NOBODY'S "ENTITLED" TO SHIT, BUSBOY Your paper states that it covers ...

TITLED" TO SHIT, BUSBOY

Your paper states that it covers art, film, food, etc. I am guessing "Sushimasochism" by Jennifer Blowdryer is a restaurant review (11/3). Of the 16 paragraphs, only two pertain to the restaurant, and vaguely, I might add. I am guessing the restaurant is popular, expensive and the food is good. How about the service? Is there a good sake and Japanese beer selection? Is it a good place for a date? Is it clean? How is the atmosphere? Aren't these basic criteria for a restaurant review?

I have worked in restaurants for more than 15 years. It's difficult work. If an establishment goes to the effort of providing good food and service, aren't they entitled to a positive, or at least a coherent, review?

This article is further cheapened by Blowdryer writing about her dominatrix friend throughout the entire piece. I guess sex workers equal more readers? The writer seems confused about what her job actually is (um, restaurant reviewer). Does your paper even have an editor? Isn't it the editor's job to spot things like this? Pretty sad, kids.

Scott Swenson, Astoria

BLUE DISCHARGE

Once again a New York City badge thug-uh, I mean "peace officer"-gets away with murder (The Newshole, "Tape? What Tape?," 11/3).

The first time I heard this story, I knew the police version was a reeking pile of shit. I'm a gun enthusiast, and over the years I've fired just about every type of gun from BB guns to .50 caliber belt-fed machine guns. Speaking from experience, modern handguns will not fire if they are dropped.

New York City police are issued modern semi-automatic pistols-Glocks or SIGs-and modern double-action revolvers. Loaded guns of this type just won't fire if dropped; they won't even fire if they are repeatedly thrown against a wall.

I've always known that the police were liars, but they don't even make an attempt to come up with credible lies anymore.

Mark Surich, Paramus, NJ

WOULD CHIPPER

It seems your paper shares news before the other papers do. I also notice that your paper shares a lot more details, maybe because you are not censored, as many of them are.

I find that the article "Fare Hikes Are Only the Beginning" lines up with Bible prophecy (the micro chip in right hand or forehead), and I don't find it surprising at all ("The Newshole," 10/13). I do believe this is a start of a global new way of doing things. This is just the beginning of something much bigger.

I hope that your readers appreciate your bringing the news to us without censorship, as I do. I also enjoyed the story "Orphans on Trial" by Liam Scheff (7/14). Great job of reporting the news, as always.

Nancy McDougall, Bronx

YOU, SIR, ARE A PIP!

Readers must infer from Matt Taibbi's "Wimblehack: Round 4" diatribe that since Americans are too stupid to permit intelligent candidates to run for president, the only proper solution is, apparently, something like a "dictatorship of the proletariat" (10/27). But far more profound thinkers than he have seen through the horrors and idiocy of anti-democratic notions. I believe it was Winston Churchill who put the case most clearly: "Democracy," he declared, "is the worst form of government in the world, except for all the others."

Paul Mathless, Washington, DC

A MUGGER BY ANY OTHER NAME?

I enjoyed Jim Knipfel's review of Bill Tsutsui's Godzilla on My Mind, and wanted to thank him for including a nice little plug for my own Godzilla-related tome (Books, 10/13). It's clear that Knipfel knows his Godzilla, and I appreciate the fact that a publication like New York Press is willing to lend some ink to the subject.

Incidentally, I do read the New York Press site now and again. I am a former New York City resident and used to read it all the time. (What happened to Mugger, by the way?) I also enjoyed Knipfel's column about Mongo ("A Night to Remember, I Think," 10/27). Anybody who likes X can't be half bad.

Steve Ryfle, Glendale, CA

ZAITCHIK: MAKIN' KOFI PROUD!

I read Alexander Zaitchik's article "The Big Blue Bore" on United Nations Day (10/20). I found out about this holiday when I casually looked at a calendar and took notice. His article is right on point. The mission of the U.N. has been expanded where peacekeeping has become secondary. I thought we were supposed to avoid war via diplomacy in order to avoid human strife and tragedy. Then by having the Iraq-U.N. oil-for-food scandal, the credibility of the U.N. is at stake. Thank you.

William Hronis, Allentown, PA

FARBER: LOVED BY NAVY GIRLS!

Thank you, Celia Farber, for "No Sexual Dealing" (10/27). What an intelligent and lovely point of view-I totally agree. I was a woman in the Navy during and after the "Tailhook" scandal. I have always felt that these lawsuits were about money, fear, power or revenge. I cannot tell you the hardships I went through to earn the trust and respect of my male coworkers. I fended off unwanted advances with "skill, grace, deftness, consideration and maybe the occasional irritation" and I wish others would have as well.

I remember hours of miserable training on the subject of sexual harassment, and being loathed by male coworkers simply because they could no longer say such things as "man working aloft," but had to say "person working aloft." It was insane! It was propaganda that demonized women. I would not have joined the Navy if I had been some shrinking violet, if I believed that I was somehow less than a man and had to prove myself by wielding my power of interpretation of sexual impropriety in the workplace by pointing fingers.

In this sort of lawsuit, no one wins. I'm a woman and I've been harassed, and I'm not traumatized and I'm not sorry.

Melissa Bruner, Fort Worth, TX

AMES: BITCHSLAPPED BY JESUS!

I sat here reading Mark Ames' "Save a Jew, Save Yourself!" and had one heck of a huge chuckle over it (10/13). The writer of this article is so very stupid. He may be a Jew, but is definitely one dumb Jew.

He knows nothing about why Christians love the Jews. I have Mike Evans' book, but I haven't had a chance to read it yet; I will put it as a top priority now. For Ames' information, the Christians love the Jews for several reasons, and they are not trying to eliminate the Jew to further their means of having Christ return. Christ will return in His time, and there is nothing that we can do to change that. Christ did say that when the Jews returned to their land that that generation will not pass before His return.

They became a nation in 1947, which would start the countdown. It didn't say they all had to be there, so Ames can forget our trying to shove them there. Also, the Jews are God's chosen people and the God of the Jews is the God of the Christians. Jesus also was a Jew, so if Jesus were a Jew and their God is our God, then why wouldn't or shouldn't we love them?

The figment of the Muslim's imagination (Allah) is not the God of the Jews and the Christians. They hate Ames. We don't. So why doesn't he take his attack where it belongs? I know he doesn't accept Jesus or the teachings of the New Testament, but one day he will.

It's people like Mark Ames that make us wish the Christ would hurry and get here so he can get a well-deserved slap in the face.

Christy Yeich, via email

O'REILLY'S HOUSE OF GLASS

Thank you for the article that gave words to the feelings I've had ever since the Bill O'Reilly scandal surfaced (Celia Farber, "No Sexual Dealing," 10/27). I was/am a fan of O'Reilly and was confused at this unexpected "outing" of his bad behavior.

Why $60 million, indeed? Andrea Mackris is a liberated woman who could have walked away and kept on walking. But she came back for more of the same, all the while being "repulsed." How unfortunate. More logically, she walked away and looked back to see dollar signs.

I was setting myself up for a fall when I attributed O'Reilly with a strong, almost perfect character, beyond reproach. The reality is, he got caught with his pants down, showing that he is no better or worse than I. In a way, it's liberating that my ideal is not ideal, after all.

I can move on in the knowledge that everyone has their skeletons. Everyone has their flaws and shortcomings. These can and do get exposed if not kept in check. We all falter and our weaknesses get the better of us. The sex drive takes over the wheel and directs us down the wrong path-we know this but we cannot help ourselves-we succumb only to regret after the initial and fleeting gratification. Mackris and O'Reilly collided on the intersection of Sex Road and Greed Boulevard-a dark and tricky corner.

Mackris is using the system, and O'Reilly's bad behavior has been exposed. She should not get a dime, and he now has a tarnished reputation. He can't get that back. He cannot speak out about the scandals of others without everyone saying or thinking, "Yeah, right O'Reilly, glass houses."

Steve Chase, Simsbury, CT

IF SHE DOESN'T SUBSCRIBE TO THE ADAGE?

Great piece of writing, Celia Farber ("No Sexual Dealing," 10/27). What planet are you living on? You might actually want to read the complaint that was filed by Andrea Mackris. Oops, you must have skipped over the warnings he issued if she ever came forward. What makes her claim so believable? If you don't think the threatening remarks to be within O'Reilly's nature, then you haven't been paying attention. And sadly, for the purposes of your article, you seem to have simplified (or missed completely) the dynamics of a boss-worker relationship.

If you subscribe to the adage, "where there is smoke there is fire," then O'Reilly deserves what he is getting. O'Reilly's bombastic, high-moral-ground proselytizing uncovered what a fraud he really is.

In closing, Ms. Farber, I wonder what kind of action you would take if you were subjected to similar phone calls from a coworker? Would you "fight to understand" your coworker? As he or she was pleasuring themselves to the sound of your voice, would you try "to become more human, not less human?" My guess is not.

What a silly piece of writing.

Will Kemp, Brookline, MA

DECONSTRUCTING CELIA

Not so long ago, Celia Farber sounded the death knell for p.c. in the pages of New York Press ("P.C. R.I.P. 2003," 10/15/03). With the political rise of the Gropinator, according to Farber, Americans could rejoice in the knowledge that sexist, crass behavior on the part of authority figures would once again be met with a shower of societal approbation, as opposed to the pissing party of 90s sex-hating prohibition. It would be a bonny, blithe time, this 21st century, with racy banter bubbling from every row of cubicles in every fancy fashion magazine in the land. It would be carte blanche and laissez-faire for every jug-stupid movie star and overfed ex-fratboy in this great nation.

Some taut-sphinctered puritan must have intervened in the ensuing months since Farber began her series of anti-p.c. articles. Her cover story "No Sexual Dealing" was all gloom and doom from the Sex-Police Police 10/27). In her past pieces, Farber enthused about the cultural pendulum swinging away from sexual-harassment suits, speech codes, and the like (and what a swinging pendulum it was!), but now she apparently considers recent trends only so much "pro-sex hysteria."

Yes, she busts out some postmodern relativism by questioning the meaning of "sexual harassment" in the age of Sex and the City. Since it's fairly clear, however, that the term was meaningless since its inception, what one is left with in Farber's article is a lot of talk about a dehumanized society, commodified sexual responses, and corporatization of emotion. Last year I dismissed Farber as a would-be cultural chronicler with a nascent book proposal, a sort of Curtis White manque, if such a thing can be imagined. But her most recent article offers something more serious than her previous paeans to Vogue staffers making Tyrone Slothrop maps. I thought to myself as I read her O'Reilly piece: Could we be witnessing a libertarian awakening?

Alas, no. In the absence of Farber's unfounded, unbounded anti-p.c. optimism, however, a discussion can take place. I posit that there is no cultural pendulum, no oscillating zeitgeist advancing and retreating inscrutably to the inaudible rhythm of the collective unconscious. Let us imagine in place of Farber's cliched and rather convenient symbol a metronome, precisely calibrated by people dedicated to maintaining control over the pulse of social discourse. These people are, of course, the major media players in America. The media has successfully draped a patina of libertarian permissiveness over American social life while shoring up the interests of the status quo. Not coincidentally, every single one of the real-world examples of sex-police perfidy Farber cites occurred within professional media circles. Indoctrination begins at home.

In her full-on ecstatic mode, Farber celebrated the indifference with which media commentators greeted feminist celeb Naomi Wolf's claim that she was groped by Harold Bloom at Yale back in the day. Farber rightly pointed out that 10 years ago, feminists' immoderate reaction to such a story would have been, "String him up by his age-shriveled scrotum!" What she leaves out is the clicking of the metronome. A proper post-feminist response to a wayward, liver-spotted professorial hand, as all good scholars know, is, "Professor Bloom, may I have a recommendation?" What would Samantha Jones do?

Sad, tiny incidents like the Wolf/Bloom groping happen every day to women in academia and in every other profession. Farber's insistence, in her O'Reilly piece and in all her past pieces, that each incident of sexism must remain isolated from the larger political scheme of oppression derives from pre-feminist, Betty Crocker thinking. In essence, she says, "Pay no attention to the men behind the metronome." Whether scapegoating or scoffing, enraged or blase, prevailing cultural attitudes always excise the fundamental political issues from the discussion.

The New York Times recently published an even-handed article about sexual harassment suits filed by ex-NBC employees. As in the O'Reilly case, the defendants don't dispute that inappropriate gestures were made and lewd words were uttered. Their defense consists of the assertion that groundbreaking, sexually truthful television such as the primetime hit Friends is created through free-floating blue banter and tension-releasing dick jokes. In other words, it's the status quo, schmo. So the hack takes a break from cranking out TiVo fodder to simulate masturbation in front of a straitlaced assistant: "I just wanted to see the look on her face, man; totally priceless!" Farber wants to tsk-tsk about the man's "abnormal heart" and let him go about his business, uncensured and undisturbed. But the hack's fake jerkoff was the clicking of the metronome: a powerful man exulting in the very arbitrariness of his power.

That arbitrariness cannot be wished away by projecting it onto that ever-swinging cultural pendulum, because there is no pendulum, just good old American patriarchal arrogance. Farber's grandfather clock has stopped.

Benjamin Kessler, Brooklyn

WE'LL POSITIVELY ASK

I've read New York Press for years, and I finally have to ask: Do you think you could ask Caeriel, the horoscope author, to refrain from using foul language ("Sign Language," 10/27)? I'm not a prude or anything, and an occasional word may even slip out of my own mouth, usually only if I'm in pain. And I know that it's 2004, and foul language should easily be acceptable, but it's getting pretty old and worn out. Especially to see it when it is used in a horoscope, which is something that a person is usually reading for tips on how to better themselves or how to better their life, or to draw inspiration. So, seeing a word such as "fuck" in the horoscopes kind of defeats this purpose. See what I mean?

It's not cute and it's not hip, and it's actually quite negative. Don't you agree?

Janet J. Myers, Manhattan