LETTERS
LETTERS to the Editor Our Best Reading of 1994 Your Best Reading of 1994 (Books, January issue) discouraged me. It discouraged me because it included no serious fiction. It is wrong for you to...
...All letters may be edited for clarity and conciseness...
...Is there no exit from this perennial treadmill, no real solution to the problems of the poor...
...Of course, your magazine is political and fact-based, but how are we to live in these discouraging times without reminders of beauty...
...If this article is an example of critical thought by Douglas, the editor should have checked with her doctors to ascertain that her cerebral cortex was intact...
...These small-press novels are hard to find, and that they are overshadowed by the money-making schlock churned out by huge publishing corporations is not fair...
...By increasing funding the Republicans can both win votes for the right by doing battle with a stage-prop force of evil and provide leftwing viewers a cathartic pseudo-experience that dissipates their radical energies, rendering them un-threatening...
...We on the left do not need to re-create the centralized, monolithic, coast-to-coast, top-down structure of the corporately run Democratic and Republican parties...
...Few people have the courage to speak out against the Pope's stands...
...The chief function of a public-welfare system, as stated by Piven and Cloward, is regulating the poor: "expansive relief policies are designed to mute civil disorder, and restrictive ones to reinforce work norms...
...Green parties, ballot-qualified in a handful of states from Maine to Alaska and organizing in many more, are part of a growing and successful international network...
...One voice more or less, among the gibberish and white noise of the information age, makes no difference at all...
...In other words, relief policies are cyclical—liberal or restrictive depending on the problems of regulation in the larger society, with which government must contend...
...W. Douglas Larson Hinsdale, Illinois January's issue brought forth an article by Susan Douglas titled," The Big Swill...
...William J. Logal Buffalo, New York Will Public Broadcasting Survive...
...She lists seven positions about which she is irate...
...Among the elite intellectuals in academia, the church, and the media, anti-homosexuality is denounced—indeed, not even discussable...
...In fact, if the Republicans were half as smart as they are cynical, they would increase funding for Public Broadcasting while occasionally growling about "liberal bias...
...Blair Bobier Detroit, Oregon Poorhouse Politics Frances Fox Piven's article ("Poorhouse Politics," February issue) hits all the right notes if we limit our sights solely to the issue of welfare reform and current attempts to gut the welfare system...
...Any innocent student in the Ivy League or any state university who makes the plaintive comment, "I thought homo activity was wrong," will not be engaged in moral deliberation but will be referred for psychological counseling, a process once used by the Roman Catholic Church and by Stal-inites...
...PBS, like all other television outlets, is just another provider of alienated spectacle...
...She does a very effective job in exposing the myths underlying the "rhetorical assault" by both Democrats and Republicans on the welfare system...
...To attack a person and assail his or her character begs the question and lowers debate to the hate-filled gutters that are becoming so prevalent...
...Raymond Bin Bloomington, Indiana Cart and Horse Conspicuously absent from the discussion of political alternatives in the last two issues of The Progressive has been any mention of the Green political movement...
...If the Greens, Labor Party advocates, and New Party proponents have any hopes for success, it will come from cooperation and coalitions...
...The Pope makes me sick because for a man whose stock in trade is supposed to be compassion for the poor, the positions he takes are so cruelly uncaring about the real needs of women (and in fact, all peoples), given current global realities...
...Let's honor our diversity and respect our bio-regional differences while uniting in coalitions which allow us to work together...
...There is no suggestion that the existence of the present-day poor is perhaps a historical product of contemporary society, namely a capitalist society, which by its very nature necessitates some form of welfare...
...In short, is the need for a welfare system, addressed to the requirements of the poor, destined to be permanent...
...New Mexico's Green gubernatorial candidate, Roberto Mondragon, was featured on the front page of The New York Times even before he polled 10 percent in the November election...
...As to adrift private morality, Douglas has not given us a cue as to hers...
...Suzanne Corky New Orleans, Louisiana Paean to the Papacy Iam a Progressive subscriber and wanted to congratulate you and Susan Douglas (Pundit Watch, February issue) for her superb piece on the Pope and Time magazine's sickening glorification of and toadying up to a man who is doing so much harm in the world with his ludicrous stand against contraception and his stand against freedom of choice for women in a world that now has almost six billion people and is due to have another four-to-five billion join those crowds in only forty years...
...It is my hope that Douglas, having off-loaded on the Pope, will find peace within herself, and I am sure that the Church will survive and the papacy long after Douglas, you, and I are dead...
...There is neither space nor time for meaningful commentary, dissent, and input from the vast numbers who consume the mass-communication product...
...Two examples from 1994 are Carole Maso's The American Woman in the Chinese Hat, published by Dalkey Archive Press, and Sunetra Gupta's The Glass-blower's Breath, published by Grove Press...
...Who could ever have imagined that Douglas could have written such swill in February as "Paean to the Papacy...
...If so, does not the struggle for an acceptable welfare policy become in itself a Sisyphian task, a never-ending struggle with its ups and downs, rising and falling cyclically within the limits of the government's need to regulate the poor...
...Then she links the Pope to a "deeply religious" murderer of abortionists...
...I do know she enjoys splattering mean words, unsupported by acceptable argument, and that will not do for a subscription to a magazine that I hope has the aim to help me think...
...To imagine that any means of one-way mass-communication, whether publicly or privately owned, is an instrument of democracy is pure fantasy...
...Should not one at least hint at the need for and the possibility of an alternative society, however defined, in which there will be no poor and therefore no need at all for a public-welfare system designed to regulate the poor...
...Yet there is a lacuna in Piven's position regarding the limits of welfare reform, a failure to at least raise the possibility of going beyond the issue of "ending welfare as we know it" to ending the need for welfare as such for the poor...
...Lee Evans New Canaan, Connecticut After subscribing to the Spectator for a year, and finding it had useful information and a slant I needed to perceive, I canceled because the bile finally drowned reason and information...
...This phalanx of intolerance is solid throughout American media, newspapers, magazines, schools...
...Jack Farkas Forest Hills, New York The editors welcome correspondence from readers on all topics, but prefer to publish letters that comment directly on material previously published in The Progressive...
...The vitriolic babble of the right is in direct proportion to the mindless uttering of the left and this article is a fine example of the mindless journalism that masquerades as professionalism...
...If being Catholic qualified one for being an expert in moral theology or philosophy, it would be a far different world...
...Is there no alternative that would eliminate this need...
...Matthew Rothschild ("Cart and Horse," Editor's Memo, February issue) is correct to note that an insurgent left-wing candidate who received 5 or 10 percent of the vote would gather attention and influence...
...And finally she heaps monstrous blame on the Pope for massive wrongs, and decorates this with deep knowledge of what makes the Pope tick...
...Piven herself makes this point in a book she co-wrote with Richard Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare...
...Your magazine is in a position to alleviate their obscurity somewhat...
...They are too intimidated by the Catholic Church and all the crazies that abound in America, who are willing and eager to assassinate anyone who is strongly pro-choice...
...All the desperate news from Washington and the Christian Coalition heartland would be easier to take if there were an illuminated page here and there...
...I can sit in my living room and pretend that I am "involved" in a radical movement by watching a documentary, much as I can pretend that I have hip friends by watching Seinfeld, or that I am part of "taking back America" by watching Rush Lim-baugh, or that I'm an athlete by watching sports...
...Susan Douglas, writing on the papacy, lies in the same gutter...
...Democracy requires interaction between citizens, not a bunch of passive, isolated couch potatoes who watch an opinion or news program so they can shop for pre-packaged ideology like they shop for pre-packaged frozen meals or mass-produced consumer goods...
...There are scores of excellent novels published each year by small presses...
...Will Public Broadcasting Survive...
...And what does Douglas think of her deeply intolerant autocrat, her editor who will not accept for publication certain letters and articles questioning the homosexual lifestyle, or even use of the phrase "homosexual lifestyle...
...Good and evil exist in the world and have since the dawn of humankind, and the philosophical discourse continues...
...It is wrong for you to assume that a progressive mind contains room only for facts...
...I do not need to read hateful messages from "raised Catholics" now lapsed...
...Green office-holders include the mayor of Rome and city and county council members in Hawaii and California...
...Not only is the what of the two parties dysfunctional, but the how is as well...
...March issue...
...Please consider the possibility of reviewing more fiction in your magazine...
...Anything that is produced by any means of mass-communication—including even this publication—is thoroughly screened, edited, reviewed, and sanitized to make sure that it is tailored to suit its demographic audience or market segment...
...Implicit in Piven's article is the assumption that the poor will always be with us and, therefore, we must constantly struggle to either improve existing welfare programs or resist attempts to curtail them...
...How are we to cope with the minutiae of our lives without thinking huge thoughts...
Vol. 59 • April 1995 • No. 4
