Mash Notes, Hate Mail & Other Correspondence

Dear Editor: I’ve just written to the few people I know reading or having copies (that I gave them) of Maine author Carolyn Chute’s just-out novel, The Recipe for Revolution (Grove Press). The paper jacket has this Kirkus Review recommendation: “Essential Reading.” I agree. It’s a big book, 732 pages—good for pandemic-time/isolation reading. On pp. 666-675 Chute does an exposure of our U.S. racism’s roots through the eyes/mind of Blake who is mixed—”Some of my family is white by marriage and we got the Indian factor. But we’re labeled ‘Black’. And we’re labeled ‘inner city,’ which is like being labeled ‘toilet.’ This didn’t happen overnight. …

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To the Editor: In Tulsa on June 20, President Trump announced that he had asked “his people” to go slow on virus testing, explaining that if you do more tests, you have more cases (which would be embarrassing). Spokespersons said the next day that Trump had spoken “tongue in cheek.” This was after doctors standing next to the President at numerous press conferences had explained repeatedly that testing is essential to controlling an epidemic, as it allows directing of efforts, quarantining and contact tracing. It avoids having contagious staff infect nursing home residents, and young people bring the virus to their grandparents. At those conferences, …

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To the Editor: COVID-19 slashed household and town income in N.H. and across the country. Senator Martha Fuller Clark’s June 24th “My Turn” [column in the Concord Monitor] highlights a bipartisan solution to save money for towns and citizens: expand net metering (renewable energy sharing). Make it more accessible in our state. Last year net metering bill HB365 passed the Senate and House with bipartisan support. Governor Sununu vetoed this bill; the vote to override failed. A similar fate met net metering SB446 in 2018. HB365 would have saved N.H. businesses and communities $2-$2.5 million annually, just on electricity generated with hydropower. Tax- and rate-payers …

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“The execution of Fred Hampton was the gravest domestic crime of the Nixon administration.” – Noam Chomsky, quoted in The Assassination of Fred Hampton, by Jeffrey Haas –=≈=– “As a people, we have become obsessed with Health. There is something fundamentally, radically unhealthy about all this. We do not seem to be seeking more exuberance in living as much as staving off failure, putting off dying. We have lost all confidence in the human body.” – Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail (1979) –=≈=– “Everybody’s a mad scientist, and life is their lab. We’re all trying to experiment to find a way to live, to solve …

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To the Editor: It is my pleasure to endorse Mindi Messmer for New Hampshire’s Executive Council. Anyone who has been following the environmental issues on the Seacoast has often heard the name Mindi Messmer. Her work on the Pediatric Cancer Cluster task-force and her involvement with drinking water contamination, backed up by her professional expertise, has made her a voice to be listened to. Additionally, she has been a voice for enhancing the radioactive monitoring capabilities of the State of N.H. to bring more public transparency to the residents in the towns surrounding the Seabrook nuclear plant. As a fellow scientist who currently serves on …

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Dear Editor, Delighted to read the references to Confederate General A.P. Hill in the latest front page Rant. Living within spitting distance of the general’s monument/grave, I thought your readers might enjoy a bit more about his postmortem adventures and how he manages, even in death and to this day, to make his presence felt. Fatally shot in battle less than two weeks before hostilities ended at Appomattox, he was hastily buried in Chesterfield County, then two years later dug up and reinterred in Hollywood Cemetery, in a spot years later deemed unsuitable for one of his stature. In the early 1890’s, as the whitewashing …

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