LETTERS
LETTERS to the Editor Dimwitted Activism The decline of intellectual coherence evident generally seems reflected all too well these days in the pages of The Progressive. I must take note, though,...
...She speculates that the prey-predator relationship— with humans as the original weak, vulnerable prey cringing in the dark—imprinted into our psyche the fear, the explosive passions, the requirement of sacrifice, and the eventual thrill of defensive triumph...
...she transcends the particularities and causes of any given war...
...Don Sloan New York, New York Off With Your Helmet Colman McCarthy ("Confessions of a Cyclist," October issue) quotes James E. Starrs saying, "The bicyclist's mantra is non-conformity...
...Readers genuinely interested in the latest insidious business techniques for hooking kids on products should see Business Week's cover story of June 30, 1997, Hey Kid, Buy This...
...The player who leads a life of violence and brutality off the field has not learned the real game and most likely learned such anti-social be- havior long before he ever donned the pads...
...but this] Clausewitzian interpretation has little to do with the actual series of accidents, blunders, and miscommunica-tions" that impelled the nations of Europe to war...
...The book eschews war's root etiology—capitalism's need for cheap labor, always achieved through hegemony...
...Ehrenreich's stunningly original work is an important contribution of critical thinking applied to the catastrophe of war in human culture...
...Immature bicyclists who ignore traffic laws altogether imderrnine the efforts of sensible bicyclists who are working to get better laws relating to bicycling...
...Landy's review represents an intellectually slothful perspective...
...Simply opting for the bicycle as the preferred means of transport qualifies a person, without more, as willing to live on the edge, as distancing oneself from the pack...
...War can infect any permutation and socioeconomic structures, any enumeration of race, gender, power, and territorial imperatives...
...Or in mid-nineteenth-century China during the Taiping Rebellion (twenty million dead...
...William Parsons Brooklyn, New York Colman McCarthy's proposal that bicyclists should be "enlightened anarchists" alarms me...
...Weren't yours, Mike...
...James D. Hightower Merrimack, New Hampshire Kudos to Joanne Landy for her review of Blood Rites...
...In this case, the hucksters are tailoring messages, as they have for years, to common psychological developments of adolescents...
...the commodi-fication of, well, everything...
...These phrases are torn out of context: Miller uses them to refer not to anti-social behavior unique to youth (as Males would have us believe) but to the way that advertising is aimed at specific markets...
...War is indeed powerful, and it is now mutating, in true postmodern formlessness, into a "form" that will be even more difficult to exorcise from human culture...
...She assesses the passionate energies invested into war...
...As is any coach who relies solely on blockhead tackling and ball-carrying...
...He blames Miller for using "stereotypes" to prove the point—the "inevitable rebelliousness of adolescent boys," "hormones raging," "defiant boorish behavior...
...Landy, on the other hand, attempts to argue (actually, just to state axiomatically) the preeminence of sociopolitical factors in determining the impetus toward war...
...Tragically, the only certainty is that these will be the foundation for continued pandemic violence as we enter the twenty-first century...
...As Landy said, there has never been a war in history that was not economic...
...His unwillingness to obey traffic laws that he finds inconvenient gives indirect support to the small but nasty minority of drivers who feel that a motorist's convenience is more important than a bicyclist's safety...
...Any discussion of masculinity, aggression, and the culture of football that proceeds from the assumption that football begins and ends with * wild-eyed boys/men crashing into each other is doomed...
...as well as societal, in terms of the political-economic imperatives of elite dominance and oppression...
...What blather...
...She uses all the fashionable phraseology of a rather dimwitted activism to construct an impenetrable fortress of preconceived, self-justifying logical inconsistencies...
...A self-parody of activism, perpetually preparing to be against the last war, locked into a template that will have little impact or relevance to twenty-first-century war...
...in this radical context...
...Those genes, that sexism, and the urge to claim power over the beast are all window dressings...
...Though he wouldn't phrase it this way, he would probably agree with the Too Te Ching as it counsels, in Mitchell's translation, "When two great forces oppose each other/the victory will go/to the one that knows how to yield...
...clarity and conciseness...
...I enjoyed the coincidence but I was dismayed by Douglas's simplisti understanding of the game of football...
...Of course, we all recognize and abhor the oppressive nature of elite domination at the close of this century...
...The brilliance of her work is the illumination of what remains...
...Nor could it explain the cowed acceptance of the resultant grinding slaughter...
...Doug Magee New York, 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...
...exploitation by transnational corporate power...
...This is vintage Males—a mixture of nonsense and caricature, propped up by misrepresentations...
...We need more of Ehrenreich's critical insights and less of Landy's puerile criticisms...
...Males accuses Miller of implying that young people are uniquely open to media brainwashing...
...Attacks on them by, among others, "progressive reformers...
...not so different from those on the Christian right" reinforce "the Clinton doctrine that youth behavior is the problem, and curbing young people's rights the answer" to violence and addictions of various kinds...
...She writes that the "Great War" of 1914-1918 grew out of the dominating urges of "competing imperialist states...
...May/June 1997...
...While just about all reviews elsewhere have praised Ehrenreich's theories, Landy was on target all the way...
...The telltale mark of Males's politics is that never has he placed his own depiction of the "marginalizing of youth" (including affluent youth, Mike...
...She chastises Ehrenreich for a "sweeping dismissal of the relevance of social and economic hierarchies to warfare" and for giving "short shrift to the systematic poverty and insecurity that make it difficult for people to resolve their differences...
...We can all see that the "triumph of democracy" has given us only the triumphalism of neoliberal state capitalism...
...With blatant over-generalization, she places the blame for war on the oppression by elite interests and the "imperatives of contemporary capitalism...
...Now the advertising is more pervasive, thanks to technological "advances" and the massive intrusion of private capital into what once were public domains...
...Ehrenreich's palaver about genetic transfers, man's need to show his testosterone levels, some biblical references to blood and guts, and the purpose of showing Homo sapiens' power over lower animals was just a subterfuge...
...Writing with crisp creativity and well-grounded scholarship, Ehrenreich strips away conventional explanations of war: both individual, in terms of innate male aggressiveness, blood-lust, and rage...
...and accumulating inequities of wealth and power distribution...
...One wonders whether Starrs's mantra was composed prior to the current foliage of spandex, gladiators' turtle-like helmets, and de rigueur speed...
...I choose not to comment on the fatuous and irrelevant cover story on Bill Clinton's future career prospects, but I must react with protest against Joanne Landy's banal review of Barbara Ehren-reich's recent work, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War...
...For it is the very conformity of class-based symbols, especially the ubiquitous helmet, that has turned off more than one from bicycling...
...In some places, bicyclists have to contend with ordinances that force them to ride on side paths that are more dangerous than adjacent streets...
...All letters may be edtteo\for...
...Ehrenreich's conclusion that war is a "living thing" and cannot be avoided because it is built into the human framework ignores what has taken place on this planet since the beginning of time...
...America's young," says Males, are "increasingly marginalized...
...and she comes to grips with the near-universal sacralization of war culture...
...An analyst like Miller, by contrast, places Channel One and its vampire operations squarely in the realm of corporate capital...
...Overhearing a coach berate a young player for lack of aggression, Douglas leaps to the assumption that the game is only about bitting people...
...Cozza, the win-ningest football coach in Ivy League history, didn't survive thirty-two years in New Haven by convincing his eggheads they should be hard-boiled...
...What has happened to the leisurely coast, the rhapsodic meander...
...A bicyclist who considers himself above the law puts himself outside the protection of the law...
...Quoting Tolstoy, she notes that for any particular war, the various causes in and of themselves are valid, but "equally false by [their] insignificance compared to the magnitude of the event...
...as chancing a joyous moment of non-conformity...
...Richard B. Du Boff Haverford, Pennsylvania % . Soft and Yielding Football Susan Douglas's ruminations about football ("The Making of a Bully," October issue) came to me on a day when I was: a) working on a screenplay for Paramount about Carmen Cozza, Yale's legendary, now-retired football coach...
...Any other discussion is chimeric...
...But this raises issues that Males has always suppressed, or tossed in as afterthoughts to burnish his "left" credentials...
...volatile mixtures of race and religion...
...Among the latter is Males's attack on Mark Crispin Miller for his "antiyouth bias" in "The Lessons of Channel One" (Extra...
...My hormones were certainly "raging" at that age...
...Carmen Cozza and Lao-tzu ¦. knew better...
...A few unbiased hours in front of the tube studying the game they so blithely condemn would teach Douglas and others what most people who have played the game know: Many more yards are gained by the soft and yielding parts of football than are gained by brute forces colliding...
...and b) spending time rereading Stephen Mitchell's translation of the Too Te Ching...
...Gone, gone with the wind...
...Garth Peterson Sioux Falls, South Dakota Nonsense and Caricature The October issue gives us another article by Mike Males ("Stop Blaming Kids and TV") promoting the idea that our youth are "scapegoats" for every social problem facing the country...
...Various particularisms will cause various outbreaks of horrific slaughter, but the real tragedy will be that war will be as it ever was...
...What are the "imperatives of contemporary capitalism" that are fueling the never-ending slaughter of innocents in Algeria today...
...Males totally distorts Miller's comments on advertising, "directed," as Miller clearly states, "at the weakest of us: the poor, women generally—and kids, as Channel One makes clear" in its targeting of "the whole boring, regimented context of the school itself...
...It brandishes all of the tired rhetoric effectively proclaiming that "war is bad, we are against it, and we know who the villains are...
...I must take note, though, of the nadir reached by the October issue...
...It predates all of the "isms" and thus will continue its predation on us all...
...Although we all know of Ehrenreich's contribution to the progressive literature and thinking, I wish she had hired Landy as her ghost for this one...
Vol. 61 • December 1997 • No. 12
