Give peace a chance
This is in response to Charles Mathewes’ letter [“Critic’s choice,” Mailbag, October 28] regarding my “No Exit” strip, printed in C-VILLE on October 14. My cartoon was a reaction to the wall that the Israeli military is building along and into the West Bank, which encompasses or surrounds many Palestinian towns and villages. Such walls already surround Rafa and other parts of Gaza, sealing them off from Israel and from Egypt to the south. I was not equating Israeli policy with the Holocaust, but with “forced ghettoization,” in which a people are systematically deprived of their land and livelihoods and forced to live in walled off, impoverished ghettos.
As someone of Jewish descent, I deeply want Israel to succeed in peace and prosperity. I don’t believe, however, that these walls or Ariel Sharon’s militaristic policies will do anything to further Israeli security. They will only breed more hatred and violence. In retrospect, my cartoon was somewhat unclear and excessive, but it is difficult to communicate all these issues in a single panel. I apologize for any offense.
Andy Singer
andy@andysinger.com
Liver worst
Thank you for mentioning the “foie gras/force feeding controversy” in your write-up of Fleurie’s Foie Gras cuit au Torchon [“Bite this,” October 21]. I share your belief that readers should decide for themselves whether they can “get past it,” and offer the following to help them make an informed decision.
Foie gras—French for “fatty liver”—is the grossly enlarged (up to 12 times normal size) liver of a duck or goose. It is produced by force-feeding. The bird is held between an operator’s legs or restrained in some form of clamping device with her neck extended. A metal tube up to 25 inches long is forced down the bird’s throat. Food is forced down the tube from a funnel into the bird’s stomach. A motor turns a screw, which forces the food down the tube. The operator rubs the bird’s throat to force the food into the stomach. On some farms an elastic band is put around the bird’s neck to stop her retching up the food.
The birds are force-fed three to four times a day. The amount of food gradually increases each day until they are being force-fed approximately six pounds a day before slaughter. Force-feeding lasts three to four weeks.
The process of forced feeding is so traumatic, and the confinement and conditions on foie gras farms so debilitating, that the pre-slaughter mortality rate for foie gras production is 20 times the average rate on other factory farms. At Sonoma Foie Gras in California, which produces 20 percent of the United States’ foie gras, investigators found crowded pens in filthy sheds. The floor was covered with feces and vomit. The farm was so unsanitary that rats ran freely. Investigators witnessed and documented a rat eating two ducks, still alive but too weak to defend themselves.
Medically known as hepatic lipidosis, foie gras is a disease marketed as a delicacy. Bon appetit.
Amy Espie
Esmont
Study guides
Regarding Brian Wimer’s October 28 letter [“That’s Infotainment!” Mailbag, October 28] about the University of Maryland study, “Misperceptions, the Media, and the Iraq War”—it will never happen in a million years given the leftward leaning of academia, but I would love to see a study of those who primarily listen to and watch NPR and PBS. I’ll bet it would show flagrant misperceptions of: United States and world history (Iraq is like Vietnam, the United Nations was successful in Bosnia and Serbia) or basic economics and civics (tax cuts cause deficits, this is the largest deficit in history) or even the United States Constitution (Gore should be President—heaven forbid—because he got more popular votes, denying the importance of Amendment II to our freedom).
If studies like the one cited by Wimer prove anything, it is that we as citizens have the responsibility to gather as much information from as many different sources as possible before making a judgment. Even the most partisan news outlet contains buried nuggets of fact. It just takes critical thinking to extract them.
John Payne
Afton