Picking Up the Crumbs

I have read Dan Piepenbring’s review of Dan Nadel’s biography of me [“New Books,” April], and just to set the record straight, the “victim” who said, “You don’t cop a feel. You cop a ride,” was a big strong woman who INVITED me to hop on her back and then danced around humming a tune just to show how easy it was for her. I was thrilled, of course, “pervert” that I am. She worked for the parks department in San Francisco and boasted of how part of her job involved carrying ninety-pound sacks of manure, which she said was no big deal for her! Wow! Oh, I love big strong ladies.

And in case you are unaware of it, there are many such women who actually ENJOY being very strong and seem happy to show off their prowess to an appreciative male. Many of these strong women have told me that it was refreshing for them to finally meet a man who was so attracted to them for their powerful physique, and they would often eagerly volunteer to show what they could do. And of course, I had no end of ideas and suggestions for things to do!

A lot of men who are sexually attracted to strong women (most, perhaps) desire to be dominated by them. But I’m the opposite. I like to sexually dominate them! I love it when they let me “conquer” them, when I know full well that there’s no way that I, a skinny weakling of a male, could overpower them against their will. And yes, many strong women are sexually submissive, and want to be “objectified” and ordered about in sex play. Many times they would say things like “Don’t hold back” or “Do your worst.” They knew they could stop me if they wanted to.

Just so you know, I never, ever physically “abused” any woman in real life—only in the comics—except for this one time I broke a chair over Kathy Goodell’s back, but she was undaunted while I caused a bloody gash on my own head in the act. She and I had some fierce fights in those days. She was a hot-tempered woman, but also extremely passionate sexually. Aline, too, was very strong and once gave me a black eye for something flippant I said. I wouldn’t think of hitting her back. In fact, I cried. She was a bit drunk at the time.

Robert Crumb
Sauve, France
Occupational Hazards

Ben Ehrenreich gives sensitive treatment to the acceleration of settler colonialism in the Israeli-occupied West Bank [“After Nonviolence,” Letter from the West Bank, May]. His reporting rejects the tendency of other publications to pathologize Palestinian armed resistance as a vengeful, antidialectical undertaking: the domain of savages whose motivations can be empathized with, but whose methods can never be endorsed as legal, just, or effective. (And his depiction of the Israeli prison system—its starvation, torture, and sexual abuse of prisoners—is a welcome antidote to the near-universal silence on the subject in the mainstream Western press.)

Ehrenreich suggests that Israel’s response to the events of October 7 has rendered nonviolent resistance a mere relic of idealism, and armed resistance necessary for survival. But Palestinian resistance has always encompassed both components, operating in strategic and mutually reinforcing relation. The former is a historic practice rooted in defending land; building out social institutions (education, unions, farming); and in so persisting, incurring long-term costs to the occupier. As such, there is no “after” nonviolence, as the title suggests, for everywhere there is oppression, there will always exist a strategy of refusal. Perhaps we might say “after nonviolent appeal,” a seductive myth that, since al-Aqsa Flood, now limps along, beleaguered by the futility of engaging a bipartisan U.S. compact that is financing the extermination in Gaza.

It is worth insisting, however, that political appeal through revolutionary practice has not itself faded, only refocused: on the popular masses around the world who clearly stand with Palestine, and on the Arab and Muslim people, who have faced down an imperial pillaging of their lands by the long American Century.

Kaleem Hawa
Brooklyn, N.Y.

For all its emphasis on resistance efforts in the West Bank, Ehrenreich’s article seems hardly to discuss the actual struggles facing ordinary Palestinians. His piece instead centers on a romanticized, disorganized movement, and a few visiting activists eager to tally symbolic arrests. What about the daily threats from settlers? What about the shortage of public resources? I wish Ehrenreich had devoted more attention to how settler expansion affects Palestinian towns, or how the presence of Palestinian militias in places like Jenin might make daily life more dangerous and unstable for civilians.

Tyler Redd
San Diego
Under a Cloud

Maddy Crowell does an excellent job investigating radioactive contamination at George Air Force Base [“Radioactive Man,” Report, May], highlighting a black hole of information that our government ought to redress with long-term medical studies and archival transparency. We might situate Frank Vera’s story within a series of cover-ups beginning with the first detonation of a nuclear weapon, in the New Mexico desert, in 1945. (The cloud of radioactive debris from the Trinity explosion reached forty-six states, Mexico, and Canada—a fact revealed only as recently as 2023.) After Trinity, these cover-ups continued in the form of denials that downwinders had been harmed at the Nevada Test Site, the Santa Susana Field Laboratory north of Los Angeles, the Hanford Engineer Works along the Columbia River, and elsewhere in the United States, across which some ninety thousand metric tons of radioactive waste are stored at commercial nuclear power plants and even more is held at military bases.

Thomas A. Bass
Professor of English and Journalism, University at Albany
Albany, N.Y.

All in Good Faith

With no disrespect to Carlo Acutis or his family [“A Millennial Saint,” Letter from Assisi, May], I am stunned that the Vatican can claim to employ “scientific experts,” including doctors, to confirm whether a miraculous event has occurred. The Vatican does not seem to clarify how these “experts” are chosen (though it does make clear that they receive only nominal payment), but I think that doctors and scientists who participate in this farce deserve to lose their professional memberships and licenses. It’s their right to pray on their own time, but not to use their professional qualifications to further muddy the waters between faith and reality. And as Tertullian might have added, any Catholic who needs a scientific explanation for unnatural events is lacking faith anyway.

Dan Littman
Oakland, Calif.