Dear Editor
Dear Editor On Cable Marvin Kitman's wit is amazing. His column on Cable TV ("Cable Hopping," NL, June 28) shows the banality of the new technology more than any serious article would. It proves...
...In spirit, my book probably falls closer to Rous-seas' Capitalism and Catastrophe than to Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom...
...I suppose t should have ranted about monopoly capital after all...
...Gewen seems to share Mailer's apparent view that promiscuity in a woman is deplorable...
...Fori Lee, N.J...
...Although the cessation of Civil War pensions in the North no doubt contributed to the severity of the Great Depression, Northern industry was stimulated again by World War II...
...that has been growing markedly in recent decades...
...The tendency toward future regional strife is acute...
...I had hoped Rousseas' assault from the Left would be balanced by equal slings from the Right...
...It proves that "many a truth is said in jest...
...Stephen Rous-seas' review of my Minds, Markets and Money ("Economic Games," NL, May 17) is more precis than pinpricks, so I can't complain...
...I do not, however, climb on the wheezing warhorse of radical economics—monopoly capital...
...To judge from the review, Gewen is "thankful" for Mailer's idea that it might be interesting to forcibly sodomize a woman ("tool her, if they're able...
...Moreover, he leaps from a real problem to a perceived revolution...
...A whole century of one section getting fat and corrupt at the expense of another is not easily put right...
...For men, though, promiscuity ("the hunt") is a highly desirable ingredient of life, but is fun only if women try to be chaste...
...Much more serious is the extent to which our two-tier system is sectional, exacerbating the continuing economic struggle between North and South...
...Barbara R. Bergmann Professor of Economics University of Maryland Barry Gewen replies: Some of Mailer's views I share, some I don't...
...Princeton, N. J. Shlomo Maital Visiting Fellow Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs Sectional Strife Gus Tyler's eighth installment of "Charting America's Future" ("Farewell to Fairness," NL, June 28) covers a lot of territory familiar to readers of The New Leadfr before finally getting to really interesting virgin terrain...
...In addition, consumer income in the North was given a healthy boost by the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, a law that worsened the North-South economic divisions through the creation of "right-to-work" states...
...which was based on the Union soldiers' pensions, as is well documented by Walter P. Webb in A House Divided...
...For 35 years, Northern trade unionists have had a field day at the expense of nonunion Southern workers...
...In war, crossfire is fatal...
...Unless a better compromise than the one arrived at in 1850 (limiting the spread of slavery) is reached soon, nothing can prevent a showdown: Decline in the North and Midwest will accelerate while the South and West flourish...
...Their] suppressed expectations are likely to turn to irrepressible explosions [and] society will be seized, as Aristotle warned, with the 'sedition' that 'stems from inequality.'" It is a shame that Tyler's analysis here is so short...
...In literature, it is invigorating...
...I debunk Friedman's miraculous free market pencil, where wood, graphite and rubber mesh neatly through the wonders of competition and the profit motive...
...Industry in the North and Midwest flourished because of this government-financed consumer purchasing power from the 1870s well into the 1920s...
...The only effective remedy is the simultaneous establishment of uniform labor laws and the implementation of an incomes policy a la Sidney Weintraub...
...But Business Week's review was favorable...
...Austin, Texas Gary Jordan Mailer I was very glad to learn from Barry Gewen ("Minor Mailer," NL, June 14) that Norman Mailer has found out about the women's movement, and has been distressed by it...
...By contrast, between 1930-50 there was no concerted effort to build industry in the South...
...Women, youth, the elderly, minorities, and immigrant workers may occasionally strike out in frustration, but the notion that they could organize a sustainable revolution is silly...
...Tyler states that there is a little-noticed form of "malignant maldistribution ????namely, the maldistribution of income within the bourgeoisie and within the proletariat...
...Gewen joins Mailer in deploring a "dictatorial element" in the women's liberation movement, although both he and Mailer must be aware that the women's movement results from the desire of women to be relieved of the dictatorship of men...
...At the same time, I was surprised to find The New Leader employing a critic who is not repelled by Mailer's attitudes toward women, and who may even share them...
...Among the workers in this second tier, whose decline in living standards has been far more steep than in the country as a whole, there is a disproportionately large percentage of women, youth, elderly, minorities, and immigrant workers...
...Bethesda...
...Stephen Housman Crossfire The unwritten law of reviewing books demands that the reviewer blend bile, derision and vitriol with information on what the book says...
...That clearly irks Rous-seas...
...It is not the women, youth, elderly, minorities, and immigrant workers who will take up arms, but rather Northern and Southern white males...
...Consider the ascendency of the North following the Civil War...
...But to clarify one point, I am opposed to sodomizing anyone forcibly...
...Basically, the division is between those employed by small businesses and those employed by the larger corporations, usually operating in oligopolized sectors with heavily capitalized resources...
...I don't believe you would allow in your pages a reviewer who found "valuable" a book suggesting even in jest that blacks be forcibly sodomized by whites, or a book that took offense at the "dictatorial" insistence of the black movement that racist practices and attitudes change...
Vol. 65 • September 1982 • No. 16
