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salon.com > Letters June 29, 1999 URL: http://www.salon.com/letters/1999/06/29/cox_report Letters to the Editor Blaming Clinton for three decades of Chinese spying; Cintra doesn't really understand why blacks are angry. - - - - - - - - - - - - The current scandal dates back to theft of information that began in 1970. The Bush administration was made aware of Chinese spying and came to the conclusion that nuclear security was not an issue. The story was largely ignored by the media in 1990, and only now is it coming to further light. I would go so far as to say that the only reason the scandal is generating so much interest on Capitol Hill now is that conservatives, still stung by the fact that they could not remove Clinton from office, are attempting to lay the current scandal at Clinton's feet with an eye on campaign 2000. Wouldn't it be nice if Horowitz and conservatives could actually view current and future crises of U.S. policy objectively? Of course it would be much harder to find solutions to security leaks over the last 30 years than to point fingers and lay all blame where only a small fraction of it belongs. -- Kevin Barry I remember commiserating with a brother over the first term of the Clinton presidency as the '96 elections drew near. We both thought the last four years had been pretty disastrous; I told him that the next election was crucial to our future, saying, "The reelection of President Clinton will indicate that God is through with us as a nation." I did not know how prescient my comment was. What has been revealed as the work of this president is nothing less than the dismantling of this country. It is obvious that the president and the Democratic Party broke the law to win reelection (the Democrat vote of illegal immigrants allowed in days before and during the election, etc.). But also, America repeatedly has shown the power to renew herself. Freedom does that to a people. With such exposés as Horowitz has written, I still have hope. -- J. T. Wheeler I'm horrified to see that there are still people like David Horowitz, who seem to believe it is possible to prevail in a nuclear war. True, at some point it may be possible to build an effective defense against ballistic missiles. But developing an "edge" in the form of "more sophisticated warheads and more accurate missiles" merely ensures that everyone loses, not that one side can win. It is immoral to view the deaths of hundreds of millions of people, on either side, as an acceptable outcome. It is irresponsible to suggest that one side of such a conflict might survive, since it makes the use of nuclear weapons more likely. Now, China's distribution of this technology to other nations is troubling. But, like cryptography or computers, what has been discovered once can be reinvented elsewhere -- keeping technology secret is not a long-term solution to preventing its use. We must find ways of ensuring stability that do not depend on a nuclear oligopoly; we shall be forced to do so in the long term anyway. -- Mark Gritter DAVID HOROWITZ RESPONDS ... It's true, as Kevin Barry points out, that there were security leaks before the Clinton administration. But there was not a wholesale dismantling of security controls by previous administrations, nor a systematic coverup of the leaks, nor a massive cash flow into the coffers of the administration party by people associated with the intelligence and military of the spying power. Timelines printed on Rep. Curt Weldon's Web site show the damage that took place specifically in the Clinton years, as a result of the Clinton policy. As for Mark Gritter's outrage, it is simply misplaced. Nowhere did I say or imply that the United States or any other nation could prevail in a nuclear war. Adventures in the skin trade Rolf Potts' pious refusal to have sex with a Phnom Penh hooker is pretty funny considering that by publishing his piece in a widely read magazine in a rich country he will probably be responsible for drawing hundreds, perhaps thousands of wealthy, voracious sex tourists to Cambodia. He's not willing to patronize the industry but he'll gladly do PR for it. Your travel section has recently devoted a lot of space to publicizing discount third-world sex opportunities. Recent pieces by male writers who carefully deny that they would ever patronize a prostitute -- and in fact devote much of their articles to smarmy agonizing about it -- strike me as the very familiar American blend of piety and leering voyeurism. -- Marcus Stanley
Bitter and blacker My instinct tells me that Cintra Wilson doesn't really believe the deep-seated frustration and bitterness, so often voiced by black comedians, is reasonable. That lack of knowledge seems especially difficult for "hip" white people to accept about themselves. If Wilson desires to gain a better grasp of this "simple, profound, multi-generational resentment, which ... is usually kept hidden under the mild social politeness that has always kept integrated society from dissolving into total mayhem," she should pull out the article she wrote about the Ricky Martin phenomenon. In that article, she wrote: "The pop sensation machine has finally found the answer, however, to the age-old marketing conundrum of What Makes Girls Randy, and now all media outlets are saturated with bedroom-haired, cologne-marinated, undergraduate-age dancing boys." News flash: Black girls have known that for years because black guys were "sellin' it" that way long before Ricky Martin perfected his winning Colgate smile. But now that young white guys are finally learning how to dance, a white guy who can keep a beat instead of chug-a-lugging beer is considered hip and sexy. I'm amazed at how white folks continually push this notion that it ain't happening unless white folks steer the bandwagon. It sure would be nice if people like Wilson could tell a more complete story when they write about our American culture. But because they don't -- either out of ignorance or deliberate omission -- it becomes a source of resentment. And one other thing: Regarding Wilson's detection of a "one of these things just doesn't belong here" vibe while she attended Rock's show at Harlem's Apollo Theatre, I say, "Welcome to the club." -- Bob Campbell
Brilliant Careers: Germaine Greer Surely some of society's beliefs concerning our so-called limitations are the result of cultural programming, and bio-determinism has been used as an excuse to tell us we are naturally timid and submissive, and other such rubbish proffered by men. We must not feed their ignorant bias and strengthen their foolish arguments, however, by rejecting observational science in an extreme "reaction" to their stupidity. It is obvious that there are innate differences between the genders. Germaine Greer does us all a disservice, however, when she advocates the rejection of intersex females, basing her arguments on misapprehended and ill-applied facts of biology and genetics, and other facets of the very bio-determinism she repudiates. Greer, and those like her, should be repudiated for their appalling diatribes and mean-spirited attacks on women who have been biologically challenged at worst, and who are likely to prove to be very helpful in our understanding of ourselves and of human sexuality in general. -- Natasha Lumna
What a shame that Germaine Greer, in all her world-wide wisdom, is so much more interested in becoming famous for debunking other peoples' truths than she is in finding out the common medical fact that estrogen decreases the risk of dementia in women. -- Judith Beck
Has feminism changed science? Wertheim's reviews are less about the influence of feminism on the practice of scientific investigation, and more about the prevalence of the influence of "relativist" thinking in the history of science. Given that she and others are able to reflect on the role of cultural biases and conditioning in the process of scientific analysis and discovery, is it not obvious that, progressively, such biases will over time be exposed, and the results which they shaded or caused to be misrepresented will be shown to be false? Her example is a near-perfect case of scientific accuracy progressively increasing. And let us add that we are looking at a relatively short span of scientific history: It would be even more instructive to make a catalogue of all the many hundreds of cultural biases on record which have been similarly clarified in the slowly accumulating body of observed objective reality over, say, the last 3,000 years, and which no longer cloud our collective understanding of reality. To say that there is no cultural bias in scientific investigation, or, indeed, in any other branch of human discovery, would be absurd. But it is equally absurd to argue that we are doomed to be hoodwinked by our cultural biases permanently. It may very well be that we'll never be entirely free from culturally induced hypothetical and analytical errors, but it surely is the case that more and more of them shall be exposed, and that the body of objective understanding will be, progressively, more and more accurate. -- David Yancey Games don't kill people -- do they? Greg Costikyan's extremely well-thought-out article hit the nail right on the head. As a 19-year-old who has been an avid computer gamer for nearly 10 years, my thoughts have been those of Costikyan's: Parents, politicians and gaming naysayers all chastise the games we play and the people who play them simply because they did not grow up with the technology. They do not understand the media, and more importantly, they do not realize that individuals who are playing these games are actually less harmful to society, as they are relieving their tensions and gaming proclivities through a mouse and keyboard rather than a real arsenal. The gaming industry ought to seriously consider Costikyan's piece its mantra on the issue in the long and tedious government probes surely to ensue in the coming months. -- Doug Leney
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