Todd Gitlin

It is a given: A man who abandons his family stirs deep, tangled and painful feelings in the people he leaves behind. To his spouse--who as an adult is always complicit in the failure of the relationship--the rupture becomes graspable and survivable in time; to his child, who is a voiceless and impotent bystander, the legacy is far more enduring. The child's quest to understand his father's actions often becomes a lifelong, passionate preoccupation.

Re "Race for president builds characters," Opinion, Sept. 28 Todd Gitlin observes that presidential campaigns are as much concerned with American myths of self and country as they are issues, and he describes the archetypes embodied by John McCain and Barack Obama. McCain is easily recognized as an archetypal figure of the American West, but Gitlin has a harder time locating Obama, calling him "elusive, Protean, a shape-shifter." Obama cannot be easily categorized because he embodies the protracted birth of a new myth.

Brian Anderson's description of a liberal media behemoth starting to crumble before conservative challenges is several years behind the times ("Culture Clash," Opinion, Nov. 23). For the last several years, the story has been of an unchallenged conservative media behemoth that liberals have barely started to chip away at. Anderson's contention that Fox News exposes viewers to conservative opinions not heard elsewhere on TV is ludicrous. David Brooks, George Will, Ann Coulter, Robert Novak, Kate O'Beirne and many others all offer conservative spins on news events on channels other than Fox News.

Re "From 1968 to eternity," Opinion, June 17 I am not sure where Todd Gitlin was in 1968, but I was observing the situation up close. I saw the decades-old fight for basic civil rights degenerate into a demand for special privileges. I saw Students for a Democratic Society trample on democratic principles. I saw academic freedoms and standards diminished by political correctness. Gitlin gives the movement credit for making it possible for Nicolas Sarkozy, descended from Jews, to be elected president of France.

Re "The New Censorship: Controversy in a 'Smiley Face' Culture," Opinion, June 7: Todd Gitlin needs to become a little more friendly with his dictionary before he throws around words like "censorship." The efforts of the Catholic League and others to oppose Terrence McNally's play, "'Corpus Christi" (whose offensive portrayal of Jesus having sex with his apostles has been confirmed by a New York Times reporter who read the script), constitute not censorship, but American democracy in action.

The Air Force claims that its June 21 laser-reflection experiment--bouncing a beam off the space shuttle Discovery's mirror--was a "complete success." Yet, in a way the Air Force could hardly have intended, the failure of its previous experiment inadvertently reveals how absurd is the dream that "Star Wars"--or SDI, if you wish--is going to provide a foolproof shield against nuclear attack. For the June 19 attempt failed because a simple mathematical error caused the shuttle and its mirror to point in the wrong direction.

Re "How TV Killed Democracy on Nov. 7," Commentary, Feb. 14: After the votes had been counted twice and George W. Bush was the leader in the Florida vote count, I find it odd that anyone would think that the person with the lead in an election, no matter how slim, should concede. Local elections are frequently decided with margins of as few as one vote, and no one thinks the winner should concede. It's time to get over it--Bush is president for the next four years. WALTER T. BACHE Artesia Thank you, Todd Gitlin, for skewering the myth of "the liberal media."

To clarify some misconception that Todd Gitlin possesses, as evidenced in his letter, "Star Wars" (July 2), I feel the other side should be represented. Gitlin states that "the failure of its previous experiment inadvertently reveals how absurd that . . . the Strategic Defense Initiative is going to provide a foolproof shield against nuclear attack. . . ." If Gitlin has ever experimented with any new idea or technique, he would clearly understand the importance of obtaining data from failed missions.

From my point of view as a specialist in literacy development, it is clear that Dinesh D'Souza's "Illiberal Education" (April 14) accurately analyzes one aspect of "the new illiterates," reviewer Todd Gitlin to the contrary. The book correctly depicts the "deconstructionist" theory of reading comprehension that has been adopted by English departments of even major universities. This theory's central contention is that written language has no inherent meaning. Written texts are said to mean whatever their readers will them to mean.

Re "From 1968 to eternity," Opinion, June 17 I am not sure where Todd Gitlin was in 1968, but I was observing the situation up close. I saw the decades-old fight for basic civil rights degenerate into a demand for special privileges. I saw Students for a Democratic Society trample on democratic principles. I saw academic freedoms and standards diminished by political correctness. Gitlin gives the movement credit for making it possible for Nicolas Sarkozy, descended from Jews, to be elected president of France.

TODD GITLIN'S objective with his 11th book, "The Intellectuals and the Flag," is "to contribute to a new start for the intellectual life on the left." The former leader of the radical Students for a Democratic Society in the '60s aims "to resurrect a liberal ideal of patriotism in the awful aftermath" of Sept. 11, 2001, "refusing to bow to the notion that the proper reply to mass murder is plutocracy, zealotry, and indiscriminate war," he writes in the introduction to this collection of essays.

Brian Anderson's description of a liberal media behemoth starting to crumble before conservative challenges is several years behind the times ("Culture Clash," Opinion, Nov. 23). For the last several years, the story has been of an unchallenged conservative media behemoth that liberals have barely started to chip away at. Anderson's contention that Fox News exposes viewers to conservative opinions not heard elsewhere on TV is ludicrous. David Brooks, George Will, Ann Coulter, Robert Novak, Kate O'Beirne and many others all offer conservative spins on news events on channels other than Fox News.

Two years ago, I was invited to the South Australian desert to meet a group of Aboriginal elders who were fighting a radioactive waste dump on their land. I went to Coober Pedy expecting to be bombarded with alarming facts about toxic waste leaking into groundwater, cancer risks and the half-life of radium. Something else happened instead. Immediately upon my arrival, I was scooped up by a group of young environmentalists who dressed like "Mad Max" characters and took me camping.

Marshall McLuhan once said that whoever discovered water wasn't a fish. It's hard to put the mass media in perspective; most of us, most of the time, are fish in the media ocean. But it's not impossible to be amphibious and see our information society as a sometimes oppressive torrent of words and images, flowing through a variety of media that entertain and inform us, while variously distorting, compressing, magnifying, ignoring and counterfeiting different aspects of social reality.

Re "How TV Killed Democracy on Nov. 7," Commentary, Feb. 14: After the votes had been counted twice and George W. Bush was the leader in the Florida vote count, I find it odd that anyone would think that the person with the lead in an election, no matter how slim, should concede. Local elections are frequently decided with margins of as few as one vote, and no one thinks the winner should concede. It's time to get over it--Bush is president for the next four years. WALTER T. BACHE Artesia Thank you, Todd Gitlin, for skewering the myth of "the liberal media."

It is a given: A man who abandons his family stirs deep, tangled and painful feelings in the people he leaves behind. To his spouse--who as an adult is always complicit in the failure of the relationship--the rupture becomes graspable and survivable in time; to his child, who is a voiceless and impotent bystander, the legacy is far more enduring. The child's quest to understand his father's actions often becomes a lifelong, passionate preoccupation.

Re "Race for president builds characters," Opinion, Sept. 28 Todd Gitlin observes that presidential campaigns are as much concerned with American myths of self and country as they are issues, and he describes the archetypes embodied by John McCain and Barack Obama. McCain is easily recognized as an archetypal figure of the American West, but Gitlin has a harder time locating Obama, calling him "elusive, Protean, a shape-shifter." Obama cannot be easily categorized because he embodies the protracted birth of a new myth.

Re "The New Censorship: Controversy in a 'Smiley Face' Culture," Opinion, June 7: Todd Gitlin needs to become a little more friendly with his dictionary before he throws around words like "censorship." The efforts of the Catholic League and others to oppose Terrence McNally's play, "'Corpus Christi" (whose offensive portrayal of Jesus having sex with his apostles has been confirmed by a New York Times reporter who read the script), constitute not censorship, but American democracy in action.

Steven Weinberg, a liberal eighth-grade history teacher in Oakland, was surprised at the silence among conservative parents in 1991 when his school district considered adopting a progressive, K-8 textbook series that talked about "'Eurocentrism" and "ruthless" conquistadors, that devoted more pages to African and Native American cultures than George Washington and the Wright brothers. "I said to myself, 'Be happy for small favors,' " Weinberg told Todd Gitlin two years later . . .