David Oates has us happily swimming in the ocean of his imaginative approach to teaching literature to college kids (HCN, 4/16/07). That’s for the first five paragraphs.

Then he pulls the plug and leaves us high and dry, blistered by his attack on the current federal administration for its, to him, lack of imagination. In fact, the government may have had a lack of information, but there was plenty of imagination in the announced intention to bring democracy and self-government to a part of the world woefully lacking in those attributes.

In any case, it is a strange article to publish in High Country News, as it has so little to do with either high country, the West (except for Oates’ fondness for Portland’s boundaries), or environmental problems.

OK, it’s normal for environmentalists to be politically leftist, but it is by no means obligatory. Some of us have moved several steps to the right, motivated by the growing attacks on our institutions and our security from the resolute and terrorist Islamist movement, that aims to have us all live under Shari’a — or die!

John M. Worlock
> Salt Lake City, Utah<B>