Letters may be edited for clarity and length. E-mail to le*****@oc******.com, or send to Letters to the Editor, c/oOC Weekly, 1666 N. Main St., Ste. 500, Santa Ana, CA 92701. Or fax to (714) 550-5908.
GARYWEBB
Nick Schou, you made my day! At last Gary Webb gets it told like he wrote it and not spun into something else [“Ink-Stained Wretchedness,” April 22]. I kept asking myself why the news media, not just right-wing ideologues like Chris Reed, set out to ruin this man and eventually drove him to suicide. Maybe someday we'll get the honest answer to that question.
D.J.Bell
viae-mail
HEYYOUSUCK
I just wanted to write to you and express my disgust at the “Hey You” column for April 15. It seems that “Whoribble Friends” may have been printed as a swipe at both the author and the subject, but it's clear that whoever edited and cleared this piece comes out looking like the real idiot. Why would you allow what is normally a funny and clever portion of your publication to fall to such standards? Maybe I'm getting old, but this was the biggest piece of trash I've seen in your rag for some time. There had to be something better than this, right?
JamesC.Harris
SanClemente
Editorresponds:No,actually,therewasn't.
POPEULAR
As a victim of Fr. David Holley in 1963, I wish to disavow myself from anything you have to say about Pope John Paul II [Gustavo Arellano's “A Moral, Abject Failure When It Mattered,” April 8]. After college I become a Peace Corps volunteer. I lived with the family of the Archbishop of San Salvador, Arturo Rivera Y Damas. After I left the country, the family asked for political asylum due to threats to priests in El Salvador. They were assisted, and the Archbishop told me he kept the pope informed of these events and had his blessing. I also worked at a bakery in 1980 at which Polish immigrants worked. I lived in a house of a Polish immigrant family. I was struck by the tight community all stretching from a deep Catholic faith. Every night the entire street I lived on had the house lights off at 8:30 p.m. Solidarity had begun. The pope made this happen. The death squads in El Salvador eliminated. Poland, free. I was a victim yet was given the gift of seeing these events, witnessing the power of faith. I am humbled by having been a witness to this man's actions. This grace was a profound gift. Evil deeds done behind locked doors by evil souls are theirs to account for and to ask forgiveness. The splinter in the eye of this pope you see is blinding you to the log in your own.
Namewithheldbyrequest
viae-mail
Hey 'Name withheld,' aren't you bold writing letters anonymously [Letters, April 22]! Look, you fake, get over it. The Catholic Church didn't molest you; a depraved, homosexual pedophile molested you. If a rotten mechanic put lousy tires on your Mercedes, you wouldn't say, “The Mercedes is no longer my car.” If you had any faith to begin with, the Catholic Church would still be your church.
B.DirkYarborough
CostaMesa
LOVETHATMEXICAN
People who criticize Gustavo Arellano's “Ask a Mexican” need to get a grip. Gustavo is completely comfortable being a Mexican-American. And he also realizes that Mexicans, just like Anglos, the ancient Greeks, and the Jews who wrote the Old Testament, are equally capable of being pathologically ethnocentric. His college courses in the humanities have taught him a lot!
HarleighKysonJr.
LongBeach
Arriba! Keep it up, Gustavo Arellano. You're well on your way to teaching America more about Mexico than anyone since the original Gustavo A.: the cartoonist Gus Arriola of Gordo fame.
RyanAnthony
Tucson,Arizona
I don't know why so many people get uptight about Ask a Mexican. The caricature of the Mexicano is totally cool. You know, I've actually met guys who look like him. Plus, I like learning about my fellow citizens, legal or not so legal. In the interest of balancing the scale, why don't you start a “Ask a Gringo” column? Our south-of-the-border brethren can then take their swipes at the questions they've always wanted to ask us. If you need a volunteer to provide the answers, I'm at your service. Vive la raza!
CraigFromm
SantaAna
TheMexicanresponds:Testfailed—itwouldbe“AskaGabacho”pincheputopendejogabacho.
LOVETHATDICK
Your tongue-in-cheek notification of Bob Dole coming to the Nixon Library served as an insult to one of our finest presidents [Derrick Judson's “This Week in Bob Dole,” April 15]. You can slag that corporate shill Bob Dole all you'd like, but you'd think, especially with our current situation in Iraq, that Nixon—the man who brought home the troops Kennedy and Johnson sent to Vietnam—would get a little more respect. And please refrain from cries of “Watergate!” when I doubt any of your readers—or staff, for that matter—could explain “Watergate” or the circumstances under which Nixon resigned for the good of the nation. You half-wits couldn't even manage to get your digs straight. Nixon passed away in New York City, not inside his presidential library. “Burial Site” doesn't equate to “Deathplace”—do you even know what a fact check is? On that note I'll end my tirade and let you get back to writing tired jokes about Republicans.
H.WilliamO'Blivion
Orange
