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...
...I do urge the study of Mencken on all of you...
...Thus, our involvement in Vietnam was based on the belief that we were "keeping the world safe for democracy" (a thoroughly commendable objective, obviously...
...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...
...Both these premises are false...
...Keep it up...
...These factors continue to make this a time of some uncertainty in Washington...
...Each month the entire office rollicks to the "Continuing Crisis," "Current Wisdom" and other features...
...He barely beat Baker two years ago and several of those who supported him then will not be returning in January...
...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...
...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...
...Tyrrell, beyond an obvious' fascination for somewhat crude provocative rhetoric, are simply aesthetically and possibly ethically obtuse...
...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...
...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...
...to that end, he allied himself with Communists...
...or, even worse, our inaction would have caused World War III, so that no one would be fighting anybody...
...Sincerely, David Finkelman Santa Clara, Ca...
...Kasun Replies: Mr...
...had not intervened with force in Vietnam in the 1960s...
...Perhaps Mr...
...I would assume, not without some justification, that those, like Mr...
...I also liked the pieces by Paul Weaver, Roger Rosenblatt, and, not least, your invaluable Bascom C. Slemp...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Mencken whose absence from the scene I keep lamenting more all the time...
...Bill Buckley can't go on intimidating Gore Vidal forever...
...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...
...One suspects that individuals such as Mr...
...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...
...The record of our involvement in Vietnam is sad enough, but the tragedy is compounded if we continue, as Ms...
...Lawrence once called "cosmic piety...
...Finkelman implies does not really exist...
...It does not appear that Mr...
...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...
...I guess I was wrong...
...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...
...R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...Sincerely, Howard A.Gardner Chicago, Illinois Establishmentarians: Gads...
...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...
...Tyrrell has seen fit, in an almost sophomoric pique, to denounce what D.H...
...There are occasional signs that The Alternative may yet fill the gap...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...It does a disservice to the cause we both espouse...
...But this particular editorial, I feel, descends to the depths of murky thinking and unnecessary mud-slinging...
...The view expressed by Mr...
...Ho Chi Minh's main interest was Vietnam's independence...
...Quite aside from the fact that this premise is a reckless post hoc assertion, it is empirically unsupportable...
...San Diego SLEMP (continued from page 17) that preceded it...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...You are needed...
...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...
...Conservatives with a touch of grace and wit...
...Kasun does, to cling to the false notions that got us there in the first place...
...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...
...White House staff people are maneuvering and moving around not knowing how things are going to turn out...
...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...
...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...
...Keep up the good work...
...Right on...
...If either runs and wins, the President will face a decidedly different situation in dealing with the Senate during the next session...
...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...
...I hope so...
...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...
...had responded with force in the Rhineland in the 1930s, it was about what might have happened if the U.S...
...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...
...Piety, you may recall, originally meant reverence for one's origins...
...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...
...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...
...Jacqueline Kasun U.C...
...It's an insult to intelligent readers who like to read or hear the facts, and then render their own pertinent judgments...
...Therefore, the next few months should prove most interesting...
...This strange thesis is supported by such gems of logic as the following...
...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...
...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...
...In my opinion it is so pompous and verbose and passionately and sneeringly belittling as to approach demagoguery in its worst form...
...Tyrrell's exuberant essay...
...During the campaign the President locked himself into certain positions, made a few promises, and ruled out certain courses of action...
...To the Editor: Your superb editorial on McGovern could hardly have been improved upon by the great H.L...
...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...
...Your fine and worthwhile publication usually makes good use of light whimsy and humor to make its points...
...What underlies Mr...
...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...
...Of course I am distressed that Mr...
...But let me assure you the wait was well worthwhile (no alliteration intended...
...Finkelman has weakened this thesis...
...But a hearing may be all that he will get...
...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...
...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...
Vol. 6 • December 1972 • No. 3
