Correction: Because of an editing error, early versions of the story "Wall Street lovefest" included a quote by Doug Henwood of the Left Business Observer describing some people's assessment of outgoing Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin as "an abrasive prick." Henwood used the phrase to describe Lawrence Summers, President Clinton's nominee to succeed Rubin as treasury secretary. Salon regrets the error.

Jesse Ventura's gaffe riot
BY JAKE TAPPER
(05/07/99)

Jake Tapper paints Gov. Ventura as a bumbling buffoon who doesn't have the first clue about playing the game of politics. Thank God for that. Jesse Ventura may not be a political insider, but he does have drive and a desire to see changes come about. I think it is refreshing to have a leader who says what is on his mind, rather that checking with his pollsters to find out what is popular.

-- Clifton Reed Johnston

Who started this fad of calling anybody who isn't a racist "sensitive"? It makes the racists sound like the normal people. Once again, "sensitivity" is used to describe what is just plain common sense. You don't need to be "sensitive" to realize, especially in this day and age, that racism is wrong and stupid remarks are, well, just plain stupid. And you make a career out of saying stupid, racist things, you are going to end up being perceived as a stupid racist.

-- Juliane Schneider
New York

Jake Tapper uses the increasingly popular media epithet "gun nut." I do disagree with Tapper, but does that also qualify me as a "nut"? I certainly don't feel like one. Apparently, neither did Yale University when they offered me a double-major degree a few years back. Nor does my current employer, who sees fit to pay me quite well for my services. And the federal government certainly offers me no insanity-based tax break.

Why is it then that an otherwise intelligent reporter feels the need to attack political rivals with ad hominem attacks?

-- Sam MacDonald
Baltimore, Md.

Web of doom
BY SCOTT ROSENBERG
(05/07/99)

Scott Rosenberg is missing some of the real differences that this new medium has made in the availability of information.

The Net, first of all, is the cheapest and most accessible form of publishing ever known. As a result, the Net is an immense source of free information, with access limited only by one's skill at searching. That includes all sorts of information offensive to good mores and conventional morals.

The Net is also unmediated by a showing of general interest. If you can find it, it doesn't matter that your local library or bookstore doesn't consider the information worth stocking for commercial or moral reasons.

Unlike TV, movies and popular music, moreover, the Net is interactive. Whatever your interest, there is likely to be someone else like you out there who has written and/or made images about it. You can ask questions, get answers, and develop relationships with people who are interested in what you are, people from anywhere in the world, whom you would otherwise not have a chance to meet.

The combination of broadly available unmediated information and new relationships makes the Net a validator. The gay 15-year-old in the small town in the big square state can quickly learn that he is not, as everyone around him seems to think, a weirdo, and that the world contains many people who think and feel as he does. So can the white supremacist, the goddess worshiper, or the kid who has sexual fantasies about the Olsen twins. The marginal kid, who might otherwise be pushed back into respectable behavior by social pressure, gets to draw new strength from the knowledge that someone else like him is out there.

Finally, the Net leaves no physical evidence behind: no Playboy under the mattress, no CDs, no package in a plain brown wrapper. As much as parents may hate and fear the influence of commercial pop culture, it is at least out where they can see it.

The American middle-class suburb is built on a foundation of class segregation for the purpose of rearing children in what parents consider a healthy physical and moral environment, free from the bad people, bad ideas and physical temptations of the ethnically, economically and morally diverse cities. The suburb cannot keep out the professional bad influences of pop culture that pander to teenage longings, but these are motivated mainly by what will sell to a broad audience. The Net is a source of bad influences that are much more diverse and individually selected and are much less economically motivated than the older commercial media. It represents a new level in middle-class parents' loss of control over the associations and ideas available to their children.

-- James M. Hirschhorn
Newark, N.J.

Parents let their kids go online without keeping an eye on what they are doing, then blame the medium for the things the kids find. This is a parenting problem. When are these bellyachers going to get their heads out of the sand and take responsibility for their own laziness?

-- R.J. McFate

Lips made for ...
BY GREG NOTT
(05/08/99)

It's funny how men and women respond differently to sexual situations, both initiate and advanced. Maybe it's based on cultural and social stereotypes, or perhaps it's something biological or emotionally deeper. Most women I know, including myself, "practiced" their first kiss ultimately intended "for boys" with another girl. Whether or not they ended up identifying sexually as an adult as gay, straight or bisexual is another matter.

-- Jamie Joy Gatto
New Orleans, La.

Everything she had
BY VIRGINIA VITZTHUM
(05/04/99)

How is this experience between a person living with AIDS, indeed dying from AIDS, and a "public health expert" different from gay men "barebacking"?

I'll tell you -- the "expert" is straight, so that makes it a "real experience," instead of being just a gay man's collective idiotic suicidal impulse. How hypocritical and ultimately homophobic of your author to present the story that way.

-- Rich Lane, Ph.D.

The bitter end
BY JACK HITT
(05/07/99)

Hitt writes: "Whitewater ... ended not as malfeasance, not as politics, not as sex, not as perjury, but as a classic American morality play between absolutists and humanists."

I wish I believed this, er, factual account. Then I could be happy that Clinton is still in office; I could dismiss the account of Juanita Broaddrick as so much "stalking"; I could wipe from my brain my own visceral sense of Clinton's pathological dishonesty; I could convince myself that there is no long-term price to be paid for placing the most powerful elected office on the planet in the hands of somebody for whom there is no substantive truth.

But since I can't manage the mental gymnastics that all this would require, I guess I'll just have to be classed with that absolutist anti-humanist puritan, Christopher Hitchens.

-- Erich Schwarz