Mail call

LITTLE ROCK — Dear Curious,

In response to your question-who’s going to win this year’s presidential election-allow me to borrow Mark Twain’s response on a similar occasion:

Ma’am, I am gratified to answer your question. I don’t know.

Also, I always call ’em wrong.

Instead of following the polls or newspapers or television talk shows you mention as your guides, I’d go by the economy. The incumbent president’s chances have a way of improving in direct proportion to the economy’s.

When it comes to presidential elections, gas prices may prove a better indicator than Gallup polls.

No poll watcher,

———

Dear Alert Reader,

I can’t say it was wholly a pleasure to receive a letter from so perspicacious a gentleman taking exception to one of our editorials.

In our innocence, we’d assumed our opinion was as unassailable as ever.

But leave it to your critical eye to find the flaw in it.

We were particularly proud of our observation, intended to be acerbic, that the state’s lottery commission is now flirting with the idea of letting the suckers use debit cards to buy their lottery tickets, and so might soon enough let them use their credit cards, too. And let them get in financial trouble even faster.

Why not, we added with a rhetorical flourish, offer a payroll deduction for lottery tickets?

That way, folks could go into debt automatically.

But you just had to point out that We the People already have that option in Arkansas, though the deduction “does not begin until one has been playing the lottery for an extended period of time. It is called a court-ordered garnishment.’’

Touché!

Dear Dittohead,

It was not wholly a surprise that you weren’t pleased with my response to your email criticizing our most recent editorial about Mr. Rush Limbaugh. A number of readers, bless every one of them, are always disappointed when we don’t just echo his views and those of his fans, aka dittoheads.

I try to answer each angry letter politely. (“It’s always good to hear another point of view,” “We learn most from our critics,” or a variant thereof.) And remember to invite our critics to send us a letter to the editor, too, for why should we be the sole beneficiary of their heated views? That’s part of what being an editor should be about-encouraging a robust exchange of opinion.

But inevitably there are some correspondents who aren’t satisfied with such a response and invitation, and would like to keep arguing the point. As if the editorial didn’t make our position sufficiently clear. Which is no great compliment to the clarity of our prose.

I could sense your dissatisfaction with my stock response in your brief but exasperated message: “You say the same thing every time.”

Dear lady, I say the same thing every time because it applies every time. We are happy to hear a different point of view. We do learn most from our critics. We do welcome letters to the editor. And I really don’t have anything to add to our editorial. Or I would have added it.

I suppose I could have just repeated the gist of our opinion, but I wouldn’t want to risk boring you(and myself) by just going over the same ground.

Nor am I about to argue with a lady in private when she can share her thoughts with the entire state, not just with me, via our Letters column. Indeed, that’s the purpose of our Letters column-to let our readers have their say.

I’m certainly not going to argue with your position out of public earshot. With me, what I know, our readers know. Which is why I make a policy of never going off the record.

And I’m certainly not going to follow Mr. Limbaugh’s example and call you a slut or prostitute, and expect you to accept such epithets as-how did you put it in your defense of his rhetoric?-earthy conservative opinion.

I was not raised that way, ma’am, and it’s too late for this grandfather to learn bad manners, or want to.

I, too, believe in free speech, and would no more prevent Mr.

Limbaugh from exercising his right to it than I would give up our right to call a boor a boor, or to point out that a conservative honors the customs, manners and traditions of the past by practicing them in the present-rather than ignoring them.

Yours for civility and the Southern graces,

Inky Wretch

Paul Greenberg is editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. E-mail him at: pgreenberg@arkansasonline.com