Letters
LETTERS to the Editor 1984! The cold, dreary winter months are depressing enough without your February issue, with its accounts of the increased chances of a no-win nuclear war, the additional...
...Schorr objects to They demonstrated in protest of the decision, but makes no case against it except that he insists on protest against...
...2) Beatty was certainly interested in Reed for a decade—he has consulted me since 1972—but "ten years on research" is hype...
...Where I live, our downtown area has just about been destroyed by bums, winos, mendicants, drug addicts, occupants of alcoholic recovery homes, etc...
...It's lovely to be liberal and talk about the rights and privileges of people who hang around on the street and solicit money—until you or someone else close to you has been frightened by the menacing approach, or until you've seen a child have to cross to the other side of the street to avoid these kinds of people, or until you've had people defecating in your parking lot, or until a retail business that you like goes out of business or stops being open after certain hours because "nobody comes downtown after that time anyway...
...While the rhetoric and passion of the 1960s seem overheated in retrospect, one could make a case that SDS, the New Left, and even the Weathermen contributed more directly and clearly to the issues of their day than the "sobered and realistic" American Left of today...
...aside from my own book, there is the very good Granville Hicks biography, which dates from 1936, and many studies such as Daniel Aaron's Writers on the Left (1961), which give mini-biographies of Reed...
...William A. Fraenkel Hudson, Massachusetts Fit Words Though Daniel Schorr's article on misuse of the language ("Words Fit to Print," January issue) properly points to serious abuses that appear in print, it has flaws of its own...
...Robert A. Rosenstone Venice, California The author replies: 'm not sure just what Robert Rosenstone is complaining about...
...I can understand why he might feel ripped off, but his virulence seems strangely misdirected...
...it's just beginning...
...The superior tone of the article is not warranted by any significant improvement in the American Left's relevancy to the struggles of the American people in the 1980s...
...I just don't see why we have to hand the world over to the people who seem bent on destroying it...
...The noun follows from the verb, "in protest against...
...For them, the family is not dead...
...It's taken us ten years to come back from the impaction...
...In particular, I wish to refer to Seitz's assertion that "while its screenplay takes a few liberties in its portrayal of the relationship of Reed and Louise Bryant, it is otherwise, so far as I can determine, faithful to the historical record (Beatty, it's been reported, spent ten years on research...
...It pays to use the baseload during the night to pump water to an upper basin, and let the water down again to generate somewhat less power during the peak...
...Our political objective is the destruction of honkiness...
...How is it that bright young people said strange things like that...
...Probably your typesetter, not Schorr, is to blame for an omission of part of the non-sentence, "I do not know by what right the pro-abortionists on 'life.' " If this letter has sounded a regrettably antagonistic tone, I wish to say I heartily agree with Schorr's basic point regarding words fashioned into weapons...
...Anthony Standen South Kent, Connecticut Let 'em Eat Elsewhere Your Neutron Bomb Award in the February issue gave me pause...
...Such "establishment" publications as The Wall Street Journal, New York magazine, and The Los Angeles Times managed to find and refer to my book...
...This is "pumped hydro storage," and it is widely used to achieve a saving in raw energy...
...The whole thing wasn't such a bust, and we haven't advanced so far beyond what the New Left attempted and accomplished in the 1960s to shrug off their experience as casually and contemptuously as Judis does...
...Others react by withdrawing into shame, hostility, and fear...
...And I thank him for the last paragraph...
...The utilities may be wicked, but they are not insane...
...Reds is only the second Hollywood film ever made about a historic, native radical (the other was Bound for Glory) and the first to have a Communist as an open hero (Woody Guthrie's Communist Party connections were fuzzed in Glory...
...The Award cited officials of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, who proposed to deprive vagrants of a source of food by spraying a repulsive scent on garbage cans...
...Surely they drew more adherents than we can claim...
...Granted, a film reviewer need not be a historian...
...More in the review might be criticized, but let me merely suggest to readers that they look into Reed's life for themselves...
...Schorr's expression " 'waste,' a much different concept than fraud or abuse...
...I hope disinformation soon drops out of the language, as its near relative brain washing seems to have...
...But the whole tone of your award implies that there's something wrong with a city wanting to avoid problems of vagrants...
...People who are bent on the ordinary purposes of life—going to work, entertaining themselves, going to a restaurant, going to a shop— have a right to do so without being molested by the sights, sounds, and smells which the transient and alcoholic population produce, especially when they take over a downtown area...
...Daniel Schorr Washington, D.C...
...One protests one's love and sometimes one protests too much...
...John Marshall Collins San Jose, California New Left John Judis displays a lack of historical perspective in his article on the Weather Underground ("When the 'Visible Saints' Come Marching In," January issue...
...Even before working on the film, I knew history was too important to be left to Hollywood...
...To defy the law is to act in defiance of the law...
...Why not conclude from such examples that to protest a decision is to act in protest of the decision...
...But this is a special case...
...One might think, then, that The Progressive's reviewer would glance at the historical record...
...If one opposes something, one protests against it...
...it sounds like a silly, futile measure...
...Reds is in many ways a brave film to bring out at this time, but for anyone committed to the ideals by which Reed lived, it can hardly be satisfying fare...
...In sequence after sequence, the film proves to have represented the critical events of Reed's last five years quite as Rosenstone has described them...
...Much of Reds so closely resembles scenes described in Romantic Revolutionary that Rosenstone should probably have been given some writing credit (e.g...
...A valiant and, in some areas, successful struggle against racism and the Vietnam war was carried out by the New Left of the 1960s, often with the participation of hundreds of thousands of people...
...I still read things that seem strange in the pages of In These Times, The Guardian, and other publications...
...Now I also know it is too important to be left to film critics, even for intelligent publications like The Progressive...
...The demand on a utility swings widely, being far lower at night than during certain daytime hours...
...Based on the Biography by...
...In a long article in the Village Voice Literary Supplement for February 1981—"To Russia with Love: John Reed and the Greenwich Village Revolutionaries"— Paul Berman asserts that "by and large the historical sense in Reds is magnificent, down to the tiniest details, and ought to prompt Hollywood to give Beatty and his researchers an Academy Award for scholarship...
...Electric Circus Ilove your No Comment section, but I must comment on an item that appeared under that heading in your February issue...
...Does he disagree with my judgment that Reds is a good film (which is his prerogative), or does he mean to suggest that the production which he served as historical consultant significantly distorts the historical record (which seems to be an odd position for him to take...
...there is nothing in the film that was not in my book and little that was not in Hicks's work...
...Not that I agree with putting bad smells on garbage cans (they already smell pretty bad) to keep vagrants from getting food out of them...
...What next...
...Let me disentangle the strands of this statement by saying three things: 1) The historical record is not difficult to find...
...This conclusion, moreover, is shared by observers more familiar than I with the pertinent historical literature...
...To abuse the environment is to act in abuse of the environment...
...The cold, dreary winter months are depressing enough without your February issue, with its accounts of the increased chances of a no-win nuclear war, the additional horror of chemical warfare, the newest laser technique for converting atomic energy plutonium into atomic bomb materials, x-ray abuses resulting in a higher incidence of cancer, and more...
...All that I found there led to the conclusion that the film does not misrepresent Reed's political positions and involvements during the period (1915i920) it covers...
...At night the efficient baseload equipment can be used, whereas during peak hours the demand must be satisfied by special on-off equipment that is far less efficient...
...Without protest, and with edification, I accept everything in the following paragraph of Herbert Glucksman's letter...
...One does not protest of it...
...Perhaps some interplay of events and forces placed the question of the relationship between white and black America in the forefront...
...The fact that a generation of college-educated, middle-class and upper-middle-class white youth were forced to deal with this profoundly difficult question on the basis of little or no societal experience and were found wanting should not be as big a cause for disappointment as Judis feels it is...
...This is true, in a certain literal sense, but there is an explanation...
...You're cutting the heart out of the progressive movement if you say that local folks can't produce better conditions for themselves...
...I've since purchased and read Romantic Revolutionary, and it has left me even more bewildered by Rosenstone's vituperation...
...Whew...
...Michael H. Seitz New York, New York Correction Atypographical garble in the March issue scrambled one paragraph of George Heymont's "Parents Come Out...
...Much of Berman's piece is based on material in Rosenstone's book, which he finds "intelligent and well-written...
...Herbert A. Glucksman Lexington, Massachusetts The author replies: To protest is to declare or assert...
...Lots of people from all sections of the Left (and, it goes without saying, the rest of the political spectrum as well) said funny, silly things back in the 1960s...
...How can The Progressive and its readers reverse the tide...
...Is this 1982 or 1984...
...John S. Ranson Astoria, New York 'Reds' As a long-time subscriber and occasional contributor to The Progressive, author of a biography of John Reed (Romantic Revolutionary, 1975, reissued in 1981), and historical consultant on Reds, I am shocked and grieved that your film reviewer, Michael H. Seitz, displays such a self-satisfied lack of knowledge of the historic John Reed and the period in which he lived ("Picture from a Revolution," February issue...
...It should have read: The survivors are the ones who reach out and say, "You're still my child...
...The author of an article on usage should be careful to keep his own impeccable...
...I did glance at the historical record before writing my review, although the work I consulted was not Rosen-stone's but "the very good Granville Hicks biography...
...You cut off their food supply," a city commissioner explained, "they'll go elsewhere...
...3) the liberties taken with Reed's life are many, and not just related to the portrayal of the relationship with Bryant...
...contains two errors: He should say very different, not much different, and different from, not different than...
...I wonder why you feel compelled to stand up for street people against the rights of others...
...Where I live, this has focused on cleaning the streets of the bums as a first condition to living in a decent area...
...It might be amusing, but it's just not helpful to cite a bunch of seemingly ridiculous quotes by leaders of the Weathermen back in 1969 on the imminence and inevitability of socialist revolution in the United States...
...Have we lost our minds...
...But many parents muster the courage to find out about part of their child they never knew...
...In defense, one might offer evidence that a noun like protest, whose parent verb is transitive and so takes a direct object, is generally followed by the preposition of...
...You note that Virginia Electric Power Company's new hydroelectric project in Bath County "will consume four kilowatts of power for every three kilowatts generated...
...Rosenstone may, indeed, have a legitimate grievance, but I don't believe that it's with me, or that it ought to be formulated in terms of Hollywood's misuse (or my alleged ignorance) of history...
Vol. 46 • April 1982 • No. 4
