Correspondence
Correspondence To the Editor: I write to offer serious objection to the tone and content of your lead editorial, "Hard Times for Endangered Species," in the May issue. Its principle fault, amply...
...Its principle fault, amply illustrated by the most curius convulsions of reasoning, is the positing of a flamboyantly false dilemma: the contention that a desire to preserve from extinction our endangered coinhabitants of the planet requires the rejection of valid human claims and interests...
...Tyrrell, on the other hand, liberated from his mammalian ancestry, glories in the predacious capabilities of his species, its presumed imperturbability to the face of its devastations...
...or, even worse, our inaction would have caused World War III, so that no one would be fighting anybody...
...Your serious articles often spark lengthy debate...
...Sincerely, Donald Atwell Zoll Professor Arizona State University Tyrrell Replies: All those homely strictures about not driving automobiles while under the influence can also be applied to the use of a typewriter...
...For example, at my campus this spring a leading Marxist, Herbert Marcuse, stated "The domino theory is correct" and continued by saying that as soon as the United States and its allies have been defeated in Vietnam the world "liberation" movement can redouble its momentum...
...These factors continue to make this a time of some uncertainty in Washington...
...Keep it up...
...Therefore, the next few months should prove most interesting...
...Jacqueline Kasun U.C...
...Kasun does, to cling to the false notions that got us there in the first place...
...Your publication obviously purports to attract such readers, so there would seem to be no excuse for the kind of diatribe that makes up this editorial...
...Quite aside from the fact that this premise is a reckless post hoc assertion, it is empirically unsupportable...
...Finkelman has weakened this thesis...
...Certainly we have been treated, from time to time, with colorful examples of anthropocentric hubris, of promethean bravado, but few compare in terms of utter brashness with Mr...
...I also liked the pieces by Paul Weaver, Roger Rosenblatt, and, not least, your invaluable Bascom C. Slemp...
...Tyrrell has seen fit, in an almost sophomoric pique, to denounce what D.H...
...In the Senate, Hugh Scott will be working to line up the support he will need to hang on to the leadership position he almost lost to Tennessee's Howard Baker two years ago...
...On the contrary, however, I feel that your editorial entitled "Clod Populism's Man of Change" (page three of your October issue) seriously damages that cause...
...But this particular editorial, I feel, descends to the depths of murky thinking and unnecessary mud-slinging...
...He and his friends tried to cover all the bases during the campaign by putting money into most close races so that he would at least get a hearing from the new members...
...Bill Buckley can't go on intimidating Gore Vidal forever...
...Perhaps Mr...
...Kasun Replies: Mr...
...This strange thesis is supported by such gems of logic as the following...
...Right on...
...For example, he is on the record with the promise to veto legislation that could force taxes up such as the tax quota highering policy pushed during his first term by HEW and Office of Education officials...
...Tyrrell, who flippantly state that "I shall be no more disconsolate when the last monkey-eating eagle assumes room temperature than when the last Austrian Archduke croaks" display an omnibus insensitivity to natural phenomena that most certainly includes a lack of a delicate regard for the human condition...
...The die, however, will be cast by the beginning of February and we should then know which direction the President will be taking during at least the next year or so.l be taking during at least the next year or so...
...Thus, our involvement in Vietnam was based on the belief that we were "keeping the world safe for democracy" (a thoroughly commendable objective, obviously...
...I hope so...
...The record of our involvement in Vietnam is sad enough, but the tragedy is compounded if we continue, as Ms...
...One suspects that individuals such as Mr...
...Tyrrell, in deploring George McGovern's candidacy, and I feel that articles such as Alan Reynolds' dispassionate, measured and specific appraisal of "McGovern's Muddled Economics" (page five of your October issue) are most valuable in promoting our common cause...
...What underlies Mr...
...It does not appear that Mr...
...To place art or nature or ethical values upon some scale of subjective appetite is to reduce society to the level of the stock exchange...
...The view expressed by Mr...
...had responded with force in the Rhineland in the 1930s, it was about what might have happened if the U.S...
...Tyrrell is an unreconstructed devotee of Bishop Wilberforce, unwilling to accept his naturalistic genesis, but if this be the case, his problem does not consist alone in his scientific naivete, but what can only be described as a rather typical, alas, case of alienation from the taproots of human nature...
...Tyrrell's volatile invocation of hominoid independence is revenge, the not too covert urge to inflict punishment on the realm of nature as a target for anxiety, frustration, and to erase the offensive imperi-ousness of man's fellow creatures...
...But let me assure you the wait was well worthwhile (no alliteration intended...
...The North Vietnamese effort to subdue the rest of Indochina is, of course, generously supported by the Soviet Union and PR China, in spite of their split, as well as other countries in the communist world which Mr...
...I guess I was wrong...
...Lawrence once called "cosmic piety...
...Each month the entire office rollicks to the "Continuing Crisis," "Current Wisdom" and other features...
...Finkelman has refuted a number of arguments which were not in my article, which had as one of its main points the observation that to the extent a limited war achieves its objectives it must itself appear to have been unnecessary...
...Name Withheld Washington To the Editor: Jacqueline R. Kasun's "A Rhineland Fantasy" (October) is, of course, not at all about what might have happened if the U.S...
...Tyrrell is a not untypical illustration of a tendency in contemporary conservatism to view conservation as the preservation of those facets of immediate life thought to be subjectively gratifying...
...Sincerely, Howard A.Gardner Chicago, Illinois Establishmentarians: Gads...
...I would assume, not without some justification, that those, like Mr...
...Piety, you may recall, originally meant reverence for one's origins...
...Tyrrell, beyond an obvious' fascination for somewhat crude provocative rhetoric, are simply aesthetically and possibly ethically obtuse...
...or two, that there exists a monolithic entity called Communism, that, like Hitler's Nazism, has a definite and well-coordinated plan to dominate the world by military means...
...San Diego SLEMP (continued from page 17) that preceded it...
...Please forgive me for not signing my name, but I am a staff member in the office of a United States senator and do not wish to see the boss' name in your "Letters to Plunkitt" column...
...Tyrrell does not react as others do to the beauty and tragedy of nature, but I can no more compel him to so react than I can coerce others to enjoy Brahms or the vocal art of Birgit Nillson, but, too, such lack of responsiveness is, per se, no justification for the closing of concert halls and opera houses or, for that matter, the continued destruction of endangered species...
...White House staff people are maneuvering and moving around not knowing how things are going to turn out...
...He barely beat Baker two years ago and several of those who supported him then will not be returning in January...
...No one knows who will oppose Scott this time, but Colorado's Gordon Allott has been prominently mentioned and Baker himself might be interested in another run at it...
...Both these premises are false...
...The clear implication is that if we hadn't decided to fight the Communists in the jungles of Vietnam in 1965, we'd be fighting them in the jungles of Central Park in 1972...
...Not since Mencken on Wilson's academic flatulence, on Harding's "Gamalielese," on more appropriately here the inane populism of William Jennings Bryan have I read anything more splendidly in the Mencken tradition than your assessment of the Clod Populist, McGovern...
...Keep up the good work...
...You are needed...
...In addition, the men who will be taking those seats and some of the new people who should have been elected on November 7 will give the Republican party and the Senate a considerably more conservative cast...
...had not intervened with force in Vietnam in the 1960s...
...Of course I am distressed that Mr...
...And I had thought that the events of the past few years, most notably the Sino-Soviet conflict, had laid to rest any lingering notions of a "worldwide Communist conspiracy...
...There are occasional signs that The Alternative may yet fill the gap...
...To the Editor: Your superb editorial on McGovern could hardly have been improved upon by the great H.L...
...R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...Mencken whose absence from the scene I keep lamenting more all the time...
...I think that the people who got us into Vietnam had been so scarred (sic) understandably by World War II that they were determined not to repeat the mistakes that led to it...
...I do urge the study of Mencken on all of you...
...He may also deal with a different and possibly more independent Republican party, and with a new Congress that could be quite different from the one he has dealt with during the last four years...
...Tyrrell's exuberant essay...
...Finkelman that the United States' action in Vietnam is merely frustrating the legitimate desires of a small country for independence is not widely shared outside of the American anti-war movement...
...But a hearing may be all that he will get...
...This argument rests on at least one of two faulty premises: one, that Ho Chi Minh was really Adolph Hitler, or a reasonable facsimile thereof...
...If either runs and wins, the President will face a decidedly different situation in dealing with the Senate during the next session...
...Your fine and worthwhile publication usually makes good use of light whimsy and humor to make its points...
...Cordially, Ron K. Javers Editorial Page Editor Philadelphia Daily News To the Editor: As a regular reader of your magazine I was greatly dismayed to learn that you do not publish during the summer months...
...In my opinion it is so pompous and verbose and passionately and sneeringly belittling as to approach demagoguery in its worst form...
...It's an insult to intelligent readers who like to read or hear the facts, and then render their own pertinent judgments...
...Sincerely, David Finkelman Santa Clara, Ca...
...It does a disservice to the cause we both espouse...
...During the campaign the President locked himself into certain positions, made a few promises, and ruled out certain courses of action...
...to that end, he allied himself with Communists...
...Robert Nisbet University of Arizona To the Editor: I take no back seat to anyone, Mr...
...these curious persons who adore the orangutan often end up abominating their own country and civilization...
...That these motivations, in the public eye, can be connected to some even exotic variety of conservatism is much to be lamented...
...Ho Chi Minh's main interest was Vietnam's independence...
...Conservatives with a touch of grace and wit...
...Finkelman implies does not really exist...
...No reasonable observer can deny that man, along with other mammals, is a predator, but the honest predation of the natural order involves both a survival requirement and what I would judge to be a melancholy acceptance of the necessity of predation...
Vol. 6 • December 1972 • No. 3
