To Joe Dumas and My Reading Public (which I’m guessing is shrinking),

A certain friend of Joe’s has written to me to suggest that I ought not to have broadcast my “personal” attack.  On looking over what I sent, I regret one phrase, the accusation that you are “self-blind.”  For that phrase I apologize.  Truly, I mean it.  I seem to be having to apologize a lot today.

I think, however, that mostly my message merely connected dots that most people who are not so anti-government long ago connected for themselves, the dots between the taxpayer and the professor at the public institution that is made an affordable institution for the masses by precisely the sorts of government subsidies of professorial salaries and other expenses that Libertarian philosophy finds so abhorrent.  People vote.  They elect officials who vote on taxes.  The taxpayers write the checks.  Folks hired by the state get paid.  That’s how it works.  The buildings and offices we work in are paid for by the state.  I know three, maybe four, self-professed Libertarians.  Every last one of them is on the public bankroll.  I find that hypocritical to a certain extent, and I will continue to be unafraid to point it out.  

The real root of my anger was that Joe implied that the rural folks he met had “taken care of their own” while the urban poor, many of whom paid with their lives, lacked the gumption or the human sympathy to help out their neighbors or themselves.  No, tha
Christopher Stuart
UC Foundation Associate Professor
English Department
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga