David Oates has us happily swimming in the
ocean of his imaginative approach to teaching literature to college
kids (HCN, 4/16/07). That’s for the first five paragraphs.
Then he pulls the plug and leaves us high and dry,
blistered by his attack on the current federal administration for
its, to him, lack of imagination. In fact, the government may have
had a lack of information, but there was plenty of imagination in
the announced intention to bring democracy and self-government to a
part of the world woefully lacking in those attributes.
In any case, it is a strange article to publish in High Country
News, as it has so little to do with either high country, the West
(except for Oates’ fondness for Portland’s boundaries),
or environmental problems.
OK, it’s normal for
environmentalists to be politically leftist, but it is by no means
obligatory. Some of us have moved several steps to the right,
motivated by the growing attacks on our institutions and our
security from the resolute and terrorist Islamist movement, that
aims to have us all live under Shari’a — or die!
John M. Worlock
Salt Lake City,
Utah
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Imagine there’s no terrorists.
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