Marti Merzer, The Miami Herald

October 22, 2007

Marti Merzer

The Miami Herald

One Herald Plaza

Miami, Florida 33172-1693

RE: “Women Rising” + “Cuban Elections” – A Page 1 “Jump the Shark” moment for American journalism in general and the Miami Herald in particular.

Ms. Merzer,

Was any consideration given to “Women on Top”? Talk about “Riding Saint George”. I mean the rocket is long and sleek and powerful and capable of awesome thrusting. It could have been designed by Ayn Rand. What a smoke after blast-off!

Your sub-headline about women astronauts [Astronettes? Astrosansnuts?] sits alongside, like a turd in a punchbowl, the Page 1 story about “Cuban elections”. The word Cuban and the word election in the same sentence are beyond parody. Was Page 1 put together by George Carlin with the able assistance of Professor Irwin Corey? I glad to see that the old tradition of gin, a lot of gin, before making up the paper is still held in high esteem at the Herald.

I could start with the Greeks but then we get caught up in 25 centuries of DWEM [Dead White European Male] achievements. If I did that I would run the risk of starting off on the wrong foot so let’s start with Newton.

There he was, minding his own business, power napping under an apple tree, when he gets hit by a bloody falling apple. Voila!, and that’s the last time I’ll say something nice about the Froggies, gravity.

A strong case could be made for all of mankind’s - OOOPS! – humankind’s efforts at physical science since his bonking has been to study gravity so as to overcome, indeed conquer is a better word, it.

My father, the legendary Judge Smith, was born before men flew at Kitty Hawk in 1903. He lived to see men walking on the moon. In that 66 year period humankind –see how gender sensitive I am – not only defied gravity, they conquered it and, not necessarily in a fit of pique, bitch slapped it.

My father also thought that some of the strange weather patterns of the early ‘70s – Remember Global Cooling? – were caused by rockets poking into the upper atmosphere and beyond. Who is to say? If he had lived a few years more he might have won world wide scientific acclaim. With jeremiads about bears drowning and cows farting former Vice President Alpha Gump won a Nobel Prize.

We, sensate cognitive bi-pods, overcame earth’s gravity. We escaped our planetary orbit. We orbited another object, our moon, in our galaxy. We landed on that object. We walked around for a few days helping ourselves to a few souvenirs. We escaped the gravitational pull of said moon and returned to the earth. Just like a walk in the park.

My son Sean, AKA the World Famous Attorney, decided at the age of 4 that, the moon already having been trod upon, Mars was his choice of extraterrestrial spring break destination.

Are you telling me that we did all this, that we are doing all this, and that we tax ourselves to do this so that we can achieve gender equality? “Bedlam” awaits.

If a word other than “bullshit” can be found in the English language to explain all of your flap-doodle clap trap it has escaped me. Please believe me when I tell you that my lexicographic Odyssey, unlike the mighty Odysseus’s, is never ending.

Logic, and why do I think that it is a discipline totally unknown in the news rooms and editorial rooms of the Herald, dictates that if gender equality is the goal why not start at Arlington National Cemetery? Kipling, our first multicultural poet and champion of diversity, told us that the female is “the deadlier of the species”. Who knew they could fly too?

Let’s name the next spacecraft “Antigone”. That’s a chick we can all get behind.