Correspondence
"Correspondence" To the Editor: It is perfectly understandable that David Brudnoy would find Charles Colson and Christ an "unlikely couple" (Brudnoy's Film Index, December 1974). "A natural, unspiritual (lost) man...
...I would appreciate a further development of this point since it has always seemed to me that the presidential tyranny he mentions is just what we had built up by all the administrations since 1932 and Watergate only "put a stop to it" because at last the "liberals" recognized its dangers because now there was someone in office that they didn't like...
...Were there alternatives...
...How can one explain the obvious contradiction between what Churchill had said at Fulton, sincerely, we are prepared to grant, and what he had said a few months before, also sincerely, before the British Parliament...
...Even if this is true, it is not at all clear who benefits and who pays in such a surreptitious scheme of cross-subsidization...
...All of his objections notwithstanding, Zionist ideology did—and possibly still does—contain elements of "blood and soil nationalism," which were conspicuously in evidence in the writings of such Zionist theoreticians as Vladimir Jabotinsky and in the rhetoric of the interwar Zionist press...
...What religion is he?—Protestant, Catholic, Jew, Atheist, Agnostic, Zen Buddhist...
...A natural, unspiritual (lost) man does not accept the things of.the Spirit of God...
...If the FCC really prevents Bell from fighting back, then that should be the objection—not the undercutting of avowed monopoly pricing per se...
...Neither FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy nor Johnson tried to turn the political process to the politics of personal salvage...
...The Churchill issue of The Alternative reads as though it might have been edited by Henry Luce or Cyrus L. Sulzberger...
...In fact the Berliner Jiidische Rundschau, the Zionist newspaper with the largest circulation in Germany in 1935, hailed Hitler's infamous Nuremberg Laws as an honorable attempt to preserve the racial purity of Jews as well as of Germans...
...But this argument does not explain why households must pay several dollars each month for a phone that costs $25 to build...
...Reinken's answer is that if we don't pay extra for...
...Friedberg does at some length, because of their author's communism...
...However, it is not understandable to me why the editors of The Alternative did not exercise more discretion than to allow such a sick statement to be included in the December issue...
...I hope that he does have this experience soon...
...I was most interested in his "aside" in the article "From Language to Cant" in the November issue, to wit: "For let none doubt that had the Watergate Conspiracy succeeded we should be living todayunder a form or presidential tyranny comparable to that of the Lincoln administrations, without remotely enjoying the justifications of trying to save the Union that Abraham Lincoln could claim during the Civil War...
...J.S...
...The power to pull off a Watergate has always been a possibility, presidential power being what it is...
...Now they listened...
...For years I-and-my-friends have been screaming "Power corrupts...etc...
...The world has been taken over by morons and they are leaping out of our television sets...
...By the same token, this criticism might be applied with equal validity to Mr...
...Until then I wish that he would respect the rights of Christians by curbing his tongue when he writes...
...David A. Williams Fort Worth, Texas To the Editor: This is from a devotee of the writings of Arnold Beichman...
...A few months later, on February 27, 1945, he said, "In support of the Russian claim to the Curzon line [by which Russia acquired what had been eastern Poland] I repudiate and repulse any suggestion that we are making a questionable compromise or yielding to force or fear, and I assert with the utmost conviction the broad justice of the policy uponwhich, for the first time, all the three great Allies have now taken their stand...
...Friedberg's characterization of the Zionist movement during the prewar (or, does he mean the "interwar...
...I assign Nine Lies About America to my senior government class as required reading...
...This is just another instance of Brudnoy showing his abysmal ignorance of Scripture...
...However, his crack that Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon are the unlikeliest couple since Colson and Christ (December 1974) made me sick...
...A natural monopoly exists when the cost-reducing advantages of size are such that smaller firms cannot match the price and survive...
...We are all sinners and we need Christ...
...Since the Bell System's rivals are flourishing, the Bell-Western Electric complex is not a natural monopoly in the customary sense...
...The vigorous talk and lively activity that went on in that place is probably lost forever...
...Grigsby, Jr...
...Henry Regnery Chicago, Illinois...
...What right does he have to make such a blasphemous statement...
...Churchill said that he would make an alliance with the Devil to save Britain, and he did, forgetting that the Devil is a hard bargainer and exacts his own price...
...2:14...
...If it's your president, he deserves power...
...For all his great knowledge of the facts of history, he was unaware, it would seem, of the forces which make history...
...Similarly, the question of whether "protective devices protect anything but AT&T's monopoly is a technical question unrelated to the basic issue...
...but nobody would listen...
...Why single out the hapless "liberals"—or the all-powerful "liberals"—as stopping presidential tyranny when, it seems to me, liberals and conservatives alike helped presidential aggrandizement since 1932...
...Nor is overcharging business inherently desirable, as the quote from the Regulatory Utility Commissioners implies, since the expenses of a viable business must ultimately be reflected in price...
...And Christ died to save sinners—Romans 5:8...
...Maybe AT&T is an exception, but assertions by regulars and Bell officials is not the right kind of proof...
...Alan Reynolds New York, New York (continued on page 32) CORRESPONDENCE (continued from page 35) To the Editor: Alternative to what...
...Moreover, I find that neither my respect for Israeli pluckiness nor my contempt for Soviet imperialism is in any way diminished by my reservations about the racist conceits of particular Zionist groups either now or in the past...
...To put it briefly, the December issue of The Alternative was a great disappointment...
...William Glasser New York, New York To the Editor: Paul Reinken's apology for Ma Bell invokes a rather hazy concept of "natural monopoly" as synonymous with overcharging on equipment in order to undercharge on service...
...If it's not your president, any power is too much...
...Weisberger is still around and still raising intelligent hell...
...Telephone service—as opposed to equipment—should probably be monopolized to avoid duplication...
...We are all aware that Winston Churchill was an inspiring war leader, a great rhetorician, and a man of indomitable will, but it seems hardly necessary that a magazine that calls itself The Alternative should find it necessary to plow that well-worked ground again...
...In "A Kind Word for Cream Skimming" (The Harvard Business Review, November/December) I argue that consumers usually pay and nobody benefits—that the monopoly profit is dissipated in nonprice competition and rents to specialized resources rather than devoted to worthy causes...
...Nashville, Tennessee To the Editor: I have tolerated Brudnoy's plea for "queer" rights...
...Therefore, since God loves all of us, that includes Charles Colson, Fidel Castro, myself, and even Dave Brudnoy...
...They also enjoy it, even though it is "required...
...There is also this to be said: Watergate was presidential aggrandizement of a different kind...
...The Lord loves and is willing to save sinners—John 3:16-17...
...So long as Congress seems unable to minimize its localist bias, the danger of presidential monopolistic power not merely in foreign affairs but in domestic affairs as well (impoundment...
...Britain went into the war in 1939 ostensibly to protect Poland, but where is Poland now...
...In his famous "Iron Curtain" speech in Fulton, Missouri, Churchill, in his best rhetorical style, said, "The Russian-dominated Polish government has been encouraged to make enormous and wrongful inroads upon Germany, and mass expulsions of millions of Germans on a scale grievous and undreamed of are now taking place...
...This is typical...
...Cosgrave exercises his two English Bulldogs, even "West Indian young people" ask "which of the dogs is called Winston...
...It doesn't matter if we are "good" or "bad...
...As I attempted to prove, his analysis of these choices was both self-serving and inaccurate...
...Is it not time to ask, Was the great military triumph worth the price...
...It is good to know that Mr...
...Metternich demonstrated at Vienna what every statesman must know, that the victor, when the war is over, must live with the vanquished...
...All competent studies (e.g., R. Jackson, "Regulation in Electric Utility Rate Levels" Land Economics, August 1969) indicate that inter-fuel competition rather than regulation is what really determines the level of the rates...
...2. Watergate put a stop to this tyranny because "at last the 'liberals' recognized its dangers...
...this Churchill seems to have forgotten...
...Patrick Cosgrave, in the breathless style appropriate to the editor of the Sunday Magazine of the Daily Telegraph, tells us that "when Churchill's body was taken by boat down the Thames...the London dockers dipped their cranes in tribute," and that "the strategy of bombing German cities" was "born" the night a woman, during a London air raid, shouted, "Give it 'em back, Winston...
...I would also request that the editor exercise some judgment over remarks that make fun of Christ and Christianity...
...He was a romantic, a man who lived with all his great vitality and exuberance completely in the present, oblivious to what he might have been or said only a short time before...
...The two Republican administrations -which also "built up" presidential tyranny were fully supported by Republican conservatives...
...But I wonder if they will remember after November 5, 1974...
...There is a vast difference in character between a Nixon and a Ford, between a Nixon and a Goldwater...
...equipment, long-distance dialing, and so forth, basic local service rates might have to double...
...I mention these facts not as an enemy of Israel, but as someone who admires historical honesty...
...for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually appraised" (1 Cor...
...To the Editor: While being gratified to learn that Mr...
...Alice S. Gifford Lynchburg, Virginia Mr...
...We are quite willing to grant all that, but I, for one, would like to have expected a little more of The Alternative...
...We are informed that he "saved the country...
...Let me simply point out that my examination of the statement in question had reference not to Hobsbawn's definition of Zionism, but to his description of the political choices open to Central European Jews during his youth...
...Less than a year before, however, on December 15, 1944, to be exact, reporting to Parliament on the decisions recently made at Tehran, Churchill said, "I cannot accept the view that the arrangements which have to be proposed about the frontiers of the new Poland are not solid and satisfactory...
...The purpose of regulation is to bend the structure of rates to benefit large users—to soak the poor and aid the rich...
...Churchill, during the war, proclaimed, "I did not become the King's First Minister to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire," but that is preciselywhat he did...
...The presidential office is the beneficiary or victim of ethical relativism...
...Beichman replies: The writer makes two points: 1. The presidential tyranny I referred to "is just what we had built up by all the administrations since 1932...
...The Poles are free, so far as Russia and Great Britain are concerned, to extend their territory, at the expense of Germany, to the West...
...years...
...Machiavelli wisely pointed out that the prince who makes an alliance with a much stronger prince becomes his servant...
...His libertine views on drugs and pornography I have tried to ignore...
...I do not propose to go into exact details, but the extensions, which will be supported by Britain and Russia, bound together as they are by the twenty years' alliance, are of high importance....The transference of several millions of people would have to be effected from the East to the West or North, as well as the expulsion of the Germans—because that is what is proposed: the total expulsion of the Germans—from the area to be acquired by Poland in the West and the North...
...What, in the meanwhile, it is fair to ask, had become of the "Atlantic Charter," which Churchill and Roosevelt, with all the solemnity appropriate to great acts of state, had announced would be the basis of the peace that was to follow the war, and included the promise that national boundaries and governments were to be on the basis of the principle of self-determination...
...of how, when Mr...
...Paul Gottfried Rockford, Illinois To the Editor: I remember Siegfried Weisberger well, for I used to buy books in his splendid book store and drink beer in his magnificent stube which was attached to that book store in Baltimore...
...It is understandable because Mr...
...Brudnoy obviously has not experienced the "fun" of a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ who is the only way of salvation (John 14:6...
...Since 1932" includes four Democratic administrations—FDR,Truman, Kennedy, Johnson—and two Republican administrations—Eisenhower and Nixon...
...is great...
...I'm sorry but it's not a conservative v. liberal issue at all or a Republican v. Democratic issue either...
...Friedberg found my review of Hobsbawm generally "perceptive," (Letters to the Editor, December 1974) I must object to his comment that I "carelessly [accept] its Communist author's characterization of Zionism as blood and soil nationalism...
...As most educated people know, an argumentum ad hominem is really no argument at all...
...Incidentally, the natural monopoly argument, contrary to Reinken, does not apply to electric utilities, where there is substantial competition with other energy alternatives...
...We are all sinners—Romans 3:23...
...It also appears unwise to condemn Hobsbawm's statements, as Mr...
Vol. 8 • February 1975 • No. 5
