Letters for June 19, 2003

The Attorney General appears before Congress Committee to ask for revisions of the Patriot Act. He testifies that because of police surveillances on public libraries and customers, Ted “Unabomber” Kaczynski was captured. No, he was captured when [Kaczynski’s] brother read the Unabomber’s manifesto in a newspaper and called the FBI.

What can we trust? Revisions of the Patriot Act will give the President and Attorney General near dictatorial powers that will almost nullify our Constitution. These types of powers are foreign to American democracy.

For over 225 years, Americans have shed their blood during wartime in order to protect our Constitution. We need to let our government officials know that’s still the American way.

Scott Zorc
via e-mail

Keep Sparks nice
As a former Sparkonian or Sparkler or just plain Spark, I have to ask, what the hell is going on over there? From the “Great Wall of I Can’t See Sparks Anymore” being constructed on Interstate 80 to the complete uprooting of those old trees at McCarran Boulevard and Prater Way, Sparks is starting to scare me. Sparks has always been the little town that could without really having to try. It is sweet, quiet, homey and nice. Nice can be seen as a bad word, but for Sparks that is its best selling point. It’s nice there.

The “Wall of Mountains covering the view of real mountains” smells of money. The complete disregard for those big trees that have been there since that shopping center opened definitely smells of money. Whoever made that decision to take out those trees, let me clue you in. If your potential customers are so stupid that they can’t find their shopping destination because beautiful, living, growing trees obscure your neon signs, then you really don’t need them. There are many other potential wallets that you can tap into that have the ability to use their car’s steering wheel and get to where they need to go. If this letter has any affect on you, by all means, put the trees back. Oh wait, you can’t. It will take 20 years to replace what you’ve done. Definitely not nice.

David Herold
via e-mail

Artown or Moneytown
Re “Creative differences” [RN&R, Letters, June 12]:

As a former employee of the Reno-Sparks Convention & Visitors Authority (a sponsor of last year’s Artown), I feed compelled to join the fray. Andrew Dicus picked up an important theme in his discussion of culture and the ends to which it is used in his letter to the editor last week.

Commercial sponsorship of the arts is a murky business. At institutions like the RSCVA, the arts are by and large discussed as another draw to book room nights and promote tourism in the Truckee Meadows.

The mindset is similar along Virginia Street. You will not find a large population of hotel/casino executives who have the patience or foresight to support a community of artists if it doesn’t bring them a quick return. Artown capitalizes on this, promising out-of-town visitation to casino owners and community enrichment to Reno citizens. Exhibitions like last year’s sheep are the result of this art as marketing tool—a way corporations can get their names associated with “cultural” goods.

Culture, as a word and an idea, springs from the idea of cultivation. It is not particular to the arts, but to the community as a whole and how it lives. Patronage has a long, illustrious history within the arts community. In fact, it was the source of funding for most works created during the Italian Renaissance. Done with the right intentions, that’s cultivation. But doling out money to arts organizations only to take advantage of name association is shortsighted.

Rob Tocalino
via e-mail

Correction:
In a story, “War council,” RN&R, March 20, which examined the issue of whether war protesters could use audio-visual equipment in Reno City Council chambers, City Attorney Patricia Lynch was quoted as saying that Guy Felton once displayed pornography on overhead visual equipment. This statement is untrue. Lynch was misquoted. We apologize for any distress our error may have caused Mr. Felton or Patricia Lynch.

In a June 12 memo to Guy Felton, City Attorney Patricia Lynch wrote that she’d been misquoted, "What I said was that you had sued the city for alleged wrongful arrest and that you were always trying to use the audiovisual equipment during public comment. I then said that another person had put up what we though might have been pornography and that person was talking about child pornography at the time. I can understand where Mr. [Brad] Summerhill might have misunderstood me because of the din and confusion at the time, but I never said that you were the individual who tried to display pornography to the Council. …"