Letters to the editor of daily – and weekly – newspapers can be very informative, but sometimes not in the way the writer intends. Reading a paper often enough will identify in the community who is articulate, who is centrist, who is far left or far right. Often the reader knows by first noting the name what the content will be. It probably works that way with columnists, too. However, one has to discriminate about what one takes for the truth.
For instance, a recent Press of Atlantic City issue featured a writer objecting to people of the famous 47 percent who mooch off the government. If it weren’t for them, taxes would be lower. What they should do is get a job, like the 53 percent. Sounds good until we reckon that jobs are being outsourced overseas, that people with the wrong color skin walk into a place advertising a job opening, that there are a million blind Americans, or that there are three applicants for every job being offered in this country. It’s not so easy.
The Philadelphia Inquirer receives a hundred letters or faxes or emails a day and only has room for perhaps 10 on a good day. What standard does the editor use? It depends on the paper’s profit motive. Since an editor needs to sell newspapers at a time when electronic media are consigning newsprint to oblivion, the content choice may be far different from the editorials. It may be sensational or controversial or absurd, but if it is typical of thought known to be current in society, it will appear. Flat-earthers and Kenya birthers get their space. Whether we like it or not, anyone with a 46 cent stamp and a crayon can appear in print somewhere.
The following is one such. It arrived not at the Star Herald but at my address. It of course was anonymous, and the feminine script and the postmark on the envelope did little to identify the writer. In full and unchanged, it read:
“Today I swung my front door wide open and placed my Remington 870 right in the doorway. I gave it 6 shells, then left it alone and went about my business. While I was gone, the mailman delivered my mail, the neighbor boy across the street mowed the yard, a girl walked her dog down the street, and quite a few cars stopped at the stop sign right in front of our house. After about an hour, I checked on the gun. It was still sitting there, right where I had left it. It hadn’t moved itself outside. It certainly hadn’t killed anyone, even with the numerous opportunities it had been presented to do so. In fact, it hadn’t even loaded itself. Well you can imagine my surprise, with all the media hype about how dangerous guns are and how they kill people. Either the media is [sic] wrong, and it’s the misuse of guns by PEOPLE that kill people, or I’m in possession of the laziest gun in the world. Alright, well I’m off to check on my spoons. I hear they’re making people fat.”
I appreciate irony. It’s an effective literary device. Jonathan Swift four centuries ago wrote “A Modest Proposal,” which baffles first-year literature students into thinking that he really recommended solving England’s hunger problems by eating surplus Irish children. Or John Henry Newman two centuries ago described an English gentleman as a model to be copied despite his rapacious colonialism.
Is my correspondent being ironic? I’m open to the possibility. She will have to let me know. The pro-gun rationale we have endured since Newtown and Aurora and Fort Hood defies belief.
Except for Yemen, most of the rest of the world has long since legislated the impermissibility of handguns, and life around the world enjoys a far lower hand-gun death rate. People there hunt, collect and target shoot without our staggering 85 gun deaths a day, all without psychiatric ruin. And importantly, they rely on their armed police for the protection for which American gun devotees say they need their heaters. Many foreigners with criminal intent visit the United States expressly to buy guns to take home. It may be helping our balance of trade deficit, but it’s also helping the undertaking business abroad.
Another citation from literary history is that there is none so blind as she or he who will not see.
at the bottom and then tap “Add to Home Screen”