Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR SDS Steven Kelman's article "SDS: Troubled Voice of the New Left" (NL September 27) is ODe of the most useful. informative analyses I have read in a long time. From my own observation...
...Can we make this force flow into channels in which it will help us move toward a better society...
...but he seems incapable of seeing beyond what he wants to see...
...Last week Lindsay defied the professional red-baiters more openly and directly in the middle of a campaign than any other major political figure I have heard of in recent years, and shocked opponents Beame and Buckley by asserting that membership in the Communist party should not be a disqualification for city employment, If liberalism retains any meaning beyond Democratic partisan regularity, Lindsay does not have to apologize to anyone for his, To turn to the Middle East, why doesn't someone remind Hal Lehrman ("The Middle East Mystery") of the time back in 1956 when Secretary of State Dulles decided to teach Nasser a lesson by withdrawing support of the Aswan dam...
...Abe Beame's campaign so far has indeed been a prodigy of liberal name dropping...
...Beneprop himself, join 1 host of literary levellers...
...Their opera are factory produced, if not in actual deed, in intent...
...Unfortunately it's not, but it's pretty hard to see why the admittedly flawed American way still isn't the best bet going...
...New York City WILLIAM BOARDMAN...
...From my own observation of the New Left in Berkeley, I can confirm that the dominant tendency is an emotional anarchism...
...Secondly, the unwillingness to make a choice between action as a profession of personal faith and action as a means to achieve desirable ends, a distinction which undrlies that between Gesinnungsethik: and Verantwortungsethik: in Max Weber's terminology...
...Why not just ignore John Simon...
...Nobody who strives for the humanization of society can afford to spare the New Left the hard-hitting criticism it deserves...
...While I am biting the hand that feeds me, let me ungratefully can to account also Robert Lekachman's inexplicable willingness in the same issue ("The Choice in New York") to grant Beame's liberalism while impugning John Lindsay's...
...This is not criticism, or anything but the rankest innuendo...
...I doubt that famine caused by withdrawal of aid would be a helpful corrective for those frailties of the Arab character that Lehrman describes with such relish...
...But in fact the future of the Democratic party in the city as a progressive force depends on Beame's failure...
...Congressman Lindsay preceded the Democratic Congressional majority in advocating legislation for the comprehensive assurance of civil rights for Negroes, for medical care for the aged, and for a Department of Urban affairs, to name just three areas...
...The artist lost all his identity as a creative person, in my opinion, when he banally bartered his own creative capacity for a commonplace, commercial contentment...
...Moreover) the difference between President Kennedy's education bill, which Lekachman says Lindsay opposed, and President Johnson's, which he supported, is the difference between an ineffectually wide diffusion of Federal funds and a constructive and discriminating program for educational reform and revival in areas where federal aid is indispensable...
...At the very least, he would then oblige those of us who disagree with his views to begin by confronting them seriously, an opportunity denied us now...
...If the world is to be changed for the better, demonstrations which strengthen the opponents of change have no place, Moreover, it is immoral to flaunt ethical standards and at the same time to fail in the moral duty of thinking the effects of one's action through, and to build up a black-and-white case between the "establishment" and its critics...
...This does not preclude, of course, that Communists are trying to use the movement for their own purposes...
...Those who do should join in urging Simon to reconsider his methods or suspend his column...
...But they are not really willing to let the chips fall as they may, and various arguments...
...But please don't cancel my subscription-even though I always receive the issues two days after I buy them on the newsstand, New York City GEORGE F, GILDER SIMON Are you aware that John Simon's film column is and continues to be objectionable...
...It is thus most demoralizing to see him defect...
...However the author is on firm historical foot when he denies the people of Vietnam the opportunity to choose their own government in their own homeland (a choice that has never been possible in their history...
...when he announces that the real purpose of Le Petit Soldat is "to give Godard a chance to masturbate on screen," what does he mean exactly...
...is, in fact, the offspring of the mass media and advertising concerns...
...Because his cursory show of erudition and belligerent muckraking pose are exactly calculated to charm readers who don't happen to know the territory...
...I think there are two interrelated reasons for this vagueness: First, a feeling that may be called fetishism of action-the idea that "actions," even if they consist merely of demonstrations, are creative whereas words are not-in combination with a half-conscious fear that the analysis necessary for a concrete political program might reveal the hollowness of this activism...
...There is evidence that if he checked the viciousness and the indefensible sniping, he could lend film criticism a helpful voice...
...inevitably spurious, are profferred to show that these acts, in addition to their value as an expression of personal standards of morality, are also politically useful, One criticism of the Kelman article that might perhaps be made is that the author implies rather than vigorously states the anti-Marxist character of the New Left...
...Lekachman's attack on Lindsay's record in Congress is suggestive of his own partisan dogmatism, If the Area Redevelopment Administration, recently expired of its own weaknesses as one of the most egregious pork barrels in recent Congressional legislative history, embracing at its height one third of the nation's counties in its depressed areas DEAR EDITOR category, and dissipating federal funds almost everywhere except where they were most needed-in the urban slums-if ARA constitutes a test of liberalism for Lekachman, then it is Lekachman's, not Lindsay's liberalism that comes in question...
...Its vulgarity and viciousness are typical of Simon's film reviewing, Where, for example, the easiest targets for this kind of abuse, those whose work betrays homosexual elements (or who are simply thought to be homosexual...
...But he seems to have forgotten entirely the outrageous conditions in the Negro ghettoes of the city, which should be the central concern of any relevant liberal program, and which cannot be exercised by a mumbo-jumbo of hagiology, even if it includes, reverently pronounced, the names of Eleanor Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson and even if its recitation is suspended for a day to make way for the benediction of the Pope...
...What the author is logically saying is that he would have no quarrel with Nazism if Hitler had relaxed after Munich and contented himself with killing only a few thousand Jews...
...If Simon falls to the Malaprops, who is there left that we can trust...
...doctors and civil servants...
...But I don't think we need to spend time on Simon's aesthetic assumptions...
...And this further ignores the military and non-military aid to South Vietnam from 29 nations besides the U.S...
...including small-town movie critics, Congressmen, New York Times reporters, civil rights evangelists, mayoral candidates, and Episcopal ministers, in the verbicidal assault against the distinction between two valuable monosyllables, flaunt and flout ("On Screen," NL, October 11...
...The work they are called upon to savor...
...What is disturbing here is not the simplistic view of the world, but the untruth...
...POP ART James R. Mellow's dicta ("On Art...
...Beame would have us think that the very future of the Democratic party depends on his success-a-that in a crisis President Johnson would reroute into the Bronx the holy waters of the Pedernales itself to save the Beame campaign and thus, one assumes, his own career...
...If this is supposed to be a metaphor, it is not a viable one, if one considers the figurative alternatives...
...As for the poverty program, Beame certainly is in favor of the poverty program, and so is his satrap in Harlem, Adam Clayton Powell, and with Beame as Mayor we can expect Powell to maintain control of it and we can be assured that Powell and his friends will not go hungry...
...When confronted with evidence that, for instance, the kind of civil disobedience for which the New Left has been propagandizing, benefits the extreme Right, the New Leftists show a tendency to fall back on their need to profess their personal faith...
...What is disturbing here is not the ludicrous political naivete, but the insensitive authoritarianism...
...CARL LANDAUER SIMON, LEKACHMAN, LEHRMAN I was startled to see John Simon, Mr...
...may expect to find themselves slandered regularly-it's "jugglers without balls" this week-and where a director guilty of honorable eclecticism may be transformed into an object as virulent as a "dung-beetle...
...Sometimes, however, the Communists-at least the pro-Moscow school-seem to be exasperated by the tendency of the New Left to undertake action as an expression of faith without regard to political consequences: The party line does not favor separation from all the major trends in American public opinion...
...If these people had lived in the days of the First International, almost an of them would have sided with Bakunin against Marx...
...How does the author balance the horrible but tangential killing of civilians against the purposeful and systematic assassination of teachers...
...But Simon has always been a veritable porpoise in that medium...
...But there is a treasure of idealism in the New Left, a real THE NEW LEADER welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words...
...Beame represents the Democratic tradition not of Johnson, Roosevelt or Lehman, but of Mayors Daley of Chicago and Yorty of Los Angeles...
...J think that the masturbation remark is there exclusively for the sake of a gratuitous and vile allegation about the relationship between the filmmaker (whom Simon characterizes in terms like "slobbering") and the actress (whom Simon takes pains to identify as the filmmaker's "ex-wife...
...On Screen, NL, October 11...
...New York City JAMES STOLLER WATTS William M. McCord replies: In a situation as volatile as the Los Angeles riots, rumors spread quickly, I personally did not see "Minute Men" in operation...
...Berkeley, Calif...
...Egypt is caught in an authentic Malthusian squeeze, by American aid...
...Kelman is also right in regarding a vagueness of postulates-s-often amounting to a refusal to show alternatives to the policies attacked-as characteristic of the movement...
...perhaps, one might equate vegetable soup to the Holy GraiL The artists are concerned with a sort of existential nonentity bordering on the sterility of an operating room...
...He continues, "My own tentative suggestion is that it might be wise to persuade Thailand, for instance, to offer asylum to all anti-Communist warriors, and then defend this asylum with massive military power...
...After all that's what America did with her Indians...
...The woman could have been lying, fantasying, or hysterical...
...I did, however talk with a white woman in Watts who claimed that she had been saved from rape when five uniformed Minute Men came to her assistance...
...August 30) reflect a tremendous role reversal for the critic...
...Tuckahoe, N. Y. RICHARD KONTUR NIEBUHR Reinhold Niebuhr's article ("Consensus at the Price of Flexibility," NL, September 27) contains some thoughts which are terribly upsetting because they have been put down with such apparent seriousness by a man of some reputation...
...The about face is due primarily to the work they are asked to disseminate for the mass media...
...What makes Simon objectionable cannot be traced to differences of opinion or taste merely, but rather to the totally objectionable nature of the abusiveness which is his stock in trade, For example...
...Pop" art is an attempt to present the American symbol, as...
...Yet, while discussing the incident, she seemed rational and calm...
...His victory would gravely damage both parties, as well as the city, for it would prove that the Democrats do not have to be liberal to win and that the Republicans cannot win no matter how liberal they are...
...The questions the author has raised are valid and vital...
...I don't mean simply that his understanding of films leaves much to be desired, hard as it is not to wonder what kind of soul lodges in a critic who thinks Dreyer's Gertrud is "unutterably boring...
...It would be lovely if this were a world of peace and goodwill...
...Having for so many years flaunted his verbal resourcefulness and precision, he now flouts indispensable semantic distinctions...
...Most of the previous offenders have been men in over their heads in the English language...
...With the Army of the Republic of Vietnam numbering over 500,000 (more than three times the American troop commitment), it is hardly accurate to say "solely" with our own military might...
...What is disturbing in this is not the intellectual arrogance, but the moral relativism...
...readiness to suffer for one's convictions...
...Los Angeles Times reporters independently wrote that they saw Minute Men walking the streets of Watts...
...He concludes, "The twin dogmas of the policy . have prompted us to challenge the Asian wing of Communism on it's own ground, and solely with our own military might...
...He writes, "The analogy implies a similarity between Nazism's threat to the whole of Western culture and Ho Chi Minh's threat to a little sliver of a nation in Indochina...
Vol. 48 • October 1965 • No. 21
