Letters
Editors: Susie Linfield has so crudely misrepresented what I wrote about James Nachtwey in the Village Voice ("Beyond the Sorrow and the Pity," Dissent, Winter 2001) that I can't be sure if she...
...nuclear power plants or toxic-waste dumps...
...Readers of Richard Woodward's letter may get the impression that the subject of my article was Richard Woodward...
...What would they think if they knew...
...Hardly...
...Woodward protests the infringement of the Sudanese man's "legal rights...
...I don't love Capa's pictures because they're blurry...
...Senator Wellstone, Representatives Conyers, Lee, and McDermott...
...Focused or not, his images of the Spanish loyalists often have the casual intensity of family snapshots...
...At first we were going to Bosnia, then Chechnya, then the favelas of Brazil...
...Maybe I need more schooling in social theory, but this position by Linfieldthat the meaning of images isn't "pure" but constructed— sounds awfully "chic" and "porno" to me...
...However, that job would become much easier if Congress took on a more progressive face and acted as a partner in this endeavor...
...I quoted Woodward in two paragraphs, each time briefly...
...Connected to those he memorializes, he is partisan in the best sense...
...As Freud pointed out, individual and group psychology are not the same...
...What about Gore's swerving between populist and Democratic Leadership Council positions throughout his campaign...
...But, it is important for Nader supporters, and those who have criticized his campaign, to recognize that virtually every single issue Nader ran on is represented in a piece of legislation introduced by one Democrat or another in the U.S...
...Whose delicate innocence are we protecting, and to what purpose...
...Just as she imagines that I prefer blurry to composed pictures, she also believes that anyone opposed to the treatment of human misery evidenced in Inferno demands that war photographers and viewers "disconnect...
...She revisited many of these same people years later for the film Pictures from a Revolution, the most searching selfexamination of the moral role for the photojournalist in the midst of world politics (and its depressing aftermath) that I've ever seen...
...It's a place for getting results, period...
...Re: the Democrats not being "monolithic...
...Not only is this person nameless and dead, and thus without legal rights, his kin surely have no clue the picture has been chosen for the honor—if it is an honor—of appearing in Inferno...
...rather, it expresses fears that need to be respected, however wrong they may be, and [reflects] the use of tools that people are given in American culture to deal with those fears...
...It is a position that I understand as fundamentally undemocratic, no matter how fervent their support for the Democratic Party...
...So we can thank the Greens for the fact of the act...
...Do they consider the Clinton factor, as Al Gore himself did...
...Either way, what she puts forward as my thinking on the responsibility of war photojournalists shows a cavalier disregard for my carefully chosen words...
...Kigali in 1994 wasn't Barcelona in 1937...
...To Letter Writers • We welcome succinct letters from our readers...
...They will also be able to judge whether I misrepresented Woodward...
...My article was relatively long and included many sources...
...And oddly enough, Linfield, after bravely standing up against those trendy "postmodern photography critics," proceeds to embrace several of the points I made...
...We think not...
...Woodward does raise a couple of important questions...
...In 1994, for instance, neither Paul Wellstone nor any of the House members cited by Tom Vinson as champions of universal health care made the slightest criticism of Bill Clinton's conserva126 n DISSENT / Summer 2001 LETTERS tive, pro-insurance company health care proposal, let alone uttered the words "national health insurance...
...What no one points out is that Clinton signed off only after it was clear that Gore had lost...
...To level all events—or even all suffering—is not an expression of humanism, but of its opposite...
...Letters nmst be no more than 500 words, typed, double-spaced, and carry the full address and name of the sender...
...I am distressed that the Sudanese man is starving, almost certainly without his consent...
...But because we have a long lead time for each issue, you have to send us your letter within three weeks of getting an issue of Dissent in order to get it into the next issue...
...Like a fashion photographer, Nachtwey fetishizes bodies, not individuals...
...I see no problem with German, French, American—or even Sudanese—photographers documenting the Columbine victims: Why in the world not...
...Representative DeFazio...
...If Gore had won, this would have been impossible because he supports both...
...But Woodward's fixation on Columbine raises a larger issue, and reveals exactly the worldview (an increasingly popular one) that my piece critiqued...
...And on the principle front, what about St...
...It is up to those of us with higher aspirations to help spread better ideals and tools...
...Editors: Todd Gitlin and Sean Wilentz argue ("Memo to Those Who Supported the Nader Campaign," Spring 2001) that the Greens are just a social movement, not a political one, and that they will never exert real power and influence in national politics...
...In the absence of any explanation from him, she offers her own: "Perhaps Nachtwey thought his pictures would be more powerful—or closer to the abstract values of 'rear art—if readers were not distracted by text...
...Public financing of elections...
...The simple fact is this: after the 1960s, all the self-congratulatory radicals of the New Left either got tenure somewhere or just gave up on politics...
...The Senate Democrats' craven unanimous support for confirming Antonin Scalia in 1986 (after rejecting Robert Bork) is only one example of why the energies of the left need to be continually applied where they can do some good...
...There's no time to situate yourself in these foreign countries and perhaps learn the language of the culture you're photographing, not when you're the recording angel for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and there is so much bloodshed and privation all over the third world and you're on deadline for Time...
...Linfield ignores my further point that Nachtwey's voyeurism caters to the tastes of the developed, wired world...
...But what should we make of his career move to break out of the magazine format and present himself now as an artist, with a heavyweight tome of images printed in tritone on deluxe stock to accompany a huge touring show of supersized exhibition prints...
...So Al Gore ran a lousy race...
...But Robert Capa's photographs are easy to love...
...Editors: I want to respond to Todd Gitlin and Sean Wilentz's bitter critique—perhaps assault is a more appropriate word—of Nader voters in the Spring 2001 issue...
...He never stays anywhere for long...
...Can the scarred survivors of genocide in Rwanda be offered up as art photographs without ever trying to analyze the causes that led to the massacre...
...But what will they offer in borderline states in 2002 and 2004...
...I would add that there are also real opportunities to work with the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, with people like Bennie Thompson, Paul Wellstone, and Russ Feingold...
...Building alternatives to the Democratic Party and working within the party to move it left do not have to be mutually exclusive efforts...
...Such a position comes dangerously close to that of the New York Times's editorial page, which repeatedly called for Nader to leave the race to avoid throwing it to Bush...
...Susan Meiselas's photographs from Nicaragua in the '80s are animated with that same spirit...
...But we didn't support Gore because we thought him ever-reliable...
...Columbine is not the historic or moral equivalent of Rwanda any more than the murder of the Lindbergh baby was historically or morally equivalent to the murder of Anne Frank, or the killing of Tupac Shakur was as important as the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, or Martin Luther King Jr., or Chris Hani...
...Gitlin and Wilentz are wrong from their accusatory first sentence ("no small 124 n DISSENT / Summer 2001 LETTERS thanks to Antonin Scalia—and you"), having forgotton that Al Gore voted to confirm Scalia, right through their list of complaints starting with global warming (just who was it that sabotaged last November's Kyoto meeting...
...But one can't help noticing that Nachtwey hasn't included a single American disaster in his book, perhaps because we wouldn't stand for his prying eye...
...His argument that NIMBYs are motivated primarily by status concerns is far too limited...
...Congress, often by members of the Progressive Caucus (http://bernie.house.gov/pc/), an increasingly assertive bloc of Democrats in the House of Representatives...
...Halt the death penalty...
...I mention these, only a few of many examples, to counter the monolithic image of the Nader voter given by Gitlin and Wilentz...
...Columbine was a sad incident, but it is not even vaguely comparable to the genocide in Rwanda, or to the Bosnian or Afghan or Sudanese or Chechen conflicts, or to the fall of the Wall in Berlin or of apartheid in South Africa, all of which Nachtwey has documented...
...They will, however, be the first progressive party in decades to make a principled and articulate stand against the corporatization of American politics...
...Editors: I was disappointed by the weak arguments posited by Todd Gitlin and Sean Wilentz in their "Memo to Those Who Supported the Nader Campaign" and by the pallid nature of Ellen Willis's response...
...I have no sympathy for dictators who ban the Western press from reporting on governmental corruption and torture...
...That's not going to happen until the left acknowledges that there are decent members of Congress, supports these members, and recruits other candidates to run for office...
...The NIMBY phenomenon reflects what Daniel Bell and others have referred to as the cultural contradictions of capitalism...
...If the Democrats want the presidency anytime soon, they had better get the Green message...
...In Berkeley, for example, where I am the acting housing director, a neighborhood of predominantly workingclass, African-American homeowners has strongly opposed development of an apartment building on the other side of a major street that is a designated bus corridor...
...I agree with the photographer Sebastiao Salgado, who said in a recent interview, "[T]here is no person in the world that must be protected from pictures...
...Are Nader voters to blame for Tennessee or the loss of Arkansas, the home of his longtime partner...
...A living wage...
...This is hardly status snobbery and image maintenance...
...The suffering people in his photographs are defined for us by their scars and diseases and places of death, not by their names, their possessions, their family, their land...
...I doubt he knows the names of more than a few of the people whose agony he so lovingly captures in his book...
...Having been lumped in with "postmodern photography critics," whoever those straw men may be, I want to set the record straight...
...they can judge for themselves if his views there support his current claims that he is "glad [James] Nachtwey is out there recording the horrible things people do to each other every day," and that he regards Nachtwey as "a brave man" with "a keen, elegant eye...
...In other words, this opposition between "blurry" and crafted pictures that Linfield attributes to me is one of her own invention...
...Al Gore had promised to seek fast track approval...
...Nothing new had been learned about arsenic in eight years: Clinton could have signed that act in his first year in office...
...and in Miami, when he sided with Elian Gonzalez's cousins...
...But each time, just as we were about to embark, he would change his mind...
...Nor have liberal Democrats made any serious attempt to fight the direction of the party since 1992...
...Ken Weiss claims that Clinton's late-term executive orders were offerings to the Greens, but offers no evidence that Clinton would have refrained from lowering arsenic levels, protecting the Arctic, and so on, had Gore won...
...Actually, I'm glad Nachtwey is out there recording the horrible things people do to each other every day, and which many of us would rather not know about or see...
...With all these progressive proposals being introduced in Congress, why don't any of them get enacted...
...Everyone supporting Nader did not agree with his characterization of the differences between Republicans and Democrats, his decision to campaign heavily in swing states, or his focus on issues of social and economic justice...
...Like The Family of Man, apparently one of Linfield's favorite books, Inferno reeks of sanctimonious bombast...
...Similarly, Bush's recent turnaround okaying lower arsenic levels is a Green bonus...
...You can't admit to complex motives, to the awful fun of reporting on a war, to being human, when you're the hieratic conscience of photojournalism...
...I wonder what happened to his human rights...
...Editors: In "Suburbs, Status, and Sprawl," Benjamin Ross argues correctly that NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) opposition to needed housing development—including both non-market housing and market-rate housing—that is situated near transit lines can not be explained by the supposed effects on neighboring property values cited by the neighbors themselves...
...Payroll tax relief...
...The GOP is resigned to losing this one...
...It deals in generalities when we crave specificity or per 122 n DISSENT / Summer 2001 LETTERS sonal engagement...
...But the older, sainted Nachtwey is incapable of writing a thrilling young man's book like The Bang Bang Club, although he appears there as one of the guys, sharing adventures with the pack of shooters as they run around dodging bullets on the front lines...
...I would expect Ellen Willis, who criticized Todd Gitlin and Sean Wilentz for painting Nader supporters with one broad brush stroke, to not do the same to the Democratic Party...
...Likewise, one feels Meiselas's personal connection to the Nicaraguans she photographed for her book...
...Repeatedly, Nader said he would campaign one way, then did the opposite...
...They and Willis, in their agonizing over what might have been and what might yet happen, overlook some tangible benefits that have already accrued, thanks to Green voters, of which I happily happen to be one...
...Don McCullin and Larry Burrrows are two more photojournalists whose involvement in the lives of everyone around them in Vietnam is visible in their work and is moving to behold...
...and perhaps he felt uneasy about making himself more important than the wretched people in his pictures, an attitude I can respect...
...Let me preface my defense of the Democrats by first disclosing that I voted for Nader and contributed to his campaign, only the second time I've ever given money to a candidate (Paul Wellstone's brief presidential exploratory committee was the first...
...and more recently at Columbia University, where, after insisting on teaching an "off the record" journalism course, he didn't have the guts to admit it was his call and let Columbia take the rap...
...But Gore was no bargain either, and no friend of the environment no matter how many books he's written...
...We reserve the right to edit letters down to fit our space and to choose which shall be printed...
...Aside from the latter, would any of this have happened under Gore...
...Representative Kucinich...
...In those cases, the NIMBY strategy is the perfectly respectable one that if the developers find nowhere to build, society will have to find alternative and healthier means of producing power and ways to produce goods without generating non-recyclable wastes...
...Economically, private property is the dominant means of producing commodities (in this case, housing), but private property is culturally dominant as well, so that the most widely understood means of protecting the sphere of private life (in this case, the home) from anything new and the threat of change brought about through the "creative destruction" of the realm of the market, is through the use of a basic characteristic of property rights, that of exclusion...
...Oprah was appropriately moved to tears as she flashed his pictures on the screen while Nachtwey, the squarejawed photojournalist hero from central casting, spoke gravely about his mission...
...Everything that happens in the world must be shown...
...I am not making any judgments about the value of the human lives involved in these various events—which is, I believe, something that no one can do...
...We are unable to acknowledge letters...
...Naturally, then, moral purity resides in refusing to either take, or look at, such nasty pictures...
...He is distressed that James Nachtwey photographed a starving Sudanese man, probably without the man's consent...
...You can't do this kind of work for as long as Nachtwey has without, at some level, enjoying it, or at least relishing the role you're playing...
...As she writes in her caricature of postmodern criticism: "Alas, the viewer is no better than the photographer, for the former's gaze precisely, indeed rather remarkably, reproduces the oppressive power relations that the latter seeks to expose...
...The consequence has been that there is now no meaningful progressive wing of the Democratic Party...
...I think not...
...The New York Times Magazine printed photographs of, and interviews with, high-school students in Santee, California after the shooting spree there...
...They hit the nail with their arrogant heads...
...That would be impossible, both in emotional and practical terms...
...No kidding...
...If we can kiss fast track good-bye, thank the Greens...
...In this case, the critical contradiction is in the public understanding and use of private property rights...
...I look for his work in the pages of Time, which, despite its obvious limitations, offers his images within the urgent context of news reporting...
...Despite the bitter polemics between Gore and Nader supporters, many of us who backed Nader are ready to move forward and build progressive coalitions at all levels of our polity and society...
...And it cost the Democrats the election...
...Representative DeFazio...
...Perhaps Nachtwey should intentionally muddy his photographs so that, like carefully 'distressed' furniture, they can achieve the kind of shabby chic that critics (and home decorators) now seek out...
...I suggest that we need to look more at the cultural roles of private property and individualism in America...
...Surprisingly, Bush is also reducing subsidies to the Import-Export Bank, is cutting farm subsidies that usually go to corporate giants, has proposed higher fees for broadcast licenses, and okayed Clinton's privacy protection act—all of which should be cheered by everyone on the left...
...We are not in a society where cooperative action is celebrated and conflict resolution skills taught to everyone from childhood...
...He disparaged the importance of Roe v. Wade, and his signature stance on trade only barely distinguished him from Pat Buchanan...
...Here is what I wrote: "[Luc] Santé notes [in his introduction to Inferno] with some discomfort that 'Nachtwey's pictures are always compositions.' But he sidesteps the question of what to do with the troubling fact that the photographer took his time in framing and lighting the victims...
...Though Gitlin and Wilentz remind us of the outcome of the 1968 election (in what Ellen Willis rightly points out is a highly dubious interpretation of those events), I would remind them of the 1984 election, when Walter Mondale, despite being crushed by Reagan in the race, still secured his home state of Minnesota...
...He grandly declares himself an "anti-war photographer" as he makes war his business, moving around the globe, from Afghanistan to Zaire, in search of fresh disasters to examine upclose and impersonal...
...We accept E-mail submissions to editors@dissentmagazine.org, but request that you also provide a street address...
...Or perhaps he wanted to—in the words of that old, erroneous expression—get the pictures tell the story.' For whatever reason, he has made exactly the wrong choice...
...Five paragraphs later, in a passage having nothing to do with composition, I praised Capa and Susan Meiselas in the following terms: "In Robert Capa's scrappy, often blurry pictures of the Spanish Civil War and World War II, you can see where he stands in the political fight...
...NIMBYs are using the ideals and tools of self-defense that are provided by the larger culture...
...My piece questioned his right to appropriate dead and starving people from around the world and offer them up in this way, as grace notes in his throbbing symphonic score about the human condition...
...Opposition to increased population density is pervasive in American society, despite the many environmental and cultural benefits of denser development...
...He hit the beaches with the GIs at Normandy and knew some of those who fell that day and after...
...For the foreseeable future, the Greens won't be cabinet secretaries or senators making policy or cutting deals...
...As a result, the administration's proposal became the left wing of the debate and was treated by the Republicans as if it were the essence of bolshevism...
...Nachtwey's photos look different than Capa's because Nachtwey's world—which is our world—is different than Capa's...
...He didn't dress himself up as an artist on the battlefield or in his books...
...Linfield doesn't dare venture a guess, perhaps because she knows the answer...
...NIMBY, after all, is the same response that people have to construction of nearby...
...When the starving woman in a wheelbarrow reaches her hand toward us, or the child on his knees near death looks up at the camera, we know where Nachtwey was standing when he chose to click the shutter...
...My piece was an attempt to shift the focus of attention from the former to the latter—to shift it, that is, from an obsession with the inequality and exploitation of "the gaze" to the inequality and exploitation of the world...
...I suspect that in politics, as in personal affairs, excessive grief over the past can be a way of evading the challenges of the present (and future...
...The party is a hopeless consortium of jaded fundraisers chasing after the same donors who give to the Republicans...
...I never knew why...
...But perhaps as well he didn't like the idea of someone watching him as he approached a corpse or an amputee, hovered, changed lenses, moved closer, focused, clicked, and strolled away...
...What we Greens did last fall was to take a hard-nosed, realworld stand against the rightward drift of American politics and the Democratic Party...
...A more sensible budget framework, including a 20 percent reduction in Pentagon spending and corporate welfare, and large increases in education, health care, housing, social services, etc...
...The impaired ability of Americans to make political and historic distinctions— and the narcissism, isolationism, sentimentality, and intellectual laziness that underlie this failure—is alarming and dangerous...
...Early reviews of Inferno, such as David Rieff's in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, wrote of him in hushed, reverential tones...
...Proportional representation...
...Linfield writes that "critic Richard B. Woodward castigated Nachtwey for 'the troubling fact that the photographer took his time in framing and lighting the victims,' and compared his work unfavorably with the 'scrappy, often blurry pictures' Robert Capa took of the Spanish Civil War...
...This startled me when I first read it, and it startles me now...
...But the starving Sudanese on his hands and knees who looks into Nachtwey's lens can't object to being photographed, even if the man's turned head and imploring eyes would seem to indicate some last, helpless gesture of protest...
...They portray the Nader supporter as recklessly utopian, excessively moralistic, and just downright ignorant of and indifferent to the realities of the American political system...
...Some who applauded his call for a "deep democracy" were often reticent to embrace a presidential campaign, preferring to concentrate on local politics...
...In my view, a single-payer proposal would have been both easier to understand and far more popular—and I have no doubt that some compromise resembling the Clinton plan would have passed...
...The lack of context for these pictures also bothers her...
...On the contrary, there was a remarkable diversity of opinions, ideas on strategy, conceptions of politics, and stated DISSENT / Summer 2001 n 125 LETTERS goals articulated during the campaign...
...There are many Democratic legislators who, as individuals, may have fine politics...
...Letters will not be returned to senders unless they are accompanied by stamped, selfaddressed envelopes...
...As I wrote in my piece: "He cares little how people live, only how they die...
...What a guy...
...corporations to abide by high labor and environmental standards in overseas operations...
...Representative John Tierney...
...Representatives Watt, and McKinney...
...In fact, they're spoiling for an eight-year Bush reign, after which, they imagine, the left will have revived itself— and to hell with the country 'til then...
...As I wrote: "Would the families of, say, the Columbine students apDISSENT / Summer 2001 n 121 LETTERS preciate a German or French photographer who offered exquisite close-ups of their slain children to Europe's appraising eyes...
...They have no life story except involvement in sweeping historical movements like "New World Disorder" or some such journalistic category...
...It is my hope that this spirit does not carry the day...
...This does not mean, of course, that pictures of Columbine would necessarily be illuminating...
...Senator Feingold...
...Had he won, Democrats would have been forced to go along with it...
...Would they have helped Gore win Tennessee last time...
...Like Ellen Willis, I feel optimistic about the grassroots activism and energy generated by the campaign and by the efforts to join with the existing movement challenging neoliberal globalization with an unabashedly left-wing critique...
...It, too, was one of the last acts Clinton signed off on, safely after Gore's defeat...
...Their memory loss seems to be total in that they refer to Gore as an environmentalist...
...Editors: Susie Linfield has so crudely misrepresented what I wrote about James Nachtwey in the Village Voice ("Beyond the Sorrow and the Pity," Dissent, Winter 2001) that I can't be sure if she failed to understand my argument or just chose to ignore it...
...Like Woodward, I love Robert Capa's photographs...
...Nachtwey, on the other hand, has no allegiance that I can see to individuals but only to airy concepts like human suffering and his own artistic ambitions...
...Universal health care...
...Gore showed his mettle with a proposed military budget $80 billion larger than Bush's...
...Electoral politics can't rest content with "a principled and articulate stand...
...In Rieff's bizarre, if telling, comparison of praise, Nachtwey is to war photography what Annie Liebovitz is to celebrity portraiture...
...I'm also not sure that his unflinching stance toward his subjects—Linfield quotes admiringly his famous statement that "there isn't any picture he wouldn't take"—applies to pictures of himself...
...I love them because I can tell he was engaged by what he photographed...
...It's certain he wouldn't have if Gore had won—that would have been seen as an act of sabotage to the incoming administration (one-upmanship, certain to arouse GOP ire...
...and including their tears for workers (again forgetting a few facts, such as that the number of Occupational Safety and Health inspections during the Clinton administration were the lowest in OSHA's history...
...As for the Nader campaign now, it sounds as though some of his supporters will try to move Democrats to the left in states that are already Democratic...
...As Senator Wellstone has pleaded, help these progressives retake the reins of the Democratic Party...
...All the Washington liberal interest groups and all the ex-radicals at the elite universities have failed miserably in stopping the resulting rightward drift of the Democratic Party...
...We will only succeed if we approach our fellow citizens with respect, however much we disagree with them...
...For someone as image-conscious as Nachtwey, I don't think that's the kind of complex photograph he wants to be taken...
...The far more plausible reason why Clinton waited so long is that, had he tried earlier, the vicious Republican Congress would once again have undermined him...
...If what I wrote in the Voice read to her like a "resentful tirade" against Nachtwey, that was due to my effort to dispel the air of fake piety that now surrounds him and his work...
...I supported Nader, but I also work as a legislative aide for one of the aforementioned Democrats...
...Moreover, one might ask of Gitlin and Wilentz, and here I repeat a criticism made by Ellen Willis: would they only have been satisfied if half of or perhaps every single Nader vote had gone to Gore...
...I don't buy the act...
...And, I would expect Gitlin and Wilentz to do a much better job of recognizing the factions that exist within the Democratic Party, even within Congress...
...Another benefit is that now Democrats can behave like Democrats and oppose the World Trade Organization and rampant globalization...
...Representatives Sanders, Gutierrez, and Bonior...
...Ralph's less-than-holy crusade...
...For all their warnings about utopianism, the spirit that comes through in Gitlin and Wilentz's piece is one of mutual contempt and renewed sectarianism from the center to the left...
...Reforming the International Monetary Fund and World Bank...
...I admire individuals who work on the ground trying to make people's lives better one person, one community at a time...
...If only he could admit that globetrotting to trouble spots around the world and putting himself at risk can sometimes be a high as well a soul-shaking horror, I could forgive everything else, including his misguided attempts to blow up his news documents into monumental art...
...I am, however, making judgments about the historic significance of the events themselves—which is, I believe, something that all of us, as citizens of the world, must do...
...Rather, we are in a society that idealizes the individual and sets aside the home as the "haven in a heartless world...
...Although reforming the Democrats is a worthwhile endeavor, we should remember that the Green hope is for a reformed, truly democratic system, currently beyond the vision of the two major parties...
...For example, it seems certain Clinton's protection of the arctic wilderness will stick...
...How, in such a tight race, could Gore lose his own state of Tennessee...
...Pity, guilt, and even outrage are not the same as values and convictions...
...There are certainly many more horrors to come...
...Like Elie Wiesel, he is now treated as a saint for having witnessed so much unspeakable suffering...
...This is incorrect...
...Yeah, Bush is no bargain and none of the above should be construed as a defense of the man...
...Obviously, opposition to affordable housing has not the slightest chance of persuading capitalist society to cease producing people with low incomes...
...They have been readily joined by the gentrifiers now moving in, and the views expressed show no great differences...
...DISSENT / Summer 2001 n 127...
...Editors: I was disappointed that your Arguments section on Ralph Nader in the Spring 2001 issue suffered from the same flaw as nearly every other debate I've read about the wisdom of his campaign—it treated the Democratic Party as a monolithic entity...
...Recently my congresswoman, Nita Lowey (normally a big booster of globalization) declared she won't support fast track legislation...
...But it was a triumph for the set of ideas that the Democrats abandoned about thirty years ago...
...Furthermore, had progressive Democrats stood up for their ideas instead of collapsing in a demoralized heap, I don't believe the Gingrichites would have won the House...
...Nor would consumers of magazines take kindly to seeing other Americans treated in this fashion...
...I think part of the reason is because too often progressives want to remain "pure" and don't want to sully themselves with the stench of electoral politics...
...Probably he didn't want me interfering with his work, which I understand...
...Surely they jest...
...but as a party, the Democrats have consistently failed to offer any serious resistance to the country's rightward trend...
...In addition, Gitlin and Wilentz do not simply criticize Nader and those who voted for him, they demand an acknowledgment from us that we put George W. Bush and his right-wing entourage into the Oval Office, yet they show little ability to practice self-criticism...
...The shift is already happening...
...They existed, it would appear, only to be photographed by James Nachtwey...
...He is a brave man and a magazine photographer with a keen, elegant eye...
...With its eleven electoral votes, Tennessee would have easily clinched the election for Gore and allowed him to escape the debacle in Florida...
...She seems as troubled by this as I am...
...Representative McKinney...
...The truth is that in the process of losing their nerve, the Democrats have become lousy game-players besides...
...I urge interested readers to look up Woodward's original Village Voice review (June 13, 2000...
...most were shocking only in their banality (Pace Woodward, though, Nachtwey's show at DISSENT / Summer 2001 n 123 LETTERS the International Center of Photography last summer did include a section in which the photographer's "prying eye" was turned on what I, at least, would consider "American disasters," including an Alabama chain gang and homicide scenes in New York City...
...In his letter, and in his Voice piece, Woodward suggests that it would be exploitative for "a German or French photographer" to photograph the students killed at Columbine...
...Requiring U.S...
...In 1995, I had an assignment from Esquire to accompany Nachtwey into the field...
...I should know...
...To attack Nachtwey's critics, she invents false dichotomies...
Vol. 48 • July 2001 • No. 3
