Web Letters | The Nation

Madness in the Method: On 'Homeland'

I would like to request that The Nation reconsider its publication of this article. The author speaks with false authority about mental illness, and risks perpetuating dangerous stereotypes with her inaccurate statements. The following quote is from the last page of her article: “Stigmas originate in fear of the unknown; when they are abandoned, it is because a quorum of right-thinkers recognizes that the libels against the feared population are false. To be racially black is not to create or inhabit darkness; Jews don’t drink the blood of Christian babies; gay teachers won’t change the sexual orientation of your child.”

This quote portrays the author as an informed liberal who knows about past fights for civil rights and religious freedom. But she continues with the following: “But in a way that is profoundly different from race, sexual orientation, gender or creed, the stigma surrounding mental illness contains a dark unknown that is real rather than socially constructed. Some (and by no means all) mental disorders, no matter how much light they may generate, contain voids darker than a terrorist’s hidey-hole. Manic flights, voices, paranoia, suicide—these are not just the outside pressures of a treacherous social landscape. They are contained within the self, and the traditional rhetoric of diversity and inclusion cannot accommodate them. The minds of people with mental disorders are not just like ours, especially, as Carrie can see even from the depths of her self-estrangement, when we are the ones who are ill.”

With this paragraph, the author pretty thoughtlessly diminishes the status of people with mental health issues by indicating that they deserve their marginalized status because they are different. This position is offensive and even a little embarrassing in the same way that comparably ignorant articles from the past about people of color, women or gay/bisexual/transgendered people are offensive. I expect that in ten or fifteen years, statements like this, “the stigma surrounding mental illness contains a dark unknown that is real rather than socially constructed,” and this, “the traditional rhetoric of diversity and inclusion cannot accommodate them,” will be scorned as ignorant in the same way as are pre–Civil War articles that say “black men are less than human and could attack you like a savage beast, thus we must shackle them to the barn”; or pre-suffrage articles that say, “it’s OK for the freed-slave men to participate in elections but women are inherently unstable thus we cannot trust them to vote or hold political office”; or, “unlike people of color and women, gay people are unnatural and offensive to God so we cannot let them serve in the military.” We know now that such statements are ignorant and discriminatory. Some people know that similar statements about people with mental health problems—even when couched in introspective rhetoric—are comparably ignorant and discriminatory. I entreat The Nation to break new ground and be an early joiner of the right side of history. Please retract the discriminatory sections of this article (or the whole thing) and make room for all people to enjoy equal rights in America.

Wayne LaPierre Is Winning

Most mass murderers would pass background checks before their heinous crimes. Criminal laws enforced after crimes have been committed cannot prevent crimes.

Most citizens don’t understand that preventing crimes requires addressing the causes. All crimes involve perpetrator(s) and victim(s), but not guns. Most violent criminals are repeat offenders. The best method to reduce crime is catching repeat offenders and separating them from society. This act alone has the potential to reduce crime by 90 percent.

The current focus on regulating the tools that criminals to use commit crimes has never worked, and it never will. Anything available can be used to commit crimes, including bare hands. An X-acto knife was the last tool used on a Texas school campus. What next, require background checks to purchase Exacto Knives, kitchen knives, box-cutters, baseball bats, hammers, screwdrivers and everything that has been used by criminals?

All background checks/registration schemes do is consume valuable resources that would be better served capturing and incarcerating repeat offenders.

Oppressive registration laws will not work. Taking perpetrators off the streets is the only effective method to reduce crime. Don’t let the misinformed activists dictate ineffective new laws.

Kircher’s Cosmos: On Athanasius Kircher

Thanks for the interesting article mentioning Solresol and Esperanto. Many ill-informed people think Esperanto “never took off”—other ignorant people say that if human beings were meant to fly, God would have given them wings.

Esperanto is neither artificial nor a failure, however. As the British government now employs Esperanto translators, it has ceased to be a hobby. More recently this international language was used to address the United Nations in Bonn.

Followin a short period of 125 years Esperanto is now in the top 100 languages, out of 6,800 worldwide. It is the twenty-second-most-used language in Wikipedia, ahead of Danish and Arabic. It is a language choice of Google, Skype, Firefox, Ubuntu and Facebook.

Native Esperanto speakers, (people who have used the language from birth), include World Chess Champion Susan Polger; Ulrich Brandenberg, the new German Ambassador to Russia; and Nobel laureate Daniel Bovet. Financier George Soros learnt Esperanto as a child.

Esperanto is a living language—see #! A new online course  has 125,000 hits per day, and Esperanto Wikipedia enjoys 400,000 hits per day. That can’t be bad!

The Passion and Eloquence of Anthony Lewis

Ironically, though he is quoted several times, the only words used to describe Anthony Lewis in Chomsky and Herman’s Manufacturing Consent are almost identical to those chosen by Eric Alterman. Alterman calls him “the most radical voice in the American mainstream.” Chomsky and Herman called him “perhaps the most outspoken critic of the war in the mainstream media.” Alterman seems to have misinterpreted this as an attack on Lewis by Chomsky, but the point was simply to show how the media propaganda system effectively restricts the debate. In other places Chomsky used phrases such as “the outer limits of critical independence” and “the far left of the spectrum” to describe Lewis’s position in the mainstream (in a November, 1997 Z Magazine article), but I can find nowhere where he impugned Lewis or his motives personally. One can actually agree with Lewis, disagree with Chomsky, or whatever, while still accepting his central point as valid: Had Lewis suggested that Vietnam was anything less than well-intentioned mistake, he would not have been allowed to write for the mainstream press.

I am not sure why reflexive Chomsky-bashing remains a litmus test for liberal pundits to prove their maturity, but I highly recommend Glenn Greenwald’s recent column for The Guardian “How Noam Chomsky is discussed.”

Korean War Games

To call the Spratlys/Paracels a pile of rock is misleading. It makes China, Japan, etc. look silly. In fact, they and others covet the islands because of the underwater petroleum around the islands, not to mention their strategic location.

Obama Walks the Middle East's Nuclear High Wire, Eyes Closed

The author managed to write a full length article on US policy in the Middle East without once mentioning the Israel lobby. Makes me wonder who is the one really living in fantasy land.

'Roe' Didn't Incite the Culture Wars, and Neither Would a Supreme Court Ruling for Marriage Equality

It is passing strange that the discussion back and forth about same-sex marriage never looks across the border into Canada, where same-sex marriages have been a fact of life for some years now. No one here is saying, “Oh, that’s the end of marriage, so we are breaking off our engagement.” Or, “We are not going to have any children because same-sex marriages are the end of the family.” The mainline congregation to which I belong had its first gay marriage last year. No one has left the church; offerings have not dropped off; parishioners are not hugging their children closer to protect them from Gross Evil. As a person with dual citizenship, I piously (and vainly) wish that persons from SCOTUS on down would cease being so provincial and look at what is staring them in the face “up here.”

Kill the Child, Spare the Lamb

Few indeed are the liberation narratives of any culture that do not include death of repressors. At least during the seder wine is removed from our cups in sadness over lives lost. Do we mourn for southern soldiers in the civil war? Or celebrate the victims of abolitionist movements during the run-up to that war?

The Rehabilitation of Elliott Abrams

Eric Alterman asks what the life story of elliott abrams says about "our most influential and important institutions that this lifelong embarrassment to American democracy can be embraced as one of their own." Maybe our most influential and important institution is AIPAC?

Ten Things to End Rape Culture

I am a rape survivor. I have quietly struggled to reclaim my life. I became a victim several times because I didn’t value myself enough to be careful about who I was spending time with. But I’ve come to learn that none of that was my fault. I should have been able to make poor decisions about my clothing, my drinking, even my friends without fear of being assaulted. I never got justice for the things that happened to me, and I’m OK with that. While what happened to me will always be part of my history, it no longer defines who I am. I’m not a victim, I’m a survivor.

I have four beautiful children and an amazing husband, my oldest son is 13. I decided to talk to him about rape culture and what happened in Ohio. I started by asking a question. “There’s three teenagers, two boys, one girl, the girl drinks so much that she passes out at the party, the two boys touch her and have sex with her. What has happened to her and whose fault is it?” My beautiful, sensitive 13-year-old son looked at me and said, “She was raped” (yes! Score one I pat myself on the back.) “It was the girl’s fault. She shouldn’t have been so drunk.” What?! Are you kidding me?! How could I have failed so completely as a mom, as a woman, as a survivor myself, to teach my son correctly?!

That’s when I realized I had and I did, but I was not the loudest voice he heard. He saw jokes about drunk girls on TV. The boys at school have a game called scooping where they run up behind a girl and brush against her breasts or privates. So I remained calm and I asked him if it would be his fault if he got drunk and a guy took off his pants and touched him. “Ugh, Mom, no way!” So why would it be different for a girl? We talked about pictures that could get sent around on kids’ phones and how dangerous that is. The charges that can come from that, all good discussions.

But I want to help. I want to help end this culture that affects our children. I want my daughters to not face the ugliness I had to deal with. I want my sons to see women as beautiful, strong equals to be cherished. How can I help? What can I do? I sign the petitions, I call my congressmen, but it feels like so little. I want to help other girls, like this girl in Ohio know that there can be a future, and I want to help boys to understand that just because a girl is impaired doesn’t mean she’s a free target, or if she’s wearing a skirt she’s doing it for easy access. Please let me know if you know of things I can do.