Letters

...There is good reason to think about the kinds of publications that should be offered for sale at a great public university, and there is no reason to assume that anything that gets printed is entitled to be sold...

...I am not attempting to portray trial lawyers as benevolent and charitable people...

...Reagan and a large part of the American people have ridden the Rambo train to fantasy land, where they have persuaded themselves that America would have "won" in Vietnam had it not been for those sissy protesters...

...Doris Richstein Oshkosh, Nebraska Regarding The Progressive's artwork—it's to the point, and jolts us out of our slumber...

...John Rossen Chicago, Illinois Encounter in Gaxa Michael Rosenblum's "Encounter in Gaza" (June issue) presents a valuable account of Palestinian life under brutal Israeli military occupation...

...they are complete statements in themselves...

...He seems to be a direct descendant of the Elbert Hubbard school of Transcendental Conservatism, and while I deplore his pro-business stance, I enjoy his populist positivism...

...I deplore censorship and the me-to-read-and-you-to-not syndrome, but I sense that a bugbear is being created in regard to bookstores and libraries...

...I am a veteran of the Lincoln Brigade, and I have participated in one way or another in every major movement for peace and social justice for all of my adult life...

...Pornography" does not strike me as an accurate appellation for a magazine of that sort...

...All letters may be edited for clarity and conciseness...

...The reality is that we love our country and our world...

...In these cases, the trial lawyer bears the brunt of the loss and the injured person pays nothing...

...But people who would resolve such questions by simply banning all monthly magazines (including The Progressive) are clearly unfit to engage in a serious discussion...

...at the University of Iowa had not called a rally to support the bombing...

...However, the dictionary defines patriotism not as love of a nation's government or policies but as love of country...

...Maybe the censors who have proposed banning all monthly magazines from the campus newsstands are just trying to increase your circulation ("The Immorality of Monthliness," Editor's Memo, July issue...

...However, in a state like Mississippi, where the unions have very little power and the average worker has little economic influence, the trial lawyer and the tort system are all that workers have going for them...

...Though we are not obliged to wave the flag and support the military cancer, we do have one obligation: We must love our country...

...What do people want— Saturday Evening Post/Good Housekeeping/Newsweek dull (and expensive) prettiness...

...Griffin's letter in the June issue, wherein he criticized trial lawyers and the contingent-fee system...

...Under our present system, the poorest and least influential member of society can take on the largest corporate defendant in the courts and have a fair chance of winning a legitimate case...

...Peaceful dialogue will come about in the Middle East when the U.S...

...It was shocking, therefore, to read Matthew Rothschild's attack on patriotism...

...I do not see how deciding what literary merchandise to stock or not to stock involves censorship...

...a bizarre system for upsetting the nuclear balance is called the "defense shield...

...Congratulations on Pat Aufderheide's article on Paul Harvey (July issue...

...The Weekly Progressive will abstain from publishing during all weeks of mourning, including financial mourning...

...The tort system is the only viable control over corporate conduct in this country today...

...Leftists have been playing these intellectual games for decades, demonstrating their blindness to human reality...

...Christie Hefner Playboy Enterprises, Inc...

...Prejudice against the obese is as stubborn, as irrational, and at least as pervasive...

...The President's penchant for bombing and bragging about it shows how far the realities of Vietnam have been pushed from public consciousness...

...The great insurance scam will, if successful, constitute a great upward transfer of wealth in this country...

...Earl Price New York, New York People who characterize Playboy as "pornography" would presumably use that word to describe anything that has a sexual content— from the Calvin Klein Obsession ads (which were the target of successful boycot efforts) to R-rated movies and romance novels...

...And for the last thirty years I have considered myself an American patriot, a revolutionary nationalist, and a true internationalist...

...Many trial lawyers do earn great sums of money...

...Mercenary thugs are called "freedom fighters...

...Michael Sean McDonough Madison, Wisconsin The Great Insurance Scam Iwas pleased to see Keenen Peck's article, "The Great Insurance Scam," in the April issue, but I was troubled by C.W...

...Edith Wisdom Staten Island, New York We are writing to say how very much we enjoy the graphics in your magazine...

...Arabs may be "easy enemies," but the student movement will not sacrifice them on the altar of Reaganism...

...If ever a Museum of Political Horrors of the Left is opened in the United States, I would nominate this as the central exhibit, overshadowing the most outrageous political horrors of the wildest of the Neanderthal Left...

...Charles Obler Boston, Massachusetts Beginning with the publication of Jeremy Rifkin's essay, "The Red, White, and Blue Left," in November 1970, The Progressive has stood almost alone among publications of the Left in its enthusiasm for a renewed and redefined patriotism that would permit a fragmented and floundering Left to overcome its sectarian isolation from the American people...

...The young John Quincy Adams was very much the patriot when he told his father, the second President, that he could not ask support of his country or government when it was in the wrong...

...LETTERS to the Editor O Patriots: An Exchange In their debate on patriotism ("O Patriots: An Exchange," July issue), both John Buell and Matthew Rothschild seem to equate patriotism with nationalism...

...I grieve that Rothschild's misbegotten piece of political poppycock should have found its way into the pages of The Progressive even as part of an "exchange...

...Matthew Rothschild is more sensitive and more honest, but he goes too far when he says, "The notion that one owes an obligation to one's country is absurd...

...However, one of his arguments seems rather tenuous: Rosenblum naively asserts that if American and Israeli Jews could be made aware of repressive conditions in the occupied territories, they would develop the sympathetic understanding necessary for peaceful dialogue between Arabs and Jews...

...I pass the magazine on to others, and am always tempted to remove my mailing label first...

...However, trial lawyers spend thousands of hours in research, investigation, and preparation of cases...

...It is a feeling, a way of life...

...The 20 per cent that is pictorial features nonviolent, non-explicit photographs of beautiful women...

...first-strike weapons are called "peacekeepers...

...Thousands of hours and thousands of dollars invested by the trial lawyer may result in no recovery...

...Language is regularly debased in our time...

...I organized the unemployed in the early 1930s, and auto workers and coal miners in the middle and late 1930s and the 1940s...

...military intervention...

...Connor Baldwin Oklahoma City, Oklahoma Fan Mail While I agree with The Progressive's politics, the underlying sense of gloominess and defeat I get from most articles is too discouraging...

...And the artwork certainly adds to an overall sense of ugliness and despair...

...1 find them powerful, provocative, and fun to look at...

...Playboy is 80 per cent articles, fiction, interviews, lifestyle, and service...

...Amy Gray Diane Wiatr Olympia, Washington The interesting and eyecatching artwork is what initially attracted me to The Progressive, and it continues to add visual enjoyment to informative reading...

...It's refreshing to read a publication that is willing to express pain through art, not just report it...

...The best way to deal with the University's time-warp attempt at censoring such monthlies as Playboy, Play-girl, Penthouse, and (most seductive) The Progressive may be to design a special cover wrapper for copies of your magazine to be distributed on that campus: "The Progressive announces a change of policy which 'honors and reflects the University's commitment to intellectual freedom' with The Weekly Progressive, a special edition for the University of Wisconsin...

...Louis Worth Jones San Mateo, California What I most regret about the sort of heavy-handed censorship described in your July issue Editor's Memo is that it diverts attention from some serious issues that ought to be discussed...

...Patriotism is not a slogan...

...Chicago, Illinois The University of Wisconsin newsstands may, indeed, be guilty of hypocrisy— but censorship...

...Government stops bankrolling the expansionist policies of the Israeli government...

...Perhaps our love could be wiser, deeper, freer—that's where the debate ought to begin...

...Stick to your intelligent, provocative pictures...

...In his great Farewell Address, George Washington warned that true patriots who might in the future oppose wrongheaded policies were likely to be "suspected and odious," but would remain courageous patriots nonetheless...

...it's so pointless...

...With an obvious bias—I am an attorney and the greatest percentage of our firm's practice involves the representation of injured persons in personal-injury lawsuits—I must speak in defense of the trial lawyer...

...Novak Austin, Texas The eternal artwork debate amuses me...

...The best one can say about Rothschild's position is that it is a classic clinical case of advanced terminal sectarianism, the crippling and often fatal political disease that afflicts so much of the American Left...

...To suggest Israelis are ignorant of conditions in the Palestinian refugee camps rings as hollow as similar assertions of ignorance made by Germans who were confronted after World War II with the geno-cidal practices of Nazi concentration camps...

...I hate to have it known that I subscribe to a publication that prints such repulsive, unskilled pictures...

...I doubt that the author can be cured, but he might try as last-minute political therapy a reading of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, or Pablo Neruda's "Let the Rail-Splitter Awake," or the works of Tom Paine or Benjamin Rush...

...Without our present system of laws, the workers of our state might be no better off than the dispossessed workers of the Third World...

...It was a remarkably balanced piece—which surprised me, given the vituperative potential of The Progressive...

...And to love our country, we must love freedom, truth, and life...

...Barry J. Walker Tupelo, Mississippi Students and 'Easy Enemies9 Though I agree wholeheartedly with your editorial on the bombing of Libya ("Easy Enemies," Comment, June issue), I want to correct one small error: The students who chanted "U.S.A., U.S.A...

...they were part of a group of egg-throwing hecklers at an anti-bombing rally mobilized by a coalition of progressive student organizations...

...You either have it or you don't...

...I like Paul Harvey, though I am well aware of his inconsistencies and embellishments...

...I consider it a gratuitous insult to me and many other radicals and progressives who refuse to deny their American identity, who love this country, and who consider themselves true patriots because they are working for a better America and a better world...

...Although large groups of students, primarily white men, supported the bombing, there was widespread, organized opposition on campuses across the nation...

...To me, they are an essential part of what makes The Progressive progressive...

...For years now, most Israelis have known about—and have fully supported—their government's iron-fist policies of political persecution and economic strangulation against Palestinians in the occupied territories...

...It does an injustice to the principled and truly patriotic men and women who love their country and work ceaselessly to improve it and correct its course to deprive them of the noble word patriotism and surrender it to the nation's misleaders and those who unquestioningly follow them...

...Until we have built a bastion of democracy in this country, and can celebrate it with fitting drawings and murals, keep drawing it like it is...

...Your illustrations are so much more than just "nice pictures" to accompany an article...

...Maybe the Rambo train will return to reality some day, and we'll have a huge ticker-tape parade to thank those who risked so much protesting that war...

...And mindless jingoistic Ramboism is mislabeled patriotism...

...Ann Burlingham Perry, New York The editors welcome correspondence from readers on all topics, but prefer to publish letters that comment directly on material previously published in The Progressive...

...K.D...

...If the tort liability system is drastically reformed, if the incentive to manufacture and sell safe products is removed, the United States will immediately become a more dangerous place in which to live, and the average worker and consumer will give up significant economic power...

...Why cover up potentially dangerous conditions with "pretty" pictures...

...Aufderheide explained— sympathetically, I think—the reasons for Harvey's appeal...

...Edward Pessen New York, New York John Buell seems to believe that love of country can be turned on and off—that intellectual calculation can dictate our feelings...

...Chris Williams Albany, New York It seems awfully strange to me that you can't hire someone who draws well to make your illustrations (if we need illustrations...

...Robert J. Byrne III Shawnee, Kansas LETTERS r to the Editor Stubborn Prejudice Homophobia is not "the most stubborn of prejudices" ("Again the Hot Iron," Comment, June issue...

...Kay Irvin Minneapolis, Minnesota Paul Harvey, Good Day...

...On several campuses, black students played a major role in the demonstrations, in accord with your observations...

...Students at Minneapolis, Iowa City, Grinnell, Madison, Rochester, Washington, D.C., Chicago, San Francisco/Berkeley, Champaign, Ann Arbor, DeKalb, Philadelphia, New York City, Amherst, Wesleyan, and Oberlin demonstrated against the attack and showed growing unity in opposition to all U.S...

...Bruce D. Nestor Iowa City, Iowa The Progressive's observations concerning the manifest aggressive tendencies of the Reagan Administration were both accurate and disturbing...

...David Munford Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts Count me among the large number of readers who do not believe that graphics must be repulsive and depressing to be "politically correct...

...Griffin may be overlooking the fact that the contingent-fee system enables injured workers and consumers to obtain competent representation...

...Kathleen A. Yagelo Ann Arbor, Michigan The Immorality of Monthliness Ithink it's shameful that only a dozen copies of The Progressive sell on the University of Wisconsin campus...

...Because of the tort liability system, workers enjoy a safer work place, babies sleep safer in their cribs, and every one of us rides in safer automobiles and uses safer kitchen appliances and lawn or garden tools...

...A trial lawyer will often work on a case for years before receiving any fee...

...I have been a political activist for fifty-seven years...