Keep the letters coming

By John Brummett

Posted: January 25, 2012 at 6 a.m.

Brummett Online: At least they're consistent

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The sweet and dear woman who blesses me with wedlock says she gets mad reading these letters to the Voices page that assault me regularly.

And I reply, “You mean there’s another one today?” And she says, “Two.” And I reply, “Great. Let me see.”

My first assignment—before we get to informing and illuminating and maybe even influencing through informing and illuminating—is to engage readers.

No greater evidence exists of successful engagement of readers than for some of those readers to become so moved that they take pen to paper and affix a postage stamp.

Do you really want to hurt me? Let me hand you the bullet: It is to stop reading right here and to care too little to respond.

Please, not that. Anything but that.

We are not a Christian nation, but a free-religion one.

I only put that in there to see if you were still reading.

Now you’re high-peeved because you think I’m a secular humanist who has attacked your Lord and Saviour. But I have not besmirched in any way your religious faith. I have only written the plain truth that our Founders set up a government carefully separated from your religion or any religion.

I have merely written of the wetness of water.

Write a letter to the editor if you don’t agree. Explain the dryness of water.

Barack Obama is one of our greatest presidents.

I only put that in there to see if you were still reading.

If you don’t share that assessment, send a letter to the editor. That ought to fill the Voices page for a few decades.

I am not hurt, but gratified, by occasional letters in which the writer asserts that he does not read my columns because they are drivel. Then he explains why they are drivel by making disdainful references to specific assertions in these columns that he has not read.

If you do not read these columns, how do you know that I wrote those things? And if you only accidentally read them, then how was it that reading material you found worthless came to be worthy of writing in response?

I have you there, don’t I? Your only hope of saving face is to fire off a letter to the editor saying you didn’t read it.

Sometimes a critical letter is on point and instructive. State Sen. Missy Irvin’s father-in-law wrote to say I had mistreated her by assigning her to the Tea Party when in fact she’d had a Tea Party opponent. I understand his concern, and I regret my carelessness. I also would point out that I only called Irvin “Tea Party-inclined.” I would add that I would not care to get a load of whoever ran to her right.

Then there was the fellow who sought to impart Solomonic wisdom in the matter of rampant reader criticism of my columns. He wrote on the one hand that I impart great knowledge. But he wrote on the other hand that I’m always going to go left of center with that knowledge and that we certainly don’t need that in the newspaper in a presidential election year.

Hmmmm.

Two things:

One is that, yes, I’ll usually head left of center, though you will find from time to time that I will surprise you.

Nancy Pelosi makes me ill. I only put that in there to surprise you.

The second is that it seems to me that a left-of-center perspective is precisely what we need.

The right-of-center perspective positively gushes, imparted by college professors and Pulitzer winners and other notables in this newspaper of a rightward bent. Why not one meek fellow to come at you every day or two usually from the other side? It is to the newspaper’s credit that it gives over portions of its newsprint and ink to the other side, to “variegated” views, as a man put it.

It is wholly a pleasure. That’s all I’m really trying to say. If you consider that plagiarism, write a letter to the editor.

Bobby Petrino can’t coach a lick.

I only put that in there only to see if you read all the way to the bottom.

John Brummett is a regular columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com.

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