Dear Editor
Dear Editor Women's Lib I disagree with some of Walter Goodman's statements about the women's movement ("Whither Women's Lib," NL, December 22). I am not convinced there is a preponderance of...
...3) if found out, lie about it...
...The Moynihan article is an extension of the Landauer doctrine, and it calls to mind an earlier statement by our UN Ambassador —made just before Watergate when he was leaving the Nixon White House—that the world needs "great complexifiers...
...If the pro-interventionists had based their position on economic arguments, those of us who opposed them would have had a very easy task...
...We repudiate the charge that we have exploited or plundered other countries, or that our prosperity has ever rested on any such relationship," says Moynihan...
...If, in fact, some women resent hearing this, one cannot overlook how it has caused many other women (and men) to discover what shapes their lives...
...Imagine the millions of Red...
...But as Moynihan states, "No nation is so poor that it cannot afford free speech...
...It is highly unlikely that Eisenhower's more sophisticated successors, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson—under whom the intervention gained its fatal momentum—took the economic argument seriously...
...The sense of my article—as I still trust I made clear to most readers—was merely that one should not be crushed by guilt feelings, since nobody is free of guilt...
...He was murdered in a nation where the slogan "sin with gusto" became national policy—a nation full of self-confidence that transformed "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God" into "Flying Fuhrer Bunker...
...Correction In the review of The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher (NL, January 19) the publisher, Arbor House, is incorrectly listed as Astor House...
...He continues: "We are prosperous because we are—or were—an industrious and productive people living under a system that has encouraged the development of our capacities and energies...
...Sin with enthusiasm, then, becomes the slogan for our personal and national life...
...Did Landauer, an economist, miss those recently retelevised remarks...
...But instead of learning the dangers of corrupting language from Orwell, he simply learned how to corrupt the language more effectively...
...A last point: For the past few years I have been working on a meditation on the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, I can't help wondering what he might have said to Professor Landauer and Ambassador Moynihan...
...It is Professor Billings' privilege to believe that we have not lost confidence in ourselves as a nation and that we have merely withdrawn confidence from our leaders...
...Thomas A. Billings Professor of Education, Western Washington State College Carl Landauer replies: The only point where I concede a possible error in my article is my attempt to support my statements with a quotation from Luther...
...Indeed, how could anyone cite economic considerations as our motive for intervening in a country that had no American investment to speak of...
...had no raw material we could not easily buy elsewhere, and—aside from assistance at our own expense—purchased only an insignificant part of our exports...
...we simply have no faith in officials who lie to us, tax us to death to support adventures utterly at odds with our interests, send us into battle against our brothers all over the world, corrupt our language, and, not least of all, bore us to death...
...hence I feel compelled to respond...
...The United States acknowledges no such debt...
...The New Leader welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, bat letters should not exceed 300 words...
...2) sin with gusto, therefore...
...Moreover, it seems to me we still have confidence in our institutions and in each other...
...I never maintained that our motives for intervening in Southeast Asia were purely altruistic...
...Marjorie Plastina Self - Confidence Two recent articles, Carl Landauer's "The Need for American Self-Confidence" (NL, May 12, 1975) and Daniel P. Moynihan's "America's Crisis of Confidence" (NL, October 27, 1975), disturbed me deeply...
...For beneath the cute complexities of the Moynihan style, the same essential untruth about American motives in foreign places appears again...
...Both writers, I think, have made a serious, potentially lethal, mal-diagnosis of our ills...
...And there we have the extended version of the Landauer doctrine: Sin is not what you have done to your neighbor...
...Perhaps a simple citizen has no right to protest the words, however untruthful, of persons occupying seats of power...
...Black, Brown and Bronze souls who will sleep ever so much more comfortably in their graves with this assurance...
...I delayed sketching out my misgivings thinking that, perhaps, with an additional reading and more thought my misgivings would subside...
...Eisenhower, of course, was no expert on economics, nor, in my opinion, on American foreign policy...
...not being a theologian, I may have been mistaken about his meaning...
...Using Martin Luther as his guide, Landauer argues that a nation, like a person, "cannot live without sinning...
...There is a direct connection between many of the intolerable situations in which women (and men) find themselves and the larger socio-economic, legal forces beyond their control...
...I do not remember what Eisenhower said but I consider it irrelevant...
...Petersburg, Fla...
...I simply said that it would have been better for the world if the United States could have played the role of policing the globe against totalitarian expansion—although I realize that the U.S., like the policeman on the beat, is not free from selfishness and is apt to succumb to temptations...
...If his advisers persuaded him to say that intervention in Vietnam—in his days a small-scale affair—was necessary for economic reasons, they may have thought that economic arguments would have more effect on public opinion than merely political reasoning...
...That economic interests were not the reason for our moving into Southeast Asia simply won't wash, either as history or as credible lie...
...we have to absolve ourselves, renew our spirit and sin boldly once again...
...But whatever Luther wanted to say, I certainly did not imply that we, as a nation or as individuals, should sin with enthusiasm...
...Buried in Landauer's article is the remarkable untruth that our involvement in Southeast Asia, while perhaps misguided, was purely altruistic and had nothing whatever to do with commodities or markets or economic resources...
...My disagreement with Landauer and Moynihan is not on the importance of national self-confidence...
...The idea of reparation implies a debt incurred as a result of past wrongs...
...I am not convinced there is a preponderance of Jewish, Protestant or divorced women in the movement—or that religious preference or marital status is at all relevant...
...It seems to me the strength of the movement is its dynamic message about this "swampy place...
...It is my privilege to declare my (sad) belief that there is a crisis of national self-confidence in this country...
...Landauer's argument goes on: Whatever our past sins, whether of national policy or corporate principle, the nation cannot let itself be paralyzed by reflective, retroactive guilt...
...It also holds that repentance is good for the soul, and that lying about one's sins is doubly reprehensible, triggering an endless chain of recriminations culminating in a veritable "orgy of recriminations"—to quote another great expert on sin, Henry Kissinger...
...The Big Lie appears late in the Moynihan piece, and it is offered with the gusto Landauer would have as the prerequisite of self-confidence...
...Or is our nation so morally poor that it cannot afford the truth...
...I came from a tradition (which I fancied had found a home in America) that sees sin as common, indeed, but only common...
...Bellingham, Wash...
...Sin is in admitting to it...
...But they have grown...
...Since "sin" is inevitable, he continues, we must summon the courage (self-confidence) to "sin with gusto...
...Moynihan fancies himself an Orwell buff, and I suspect he is...
...4) that is the way to self-confidence...
...But the Landauer doctrine would seem to be: (1) a nation cannot live without sinning...
...Rather, it concerns their views of how a nation looses that quality and what must be done to regain it...
...no student of international affairs could make such an assertion about any action of any state...
...How, then, does he explain President Eisenhower's very explicit statement before a national audience specifying the economic motives behind our military adventure in Vietnam...
...If Moynihan will protect my right to tell the truth, I will protect his right to lie, and we'll bundle that all up and call it "free speech...
...More disturbing to me is the assertion that feminism is "mired" in that "swampy place where private lives and public issues meet...
...Quite far, I think, since it is broader based than previous superficial social movements...
Vol. 59 • February 1976 • No. 3
