Several times Camille Paglia refers to the "liberal media." She may be interested that FAIR (admittedly part of the "liberal media") published a paper in June 1998 in which the author found that "on select issues ... journalists are actually more conservative than the general public" and "journalists are mostly centrist in their political orientation." The paper agreed that among the minority of journalists who did not identify with the center, their economics views were right of center and their social views were left of center. I know the view of media as liberal is a popular stereotype but I wonder if Paglia has anything more than anecdotal evidence to back up her claims?

-- Justus Pendleton

I must take Camille Paglia to task for accusing the Seattle Police Department of being "astonishingly unprepared and inept." The SPD in fact displayed astonishing discipline and order during the WTO protests. I have heard firsthand accounts from officers of 18-hour days with no breaks for meals or bathroom use. Why did that happen? Because of the unprepared and inept "leadership" from Mayor Schell's office.

Unfortunately, the WTO debacle has cost us a decent police chief. The one who needs to be tossed is the Democratic mayor, who left his police force twisting in the wind, just when our city most needed some real leadership.

-- Norm Jacobowitz

Most of the people I know could care less about the riotous behavior in Seattle, but they do care whether or not an anonymous bunch of apparatchiks are going to be able to overturn environmental or labor laws democratically arrived at just because some two-bit third world country thinks they might make it more difficult for them to sell more useless toys in the United States.

-- George Hogenson

No one in Brittany speaks "Gaelic." Some still speak Breton, which they call "Brezhonic," and which is a very close cousin of Welsh. What Camille Paglia's misinformed source might have been trying to say is that the Celtic languages are split into three groups: Continental, the assumed Celtic language of the Gauls, which survives in small fragments in French; Brythonic, which includes Welsh, Cornish (extinct but being artificially revived) and Breton; and the Goidilec branch, which includes the Gaelic spoken in Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man. The Gaelic and Brythonic languages are similar in grammar and form but mutually unintelligible. Welsh and Irish are Indo-European languages but the shared cognates with Latin are most likely the adoption of Roman during the empire and the direct influence of liturgical Latin.

-- Joe Orfant

Next page | Can a mother love her baby and still kill him?