HOLLIS IS SWELL
My life was nothing like this really, but I enjoyed this piece. I could really see the situation in my mind (Cover Story, "Trailer Trashed," by Hollis Gillespie, Aug. 9-15). I also worked at LazyDayz for one week. I hated it! That place was like being in a redneck prison camp. I had to escape for my own sanity. I used to spend my lunch break exploring the RVs. Some of them are so amazing and neat.
Allison Menendez
Via website
Hollis Gillespie is such a super writer! It is wonderful that that she is now writing for this publication. Her writing style really hits you in your heart, but makes you laugh, too. Hollis Gillespie is a thoughtful and evocative writer. One of the best columnists ever, in my opinion.
Kimberly Kislig
Via website
TOUGH TRAFFIC
Did you know that the Tampa Bay area has the least amount of freeway miles per capita of any major metro area in the country (Commentary, "Atlanta on the Gulf, " by John Sugg, Aug. 9-15)? That's why Tampa Bay traffic is so bad — not enough freeways were built, and the existing freeways were built in the late '50s and the '60s when the population of the Bay area was much less than it is today. Tampa Bay is not like Atlanta; Atlanta is an inland transportation hub of national significance with vastly more heavy truck traffic than Tampa Bay. The problems on the I-285 beltway around Atlanta are caused by incredibly heavy truck traffic from I-75, I-20, and I-85 — all major interstates. Florida does not get the cross-country heavy truck traffic Atlanta sees. Pinellas County has a single freeway, I-275. That's it. The Veterans Expressway was built only four lanes wide. As you say, the existing routes are woefully inadequate today. There is no east-west freeway across the northern portion of Tampa, forcing traffic to use State Road 54 or a mishmash of traffic-signal laden arterials to travel east and west, between I-75 and US 19. I agree that Tampa needs more mass transit. However, the City of Tampa has no say over a toll road, paid for by road users only, that is located outside of its boundaries.
Steven Schindler
Via website
ALMIGHTY MYSPACE
I detest MySpace and its long-reaching poisonous tentacles, sucking people into making an abomination of a personal page and leaving correct spelling and grammar far behind. Therefore, I applaud your efforts to try and find the allure behind the website (Cover Story, "MySpace MyAss," by Alex Pickett, Aug. 2-8). I was forced to join MySpace, but I have thus far rebelled and left my page almost completely blank. I will not degrade my representation of myself with blaring, glittery eyesores of html that will inevitably break my browser. MySpace encourages this generation to be lazy, to stop thinking, to conduct their social networking online where intentions can be easily misconstrued. I do not see the addiction or allure of this website. It is a monstrosity of falling social standards. I'll leave my networking to Facebook and Livejournal, thanks. I log into Facebook about once a week to check for messages. I've made legitimate friends on Livejournal, where reading another's journal can give you valuable insight into the mind of another, and you needn't worry if you've been removed from someone's top eight.
Bee
Via website
There are plenty of people who don't log onto MySpace every day. I was recently out of the country for an extended period, and I can use websites like MySpace to easily keep in touch with the friends I made there, and to occasionally see how they're doing and what they're up to. If you can't get in contact with a friend outside of MySpace, is that really a friend? If you're worried about something you post on MySpace coming back to haunt you, you probably shouldn't be using the Internet because that's a phenomenon not restricted to MySpace alone. MySpace is like communism, good in theory. It isn't MySpace itself that's evil; it's the way people use it, and if you spent a week obsessively engrossed in MySpace just to write an article against it, then my pity goes to you because there are much more productive, or at least entertaining, ways you could have spent your time, and much better things to write an article on.
Miranda
Via website
BIG, BAD NIETZSCHE
Mark Leib seems to have seriously overreached himself in his recent review of the Leopold and Loeb inspired play, Thrill Me (Art Column, "Timeless Thrill," by Mark Leib, July 19-25).
Does he seriously think that the Ten Commandments form the basis for our legal system? Murder is illegal only under certain circumstances — and not because of any arbitrary commandments or religious judgments, but because of the infringement that murder represents upon the rights and wellbeing of the murdered. Indeed, our legal system is closer to the moral system envisioned by Nietzsche than it is to the divine system of the Ten Commandments, unless Leib is here suggesting that we adopt a system of religious legal courts, like those operated by the infamous Taliban.
The problem with Leopold and Loeb was not that they were Nietzscheans, but that they were deranged. "Beyond good and evil" is not a license to kill; it is a call to rationality. And while the story of Leopold and Loeb has from the time of Hitchcock's Rope been used as an example of the supposed dangers of going beyond good and evil, this is of course only one of any number of the supposedly "starkly clear lessons" which could be learned from the Leopold and Loeb story; such as, for example, the way in which the ideas of one of the most important penetrating philosophers of all time could be misinterpreted and misused by those unable to fully comprehend his ideas.
Nietzsche has long been at the top of the religious fundamentalist hit list. The Judeo-Christian system has thrived by identifying itself with the side of good and "righteousness," and the entire bottom would fall off their theological system if the world caught on to the fact that ideas like "good" and "evil" simply have no meaning at all. I can still recall watching a segment on Pat Robertson's The 700 Club as a child, during which an angry female college professor railed against some of her students, whose chief God, she claimed, was "Nietzsche." I can recall, too, an incident that I witnessed in high school, when a self-professed Christian student, Mark Wilson, snatched a copy of Nietzsche's Twilight of the Gods from the hands of my soon-to-be-girlfriend and tore the book to pieces. This hatred for Nietzsche's books has not prevented people on the religious wrong from writing books of their own, including John Koster's book, The Atheist Syndrome with an introduction written by Pat Buchanan, in which Koster extols "the good old days" when the Church controlled society (i.e. the dark ages), and then goes on to attack Nietzsche for his supposed homosexuality.
Gavin D. Callaghan
New Port Richey
This article appears in Aug 16-22, 2006.