Correspondence
CORRESPONDENCE Elie Kedourie Replies As Mark M. Jilka rightly says (Correspondence, TAS, January 1988) in response to my October article "Cruising for a Bruising: The U.S. in the Gulf": "one of...
...In such a case, are the forces in the Gulf able to mount an invasion of Iran...
...The pertinent accumulating medical evidence indicates that the result will be deafness, period—to all sound: the barbaric rattle of pebbles under the receding wave as well as the great non-returning song of civilization...
...Terry may relax: what Bloom ismerely saying is that extensive exposure to rock will result in permanent deafness to what he calls the "great tradition...
...Chemical technologies bring us plastic hipbones, the Green Revolution, and one-calorie diet cola...
...It is clear that Mr...
...The extended quotation from the University of Wisconsin Badger Herald in the 20th Anniversary issue's best of "Current Wisdom" may have given your readers the wrong impression about our paper...
...Jack Powers New York, New York THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1988 47...
...While the computer is an extremely important component, high tech is not limited to chips and floppies...
...there were none in your article that I had not related to (continued on page 47) THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1988 7 CORRESPONDENCE (continued from page 7) during my eleven years there...
...lacking the minimal courage to avoid vulgar euphemism, he simply satisfies himself with a witless solecism: "In your ear, Allan Bloom...
...I have noticed over the years that more and more members of Congress have deserted their local teams back home and become staunch Washington Redskin fans...
...My memories of my years in Bloomington are rich and warm...
...Of course there are those whose cultural instincts are so dulled that they could stand contemplating Lord Clark's cathedral for a millennium and see nothing but piled stone...
...I have been an educator teaching about The American Constitution and the ideals which motivated the Founding Fathers...
...Its omission by your contributors (the selection in its stead of Bill Buckley's—Jonestown—being by contrast the most pathetic) is tragic testimony of that retreat...
...You have produced a memorable, fascinating, and thoroughly satisfying number that I have just finished reading with delight from cover to cover and to which I shall certainly return more than once...
...David Gammon Editorial Writer Badger Herald Madison, Wisconsin Three cheers for The American Spectator and for the Twentieth Anniversary issue...
...Seeking an escape from my youth in Mayor Daley's embattled and corrupt Chicago, I found refuge in the small-town innocence of Bloomington and the naturally beautiful surrounding countryside of Monroe and Brown Counties (a five-minute motorcycle ride from campus) from 1965-1976...
...It is these obscurities which have led me to express doubts and fears in my article...
...If so, then one has to say that preventing Iranian attacks on shipping is not enough to achieve that objective...
...Perhaps the most astonishing development of the last two decades is America's retreat from that pinnacle of achievement...
...That is the most astonishing single event of the past twenty years...
...Those of us who toil in the high-tech vineyards have commented for years on the irrelevance of most economic theories when confronted by new technologies...
...My fear is that this is also the case in the Gulf today...
...Bruce Sutchar Evanston, Illinois Ouch...
...Anyone who writes like that is a great soul...
...While TAS was beginning in 1967 I was a liberal idealist who helped circulate our own newspaper "The Spectator" to help activate politically indifferent students on campus...
...Not surprising, and typically, he fails to make the least effort to meet Bloom's argument...
...George Savage Aledo, Texas Allow me to add my voice to the chorus of congratulations you will be receiving on your 20th Anniversary issue...
...W Provance Oceanside, California The most astonishing thing about your "Astonishing Moments" in December was that not one of the contributors so much as mentioned what unquestionably should be regarded as the single greatest achievement of the human race: landing a man on the moon, on July 20, 1969...
...Economic policy should support invention and enterprise, not protect ignorance and bureaucracy...
...But, most of all, I am inspired that the ideals with which so many of us baby boomers were raised (by our WW II veteran fathers and mothers) are now presented by TAS, while the liberal ideas of "The Spectator" have gone out of print...
...Your publication arrived at a time when my wife decided to discuss several matters of great interest...
...If it weren't for the preceding forty years of happy marriage, ours would have been doomed...
...There is another source for anxiety, however...
...Kudos I have just finished reading your Special Anniversary issue of December 1987...
...The quality of your staff, contributors, and those whom you draw into your orbit is simply amazing...
...We may anticipate multitudes of pathetic rock-addled deaf-mute nostalgiacs freaking out under tubelight to the mindless throb of . . . s-u-b-t-i-t-l-e-s...
...Unfortunately I became engrossed in reading your home-wrecker and my attempts to convey rapt attention to my wife's comments met with little success...
...Is it the defeat of Iran...
...Construction technologies help us build bigger bridges, smarter buildings, and safer highways...
...After I returned to the "real world" my religious commitment as well as the basic conservative ideals of my youth "returned" as well...
...Nineteenth-century concepts like labor and capital are not very helpful, nor are twentieth-century organization charts, five-year plans, or anything that requires a committee...
...Just as there are those whose instincts in such matters are etiolated to the extent that they can be subjected to the manifestation of civilization's opposite, barbarism, in the form of rock music and not recognize it for the fundamental, irremissible rot that it is...
...But Gilder invokes the evangelical patter of Silicon Valley—extolling the information economy, predicting new harmonies of integrated knowledge, describing the collapse of time and space—to equate technological progress with electronic computing...
...As Mr...
...In a world where wealth is created not by digging rocks out of the ground but by rearranging software codes, gas molecules, and strands of DNA, only a society that nurtures invention can be called wealthy...
...I was particularly touched by Stephen Harris's letter which I read with swimming sobs...
...Is the objective to persuade or compel Iran to end its war with Iraq...
...Biotechnologies are fighting diseases, cleaning up oil spills, and making new life forms possible...
...I look to TAS for information and inspiration, and to see our name printed without qualification on the same page with Ms., the Washington Post, and the New Yorker, is, well, a little disheartening...
...In the debate over trade deficits and government intervention, let's hope we don't lose sight of the source of our success in high tech...
...The Badger Herald is the nation's only daily, independent student newspaper which also boasts a conservativeto-libertarian editorial page...
...The return of civilized silence...
...Oh consummation devoutly to be wished...
...Allan Bloom's chapter on "music" in his exquisite unmasking of the Unreal City we all live in, The Closing of the American Mind, has caused more than a few by their reaction to it to reveal such a retrogressive incapacity...
...In the latter, the observations were so good that it seems unnecessary to name the best, but I was grateful in particular for Taki, James Q. Wilson, Arch Puddington, and R. Randolph Richardson, whose final paragraph is a masterpiece of scholarly perception...
...So if nervous Terry Teachout, intrepid guardian of the conservative ethos, is correct—if his prediction is borne out and the gray boomers stay home for a TV jolt—the emerging image is quite delicious to consider...
...At that time the conservative publication "The Alternative" was a joke on campus, as were the Young Republicans or the Young Americans for Freedom who would meet in an isolated room in the Student Union with little or no effect on the student population of Hoosiers...
...Jilka will appreciate, what constitutes a sufficient military force is to be judged in relation to the policy objective...
...The paper came to life in the late sixties precisely because the kind of drivel you quoted was going unchallenged in the University's official student newspaper, the Daily Cardinal...
...As the weeks pass, the doubts are by no means diminished...
...A plant in Osaka that licenses an American design to produce a $10 microchip makes it possible for a software house in Cambridge to develop a $10,000 information system...
...It is not at all clear what the U.S...
...However, I must report that your publication has done little to promote harmony in my household...
...Jack Wheeler, Director Freedom Research Foundation La Jolla, California Early in a television series dealing with the subject of civilization the late Kenneth Clark stood before a magnificent Gothic structure, pointed toward it, and informed his audience that while he could not define "civilization" he knew it when he saw it: "And I'm looking at it now," he added...
...Teachout is suffering under the false impression that Bloom is hypothesizing the removal or disappearance of the particular fix for trousered apes in question, and apparently the thought alarms him greatly...
...That's the American advantage—not punching out components but linking them together into new applications...
...The rationale for printing Linda Evans's graceless musings in the Herald is probably irretrievably lost—you note that it appeared in April 1971—but as an editorial writer for the Herald, let me assure you that her comments reflect neither the spirit nor substance of our editorial writings in the eighties...
...It is not clear that this objective, if accomplished, would necessarily advance U.S...
...I send special praise for Tom Beth-ell's "I Hate to Spoil the Party" and your symposium, "Astonishing Moments...
...I don't know how you fit so many top-notch conservative voices in 110 pages, but I know I'll be reading and re-reading the December issue well into next spring...
...If other readers are as enthusiastic as I am about the "Most Astonishing Developments of the Last Twenty Years" by twenty-eight distinguished observers, you will doubtless hear from many undistinguished observers with their own views on the subject...
...Alvin Laidley Carmichaels, Pennsylvania Your Special Anniversary issue is a huge success, the best of holiday reading...
...What's important here is not analog circuitry, encyclopedic databases, or fiber optics, but the fact that components—hardware, software, prefab wall units, bacterial molds—are trivially inexpensive when measured against the benefits they can deliver—if applied properly...
...And Terry Teachout in the December issue of TAS is the latest I've noticed to so flash open his intellectual trenchcoat, as it were, only to expose an embarrassment of cloddish stultification...
...Neil G. Barclay Salt Lake City, Utah I thoroughly enjoyed the "I Remember Bloomington" section in the December Anniversary issue of TAS...
...As everyone knows, Iraqi attacks on shipping go on continuously and have gone on for a number of years...
...Nothing was done and nothing is being done to stop them...
...I have now lived four times twenty years and can scarcely hope to share in your next anniversary, but I can say that TAS is one of the things that make life still worth living...
...Hazel Sample Guyol Arkadelphia, Arkansas Fred Barnes's article "A World Apart" was a bull's eye...
...policy is in the Gulf today...
...in the Gulf": "one of the reasons for the U.S...
...Or is it to maintain the freedom of the seas...
...interests...
...I hadn't paid much attention to the Redskins since the Bears beat them 73-0, but lately I have been rooting for them to lose...
...The business of America is invention, and Gilder is correct in pointing out that the calculation of productivity and trade deficits ignores the wealth-producing power of cheap, accessible new tools...
...I shall re-read it at a future date at a more leisurely pace to make sure I didn't miss anything...
...failure in Lebanon in 1982 was the fact that the military was given a poor framework to work in...
...Our birth was greeted with bomb threats, confiscations, and all else that passes for dialectic engagement on the left...
...We need some clear thinking about the way technology works and about how the tools we use change the kind of people we become...
...Two-and-a-half cheers for George Gilder's somewhat rambling essay "The Message of the Microcosm...
Vol. 21 • February 1988 • No. 2
