Dear Editor
Dear Editor Reader's Choice Whoever assigns reviews at The New Leader is really mixed up. In the Christmas Book Issue (NL, December 4), Gunter Grass' The Floundera work of true and lasting value...
...Surely, the assignments should have been reversed...
...Meanwhile, Simon, whom some readers consider the NL ace, is allowed to fritter away his talents on a book nobody of any mind is about to read, Michel Foucaull's The History of Sexuality...
...That is a tine thing, and I'm all for it...
...When ii spends beyond that to finance all sorts of welfare schemes—no matter how noble these may be—the result is inflation...
...Joseph Buck...
...Without having had any real effect on the percentage of people living below the poverty line, these programs nevertheless managed to waste billions of dollars—money mostly spent on "administrative costs...
...He's right, of course, about the '70son the whole, it's been a pretty poor excuse for a decade: selfish, narcissistic, stupid, an era "of psychic mirrors and mirages...
...Bureaucrats got fat, while the poor are as thin as ever...
...In short, every decade must pay for the sins of the one before it...
...Rogers Park, Ill...
...Anchorage, Alaska Roger Walters Women Does Steven V. Roberts really believe that the number of women in the House or Senate makes any difference...
...Nevertheless, his case would have been more convincing had he not indulged in what 1 consider journalistic cliches...
...But where did this stance originate it not in the mysticism, in the desire to drop out that so characterized the '60s...
...These are not so much of fact as of interpretation...
...One greed) Con-gressperson is like another...
...Today everyone is concerned with his own life, his own "personhood...
...This, in turn, makes the life of the poor and of the lower middle classes all that much moremiserable...
...NL, November 20...
...Women's Liberation has disabused us of our notions about the so-called "feminine qualities...
...and, sometimes, money that was merely ripped oft...
...And, as we have been discovering to our dismay, there is a limit on what the government can spend...
...Austin...
...In the Christmas Book Issue (NL, December 4), Gunter Grass' The Floundera work of true and lasting value and an extension into fiction of John Simon's sexual imagination—was reviewed by Richard Howard, who is superficial and lacks imagination...
...to the exclusion of larger matters...
...What Margolis and his confreres politely neglect to consider is how all these fine feelings led ineviiahly to the evils we are experiencing today...
...That limit is how much money the government already has...
...Therefore, one has no reason to expect that the participation of women would in am way improve our nation's government...
...But, at the same time, it seems to me that once we take women off their pedestals, we have to admit that they arc subject to the same pressures and Haws as men...
...Most are by now completely defunct—and rightly so...
...Gary Jordan '60 and '70s Richard J. Margolis makes, I think, a few mistakes in his "Have a Good Decade" (NL, December 18...
...A Woman's Place Is...
...Just think how much there is to look forward to in the'80s...
...as some fool once called ii...
...One such cliche, which seems to be gaining ground daily in the media and in the popular culture as a whole, is that the '60s were glorious—a period of love and altruism in personal relations, and activism and concern for the poor on the political level...
...The attitude of young people is yet another example of the disastrous continuity between the '60s and '70s...
...Consider the much touted welfare programs...
Vol. 62 • January 1979 • No. 1
