I would like to correct several factual inaccuracies in Charles Taylor's review of my book, "Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self."

First, he writes that "Brison claims rape victims share the same status as Holocaust survivors," which I nowhere say and, on the contrary, explicity deny throughout the book. Although I do point out that such diverse groups as survivors of the Nazi death camps, veterans of the Vietnam war and rape survivors "frequently remark that they are not the same people they were before they were traumatized," I add that "I do not mean to imply that the traumas suffered by these different groups of survivors are the same, or even commensurable." In fact, I disagree with the title of the review itself, which calls rape "The Ultimate Violation." I don't myself see the point in ranking traumas, but, if forced to do so, I would, without hesitation, put what happened to me far lower down on the "trauma scale" than what happened to Holocaust survivors.

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What a weight off my shoulders.

Herman Melville
R. W. Emerson
(some of) Don DeLillo
Dreiser

They are crap, they really are.

-- Stephen Rifkin

Tom Bissell "[has] never read more than a dozen sequential pages" of Faulkner or James, yet proclaims the former "perhaps the streakiest writer to have ever lived" and that even the latter's "shorter work left [him] feeling as though a very large screw indeed were turning into [his] brain." These must have been very short streaks indeed, and I wonder how Mr. Bissell can distinguish between James' short stories and novels when he reads only a bare fraction of either. Reading more than mere snippets of these writers' works would allow him to learn if his critiques are valid. But to be fair, he may go on to make many cogent -- even brilliant -- points in his essay; it's not for me to say, as I have never read more than a dozen sentences of Tom Bissell.

-- Mike Murphy

I was rather relieved to see Tom Bissell's article about the authors he hates to hate. I once admitted to my American lit I professor that I utterly despised Henry James. She calmly told me that she had done her dissertation on James. Gulp. I shall always be grateful to her that she seemed to understand, if not share, my intolerance for reading James.

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I was surprised by what Pelton had to say about the real enemies of the U.S. When Pelton is able to know that the people who were killed by our bombing in Afghanistan are Pakistanis, how is it possible that well-known journals like the New York Times or the Washington Post or reputable TV channels like CNN or BBC has not reported on such shocking news? Why have they not uncovered what will have a devastating impact on U.S. foreign policy? If Pelton is telling the truth, then the U.S. must be waging terrorism wars against different countries. Or at least the U.S. should not refer to countries like Pakistan as a dependable ally.

Everyone knew that it was General Musharraf who had supported the Taliban in the past, it was he who supported militant training schools called Madrassas, it was he who encouraged al-Qaida. But it was reported that he is a changed man now after Sept. 11. Is this the truth? Or is he still secretly harboring Taliban and even Osama bin Laden. It would have been useful if Pelton could shed light on these issues.

In any case, this interview has been very useful to me to decide on who our real enemies are to fight against the terrorism.

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Thank you, Mr. Bayard, for puncturing the ridiculous "my America is better than your America" hypocrisy continually spewed by Bill Bennett and the "moral clarity" crowd.

As a self-professed liberal who has had the privilege to live overseas (including the Middle East), I don't need him to tell me why and how I should love my country. We live in the greatest nation in the world, but we are not perfect. What makes us great and makes us strong is the ability to question the actions of our government and learn through experience.

Instead of fighting for these ideals, Bill Bennett and his ilk pay lip service to freedom and then castigate those who exercise it. His worldview has more in common with fascism then the wisdom of our founding fathers.

As for the notion that exercising our free will weakens our nation, will someone please tell me how I am helping Osama bin Laden by asking whether we should be fighting in the Philippines instead of concentrating on mopping up al-Qaida and strengthening the Karzai government?

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I read Laura Miller's good review of Chesler's book on women and once again am struck by the naive portrayal of women as unfortunately, not perfect.

Well, duh.

Of course women hurt and undermine one another. We all hurt and undermine one another. Why should women be expected not to? Because "we're above that"? How foolish.

I am disappointed that an obviously smart feminist holds women to some undefined higher standard than men. We all, regardless of sex, have our narcissistic moments of self-indulgence. We all do crappy things that we should be ashamed of. There is a reason we call it "survival of the fittest."

To assume that women shouldn't do horrible things to one another is unfair to women. Can we not be as smart, talented and shallow as men?

-- Jake Goodrich

I'm a singer songwriter, and years ago, I wrote all sorts of feminist songs, including my first recording, "Fetish for the Underdog." I definitely would call myself a die-hard feminist, so imagine how disturbing it was for me to recently say to my temp agency, "I won't work for a woman. Don't send me to a woman boss." Whoa. That was a tough thing to hear myself say. And when I admitted this to the other female temp secretaries, they all agreed: 9 times out of ten the woman boss is just a nightmare to work for. Much worse than the men. Especially female attorneys.

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With due regard to your demonizing the work of Thomas Kinkade, please allow me to make this observation. Mr. Kinkade's works are very well received within the Christian community and he understands this and uses his talents to glorify his Christ.

I resent the vilification by your writer and feel this is the reason for finding fault with Mr. Kinkade's work.

-- Charles Jordan

You rock. I'm really an artist, no kidding, and the last thing I ever want to see is a Karo Syrup Kinkade Art-Based Product. It is absolute heresy to say that what he creates (or purports to create, since he never sells his "originals") is anything like "art." But unfortunately, the masses in our society with Jell-O for brains are mostly vapid cowards more concerned with their neighbors' opinions than their own. And to that point, Kinkade is a marketing genius. He shows us that, in true American style and grit, anyone with enough raw ambition can become a billionaire, if that is what they truly wish for.

-- Brenda Bredvik

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Laura Miller follows in the trend of New York literary critics who somehow think they have been suddenly, magically endowed with a thorough knowledge of military history and are therefore just as qualified to review books on that subject as they are to chatter about bad women's fiction. Her review of my "The Lessons of Terror" is riddled not only with references to statements made in the book that she can't PROVE wrong, but simply FEELS MUST be wrong, as if she is reviewing something as subjective as Lady Bushnell's latest tripe, but also with arrogant misstatements of actual facts: Japan, for example, was not reduced to surrender by either the bombing of its civilians or, finally, the atomic bombs; it had been reduced to fatal weakness by something that I'm sure Ms. Miller is utterly unaware of, one of the most underappreciated military campaigns in history: that of American submarines against Japanese naval and merchant shipping. But let's not let facts or a shaky grounding in history keep us from being a bitchy wise-ass -- THAT would get you thrown out of the club that meets at Michiko's to watch "Sex in the City" and spout a lot of nonsense about things they don't know.

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So ... let me get this straight: The Los Alamos incident was nothing more than some "vast right wing" conspiracy to make the White House look bad? Remember that this happened during Janet Reno's watch, so what does that say about her? Is she secretly part of the "Beltway" frenzy?

More important is the presumption that "Chinagate" is over. Allow me to show you how wrong you are:

A. Judicial Watch, in 1995, through the Freedom of Information Act, uncovered the connection between Chinese campaign contributions and the exchange of sensitive missile and weapons technology.

B. Judicial Watch obtained a court judgment against the corrupt Clinton-Gore Commerce Department in the Chinagate scandal, which found that evidence had been destroyed and testimony falsified.

C. The Clinton-Gore administration offered to pay for all of Judicial Watch's legal costs (totaling about $2,000,000) if Judicial Watch agreed to drop its first Chinagate investigation and lawsuit. Judicial Watch refused the "bribery" attempt and instead dramatically "ramped up" its Chinagate investigations and lawsuits.

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An interesting and (dare I say it?) entertaining article about that weapons-grade epithet, and Randall Kennedy's book on same. Being a black American (and having survived the word a few times already in this life), I couldn't help wishing that Charles Taylor had made the biggest point about the true nature of the "evil" of the word: that there isn't (and can't be) an equivalent verbal dagger for whites. It's the asymmetry of the thing that makes it so potent.

-- Steven Augustine

My own children's book, "Buckaroo," published by Delacorte Press, has been quietly banned at my granddaughter's elementary school. I say quietly -- the librarian said that parents would raise a stink because the N word is used twice. In the book, the young protagonist, a white boy, hears the N word snarled, is appalled and knows it's a word that rolls on his tongue like a rotten raisin. Later, he himself uses the word in a fit of rage and is horrified because this thoughtless, stupid action hurts his new friend Ivy, a black girl. The story, set in 1958 Arkansas, opens with: "Preston Davis had never seen a colored girl up close." Preston (and I hope the reader) discovers that people are just people and that words hurt as badly as thrown stones. My question: How can children or adults learn valuable life lessons if they're not allowed to read about them?

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Joan Walsh has complained that Ralph Nader is arrogant for challenging Gore in 2000, but it's Joan Walsh who shows extreme arrogance in her ruthless attacks on third parties. Nothing wrong with giving critiques of Nader's campaign, but there is something elitist about Walsh's endorsement of the two-party-only system. It is the snobbishness and arrogance of the Republicans and Democrats and their stranglehold over the media that is stifling political debate in this country.

-- Fiz Parsons

Joan Walsh protests that Green Party supporters are sanctimonious, but perhaps they have good reason for it. After all, unlike Al Gore, Gray Davis and other leaders of the Democratic Party, the Green Party actually stands for something.

Al Gore apologists repeatedly offered during the campaign, as they still do today, the same tired old negative arguments to justify voting for Gore. We were never told to vote for Gore because of his own progressive virtues, but rather because of the bad things that would happen if Bush were elected. The very fact that Gore apologists had such a hard time coming up with positive arguments for supporting Gore, but instead relied so heavily on the negative "fear of Bush" factor, says it all.

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Malleable money-grubber Michael Moore seems to think that a refusal to sell his book is censorship. But the reality is, his poorly written undeveloped "satires" (more pitiful tirades than anything else) just don't sell because they aren't that funny. Moore is all rage and no thoughts. Maybe one thought he could start with is looking up the First Amendment and trying to understand what it really says.

-- Phil Edwards

Michael Moore's book will be the last one I ever buy from the jackboot-licking cowards at HarperCollins.

-- David Harnden-Warwick

It seems that Rupert Murdoch is not content with using the Fox News Network as conservative soapbox. Now, with his ownership of HarperCollins, he is also seeking to censor and squelch any dissent from the conservative/Republican party line.

Welcome to Amerika 2002.

-- Todd Sanders

It's ironic to think that Michael Moore could have avoided the uncomfortable experience of dealing with the censorship of his book had he been enough of a political realist to support Al Gore in the 2000 elections. Instead, he and his friends in the Green Party supported Ralph Nader, and thus we have George Bush as our president. So now he publishes a book about Bush and makes money from his misguided politics. Isn't this the sort of thing Moore usually rails against?

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"American firepower has been on the right side of history."

This comes as no surprise -- after all, it's the winners who write history.

-- Xana Huerta

Thank you for your brilliant and heartfelt piece explaining why you (and by extension) others like you have become "hawks." But as a left-liberal who agreed with your position on Vietnam and who agrees with you now on the effort against terrorism, I do not believe we have made any journey at all. It only seems that way because you have used an academic model mechanism which splits the intellectual world into boxes, fills those boxes with "Wilsonians, Jeffersonians, Jacksonians" and heaven knows what else, and then uses these artificial categories as analytical tools which reflect realities. They don't. They are simply rhetorical devices used to rationalize positions reached on other, far simpler grounds.

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"The Jackson scandal" by Anthony York

"Aphrodisiac of power" by Joan Walsh

"Jesse Jackson? That's just my baby daddy" by Jimi Izrael

Who the hell cares? Here we are on the verge of inaugurating a president who was rejected by most of the people who went to the polls, and the best the media can do is to rejoice over what it hopes is Jesse Jackson's downfall. Have matters deteriorated to such a sorry state?

It would be one thing if Jesse Jackson had had a child out of wedlock and the mother was receiving public assistance. But that is not the case. The mother is receiving child support. There are no accusations that whatever relationship he had with the mother was anything other than consensual. What's more, the mother of the child was, presumably, of legal consenting age. The day has long passed when there was any enormous shame attached to an extramarital affair or a child born out of wedlock. It's a private matter. Jackson never went around trashing other people for their so-called lack of morality, like Newt Gingrich and Co. did before their deeds were exposed. He deserves to be left alone. I guarantee that Jackson will survive and move beyond this.

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David Horowitz seems to forget rather conveniently that the right wing has been using this rabid lynch mob mentality far longer and far better than the left. Instead of complaining about foul play, Horowitz should grin and bear the retaliation that has been years in coming. It seems more than a little hypocritical to expect the left to remain silent as the right spreads its vindictive hatred for anything liberal.

Horowitz claims that the "same pack of feminists, civil rights advocates and liberals who slandered Thomas" could not wait to defend Clinton. Yet he neglects to mention that those same Republican senators and conservatives who refused to give Anita Hill justice could not wait to see Clinton disgraced. Surely Horowitz, a seasoned policital writer, is not naive enough to think that this is about ideals instead of the reality of political bedfellows and best interests.

-- Avi Lev

Perhaps David Horowitz should be reminded that the Democratic candidate didn't lose the election -- he won the popular vote. That means more than half the country didn't want George W. Bush to become president. Now, after Bush made plenty of noise about unity and how the Democrats would have a significant presence in his administration, where are they?

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An interesting and compelling case was made for Apple to switch to an Intel-based x86 architecture, but it neglected what I think is the most significant problem, from Apple's perspective: loss of hardware sales.

As I understand it, Apple makes a great deal of its total revenue from the hardware. It can't afford to lose that to competitors, as shown when it killed the popular (with consumers) "clone" makers a few years back. And if Apple couldn't cope with those competitors, it would be eaten alive by the big boys in the PC world: Dell, Gateway, HP, etc.

Ultimately, if the financial wizards at Apple thought that they would make more money selling the OS to a broader market than they would lose from losing a huge part of their hardware sales, they would go with it, Steve Jobs or not. But this recurring idea has consistently been rejected (or ignored) by Apple. And it's no more interested today.

-- David Fischer

Another periodic downturn in the tech sector, another round of "Apple is Doomed" articles. Yawn.

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I'm sorry that Chris Scott had problems when he bought his new Macintosh. In large measure, I agree that Apple's customer service is not on par with, say, IBM's. I'd also have to say that Apple's treatment of customers has gotten worse, not better, under Steve Jobs.

However, even a minimal amount of research would have turned up the problem well before Scott's actual purchase. Since Scott was evidently able to find Mac-specific sites on the Internet (witness his report of Powerbook G3 problems), I can only assume that he got hot for the box and hastily bought it without doing his homework first. Is that Apple's fault? Hardly.

-- Paul Robichaux

Apple did the right thing changing the connector.

Yes, Apple (or the reseller) should have done a better job educating the market. But you would not want to use a flat-panel display with a VGA video output signal. That'd be like buying hub-and-spoke wagon wheels for your brand new BMW Z3.

-- Jason Osgood

The digital video port on the back of the "old" PowerMac G4 that Chris Scott has is not proprietary at all.

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Brava to Fiona Morgan for taking the Times to task on the Condoleezza Rice profile. Just an additional thought however on the paper's headline, "Compulsion to Achieve": Compulsion? How often is a term more associated with psychological pathology used to describe a businessman or male politician's motivation for success? The headline set the tone for a pretty creepy story.

-- Elaine Lafferty

Fiona Morgan's comments on the Times' treatment of Condoleezza Rice are well taken. The Maureen Dowd tradition, wherein we can't tell the political news from the gossip columns, is certainly pernicious in the Times' treatment of conservative women, but doesn't stop there.

Morgan's story would have had deeper resonance if she had discussed the Times' choice to begin its Sunday story on Colin Powell with a lengthy description of the G.I. Joe action figure modeled after him (which, the Times helpfully pointed out, was produced with a "fairer" complexion than Powell himself has) and didn't begin to discuss any political substance until five paragraphs in.

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As a graduate of the Harvard class of 2000 I was interested to hear what admissions officers had to say now that I am no longer a prospective applicant. I was disheartened to see that not only did the Salon interviewer seem to be somewhat off the mark, but the university representatives failed to reveal some important (although unpleasant) information.

To begin with, the idea that stress over college applications begins during senior year of high school and is based primarily on information disseminated by the colleges is simply ridiculous. The first time someone mentioned going to Harvard to me was when I was 6 years old (and no, it wasn't my overeager mother or father). My high school began the college counseling process at the beginning of my sophomore year. The role of high school college counselors is a crucial element in the problem of burned out students, and one that no one mentions in this article. Just as colleges rely on ratings and selectivity statistics to market themselves, most private high schools use college acceptance rates as an important tool to lure in new students (and new parents with fat checkbooks). It was in my high school's interest to get as many kids into Ivy League schools as possible, regardless of whether it was a good "match."

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Please don't overly emphasize the black vs. white feelings about this election. I'm white and I feel just as strongly as any black person that this election was stolen, the U.S. Supreme Court was partisan, etc.

Perhaps more blacks feel that way but many, many white people do, too. It's not just a race issue.

-- Barbara Ellisor

It is regrettable that Adora Obi Nweze, president of Florida's NAACP, believes that whites do not feel anger about the results of the recent presidential election. This unfortunate and, I trust, unintentional generalization is unfair to those of us who voted for Gore and who believe that the Florida election was conducted unfairly and perhaps illegally.

I would like to assure Nweze that there are indeed white Americans who are infuriated by the arrogant conduct of the Florida executive branch and the Bush legal team during this fiasco. This travesty should never have been permitted 35 years after the Voting Rights Act.

For the record, I also agreed with the O.J. Simpson verdict.

-- David E. Sallis

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I wanted to clarify a few items inaccurately reported in your article today regarding the San Francisco Ballet School.

1. San Francisco Ballet School is not being sued. There has been a claim filed at the Human Rights Commission but no lawsuit is pending.

2. San Francisco Ballet Association receives funding from Grants for the Arts but the school does not. According to the specific guidelines provided by this funding organization, the funds received by the professional company cannot be applied to education and training activities or performing activities of students. We do not use the funds in the school, only for the professional company.

3. Fredrika Keefer was never denied access to audition for San Francisco Ballet School.

4. Fredrika Keefer was accepted into San Francisco Ballet's highly respected Dance-In-Schools program in May of 2000. If Ms. Krissy Keefer had accepted that invitation into that program, her daughter would have been a part of the school without any audition process (for further information on Dance-In-Schools, please refer to our Web site or contact San Francisco Ballet). The Dance-In-Schools program goes into 19 public schools throughout San Francisco and teaches world dance to over 1,500 children. At the end of the session, 70 boys and girls are selected to come to San Francisco Ballet School, on full scholarship, to study.

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