Letters: Torture, Poetry and Curt Gowdy

Copyright © 2006 National Public Radio®. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

MELISSA BLOCK, host:

Thursday is the day we read from your letters.

ROBERT SIEGEL, host:

And listener Edward Belfar (ph) was upset by something that he did not hear in this story from France yesterday. He writes, I listened with rising irritation to your report on Ilan Halimi. How is it possible that in a story on the evidently religiously motivated torture and murder of a Jewish man there was no mention of the very salient fact that at least one of the alleged perpetrators was Muslim? Are you afraid that by telling the truth you will offend someone?

BLOCK: A number of you were unhappy with part of Robert's interview with New Yorker writer Jane Mayer.

SIEGEL: We discussed her profile of former Pentagon lawyer Alberta Mora, who fought against the harsh interrogation techniques used at Guantanamo. Listener Carl Scwarzendruber (ph) of Sterling Heights, Michigan, says he was moved by the interview, but he writes, I was disappointed that Siegel and Mayer ended up discussing whether torture can yield reliable information. Jane Mayer says the problem for journalists is their inability to verify claims that it does. I disagree. The problem is that a journalist or any thinking person would grant relevance to such claims as though torture might be palatable if it could be shown effective. Have we forgotten that our nation was founded by people who preferred death to tyranny? Our commitment to basic human decency defines America's greatness. Only by upholding those values can we survive all assaults and earn the world's respect.

BLOCK: My conversation with poet laureate Ted Kooser about his workshop with Hallmark card writers and about his book The Poetry Home Repair Manual brought in some critiques as well. Jason Bell of Venice, California, thinks Kooser's work with the greeting card industry cheapens poetry. He writes, Kooser's genial efforts to democratize poetry hurt a great art form by turning it into mere communication at best, and commercial rhetoric at worst. Poetry instead should be the K2 of the language. Bell is referring to the Himalayan mountain there. He continues, poetry involves the elimination of cliché, the discipline of hard-won learning, hard thought or hard emotion, the use of language like pitons and carabiners and rope as if lives depended on it. Remove that precision, that high resolve in the name of Hallmark accessibility, and something huge is lost. No mountains, no mountain climbers.

SIEGEL: Timothy Tullock(ph) of Utica, New York, writes with praise for our reporter Jason Beaubian, who sent us a story this week about refugees from fighting in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He visited an island in the Congo River where thousands of the displaced have settled.

BLOCK: Tullock writes, this was a terrific piece of reporting, full of telling detail and compassionate in a clear-eyed and unsentimental way. I could not help but admire Mr. Beaubian's tenacity in getting to this unwholesome destination, and then immersing himself in it so thoroughly. The ending of the story was pitch perfect. If ever a story needed a ray of hope at the end, this was it.

SIEGEL: Finally, a few fond words about the late sportscaster Curt Gowdy. He passed away this week. Neil Bernstein of St. Louis, Missouri, heard our obituary and sent these memories. He writes, I was a teenager in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in the 1940s when Gowdy began his broadcasting career at our local radio station. Every Saturday afternoon during baseball season, he put on a major league game of the day using nothing but a skeleton teletype report of the game, a record of crowd noise, a pencil and a hollow tube, he brought the game to life. We teenagers would go to the station every week to watch him create the excitement. It was magic.

BLOCK: We'd like to hear from you. You can write to us at our website. Go to NPR.org and click on contact us at the top of the screen.

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