Writer on the storm

Bill Kauffman's otherwise enjoyable interview with Carl Oglesby ("Writer on the Storm," April) was deeply marred by Oglesby's blase slander of cowboys. George W. Bush's "handlers," Oglesby said, "grasped that there is a basic collision between the neo-Union and the neo-Confederacy. The Civil War is not over; its issues continue to echo. Bush II emerges from that process. He is a Cowboy, as I use that term, and represents the movement of the Confederacy from the East to the West."

Drawing from seemingly nothing more than Hollywood preconceptions, Oglesby tied ranch workers to the Confederacy, George Bush, and other black holes of ill repute. Anyone who has earned a buck in the saddle is fully vested in the live-and-let-live philosophy, the very foundation of libertarian logic. Bush and other Connecticut rednecks are not.

Guy Smith

Alameda, CA

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