Old letters

I was looking through my Microsoft Word files and realized with a start that some of the letters in there are almost 11 years old.

Here's a couple from 1996 to the Post and Courier, one of my favorite penpals of the time. Evidently I didn't think much of their TV critic or their book critics.

Dear Editor

The Post and Courier really needs a TV critic.
Yes, I know you have Frank Wooten, but his columns are so full of his right-wing political opinions and constant tiresome slams at Hootie and the Blowfish, he must fancy himself an editorialist or a music critic.
One thing he definitely is not, as evidenced by Friday's spiteful and muddleheaded hatchet job on vegetarians, is a biblical scholar. He misquotes Genesis 1.28. It does not say that man shall have "dominion over the beasts of the field". And he totally ignores the next verse, Genesis 1.29, where God states: "Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat."
His characterization of vegetarians as "kooks" is just another example of Wooten using his column as a place to grind his own personal axes. And bringing Adolf Hitler into it is reprehensible. Hitler was a vegetarain, but so were Albert Schweitzer, Mahatma Gandhi and St. Francis of Assisi. What does that prove?
It proves that the Post and Courier needs a TV critic.

Sincerely,


Robert Loy

Dear Editor;

Sometimes I wish I subscribed to your right-wing, reactionary rag just so I could angrily cancel my subscription every time you insulted my intelligence -- which is daily.
Lately your book reviews have gotten as muddle-headed as your editorial page. Alan Kovski dismisses Harlan Ellison as a "gusher of cuss words" and his writing in "Edgeworks:Volume One" as dated because it was written in the 1980's and many of his "ideological foes have faded from the limelight." (Although it appears to me that Jerry Falwell and Phyliss Schlafly and others of that evil ilk are still very much with us.)
Is Mark Twain dated? Is Ernest Hemingway? After all, World War Two and the days of riverboats on the Mississippi are over. Does Kovski know that Ellison's book "The Glass Teat" is still required reading in many college media classes even though it ostensibly concerns itself with television of the late 60s and early 70s? Ellison's writing is timeless, as evidenced by his many Hugo and Nebula Awards (for science fiction writing) his Edgar Awards (from the Mystery Writers of America) and Writers Guild of America Awards (for television script writing), as evidenced by the Edgeworks project which is reprinting virtually every word of his 40-some odd books.
That you give some narrow-minded Philistine space to call one of the greatest writers of this century a "gusher of cuss words" makes me mad.
Cancel my * never mind.


Sincerely,


Robert Loy