"To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend." - Jacques Derrida

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13th January:

SIR – At the last election I voted Green because the party is strongest on public-transport issues. My mother voted Conservative, because she always has, and my neighbour voted Labour because she felt sorry for the prime minister. I am left unconvinced of the efficacy of the political statement I made. Voting is important, of course, but it is a blunt tool that we should use to favour politicians who listen. We also need to give them something to listen to and the way we consume sends a focused signal about what is important to us. Ethical shopping, like politics, may not be a simple activity, but let's not use this as an excuse to rubbish the pursuit of our goals.

David Martin
Much Birch, Herefordshire


20th January:

SIR – My research shows that countries with a higher economic and social quality of life have a higher suicide-rate. It may be that, as capitalism makes us wealthier and we can buy what we desire, we can no longer blame an external situation for our misery and are forced to realise that our unhappiness has its source in our own minds.

David Lester
Blackwood, New Jersey

SIR – An article that is written as a paean to contemporary country music jangles one almost as much as having to endure the stuff every day in just about every shop, garage and (yes) bank that one is forced to frequent (“Middle America's soul”, December 23rd). Not to mention being forced to listen to it while placed on hold during a phone call. Subtle as a sledgehammer, these maudlin musings set to tunes leave no musical or lyrical clichés untouched or any irony unexplained in their appeal to what Larry the Cable Guy, a redneck comic, calls country music's “patriotic fan base”. Forty years or so ago the musical “British invasion” changed rock 'n roll for the better. Would that something similar could happen today and make country music listenable.

J. Edari
Allenford, Canada

SIR – Perhaps you could explain how, notwithstanding a combination of conservative values and old-time religion, the “too sensible” and “God-fearing, rural-thinking folk” of states such as Arkansas, Kentucky and Tennessee have some of the highest rates of teenage pregnancy, road death and divorce in America?

Robert King
Brookfield, Australia


"They poison the mind and corrupt the morals of the young, who waste their time sitting on sofas immersed in dangerous fantasy worlds. That, at least, was the charge levelled against novels during the 18th century by critics worried about the impact of a new medium on young people. Today the idea that novels can harm people sounds daft. And that is surely how history will judge modern criticism of video games, which are accused of turning young people into violent criminals...

Criticism of games is merely the latest example of a tendency to demonise new and unfamiliar forms of entertainment. In 1816 waltzing was condemned as a “fatal contagion” that encouraged promiscuity; in 1910 films were denounced as “an evil pure and simple, destructive of social interchange”; in the 1950s rock 'n' roll music was said to turn young people into “devil worshippers” and comic books were accused of turning children into drug addicts and criminals. In each case the pattern is the same: young people adopt a new form of entertainment, older people are spooked by its unfamiliarity and condemn it, but eventually the young grow up and the new medium becomes accepted—at which point another example appears and the cycle begins again."