I refuse to publish canned emails--I have received them on other topics, many of them generated by the same software ACS uses--for a number of reasons. The people represented in this letters column are readers of the Spectacle--people who bothered to spend some time here. By responding to something they read, they are acting as members of a community of Spectacle readers. People who click the "send" button on someone else's site have either never been here, or even if they have, are unaware which publications they are contacting when they press the convenient button. No relationship, no community, equals no publication here of their letters.

Secondly, I will not publish these emails because they are not original work. The people sending them are parroting the words of someone unknown to me with a hidden agenda. Though I was able to identify the puppet-master in this case as the American Cancer Society, whose goals I share (I lost my father, my aunt, and two close friends to cancer and expect to go that way myself), I still refuse to publish letters which were secretly written by someone other than the person who sent them to me.

Finally, this is spam. It is very irritating to delete two hundred mails a day. My spam filter will not catch it, because the mail appears to come from each individual and does not meet the criteria for commercial spam. It would be sad indeed if I had to tweak the filter to look for phrases like "cancer research".

I formerly had tremendous respect for ACS. I think the organization made a very bad choice, perhaps driven by ignorance, when it chose to run this spam software on its site.

Jonathan Wallace jw@bway.net