re: "A Featured Spot for Rove Raises at Least One Eyebrow"

I write letters to columnists frequently, but don't bother to note that here. (I also don't bother to note that I continue, irregularly, to post to the Obama campaign.) But here's one of several I sent today, in this case to Peter Steinfels of The New York Times:

Dear Mr. Steinfels,

The logic of your column today is unassailable (and very entertaining—though the reality implied is anything but). The narrativity highlights for me an interest I increasingly feel, which pertains to a surrealist disposition in the high journalist voice—call it a philosophical import of the highly raised eyebrow (so entertaining in Gail Collins' columns, so overtly surreal in Mareen Dowd's columns). It's something, I think, that must become the fate of the seasoned journalist who doesn't quit the world to do gardening in some backcountry. Though journalism is always in a mode of raised eyebrow, the reality cramps the eyes, as the hand must still write objectively.

After witnessing so much "suffering caused by war, hunger," etc.—and so much duplicity—the journalist goes on writing anyway (thank goodness), about The Way It Looks, objectively speaking, in the economy of what can be witnessed. All the world's a theater where Derridean quote marks are annuled, as all words are already always traces protected by the fair game that we must nevertheless hold sacred.

I often think that success in educational reform undermines Republicanism, so "No Child Left Behind" is really about keeping "the assault on reason" properly governed. No wonder China is such a great investment opportunity. "But I digress" (Gail Collins might say).

Indeed, "creating a 'culture of life' is a multidimensional task." Task? If you take all of the standardly-hot-button issues as somehow belonging together (Choice, same-sex rights, evolution, etc.), the Somehow (the "etc"-ness of it all) is an epochal challenge to self understanding. Religion arose amid the insatiable need for population growth, a matter of public health at heart vested in a moral compass that illiterate society could understand. The legacy of population maximization is deeply enmeshed with the conception of morality as such. The Pope must say what the Church is all about. The Bible is what it is. And that's the way it goes.

---

July 7: Mr. Steinfels replies:

I'm not sure that I understand 100 percent of your note and I'm not sure that I agree 100 percent with what I do understand, but your're onto something about those of us who have been reporting and opinionating for a good while. My copy editor (copy editors, as you probably know, write the headlines) deserves credit for the one raised eyebrow. I think he was telling me that his wasn't raised!

Best wishes.

---