal," Paglia herself cites her traditional Italian upbringing (again), her 1992 visit to Brown (for the umpteenth time) and a vague recollection of seeing spoiled children in a grocery store (which may, strictly speaking, be too nebulous to qualify as anecdote). Given Paglia's increasing reliance on narrative to support her conclusions -- virtually every essay in "Vamps and Tramps" relies on it -- for her to attack Harris' book as disguised memoir is frankly disgusting. I remember how delighted I was to discover Paglia in 1992, how her voice seemed a beacon of sanity in the guilt-addled, poststructuralist morass of my English program. Now that voice can hardly bear to speak anything but its own praises, and it has missed a chance to test one of the most lively, well-written and thought-provoking books on human development in recent years. Harris' book was never intended to be the final word on the nurture debate. By refusing to even meet the challenge, Paglia shows just how far her decline as a cultural commentator has advanced. -- Dan Wiencek When will you get rid of the misanthropic mumblings of Camille Paglia? Now, with the line, "Affluent American students these days are either hysterics or melancholics," she's written off much of a generation, apparently because she was scared by a glimpse of her own venom on the faces of protesters at Brown. Oh, please, Camille. Affluent American students are "people." Contrary to the imaginings of your fevered ego, on the day when a few protesters hollered at you, I promise you that most of Brown's students were completely unaware of your existence. Some were waiting tables or shelving books in the library to pay their bills. Others were playing soccer, driving to the mall, hanging out in the dorm with friends, getting tattoos, studying, daydreaming and following other individual pursuits far beyond the range of your crabbed imagination. Paglia's obviously well-read, and if she ever learns to resist her own urge to argue by insult, her writing may become worth reading. As long as she insists on "winning" her points by lumping people together into homogenous categories and then dumping garbage on them, though, I'm going to click past her column. And no, I'm not a student, and haven't been one for lo these many years. I'm just a determined supporter of rational thought. -- Catherine Murphy
_______________RECIPES MAKE THE WOMAN BY SALLIE TISDALE (09/24/98)
	Sally Tisdale's article is beautifully expressed. My mother seems to have lived a life she was not meant to live. She has a drawer full of recipes that do remark on what she thought was right. I often see her attempts at "domestication" and am saddened -- if only she had my opportunities. She is a wonderful, smart woman. As you imagine your mother in Reno, I pray that my mother remembers a singular night of passion, forgetting, at least for those few moments, she is a person without the need to make sure her family is getting to enough vitamins. -- Leslie Shapiro When I was young, my mother was a "stay at home mom," taking care of the family, etc. but wanting more out of life. Mom and I spent hours on weekends cooking and baking together, with the Better Home and Gardens cookbook open and usually covered in batter. She returned to school and to the work force when I was about 10. I didn't realize it until my mom passed away six years ago, but I really missed those days making jelly rolls for my Dad out of leftover pie crust, and baking pretzels for Sunday afternoon football. The things I wanted most were mom's recipe box and the cookbooks. When I have time to prepare something a little different for my family, I turn to the dirtiest pages in the cookbooks to find Mom's favorite recipes. The childhood memories come back in glorious detail as the familiar scents come from the oven. Someday, I hope my daughter will have the same experience. And, all my mother wanted was to take a cruise to Hawaii. She died of cancer four months after we gave her one for her 50th birthday. -- Charlene Huggard Troy, N.Y.
_______________ANATOMY OF AN E-MAIL CHAIN LETTER BY AMY VIRSHUP(09/22/98)
	When I received the Disney/Microsoft "offer" mail, I asked myself the same question addressed in the article: Why would anyone forward it, at least with any seriousness. However, the one piece of seeming naiveté that struck me was the apparently blithe acceptance of Microsoft's representative's claim that "Microsoft takes security and privacy very seriously," and that "There's no such program." I know of no corporation that takes either security or privacy seriously (except their own, of course -- that's sacred). Corporations seem to believe it's their business to find out everything they can about all of us in order to determine (in both senses: "find out" and "direct") what we buy. As to whether there's an e-mail tracking program in the works, they'd say there wasn't either way, wouldn't they? -- Wilson Fowlie British Columbia SALON | Sept. 28, 1998

R E C E N T L Y+| CONCEPTION BY DECEPTION BY TRACY QUAN

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