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_______________ LET THE SEXUAL HEALING BEGIN BY JAMES PONIEWOZIK (03/04/99)
	I refused to watch Barbara Walters interviewing/spinning Monica last week, as I have refused to be complicit in all media-manufactured coups d'état on this whole sordid affair. What a bunch of self-righteous, anal retentive, bloated commentators, who but for their enormously undeserved salaries would not know how to survive on the streets should mother nature blight their privileged perches and perks. (Larry King's righteous indignance is the most amusing -- he, the aging, sickly money bags who never wants for younger and younger wives). So I am laughing, laughing so hard at James Poniewozik's column satirizing the very William Bennett who really is dancing dangerously on the edge and will lose it should anyone tip him off to the real vagaries of the human condition. Thank you, James, for being soooo bad, that it feels good to be an American again. -- Amy Dadichandji Laly Seattle Monica Lewinsky's "he was just my boyfriend" and "I been done wrong" routine is a bit thin. Let's not forget this is the person who followed her married high school teacher to Oregon to continue an affair, perhaps at the expense of his marriage, and bragged about her "presidential kneepads" before she even arrived in Washington, D.C. Lewinsky dismisses flashing her thong underwear at the president of the United States as subtle and simply playful flirting. I can believe that the emotions she describes as a result of this experience were real. Just imagine then what it must be like for Julie Hiatt Steele or Susan MacDougal, who don't have the rich daddies and mommies to foot the bill to hire the best lawyers, PR reps, image consultants, bodyguards, limousines and doctors. Americans like people who overcome adversity. The interview with Barbara Walters and especially Andrew Morton's book do their best to make Lewinsky look sympathetic. But this is really a story of how to overcome adversity insulated in the posh Watergate complex with the right tranquilizer prescription until the time is ripe to make all those appearances. In American culture, "the right stuff" used to mean something different. Let's get her legal bills paid off and get this over with so we can move on to reading about people with character. -- C. Duffek Kiel, Germany
_______________ RIGHT ON! HATS OFF TO A CONDEMNED MAN BY DAVID HOROWITZ (03/01/99)
	While David Horowitz made some good points in his column defending Christopher Hitchens, I must strongly disagree with his opinion of Elia Kazan. Kazan does not deserve to be honored by the Motion Picture Academy or anyone else, because he is a racist who promoted the myth of "white racial purity" in his racist propaganda film "Pinky" (1949). Given Kazan's swarthy complexion and heavy Mediterranean features, his insults and hypocrisy are even more intolerable because he was denouncing as "Negro" people who were far "whiter" than he could ever be. Perhaps he didn't want us to know that his own ethnic group, the Greeks, were often considered too dark to be fully "white." Stanley Crouch described such people as having a "darky past" behind the "dark white" façade. Let's honor people who work to destroy the myth of "race," not those who tried to "Aryanize" themselves by "blackening" others. -- A.D. Powell Madison, Wisc. SALON | March 10, 1999

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