Money for Afghanistan – and Halliburton doesn’t have a hand in it

To the Editor:

I read the article “Iran Is Seeking More Influence in Afghanistan” with a wry smile. Does Iran really think that road and construction projects, a rail line, and anti-drug efforts are going to help them win support in Afghanistan? As a mature world power, the U.S. government has a far more sensible plan to win support from the Afghani people:

1. Destroy infrastructure via air war. Continue to strafe the occasional wedding party long after victory has been declared.

2. Pay assorted warlords to announce that they’ve become good guys now.

3. Whittle away meager rebuilding funds on profits for private contractors.

4. Let the legitimate economy languish while the drug trade flourishes.

5. Forget country exists, except when the dashing Hamid Karzai models a flowing cape for American photojournalists.

How could Iran think they can beat us at this game by actually helping to rebuild the country?

I’ll take the soup!

In today’s NY Times, one of the best corrections I’ve seen in many hours spent on good old page A2 ove many years:

Because of an editing error, an obituary on Sunday about Sid Raymond, a comic actor, rendered one of his jokes incorrectly. It was about a son who sends a prostitute to his widowed father, still a self-proclaimed ladies’ man in his 90s. The prostitute tells the father that she is his birthday present and promises to give him “super sex” (not that she promises to give him whatever he’d like.) The father replies, “I’ll take the soup.”

I’d sure hate to be a copyeditor at the Times — their corrections editor is always blaming everything on “editing errors.”

But I do want to know — who’s the goofball who changed a joke in an obituary. Apparently, the same kind of goofball who thinks they can re-write a joke in an obituary, likely because they didn’t catch the pun on “super sex” vs. “soup or sex”.

Just imagine the angry fans who came upon a butchered joke where a prostitute said “I’ll give you whatever you like” and the elderly Cassanova replied “I’ll take the soup.” Nobody’s been that upset at a comedy routine since I unveiled my “dead milk” series of gags to no acclaim more than 20 years ago in New Jersey.

Safire: Discrimination Expert?

To the New York Times Magazine editor:

In Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, William Safire takes time out to render a judgment on whether or not the term “urchin” is offensive. Safire says it is not.

I don’t have an opinion on how suitable the term “urchin” is for polite conversation about African adoptions, though I suspect that Dickensian children are not a protected class in the eyes of contemporary law.

But I do have my doubts that William Safire of all people is qualified to render judgments in such matters. He’s a former Nixon speechwriter for god’s sake. And he’s staunchly opposed to the bulk of the contemporary civil rights agenda, from affirmative action to redistributive taxation to any given social justice effort. But because he’s made a second career out of rendering grammatical judgments, Safire gets to make judgments on offensiveness as well?

And so clearly he lays down his decision:

“The word is neither racist nor sexist.”

Again, Safire gets to decide this? How about we let those being described as “urchins” (and those close to them) decide? A descriptive view of the vocabulary of taking offense is far preferable to a proscriptive view–no matter what your take on the grammar of Standard Written English.

In any case, I hope the urchins of the world have protectors of more repute than William Safire to look after them.