Tucson Weekly: Mail Bonding (December 10

If I May Be Permitted To Respond...
By Tom Danehy
I GET A surprising amount of mail for being a sports columnist for a weekly paper. As per Weekly policy, the negative ones get published right away. The positive ones, usually signed by nuns or Nobel Prize winners, get thrown in a basket because someone decided that nice letters make for a boring letters-to-the-editor page.
The other thing that bothers me is that the real writers around here get to respond to their detractors right there in the Mailbag section. In italics and everythang.
Danehy You know how it works. They'll write a well-researched, 2,000-word piece on water rights. Then some guy out in a shack in West Marana will write a 2,500-word letter debating the merits of the author's interpretation of eminent domain. After which the author will respond (in italics!!) to the letter-writer's concerns. It's all so wonderfully New Yorker.
But do I get to respond to letters? Noooo. Like a couple weeks ago when my friend Howard responded to my column about my semi-perfect daughter by writing that he hopes my son will be a holy terror so that at least one of my kids will be "normal."
Gee Howard, sorry to disappoint. While he admittedly comes at things from a different angle than his sister, Alexander's also a straight-A student. And despite being the smallest kid of the entire team, he was a first-string defensive and special-teams stalwart for the La Cima 7th-grade football team, which won its league championship.
Now, as for the guy who ranted about Waco, I want to tell you that I have indeed seen Rules of Engagement. Twice. And while I'm not at all pleased with the way the ATF guys handled it, I sure don't remember any scenes of government goons spraying machine-gun fire into occupied buildings. Maybe on my copy those scenes were cut out, presumably by the same Utah video store that snips off the Kate Winslett nude scene from Titanic.
As for your suggestions, I can state very clearly that I don't think we live in a police state. Furthermore, I believe that it's an informed populace--not an armed one--which keeps it that way.
This is not to say that excesses aren't committed every day in our country. Certainly the ATF's dreadful handling of Waco needs to be examined. But one should be embarrassed to suggest that it was the Gestapo pickin' on just plain folks.
There is clear evidence that David Koresh had been raping children inside that compound. What were the authorities to do, sit outside and blast Metallica music at the compound until Koresh's johnson fell off?
There is also evidence that the Davidians set the fires which consumed the buildings in the compound. Why, we'll probably never know. But to suggest that the gub'mint burned 'em out, then gunned 'em down, is absurd.
It's a tragedy that innocent people died that day, and, after seeing Rules of Engagement, it's obvious that the ATF screwed up royally, and probably even criminally. But to hear some people tell it, the ATF and Janet Reno were sitting around one day and someone said, "Hey, let's go torture and then kill 100 innocent little angels out in Texas. No one will care."
Let's look at it this way. You're barricaded in a building, surrounded by government officers (or goons, depending on your outlook). What choices do you have? If you believe in American justice (which, oddly, some of us still do), you surrender and take your chances with the legal system.
If you don't believe in the justice system (a stance for which you may have good reason), you have only three options.

You can wait for the government guys to run out of Metallica records and just go home. That probably won't happen.

You can choose to shoot it out against vastly superior firepower, taking innocent children with you, and hope that after you're gone some redneck will bomb a government building in your honor a couple years down the road, taking even more innocent children's lives.

Or you can surrender, save the kids' lives, and not trusting the legal courts, try to take your case to the Court of Public Opinion. Not a real good option, but you'll still be alive.

Those responsible for the screw-ups at Waco should be identified and punished. But I'm real tired of the ex post facto canonization of David Koresh.
So, did Koresh bring it upon himself? Yes, he did. Having said that, I politely decline the invitation to dine at the Waffle House. I'm not a waffle guy. Unless they come with salsa.
Finally, there was the distressing letter last week from a guy who took offense at my making fun of a fever blister. The guy has AIDS, for which he has my sympathy. But because he's sick, I can't make a joke about a harmless condition which is shared by tens of millions of Americans? Where's that written down?
In the letter he claimed I was ridiculing seriously ill people. Somehow he read one line I wrote and deduced that I equate a cold sore with breast cancer.
Look, according to some estimates, a majority of American adults have some form of herpes. Fortunately, for most of us, it's the mild form which we picked up through casual contact as kids, and only know about when that annoying lip blister shows up, generally right before the big date, the senior prom, or the important business presentation. We treat it with Chap-Stick and it goes away in a few days. And we never, ever think of our annoying little cold sore as a license to make fun of diabetes, blindness, or cancer.
Of course, there is that other form of herpes, the kind that comes from not-so-casual contact. The kind which is completely avoidable and could be eradicated with a simple shift in societal mating practices. But then, I wasn't talking about that kind, which has totally different symptoms and, of course, isn't funny.

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