Correspondence
Correspondence 'La Matanza' Columbus, Ohio To the Editors: The Reagan administration has talked loudly about "international terrorism" and "USSR interference" in El Salvador [Editorial, Mar. 13]....
...JAMES CHRISTOFF Celebrity intellectual Los Angeles, Calif...
...For the best commentary on this statement, we can look to the work of Gustav Gundlach, S.J., who must have participated in its drafting...
...In the last fourteen months over fifteen thousand people have been killed...
...El Salvador has an illiteracy rate of 58 percent (95 percent in the rural areas) and an infant mortality rate of 58.3 percent per 1,000 - four times that of the United States...
...As a critic her main purpose always seemed to be to reduce intellectualism to a private club...
...p. 260, Ross, Rothco...
...It would therefore be futile to ask her why, according to her reckoning, the work of Yourcenar or Gadda is superior to most modern artists 'or Genet's "The Balcony" is the best play since World War II...
...p. 272, Handelsman, Punch.p...
...Microfilm from Vol...
...48106...
...And the slaughter continues...
...Biblical studies have progressed dramatically in our day...
...Sontag defensively claims she can discuss popular culture with anybody, a fact I find hard to believe, since her stunted world seems to be defined by the boundaries of the Partisan Review and The New York Review of Books...
...Nell-Breuning, S.J...
...Stressing the personal development aspect of group life, Gundlach wrote as early as 1930 that' 'Every worker needs a group, no matter how small, wherein he can exercise personal responsibility," and through this exercise, he finds growth...
...13] calling for a deeper awareness of social responsibility may be seconded, I believe, with a discussion of one remark of his, "Until our church begins to understand that the central teaching of the worth and the dignity of the human person integrates all of Christian life . . ." The truth is that the church, in the persons of her leaders, understands this very well...
...Here "social life"meant community life of any sort, whether the community happened to be political, social, economic or what not...
...She certainly has been prolific in her mediocrity, though...
...Seventy-five percent of all Sal-vadoran children under the age of five are malnourished...
...I, 1924, to current issues available through University Microfilm, 300 N. Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Mi...
...Once again we are supporting the wrong side...
...The great majority were landless farm workers and their families, teachers, students, labor organizers, priests, nuns, lay missionaries, and others marked for death either by the right-wing para-military forces or by uniformed soldiers and police...
...Second-class postage paid at New York, N.Y...
...To support this remark, there is as external evidence the claim of O.V...
...Thirty thousand farmers, reformers, and intellectuals who protested against these conditions were murdered by the army in 1932, a period in their history that Salvadorans call La Matanza, The Slaughter...
...What O'Brien quoted is a rather weak, static version of what had earlier been presented in a more dramatic and dynamic form, but is now almost lost...
...Copyright © 1981 Commonweal Publishing Co Illustrations: Cover, pp...
...Serials Data program No.: ISSN 0010-3330...
...DAN O'NEILL Lost social teachings Chicago, 111...
...264, 266, 267, 273, 274, Bas., Tachydromos, Greece...
...13], like a highbrow Joyce Brothers, to babble about assorted cultural matters...
...While she may hold some interest as a cultist, granting permission to repressed intellectuals to enjoy the Supremes and Bruce Springsteen, she certainly can't be taken seriously as an artist...
...a large part of this progress has been due to a revived (Continued on page 286) Commonweal is indexed in Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, Catholic Periodical Index, Index of American Periodical Verse, Book Review Digest and Review Index...
...The percentage of members of the rural labor force owning land is 10 percent and is among the very lowest in the world...
...Against Interpretation, the title of one of her collections, seems to sum up her approach to the craft itself...
...This limited view helps to explain why Sontag's brand of intellectual is so creatively impotent and out of touch with reality...
...To the Editors: David O'Brien's good letter [Feb...
...To the Editor: Susan Sontag is our official celebrity "intellectual," surfacing periodically, as in your recent reverential interview [Feb...
...272, Handelsman, Punch...
...we must also work for his development, and this can be facilitated through community life...
...We must strive for the recognition of each person's dignity...
...The origin and primary goal of social life is the safeguarding, development and perfection of the human person . . ." This was the basic statement, presented by Pius XII in his Christmas address of 1942...
...it is now up to her members generally to learn it...
...with logic and dramatic sense becoming extra baggage she finds irrelevant to modern criticism...
...for internal evidence we have the published writings of Gundlach himself in the late 1930s and early 1940s...
...p. 262, Taylor, Albuquerque Tribune...
...p. 271, Leed, Rothco...
...If we were, in reference to the play, to introduce the names of Inge, Beckett, O'Neill or Pinter, to challenge her opinion, it would be merely clouding the issue by refusing to abide by her rules of intellectual gamesmanship...
...But they have just increased their military aid to the ruling junta of that country by $23,000,000 of "lethal military assistance" and more than doubled their acknowledged military advisors...
...Her whole career has been that of a dilettante, with her fiction consisting of imitation Borges and her film critiques reading like ersatz Kael...
...Fourteen families on whose behalf the military has ruled for over five decades own almost all of the productive land, thereby controlling 60 percent of sugar cane exports, 75 percent of cotton, and 85 percent of coffee...
Vol. 108 • May 1981 • No. 9
