Editor,
I am writing because my teenage son recently picked up a copy of your sleazy magazine in a dingy bookstore he frequents far too often for my liking. My son didn’t show me your publication — he only confessed to buying the damn thing when I confronted him with it after finding it hidden in a copy of Scientific American.
The issue in question has a lengthy attack on Big Tech companies, and elsewhere in your bile-infused tirades you took issue with increasing “disparities” in income between rich and poor in the good ol’ USA.
I don’t usually read the elitist snobfest New York Times, but my brother, who I’m proud to say is a senior aide to Senator Dianne Feinstein (my favorite Democrat — go DiFi!) sent me a column by a fellow named David Brooks. Mr. Brooks is clearly much smarter than you. The column ends with these paragraphs:
Successful executives are doing what’s best for their companies, gathering as much talent as they can. This isn’t evil. It’s not exploitation.
The job of public policy is to make it easier for everybody to do what successful people are doing. Productivity is the key to national prosperity. Every time we increase productivity for one person, we all thrive a little more, together.
I couldn’t have said it better myself! It’s time for you to join the winners and realize that you can’t stand in the way of progress! Though based on your obvious loser mentality I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for that to happen.
Angrily,
Disgusted in Dubuque
Dear Disgusted,
First of all, congratulations on having written the very first letter to be published in our new, though perhaps not improved, online edition! I hope you will appreciate the historical import of this brief moment (oops, almost gone!) as much as I do.
Secondly, I in turn have a paragraph for you, taken from an interview with the late great Gore Vidal. In regard to your question of me, Vidal captures my feelings exactly:
I exist to say, “No, that isn’t the way it is,” or “what you believe to be true is not true for the following reasons.” I am a master of the obvious. I mean, if there’s a hole in the road, I will, viciously, outrageously, say there’s a hole in the road and if you don’t fill it in you’ll break the axle of your car. One is not loved for being helpful.
If I live to be, oh I don’t know, a bit older than I am now, I couldn’t come up with a better answer to your inane ravings.
Lastly, as my mother used to say, who cares what you think?
Impatiently,
The Editor