Dear Editor

...Dear Editor Heartless Critics Robert Asahina's remarks on Hair, and the sentiments behind them, were crass, small-minded and overall had little—if any—base in reality ("Failed Fantasies," NL, April 9...

...It seems to me that, whatever its flaws, a film that succeeds as well as Hair does in symbolizing and chronicling an era and an entire generation deserves better...

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...In 1977 Tom Hayden could declare: "[The New Left of the 1960s] desegregated the South, toppled two Presidents and made a horrible war impossible to continue...

...to them...

...But there is little about Asahina's statements that could be said to be reasonable...

...Perhaps in his enthusiasm to avoid such excess, he has been led to mistake hatchet jobs and nit-picking for critical honesty and discriminating analysis...

...And this would seem to point to the need to forsake nationalism and isolationism...

...Pittsburgh Diane Brooks Liberty and Equality According to Steve Kelman's review ("Abandoning the Good Fight,"NL, May 21) of Peter Steinfels' The Neoconservathes, people who think it is difficult to reconcile liberty and equality are inventing a facile dichotomy...

...Further, Asahina charges that Hair's music "was curiously out of place even in the original stage version, since it had only a nodding acquaintance with...

...As for his write-off of the choreography, there is little elaboration to support it...

...It extended the democratic rights of more and more people . . . and maybe, on a deeper level, it shook up the comfortable assumptions of American society, got people thinking about the need for social change...

...It is possible for reasonable folks to find reasonable fault with it...

...2) Berger's audience was not "the middle class" at all...

...it was the fancy-pants rich...

...but many goods limit or cancel each other, and therefore we will never enjoy them fully at the same time...

...It is undeniable that the nations and economies of the world are becoming more interdependent...

...Similar willful blindness is evident throughout the piece...

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...he was hustling for honesty, for openness, for a then-new decency toward others and compassion for those who are different...

...While it is a fact that no one even vaguely familiar with hard rock would argue that it appears in Hair's score, the blanket dismissal is unwarranted...

...the real music of the counterculture," and that "[Twyla) Tharp's choreography is inane, too...

...When Berger did ihe "1 Got Life" number on the dinner table it served as an expert pie-in-the-face to meaningless convention, one-dimensional stiffness and basic repression of attitudes and sensibilities...

...He not only dismisses and demeans one of the most socially aware and concerned generations of the 20th century, he also totally disregards the fact that this group was responsible for many important and lasting changes...

...Nevertheless, the major force in the world toda\ is, in fact, nationalism—as we can see from the situation in Yugoslavia, in the I'SSR, in Africa, and in Iran, among other places...

...I don't know if Asahina was daydreaming during Hair or simply distracted while at his typewriter, but he also missed two important factors in this scene: (1) Somewhere near the end of " I Got Life," one of the most bourgeois of the guests (portrayed by the veteran character actress Charlotte Rae) freely participated in the number...

...In "The Meaning of Social Democracy" (NL, January 1), adapted from his address to the Social Democrats, U.S.A., he repeals what he says more pithily in his "How to be a Conservative-Liberal Socialist" [Encounter, October 1978): ". . . innumerable evils are compatible (i.e., we can suffer (hem comprehensively and simultaneously...

...But there is another possible explanation: In one of his reviews last year, he piled considerable scorn upon unreasoned praise of films ?boosterism," he called it—in all its forms...

...Had Asahina been paying attention rather than working up his insults, he would have seen that Berger and his longhaired troupe signified freespiritedness and scorn for largely purposeless conformity—a conformity, I might add, thai was greatly responsible for the continuation through the *60s of intense racial and economic injustice, not to mention a corrupt and senseless war...

...Finally, there is Asahina's complaint about "the self-righteous and self-contradictory contempt for the middle class that motivated much of the '60s activism," and his pouting disappointment that Hair's director, Milos Forman, did not "debunk the myth of the '60s...

...Leszek Kolakowski is not one of those facile neo-conservatives...

...White Plains, S. Y. Miltos Himmelf arb Interdependence The global situation is not quite as simple as Ernest Schell and his "distinguished panel of scholars" make it out to be ("Correspondents' Correspondence," NL, June 4...

...Asahina insists, for example, that the Berger character (played by Treat Williams) "now appears to be exactly what he was all along—a panhandling, kidnapping, overbearing hooligan...

...The young activists of the 1960s saw that there were many injustices and brutalities going on and moved to awaken the nation Thk Nfcw Lfadj-r welcomes comment and criticism on an> of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words...

...Thus your critic is right when he says that Berger was "frenetically hustling...

...The spunk and exuberance of "Good Morning, Star-shine," "I Got Life" and "Aquarius," as well as the warmth and intensity of such slower tunes as "Easy to be Hard" and "Let the Sunshine In," expertly captured the mood and style of the '60s...

...That could be one explanation for Asahina's remarkable vulgarity...

...A society in which there is no equality and no liberty of any kind is perfectly possible, yet a social order combining total equality and freedom is not...

...They constitute, for the most part, a collage of invective, cheap shots, broad kissoffs, and two-dollar profundities posing as a professional critique...

...Hair is not a flawless and towering creation...

...Perhaps since Asahina's predecessor was John Simon (whom Andrew Sarris has called "the Count Dracula of critics"), the former is influenced by the latter...

...To assert, as he does, that Hair makes clear "just how ugly—morally and es-thetically—those 'beautiful people' [of the 1960s counterculture] really were" is to not only sorely misinterpret the thrust and attitude of the film, but to dismiss the many accomplishments of this group...