E D I T O R I A L
Interactivity & Democracy

Rejected Letters to the Editor was conceived in November 2006 by a sudden burst of an idea, an uttered sentence and some enthusiastic interactions. Then, after a gestation period of only a few months, the infant publication—yet unschooled as to its potential consequences —was born on March 23, 2007.

From the beginning it was a homemade operation, a work in process.

In the beginning, none of us had any background as web designers or programmers. We got some initial help but we didn’t know how to make this technology work in a way that was fully consistent with our vision. We were simply driven by the desire to create a public square where informed thoughts and outlooks—those that didn’t make their way past the watchdogs of public opinion—would see the light of day.

As we noted in our opening editorial:

“In major newspapers, the one remaining territory for public voices is the letter to the editor page, a faint residue of a time when public conversations and bold proposals shaped the pages of the press. Through Rejected Letters to the Editor, we hope to tilt that balance back towards the conversations and visions of ordinary people.”

In one critical area, however, our web inexperience stood in the way of our egalitarian objectives. We have not built the town hall we wished to, where “the conversations and visions of ordinary people” can take place ceaselessly. Where the discussions and debates that are the essential nutrients of democracy can take flight.

We have not provided a built-in mechanism for the content that we’ve posted to provoke dynamic conversations on an ongoing basis. In spite of our espoused aspirations, Rejected Letters to the Editor has, to this point, been far too static.

Nostra culpa!

Fortunately, a goodly number of RLTE aficionados expressed their concerns about this deficiency, and we have listened to them.

In this, our fourth issue, we have begun working to address this paradox. Each published item is now followed by an opportunity for readers to become writers, to offer comments and opinions that may add to and/or dispute positions taken. While we will be making editorial decisions regarding the suitability of comments submitted—just as with the letters and op-eds we choose to publish—we hope to responsibly expand the spectrum of visible ideas on an ongoing basis. This way, the content of each issue will be growing continuously.

Please take advantage of this regrettably belated interactive potential. Keep an eye on RLTE, keep focused, and keep the stone rolling.

We will be adding RSS feed capability this summer, and will continue to make additional changes that will enhance the dynamism of this publication. Send us your design and functional recommendations and we will do our best to make Rejected Letters to the Editor the participatory democratic forum of your dreams.

—Stuart Ewen, Editor-in-Chief
—Robin Locke Monda, Managing Editor
—Elizabeth Ewen, Editor-at-Large

Comments will be reviewed and
posted on a daily basis.

C U L T U R E I& II D E A S
Mocking Mom:
Joke or Hate Speech?



Written by Paula J. Caplan, submitted to
The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe,
Baltimore Sun, San Francisco Chronicle and Atlanta Journal Constitution,
May 14, 2007.

Imagine: a stand-up comedian says, “I’ve gotta tell you about this Black guy,” and people in the audience roll their eyes and guffaw… just because the comedian said, “Black guy.” We would recognize this as racism. But when a comedian says, “I’ve gotta tell you about my mother,” and people roll their eyes and guffaw, we don’t usually recognize this as “momism,” prejudice against mothers.

Despite increased awareness of the damage done by nasty comments about women in general, those who make such comments about women who are mothers do so with impunity. The mocking and blaming of mothers are committed by many who would not dream of telling a generally sexist “joke” and would protest if someone else did so. But replace the word “women” with the word “mothers,” and anything goes. Mothers — and stepmothers and mothers-in-law — are considered legitimate scapegoats, and when anyone objects, as I regularly do, I hear, “Oh, but you don’t know my mother!”

If that stand-up comedian says, “I’ve gotta tell you about my father!” the audience waits to hear what’s funny. Simply being a father does not put one in an easily scapegoated group; simply being a mother does. Why is the bumper sticker that reads “Mother-in-law in trunk” considered hilarious, and if it’s so funny, where is there no “Father-in-law in trunk” sticker? Why do audiences laugh uproariously when I observe, “No one ever says, ‘Thanks, Mom, for the week’s worth of nourishing and tasty meals and the great job of dusting the furniture’,” but wait silently for what comes next when I say, “Does anyone ever say, ‘Thanks, Dad, for the great work you did on the lawn’”? Except on Mother’s Day and greeting cards, the thought of praising women for mothering work strikes us as funny. Why? Because it is unimaginable in a way that praising men for being good fathers is not.

After 20 years of doing research, clinical work, teaching, and writing about mothers, it recently struck me: Mother-blame is often hate speech. So is the mockery of mothers. That sounds melodramatic; we realize we put mothers down but don’t consider ourselves frankly hateful. Hate speech, though, is vilification of a person because of their membership in a demeaned group and is aimed to shame, silence, intimidate, and otherwise control its targets. Here is one common example: A major television network producer called me last week, because she was doing a “light, funny” piece about “meddling mothers.” Mothers are expected to love and protect their children nonstop, but caring, conscientious mothers are often labeled as meddling, intrusive, and controlling or are simply ignored. So of course they feel ashamed, silenced, intimidated. The most extreme and terrifying consequence of the hatred of mothers is that the leading cause of death of pregnant women in America is murder, usually by their male partners.

I worked in a clinic where no therapist described any mother as good: They described mothers as either intrusive, smothering, and overly emotional or cold, rejecting and — if the child was male — castrating. How do demeaning, blaming, and name-calling affect mothers? The same way they affect anyone: Mockery causes shame, fear, and a sense of powerlessness. And because mothers are blamed for anything that ever goes wrong with their children, other effects include intense fear, anxiety, self-monitoring, and exertion to the point of chronic exhaustion, because a mother’s worst nightmare is her child being harmed. For more than two decades, nearly every mother I meet has acknowledged constantly judging herself, wondering whether she is intrusive and smothering or cold and rejecting. It is virtually impossible to locate the narrow band of behavior that seems acceptable for mothers.

How did it come to this? For centuries, mothers have been expected to meet impossibly high standards and to do so without expressions of appreciation and without credit for success, although they have usually been the only ones blamed when anything bad happens to their children. Empirical studies of therapists’ articles in clinical journals have shown how far clinicians, regardless of their sex, often reach in order to blame mothers. Even the kinds of information they provide about patients’ fathers often differs from what they provide about mothers: One professional reported that the patient’s father was 36 and a bricklayer, while the mother was 34 and “nervous.” And as a prominent radio host once said on-air just before interviewing me when, as a misbehaving young boy, he was taken to a psychiatrist, who asked what was wrong. He told the psychiatrist that his father beat him; but soon, said the host, the psychiatrist had him blaming his mother rather than his father.

Not long ago, mothers were expected to teach their daughters to be sweet, passive, and selfless and to support their sons’ striving for independence, assertiveness, and achievement. They were also expected to be perfect role models for their daughters, showing how to be unfailingly good wives, mothers, and housekeepers. With the women’s movement’s Second Wave, the entry of increasing numbers of women into the paid workforce, and the rise of Martha Stewart, expectations for mothers have only increased: Now, they also have to teach their daughters to be assertive and achievement-oriented and nevertheless avoid being threatening to men who have traditional ideas about women. Mothers are expected to execute flawlessly the tasks of wives, mothers, and housekeepers while also holding down a paid job…and do it all with ease and calm. Mothers who protest these superhuman standards are likely to be called selfish, ungrateful, whiny, or strident.

Myths about mothers that pervade our culture, some casting mothers in a negative light (Bad Mother myths) and some setting impossibly high standards, so that mothers look bad because they fail to meet them (Perfect Mother myths). It is fascinating that some myths are mutually exclusive, such as the Perfect Mother myth that “Mothers naturally know everything about raising happy, healthy children” and the Bad Mother myth that “Mothers cannot raise happy, healthy children without lots of help from experts.” Such mutually exclusive myths serve the function of keeping mothers scapegoated: With a myth for every occasion, everything mothers do can be used to support the claim that they are deficient.

All of this happens in a social and political culture that has limited high-quality, affordable daycare; underpays women relative to men; and penalizes parents of both sexes when they leave work to care for ill children: Women are “not truly committed to their job,” and “What kind of man takes time off work to care for a kid?!” Furthermore, despite the spate of books on “The New Man,” the average father living with wife and children still does less than one-third of the child- and household-related chores, and many of those are the more visible, less daily and monotonous kind (getting the car repaired, changing light bulbs). Compounding mothers’ difficulties is the myth that women have achieved equality in all respects and the only reason men don’t do half the housework is that women are too controlling to “let” them. This makes the contemporary mother, who tends to believe that she is failing everyone — her children, partner, parents, employer, workmates, friends — feel as crazy and inept as Betty Friedan’s unhappy housewives of the 1970s: What’s wrong with me, that I am so unhappy, frustrated, and absolutely exhausted?

In a society that truly values mothers, mockery and vilification of them would not be considered acceptable and certainly not funny. In such a society, the myths of motherhood would be recognized as unfair, crazy-making obstacles to the essential work of raising daughters and sons.

—Paula J. Caplan, Ph.D., is a clinical and researcher psychologist and the author of ten books, including The New Don’t Blame Mother: Mending the Mother-Daughter Relationship. She will teach “Myths of Motherhood” at Harvard University this fall.

EDITOR’S NOTE:
One of the interesting aspects of Paula Caplan’s Op-Ed piece is that in its original usage—coined by writer Philip Wylie in Generation of Vipers (1942)—“momism” connoted a mother’s overbearing smothering of a child, and the excessive attachment of a child to a mother, according to the Wordsmith website. The online Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus offers “overshielding” and “overprotection” as synonyms for “momism.” Paula Caplan’s reappropriation of the term points to the momism within Wylie and subsequent authors’ definition of “momism.”

Comments will be reviewed and
posted on a daily basis.

B U S I N E S S I
& IE C O N O M I C S
America is Like a Car Speeding Toward a Cliff.


Written by Matt Olive to Wallaces Farmer magazine, September 2006.

For those unfamiliar with Wallaces Farmer magazine, Mr. Olive has written an introduction to his letter:

Hi.

Below is a letter to the editor I wrote to the farm magazine called “Wallaces Farmer.” It’s a somewhat famous magazine in the farm belt. Its founder was Henry Wallace. He was Franklin Roosevelt’s Agriculture Secretary and later his Vice President. In 1948 Wallace ran for President from the Progressive Party. His magazine now represents corporate agriculture to his beyond death dismay, I assume. By far, the majority of their articles favor large agribusiness. My letter is in response to editor Rod Swoboda’s story about a CAFO (Confined Animal Feeding Operation—see image below) in southeast Iowa. The story defended the cause of a farmer who was constructing one of these CAFOs on his farm against neighbors who were trying to file suit against him. In my opinion Swoboda cherry-picked a circumstance of one of these CAFOs being constructed that did not reflect the reality or norm of what is going on with these things throughout Iowa. I sent my letter in in September 2006. It was not printed nor did I receive a response.
—Thanks,
—Matt Olive

(See Matt Olive’s letter below)


Dear Rod Swoboda,

I recently read the article from the August edition of Wallaces Farmer, “Suit threatens family farms.” I’m a farmer north of Corning, Iowa. Currently, a neighbor is going to drop two 1,200 head hog confinements into a neighborhood where twelve of thirteen neighbors within one-and-a-half miles of ground zero strongly oppose them. Note that of the twelve neighbors in opposition to the confinement, five are full-time farmers, three are part-time farmers and four work full-time in town. Also note that four of those neighbors used to raise hogs before CAFO’s put them out of the hog business during the 1980s and 90s. In our part of southwest Iowa (Adams, Taylor, and Union Counties) corporate hog ownership is the norm. Corporations (Tri-Oaks Foods, Swine Graphics and Iowa Select) predominate. They get young men, or farmers who are in financial trouble, to build these finishing units. It makes an easy job for a young kid and provides a way for desperate farmers to keep “farming.” I wish you would do a three county survey down here and publish the percentage of hog confinements where the owner of the land does not own his own hogs. Therefore, I feel your article does not accurately reflect what is really happening in rural Iowa.

Economically speaking, America is like a car speeding toward a cliff. This is a shame because after World War II America had an opportunity to set a wonderful economic example for the world. We are blessed with an abundance and variety of raw materials. Our trade deficit could have always been in our favor. And so long as we didn’t exploit other countries’ raw materials or labor (or our own) we would have helped to slowly build their economies. Instead the greatest generation fell asleep politically and let plutocrats take control of our representatives. In turn these plutocrats took the route of empire. This empire is a little different from empires of the past in so much as it is more of a corporate empire rather than a strictly national one.

I don’t know if you write for Wallaces Farmer because you believe in their philosophy or out a necessity for work. If it’s the latter, I sympathize. I plant Monsanto Round-Up soybeans. I detest Monsanto. However my margins are so thin that I cannot afford not to plant Round-Up soybeans. It’s not the Round-Up soybeans I have a problem with. What I detest is a corporation that is attempting to create terminator genes and a corporation that claims that it owns second-generation seed. In a more advanced civilization these acts would be considered criminal. The least consequence would certainly be that their corporate charter would be revoked.

I guess it makes me a hypocrite to buy a product from a corporation I detest. I call my quandary being a hypocrite by economic necessity rather that a hypocrite by choice. I have friends who hate Wal-Mart but they say they shop there because they’re too poor to shop anywhere else. I encourage them not to let those feelings of hypocrisy prevent them from speaking out against the economic injustice that Wal-Mart perpetuates.

Otherwise, silence will be our death chant. So, if you’re in a similar position and are haunted by feelings of hypocrisy, I would encourage you to do your best to practice real journalism. Please come down and do a story about these confinements down here in Adams and Taylor counties. I think the title of your article is more likely to read, “Suit threatens corporate hog owners, saves family farmers”.

Thanks for listening,

—Matt Olive
—Corning, Iowa

EDITOR’S NOTE:
Terminator gene technology refers to the creation of genetically modified plants where second generation seeds are sterile. This ensures a continuing market for corporate seed, since a farmer’s plants have been genetically altered so that they will not produce usable seed.

In addition to the economic effects of CAFO’s, described by Matt Olive, The Environmental Health Sciences Research Center at the University of Iowa has published a damning study of the health implications of these Confined Animal Feeding Operations, “Iowa Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation Air Quality Study” (2002). A full copy of the report is downloadable from the Environmental Health Sciences Research Center.

Of interest, when Wal-Mart announced that it would be featuring organic meat in its stores beginning in 2006, missing from that piece of green publicity was the fact that in order to stock Wal-Mart’s coolers with “organic” meet, the mass-production of such animals would become all the more necessary. The implications of this, more and more CAFO’s, with all of the problems they bring to farmers, the environment and the economics of everyday people. As reported in The New York Times, June 4, 2006, (“The Way We Live Now: 6-4-06; Mass Natural,” Michael Pollan) the massification of organic would move meat production from small farming operations:

“Whether produced domestically or not, organic meat will increasingly come not from mixed, polyculture farms growing a variety of species (a practice that makes it possible to recycle nutrients between plants and animals) but from ever-bigger Confined Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFO’s, which, apart from using organic feed and abjuring antibiotics, are little different from their conventional counterparts. Yes, the federal organic rules say the animals should have “access to the outdoors,” but in practice this often means providing them with a tiny exercise yard or, in the case of one organic egg producer in New England, a screened-in concrete “porch” —a view of the outdoors. Herein lies one of the deeper paradoxes of practicing organic agriculture on an industrial scale: big, single-species CAFO’s are even more precarious than their conventional cousins, since they can’t use antibiotics to keep the thousands of animals living in close confinement indoors from becoming sick. So organic CAFO-hands (to call them farmhands seems overly generous) keep the free ranging to a minimum and then keep their fingers crossed.

“Wal-Mart will buy its organic food from whichever producers can produce it most cheaply, and these will not be the sort of farmers you picture when you hear the word “organic.” Big supermarkets want to do business only with big farmers growing lots of the same thing, not because big monoculture farms are any more efficient (they aren’t) but because it’s easier to buy all your carrots from a single megafarm than to contract with hundreds of smaller growers. The “transaction costs” are lower, even when the price and the quality are the same. This is just one of the many ways in which the logic of industrial capitalism and the logic of biology on a farm come into conflict. At least in the short run, the logic of capitalism usually prevails.”

Comments will be reviewed and
posted on a daily basis.