_______________BEER, BABES AND BEATINGS BY JOSHUA GREEN (10/28/98)
	Despite Joshua Green's contention that forgoing rush spells social ostracism for the average college freshman, the fact remains that university men and women are opting out of the Greek system on campus in droves. Fraternities and sororities are no longer the be-all and end-all of school life they appeared to be during the first part of the 20th century. "Ookie Cookie" may be a potent boogeyman tale with which to appall and titillate moist-eared plebes, but let's rationally examine the anecdote we're being force-fed here. OK, guys, ever been physically unable to urinate before an audience, even while intoxicated? Now, imagine being asked to masturbate, while drunk, in a circle with your friends and nothing more to inspire you than a proffered Oreo. Somebody call the urban legend police, please. More mayhem occurs in a typical freshman dorm than all the Greek residences on the average college campus combined during any given weekend. Yet freshman dorms aren't sanctioned or unsanctioned school entities. They are simply barracks. When a bung-up happens in the designated "Animal House" it's easier to categorize it as frat boys being frat boys once again. After all, boogeymen are only as real as the wide-eyed audience that believes in them. -- Robert Bess Roanoke, Va. Joshua Green's tale of undergraduate hazing, and the tone with which he relayed it, amazed me. Any 18-year-old who deems it necessary to submit to the authority of a drunken mob of fraternity brothers deserves to eat a cum-laden cookie. Why insist that university administrators squander much needed resources to play mommie and daddy and highlight for you the fact that you don't place your well-being in the hands of your equally stupid peers? I hope both the writer and his friend learned a valuable lesson and that their education wasn't subsidized by the government. -- Michael Valaire New York While I was at Oregon State University I met a friend who transferred to OSU mid-term. After getting to know him the story came out about his transfer. While pledging a frat at the University of Washington he ran into some serious hazing. He and two other pledges were in the frat house watching television. The brothers decided to paddle them. My friend was the only one who didn't go to the hospital. One of the others suffered kidney failure and was in the hospital for quite some time. The other was released in a few days. I have done a lot of crazy things in my time in a lot of different countries around the world. I have never missed being in a frat. They're just not worth it. -- Joshua Teague Is there anything you can accuse fraternity members of that people won't believe? It's a foregone conclusion in non-Greek circles that fraternity members are desperate alcoholics, habitual rapists and ritual homosexuals. There is no circle jerk during pledging; that is a rumor that always seems to crop up in one form or another. For my fraternity, the rumor was that we'd have to do something called the "elephant walk." I've heard of sororities that make prospective members take off their clothes and whose members then circle "areas for improvement" on the girls' bodies, or who line up prospective members in order from prettiest to ugliest. Does someone actually have to tell you that these rumors aren't true? Speaking for the Greek readership of Salon, I demand that the Ivory Tower column apologize for its absurd accusations. Someone on your staff should at least have the decency to undergo some hazing before you publish an article about its "horrors." Let's keep the party going, baby! -- Anson Lang As a recent graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, I am having a hard time mustering any sympathy (let alone empathy) for Joshua Green's account of the horrors of hazing and frat life. His simple-minded view of socializing as an undergraduate -- that you are either in a frat or you never meet anyone -- is ridiculous. Assuming he was not a student at the Citadel or VMI, I would think that there were ample opportunities to meet women and socialize in such obscure and mysterious places as local campus coffee shops, or even in class! As for the horrors of hazing: Who pledges to a fraternity with absolutely no clue that such things might happen to them? And who would actually eat a semen-soaked cookie? Even as a wide-eyed freshman, I knew that any club that encouraged group masturbation and ejaculating onto cookies was not my scene. All incoming college students can choose whether or not to join any organization on campus. If I was such a wimp that I thought I could never meet anyone unless I joined a frat, I think I would be embarrassed and try to keep it quiet rather than publishing the information in Salon. As for "exposing" fraternity hazing, Green's shock and horror simply reinforce what a naive and sheltered youth he must have had before going to school. -- Chris Carter Berkeley, Calif.
_______________MAN BITES DOG BY ROLF POTTS (10/28/98)
	I have just finished reading Rolf Potts' article on eating dog in Korea. I was in the U.S. Army in Korea in 1993. I ate dog. It is actually quite delicious. I had a different dish called gae-go-gi. Basically, it is thinly sliced dog meat that has been marinated. It has a gray, ashy color -- a little darker than pork but similar in appearance, and it has the texture of marinated beef. This type of dog dish is more difficult to find, but is a delicacy in Korea. I do not wish for dog dishes to be served in America. I did have a little bit of a moral dilemma when I found out what I was eating, but I continued. I wish to thank Potts for reminding me of some history that I had forgotten, and for telling a little bit about a culture that is not widely known about here in America. On a slightly negative note: I don't know if this is still practiced in Korea, but I was stationed near a "dog farm." They did breed dogs for slaughter. I also had the unfortunate privilege of traveling by a dog-slaughtering house. The sound of the dogs being killed made me cringe, and seeing all of the carcasses lying around was very upsetting. I rationalized this away by telling myself that it was the same with cattle. -- Troy Patterson
_______________PRIME TIME FOR HACKERS IS OVER BY RICHARD THIEME(10/27/98)
	Hacking? What does this have to do with hacking? That term originally referred to writing particularly inventive code. Later it became associated with cracking computer security. Blosser did neither. He simply installed pre-written software on systems he already had access to. He may be guilty of poor judgment and misuse of company resources, but if he's a hacker, so is anyone who plays solitaire at work. -- Jason Steiner
_______________POWER PLAY BY HARVEY WASSERMAN (10/27/98)
	Your story "Power Play" covers an interesting topic: the "stranded costs" battle in California. Unfortunately, it is so one-sided and poorly written that it ignores the interesting issues and probably doesn't belong in your excellent online magazine. With a little editing, it might be appropriate for a publication devoted to covering the environmental movement. There are many interesting issues here. Should rate-payers compensate shareholders for stranded costs? Are there real economic savings to be had from deregulation? Is deregulation really about making residential consumers pick up more of the bill for electricity, possibly subsidizing commercial and industrial consumers? Harvey Wasserman misses all of these interesting issues. He uses terms like "giveaway" and quotes people calling it a "rip-off" as if he has studied the issues thoroughly and come to such a strong conclusion, but he never gets around to letting us in on what the fuss is all about. All we learn is that some environmentalists are upset about it and utilities are spending a lot of money to defeat an initiative that would cost their shareholders a lot of money. And I certainly don't understand the part about a decline in electricity rates encouraging more solar and other alternative energy generation. What a mess! You can do better. -- John Goldsmith Chevy Chase, Md.
_______________THE BRIDEGROOM STRIPPED BARE BY DANIEL REITZ (10/22/98)
	Daniel Reitz responds to Robert MacGrogan's Oct. 28 letter to the editor: I feel sufficiently provoked to comment on Robert MacGrogan's accusation that I'm a dirty liar -- at least there was a very strong insinuation of such, with comments like a "supposedly genuine stag party" I "supposedly" attended, that it was all a "flight of fancy" I dreamed up to, as it were, get my rocks off. Like Charlton Heston, who insisted Michelangelo was not homosexual, namely because Heston once played him in a movie, it seems my angry reader seeks to reclaim the sanctity and good name of such rituals as stag parties and touch football because he's straight and so are his friends, damn it, and when they participate in these activities, there's no repressed anything. He seems particularly miffed that it's a gay man attempting to supposedly sully these decent, clean, healthy activities by smarming it all up with faggot accusations. Nevertheless, the stag party I wrote about happened, and I was there. However, nowhere in the article did I say that the bridegroom-to-be donned a wet T-shirt to be torn off him, as the letter stated; said T-shirt was already, as it were, in place. A small point, but a significant one. While I agree that aggressive, even obnoxious male behavior does not suggest latent homosexuality, might I suggest that not all such heterosexual rituals mentioned above are devoid of sexual tension (which does not necessarily suggest repressed homosexuality, anyway)? It might not apply to any he's been to, but that's his experience. I was not writing about a roomful of closet cases; I was writing about the drunken, angry, confrontational and nasty behavior of one man, who seemed to have a bone to pick with someone. I think it's important to make these distinctions, because buried aggression of any kind is dangerous. In this case, it was fairly benign. But in the case of Matthew Shepard, murdered by supposedly heterosexual men because he was gay, it wasn't hate that killed him, it was fear and self-loathing. SALON | Nov. 3, 1998

R E C E N T L Y+| CIRCUMCISION IN AMERICA BY DEBRA S. OLLIVIER

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