ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Thursday is the day we read from your e-mail. And we received quite a few impassioned comments about our coverage of John Kerry's self described botched joke about education and the military and President Bush.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
Bethany Stackhouse of Tacoma, Washington, was not impressed. She writes, “Is there nothing better you could be covering as the top story this close to Election Day? Instead of wasting many minutes of airtime on this trivial statement, why not focus on the actual state of things in Iraq or the actual cost of education that drives so many young people to join the military to pay tuition. Those are subjects worthy of NPR.”
SIEGEL: Listener Kit Howard was unhappy with some of Mara Liasson's remarks during that story.
BLOCK: Howard writes, “Today her bias clearly showed with comments regarding John Kerry, such as, all Democrats want to hide after his statement. Well, I'm a Democrat and want Ms, Liasson to know she doesn't speak for me or any other Democrat out there. Shame on her.”
SIEGEL: All this week NPR's Guy Raz has been reporting on the language that has become part of our vocabulary since September 11th. Yesterday's term was war on terror. And Glenn Quinnett(ph) of Providence, Rhode Island, was happy that we included it in the series.
He writes, “The term and the use of it has been a point of extreme exasperation for me since its introduction as part of the administration's rhetoric. I cringe every time it is used, especially by journalists, because it is a political phrase loaded with the implications Guy Raz so ably detailed. I only wish it could have been confronted five years ago before it established such prominence in both our national discussion and our national policy.”
BLOCK: And Stephen Cominsky of Greenville, South Carolina, calls the report “an excellent summary of the limitations of labeling our post-9/11 response a war on terror.” He continues, “What Guy did not mention was the struggle we all had in the first few days following the attacks trying to find the right set of words to describe what had happened. We settled on the language of war. But if, as George Orwell tell us, language shapes thought, we may have followed a wholly different and possibly more defensible course had we framed our response with the words of crime and justice.”
SIEGEL: Finally, a clarification. On yesterday's program music critic Robert Christgau's was reviewing singer Maria Muldaur's new CD, which features Bob Dylan's love songs. And he said this -
ROBERT CHRISTGAU: I mean, when a few minutes later she reaches the strange lines Genghis Khan could not keep all his men supplied with sheep, I got a whole new idea of what those sheep are for.
SIEGEL: Well, there seems to be some debate over whether the actual lyric is sheep or sleep.
BLOCK: Listener Ed Gorowitz of Inclined Village, Nevada, writes, “Any Dylan neophyte knows that the word in the song is sleep and generally is taken to refer to drugs.”
SIEGEL: We got in touch with Maria Muldaur as she was traveling to her gig in Tucson, and we asked her what she thought Bob Dylan was singing.
Ms. MARIA MULDAUR (Musician): Genghis Khan he could not keep all his men supplied with - we didn't know whether it was sleep or sheep. So we decided sheep was a lot funnier, so we sang that. And it kind of makes more since on a lot of levels that we don't need to go into. But, you know, it makes a lot more sense.
BLOCK: Whether you think we make sense or not, please write to us. Go to NPR.org and click on Contact Us at the top of the page.
(Soundbite of song, “You Ain't Going Nowhere”)
Ms. MULDAUR: (Singing) Genghis Khan, he could not keep all his men supplied with sheep. We're going to climb that hill no matter how steep when we get on up to it. Yeah. Oh, ride me high. Tomorrow's the day that my man's coming home. Oh, yeah. We're gonna slide down into the easy chair. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.