Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR THE NEW LEADER welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should nor exceed 300 words,' MIHAJLOV This is just a brief note of thanks to you for prmtmg The...
...Since I wrote my article...
...Johnson, Vt...
...Les Arends is a Representative from Illinois...
...Wilson is some belp to the "sick, lame, tortured voices," but as a writer of letters on society and politics, and voter for Goldwater, he produced a narcotic dose...
...disabled by the welfare state of the middle classes is an important one ("The Poverty of Equality," NL, March I...
...They have indeed turned in upon themselves and when they appear in a public spectacle it is an embarrassing kind of cannibalism to observe...
...Other writers have been making similar statements for some time, and I have heard them often in conversation...
...of the matter when he wrote: some weeks earlier: that Little Gidding offered restitution for some of the more unpleasant views to which Eliot gave voice during his lifetime, whether he really believed them or not...
...I concluded the nights out in rural and small town America must be awfully cold and lonely...
...Perhaps it is they who will replace the October of Lenin with that of the Russian people by developing their anti-Stalinism into a democratic prrnciple...
...Nell' York City RICHARD ELMAN Irving Kristol replies: When I wrote that the poor "benefit to an astonishingly minor degree from rent control...
...His hand must be cool because it is attached to a mind that has lost its grasp on reality...
...Then why did they go at all...
...This is romantic mythmaking...
...It is discouraging that Tito finally tre ated Mihajlov as he did Djilas...
...Maybe the problem is getting our social welfare agencies to begin to do their jobs-namely to serve the needy regardless of what they may think of these people...
...I wonder, though...
...It may be that the Buffalo affair did not deserve to be taken seriously...
...Camus would have loathed it...
...but he admits that Eliot was contrite in later years for "the foolish things" he had said and written as a young man...
...The problem of why people vote the way they do is a very complicated one...
...Nell' York City SYLVIA ASHTON McKINLEY Both of the historians cited by A. Hilsenrad in his letter (NL...
...The Administration's proposed Aid to Education Bill allots $ 1.2 billion to counties that have 100 or more school-age children from families either on relief or with incomes under $2,000 annually There are about 3.000 such counties-but the percentage of the poor, within each county, varies wildly, Representative Ayres (R.-Ohio) has shown that the nation's 10 wealthiest counties will, under the bill, receive twice as much Federal aid as the 10 poorest...
...But he knows some of our real problems in the areas of society and medicine...
...And speaking of Professor Tate, I could offer his name along with those of Yvor Winters and Cyril Connolly as critics of "stature" who have espoused a classical approach to art for many years...
...As a physician, Dr...
...he wanders from perception to perception, unmoved by coherency...
...wrote a silly Jetter (NL, March 15)-a sick-sweet letter, one taste of which rots the teeth and dulls the brain...
...Stanley Edgar Hyman probably came much closer to the truth...
...Maybe the problem is not really as difficult as Kristol thinks...
...1 live near the University of Minnesota and its towering medical school (the most advanced wing named "Mayo"), and 30 miles away from the Mayo Center in Rochester...
...Let's use pram language: Most doctors are useful for ailments but not for illnesses...
...New York City LASZLO THOMAS KIss CORRECTIONS In "Moscow Summer, 1964" (NL, March 29), the Russian term for the standard sevenyear labor sentence, appearing in the song at the bottom of the first column on page 24, was misspelled...
...These writers, some of them purified throuzh political conversion...
...But doctors, like the rest of us fall victims of their own propaganda...
...I guessed with 80 per cent accuracy...
...nothing more...
...The AMA and the Dr...
...Minneapolis: Minn...
...the dust and stains give the old physician an even more hazy and puzzled look...
...It is very well written, but more important -at least to me- it tore away the sleazy facade of superciliousness which has become a uniform mantle of the "cultural celebrities" who number among themselves the fey, the intellectual phonies, the self-styled members of a superior breed...
...Extraordinary and painful self-transformations" are just what he was talking about most of his life: fundamental to the genuine philosophy of rebellion, since a real rebel must be willing to revolt first against himself...
...Nell' York City NORJ\1,\N THOMAS I would like to express my admiration for your issue of March 29, which renders a great service to the cause of free literature as well as to the potentially most powerful forces of political justice under totalitarian conditions: the men of letters with their silent, Kafkaian thoughts, Mihajlov's courageous report is an intuitive diagnosis of the fermenting Soviet society, which has been saturated with cultural explosives and which bears all the characteristics of the summer events in 1956, This, which seems to be an opening to semipolitical humanism, is the most hopeful sign to date indicating the possible (and peaceful") end of Soviet bureaucratic despotism...
...Obviously, those among the poor who do live in rentcontrolled buildings do benefit from itthough, as Mr...
...Is it true that the poor "benefit to an astonishinclv minor degree from rent control...
...Yet it is interesting to recall that the voters of New York State, in a referendum last November, defeated just such a proposal of Governor Rockefeller's, This is the sort of thing I had in mind when I talked about the way middle-income people manage the welfare state to their own advantage, and to the frequent disadvantage of the poor...
...if he really thought it out with as much information as he should have to make such categorical statements...
...Assuming Dr...
...President Johnson uses an exaggerated vocabulary that also irritates me...
...Their squeals, Continued on next page DEAR EDITOR Continued squawks and moue's of delight in each other's "inside" jokes are sickening...
...To suggest that the death of Camus at the age of 46 was "fortunate" is to my mindwell, extremely unfortunate to say the least...
...the correct spelling is semiletka...
...There is little doubt that, were the percentages reversed, there would be a marked slackening in Congressional support for the measure...
...But I never said that it was an honest election...
...DEAR EDITOR THE NEW LEADER welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should nor exceed 300 words,' MIHAJLOV This is just a brief note of thanks to you for prmtmg The whole of "Moscow Summer 1964" (NL, March 29) It sheds a light o~ developments within Communism...
...not Indiana...
...Elman suggests, this benefit is somewhat diluted by the fact that a rentcontrolled building tends to be a deteriorating building, since the landlord has no incentive to maintain or improve it...
...But those who do live in such buildings and are poor do benefit from it, don't they...
...WILLIAM E. BOHN ELIOT AND RACISM Felix Morrow's paean to T. S. Eliot, in the correspondence columns of the NL of March 15, was as uninformed as it was slavish, and it did his idol more harm than justice...
...But the cruel joke of a result is that two out of five applicants for welfare in New York City are, by the Commissioner's own account, not granted assistance and poor people are thrown out of our housing projects as soon as they begin to act like poor people...
...Most doctors are switchboard operators, useful for connecting the genuinely sick patient with a state, Federal, or pnvate medical center, far from home...
...During the past election I wasted some of my time playing this game: My wife read aloud the letters to the editor in our Minneapolis paper and 1 would guess if they came from a small town Or a large one...
...FLORIAN FOXLEA ALBERT CAMUS In his otherwise unobjectionable review of my After the Stranger (NL, March 1...
...in part...
...President Johnson's new proposal to subsidize the rents of poor people has long been recognized by housing experts as an approach which is in every way superior to rent control...
...And the propaganda is that seen in the Parke and Davis ads-the kind old doctor by the sick child, The ancient ones in drugstores and offices are "better" than the fresh prints...
...Well...
...George Woodcock says of Albert Camus' early death in an auto crash: "At times one feels that such an end may have been fortunate, that Camus had almost reached the end of what he could say without an extraordinary and painful self-transformation...
...Pittsburgh, Po, FREDERICK H. PAULS...
...The second is in praise of Stanley Edgar Hyman's review of Mailer's latest An American Dream, I read portions of that "novel" in Esquire and Hyman can truly "call 'em the way he sees 'em:' It is a "preposterous mess," punctuated with a dollar sign...
...I meant both: (a) a smaller percentage of the poor, as compared with middle-income people...
...Allen Tate claims that Eliot was not a racist...
...campaign in the free world to save him from the punitive measures of Tito, this notorious dictator of vacillating attitudes, who has a wide range of devices...
...Luther Martin Wilson Jr...
...but if I were really sick, I would fly the coop and go to the stranger in the big-city clinic...
...Or does he mean that because these buildings are rent-controlled they are likely to be second-rate homes for the poor...
...live in rent-controlled buildings, and (b) a large percentage of the poor are deprived of the possibility of getting decent housing because it is preempted by middleincome people who have the privilege of paying controlled (i.e., low) rents...
...Karl Shapiro notwithstanding, one might accept Morrow's thesis that Eliot was not a racist if Morrow could offer an intelligible argument to support it...
...are the mainstream ~f humanity inside their modern Bastille, on the march for the truth which is-for themsimply freedom...
...To switch WiJI Rogers into sweet anecdotage, "I never met a doctor I didn't like...
...another neat illustration has come in hand...
...Minneapolis, Minn, JAMES C. WHITE BUFFALO FESTIVAL May I congratulate you on the quality of Hilton Kramer's piece on the Buffalo Festival ("On Art," NL, March 15...
...I have not even considered the idea of trying to solve it...
...thanks Hilton Kramer for "protecting the innocent" public-s-for once...
...Wilmington, Del...
...TWO COMMENTS Two comments on your March 15 edition of THE NEW LEADER, The first is to correct a slight error in George Gilder's article, "The Republican Paralysis...
...at his disposal to maintain his arbitrary monopoly over the rights of everyone in Yugoslavia...
...For anything deathly, they send the patient to a specialist -as they should...
...Where has Morrow been since his attack on Paul Elmer More...
...The meaning of their evolutionism is more universal than that which Communism could ever claim to have had...
...Also, in the footnote (page 29) referring to an article by Victor Erlich, the correct date of the Partisan Review issue in which it appeared is May 1953...
...Wilson has the integrity he claims, he has sent many of his patients here or to some equivalent place far from his o!fice in Bowling Green, Kentucky...
...As Senator Ellender has said, in opposing the measure: "I cannot think of another program in all our Government which so directly takes from those who are able to pay taxes and delivers to those in poor circumstances...
...Finally, we have learned that the Zamyatin letter to Stalin, discussed on page 32, was published in English in the Summer 1962 issue of Dissent...
...There is a very good reason why welfare workers cannot convince their clients to make use of the array of free services we offer our pOOT...
...the others are merely doctrinaire...
...Wilson's~childish paranoia...
...M. Mihajlov deserves for his fine contribution an intensive press...
...DOCTORS AND POLITICS Dr...
...Or having gone, couldn't they be honest about what they Were about...
...HAYDEN CARRUTH POVERTY OF EQUALITY Irving Kristol's point that the poor are...
...The fact is that all these institutions of social welfare, including relief, seem to reflect the same proprietary attitudes of the middle classes which Kristol so neatly pinned down...
...And at the end of his life, judging by the facts that have been released so far, Camus was entering a new creative period, quite well pleased with his plans for his work, and had probably already undertaken at least the first stages of the transformation Woodcock has in mind...
...If Kristol means that only a small percentage of poor as compared to middle-class people are living in rent-controlled buildings, then he may be correct...
...The small town letters were similar to Dr...
...March 15) tell the truth about the McKinley-Bryan election...
...Wilsons keep explaining so much more than they understand that their voices reach us as silly squeaks...
...I don't see that Kristol has discussed it anywhere in his article...
...He writes: "Diagnoses will still be made by the doctor Who knows the patient, visits him at all hours as far as possible, and still lays a cool hand on the brow...
...The problem is that he doesn't seem to know what he means and, in the final analysis...
...But it was easy...
Vol. 48 • April 1965 • No. 8
