Questions You Should Never Ask a Writer

October 13, 2007 (adapted article, which appeared on the Op-Ed page on June 26, 1992)
Op-Ed Contributor
Questions You Should Never Ask a Writer
By DORIS LESSING

WHILE we have seen the apparent death of Communism, ways of thinking that were either born under Communism or strengthened by Communism still govern our lives. Not all of them are as immediately evident as a legacy of Communism as political correctness.

The first point: language. It is not a new thought that Communism debased language and, with language, thought. There is a Communist jargon recognizable after a single sentence. Few people in Europe have not joked in their time about “concrete steps,” “contradictions,” “the interpenetration of opposites,” and the rest.

The first time I saw that mind-deadening slogans had the power to take wing and fly far from their origins was in the 1950s when I read an article in The Times of London and saw them in use. “The demo last Saturday was irrefutable proof that the concrete situation...” Words confined to the left as corralled animals had passed into general use and, with them, ideas. One might read whole articles in the conservative and liberal press that were Marxist, but the writers did not know it. But there is an aspect of this heritage that is much harder to see. More

What'll ya do with an old voting machine?

Voting Machines Giving Florida New Headache
By ABBY GOODNOUGH

MIAMI, Oct. 12 — It used to be that everyone wanted a Florida voting machine.

After the history-making presidential recount of 2000, Palm Beach County sold hundreds of its infamous Votomatic machines to memorabilia seekers, including a group of chiropractors in Arizona, the cable-news host Greta Van Susteren and the hotelier André Balazs. One machine ended up in the Smithsonian Institution. Dozens were transformed into pieces of contemporary art for an exhibition in New York.

But now that Florida is purging its precincts of 25,000 touch-screen voting machines — bought after the recount for up to $5,000 each, hailed as the way of the future but deemed failures after five or six years — no one is biting.

“I think we are going to have them on hand for a while,” said Arthur Anderson, the elections supervisor in Palm Beach County, which must jettison 4,900 touch-screen machines for which it paid $14.5 million in 2001 and still owes $4.8 million. “They are probably, for the most part, headed to the scrap pile.”

Across the nation, jurisdictions that experimented with touch-screen voting after 2000 are starting to scale back or abandon it based on a growing perception that the machines are unreliable and concern that they do not provide a paper trail in case questions arise. California will sharply scale back touch-screen voting next year after a review by the secretary of state found it was vulnerable to hackers. More

Not a good way to roast cabbages

15-Truck Pile-Up in California Highway Tunnel
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 5:23 p.m. ET

SANTA CLARITA, Calif. (AP) -- The flames abated in a freeway tunnel Saturday where more than a dozen big-rig trucks lost control in the rain, causing a fiery pileup that injured at least 10 people and left one missing, but authorities still couldn't enter it to determine whether anyone died.

The key route connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco remained blocked and was still smoldering more than 14 hours after the wreck.

''It looked like a bomb went off,'' said Los Angeles County firefighter Scott Clark, who battled the blaze throughout the night.

The accident, which left wreckage scattered for at least half a mile, began when two trucks collided about 11 p.m. Friday in a southbound truck tunnel on Interstate 5 about 30 miles north of downtown Los Angeles, said Fire Inspector Jason Hurd.

The crash triggered a pileup involving about 15 big rigs and possibly one or more passenger cars, sending people fleeing for their lives. At least five trucks burst into flames, and the fire spread to the others.

Flames shot out of both ends of the tunnel, rising as high as 100 feet into the air, according to firefighters at the scene. More