Readers and writers blog

Big excitement at our household this week. Mr. That Guy (that’s what our cats call me*) got himself a letter printed in the New York Times.

You know, I’m not a big letter writer, a fact my friends and relatives will verify. And I hardly ever write a letter to a newspaper, mostly because all the papers I worked for during nearly four decades had a policy against printing letters from their own writers and discouraged us from writing to other papers as well. In fact, this was only about the second letter of mine that I remember being printed by a newspaper. (Remind me to tell you about the first.)

But lo, there it was on Tuesday. Not just on the New York Times website but in the print editions as well. Right there at the top of the editorial page, the third of six letters about the current Democratic primary race. And thanks to the way the type spilled over from column 5 to column 6, there was my name right under the end of the two-column headline.

Talk about giddy. As soon as I got back from the local newsstand with a copy of the paper Tuesday morning, my wife and I were doing high-fives and saying yay, causing the cats, unimpressed, to wonder what the hell was going on. It got in the paper, you dumb felines, that’s what’s going on. You’d have thought I was a cub reporter again.

Well, now that I’ve had a few hours to reflect on the whole thing, I’m thinking the cats weren’t so dumb. Because what little I had to say about the controversial race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton has already been in and out of Wednesday’s bird cages.

It sure didn’t impress Maureen Dowd, the columnist who inspired my letter, if in fact she saw it at all. My point — and here’s a link to the letter (it’s No. 3) — was that if Obama and Clinton were interested in unifying the country, they should start with the Democratic Party by agreeing to a unity ticket, winner at the top.

Ms. Dowd doesn’t agree, judging from her column Wednesday in which she talked about “hand-wringing” Democrats and asserted that “the whole point of a presidential race is to win.”

Well, that’s not the whole point (I almost said, “you dumb feline.” Sorry, cats). That’s how we ended up with the guys we’ve got now. The point of a presidential race is to put the best-qualified people in office.

Don’t worry, R&W Blog is not about to go political. Our subject is reading and writing, and as I have said before, politics is one of the three subjects that bore my ass off, the others being religion and celebrities. Politics and religion have been so polarized for so long now that my anger has turned to apathy. And celebrity worship always has been pathetic.

In fact, if this were a political blog, I not only wouldn’t be writing it, I wouldn’t be reading it.

By the way, I did get some reaction to the letter, mostly from Times readers who wondered how I got it in the paper. Certainly not my amazing facility with words. The letter actually was my second to the Times, the first a month earlier on the same subject — different words, same idea. I got an automated reply and then silence. This time, the automated reply was followed by an email asking me a lot of questions about the letter and me, and then it was in the paper.

It was timing. People are starting to think and talk more about a unity ticket.

Timing also played a role in the first letter I ever got published. It was written in the 1960s to my home state’s right-wing paper, The Manchester, N.H., Union Leader, which continued its obsession with communists long after the McCarthy witchhunts were dead. I sought to ridicule this obsession by sending them the following letter on May 1:

“Snoopy celebrates May Day. The Soviets celebrate May Day. Therefore, Snoopy is a communist.”

They printed it along with a much-longer editor’s reply about what a threat I was.

Come to think of it, there may have been another aspect of timing with the New York Times letter. I noticed later that Tuesday was April 1. I might have been one of the fools.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

*As in that guy who feeds us three times a day, that guy who cleans our litter box with nearly the same frequency, that guy whose body we curl up on at night for warmth. Sometimes they just call me T.G.