To the editors:
“Dimwitted” and “feeble” are appropriate ways to characterize Peter Pekin’s aborted attempt at satire in his “A Low Interest Year” (Reader, front page, Dec. 22).
Events in the real world of 1989 were almost too interesting: the brutally crushed uprising of students in China; the sudden downfall of tyrannical Communist regimes in Eastern Europe; the millions of ordinary people demonstrating in the streets for freedom and democracy; the end of the Cold War, and so on and so on.
Pekin’s heavy-handed irony fails because he chooses such wildly wrong targets.
What Pekin should have taken deadly aim at were George Bush’s sanctimonious and hypocritical version of a “kinder and gentler” America; the shocking HUD and Savings & Loan scandals; the U.S. Supreme Court’s reactionary rulings on vital issues; the ruthless, lawless U.S. invasion of Panama, to name but a few.
Pekin, you’d be well advised to seek some other line of work. Writing satire is not your metier.
Royce Wright
N. Dearborn
Paul Pekin replies:
Lighten up, Royce, it’s for fun, for fun! You want more George Bush? Cheeeesh. I thought putting him in with the oat bran said it all.