Dear Editor
Dear Editor The New Leader welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words. Civil and Uncivil Liberties Congratulations on Leo Sauvage's article...
...One can't help wondering how a German Civil Liberties Union, had one existed and defended Hitler's right to freedom of speech before he came to power, would have felt after 1945...
...Laws are created by human beings, the limits of whose foresight are set by the times they live in...
...by a hairy man in white underwear.' A reader may well wonder whether this would have seemed sufficient provocation to Chekhov, Henry James, or even Fannie Hurst, but he will discover in this compilation from five earlier volumes stories with no motivation at all...
...Everyone who has lived with someone for any extended period of time know that revulsion and passion come and go of their own accord, regardless of the activities—well-intentioned as they may be—of the mate...
...What's important is that the scene is very true to life...
...She writes: "The affable husband of 'The Chimera' brings his mate breakfast in bed, only to find her haggard-eyed, avowing 11 cannot any longer endure being served...
...Edward Thompson Short-Shrift 1 think Isa Kapp short-shrifts John Cheever ("The Cheerless World of John Cheever," NL, September 11...
...Neier and his ACLU friends argue that outlawing one group for its beliefs opens the way to outlawing others for theirs...
...After all, the great master of painting the war between men and women —August Strindberg—offered no explanation for the violence of his portraits...
...Whether or not the breakfast-in-bed business would have seemed sufficient provocation to Chekhov or James or Fannie Hurst strikes me as quite irrelevant...
...If Cheever is no analyst of motive, it may be because he regards the battle of the sexes as too ferocious for psychological interpretation, rooted instead in some primal biological antagonism, or some malevolent caprice of the universe...
...It was a devastating put-down of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and its activities on behalf of those for whom the law is a joke, something to be used to get to power and then discarded...
...But he was no moral leper who even as a schoolboy in Odessa was hatching the dastardly plots that eventually culminated in the Revolution...
...NL, September 25...
...How could they dream that people would one day feel it necessary to take actions—like banning Frank Collin's march through Skokie—whose moral correctness would be so self-evident that to oppose them by a principle of law, no matter how sacred, would seem like infamy, spitting on mass graves...
...the part of it that dealt with Irving Howe's Trotsky was not ("Single-Minded Pursuits...
...Which brings me to my second point: That Cheever looks upon domestic infelicity as too ferocious for psychological interpretation is not an effective criticism of Cheever...
...Langley, la...
...New York City GtoRGt Salzman Trotsky The part of Selden Rodman's column that dealt with Isaiah Berlin's book was very good...
...More importantly, Sauvage's piece shows the silliness of a purely formal view of the law—that is, a view that does not take history into consideration...
...Trotsky may have been an egomaniac and played an important role in the tragedy that befell Russia...
...It was merely there, a primal biological antagonism, a malevolent caprice of the universe...
...I don't see how anyone who has read Isaac Deutscher's biography, for all its biases and ideological convolutions, could doubt the depth of Trotsky's feelings for and commitment to the oppressed...
...But here, too, Sauvage has an answer that to me at least is irrefutable: Why not a law, directed specifically at the Nazis and the KKK, to prevent crimes of the kind that were about to be committed in Skokie...
...Chicago Herbert Thalheisur...
...Yet no one has yet had the temerity to criticize Strindberg for his "saturnine bent of mind...
...When they drafted the Constitution, how could the Founding Fathers have predicted that 6 million Jews would be efficiently disposed of in a period of six years...
...Civil and Uncivil Liberties Congratulations on Leo Sauvage's article "America's Nazis and their Defenders" (NL, August 14...
Vol. 61 • October 1978 • No. 20
