No Right Without The Left, Right?

To The Editor:

Dear, dear, Mr Duffy, may I call you that? (I feel we are close after all this communication.) I must agree with the kind gentleman from Sandy Hook who suggests that we terminate our discourse. That becomes so very apparent when you, dear Mr Duffy, are reduced to metaphorically dancing on the professional grave of a man you’ve never met. And so very clever of you to do it in rhyme.

Your bit of doggerel, however, doesn’t seem able to transcend your absolute time- and spirit-wasting distaste of the left. And, yet, kind sir, we are on the same side. We both love The United States; we both realize that it is only in this country that our immigrant ancestors could have succeeded as they did and created the foundation for our success. The difference is that I truly wish for your happiness. In return, you seem to hope for the demise of an American institution that many people revere and believe, that yours is the only true way. It’s as if the existence of a competing philosophy somehow denigrates yours, and that, Mr Duffy, cannot be true.

The right could not exist without the left. And without the energy that competing visions and goals can create, our vigor is sapped and our future is compromised.

And so, I wish you and your favorite publication (do you have one?) a great future. (Although one wonders: In invoking Spiro Agnew’s memory, did you really mean to mention a man, and indeed, a Republican vice president, who was forced from the vice presidency to avoid an indictment for accepting bribes while an elected official? And, yet, his offenses seem so tame when one thinks of the man to whom he reported, Richard M. Nixon.) As for the Sandy Hook gentleman mentioned above, How kind of you to only think well of the President of the United States when you noted that the Mission Accomplished sign, which was created by the White House, on the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003, was there because the “carrier had just finished its deployment.” President Bush was there to tell the nation, in a televised speech, that major combat operations in Iraq had ended, according to CNN. I am sure, in light of the ensuing violence and casualties, the White House would like us to have thought that the Mission Accomplished sign was a coincidence. But, as the old country song goes, “Are you going to believe me or your lying eyes?”

Laura E. Lerman

55 Main Street, Newtown                                            August 13, 2008