Batch 1

Dear Mr. President,

I’ll admit that I am stalling right now, trying to think of a good enough reason to write to you, when I should be finishing a lab report for a class on Ice Age Earth, and reading Emerson’s “Self-Reliance.” But then I remembered what I learned once in Psychology class—that you retain 90% of what you have learned if you teach it to someone else. So, I think it would benefit you and me both if I attempt to teach you something in the course of this letter. I will do so now:

1. Glaciers are friendly giants. They also form the most spectacular scenery in the world. When you wander on the hills formed by terminal moraine, or gaze at the craggy and rugged beauty of a U-shaped valley, you are following in the footsteps of giants—giant glaciers, that is.

2. Glaciers are self-perpetuating. If—hypothetically—the world were somehow set into a nuclear winter, and its surface was cooled enough for the glaciers of today to grow even a relatively small amount, the reflective properties of ice would lessen the warming effects of the sun, so that the glaciers would not melt in the summer as quickly as they would grow in the winter. Once the earth decides it likes winter more than summer, we can’t have summer for a long, long time.

3. Emerson was a nonconformist, and wants us all to be nonconformists too. Even you, Mr. President. He believed that the greatest men and women of the past were those who ignored antiquity and consistency in order to follow their intuition and the spark of genius that was present in their spirit. He ends his essay titled “Self-Reliance” thus: “Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of your principles.” Thus principle—that guidance upon which we base all action and meditation—will lead nowhere else, but to peace.

Thank you, Mr. President, for your time. I certainly have learned something, and I had fun doing it. I hope that you, in your considerable position, might find it useful to know the things I have just told you. Remember, the things you already know might surprise you. And they might surprise us too. “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” Now no more fooling around—I’ve got to finish my homework.

Sincerely,
A Concerned Citizen

Dear Mr. President,

I was wondering if you could feed my cats for me this weekend. I am planning to visit my sister in San Diego, and I haven’t been able to find someone else to do it.

Their names are Moo and Mao. (Moo is the fluffy one). They might not come inside the house for you, so if that happens just make sure they have some water on the front porch, and I will take care of them on Sunday.

Let me know if you need a key.

Sincerely,
Kyle Herrman

Dear Mr. President,

Yesterday I took a nap with a boy. I should not have napped with him because he likes me very much. He said that the he hadn’t been that close to a woman in six years. He said that the girls in Texas don’t like him very much. We talked about you for a bit.

Earlier in the day I gave my first puppet performance. My puppet is a pregnant woman with a cigarette dangling out of her mouth. She did a dance to “All by Myself,” and one of her strings broke while I was on stage.

Sincerely,
Kathleen Quinlisk

Dear Mr. President,

This coffee is delicious!

Sincerely,
Levi MacLeish Fuller

Dear Mr. President,

I’m Canadian, so maybe this doesn’t count. But what I have to say relates as much to your policies as it does to ours, so what the heck:

A couple of years ago I was teaching English at a night school for immigrants and refugees. I had a great class. They all worked full-time and then came to school at night, which must have taken some discipline, given that there were Russians and Afghanis and Indians and Pakistanis and so on, Serbs and Croatians, all sitting crowded around the same little cluster of tables. But they would bring in food for each other, and help each other with their homework, and laugh at each other’s jokes.

So, Mr. President, I had this one student, Rahim, who was the greatest. He worked at a Kleenex factory from seven in the morning to five at night, then he grabbed a bite to eat and booted it over to school from six to nine. His homework was always done, and he was always helping to set up little events for the class—field trips, parties, that sort of thing. And he was hilarious. We would do these role-playing exercises for conversation practice, where one of the students would be, say, a doctor, and the other was the patient, and this one time Rahim, to get in character as the doctor, put on these goggles that he brought from work, and then he strutted around stroking his chin and saying “Hmmm,” and tapping the other student (a Russian psychology professor) on the head, and—well, it was the way he did it—the class convulsed for several minutes.

So here’s the thing: Rahim was from Iraq. He had a wife and daughter who were still over there, and he was trying to scrape together enough money to sponsor them here. For an Iraqi to sponsor a family member in Canada at that time, he had to show proof that he had $10,000 in the bank. But that’s not your fault. That’s something I have to take up with the Canadian government.

What’s your fault, Mr. President, is that while Rahim was scraping together the money to sponsor his daughter, she was growing up in a place without medicine. Or clean water, or enough to eat. I mean, something like one in every eight kids her age was dying. When she was born, Mr. President, there were still functioning schools and hospitals in Iraq. By the time she was seven years old, there effectively weren’t. And you could see that it was wearing on Rahim, although he tried not to show it. Sometimes he would come to class with dark circles under his eyes, and afterwards he would come up and ask me if I knew of any part-time jobs he could take on the weekend, because the $10,000 was still months or years away and soon his daughter would be eight years old, and he just had to see her.

My point is: those sanctions are inhumane. I mean, I don’t think too much of Saddam Hussein (nor, I might add, did Rahim); but bombing and starving and denying medicine to little kids isn’t going to help matters. I mean, that’s pretty much the definition of evil, right? Killing babies? And you don’t want to be evil, do you, Mr. President? Probably you aren’t looking at it that way; probably you’re thinking about strategic matters—how much more legitimacy your presidency would have if you were to stage a “victorious war” against people who’d been weakened by years of deprivation. But really, when you come right down to it, you’re still just killing little kids.

I haven’t seen Rahim in a couple of years, but I still think a lot about him and his wife and his daughter, and the more I think, the madder I get. That probably doesn’t perturb you in the least. But I can’t help but wonder: if your policies can provoke simmering rage in a middle-class Canadian who’s admittedly got it pretty good, what are they provoking in the rest of the world?

Sincerely,
Wendy Banks

Dear Mr. President,

Down in Texas, or even Washington, you have probably never seen the Northern Lights. They are pieces of magnetic energy that rip waves across the North Pole 60-600 kilometers up, when the night is mostly cold, or at least dry.

I try to picture you as you might have been when you were a boy—running, swimming in the ocean where it is shallow enough for young boy swimming. I try to picture you learning about how hammers and nails work. I try to picture you growing a peanut plant from an unsalted nut inside a Dixie cup. I can hold the picture of you as a young boy in my head for about as long as I can hold one breath.

If you were an honorable man, if you had never accepted donations from tobacco companies who are responsible for 440,000 deaths a year, you might take care of us now that tobacco has killed my father. I tell my family, “I’ve tried picturing the president as a young boy and it doesn’t work. He has no idea that the rug in between the bed and the dresser is a river of lava. No tiny boy illustrations of one army lying in wait.”

I am the youngest and pointed out that in some foreign way supporting tobacco is kind of like supporting farmers, but my mother said that no honorable farmer is a killer.

Now a male cardinal nests in our backyard. We say he is our father, though we can’t be sure. Still, since my father has died, there have been many close experiences of color here, and we think the colors must be him—that he is now something like the Northern Lights, a bright thing without hands to hold.

My father is all the red of blood, but he is all the blue, black, and orange, purple, green and yellow too. He is everything you looked at when you were young and then, on a dare for a dollar, closed your eyes and stitched them shut for good.

Sincerely,
Samantha Hunt

Dear Mr. President,

I forgive you.

Sincerely,
Edward Urmston

Dear Mr. President,

Are there special presidential toothbrushes at the White House? What about soap and underarm deodorant?

Sincerely,
Dave Elfving

Dear Mr. President,

I think what you have done to the United States is despicable.

I live in New York. The way you treat the rest of the world has painted a target on our city. And yours. I am amazed, sometimes up to three times a day, at the stupid, stupid, stupid things you say and do.

After being amazed, I am often depressed, then scared.

Thanks a lot.

Sincerely,
John Mark

Dear Mr. President,

For some reason I can see you singing “El Paso,” by Marty Robins. I think that is a great song, but I don’t have as good a voice as he did. I like to sing Neil Diamond songs instead.

Sincerely,
Patrick Tsukuda

Dear Mr. President,

I have been asking you to Cut It With the Cowboy Antics for awhile now. When I think of Cowboy Antics, I think of shortsighted machismo and looking the other way as someone tests nuclear weapons where I used to graze my cattle. Real cowboys are compassionate. Like Willie Nelson and Barbara Boxer.

Wouldn’t it be lovely to cultivate people the way we might cultivate a fine beef, or milk producing animal: by investing in their health and well-being so they can grow to their greatest potential?

Imagine a whole ranch/country full of fully-realized humans.

Sincerely,
Sady Sullivan

Dear Mr. ,

As you know from your nearly two years in D.C., you’re incredibly fortunate that the White House has such a great location, mere blocks from a Tower Records outlet at 21st and H Streets, near the George Washington University campus. If your music collection’s been getting a little stale lately, I’d really advise you and Laura to take a walk there one evening and pick up a few new albums. I’d be pleased to make some recommendations.

No doubt you’ve already picked up Beck’s new album, Sea Change, as it’s been on the shelves for a few weeks. But on the off-chance that you still haven’t done yourself the pleasure, please do yourself a favor and get a copy this week if you have time. You really won’t regret it. It’s melancholy and orchestral and sometimes just heartbreaking. Moreover, it’s mature and cerebrally emotional. You probably still think of Beck as a guy who writes funky, loopy, layered albums like Odelay and Midnite Vultures, but this one really is a departure. I recommend it highly.

You’d probably also love the new one by the Soft Boys, Nextdoorland, the band’s first release in more than 22 years. You’re forgiven any skepticism, but it really sounds almost as though they’d never broken up. And it’s nice to hear Robyn Hitchcock’s somewhat restrained songwriting this time around. I don’t know their tour schedule, but they’re probably playing the 9:30 club, at 8th and V Streets NW next week.

I understand you’re also a Sigur Rós fan, and they’ve got a new one coming out at the end of this month, called ( ). That’s right, the album doesn’t have a name, and neither do any of the eight tracks on it. But it’s pretty amazing stuff, it flies off in directions that Agætis Byrjun didn’t.

Have you heard Luna’s new seven-song EP, Close Cover Before Striking? Also a real winner, especially in light of their previous album, Romantica, which came out earlier this year and which I found a little lacklustre.

What else? DJ Shadow’s Private Press is a terrific piece of music, a great thing to listen to while driving around the Bronx, as I did one night a few weeks ago on the way back from a wedding upstate. The Mekons have a great new album, OOOH (Out Of Our Heads)! And Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is an incredibly accomplished, complex piece of music. I was less taken with, Geogaddi, the newest effort by Boards of Canada, and Cornershop’s Handcream for a Generation is growing on me, but very slowly.

Let me know how you enjoy these albums, and good luck with the shopping. Talk soon.

Sincerely,
Todd Pruzan

[NOTE: The opinions expressed in these letters do not necessarily represent those of McSweeney’s, Knopf, or Gabe Hudson.]