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salon.com > Letters Dec. 16, 1999 URL: http://www.salon.com/letters/1999/12/16/paglia Letters to the Editor Is Camille Paglia on target on WTO? Plus: Could a mother love her child and still kill him? - - - - - - - - - - - - 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 She loves me, she loves me not Sara Blaffer Hrdy makes an absurd claim. The brutal facts of infanticide simply don't rule out the existence of a natural maternal instinct. The maternal instinct has been keenly felt and readily acknowledged for centuries, and is, I believe, a motivating factor for infanticide. A mother will protect a child when she knows that it won't be provided for; protection, in some cases, means sparing the child suffering. The maternal instinct is so powerful that a mother will kill her own child to protect it from her own (real or perceived) incompetence. Hrdy tries to strengthen her case by confusing mercy killing with murder. There is a tangible difference between villagers who sacrifice children that they know they cannot provide for, and women who inexplicably hurt and kill children that others might readily adore. -- Sara Minogue Susan Caba presented Sara Hrdy's book on motherhood as a feminist's scientific rebuttal of conservative notions of "maternal instinct," yet interviewed no conservatives for her article. I'm a social liberal, pro-choice; from the review, I suspect I won't disagree much with Hrdy's conclusions. And yet even I can see how the reviewer sets up straw men. Is the conservative position, essentially, that women should have no control over their decision to have and raise children (what Caba seems to suggest) or is it that women who have children should be careful to set up loving environments for them first, should make their choices responsibly? There is nothing in the review that suggests that a conservative who believed the latter would find Hrdy's conclusions problematic. Instead of assuming she knows how conservatives might react, Caba might have asked one or two. Hrdy's book is not a slam dunk for the liberal side. -- Kevin Douglas
Great NFL orgies and the comely gaze of dead Beatles It's good to know that there is at least one other woman who saw "North Dallas Forty" and liked it. I saw it 20-something years ago, when it came out, and I was beginning to think I was the only one. I can remember sitting in the dark theater trying to write down quotes from the characters' lines. It's not just another football movie, but I never could convince any other women of that. -- Judy Leecy Cintra Wilson refers to original Beatles member Stu Sutcliffe as a "forgotten dead boy." If Wilson had attended the Beatlefest held in Secaucus, N.J., in March, she would have heard Astrid Kirchherr and Klaus Voormann sharing anecdotes about Sutcliffe before a crowded ballroom packed to the rafters with appreciative, savvy Beatles fans -- all of whom, judging from the questions they asked, were quite familiar with Sutcliffe already. Not exactly the fate of too many "forgotten dead" people, Cintra. -- Sebastian Thaler The seeds of Seattle Of course Japanese and American unionists now find common cause. The average Japanese industrial worker makes more than his American counterpart and has for a number of years. With Japanese companies now following the lead of their American predecessors in building most of their new low- or medium-skill manufacturing capacity outside of Japan (including such comparatively "third world" places as the American South), the labor protectionist agenda of Japanese and American unions is essentially identical: "Screw the 'developing nations'; I've got mine and I'm keeping it!" At the other end of the scale, does anyone really imagine that Indonesian political developments of the last few years are unrelated to the radical increase in the percentage of the local workforce employed by foreign corporations? Trade increases the wealth in developing countries and spreads it around. The "workers of the world" have led all of the political revolutions of the last decade or so -- the Phillipines, Poland, etc. They just didn't do it out of ideology; quite the contrary: They see themselves becoming the bourgeoisie and resent remaining authoritarian limits on their ability to do so. Over the past generation, the countries of East Asia have gone from underdeveloped to developed in this way. In another generation -- absent interference -- the rest of the world's currently underdeveloped countries could do likewise. This state of affairs is achievable within our lifetimes if it is not monkey-wrenched by greedy labor unions wishing to indefinitely preserve their current privileges at the expense of everyone else. -- Dick Eagleson The protestors, peaceful and otherwise, brought to the table the frustration of those who have been neglected for far too long: those who have lost their jobs to foreign competition or those who no longer have the opportunities, once afforded middle-class Americans, to earn a piece of the American dream. During the last two decades millions of Americans have seen their futures evaporate into a fog of foreign competition and multinational corporations seeking to maximize profits by the exploitation of third-world labor. Overlooked in the Seattle demonstrations were the farm families destroyed by the multinational oligopolies which dictate prices paid for farm commodities. These displaced farm families represent a huge army of economic casualties of world trade and corporate consolidations. Seattle was a wake-up call for those who make the macro decisions that impact families at the micro level. -- Gene W. DeVaux Bruce Shapiro says "this time, there is an opportunity to raise a broader issue: What kind of global economy do we want? What commitments to labor and environmental standards must be exacted in return for any nation's right to participate fully in the global trade system?" This statement of the issue subtly avoids the real question for United States policy -- "What are the consequences of policies that restrict international trade for a) people living in the restricted countries, b) consumers in the United States, and c) producers in the United States?" Few people would disagree with choosing, as a goal for U.S. policy, the improvement of living conditions for people in developing countries. However, any actual U.S. policy that restricts trade with a nation because of those conditions, may be more likely to harm those people than to help them -- while simultaneously raising prices and restricting freedom of choice for U.S. consumers -- all for the benefit of U.S. producers (including workers in the protected industry). The problem with the Seattle protests is not the ultimate (stated) goal of the protestors -- it is that the protestors have the analysis wrong. That issue can be addressed only if the question is phrased as "What are the consequences of alternative policies?" rather than the loftier but misleading "What kind of world do we want to live in?" -- Alan C. Stockman
The respectable cult Laura Miller offers a perspective on Christian Science, its founder (Mary Baker Eddy) and its practices that misrepresents all three. It is difficult to understand why the review would describe the book as "thoroughly researched" when its author relies heavily on prejudiced sources (like the Milmine/Cather biography of Mary Baker Eddy, discredited by objective scholars) and invokes as authority anyone who has anything negative to say about Christian Science and its founder. Christian Science doesn't have a set of secret doctrines. Its teachings are completely set forth in Mary Baker Eddy's primary work, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," which has been translated into 16 languages and is publicly available in bookstores, libraries and Christian Science Reading Rooms throughout the world. Local congregations maintain church services and Reading Rooms as community resources for spiritual discovery. The sole underlying goal in all these activities is to provide products and resources which will be enriching and useful to spiritual seekers everywhere. Fraser's characterization of Eddy as a "deeply fearful person" couldn't be farther from the truth. It's precisely because she courageously faced and successfully overcame the challenges that faced her -- especially as a woman in the male-dominated society of her day -- that in 1998 the Women's Rights National Historical Park initiated an exhibit about her to celebrate her story and achievements. Likewise, it's unlikely that the National Women's Hall of Fame would have inducted Eddy in 1995, to stand alongside women like Abigail Adams, Helen Keller, Amelia Earhart and Eleanor Roosevelt, if Fraser's characterization were true. The review describes as an "alarming revelation" the fact that "many elected officials support both the right to withhold medical treatment from children for religious reasons and Medicare reimbursements for the services of Christian Science nurses -- nurses whose training is entirely religious not medical." Regarding the first point, it is fair to say that many states have, in fact, accommodated in their laws responsible spiritual healing practices. These accommodations do not "support the right to withhold medical treatment" but rather uphold the right of parents to make responsible health care choices for their children, including relying upon spiritual healing practices. These legislative provisions however, have never precluded the state from intervening as necessary. As far as the church is concerned, parents are always free to select any form of treatment they deem best under the circumstances, including conventional medical treatment. Fraser discounts the evidence of the healing efficacy of Christian Science, including over 60,000 testimonies of healing -- at least a quarter of them medically documented. Fraser instead speculates, but never validates, that there are large numbers of children's deaths among those relying on Christian Science. And yet when asked at a September book talk in Seattle how many cases of child deaths there had been in her state of Washington, she could only cite the one described in her book, recalled from her childhood. As far as Medicare is concerned, payments to Christian Science nursing facilities, representing taxes Christian Scientists pay as citizens, are payments only for professional non-medical nursing services, such as bathing, dressing, feeding, washing and bandaging wounds. These services are comparable to such non-medical services furnished in all medical facilities. Medicare payments to Christian Science nursing facilities do not reimburse for spiritual treatment. -- Gary A. Jones
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