Subject: The Morality of Altitude
Re: “Today’s Papers: Fetus Don’t Fail Us Now”
From: Charles B. Tiffany
Date: Fri Apr 27 5:04 a.m. PT
Whatever Robert Kerrey did is small potatoes compared to what our aviation butchers did. I can write freely on this subject because I provided electronic counter-measures information to assist this mayhem and am as blood-splattered as anyone. We would fly 50 B-52s at 35,000 feet and they would drop thousands of pounds of TNT. The resulting carnage was unbelievable. The number of children incinerated or hideously maimed for life is incalculable. The morality of altitude: from Nagasaki to Khartoum it drowns out a million screams.
[Find this post here.]
Subject: Porn To Be Mild
Re: “Vice: The Booty Business—My Life in Pornography”
From: Thrasymachus
Date: Mon Apr 23 5:18 p.m. PT
I remember when pornographers were social outcasts, enduring the slings and arrows of ostracism by the respectable middle class in the name of rebellion, free speech, and the right to bare arms (and thighs, bosoms, etc.). It used to take an iconoclastic personality and a measure of personal courage to be a pornographer. Now, it appears, it takes a good GPA from an Ivy League school.
[Find this post here.]
Subject: A Better Man Than You Thought
Re: “Ballot Box: The Torch Flames Out”
From: Yukon
Date: Wed Apr 25 10:50 p.m. PT
Far from being a bad pol, Bob Torricelli is actually an American patriot. He was concerned about our balance of payments problem, so he did what he could to transfer a little Korean wealth back to the States. He was concerned about the country’s drift from the time-tested greed-is-good ethos of the Reagan years, so he tried to set a good personal example. And he felt standards of public service had slipped, so he relieved his own state of the embarrassment of continuing to be represented by such an unworthy senator.
[Find this post here.]
Subject: Best For the Children
Re: “Diary: Mimi Swartz”
From: Ananda Gupta
Date: Tue Apr 24 11:52 a.m. PT
Either you believe in tracked education or you don’t. If you do, you have to buy into the idea that not all kids are equally capable or school-oriented and that we need some mechanism to separate them. If you don’t, then you have to accept that anyone sufficiently far from the median in either direction is going to get shafted, but that they are acceptable losses (and the smart ones, at least, will do OK in any case). [Also] either ethnic diversity is more important to our conflicted mom than academic rigor, or it isn’t. If it is, then what’s she complaining about?
[Find this post here.]
Fray Notes:
Worrisome Frays are those on sex (read the notes at the end of this “Vice” column) and religion (as we explained here). But the big news on the “Explainer” on “Did the Jews Kill Jesus?” was that a post by Joey Giraud with the title “Jesus had it coming” has generated more than 600 replies (the figure in parentheses next to his post is a serious undercount, for technical reasons) since appearing at the end of the article. This new Fray record led Arthur Stock, here, to discuss great Fray posts of the past: your contributions welcome.
Last week’s “Best of the Fray” proved controversial: The Fray editor was accused of having been taken in by Zeitguy, and was asked “why in the world” his posts were featured. More discussion followed …
Keen poster LT impressed us with her coverage of Slate: She seemed to have read every article and her conclusion was, “It’s just not safe out there for nice people.” Read why here. We don’t think Claude Scales could have written it in magnetic poetry, but still he charmed us with his “Overwrought Haiku” in the “Culturebox” Fray. We are too shy to republish it, but you can find it here.
Previously we had featured A.G. Android’s answer to a standard argument; he did it again with a poster who said only those who fought in Vietnam could judge Bob Kerrey: “Have you ever been an unarmed civilian, killed by foreign troops? No? Then what qualifies you to defend Kerrey?”
