Web Letters | The Nation

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.

The NCAA: Poster Boy for Corruption and Exploitation

Colleges will claim that football and basketball make money for only a few of the elite sports schools. Don’t be fooled. The value of sports to a university is “off the books.” Alumni stay in the contribution pool and provide larger donations because of their continued loyalty to their alma mater’s sports teams. Of course, the TV money and product sales shared by athletic conferences don’t hurt either.

If colleges are to remain the minor leagues for the NFL and NBA, Dave Zirin’s wish list comes up short. The following additional protections should be added:

1. The NBA and the NFL should pay a standard wage to all “student” athletes; all should recieve the same amount; TV and other promotional funds should go into that compensation pool.

2. Colleges should guarantee an education; athletes who are less than stellar scholars cannot do their day job, football or basketball player, and do justice to their education. If they do not advance in their pursuit of professional sports, the college should guarantee an appropriate education.

If Corporations Don't Pay Taxes, Why Should You?

Government wrote the tax laws that corporations must obey. No illegal behavior was executed, only possibly suggested. I’d really like to know how much these corporations actually paid in taxes, not how much they legally avoided. Lastly, of course these corporations expect government and military support in case of trouble. I’d expect no less for even the bottom 1 percent of (non-income) taxpaying citizens in this country.