As much as I admire and am moved by the frequent mention of Paglia's partner, Alison, I would hope that someday Paglia could support, rather than attack, the need for all human connection within the gay/lesbian community, between mothers, daughters, sisters, lovers and all their male counterparts. There are enough vicious attacks from the outside, without having more anger and dissent implode the fragile gains from within. Whether it's Judy Shepard, Cher, Betty DeGeneres, or Ellen and Anne, why stab the messenger when the message is so vital?

-- Lacey L. Lewis
Houston

Camille Paglia, in her latest column, lambastes the "academic establishment" for de-emphasizing the acquisition of hard knowledge, and cites an earlier work titled "The Corrupting of the Humanities in the U.S." Can we please stop equating the academic establishment with humanities departments? As someone with two degrees in physics, I can assure Paglia and her readers that parts of academe still respect the acquisition and even the expansion of hard knowledge. Moreover, postmodernism and deconstructionism never come up -- except as the butts of an occasional practical joke.

-- David J. Edmondson
Washington

While I applaud the author's call for the regulated legalization of drugs, I would suggest that her views about employer drug testing need to be revised. Because of the body's metabolism and storage of chemicals (especially in fat), it is quite possible to test positive for drugs, e.g. marijuana, days after use and days after the psychotropic effect has worn off. If employers wish to test for impairment, they should test for impairment with appropriate tests of coordination, cognitive functioning, etc. Impairment comes quite easily from legal medications and medical conditions that drug tests will miss. Drug testing in the workplace is often inappropriate and punitive, and not a means to "protect" the public.

-- Glenn Martin

Does Camille Paglia expect Salon readers to join her in "hailing" Rush Limbaugh's tremendous intellectual influence, or be impressed that she did? For the critical thinker, Limbaugh's only intellectual value is as a running brain-teaser, with listening to him an exercise in identifying the fallacy. Why would Paglia, champion of the humanities, hail the intellectual influence of a man whose poisonous tirades give the indication that he's never read a single book that wasn't published by Regnery Press -- whose idea of great music is the Mannheim Steamroller playing "Deck the Halls"? How can she attack the lockstep mentality of the liberal media but praise the intellectual influence of someone whose admirers call themselves "dittoheads"?

-- Charles Brower

Will someone please tell Camille to put down the damn thesaurus and write in today's English? While I like some of her articles, it pains me to have to keep clicking on the damn dictionary just to understand her! We believe she is smart; she doesn't have to keep trying to convince us.

-- Darrell Hampton

High noon for nurturers
BY SHELLEY EMLING
(10/26/99)

People who advocate "chastisement" of little children like to quote Bible verses in support of their theory. However, the verses they quote are all from the Old Testament and from a time when life in general was rough and primitive.

If they studied the teachings of the Christ they claim to follow, they would find no such encouragement for violence. He commended parents who gave their children what they asked for: "Which of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? ... So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you."

When people tried to keep children out of the way, Jesus indignantly exclaimed, "Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them." He even told a story about a man who didn't want to answer the door because "my children are with me in bed." Hardly a case for letting them cry themselves to sleep!

Instead of trying to make children over with harsh discipline, the hero of the New Testament admonished people, "Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." (All references quoted are from the New International Version.)

I feel those who teach that spanking is a Christian method of raising children are misrepresenting the truth.

-- Kathleen McCurdy

What's going on here is not a slight difference of opinion in parenting styles. The facts are that when people institute Gary and Anne Marie Ezzos' horrible advice, some of the babies go to the hospital, malnourished, dehydrated and failing to thrive. Newborns are diagnosed with failure to thrive because of the rigid feeding schedules and demands of parents that babies eat when food is offered or suffer the consequence -- waiting another three to four hours. Sometimes feeding tubes are necessary to keep the infants from dying. Babies are left to cry unattended for long periods, sometimes until they vomit, sometimes until there is blood in their mouths. Some babies stop making eye contact with their mothers. Can you blame them? The object of the Ezzos' practices is to break the child's will and spirit, and, by golly, it does.

-- Peggy McGonigle

Bum rap
BY LAWRENCE OSBORNE
(10/27/99)

Lawrence Osborne doesn't seem to have read the book. Eugenio Pacelli had no problem at all standing up against communist atrocities and was quite willing to put himself on the line for that. Also, Osborne is ignoring the single most crucial point: that Pacelli completely dismantled the German Center Party (a Catholic party), which was at the time the strongest opposition party in Germany to the Nazis before they really came to power.

The church before the concordat barred Nazis from receiving the sacraments of the church. Hitler specifically signed this concordat to get Pacelli to declare this political opposition by Catholics wrong and to forbid the church and its members from denying the sacraments to members of the Nazi Party. After this, Hitler's primary opposition was completely dismantled; Catholics considered this the church's official approval of the Nazi party and many joined the party in droves.

Pacelli said nothing condemning specifically the massive Jewish genocide going on, of which he had full knowledge. Several documents uncovered by the author indicate Pacelli's own anti-Semitism as well as the connection he saw between Judaism and communism, which he saw as a far greater threat to the world than fascism or national socialism. He just made two very vague statements denouncing the unfortunate suffering of people during the war due to their race -- without even mentioning Judaism specifically. He did nothing at all to stop the deportation of the Jews of Rome when he was clearly in a position of influence to do so. Hitler wanted to take over the Vatican, but the Roman head of the SS sent a letter explaining exactly why this was completely unfeasible, as it would have enraged the world's huge Catholic population and turned them against the Nazis.

This is not an author who started the book with an ax to grind but, as he makes clear, a devout Catholic who intended to write a completely different kind of book, but could not after confronting the facts, for which I congratulate him. As a Catholic who finds it extremely important that the truth about these matters be addressed and confronted, I find this whole article sickeningly offensive.

-- Cathy Witalka

Most of the reviews of the Cornwell slander against Pius XII have been naively or maliciously favorable. But Lawrence Osborne understands how weak the argument is that Pius' centralization of the Catholic Church weakened the will of German Catholics to resist Hitler. There was no such German Catholic will to resist Hitler. Pacelli did have a disagreeable personality and he did expect to be treated more like an idol than the successor of a flesh-and-blood Simon Peter. But Pacelli was no anti-Semite and no lover of Hitler. He was just too much a diplomat and too little a Christian pastor. Cardinal Tardini reminded Catholics after World War II that Vatican diplomacy originated with Simon Peter's denial of Christ. Blackening Pius XII has become necessary for leftist Catholics and for some Jews; but he was not the worst of popes, though surely not the best.

-- Norman Ravitch
Professor of history
University of California, Riverside

Lawrence Osborne's review cites the slaughter of the Dutch Jews in 1942 to underline the Nazi response to any Catholic criticism of the policy of annihilation. But this situation can't really be compared to what happened in Rome in 1944, since the German position in Italy at that time was much more precarious. The Allied advance was inexorably coming closer to Rome -- and a prominent papal response to the Jewish round-up, one which might even have put the Nazis in the position of actually having to physically imprison the pope, would have tied up precious resources. It was a classic negotiating situation, and that Pius XII didn't do anything is a grave blot on his name -- especially when examined alongside the welcome and protection he extended to Croatian war criminals, who were Catholic, after the war.

Osborne scores debater's points by turning Cornwell's argument into the position that the church, under Pacelli, could have stopped the massacres cold. That argument would, of course, be ridiculous. But the much more interesting argument has to do with whether, in some places and at some points during the war, the church could have operated differently so as to save Jews. The corollary to the proposition that they could have is to show that, due to internal political issues within the Vatican, they didn't take their opportunity. Since we know this to be the case with other governments -- notably, Horthy's in Hungary -- Osborne's rejection of it seems unmerited.

Furthermore, the case against the Vatican is strengthened by the Catholic role in some other places, like Croatia, Slovakia and perhaps Hungary. Slovakia was officially headed by a priest; and the situation in Croatia, in which Serbs and Jews were killed in astonishingly high numbers, was supported by many priests. Because the church was much more concerned about communism than fascism, it did sanction collusion in these cases.

If nothing else, Cornwell's book makes a strong case for the Vatican opening up its records on this period in history. It also makes it plain that Pius XII was no saint.

-- Roger Gathman

It is indeed unlikely that Pius could have swayed Hitler's policies toward European Jews (or Gypsies, homosexuals and Catholic dissidents). However, I disagree that this absolved Pius from his moral responsibility to speak out. Silence about totalitarianism is tacit approval, and in the case of someone in Pius' position, collaboration. We can guess, in hindsight, that Pius could not have changed the course of events, but it's wrong to conclude that he need not have tried.

-- Bill Ravdin
Oakland, Calif.

Snake eyes
BY DAVE SHIFLETT
(10/27/99)

All the anti-gambling "studies" touted by opponents can't refute the ongoing seven-decade study that's Las Vegas. It's the most successful city created since the turn of the century -- full of churches, free of state income taxes, with virtually full employment, terrific education, world-class entertainment, good housing and a round-the-clock economy -- what's not to like?

Tunica and Biloxi, Miss., are but two of many examples (since Atlantic City) of how gambling has revived impoverished sites around the country. Sure, there are economic inequities and corruption, but no more than taint cities without gambling. Anyone who doubts the efficacy of state-regulated legalized gambling need only visit the reality of Vegas to recognize the hypocrisy and denial behind its opponents' dark prophecies. Viva Las Vegas!

-- Robert Glass

The mysterious mind
BY ARTHUR ALLEN
(10/27/99)

Neuroscience will fail to explain "how the mind works" less because it "lacks a unifying insight" into its various data than because its subject of study (if it is, indeed, the mind) is not a datum. Unlike neuroscience, other sciences limit themselves to theoretical explanations of observable phenomena. Correlations of various types of subjective experience to observations of the brain don't count as an explanation of the mind, because there is no satisfying model of the causal link between the behavior of physical things (including the brain) and subjective experience.

If sensations were observable to third parties as just one more kind of physical object, then linking certain sensations to specific kinds of brain activity would go some way towards providing us with a satisfying explanation of the mind. Unfortunately, the most interesting fact about the mind -- the one that arouses our greatest curiosity -- is the very fact that will prevent any empirical science of consciousness from succeeding: Sensations, thoughts and consciousness are not empirically observable even to those who have them (having sensations and knowing that we have them is not the same as seeing, touching or measuring a sensation).

This is not to say that neuroscience has no proper object of study: It is the brain, but not the mind, that neuroscientists explain when they correlate various kinds of experience to specific brain-states. Yet it is unhelpful to conflate the explanation of one with the explanation of the other, as Horgan does even in the title of his book.

It's tempting to the scientifically exuberant to identify objectivity (in-principle scientific explicability) with existence in general. But there's no hard evidence in favor of doing so; for all the discomfort it may cause us, there is nothing inconsistent about the existence of both objective phenomena (including those having to do with the brain) and subjective experience along with their strong correlation and causal inexplicability.

-- Wes Alwan

Arthur Allen's statement that "some recent studies have shown Prozac to be no better, on average, than a sugar pill in treating depression" is a ludicrous statement. Further, the argument that Peter Kramer's book had anything but the slightest effect on Prozac's dramatic rise in popularity is equally daft. The reasons Prozac is so popular are a) it works, based on the summation of all controlled experiments, as computed statistically by meta-analysis, (as opposed to a single individual's misguided opinion), and b) because drug companies deploy massive marketing machines to support those drugs that work particularly well.

-- Neal J. Roese
Assistant Professor
Department of Psychology
Northwestern University
Evanston, Ill.

Brains for hire
BY JAKE TAPPER
(10/27/99)

Applying the term "compassionate conservative" to William Bennett is a bad joke. Bennett has been a leading hit man for the extreme right-wing for a long time. And I haven't heard anything compassionate in Bennett's political proposals: His only answer to the drug problem is to build more jails. His only answer to school problems is to further weaken public schools by supplying vouchers to private schools. He is a prime proponent of the Republican proposals to reduce taxes for the wealthy and cut benefits for the poor.

-- Morton Wachspress
Woodmere, N.Y.