A2 News - Abortion - Violet Shadow - Letters 2/13/08

“A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed in keeping rabbits.”
-- Edith Sitwell, 1923

I must confess, I have never seen quite the hoopla in the Ann Arbor News as I have of late over the Violet Shadow editorial letter of 2/13/08. Not more than a week ago the News devoted an entire section to other letter writers' responses, most of which were overwhelmingly negative. Then yesterday, 3/12/08/, a writer from Whitmore Lake again blasted Shadow. Calling Shadow’s thoughts on the morality of abortion “sickening” and lacking “morality and logic,” the writer comes to the patently illogical statement that it makes no sense “that a person would think that by decreasing the population global warming” will be lessened. She further undermines her rationale by saying, “if anything it will only slow it down.” What’s wrong with that?

The problem with most of the anti-Shadow letters is that they miss Shadow’s rhetorical wit, which I found thoughtful and entertaining. This letter is very much in the tradition of Swift, Twain, and Mencken.

The first indicator of literary hi-jinx is the name. “Violet Shadow?” Come on folks, put on your critical thinking caps, that’s a sarcastic pseudonym if ever there was one. Then there’s Shadow’s argument that since Americans are the most wasteful consumers on the planet, “politicians could consider making abortion mandatory for anyone under the age of 21.” The Whitmore Laker’s vitriolic response to Shadow’s tongue-in-cheek conviction that “if a society cannot trust a person with a beer, how can society trust the same person with a child” ignores a long history of social satire. It is not the logical comparison between abortion and the drinking age that is important, rather it is the humor in the incongruous nature of the analogy that makes her case. Instead of seeing the humor in Shadow’s call for mandatory abortions for those under 21, Shadow’s critic’s accusation is that it “screams of communism.” She might have invoked Nikita Kruschev’s shoe pounding threat that “we will bury you.”

What most of Shadow’s critics miss is that none of their letters come close to garnering the kind of response that writing like Shadow’s generates, which is after all the mark of a well written letter. I may be off on this, but the savvy reader will immediately recognize this as the work of a radical feminist thinker, and one who provides a thoroughly funny take on a serious social issue--population growth.

Peace - Randy Tessier