Letters to the editor

A Log Cabin divided
BY JAKE TAPPER
(04/06/00)

The Log Cabin Republicans are proof that politics is inherited and not a product of rational self interest. The LCR members are the only gays who are going to deserve exactly what a Bush presidency is going to do to them. As a hetero liberal, I would find this situation funny. Funny, that is, if it wasn't that a Bush presidency will be just as bad for the innocent gay people in this country as it will be for the self-loathing, self-destructive LCR members who are asking, in fact, literally campaigning, to bring so much misery down on themselves.

-- Jim Martino

Jake Tapper's article demonstrates the unfortunate truth about both Bush and the Log Cabin Republicans: Both have their head in the sand. How pathetic it is to support a candidate who is against everything that gays and lesbians need to become first-class citizens. For the sake of all gay and lesbians, let's hope that Al Gore wins in November -- and send Bush back to Texas where he belongs.

-- Matthew Reif

David Foster Wallace: Ain't McCain grand?
BY BILL WYMAN
(04/04/00)

I haven't read David Foster Wallace's McCain article, so I have no idea whether Wyman is correct in his evaluation of it. In fact, I'd probably have no idea even if I had read it, because Wyman insists on using the oldest, most hackneyed, most viscerally painful DFW-reviewing trick in the book: writing "just like" the author, except really, really crappily. This is a critical/parodic device approximately as incisive (and enjoyable) as that album by the Coolies where they parodied Simon & Garfunkel by playing all their songs really, really crappily, and basically does nothing but demonstrate how talented Wallace must be to be able to pull off such an ungainly style of writing. Please, no more. For the love of God, no more.

-- Jesse Fuchs

Wyman has misread Wallace's article. That piece -- which is the best I've read about the election so far -- isn't about why we (the "star-fucking" readers of Rolling Stone) should vote for McCain, but about the perceptual vertigo induced by the question of whether we can believe anything said by any candidate, including McCain, in a modern, media-fied election. In thoughtfully confronting primetime politics through the vehicle of McCain, Wallace finds not the evil big party conspiracies that Wyman alleges he does, just many layers of complexity and confusion. Basically he says: Here's the mess as I see it, now it's up to you to figure it out -- but whatever you do, you have to participate. I found this positive and more than a little terrifying at the same time -- but not condescending, as Wyman would have it.

Actually, I only started feeling condescended to when I started reading Wyman's piece. His simplistic reading of Wallace's difficult (in Rolling Stone? I'm afraid so) article seems more about serving his own ends, which boil down to the same old bullshit about counterculture selling out and postmodernism only caring for surfaces. Pomo is about doing a close reading of a text and it applies to both the text of politics and the text of Wallace's article. Wyman should look again. He's the one around here who's being superficial, and, in his own perverse combination of skulky grumblings about "famous writers" and his incoherent "parody" of Wallace's style, perhaps he's the one who's guilty of starfucking.

-- James Bennett

Next Page: "Does the realization that you're a moron count as a fine quality?"

• View blog reactions