Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR MUTTS AND MEDICARE Karl E. Meyer's clever article, "Of Mutts and Medicare" (NL, June 25), exposes some of the paradoxes in the Medicare polemic. How strange, for instance, that more...
...They give a lot of benefit to many people who have perfectly sufficient income to take care of themselves...
...It seems to me that it is the responsibility of journalists such as Karl Meyer to help us maintain the difference between them...
...Anthony Netboy CORRECTION A small misprint has unfortunately quite obscured a major point in my review of the Snows' collection of Russian stories ("The Snows and Burintern Solidarity," NL, June 11...
...What possible interpretation of our Constitution gives anyone the right to health assistance paid for under a compulsory Federal program...
...and that more is spent for alcoholic beverages and cigarettes than for all hospital and doctor bills...
...It was in this last period that Beethoven created the Missa Solemnis, the Ninth Symphony, the five last quartets...
...Such sustained development in the case of an artist who reaches years of maturity, is a rare and important phenomenon...
...SYNGMAN RHEE'S OVERTHROW Just a few lines to correct a factual mistake in Reinhold Niebuhr's recent piece, "Can Democracy Work...
...Perhaps the neurotic's intense disturbance opens to him unconscious depths which contain mythopoetic materials of great power and universality...
...THE REAL BEETHOVEN May I express my disapproval of Albert Goldman's article, "The Real Beethoven," in your issue of June 25...
...fantasies of a paranoic order...
...Pittsburgh Patrick J. McDonough, M.D...
...Can these works be the product of a mind in moral dissolution...
...Thus the Rhee regime was overthrown not by a military coup, but by student revolution—a unique historical phenomenon...
...Hyman's recent pieces on Herman Wouk and William Faulkner are two notable examples of his refreshingly good work...
...Meyer further suggests that the American Medical Association must feel it is unAmerican for anyone not to want to pay his medical bills...
...Perhaps Meyer should reread American history...
...Yet Goldman judges Beethoven only by his letters and some psychoanalytic interpretation of them, disregarding—and even degrading—-his music, which is the noblest expression of the real Beethoven...
...How strange, for instance, that more is spent for pet food than baby food...
...Actually, in April 1960, after 12 years of rule, Rhee succumbed to the pressure of defiant young Korean students, who staged bloody demonstrations in the streets of Seoul and other cities...
...Are we, in fact, concerned with the problem of medical care for the elderly...
...a life-long neurosis which completely frustrated Beethoven's sexual emotions and eventually perverted them into a fantastic effort to substitute himself for the mother of an adolescent boy [his nephew...
...a highly disturbed and slowly deteriorating personality...
...If medical care for the elderly is important enough to warrant all the sound and fury lately cast upon the waters of public opinion, it would seem that it is also important enough to warrant a reasonably objective analysis of the subject for those of us who have already been confronted with a vast repetitive onslaught of emotional and baseless reasons, both for and against Medicare...
...NL, May 28...
...In addition, there are some dark allusions that one day Beethoven's letters may reveal even more...
...Or are we concerned with changing the meaning of the Constitution...
...The questions I would ask of recent Medicare proposals are: Would it be wise to adopt a grossly inadequate compulsory program for the whole country just to avoid embarrassing the small percentage of indigents who don't want to apply for medical care under the existing Kerr-Mills legislation...
...Professor Walter W. Heller, Chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, says, in a national magazine: "Even the excess exemptions for the aged and the blind are in the last analysis an impediment to economic growth simply because they erode the tax base...
...Nor must we allow moral idealism to interfere with our understanding of either art or neurosis...
...Clearly it is contrary to the spirit of free enterprise and even unconstitutional...
...It certainly is outrageous that the Founding Fathers stuck such stuff in the Constitution...
...But then, is it really so strange...
...Niebuhr stated that "the corrupt regime of Syngman Rhee" was overthrown by a military coup...
...Perhaps he will lead the movement to restore literary criticism to the high standards set, in former days, by such magazines as the Dial and the American Mercury...
...Of course, this is a very brief summary of the case...
...The greatest music Beethoven ever wrote is to be found in the last quartets and the music of every decade before the final period has greater music than its predecessor...
...Reading articles such as Karl Meyer's "Of Mutts and Medicare," I become somewhat alarmed...
...Sullivan writes that no reader of Beethoven's letters can doubt that he was exceptionally insensitive to language as an instrument for expressing his thoughts and feelings...
...Meyer suggests that the proponents of Medicare feel that the end to be achieved is not providing adequate medical care for the elderly but rather establishing the principle of health care through Social Security...
...It has infused the pages of your magazine with some of the most forthright commentaries on current books available in the English-speaking world...
...The United States, I think he will find, did not achieve greatness by copying programs adopted by other nations...
...Seoul Kim Yong-koo HYMAN I want to commend The New Leader for the remarkably vital and honest literary criticism of Stanley Edgar Hyman...
...He ought immediately to launch a campaign to expunge the phrase "general welfare" from the Preamble of the Constitution, or at least to modify it to read "general welfare except for health...
...While President Kennedy proclaims the inability of the aged to pay for medical care...
...Do we throw out the spirit of free enterprise and interpose Federal controls on the medical profession and., in fact, on all employees who must by law pay Social Security premiums, or do we respect the spirit of the Constitution, which guarantees to every man the right to earn his own way and to make of it what he will...
...Is this Beethoven, perhaps the greatest genius of music of all time...
...At a time when literary criticism in the United States, as practiced by reviewers for the commercial weeklies and literary magazines, has fallen to abysmal depths, it is heartening to read a critic who seems to have standards, who speaks with authority, and who, most wonderful of all, has a feeling for language and artistic performance...
...Meyer infers that a national program of health insurance should be instituted in the United States because, among other reasons, it has been adopted "in every other major democracy...
...D. S. Dearing Karl E. Meyer replies: D. S. Dearing is too moderate...
...I do not doubt Meyer's ability to be amusing, I do, however, doubt his judgment...
...South Miami, Fla...
...London Robert Conquest...
...Or perhaps Dearing should reread American history...
...We are still very far from understanding it, but this much seems clear: Men who would be clinically described as neurotic, psychopathic or even psychotic have produced masterpieces of art, even during periods of the most intense emotional disturbance...
...Goldman gives us a distressingly terrifying picture of Beethoven: "a character and a story of character dissolution that is without parallel in the history of the arts...
...It is painful to find an article of such destructive character in the pages of The New Leader...
...The principle of Federal controls and enlarged bureaucratic programs is foreign to my understanding of the spirit of American constitutional democracy...
...This is a republic—not a blandly beneficial welfare state...
...Portland, Ore...
...In any case, we must not reduce the paradox of the sick artist and his healthy art to an inoffensive cliche by imputing to the artist a normalcy which exists only in his art...
...Referring to the latest Russian census figures, what I wrote should have been that these "show a population deficit of males even higher in the age groups that were adult in the '30s [i.e., the 1930s] than among the young men who were in their twenties in the War...
...In his book, Beethoven: His Spiritual Development, J. W. N. Sullivan writes: "The older Beethoven lived, the more and more profound was what he had to say...
...Foresi Hills, N. Y. Richard Gibian Albert Goldman replies: The connection between art and neurosis or "madness" has been a theme of criticism since the time of Plato...
...That is, deaths were lower among the age groups which invariably suffer the highest casualties in war than among their elders, which can only indicate that the purges were as destructive as the War itself...
...Here perhaps Meyer is being cute when he should be constructive...
...Beethoven's means of expression was music, not words...
...The fact is that no one in this country has any constitutional right to any form of Socialized medicine...
Vol. 45 • July 1962 • No. 15
