CORRESPONDENCE
THE DISGRACEFUL LEGACY Noemie Emery’s explanation of the moral chaos that has blossomed during the Clinton years is on the mark (“The Clinton Legacy,” Aug. 10/Aug. 17). The Clintons and their...
...We are talking about the president of the United States giving testimony under oath—testimony that he had time to consider carefully before he gave it...
...Gone is even the pretense of American exceptionalism...
...Prager is indignant that children are being taught to understand how dangerous smoking can be...
...That figure comes from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, one of the most respected public-health organizations in the world...
...Tobacco kills well over 400,000 people each year in the United States alone...
...Unfortunately, as Kaplan demonstrates, the U.S...
...The Clintons and their followers have in fact stood morality on its head...
...Almost 70 percent of all smokers would like to quit completely, but can’t because the addiction is every bit as strong as addiction to heroin or cocaine...
...I looked at the grave registration trucks in which the bodies of so many of my friends were placed,” he solemnly intones...
...Nor does he understand how difficult it is to tell such patients that there is little left that can be done to alleviate their suffering...
...He obviously doesn’t know or care to try to understand what it’s like to spend every day painfully aware of how lethal it is to smoke cigarettes, and how hard it is to kick the habit...
...The incandescence with which he breathes life into the horrors of historical memory is truly remarkable...
...Rabbi Lapin began with the premise that the various issues championed by the Left must be linked by some unifying principle...
...The errors of others with regard to Leon Bass’s background must not be allowed to obscure the extraordinary contribution he has made in teaching the lessons of the Holocaust to thousands of young men and women...
...I see this every day, and it is a constant reminder of the evils of tobacco addiction...
...What makes Bass unique is not the date on which he entered Buchenwald, but what happened after Buchenwald entered him...
...Bass and a small group from the 183rd Battalion spent a few hours at Buchenwald on April 16, 1945...
...What the Bible prohibits (for example, abortion), the Left celebrates...
...Whatever others may call him, Bass has consistently identified himself not as a “liberator” of the concentration camps, but a “witness” to the liberation...
...But at the beginning of the film Liberators: Fighting on Two Fronts in World War II, after the African-American 761st Tank and 183rd Combat Engineers battalions are falsely identified as having “helped free thousands of Jews at Buchenwald, Lambach, and Dachau,” a survivor of Buchenwald, with Bass at his side, tells a synagogue audience that “this guy walked in on April 11, 1945...
...3).Young women are told that church-going boys are scary while juvenile delinquents are misunderstood...
...I suggest he rethink his priorities...
...It is not uncommon for me to hear that these patients began smoking at age 10, 11, or 12...
...I sincerely hope that Prager’s views are not the views of the majority of our country and certainly not the views of any of our congressional leaders...
...Opinions like his keep us from moving forward to develop a comprehensive national tobacco-control policy that, I hope, will some day put me out of the business of treating smokingrelated lung disease...
...that is why these days a boy will grow into a man only through virtue...
...During the entire war, the 183rd had three casualties, compared with the 6,652 suffered by the Sixth Armored...
...LAWRENCE RUBIN JEWISH COUNCIL FOR PUBLIC AFFAIRS NEW YORK, NY MARK SCHULTE RESPONDS: Leon Bass was not a “witness” to Buchen wald’s liberation by the Sixth Armored Division on April 11, 1945...
...Many of my patients who have emphysema must use portable oxygen to breathe—and yet they continue to smoke because they cannot beat their addiction to nicotine...
...I invite Prager to tour a local hospital’s intensive-care unit to see these patients personally...
...DAVID A. STOLL NEW YORK, NY Holocaust Fibbing It is important to clarify an inference concerning Leon Bass in Mark Schulte’s article “The Holocaust Museum’s Fib” (Aug...
...Then Rabbi Lapin demonstrated that the Left does have a unifying principle: a desire to turn the Bible on its head...
...D. ROBERT MCCAFFREE AMERICAN COLLEGE OF CHEST PHYSICIANS NORTHBROOK, IL...
...In reality, one soldier from the 183rd was killed in this major battle (among 78,000 American casualties), and he died in a non-combat vehicular accident...
...As a physician who specializes in adult, end-stage lung disease, I see many patients who suffer from smoking- related illnesses...
...Their deaths are often slow and very painful, caused by illnesses, such as emphysema and cancer, that rob patients of their quality of life, independence, and dignity...
...As an educator, he is particularly good in the way he relates to young people—Jews and non-Jews alike...
...I am puzzled by your unfavorable comparison of Mike McCurry to F. H. Bradley, the last of the great British idealists (SCRAPBOOK, Aug...
...Underage smoking and premature death are major public health-problems for all of us...
...Despite Rubin’s attempt to shift the blame to anonymous culprits, Leon Bass is an unreliable chronicler of several pivotal events of World War II...
...I have worked closely with Bass on Holocaust awareness and education programs for over 20 years...
...Prager suggests that smokers save the taxpayers money by dying before they can collect Social Security and other benefits...
...Later in this discredited film, Bass invents the story that many of his fellow soldiers were killed by German strafing during the Battle of the Bulge...
...Indeed, McCurry’s recent performances suggest that the administration is relying on a typically bad reading of the early Wittgenstein, echoing the most famous sentence in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence...
...The appallingly low cure rate of lung cancer is also dramatic proof that patient education must begin early...
...Prager’s statement that “the war against tobacco . . . has come to be far more dangerous than tobacco itself ” is certainly contrary to my own experience...
...By contrast, McCurry’s epistemological musings seem far more likely the result of the sort of cut-rate logical positivism that so frequently informs the philosophically unreflective and ill read in contemporary society...
...It is the perfect ontology for those who believe there is never any moral significance to the facts because there is, in fact, no such thing as moral significance, regardless of what the facts may be...
...That Bradley, being an idealist, was something of a neo- Hegelian (by way of being a neo-Kantian, as well) hardly seems worth mentioning unless you consider all forms of idealism the sort of metaphysical bunk the age of analysis has held it to be...
...Prager has no idea how painful it is to care every day for patients with smoking-related illnesses that have robbed their lungs of the ability to extract oxygen, or whose lungs no longer have the elasticity necessary to work properly, making it nearly impossible for them to breathe...
...and where the Bible is silent (for example, smoking), the Left is free to make a moral crusade...
...Sound dramatic...
...It is, but it is reality...
...And yet he’s quite ready to contend that smoking doesn’t interfere with the “soul, mind, conscience, or emotional growth” of people who use tobacco...
...He accuses anti-tobacco partisans of hysteria, but fails to mention that smoking kills more people than AIDS, alcohol, car accidents, murders, suicides, drugs, and fires combined...
...For several weeks I have listened in disbelief as ostensibly intelligent journalists and analysts have had serious discussions over what form of perjury by President Clinton would be “acceptable” or “not important...
...Such thinking is very disconcerting...
...ARTHUR M. SHATZ BAYSIDE, NY The incontrovertible description Noemie Emery gives of the Left’s “inversion of values” with its compass “re-set with north and south reversed” brought to mind a brilliant lecture by Rabbi Daniel Lapin...
...D. A. RIDGELY ARLINGTON, VA FREEDOM AND FREE TRADE Lawrence F. Kaplan rightly sheds light on Mobil’s curious ideas about encouraging political freedoms (“Mobilizing Foreign Policy,” Aug...
...There can be no defense of such behavior...
...what the Bible requires (for example, that children honor their parents), the Left abhors...
...After all, without some point of cohesion, wouldn’t one expect that the radical environmentalists might sometimes disagree with the radical feminists...
...The indisputable facts are that smoking among high-school seniors is at a 19- year high and that 3,000 kids a day become regular smokers...
...He claims he’d rejoice if smoking was the worst vice his children engaged in, and comments that he is more worried about his kids’ getting hooked on TV...
...No one matches him in his ability to make palpable the horrors of the Holocaust, and, more important, no one matches him in making the lessons of the Holocaust real...
...ONTOLOGY, ETC...
...JOEL CAMPAGNA BRONX, NY BE A MAN Waller R. Newell’s article was all too true, but he should have mentioned the strange things girls are taught to think about manliness (“The Crisis of Manliness,” Aug...
...They do not die a quick, painless death...
...DON SCHENK ALLENTOWN, PA THE PERILS OF SMOKING Dennis Prager says he’s never been a cigarette smoker (“The Soul- Corrupting Anti-Tobacco Crusade,” July 20...
...The notion that we can foster freedom through commerce alone is too pat by half...
...government justifies its own inattention to human rights by parroting the self-serving rhetoric of the private sector...
...Prager seems to think these numbers are questionable, but he offers no figures of his own...
...It is a gift that cannot be overvalued and should not be disparaged...
...They believe that all meaningful statements are either tautologies or statements of verifiable fact, but that all else (and especially normative assertions such as moral judgments) merely reports the subjective opinions of the speaker...
...Having watched the terrible suffering that these patients and their families go through, I think it is imperative that we do everything within our power to stop even a single child from starting to smoke...
Vol. 3 • August 1998 • No. 48
