Dear Editor
Dear Editor Mideast Fantasies "Coming Down to Reality in Egypt" (NL, February 27), by Sydney Lippman, should more aptly have been titled, "Egyptians Still Unrealistic." Israel owes Egypt nothing,...
...He cynically consulted big city bosses...
...American Sex Marvin Kitman did a good job of showing how British TV treats sex "naturally and unobtrusively," whereas American TV treats it as "sinful, grim, tedious and worst of all embarrassing" ("TV's Sex Problem," NL, March 13...
...To be fair, the Arabs do not monopolize fantasy...
...It is thus a curious reversal that today we are plagued by Victorian attitudes, while the English are foot-loose and fancy free...
...Lippman lends credence to such unreasonableness by not clearly disassociating herself from it...
...Montross, Va...
...HHH was the greatest legislator of our era, and the fact that he The New Leader welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words...
...Christopher Wilson Marx vs...
...And his forthright stand against the Communist conspiracy outdid Joe McCarthy...
...Olympia, Wash...
...Chicago Geoffrey Gould...
...Socrates I really enjoyed Theodore Draper's review of Vivian Gornick's The Romance of American Communism ("The Romanticizing of American Communism," NL, March 13...
...Margolis does manage to say a few good words about Humphrey—especially that he died gracefully...
...Their despots mock us, threaten us and overcharge us, but we call them friends...
...Draper did a great job of surrounding Gornick's shabby, Village Voice prose with his own cool, incisive writing, and of putting down the author's muddle-headed interest in the emotional and personal rather than the actual political value of an idea...
...He was a pupil of Lyndon Johnson...
...Even his address to the 1948 Democratic Convention on civil rights was a gimmick to gain the political limelight...
...Egypt's Army was trapped in the Yom Kippur War, but the Egyptians think they won...
...Draper writes: "Anyone capable of putting together Marx, who knew all the answers and Socrates, who knew only questions...
...was a liberal and a social democrat is all the more reason why we should have more than Margolis' skewed appreciation in your pages...
...That in a way, is what separates liberal Western societies from Communist ones too...
...To Margolis, HHH was an opportunistic politician who trimmed his political sails to serve his overweening ambitions...
...Kissinger thought that releasing their trapped Army would give Egyptians enough pride to make peace, but it's given them confidence to consider another war...
...The Victorians were plagued by a similar dichotomy...
...Sadat makes a single trip to Jerusalem, and we consider him wedded to peace...
...John W. Piercey For the record, it should be noted (hat a brief tribute to Hubert H. Humphrey also led off the "Between Issues" column in the January 30 issue of The New Leader.—Ed...
...Well that isn't good enough...
...But I think Kitman should have mentioned that when Americans don't treat sex in this way, they treat it porno-graphically—as the gratification of impersonal lust...
...Egypt claims it was offered nothing, and demands everything...
...Bronx, N. Y. Richard H. Shuuuan HHH The New Leader was rather tardy in paying tribute to Hubert H. Humphrey, and when it did in the form of Richard J. Margolis' "The Dreams of Hubert Humphrey" (NL, February 13), we were given a patronizing and slightly contemptuous account of his political life...
...We don't need to elevate HHH to sainthood—we've had too much of that already in the cases of JFK and M. L. King—but on the occasion of his death we should have had a fairer summing up by someone who understood him and sympathized with his views...
...They demand everything and support terror, but we call them moderate...
...Israel owes Egypt nothing, but offered almost everything...
...I particularly relished Draper's remark on Gornick's quote that "Marx was their (her parent's) Socrates, the party was their Plato, and world Socialism their Athens...
...clearly requires, among other things, a more critical and demanding editor...
Vol. 61 • March 1978 • No. 7
