Letter to Stephen Goldstein

January 2, 2008

Stephen L. Goldstein – A very special correspondent

The Sun-Sentinel

200 East Las Olas Boulevard

Fort Lauderdale, Florida 33301

RE: 30 hours into the new year and you’re already in mid-season form! Thank God for Little Nell or I would never know how bad things are. As reported by you in this morning’s Sun-Sentinel.

My dear Professor,

I am too old to fall for the old bait and switch routine but a cursory glance at your column and I was hooked.

I figured that any column beginning with Dante and ending with Walt Kelly can’t be all bad.

I was wrong.

It was all bad.

The template, the paradigmatic template, to snatch a phrase from the foetid well of modern American Liberalism, is that all things evil, be they political, social, moral, financial, culinary, meteorological, follicle, athletic, or musical comes from the evil axis of Bush, Cheney, and Halliburton. Somehow the people are duped into voting again and again for cads, bounders, and wowsers who are constantly bribed, corrupted and compromised by the storm troopers of the Evil Empire.

These “whited sepulchers” then thwart the will of the “good” people, the people who “care”, the people who wish to help the poor, the old, the lame, the halt, the calorically challenged, the gender challenged, the document challenged, and the poster child of the never ending War on Poverty, the single mom who is a woman of color with one child in need of a good Ritalin program and another about to enter the ranks of feral urban youth.

That and “I’ll go on a hunger strike to save polar bears from drowning” “Let’s not be too beastly to the WOGs who want to kill us” is all of it, isn’t it?

If your only tool is a hammer everything begins to look like a nail.

You may wish to acquaint yourself with the work from which you took your opening line, “Abandon all hope”. Its first line is “Halfway through my journey I found myself in the dark wood of error”. I’ll leave the line about coming “out of the cave and looking up and seeing the stars” for you to find in a journey of surprise and discovery.

As to Pogo and the time weary line about “the enemy is us” may I suggest a new poet?

Eliot said that man’s search for a society “so perfect that no one will have to be good” is, of course, doomed.

On the second day of the New Year you tell me that the problem with society is the people who are in it. Then you tell me that “men are not angels”. In your Utopia, a word whose meaning modern American Liberals always forget, a word that means “nowhere”, there is no end, no resolution to anything. It is like the horizon. It’s there. It’s just over, forgive me, the horizon. Thus the search for victims and villains is never ending.

The bounds of Liberal Logic are eminently flexible.

Cheney was on the “grassy knoll” in Dallas before he started AIDS, right? Then he blew up the levees in New Orleans because he doesn’t like Black folk, right? Then he got the voters in South Florida to fall for an Arts Center, a baseball stadium, and a tunnel while Haitians wash up on the beach to our official indifference, right?

Send up a flare if your theme changes. If not, it will be the same column again and again and again. I’ll try to get by without them.

Happy New Year!