Letters Letters
Pot Calls Kettle Pervert New York City JoAnn Wypijewski accurately portrays Christine Quinn as a tool for the real estate lobby and a shameless opportunist [“Carnal Knowledge,” Aug. 19/26], but to suggest that Anthony Weiner’s pathological behavior is akin to a sexual preference that will one day be tolerated is ludicrous. It is OK for a woman to prefer to have sex with another woman, so long as she does not post her genitalia on Twitter for women half her age while in a committed relationship, then lie about it for a week, do it again right before deciding to run for mayor and finally compare herself to Nelson Mandela, as Weiner did. A candidate being criticized for untrustworthy behavior by a rival who happens to be a lesbian is not the pot calling the kettle black. Weiner deserves condemnation. JONATHAN BEATRICE Wypijewski Replies New York City Willy-nilly, Jonathan Beatrice and other readers whose knees snapped in synchronous reflex illustrate my point, which is that a sex scandal says more about the social order than about the wretched sod making headlines. A person may be stupid or reckless or simply following a call of nature which that social order has deemed twisted (as in the case of homosexuals when Quinn was born, though not as much today), but the particular act is less interesting than the web of rules, assumptions, official lies and mores that declare some acts disgusting and others wholesome. We are all caught in that web—Weiner, Quinn, Beatrice, me—simply by existing here, today. We can reinforce it, conform to it, work to dismantle it, but as thinking people rather than mankurts we have to recognize it and our own relation to its power. Beatrice et al. have no time for thought; every question is reduced to opinion: for or against. So it is OK for women to have sex together (what a relief!), though with provisos. Why OK or not OK? Why the provisos? Why must Huma Abedin be a martyr, and the women in receipt of Weiner’s silly tweets victims? There is nothing intrinsically good or right about a culture’s web of assumptions. Questioning it is a starting point for ethics and politics. Everything else is a cut-price TMZ. JoANN WYPIJEWSKI Bradley/Chelsea Manning’s Trials After seeing Chase Madar’s “The Trials of Bradley Manning” [Aug. 19/26], I can only second the question by letter writer Jerry Mobley in the same issue: “Are all the adults [at The Nation] on vacation?” DONALD J. DUPIER Cleveland Chase Madar’s analysis of the Bradley Manning prosecution is a compelling and persuasive defense not only of Manning but of the terrifying growth of suppression of free speech and information in America. Madar’s article was brilliant, worthy of Manning’s act of patriotism. GORDON FRIEDMAN Washington, D.C. Chase Madar wrote a great article on Chelsea Manning. Madar may have a point about how the human rights community did not do enough to support Manning, but we find the sweeping generalization quite surprising, given that from the beginning, the Center for Constitutional Rights has worked extensively on TV, radio and print to shed light on the importance of Manning’s actions and her outrageous fate, while the people responsible for the war crimes she exposed go free. Moreover, the CCR represented Glenn Greenwald, Amy Goodman, The Nation and Jeremy Scahill, Julian Assange, Kevin Gosztola and Madar himself in a lawsuit challenging government secrecy about the trial. In the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces and then in federal district court, we fought tooth and nail until the government agreed to provide ongoing press access to documents in the court-martial. The Manning case is a defining issue of our time. We admire Manning’s courage and will continue working to honor her patriotism and achieve her freedom. VINCENT WARREN, executive director Center for Constitutional Rights Madar Replies Brooklyn, N.Y. Vincent Warren is correct—the CCR has stood apart from other rights groups in its strong and unequivocal advocacy for Chelsea Manning from the very start. All the same, the mostly timid response of other human rights groups to Manning and the contents of her leaks is instructive and extends beyond the whistleblower’s case to the shocking contents of her disclosures. For example, the aerial slaughter filmed from the gunsight camera of a US Apache helicopter gunship of roughly a dozen civilians on a Baghdad street, including two Reuters employees: this is the most widely viewed wartime atrocity in history. Yet neither Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch or Human Rights First issued a condemnation or comment on this massacre, even after the video went viral. Staff of the latter two told me the reason for their groups’ silence is that the laws of armed conflict—as they actually exist—are at best muddy regarding this act of slaughter, serving more to authorize the helicopter crew’s lethal assault than to restrain it. Manning’s leaked video (see collateralmurder.com) reveals something far more chilling than a war crime; it shows the grotesque reality of “international humanitarian law” as applied to a real-life massacre—failing utterly to protect civilians while providing legal cover to the heavily armed perpetrators. It is a backhanded tribute to the power of law just how many atrocities are not illegal. CHASE MADAR Trayvon: Getting It Right Brooklyn, N.Y. Many fine journalists have tried to solve the Trayvon Martin puzzle—how a young fellow walking with sweets and ice tea could be viewed as a horrifying killer—but only Patricia Williams has the intelligence, compassion and insight to put the pieces together [“The Monsterization of Trayvon Martin,” Aug. 19/26]. Her skilled writing clearly illuminated the weaknesses of the prosecution and the insidious, overwrought racist (thereby successful) approach of the defense. Particularly moving is Williams’s portrayal of Don West’s vile bullying of Rachel Jeantel. BETH PACHECO Correction & Clarification In William Greider’s “Fed Up With Summers” [Aug. 19/26], Robert Rubin was mistakenly referred to as Bill Clinton’s first treasury secretary. Lloyd Bentsen was Clinton’s first treasury secretary (1993–94). Rubin served from 1995 to 1999. In Jon Wiener’s “Inside the Coursera Hype Machine” [Sept. 23] it was stated that neither iTunes U nor YouTube offers anything like the Coursera system, “in which a particular course starts on a specific date, with video lectures uploaded every week.” The iTunes U iPad app, however, offers some “in-session” classes with a start date.
Sep 10, 2013 / Our Readers, JoAnn Wypijewski, and Chase Madar
Letters Letters
Water Theft Pie Town, N.M. I live sixty miles west of Magdalena, New Mexico, mentioned in Sasha Abramsky’s “Dust Bowl Blues” [Aug. 5/12] as being out of water. To some, scarcity translates as dollar signs. One such water-grab attempt is an application to the state by an Italian-owned corporation for a permit to pump 17 billion gallons of water a year from the aquifer between here and Magdalena. That aquifer does not recharge at anything remotely resembling such a rate. Corporate bafflegab notwithstanding, what this would do is enable corporate owners to usurp a scarce public resource and sell it to upscale developers and water-intensive industries in the Albuquerque area. The state could thus release more Rio Grande water downstream to satisfy New Mexico’s legal obligation to Texas. One of the bases of New Mexico water law is beneficial use. The question currently in a battle of words and law is what “beneficial use” means. Does a viable local economy and ecology have value? Or is whatever use generates the most near-term “economic growth,” as corporate profit and tax base, the sole criterion? This issue has people politically opposed to each other fighting on the same side against the corporate plunder of our homes (see sanaugustinwatercoalition.org). UNCLE RIVER Roberts Court: “Crimes & Misdemeanors” Canonsburg, Pa. Michael O’Donnell, in “Roberts’s Rules of Order” [July 8/15], concludes by saying it is better to abide by the horrible rulings of the Roberts Court than to mess with settled law. But there are times when precedents need to be broken lest horribly unjust decisions are allowed to impose injustice on millions of oppressed Americans. One thinks of the Dred Scott case, Plessy v. Ferguson, Bush v. Gore, Citizens United and other sordid Court opinions— many already in this new century—that have had a disastrous impact on blacks, women, Asians and the working class. DAVID W. SOUTHERN Newton, Mass. I take issue with Michael O’Donnell’s bizarre conclusion, after his perceptive summary of the Roberts Court’s crimes and misdemeanors, that liberals have to accept the subversive undoing of our Constitution in the name of precedent! Is he serious when he admonishes us that “the tougher but better path is to accept the bad decisions as the law of the land” because, if a hypothetical liberal majority reverses them in the future, the Court will appear political? Hasn’t he read his own indictment of the Court as the enforcer of a far-right agenda? I’m disappointed that The Nation would run so important a critique, but with so defeatist and resigned a punch line. MARK S. BRODIN, professor and Lee Distinguished Scholar, Boston College Law School O’Donnell Replies Evanston, Ill. I agree with David W. Southern that the Supreme Court has an obligation to correct an egregious misinterpretation of the Constitution. I disagree, however, with Professor Brodin—a respected and beloved figure at my law school alma mater. He suggests that I am resigned to a Court that issues right-wing opinions. But he seems resigned to a Court filled with political stooges. He is free to join the likes of Justices Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito, who swing the wrecking ball at disfavored decisions as soon as they have five votes. For my part, I find the Roberts Court’s disregard for precedent immensely troubling and a poor example to follow. I would prefer a Court that respects the rule of law, even if that means accepting wrongheaded judgments from time to time. If I err in my thinking, it is because I am idealistic about the Court—not defeatist. MICHAEL O’DONNELL
Sep 4, 2013 / Our Readers and Michael O’Donnell
Letters Letters
Big Brother: watching, listening and…; nukes on our mind
Aug 13, 2013 / Our Readers, Mark Hertsgaard, and Terry Tempest Williams
Letters Letters
The Rise and Fall of the Black Panthers Northampton, Mass. In 1974, I waited an entire week to report my mother, Betty Van Patter, missing to the Berkeley Police Department in order to protect Elaine Brown’s campaign for the Oakland City Council from police harassment. Even after her body was found in the San Francisco Bay, it still took ten years and the dogged work of investigative journalists to convince me to face reality. Most people don’t understand why the politics of my mother’s murder by the Black Panther Party were as devastating to me as the loss of her as my mother. People could consider this to be crazy, callous or the result of cult thinking, but I have simply always taken political will quite seriously. The state of cognitive dissonance I found myself in resulted from recognizing the Panthers as both icons of resistance and murderers of innocents at the same time. As I read all the memoirs, articles and the rewriting of history by the academics, I remain forlorn waiting for the “real story” to emerge. Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin’s Black Against Empire had a chance, but it failed. At least we now have Steve Wasserman’s brilliant review “Rage and Ruin” [June 24/July 1] as a step forward in the conversation about the party’s history. One assertion by the book’s authors that particularly irks me is their dismissal of the late Hugh Pearson’s Shadow of a Panther as nothing more than a consultation with David Horowitz. Pearson’s intent was to present Huey Newton as the hero he believed him to be, only to discover Newton’s many crimes and cruelties to other Panthers and innocent bystanders. Pearson had the courage to write about what he learned within the context of the controversy as far as it had developed by the mid-1990s. Bloom and Martin completely missed the point. TAMARA BALTAR Hattiesburg, Miss. I am truly amazed by the quality of Steve Wasserman’s review of the new history of the Black Panthers and his thoroughly balanced and informed assessment of its accuracy. Wasserman’s descriptive detail opens a much clearer window, and offers readers a seminar on Black Power in the ’60s. In addition, his personal experience with many of the key people involved makes for exciting reading. MIKE GERALD Yes, Let’s Diversify Journalism New York City With Farai Chideya’s “Let’s Diversify Journalism” [June 3], The Nation joined a growing chorus of media insiders denouncing the industry standard of unwaged intern labor, which in effect excludes people of color and the working class. We, the Nation Institute’s Spring 2013 interns, presented our concerns to the magazine’s editors and fundraisers about the Nation interns’ marginal pay. The Nation and the Institute verbally committed to work with us to change the terms of the internship. Our five months as fact-checkers were an invaluable learning experience, nurturing us intellectually, professionally and socially. Yet to participate in the program, an intern must work full time for a $150 weekly stipend, an impossible prospect for many who are underrepresented in today’s media. As Chideya explains, the unwaged intern pipeline populates the industry with a homogeneous staff that “often produces a damaging false consensus” by excluding people of color and the working class. We hear of journalism’s impending death all too often, but the eulogies are premature. Journalism isn’t dying; it is changing dramatically. This period of transformation is an opportunity for media outlets to bring new voices to the forefront of knowledge production. Paying interns a living wage would remedy a workplace injustice and renew the vitality and relevance of the press. Likewise, recruiting more interns from public universities and community colleges would enable organic intellectuals from the working class to redefine our nation’s public conversation. To realize a just media economy in which interns earn a living wage and the marginalized can flourish, we need tenacious and imaginative media leaders. If anyone in journalism has what it takes, it is our colleagues at this magazine. The industry standard must be redefined. We ask The Nation and the Nation Institute to take the lead. ALLEEN BROWN, JAMES CERSONSKY, CATHERINE DEFONTAINE, ANDREW BARD EPSTEIN, LUIS K. FELIZ, ELANA LEOPOLD, ALEC LUHN, LETICIA MIRANDA, BRENDAN O’CONNOR, ANNA SIMONTON, COS TOLLERSON, SARAH WOOLF The Nation Institute Replies New York City We appreciate this thoughtful letter and take the concerns it raises seriously. The internship program is a source of great pride for the Nation Institute. Every few months it gives a group of talented young people the opportunity to participate in weekly editorial meetings; learn fact-checking, research and digital media skills; interact at seminars with visiting journalists, thinkers and activists; and, often, to find their own voices as writers for the magazine and the website. The Institute recognizes the financial pressures faced by interns living in New York City and has determined to increase their stipend beginning with the fall 2013 class. We will also continue to provide financial aid in the form of travel and housing grants to interns to help make their participation possible. This will put additional pressure on our fundraising for the program, so we urge readers to donate directly to the Victor S. Navasky Internship Program, c/o The Nation Institute, 116 E. 16th Street, 8th floor, New York, NY 10003. TAYA KITMAN, director, The Nation Institute Is That a Nation in Your Pocket, or… Saint Cloud, Fla. I don’t much care for Billy Graham or his Bible-thumping evangelistic ways, and I never imagined myself feeling compelled to defend him. But Edward Sorel’s stupid criticism of him based on an old photograph, along with the ridiculous comment about his hand in his pocket, has made me wonder what kind of childish, moronic staff is working at The Nation [“New York, New York, It’s a Hell of a Town,” June 24/July 1]. Are all the adults away on vacation? Keep it up if you wish to lose all credibility with normal working people. JERRY MOBLEY Sorel Replies New York City None of the Nation staff members I have met could ever be characterized as moronic or childish. But, happily, the standards for outside contributors are less restrictive. EDWARD SOREL Corrections Michael Sorkin’s “Hitler’s Classical Architect” [June 10/17] incorrectly identified architect Erik Gunnar Asplund as Carl Asplund. Marina Amaral and Natalia Viana’s ”Brazil vs. the World Cup” [July 22/29] incorrectly gave Brazil’s annual education budget as $17 billion. It is $37 billion. Accordingly, the overall investment for the 2014 World Cup ($14-plus billion) is more than one-third of the annual education budget, not a little less than half.
Jul 31, 2013 / Our Readers and Edward Sorel
Exchange: Get Thee to the Barricades! Exchange: Get Thee to the Barricades!
Response to “Letter to The Nation From a Young Radical”
Jul 16, 2013 / Our Readers and Bhaskar Sunkara
Letters Letters
No good deed goes unpunished; smashing the glass ceiling; the dollar rules the world
Jul 2, 2013 / Our Readers and Thomas Meaney
Letters Letters
A Syrian quagmire?… cheap clothing = death… Thoreau… mass transit… The Nation as ‘security threat’
Jun 18, 2013 / Our Readers
Letters Letters
Center for American Progress’s Beef Washington, D.C. Ken Silverstein’s “Think Tanks in the Tank?” [June 10/17] insinuates a lot, but the facts tell a different story. The inference at the heart of his article is that corporate donations shape or drive the content of CAP and CAP Action. That assertion is baseless and false. Silverstein’s argument relies on a junior staffer “flagging” a hard-hitting piece we did on Goldman Sachs. But Silverstein fails to say that CAP’s leadership raised no concerns—indeed it pushed for additional coverage—and the original draft appeared verbatim and remains publicly available, along with more than two dozen other pieces of our reporting that are highly critical of Goldman Sachs. All that was required was a simple search of ThinkProgress. Silverstein also argues that CAP takes funds from Turkish interests and quotes an anonymous source: “as a result of the Turkish group’s support, CAP was ‘totally in the tank for them.’” Again, the author’s insinuation is refuted by CAP’s body of work. In fact, just days before the Turkish prime minister visited Washington recently, CAP published a piece critical of the Turkish government, “Freedom of the Press and Expression in Turkey.” Silverstein goes even further, insinuating that CAP’s growth over the year is attributable to our creation of our Business Alliance in 2007 and corporate donations. As the Huffington Post wrote in March, philanthropic giving is responsible for our growth. Only 6 percent of our funding in 2012 came from corporate donors, and it has never reached double digits. These are the facts—facts that undermine Silverstein’s preconceived conclusion. We are fiercely and proudly independent and strongly refute any inference to the contrary. We expect more from The Nation, and we encourage readers to look directly at our work on corporate accountability and financial sector reform, clean energy, campaign finance reform, defense cuts and progressive tax reform to judge for themselves. ANDREA PURSE, Center for American Progress New York City Ken Silverstein, relying on anonymous sources, claims that “staffers were very clearly instructed to check with the think tank’s development team before writing anything that might upset contributors, I was told.” I am not a CAP staffer, but I have been a senior fellow there almost since its inception. Beginning in 2003, I have either written or edited every iteration of the weekly “Think Again” media column for the CAP website. At no time during the writing or editing of these roughly 500 columns did I experience anything like what Silverstein describes (or anything else that would likely fall outside the purview of the editorial process at any publication, including The Nation). Indeed, I don’t even know who’s on the development team or who CAP’s contributors are, and, thankfully, so far I have had no reason to care. I would have been happy to inform Silverstein of this had he contacted me. ERIC ALTERMAN, Nation columnist and senior fellow, Center for American Progress Silverstein Replies Washington, D.C. Gosh, along with not calling the billions of other people in the world who are not CAP staffers, I didn’t call Eric Alterman and called CAP staffers instead. This is just one of the many times in my life when I’ve thought, “If I had it all to do over again, I wish I’d called Eric to see what he thinks.” CAP was given plenty of time to reply before my article was published; it chose not to. Now it sends a letter that misrepresents what I wrote and shoots down arguments I didn’t make. There is evidence that CAP’s agenda has been influenced by its decision to take corporate money, but that is not the “inference at the heart of the article.” My main point is that CAP takes money from corporate donors without disclosing it, which is not an inference but a fact. Another fact is that in doing so, CAP sometimes acts as an undisclosed lobbyist for its donors. As I described, First Solar gave money to CAP, and CAP’s staff advocated for First Solar before Congress and in articles on CAP’s website without disclosing that pertinent piece of information. Maybe the 6 percent figure for corporate contributions is true; but we have only CAP’s word for it. It should publish and make available an annual report or otherwise disclose at least some basic financial information, as most major think tanks do. Furthermore, if CAP gets only 6 percent of its budget from corporations, that’s purely a function of its failure to close the deal, not for lack of trying (see the wonderful perks it offers to big corporate donors, as I describe in the article). It’s good that CAP sometimes criticizes its donors, but I found numerous instances where it praised them. But that’s not the point. Wall Street companies gave a lot of money to President Obama not because they expected his support all the time, but to get more than they would if they gave him no money (I’d say they got a pretty good return on their investment). I expect that’s the same impulse that prompts companies to give CAP money, unless you believe the explanation Boeing gave me that its contributions are purely “educational in nature.” Oh, yeah, and Chris Belisle, whom Purse dismisses as a “junior staffer,” mysteriously had the title “senior manager” of CAP’s Business Alliance. KEN SILVERSTEIN Gore Vidal Lives!—On e-Book Oakland, Calif. I thank The Nation for making Gore Vidal’s State of the Union: Nation Essays 1958–2005 available as an e-book. I’ve gotten through Richard Lingeman’s introduction and Victor Navasky’s foreword and am unable to resist sharing an observation. As the son of a mathematician father and journalist mother, my heart belongs to words, but my head to numbers. My mother always said there was never anyone in the newsroom who could do even the most basic arithmetic calculations. Reading these two pieces together, one’s heart is gladdened to see that this tradition is upheld at The Nation, where no one seems to be able to divide 50,000 by 25. BRUCE BOER The point remains that the wily and parsimonious Victor S. Navasky was able to get Vidal to write for The Nation for pennies on the dollar of what he was offered (and refused) elsewhere, as readers will see when they read Lingeman’s and Navasky’s versions of the tale. To purchase the Gore Vidal e-book (for pennies on the dollar), visit TheNation.com/ebooks. —The Editors Art Appreciation and a Correction Alert readers and art buffs undoubtedly recognized that last issue’s cover illustration was a reproduction of Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, which celebrates the July 1830 revolution in France. In David Cole’s “The AP’s Privacy, and Ours” [June 10/17], the first two sentences of the paragraph starting at the bottom of the left column on page 5 should have read: “Since the Supreme Court has essentially bowed out, our protections depend on Congress. Current law requires, for example, that the government obtain a court order that evidence is relevant to a criminal investigation in order to obtain real-time phone records of whom one calls and for how long. It imposes a somewhat higher standard, requiring ‘specific and articulable facts,’ for stored e-mail addressing data.”
Jun 5, 2013 / Our Readers and Ken Silverstein
Letters Letters
Lynched and Abandoned Peterborough, N.H. I was startled that in her otherwise heartfelt and astute reflection on the case of the Central Park Five [“Diary of a Mad Law Professor,” May 6], Patricia Williams neglected to mention Joan Didion’s exhaustive 1990 New York Review of Books essay on the crime, the trial, the city. From the “abstraction” of the victim to the “swirl of collateral news,” Didion dissected the improbabilities of the commentary and the case. Interestingly, in subsequent discussions of this case, Didion is rarely mentioned. Is this because she is not, to use Williams’s formulation for neglected skeptics, “poor and black and relentlessly mocked in the media as deluded apologists”? C.K. DORESKI Amherst, Mass. Patricia Williams wonders in “Lessons From the Central Park Five” if the film of that name “would be having the same reception had a black filmmaker made it,” as opposed to Ken Burns et al. The beauty of the film is that Burns lets the boys (now men) tell their story; Burns doesn’t do the telling. The same can be said of Burns’s Jazz. There were complaints from the black community that that movie, too, was made by a white filmmaker, but the musicians told their own story. Both stories were sitting there waiting to be told. Burns let it happen. FAYTHE TURNER Williams Replies Seattle My primary concern is what it takes, first, for a narrator to be heard and, second, to be heard as credible. It is true that Joan Didion’s excellent essay has enjoyed renewed attention since the PBS debut of Ken Burns’s The Central Park Five. At the time it was published, however, it was roundly denounced by readers of The New York Review of Books, who decried it in outraged, even vitriolic terms. But at least Didion had the power to get it published; and her literary virtuosity has ensured that it endures in collective memory, if underappreciated. If an artist like Didion faced such resistance to being heard about this case, what chance did the young defendants and their families have? Furthermore, I vehemently disagree that Burns “doesn’t do the telling.” His great gift is precisely in piecing narratives together beautifully and compellingly and so seamlessly that his skilled editing becomes all but invisible. That said, this was not a story “waiting to be told.” It has and had been told over and over and over—in the courts, in the media, in the streets, in the men’s nearly unremarked exoneration in 2002, as well as in Sarah Burns’s well-reviewed but generally unread book. So Ken Burns didn’t “let the stories be told”; he deployed his exceptional craft to let them be heard, and heard as credible. Burns is undoubtedly one of the best filmmakers who ever lived. But it should not require such a rarefied combination of artistry and (yes, race-gender-class) power to convince citizens to take note of what goes on in the name of our justice system. Bottom line: this is about real-life results, not the Oscars; and as of today, the City of New York continues to block, resist, drag out and refuse to settle a lawsuit filed by the five young men, as long ago as 2003, for wrongful prosecution. PATRICIA J. WILLIAMS Vanishing New York Hartford, Conn. I loved “The Gilded City,” your special issue on New York. As a New Yorker, I am biased, but I like to think the articles provide a historical picture that is really important for those who are nostalgic about the city as well as those who don’t know much about it. I grew up in Borough Park, went to neighborhood public schools (of course), took the bus to the public library on Thirteenth Avenue and the subway into Manhattan, even when I was young (we were very safe and independent), and graduated from Brooklyn College in the 1950s. My folks were immigrants from Russia and Poland and became very assimilated (my dad was a neighborhood air-raid warden in World War II). We were a blue-collar union family and always voted Democratic. I think my family was pretty typical. Times have changed enormously in New York City; that’s why it is particularly important to think historically. Thanks. MARCIA BOK Bronx, N.Y. I have seen in the Bronx that the gentrification described in your issue is pushing the poor north to upstate towns, where rents are much lower. And now these communities are experiencing some of the problems seen here in the 1970s and ’80s, especially the spike in violent crime. As a New Yorker, I am delighted that through my government employment program I can travel on public transportation for a dollar a trip and, through the local bus transfer system, as far as Rockland County, southern Connecticut and eastern Long Island for a little more; that I can attend great theater for $9 through the Theater Development Fund; that I can avail myself of free exercise classes, summer concerts and movies through the Parks Department; that I can attend free classical music recitals at the Mannes School or Juilliard; that I can read any book, delivered directly to my neighborhood library, through the public library system; and that I can pay less than $600 “maintenance” (rent) in a well-maintained, safe building in a Mitchell Lama co-op, provided I have the $15,000 deposit (which will be returned plus interest when I vacate). It grieves me, however, that those who truly need these free and low-cost amenities cannot afford to live in this incredible city and take advantage of them. SHARON BETH LONG Burp Rochester, N.Y. I commend Nation art critic Barry Schwabsky for his recent article “Sugar Rush and Stomachache” [May 6]. Sometimes when I read other art critics writing about the New Museum, I wonder whether we actually saw the same show! Barry is not afraid of observing the critic observing the art, therefore humanizing the experience. Not surprising was his annoyance at the lack of abstract painting (in “NYC 1993” at the New Museum), since he has so eloquently written about the art form in his books and articles. I always look forward to what he has to say. ALAN SINGER Launch a War; Win an Election Ottawa Alone amid the media hype, Maria Margaronis, in “Thatcherism Triumphant” [April 29], mentioned the sinking of the Belgrano—outside the exclusion zone, moving away from the Falklands toward the Argentine mainland. This event also sank any hope of a negotiated settlement, ensuring that there would be war, and won an election for Margaret Thatcher. It was either a war crime or an act of terrorism. Government officials have been hanged for less. JORDAN BISHOP
May 21, 2013 / Our Readers and Patricia J. Williams