_______________WORKING CLASS HERO? BY MICAH L. SIFRY (01/11/99)
	Did Micah Sifry really set foot in Minnesota? In a piece focusing on the roots of record voter turnout in the state, he completely neglected to mention Minnesota's commendable and populist policy of allowing same-day voter registration. A large proportion of Ventura's supporters were either first-time or lapsed voters (who are not taken off the Minnesota rolls for 10 years); the "survivors" turned out in force on Election Day because they could. Having moved from Minnesota to my current home in Pennsylvania, one of a handful of states that vigorously and litigiously resisted federal "motor voter" registration initiatives, I can attest to the enormous impact ease of last-minute registration has on the general voting climate. One more thing: Sifry ends the piece by noting, "Outside the temperature is minus 17." For the record, real Minnesotans never say the temperature is "minus 17," any more than real New Yorkers search for "pop" machines on "the Avenue of the Americas." It's "17 below [zero]," one of the many details curious visitors might notice if they actually listened closely to what the good people of Minnesota are saying. -- Jennifer Yuan Philadelphia
_______________I, RIGOBERTO MENCHÚ, LIAR BY DAVID HOROWITZ (01/11/99)
	David Horowitz should know that perceptive readers -- even those sympathetic to the plight of indigenous Guatemalans -- have always been skeptical of "I, Rigoberta Menchú." First, the vocabulary of the novel (it's probably fair to call it a novel now) seems too rich for an uneducated campesina who had supposedly just learned to speak Spanish. To me this suggested either heavy editing by Elisabeth Burgos, or that "La Menchú" herself was not exactly what she claimed to be. These suspicions are reinforced when in later chapters the book degenerates into mind-numbing Marxist-Leninist dialectic. Could a simple, uneducated peasant girl from the interior of Guatemala write prose that might be mistaken for the May Day speech of a Soviet-era commissar? I thought it unlikely when I read it, and I'm sure many others did as well. Nevertheless, I don't see how the revelations Horowitz writes of could possibly cheapen the Nobel Peace Prize. Don't forget, Henry Kissinger has one too. -- John A. Shonder Knoxville, Tenn. Regarding David Horowitz's Rigoberta Menchú, I must acknowledge that she (and those involved in this hoax) have perpetrated a horribly dishonest act. Even though I am sympathetic to the plight of indigenous cultures in Guatemala and around South America, her lies are shameful and self-serving. I will be the first to sell my copy of "I, Rigoberta Menchú" to whomever will pay for this trash. So please do not assume that all those "left-wingers" are so consumed by ideology as to ignore the truth. But please -- not everyone who thinks human rights are important is a Communist. But then I have a question. Will Horowitz actually state that there were no death squads in Guatemala? That Mayans were never pushed off their land with brutal, deplorable force? That there was never anything wrong with the actions of the Guatemalan government in the 1980s and that we should "all just leave the third world alone"? If he says this with a straight face, then he too is a liar. No better that Rigoberta Menchú. -- Samir Khan Even if everything Horowitz claims in his hyperventilating column is true, so what? Horowitz can brazenly talk of a "Castroist" conspiracy and seemingly ignore the capitalist "Americanist" history that has continually and without serious counterargument destroyed any chance of freedom or justice for a majority of the region's people. Is he somehow equating Menchú's actions with the U.S.-supported Guatemalan government over the 1980s and early '90s? By relatively conservative estimates, tens of thousands of Guatemalans were slaughtered by the government. It seems that almost anything is allowable for Horowitz if it's anti-Communist, pro-capitalist. Even genocide. Horowitz's hand waving will never obscure or erase this terrible history. Menchú, by hook or crook, has made her life (fact or fiction) an important avenue in which to assure that the world indelibly knows of the fate of the people of Guatemala. That Menchú and her colleagues may not have "played fair" in this effort seems a rather thin rebuff given the unyielding evil perpetrated by the government. -- ROBERT LIPTON SALON | Jan. 13, 1999

R E C E N T L Y+| JUDGING COMPUTERS BY THEIR COVERS BY SCOTT ROSENBERG

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