Dear Editor
Dear Editor GOODMAN I hope the sudden blossoming (?) of sca-tology in your pages ("Idolizing the Underclass," NL, November 24) represents only a lapse of judgment, not an editorial policy. The...
...Nixon is apparently not willing to use American influence to this end...
...Arthur M. Shapiro Does Walter Goodman know that Ber-trand Russell wrote an extraordinary article, around 30 years ago, entitled "On the Superior Virtue of the Oppressed...
...Connie Sanders...
...Admittedly, all the critics at the Seventh Festival had tight schedules, trying to catch the experimental and independent films in beween the high-budget presentations...
...New York City Leo Rosten BENES Regarding Jan Benes' "Impressions of America" (NL, December 8), I wonder why no one bothered to tell the visiting Czechoslovak author that excellent medical attention is widely available, free or inexpensively, in New York City to those unable to pay for it—and even to those who are able to afford medical and hospitalization insurance, but improvidently failed to take care of the matter...
...Not permitting this expansionist tendency to go unchecked, and at the same time not throwing the world into a catastrophe, will continue to be the fundamental task of American foreign policy...
...The many ambiguities in Nixon's speeches aside, however, one element essential for the achievement of a political settlement in South Vietnam is lacking in his words and actions: Without a government in Saigon that would be at least conditionally prepared to share power with the Communists, there is no prospect of a political solution...
...Kissin's belief that Hanoi could ignore American coastal positions as Castro ignores Guantanamo is entirely unconvincing...
...If the necessary revision of our foreign policy were based on the assumption that Moscow and Peking no longer want to spread their system over the globe, then revision would not mean improvement...
...In Brooklyn, to 1st Avenue, 1st Street, West 1st Street, East 1st Street, North 1st Street, South 1st Street, Brighton 1st Street, etc...
...No one, his friend included, need nurse an ear infection at home in this non-Socialist nation for want of $140 a day...
...How can anyone who has looked into their literature, from Lenin to Stalin to Brezhnev to Mao, seriously doubt that there is an expansionist tendency in Communism, based on the belief of a historic mission...
...I was convulsed when I read in the Lincoln Center Film Festival synopsis: "But the strength of the film comes from...
...Guan-tanamo is a purely military base of minor importance...
...Indeed, I suspect that the people who "discredited" it are the same ones whose wrong advice to President Johnson landed us in the spot in which we are now...
...the sensual Renoir-like beauty of the treatment...
...By this rationale, Walter Goodman's use of currently fashionable obscenities in his otherwise engaging piece is at best gratuitous and at worst a pandering attempt to be (ugh) "where it's at" even while excoriating the Yahoos...
...occupation of some key positions...
...I am not impressed with the argument that the plan, in Clough's words, was "previously discredited...
...In my review, I likened the film's technical effects to an Eastman color home movie...
...It was also rediscovered by that scourge of the professional intelligentsia, Eric Hoffer...
...That Benes left New York with the opposite impression after his short stay would appear to be the result of the stupidity of those with whom he came in contact here, or of their desire to foster unfavorable, false impressions of this country...
...Aureola" is perfect coinage ("Infidelity and Nostalgia," NL, November 24), but please keep us abreast of nonce words of this milk...
...Carl Landauer HYMAN Stanley Edgar Hyman rightly reprimands Saul Bellow for annotating his symbolism in Mr...
...Curiously, this criticism has not been forthcoming...
...to minimize this loss of trust, we must try our utmost to protect not Ky and Thieu (who as political leaders must bear the consequences of their own incompetence), but the many thousands of South Vietnamese who have taken our side with honesty and bravery—generals, privates and civilians...
...But after all, streptomycin is useful anyway...
...Lexington, Ky...
...In one of its later variants it was accurately portrayed by W.S...
...By the way, while it is satisfying to see it restated in print from time to time, Goodman's "Doctrine of the Superiority of the Underclass" has a venerable intellectual history, being a lineal descendant of the "noble savage" concept...
...Or indeed, anywhere in Queens...
...New York City Sandra Jane Shevey John Simon may well think mammillae better deserving to be nimbed than other (say, cephalic) extremities...
...New York City Maria Ben LANDAUER REPLIES In my article "A Dove's Peace Proposal" (NL, October 27), I asked for a new, unbiased consideration of Lieutenant General James M. Gavin's 1966 enolave plan as a possible way out of our Vietnam dilemma: the choice between unilateral withdrawal, with its horrifying consequences, or the sham solution of a "Vietnamization of the war...
...If the Americans held, say, Hue, Danang and a few other places with a civilian population and prospering economic life, these locations of a political system different from that of the Communists would act as a thorn in the flesh of the NLF...
...The rationale for using any word, obscene or otherwise, is that it communicates the desired idea belter than any other word...
...The Gavin plan would at least provide a chance—no more—for American casualties to be reduced to a point that would allow indefinite U.S...
...New York City Robert J. Cahn SIMON Though I usually find most of John Simon's comments thoughtful—especially in a field abounding with flip promo-editorial critics—his November 10 column (NL, "In Dubious Battle") is quite blind...
...Since I of course expected to be attacked not only from the Right but also from the Left, B. E. O'Malley's letter ("Dear Editor," NL, November 24) came as no surprise...
...Ernest T. Clough ("Dear Editor," NL, November 10) and John Kissin ("Dear Editor," NL, November 24) do not think the plan will work...
...Gilbert, who included in Ko-Ko's "little list" the "idiot who praises with enthusiastic tone/all centuries but this and every country but his own...
...It broadens his point to include all the intellectuals' romanticizations of the proletariat...
...One who would cast stones for this offense should not, however, club us with such clues to his cleverness as "the novel becomes delightfully lunatic" with its subtle italicization...
...Still, it would have served Simon well to have seen Renoir's masterpiece...
...To fulfill it, we need the confidence of other nations...
...What is most disconcerting about Simon's review is that though he disparages most of the Renoir films (with which I again disagree), he does not comment on the one which might be pertinent to a comparison, Dejeuner Sur L'Herbe...
...I had just viewed Renoir's brilliant Dejeuner Sur L'Herbe, and found Adalen '31 gross commercialism...
...While I cannot categorically assert that they are wrong—I am not a military expert, and stated that "there are numerous questions of military technique to be answered"—the General's proposal, or some similar solution, simply seems the best of all the bad options open to us at present...
...Berkeley, Calif...
...Since the North Vietnamese and the NLF want to dominate the whole of South Vietnam, the fact that they could dislodge us only by a political settlement would strengthen our bargaining position...
...Is this not the essence of the President's own policy...
...Ithaca, N.Y...
...True, in the case of the Soviet Union and the East European countries this tendency has been attenuated, but it has not disappeared...
...Maybe then he would not have settled for pap...
...Having myself reviewed Adalen '31 for Entertainment World, I was privy to the press information on the film...
...Of course, a coalition government or any similar arrangement is by no means desirable in itself—it would be easy enough to write a dissertation about its dangers...
...The essence of the Gavin plan is a defensive strategy that would both minimize American losses and create a more hopeful basis for negotiations...
...Dropping whatever illusions we may have had about Saigon is no good reason to cultivate new ones regarding our policies toward the Communist world...
...I also expected to be told that my article merely pushed with force against a door which was already open...
...Unfortunately, this confidence will be impaired by the Vietnam war, whatever we ultimately do...
...And to disabuse Benes of the notion that there is a prisonlike order in the layout and numbering of our streets, why did no one take him down to Greenwich Village—say, to Little West 12th Street, or the corner of West 4th and West 10th streets...
...In fact, like streptomycin, it seems fated to be rediscovered regularly by perceptive individuals who are better at intuition than scholarship...
...Sammler's Planet ("Seize the Moon," NL, December 8...
...But sharing the power with the Communists is part of the only alternative we have to early unilateral withdrawal, and unless the President is willing to handle this hot potato, events will drift in the direction of the Moratorium's most extreme demand...
Vol. 52 • December 1969 • No. 24
