_______________MAIL ROOM DISPATCH ...
	Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison can rest assured she has plenty of devoted fans -- many of whom wrote in to bitterly denounce Charles Taylor's review of "Beloved." Only a small percentage of letter writers agreed with Taylor's critical take on Morrison's much-praised novel and Jonathan Demme's directorial skills. A photograph of Don Black that accompanied Ros Davidson's article "Web of hate" elicited some rather un-PC responses from defenders of the Confederate battle flag who resented the implied association of their favorite flag with the legacy of slavery and racism. Richard Rodriguez's commentary on the murder of Matthew Shepard received comments from liberals who resented his attribution of "family values" to the right wing. And many of you wrote to continue the correspondence Salon contributor Christopher Hitchens began in his open letter to Gore Vidal. We've published some of these samples below and eagerly look forward to hearing from Mr. Vidal himself.
_______________AN OPEN LETTER TO GORE VIDAL BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS (10/20/98)
	Christopher Hitchens' "Open Letter to Gore Vidal" didn't add a great deal to the debate about the Clintons, but it did serve another purpose. I've been wondering for a long time why Hitchens gets exposure on television when serious leftists are pretty much excluded even from PBS. The style of the "Open Letter" answers my question. Hitchens has an exemption from the no-lefties rule because he is essentially a figure of fun -- a person so comically cynical and scurrilous that his substantive political ideas, inaudible anyhow underneath the noise of so much attitude and posing, are hardly a threat to any establishment. Hitchens is just another media clown like Camille Paglia, Arianna Huffington, David Horowitz, George Will or Sam Donaldson, all of whom make a very good living trading their self-respect for money and screen time, the Faustian bargain that defines American intellectual life in the '90s. Smirks and appeals to what "everybody knows" are not a very good substitute for political thought or even competent reporting. But Hitchens has an additional problem endemic to what's left of the left. He obviously doesn't want his side to win elections or govern nations; he just wants to enjoy the ineffable delight of living perpetually in a state of high dudgeon. -- Jim Harrison San Francisco Christopher Hitchens and the left in general just don't seem to get it. These days the tired old left more or less echoes right-wing Republicans, who cooked up this witch hunt to disguise their own lack of support or consensus. Meanwhile the "core element" of the right proceeds in trying to overthrow an elected government in the name of their New Age version of white supremacy. As the Republican Party has allowed itself to be overrun by a closed circle of sex-obsessed demagogues, the left has allowed itself to be dominated by elitists from academia, who have little connection to the pulse or the mood of most of America. Like Republicans, they insist that all of this noise is to do with the Clintons, either their morals or their policy, while the Wall Street Journal states clearly that this is the "prosecution of a whole generation." What appears to people who look beyond a laundry list of ideological baggage is a moment when, as the Parisian paper Le Figaro put it, "the Puritan insanity that has overtaken America" will either be victorious or be repudiated in the eyes of the whole world. What distinguishes the left from the right in this whole mess seems to be little but their respective shades of humorlessness. Along with this comes an almost identical set of blinders, keeping them both from distinguishing a cultural revolution from a political one, or from perceiving the relative importance of either. This election will not be a referendum either on sex and lying, or on policies and ideas, but on the image of who we think we are. -- Ralph E. Melcher In answer to Mr. Hitchens as to why folks like Gore Vidal and myself support Bill Clinton's efforts to remain in the White House, I wish to point out that I never held any illusions about Clinton in the first place. I knew that he was a "love slave," as Hitchens put it, to the ruling class from the start; that, in many ways, he was only going to be marginally better than Reagan and Bush. And frankly, I would not really cry that many tears were he removed from office. So why defend him now? The best way I can justify this is to compare his position in '98 to Boris Yeltsin's position during the attempted coup against Mikhail Gorbachev by hard-line Communists in 1991 (when there was still a Soviet Union). Yeltsin and Gorbachev (himself a party hack, let us remember) were, at the time at least, the promise of an alternative to the tired, despicable world of the hard-liners. True, in many ways Boris Yeltsin has turned out to be little better than the folks he replaced, just as Clinton has. But none of this negates the fact that now, for all intents and purposes, Clinton is now what Yeltsin was in 1991, while Ken Starr, Henry Hyde, Trent Lott and Newt Gingrich are the hard-liners. If we allow them to win and, in effect, nullify a legitimate vote of at least a portion of the American people, then we might as well give up on even a faint hope of a progressive government rising to power, maybe even on democracy itself. -- Peter Muir Alameda, Calif. I've complained before about Christopher Hitchens' blind anti-Americanism, which so far has only affected his subject matter. Now it is affecting his attitude toward readers. Not only is he attacking Gore Vidal, but he does so vituperatively, as if he were drawing writing sustenance from Vidal's awesome literary force, and he's doing so in a whiny, in-your-face tone that may offend the sensibilities of readers who aren't tone-challenged. I lived in England for 11 years and know Hitchens' elitist, Sauvignon Blanc-sipping style of pseuderie disguised as outraged left-wing concern for "the masses." So he has a facility with words? So what! What about being honest and having a heart? These qualities infuse the writing of many of your contributors. Please give him a sabbatical (to allow him time to reread his old, great, heartfelt, unembittered Nation columns and regain a sense of dignity) and spare your Salon devotees the irritation of waking up and having mud thrown at us first thing in the morning. -- Diane Rafferty
_______________ACROSS THE GREAT DIVIDE BY GARY KAMIYA (10/19/98)
	Regarding Gary Kamiya's piece reviewing several new books on "racial" harmony: I live in Oakland, Calif., the most ethnically diverse city in the United States. Our beautiful, oft-maligned town has good neighborhoods, bad ones and many that are in between -- but all are more culturally mixed ("integrated") than you could imagine. We have a long way to go to fully heal the ancient and ongoing wounds of our racist history, let alone eliminate the universal scourges of poverty, drug addiction and crime. Still, the divisions that exist here in Oakland have more and more to do with economic class than ethnicity. Only 30 years after Jim Crow laws were abolished is far too soon to throw up our hands and declare that we've done all we can to erase the stubborn economic and social vestiges of racism. I invite anyone who's interested to come to a neighborhood meeting here and observe the greatest melting pot in America, where people come in many more colors than black and white, and where we all still have a dream. --Alexandra Weber Morales Oakland, Calif. I've always considered myself to be very liberal in dealing with issues such as racism, sexuality and gender issues. What I remember most about some of the university classes and discussions that I've participated in is that the ones who were loudest in dealing with these issues were those who have never read the ideology behind what's being written -- conservative, liberal or otherwise. There appears to be a certain demonization that runs rampant throughout the discourse of race, sexuality and other issues that divide us, that everything that is not comparable to our opinions is always and inevitably wrong. I have found some of the views brought up by these conservative writers startlingly similar to my own: a sense of individuality before racial responsibility; a need for true discussion and work behind the scenes among the races, not just black and white; and a need for praxis to beef up the myriad theories that seem to crop up every few minutes in academia. The obsession over racial and ethnic division might be bound up with overemotional rhetoric, or massaged statistical data, but the desire to truly get beyond the victimization of one race and to meet it with a healing dialogue is there. The need and desire for dialogue does exist: Kamiya makes it very clear. We all need to realize the individuality beyond the stereotype, and at the same time, acknowledge and accept our differences beyond mere lip service and superficial sociopolitical musings. -- Efren Bose
_______________HOCUS BOGUS BY LAURA MILLER (10/16/98)
	I was amused by Laura Miller's review of "Practical Magic," which confirmed my own suspicions about the flick. Frankly, I don't understand why 90 percent of all films about female bonding are directed by men. Men do not have a clue. I would go further and say that men in Hollywood have a negative clueless factor. Alice Hoffman writes very nice little novels, what with cute magical elements and faux anguish and attractive single mothers packing up station wagons and then fooling around with gas station attendants. But please! If any real woman had magical powers, she would use them for both good and evil (depending upon mood) and, of course, just to make life easier and more enjoyable. It doesn't take staying awake for Psychology 101 to figure out why a man would like a story about a witch who doesn't want to use her powers. Having watched "Sabrina, the Teenage Witch" with my son, I would wager that Sabrina Spellman could figure out a way to have love and use her powers. These dumb constructs -- love a man and he dies -- are rather antifeminist, no? It is a delight to read an intelligent woman reviewing a movie. -- Martha Acosta SALON | Oct. 23, 1998

R E C E N T L Y+| WEB OF HATE BY ROS DAVIDSON

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