Letters
Editors: In his article on the revival of the magazine Transition (Dissent, Spring 1999), John Palattella notes how Lindsay Waters, in an article in Transition last year, assailed Richard...
...Baby Boomers announced themselves by rejecting their parents' values and social conventions, and Generation X is ready to do the same...
...During the campaign, Jackson was quoted as referring to New York City as "Hymie Town...
...Mexican wages were greatly reduced in the peso crisis of 19941995, a crisis facilitated by a development strategy of the Mexican government of which NAFTA was a centerpiece...
...For many in Generation X the vanity of the sixties is an embarrassment, one barely stomached in dinner table conversation...
...HENRY J. SHAMES Santa Barbara, Calif...
...How delighted I am, then, to learn that Gates, in his preface to the interview, writes that "Farrakhan really does believe that a cabal of Jews secretly controls the world," and that "apologists and detractors" were then left to "feel free to decide which represente[ed] the 'real' Farrakhan...
...Generation X's advice to graying Baby Boomers is keep quiet, or we'll put you in a retirement home and take away the television...
...I'd be even prouder—and I'd wager we'd have a whole lot more entrepreneurs—if health insurance here were guaranteed by the government, as it is in every other civilized country in the world, and I didn't have to pay 10 percent of my income to get it...
...What great and good benefit to humanity was achieved by allowing a racist like Farrakhan the chance to vent his disgusting Jew rantings irrespective of the publication's alleged efforts to synthesize the "incompatible" and the "disparate...
...That's why they want to gain self-sufficiency as soon as they can, and hope that their parents don't bequeath every last cent to a commune...
...I'll yield to it...
...NAFTA members have the luxury of a common external tariff against all other countries in the world except each other, and Mexican and American companies don't compete head-on...
...This by itself is troubling to many progressives...
...I'll bet...
...he is an entrepreneur, an author, after all...
...But because we have a long "lead time" for each issue, you have to send us your letter within three weeks after getting an issue of Dissent in order to get it into the next issue...
...Farrakhan is no political pipsqueak, and his ascendance, as Gates notes, is due in part to black churches failing to provide "a moral language in which to address the poTo Letter Writers • We welcome succinct letters from our readers...
...Or maybe it was just the pot...
...Get plenty of calcium...
...Further, although it's true that foreign direct investment is the most dynamic job creator in Mexico today, and that wages paid in foreignowned plants are generally higher than those in the rest of the economy, this should be put in context...
...Henry Louis Gates recounts these and other ugly episodes in the introduction to his interview of Farrakhan in Transition 70...
...Its provisions regarding which economic activities are regulated and protected (investor's rights) and which are relegated to weak side agreements (labor standards) make it an epitome of who gets heard in policy debates and who doesn't...
...I do not know, but maybe the fashion back then was to camouflage a profound mind with an unkempt appearance and dreamy cadence...
...People think that there's a Social Security crisis...
...When he ascribes professional ambition partly to fantasy he misunderstands the relationship between impulse and progress, which is always marked by failures, as is a manuscript, for example...
...How open mindedly liberal...
...Letters must be no more than 500 words, typed, double-spaced, and carry the full address and name of the sender...
...Shames, I don't think that ignorance can defeat bigotry...
...Bivens is wrong in saying that NAFTA disallows managed-trade policies...
...But what about subjects that Transition does find so interesting, such as the "engaging" arguments that occurred in the interview by Henry Louis Gates of Louis Farrakhan in its issue 70, where in the course of the interview Farrakhan's patented anti-Semitic vitriol spills forth...
...Now we find ourselves in another boom—and college graduates fall into nothing but a pit of insecurities...
...Conservative politics stole America's decency...
...We reserve the right to edit letters down to fit our space and to choose which shall be printed...
...Wear sunscreen...
...If Tolerant Sixties Radicals—whose opinions Perlstein seems to share—are not pleased, they should blame themselves instead of wondering, "What happened...
...Farrakhan complained that Jews control the media...
...Letters will not be returned to senders unless they are accompanied by stamped, selfaddressed envelopes...
...Nonetheless, the magazine rightly felt obliged to understand the source of his broader social appeal and significance...
...Gates's intention is unmistakable: to label the interview "Handle with Care: Combustible Contents...
...To start, NAFTA disallows international capital controls on destabilizing "hot money" and the ability to conduct managed-trade policies characteristic of postwar Bretton Woods arrangements...
...DISSENT / Summer 1999 127...
...Let's fight back, on this and a hell of a lot else...
...And, above all: join us on the left...
...Calm dawn...
...Living in an uninterrupted economic boom, all they needed to secure a lifetime's decent work was finish college and take the flowers out of their hair...
...In 1991, the Nation of Islam published The Secret Relations Between Blacks and Jews, alleging, among other things, that Jews have trafficked in slavery throughout the centuries...
...These "stark" grounds are that NAFTA ignores labor's voice, in a universalistic sense...
...Would an editor of Dissent even be allowed to explain its decision to publish my racist rant under the principle that Dissent is so devoted to the essay that it must publish my rantings to demonstrate its desire to synthesize disparate views, allowing them to grow together...
...John PaletteIla Replies: In 1984, Louis Farrakhan volunteered the Nation of Islam's Fruit of Islam to act as a security detail for the presidential candidate Jesse Jackson...
...JOSH BIVENS New York, N.Y...
...Unlike Mr...
...Try the taco stand...
...PAUL WALLECK Pasadena, Calif Rick Perlstein Replies: I admit that when I read this letter I was at a loss as to how to respond...
...Try The Taco Stand Editors: Rick Perlstein's attempt ("The X-Philes," Dissent, Spring 1999) to dismiss Generation X's discontent as just a product of their being in their twenties casts Baby Boomers in a new light...
...How nice...
...NAFTA is the essence of managed trade...
...I am in my twenties and my peers make sense to me, unlike the grainy images of youthful sixties hippies cavorting in mud, wearing flowers in their hair, and vandalizing universities...
...And trust me on the sunscreen...
...My left-leaning instincts are in disarray...
...they know Baby Boomers do not care one iota what happens after they are gone...
...Would Dissent publish the interview with only an admonition to readers to feel free to decide if my statements represented the "real" me...
...Is not this drive a rational response to a limiting job market, where a Baby Boomer is almost assuredly going to be the one who says, "Sorry, we are not hiring...
...Are there any left...
...Why publish such an interview...
...Baby Boomers cavorted naked in the mud because they could (wouldn't you...
...How did this happen...
...As for capital controls, NAFTA merely follows rather than makes the international norm...
...Let us imagine, for a moment, that I am interviewed by Dissent, in the course of which I assert that black people are totally inferior in intellect and in reasoning powers, and owe their low status in American society to their inferior inherited characteristics...
...Alice Amsden and Takashi Hikino Reply: We agree with Josh Bivens that "an intelligent case can be made against the [NAFTA] pact," but our argument was basically that NAFTA provided Mexican workers with positive gains, which were overlooked by progressives who, as Bivens notes, "oppose NAFTA on more stark political-economic grounds...
...Last, many progressives oppose NAFTA on more stark political-economic grounds...
...And of course Generation X considers Social Security a joke...
...Thanks, but we do not need the encouragement...
...Later, they characterize progressive opposition to NAFTA as evidence of a troubling leftist trend toward isolationism, asking, "So, what's so terrible about NAFTA...
...Why was the interview even published in Transition...
...There isn't, because dissembling, greedy opportunists made the story up, and there weren't enough people alert enough to notice what was happening and fight back...
...How sweet...
...They had day care...
...We are unable to acknowledge letters...
...I'm damned proud to be an American entrepreneur...
...126 DISSENT / Summer 1999 Perlstein ought to applaud Generation X's entrepreneurial impulses, not belittle them...
...How fair...
...All of this in support of Palattella's thesis that Transition's 'devotion to the essay" lies in synthesizing "the incompatible, the disparate, and letting them grow together...
...Granted, the agricultural sector was not a high-wage one, but it did provide employment for many before NAFTA, so jobs in foreign-owned plants don't come at zero opportunity cost...
...Perhaps because, as Gates notes in his introduction, Farrakhan holds sway over a few million black followers, especially those who feel vulnerable to charges of disloyalty to the race...
...I'm Glad You Asked Editors: In their article "The Left and Globalization" (Dissent, Spring 1999), Alice Amsden and Takashi Hikino assert that progressives are "wise" to call for international capital controls on destabilizing "hot money" and for "managed trade policies characteristic of postwar Bretton Woods arrangements...
...Stretch...
...Why Is NAFTA Bad...
...Floss...
...Also, a large reason that these jobs in foreignowned plants are substituting for "no jobs at all" is because Mexican agriculture, a large part of the economy, was decimated by imports coming into the country after NAFTA was signed...
...But, there is an intelligent case to be made against the pact, based in large measure on the arguments employed in Amsden and Hikino's article...
...It's clear from Gates's introduction that neither he nor Transition endorses Farrakhan's inflammatory views...
...DISSENT / Summer 1999 125 litical sins of state-sponsored racial inequality...
...Editors: In his article on the revival of the magazine Transition (Dissent, Spring 1999), John Palattella notes how Lindsay Waters, in an article in Transition last year, assailed Richard Rorty's book Achieving Our Country on the ground that it "blasphemes the truth of our dreams," managing in the process to pit the author against a "real" [sic] black rapper, Tupac Shakur...
...My first instinct was to patronize the young man...
...But, as we also argued, to have included equal labor standards in NAFTA for Mexican and American workers—as progressives demanded—would have jeopardized job creation in Mexico, which is where the action for Mexican workers lies...
...Then and only then might our children be blessed with the opportunity to dance naked in the mud when they are young—and afterward, if they choose, get the kind of job that should be every American's birthright: one that delivers a decent minimum of economic and social security...
...I mostly hear vapid slogans and tortured Tao from those freaks cum CEOs, who have created the materialistic nation they now disingenuously condemn...
...To my mind, presenting readers with opinions that might run contrary to their own, even opinions readers might find offensive, is a legitimate editorial policy, especially in a journalistic climate like ours, in which the thoughts of politicians, regardless of their race or ideology, are reduced routinely to sound bites...
...Watching them on any of the hundreds of masturbatory retrospectives devoted to their exuberance fills me with disgust...
...It's true that the know-nothing arguments on the opposing side received most of the attention during debate on NAFTA...
...An interview is as good a place to start as any...
Vol. 46 • July 1999 • No. 3
